celticman's blog

Cathy Rentzenbrink is described on the cover as a Sunday Times bestselling author. True. It reminds me of a phrase Carl Macdougal copy and pasted onto all of his books. Something from Billy Connolly that described him as a great writer. It you’ve got it, flaunt it. Often now, authors aren’t selling books but brands. Her memoir The Last Act of Love was a breakout hit. In Rentzenbrink’s memoir she described the devastation of her elder teenage...

What does your summer reading tell about you? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd69glgl2jzo I’m grumpy. I had to search for the translator’s name. It wasn’t included on the cover or listed in the first few cover pages of the English paperback of Mariana Leky’s international bestseller released in 2021. It was translated from the German for Bloomsbury by Tess Lewis. Translation is an art. Her name should have been on the front cover, not the...

It’s over 20 years since Francine Prose published her guide for Reading Like a Writer , which I try to. It’s for people that love books, which is me too, and for those that want to write them. Yes, exactly. Prose is an antonym. Re-reading Reading Like a Writer reminds me of so much that I’ve already forgotten, but I’ve already forgotten it, again. Reading is mostly what I do. But Prose as a bibliophile is at genius check-mate level. Slow down...

I’m not young. Many, or most, wouldn’t consider me a writer. Certainly John Gardner wouldn’t. For Gardner good writing, ‘creates a vivid and continuous dream’. Everything else follows. Look, for example, at the brouhaha involving Sir Christopher Nolan's latest film, The Odyssey . As most of us would expect, rave reviews followed the money. But I loved the dissenting voice of Emily Wilson. Her 2017 translation of Homer's Odyssey was cited by the...

Robert Goddard has written a stack of books. None of which I’ve read or been aware of. He’s a bit hitter. Stephen King and Lee Child are among is fans. The Fine Art of Uncanny Predictions has multiple timelines, many characters and complicated plots. But we know as a reader it will be resolved and the world set to right. The What If of fiction is topical. What if Himeko Sato, a childminder and domestic service, known as the Kobe Sensitive,...

DK is one of the big four (or five) publishers. A division of Penguin Random House. You can be sure they’ll bring together experts to produce a visual feast. 350-plus images, artwork, artifacts in a hardback. I was interested in the Fox sisters and Spiritualism. I was already acquainted with the bones of their story (terrible pun). ‘In 1888, Maggie (Fox) who had left the movement earlier, revealed that the ‘rappings’ were a hoax created using...

I wrote a short story in a few lines. I recognised it as the For Sale, Baby shoes, unused variety. I’d picked up and started several books by Scottish crime writers. I didn’t finish them. Pierre Lemaitre’s (2018) Three Days and a Life has generic recommendations, but one is from Stephen King. It’s an unusual book in that the reader’s sympathy is with the killer of a six-year-old boy. Antoine was twelve-years old in 1999 when he killed the little...

Seven Years in Tibet is a boy-own adventure with Brad Pitt playing Heinrich Harrer (I wasn’t available). Having being brought up with Escape from Colditz and Steve McQueen on a motorbike jumping over barbed wire in The Great Escape (on every Christmas) I had to keep reminding myself Harrer wasn’t British. He was a national champion Austrian skier and mountain climber who scaled the North face of the Eiger. One of the few members of the SA and SS...

Samuel Beckett, Chekov, and Alan Shearer, were prone to muse about the particular being in the universal ball into the box. God preserve us from the waffle of Alan Shearer telling us—again—how it is and how it will be. Which makes us want to jump from a high window, or even a low one to avoid England’s favourite son. His English chums chortle and parrot the same 1966 spirit and all that shite, when and then and now. Roy Keane brought in to add a...

Winner of the Jabuti Prize (2021), Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin picks apart that old maxim, ‘the personal is political’. To be a black man (and woman) brings with it structural racism—at every level—based on stereotypes. White is always right. Even when it’s wrong. Lobato offers as evidence some statistics that should surprise no one. In the year the book was published 78% of people killed by the police were black (50% of Brazil’s...