celticman's blog

Luckenbooth in Edinburgh dialect means Lockedbooth, the kind stall holders carted about to sell goods. Jenni Fagan whittles down her writing to what is true. She’s full of surprises. So when the devil’s daughter rows away from a Scottish island in a coffin made by her father and ends up in Leith docks, it’s no bigger surprise than Mary Anne McLeod leaving Tong, marrying Fred Trump and fathering the devil’s child Donald. The structure of the book...

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store was Barrack Obama’s Pick for Book of the Year. You’d expect that. Much of the book is set in the years of the Great Depression, 1936. At the very bottom of the heap were the black man and woman. Standing beside them, but slightly above them were the immigrant whites, the Jews, whom the world could burn for all they cared. Top of the heap of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania those with some education like Doc Roberts...

Tracy King is the exception to the rule, rule. She’s working class. She got educated. She got a book published by one of the big five (or four) publishers. And, oh yeh, her dad got murdered. I’d read about what happened next in The Observer. She starts but not at the beginning. Setting the scene: I was born to working-class parents. Mum, Jackie was tiny. She worked part-time as a secretary but really was a full-time mum. Dad worked abroad He was...

Three Fires is a short book, based on an audio script Denise Mina wrote for Radio 4. The logline reads something like she reimagines the life of Girolamo Savonarola. Like me, you might not know who that is. By the end of the book you should know. What are the three fires? Mina offers a definition before getting down to the wordy business of relating them to Girolamo Savonarola. In his Fire Sermon, the Buddha identified three poisons or three...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00263cs/wolf-hall-the-mirror-and-the-light-6-light?seriesId=m0024ywj I missed The Mirror and the Light on Sunday night because I was drunk as a Lord. Last episode, ‘Light’ takes us into the darkness. We all know that the commoner Thomas Cromwell, the power behind the throne of Henry VIII, will reach a dastardly end. He’s seen too much and knows too much. And there can only be one king. It’s in the title...

Adam Kay (2022) Undoctored. The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients. Adam Kay jokes he’s the 13 th best-known ex-doctor in Britain. He’s also a comedian. Or ex-comedian, author of the multi-million bestseller This Is Going to Hurt . We therefore already know about his painful, disillusionment with medicine, the only world he knew. The post-traumatic-stress-disorder after too many things went wrong and a baby under his care died. I’m not...

I tell lies every day. I call it writing fiction. I followed with interest a great country drowning under the weight of its own stupidity. "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mentiri." "It is sweet and fitting to lie for one's country." https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/05/tulsi-gabbard-national-intelligence-community-fears Shibboleth. Biblical Origin: The term originates from the Book of Judges 12:5–6 in the Hebrew Bible. The Gileadites...

It’s been a few weeks since I read The Girl Who Smiled Beads . We know the story, but don’t know the story in a way many readers will be familiar with. I could read it again. There’s much of Clemantine Wamariya’s biography (I won’t call it autobiography, although it is, because I presume Elizabeth Weil is the ghost-writer) that is increasingly relevant. Wamariya was born in Rwanda to kind and loving parents. Prosperous even. Her dad owned a...

Samantha Harvey’s 136 pages novella, Orbital , won the Booker Prize 2024. It was whittled down from 150 books. I’d picked it up before her fifth novel sold millions and started reading it. But then put it down, largely unread. Hmmm, I thought, pop. David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust has already covered this, Starman , circa 1969 and the moon landing. ‘Hear I am floating in a tin can. Far above the sea. Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do...

Politics in about power. Economics is about money. As Bill Clinton said in 1992/93: ‘It’s about the economy, stupid!’ Politics and money are indivisible. The cover has a picture of a top hat with a rabbit in it. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat? Get it? Our knowledge of our world is limited. Economics offers the illusion that we’re in control and smarter than we are. As Douglas Adams puts it: ‘The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity...