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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 9h

2019 #71
Another really good collection of short stories from an immensely promising young writer, these all set in the great Texan melting pot that is Houston.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
💙📚
#booksky
#books

Lot, Stories, by Bryan Washington.

The Millions In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 9h

Good grief, we've had our first snake in the garden this spring as well now -just one of the regular Tiger Snakes we get here. No pictures as I was too busy getting the cat to leave it alone and shepherding (or should that be snake-herding) it off the block. Another day in Australia 🙄
#snake

Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 14h

New resident in the kitchen. She was eyeing up my breakfast for some reason...
#spider

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 1d

Ordered these from the publisher in the UK just 7 days ago and they've already turned up down here. Nice! More Recovered Books from Boilerhouse Press and @neglectedbooks.com and they haven't let me down with anything in this series yet.
#booksky📚💙
#books

And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker.
Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney.
Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 1d

2019 #69 & #70
Two fascinating lectures delivered in the form of two slender volumes. Esi Edugyan muses on ideas of home while Michael Crummey explores the relationship between fact and fiction in writing. Both are great little reads full of interesting thoughts and ideas.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

Dreaming of Elsewhere, Observations on Home, by Esi Edugyan.

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention. It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are. Writing about belonging is not a simple task. Esi Edugyan chooses to intertwine fact and fiction, objective and subjective in an effort to find out if one can belong to more than one place, if home is just a place or if it can be an idea, a person, a memory, or a dream. How "home" changes, how it changes us, and how every farewell carries the promise of a return. Readers of Canadian literature, armchair travellers, and all citizens of the global village will enjoy her explorations and reflections, as we follow her from Ghana to Germany, from Toronto to Budapest, from Paris to New York.

Most of What Follows is True, Places Imagined and Real, by Michael Crummey.

Most of What Follows Is True is an examination of the complex relationship between fact and fiction, between the "real world" and the stories we tell to explain the world to ourselves. Drawing on his own experience appropriating historical characters to fictional ends, Michael Crummey brings forward important questions about how writers use history and real-life figures to animate fictional stories. Is there a limit to the liberties a writer can take with the real world? Is there a point at which a fictionalization of history becomes a falsification of history? What responsibilities do writers have to their readers, and to the historical and cultural materials they exploit as sources? Crummey offers thoughtful, witty views on the deep and timely conversation around appropriation.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 2d

2019 #68
A fine novel about life in the Thai capital as it is overwhelmed by water in a time of massive rainfall and rising sea levels. Blurb is in the alt text but I remember this as a very creative and original take on the "climate change" novel.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

Bangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

In the restless city of Bangkok, there is a house.
Over the last two centuries, it has played host to longings and losses past, present, and future, and has witnessed lives shaped by upheaval, memory and the lure of home.
A nineteenth-century missionary pines for the comforts of New England, even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. A young woman in a time much like our own gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the submerged Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember.
Time collapses as their stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 3d

2019 #67
The last book from Denis Johnson, another wonderful collection of short stories albeit very different from his previous short fiction collection. Showed he was still at the top of his game, another little gem.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson.

The final story collection from Denis Johnson, author of the groundbreaking, highly acclaimed Jesus’ Son . Written in the same luminous prose, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating mortality, the ghosts of the past, and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves.
Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 3d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
20/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

Palaeolithic cave paintings, Altamira, Spain. Artists unknown.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 4d

A novel gripping enough to keep me reading through to the end in one day. Natsuo Kirino is quite possibly my favourite Japanese writer and this did nothing to change my mind. Four teenage girls in suburban Tokyo become entangled in the aftermath of a violent murder. Dark.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
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#booksky
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Real World, by Natsuo Kirino, tr by Philip Gabriel.

