celticman's blog

Alexander Starritt’s name can be added to the list of great Scottish writers. (He’s written another book I’ve not yet read, The Beast. ) I, initially, thought We Germans was a translation like Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Home . The format is simple. A grandfather writing to his Scottish grandson, Callum. And his grandson replying. Oberkanonier Meissner was in the Wehrmacht. Six-foot-two and broad shouldered...

The title is like the snatched breath of an overhead conversation. It makes assumptions and asks questions of the reader. ‘Piped,’ refers to playing bagpipes. The identity of the ‘She’ refers to Queen Victoria. The narrator is Angus MacKay (1812-1859) telling the story of his life from a cell in Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam). Iain McDonald takes on the persona of Angus McKay. A factional story, fictionalising the few facts known about McKay. The...

Many stories I read blend into one another. Some of them I can vaguely remember. They tend to be—by that measure—the best. I’m thinking here of George Mackay Brown, Celia , which is arguably the best short story in The Devil and the Giro , edited by Carl MacDougall. I met Carl a few times and he was great, but not great enough to get in the collection of the best of The Scottish Short Story . Bernard MacLaverty short story A Time To Dance is a...

When you are asked to review books, a number of prompts are translated into numbers. For example, you are asked to award a mark out of ten for literary merit. I often cheat here. If I like a book, it gets nearer ten than one. After all, even the ingredients on the label of a brown sauce bottle have enough literary merit to get five. Ingenious Pain gets a ten, because his sentences sing and you can get your teeth into them. His characters have a...

Everybody has a cat or dog story. I’ve also read one about horses. Cathy Rentzenbrink is a reader like me, well, probably better than me. She read a book a day, sometimes two, after her brother died. She did a lot of boozing. Went a little mad, finished her degree and got married to a man she loved. Then she got divorced, but, hey, nobody’s perfect. Her brother, Matthew, was perfect, but never lived long enough to unperfect himself. He was born...

An easy read. Like picking a magazine from a rack. Fling in a bit of philosophy. Sprinkle with maxims. Challenge yourself to live the best reading life you can. Jean-Paul Sartre: Life begins on the other side of despair. ‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to other variations.’ Aristotle...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000zhk8/the-keeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_Trautmann I usually check out late-night films to see if there are any worth watching. I wasn’t sure of The Keeper . Advertised as a biopic of Bert Trautmann, my first thoughts were it was something to do with music, and I probably wouldn’t like it. Before I pulled up the preview, I realised it might have something to do with goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000z8p5/911-inside-the-presidents... Hagiography (Literary & Literary Critical Terms) any biography that idealizes or idolizes its subject Around 3000 United States citizens were killed in what has become known as 9/11. This is A Day in the Life of President George W. Bush. A ticking clock. The rest is a history of good guys and bad guys, when 9/11 became shorthand for President George W. Bush can-do...

I’m not a fan of Kazou Ishiguro. I know he’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature and that says something about me, as if I’m lacking in something. And I am. The Remains of the Day . Universally lauded. This more than any other book got Ishiguro his major prize. It was also like Never Let Me Go made into a film. Here’s the thing, I liked the films better than the books and I didn’t like the films much either. Art for Art’s Sake. You know the...

I’m sure I’ve read Henry Marsh’s book before. Almost a quarter of our blood supply is dedicated to providing energy for the brain. When things go wrong, brain surgery is the last resort. What makes Marsh different is not that he’s a brain surgeon, but that he’s also a great writer. Marsh tells us he’s grown more conservative over the years. Not conservative in terms of treating health care as something that should be floated on the market with...