celticman's blog

Pierre Lemaitre writes block-busting novels with larger-than-life characters and elaborate plots that rise and fall in the right places. All Human Wisdom is a block-busting 417 pages. And he deals with big themes. Here it’s the interwar years of great poverty and great wealth in France and other European countries. Hitler is on the steps of the Reichstag. Bankers and industrialists know which way the wind is blowing. Lemaitre’s novels start with...

Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Horse is Lexington (Darley) was called the greatest American thoroughbred racehorse of the 19th century and champion shagger. It covered a record number of mares and produced a record number of champion-winning racehorses. I’m sure you get the picture. Theo stumbles upon a picture of Lexington by accident. An elderly neighbour is leaving junk outside her house after her husband died. A sign...

I’ve never met Ian Rankin. Not even on the page. He announced to the world he’s thinking of retiring from writing. I don’t need to make such pronouncements. He’s ‘the iconic number one bestseller.’ ‘A genius’ according to Lee Child. ‘A Master,’ according to the Guardian. Midnight and Blue you’d expect to be a knockout. ‘The new John Rebus thriller’ (well, since adding to his back catalogue of 24 Rebus novels and two short-story collections and a...

Sebastian Mallaby (2026) The Infinity Machine. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for SuperIntelligence. I thought this almost 400 page book would be a bit of slog. But it reads like a thriller. I loved it. Bill Gates recommends you read it too. Demis Hassabis. You know the type. Genius son of poor immigrants (boat people) who sets out to change the world… Notes . https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm5y5nynl75ko Open AI scraps new model...

Colin Walsh’s Kala is hell of a debut novel, an international bestseller. It’s rarely I’m blindsided by whodunnit as I was here. But Kala is more than a murder-mystery set in the small fictional town of Kinlough . It’s a propping up and tearing down of what it is to by young and full of love and teenage sparring and bullshit in the endless summer of 2003, when everything is up for grabs and Kala Lanann couldn’t be more perfect, and she’s the...

Pierre Lemaitre’s prior work Blood Wedding (translated by Frank Wynne) contains many of the themes and plots used in later novels. Blood Wedding is not one novel, but two. A rewriting of what the reader believes to be the narrative truth. The serial murderer often appears in the early pages of Lemaitre’s stories. Sophie Duguet keeps losing things and losing herself in blocks of time she can’t account for, but she found a job that suits her if...

70 UP, STV iPlayer, ITV iPlayer, Directed by Asif Kapadia. https://www.stv.tv/entertainment/series/70-up/ (stv.tv in Bing) ITVX (ITV Hub) — 70 Up https://www.itv.com/watch/70-up/2a1234 (itv.com in Bing) I watched the penultimate episode of 70 UP. I’ve watched every other episode apart from 63 UP as I couldn’t access it. So it was great to catch up. The Jesuits borrowed the idea: ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.’ 7...

I’m smart enough to know I don’t know anything much worth knowing about poetry in particular. In ‘Introduction to Poetry’ in Amnest Gwilym’s latest collection, she offers some sage advice that had me thinking back to all those creative writing tutors inviting you—ever so nicely—to interrogate your work: ‘But all you want to do is place my poem in a birdcage, force it to sing its song, You start by starving it to find out what it means.’ I’m...

Douglas Sturt understands how fragile memories and language are and how they can be torn away from a sense of self. There’s no place for his Booker Prize winning debut novel, Shuggie Bain or his international bestseller, Young Murdo on library shelves for books in places like Texas that ban and burn books. His protagonists are always working-class boys going to be fucked over or just fucked for being different, for being gay. If not by others,...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002w9wy/the-iron-claw I chanced on this film. Supposedly based on the Von Erich brothers. Wrestlers handed a poisoned chalice by the domineering dad Fritz on their Texas ranch. Fritz’s signature move while wrestling was The Iron Claw. Hence the movie’s title. But Fritz never got to be the heavy-weight world champion. His boys would be and he wasn’t going to let them forget it. Their lives were to be shaped...