In a suburb on the outskirts of Tokyo, four teenage girls drift through a hot smoggy August and tedious summer school classes. There's dependable Toshi; brainy Terauchi; Yuzan, grief-stricken and confused; and Kirarin, whose late nights and reckless behaviour remain a secret from those around her. Then Toshi's next-door neighbour is found brutally murdered and the girls suspect Worm, the neighbour's son and a high school misfit. But when he disappears (taking Toshi's bike and cell phone with him) the four girls become irresistibly drawn into a treacherous vortex of brutality and seduction which rises from within themselves as well as the world around them.

Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 4d

2019 #66
This odd tale of obsession, corruption and revenge is probably the weakest of the Bolano novels I've read so far but it's still ok. There's a bit more info in the alt text but it's definitely one more for the completist.
⭐⭐⭐
💙📚
#booksky
#books

The Skating Rink, by Roberto Bolano, tr by

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martì's fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy - and revenge.
Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn't tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.
Narrated by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous civil servant, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 4d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
19/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

The company of Frans Banning Cock preparing to march out, known as the Nightwatch , by Rembrandt van Rijn.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 4d

Continuing a productive start to the month, another gem of a book in the Recovered Books series from Boilerhouse Press. This time, the tale of a psychiatrist in 1930s Germany and then WW2 trying to be "a good man in an evil system." Blurb is in the alt text, a terrific read.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 5d

2019 #65
A thoroughly enjoyable book that recounts the myriad ways our planet has shaped us as a species, from plate tectonics to ocean currents to changing climate. For more detail there's a long publisher's blurb in the alt text. Excellent.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

Origins, How the Earth Made Us, by Lewis Dartnell.

From Sunday Times bestselling author of The Knowledge, a book that takes us far back in time to the point where history becomes science, and that unpeels the layers of this history to reveal not how we made the earth, but how the earth made us.
When we talk about human history, we focus on great leaders, mass migration and decisive wars. But how has the Earth itself determined our destiny? How has our planet made us?
As a species we are shaped by our environment. Geological forces drove our evolution in East Africa; mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece; and today voting behaviour in the United States follows the bed of an ancient sea. The human story is the story of these forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents.
How are the Himalayas linked to the orbit of the Earth, and to the formation of the British Isles? By taking us billions of years into our planet’s past, Professor Lewis Dartnell tells us the ultimate origin story. When we reach the point where history becomes science we see a vast web of connections that underwrites our modern world and helps us face the challenges of the future.
From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, Origins reveals the Earth’s awesome impact on the shape of human civilizations.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 5d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
18/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

The Plain by Mont St.-Victoire, by Paul Cezanne

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

2019 #64
The story of a woman who leaves her comfortable Manhattan life and flies off to New Zealand without telling anyone and proceeds to hitchhike around until eventually she is found and has to face consequences. I liked it, but would say it is the weakest of her novels.
⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

Nobody is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey.

This dark novel follows a young woman called Elyria as she hitchhikes across the wilds of New Zealand, fleeing from her marriage and her sorrows, searching for what's missing.
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable life in Manhattan, her home, her career and her loving husband. As the people she has left behind scramble to figure out what has happened to her, Elyria embarks on a hitchhiker's odyssey, testing fate by travelling in the cars of overly kind women and deeply strange men, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests and public parks. As she journeys from Wellington to Picton, Takaka, Kaikoura and onwards she asks herself, what is it that I am missing? How can a person be missing?
Full of mordant humour and uncanny insights, Nobody is Ever Missing is a startling tale of love, loss, and the dangers encountered in the search for self-knowledge.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

Sorry about that...😬

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

I'm going to delete my admonishment as well now, only fair really.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 6d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
17/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

Studio in Rue de La Condamine, by Jean Frédéric Bazille.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 7d

Actually started reading this magnificent book back in August and it's been a chapter a day ever since. In short, an epic history of the birth of modern Europe and it's impact on the world at large but I've put a long blurb in the alt text as well that says far more about it.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

The World at First Light, A New History of the Renaissance, by Bernd Roeck, tr by Patrick Baker.

