celticman's blog

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. 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 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...

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, 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...

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...

Yellowface wowed me and as a reader (and sometimes writer) I’m not easily wowed. It offers both an insider and outsider account of the publishing industry masquerading as satire. Everyone that had hoped to have something published by the big four publishing companies, get an agent, or somehow get something published online or in print, should read Yellowface. The setup is simple. Imagine Jesus was hanging about Galilee. Judas comes visiting and...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-little-stranger/on-demand/48945-001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Stranger_(film) I’ve read a few of Sarah Walter’s books, but, as usual, with holes in my memories, I can’t remember much about them. Her other books and translation to screen include Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002). I haven’t read Affinity . Waters is celebrated for her ability to weave intricate...

Poetry frightens me a bit. It’s just so complicated. But when you get it right, as Bex Hainsworth had done in Walrussey , it sounds simple. Like many of the writers of poetry on ABCtales—where her pseudonym was Mistaken Magic—she got ‘cherried’. A poem being especially worthy of attention. She followed the usual route of Poem of the week. Nobody really cares about that stuff, but it’s nice at the time. A little fill-up before going back to...

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning author of Empire of Pain . Before I read his book I hadn’t heard of the billionaire Sackler family and how they created an opioid addiction factory (Purdue Pharmacy) that killed tens of thousands and made them obscenely wealthy. I had, however, heard of the moron’s moron and former President Donald J.Trump. I’m a Trump watcher. It baffles me that 74 million Americans voted for him in 2020. And it...