celticman's blog

Frances Ha (2012) written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwick, directed by Noah Baumbach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Ha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNFSfTZy3os Frances Ha is truly uplifting. I leave black-and-white-American movies to the likes of Woody Allen telling me some faux-funny thing I’ve no interest in hearing or seeing. Greta Gerwig as Frances Halladay as Frances Ha carries all before her as a 27-year-old dancer struggling to survive in New York and pursue her dream. She just wants to dance, although she’s not...

Gordon Smith (2003) Spirit Messenger

I don’t know if I’d read Gordon Smith’s Spirit Messenger before. I guess there’s a message there somewhere. It doesn’t matter. I picked it up and read it for the first (and last) time again. The Foreword is by Professor E Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. In other words, he adds a bit of gravitas. He’s telling us this Glasgow hairdresser is to be trusted. He lists other famous men, among them Arthur Conan Doyle,...

Rachel Eliza Griffiths (2023) Promise

I promised myself I’d read Promise . I’ve always a stack of books waiting to be read. This fell to the bottom of the pile and I had to keep starting it again and again and again. I got the set-up. Two black families on the edge of the sea, Salt Lake and a dirt-poor white family, living beside them in a kind of Eden. Jim Crow laws are being challenged and then (as now) there’s a backlash. Cinthy Kindred is two years younger than her sister, Ezra...

Pre-order on Amazon, Bronte’s Inferno by Ewan Lawrie.

Reading is what I do. Writing, not so much. But for most folk, that’s already too much. There’s a book in everyone. They’ve got one and they’re sticking with it. So I’m in a minority. I’ve also been thinking about class. I should probably use a capital C here, Class. I was reading yesterday that less than twenty-percent of youngsters (if you’re on Facebook sorry, you’re not young) didn’t know what a ‘scab’ was. I’m the kinda guy that laughs at...

Joan Didion (2005) The Year of Magical Thinking.

The Year of Magical Thinking has been an international bestseller, been reprinted over twenty times and is perhaps the best-known of her books. The subject she specialises in is death, which we’re all familiar with, but nobody seems to want to talk or write about it. In Duncan Williamson’s short story Death in a Nut , Jack (no relation) lived with his mother in a cottage by the shoreside (Williamson was born in a tent on the shores of Loch Fyne...

Amy Cuddy (2016) Presence Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.

Amy Cuddy (2016) Presence Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. I usually give books like Amy Cuddy’s Presence short-shrift. Fake it till you make it seems to me like pebbledash. Yet it works and she shows her workings. How and why it works. She traces her ideas back to polymath William James, who helped to develop psychology as a subject of study outside philosophy, or perhaps inside? ‘Begin to be now what you will be hereafter...

John Vaillant (2023) Fire Weather: A True Story From A Hotter World.

John Vaillant moves from the taiga of The Tiger to ‘thinking like a fire’ in the boreal forests surrounding Fort McMurray (Fort Money) in Alberta, Canada and the evacuation of its almost 100 000 residents in May, 2016. His argument is that these fires can no longer be considered the exception to the rule, but the rule itself in an Anthropocene warming world we have created by our increasing use of fossil fuels which destroys our planet. A...

Women Talking (2022) Screenplay and directed by Sarah Polley. Based on the Canadian 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews.

Watch Women Talking | Prime Video (amazon.co.uk) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_Talking_(film) ‘Women Talking’ is a deceptively simple title. Margaret Attwood suggested comparisons with A Handmaid’s Tale. The near-future is already here. Events that occurred between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia inspired the novel. In their close-knit religious community, it was discovered that eight men had been raping the women...

Billy Moore (2021) Fighting for My Life: A Prisoner’s Story of Redemption.

Billy Moore, a working-class Liverpudlian, was born into poverty in 1973. He doted on his mum and hated his drunken dad for beating his mum, when he was a child. He too was bullied, but learned to use his fists, gave out some beatings. Joined the group of schoolboy bullies. Matriculated in theft and drug taking and graduated to Liverpool’s Young Offenders, were ironically, he ended up a lifetime later. There are lots of books out there about...

Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song.

Writers are told, never start with the weather. Paul Lynch starts with the weather in his debut novel, Red Sky in the Morning. Prophet Song, Lynch’s latest award-winning novel, starts with the night weather and a knocking on the door. ‘The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window, looking out at the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do...

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