celticman's blog

Taffy Brodesser-Akner (2019) Fleishman is in Trouble. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble, is no trouble to read. It’s pretty much perfect. I’m pretty much tempted to leave it at that and let the book speak of itself. But I’ll say a bit more. No prologue. Just a one line invitation: ‘Summon your witnesses.’ Aeschylus. It begins at the beginning, of course, but in medias res , which is a fancy way of saying, in the middle of things...

Jagger’s novel is about a poet, Noelle, having a meltdown over her second collection of poems. Being an outsider likely complicated Noelle’s life, considering she is around the same age as the author. (Jagger identifies as autistic and reveals she had been Catholic). A good match of world views with a vampire called Moses added. There are several kinds of coming-of-age novels. We have the traditional Bildungsroman . Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë...

Bloody Scotland, 14 th September 2024 I don’t go out much. When I usually do it involves watching Celtic and getting drunk. That’s Bloody Scotland for you. But this was a different kind of outing. Bloody Scotland inspired by William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw . Labelled the Godfather of Tartan Noir, the Glaswegian detective didn’t as much solve a crime as solve the world with his philosophical musings. Over the weekend of Friday, Saturday and Sunday,...

Fern Brady is a well-known comedian. I didn’t know that before I read her autobiography, Strong Female Character . She comes from Bathgate and planned to kill herself before she left school if she didn’t get the grades she needed to go to university. Call that overkill. That’s normal for her in a world of hypervigilance in which there’s no such thing as normal. For convenience all the information the reader needs is on the cover. ‘Fern Brady is...

It’s mandatory to namecheck Louise Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room , which won just about everything. This is her tenth novel. It’s set in much the same place as her first. In and around Downhill, Partick and the West End of Glasgow. The protagonist is Jim Brennan. He’s a Professor at Glasgow University, his speciality is criminology. Louise Welsh is a Professor at Glasgow Uni too. Her speciality is Creative Writing. I take it she’s not...

In My Own Words, Billy Connolly, BBC 1, BBC Scotland, BBC iPlayer, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0022mr1/in-my-own-words-series-1-billy-connolly Billy Connolly seems to have been about forever. He’s the face and voice of Scotland. The face of Glasgow where he grew up and worked on the Clyde as a welder. That working-class grounding, he claimed, made him the man he was. He’s Parkinson disease (the bastard should have kept it to himself)...

Sarah Chaney asks in the Prologue (is a Prologue normal?) Am I Normal? ‘It seems like a straightforward enough question.’ Much the same as is it raining outside. But rain is part of the seasons and weather system. Normal is a social construct. In other words, we make it up as we go along. WEIRD people (that is, Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) in 2010 make up just 12% of the world’s population but 96% of subjects in...

As a writer in exile, writing about a writer in exile, PETRA JOHANA PONCAROVÁ offers an authentic voice. Neither English nor Gaelic is her first languages. She was brought up speaking Czech. To paraphrase Paul Valery, Language is a thing that belongs to us; but for us it is not entirely a thing; and it belongs to us a little less than we belong to it. I’m no poet. And I do not speak Gaelic. No surprise then that I hadn’t heard of Derick Thompson...

Brene Brown is a Licensed Master Social Worker. She gained her Ph.D working with women and researching Shame. We’ve all got our own ideas of what shame is and what is shameful. The most toxic kind is when we identify with the shameful labels others give us. Brown suggests her lightbulb moment came when was working in residential care. A clinical director said: ‘You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviour’. Bree’s working...

I take it Gordon Brown added an initial J. (middle-name) to his name, so he doesn’t get confused with the dour Raith Rover supporter and former Prime Minister (author of a 1999 Blairite victory, economic policy from Number 11 Downing Street). Gordon J. Brown’s debut novel takes the reader back to the 1974. There’s a picture of miner’s leader Joe Gormley in the Daily Record that year, facing down Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath that epitomises...