A magisterial history of the Renaissance and the birth of the modern world. The cultural epoch we know as the Renaissance emerged at a certain time and in a certain place. Why then and not earlier? Why there and not elsewhere? In The World at First Light, historian Bernd Roeck explores the cultural and historical preconditions that enabled the European Renaissance. Roeck shows that the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, including the science of the medieval Arab world, played a critical role in shaping the beginnings of Western modernity. He explains that the Renaissance emerged in a part of Europe where competing states and cities formed relatively open societies. Most of the era’s creative minds-from Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to Copernicus and Galileo-came from the middle classes. The art of arguing flowered, the basso continuo to intellectual and cultural breakthroughs.Roeck argues that two revolutions shaped the Renaissance: a media revolution, triggered by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type-which itself was a driving force behind the scientific revolution and the advent of modern science. He also reports on the dark side of the era-hatred of Jews, witch panic, religious wars, and the atrocities of colonialism. In a series of meditative counterfactuals, Roeck considers other cultural rebirths throughout the first millennium, from the Islamic empire to the Carolingians, examining why the epic developments of the Renaissance took place in the West and not elsewhere. The complicated legacy of the Renaissance, he shows, encompasses the art of critical thinking as learned from the ancients, the emergence of the modern state, and the genesis of democracy.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 7d

So October starts with this fine set of stories from Chile's Alejandro Zambra. There's a nice blurb in the alt text and as always Megan McDowell's translation helps bring the writer into our language very nicely indeed. Just more excellence from @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

My Documents, by Alejandro Zambra, tr by Megan McDowell.

My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. Written with the author's trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy, My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 7d

2019 #63
The question is, did Denis Johnson ever write something better than Train Dreams? The answer is yes, he did, and this collection of stories narrated by an unnamed, alcohol and drug-addled drifter, is it. A genuine classic of American literature. Just brilliant.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
💙📚
#booksky
#books

Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson.

Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by these drugs. In the course of his adventures, he meets an assortment of people, who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Out of their bleak, seemingly random lives, Denis Johnson creates modern-day parables of a harsh and devastating beauty.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 7d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
16/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gate St. Lazare, by Claude Monet

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 8d

2019 #62
Julia Phillips' much-lauded debut novel centred on the abduction of two girls in an isolated Russian settlement on the Kamchatka Peninsula and it's affects on the community. The author's second novel is out now and I'm sure it'll turn up in my tbr mountain soon.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips.

Beautifully written, thought-provoking, intense and cleverly wrought, this is an excellent first novel from an outstanding new talent. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the north-eastern edge of Russia, two sisters are abducted. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Set on the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth draws us into the world of an astonishing cast of characters, all connected by an unfathomable crime. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty - densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska - and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused. In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's marvelous feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel provides a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 8d

Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
15/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting

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Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 9d

2019 #61
This excellent little book is basically the screenplay for a TV special about Spinoza for Britain's Channel 4 and I've only just realised there's a DVD of that TV programme tucked away at the back! 😬 I'll be watching that tonight.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books

The Trials of Spinoza, by Tariq Ali.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) is considered one of the great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century. His magnum opus, Ethics, in which he criticized the dualism of Descartes, solidified his reputation and greatly influenced the Enlightenment thinkers who would build from his work.
Born in Amsterdam into a family of Sephardic Jews who had to take refuge there after they were expelled from Portugal, the precocious young scholar imbibed skepticism at an early age. By the time he was twenty-four, he had challenged what he called the “fairy tales” of the Old Testament and was excommunicated by the Synagogue. In this biographical play, Tariq Ali contextualizes Spinoza’s philosophy by linking it to the turbulent politics of the period, in which Spinoza was deeply involved.
Ali originally wrote The Trials of Spinoza as part of a series on philosophy for British Channel Four television, and this publication also includes a DVD of that original television production. This work will be welcomed as a testament to the continuing interest in and relevance of Spinoza’s work and as an example of Ali’s eloquent and always politically engaged writing.

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