celticman's blog

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...

I’d always hoped to use a sentence telling folk that Einstein and yours truly struggled with quantum physics. I’m reminded of Richard Feynman's remark -he had great comic timing, but was also a Nobel winning theoretical physicist - ‘nobody understands quanta’. I’m pretty good at writing books with no beginning, no middle and no end. Not so good at the actual maths. I’ve leaned on Carlo Revelli for this. Heligoland seems a good place to start...

Ruth Ozeki, on the book’s cover, describes, There are Rivers in the Sky as ‘A Masterpiece’. Elif Shafak’s novel was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. She is a wonderful writer who imparts words of wisdom, and I’ll be reading more of her work. Shafak plays on words. She tells the reader ‘this is the work of a junior scribe’. Her theme is the interconnectedness of being. Water remembers. Water has consciousness. It is involved in the life...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0024z1n/wolf-hall-the-mirror-and-the-light-1-wreckage Reading is what I do. Strange as it seems, I couldn’t get into Hilary Mantel’s trilogies about the Tudor dynasty. No surprise there. I’m no royalist. Henry VIII is distant to me as the current monarch, King Charles. I can’t bear to watch programmes such as Downton Abbey , which I refer to as ‘the parasites’. Yet, I binge-watched all six episodes of Wolf...

Atypical Love is an anthology. Nine writers. Nine stories from Alice Riley, Echo Darling, Carole Kenrick, Miriam Lohr, Kevin Marman, Zara Relphman, Elinor Rowlands, Lennie Varvarides, Emma Robdale. What makes it different or atypical is the nine writers identify as neurodivergent. I’m not sure what that means. ‘We use the term neurodivergent + (ND+) to encompass neurodvelopemental variations such autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, but add the...

Hex is a novella. To be read comfortably in one sitting. The premise is history that resonates. Jenni Fagin chose the North Berwick Witch trials. She has twin narrators in different centuries meeting in a cell three levels below the current city of Edinburgh on the 4 th December 1591. Gellis Duncan, a fifteen-year-old girl, is to be executed that morning for being a witch. Iris, via a séance, comes to offer comfort. Iris: ‘I was out in the Null...

Notes on nostalgia. Adolescence, when neurons exploded and rearranged themselves into them or us. Your senses discombobulated by girls. Everything tasted better. We scattered ourselves on a sea of faces. Some familiar. Some not familiar enough. Our voices thin as scratch-marks. Snod’s hair, flame-red as the hottest summer of 1976, but soon to be eclipsed and forgotten. We knew we were indestructible. All answers copied from the back of an old...

I put aside a few hours on Sunday to read Ootlin, Jenni Fagan’s memoir, straight through. ‘Ootlin’ in a simple sense means outsider. From the Scottish word oot. Fagin tells the reader in the prologue, there are stories about stories. The social work department in Scotland, adoption agencies, psychiatric hospitals and the police all had files on Fagin and her family. The in-spectre of mad, bad or sad stories went before her even as a baby. She...

I’ve a signed copy of Isobel Shirlaw’s, A Proper Mother , and twice heard her read the beginning of her debut novel. But as we know, hearing is not the same as listening. Meeting her on the page offers greater understanding. Story structure is current and counter-current, much like the watery desert that is the Black Sea. Is, was, and ever shall be. ‘ Before’ ‘August 1974. ’ ‘On the last day of their honeymoon they thought they’d check out Agios...