celticman's blog

A collection of short stories that won the Man Booker International Prize, which is a surprise, because nobody publishes short stories now, but if you’re Alice Munro you can pretty well do what you like. A good story—whether it’s short or long—makes you think of other stories, perhaps something that happened in childhood. Bad stories are easy to spot. There are no bumps or mounds among the words, no mountains of childhood and you might just as...

Watching or reading about the Holocaust, or the horrors of the Japanese prison camps, always makes me hungry. I don’t know if that makes me empathetic or a greedy bastard. I suspect in another life I’d have made quite a good Nazi. I’ve read about Terezin before. It was a half-way house to the hell of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. In buildings that should have held a maximum of 6000 the camp held, in 1942, 60 000 and they kept coming,...

Howl is a poem, perhaps the poem, that helped to bring together a loose group of writers and poets that we refer to as the Beat Generation. Certainly, Epstein and Freiman have put lots of work into establishing those credentials. The film jumps back and forth between Alan Ginsberg’s (played by James Franco) inaugural reading of the poem at the Six Gallery Reading in 1955, the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlingetti (Andrew Rogers) and his...

The Boy at the Gate is Danny Ellis aged eight. He’s waiting for his Ma at one of the three gates leading into and out of Artane Industrial School. It’s run by the Christian Brothers and has five dormitories with 175 bed, a cinema and a 325-foot long hall, a concert hall, various rooms, kitchens, administrative block. When Ellis talks about the Christian Brothers ‘caring’ for children he marks out the word care by quotation marks. ‘Christian’ and...

Let’s start with the important stuff. In the Acknowledgment’s page Kevin acknowledges all his friends on a writers’ website AbcTales.com. Yeh, I know, never heard of it either. If I had heard of it I might have read some of Kevin’s stuff and in particular the narrator Tom meeting his sister, Karen, her husband Rod (Rod’s a rod) and their daughter Natalie to celebrate his mum’s eightieth-odd birthday, and been wildly impressed. Tom is a writer. I...

Sometimes you pick a book and sometimes a book picks you. I’d looked at this book, read a little and put it down again, read a little and put it down again. It looked to be one of those books I tend to specialise in writing that nobody ever reads and fades from memory quicker than a cuttlefish. You might not know what a cuttlefish is and neither might I, but somewhere in the world someone does, and that’s enough guff. The sign of a good book is...

This book is described as a fable, a conceit, a what if? It’s I’d guess aimed at children or adolescents, although, of course books like the Northern Lights series, Harry Potter, Little Women or Treasure Island were also read and enjoyed by those that can be described as being more adult. I can’t say I enjoyed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas much, but maybe that proves I’ve finally grown up and become more mature. It’s quite a simple tale. Nine-...

I’ve read a few of Burke’s books. He’s a bit like Stephen King, so prolific, it’s difficult to keep up with him. I could tell you which ones I’ve read, and what happens. I know there were some bad guys that needed sorting and there’s a yearning, a wisful longing, in Burke’s books for a better world. In his narratives good triumphs over evil. That’s a given and allowed me to read only the first 150 pages of this and the last 100 pages. The Light...

I’ve an admission to make I was once a member of the Sally Army. I wasn’t a cadet more a lowly conscript. A Sherrif’s Office told me to join them or go to that other blasted place. So I’m not neutral about this, I was saved and the meals we served were very cheap and nutritious too. So in a way I’m family. William Booth, the Methodist minister, started it all off in 1865 and quickly recruited his wife and eighteen children into his ready made...

There is no end to war and in 2014 there will be a lot of political shuffling and looking back at The Great War to end all wars. Remarrque shows the landscape and futility of life on the front line. Paul Baumer is the first-person narrator, and the book is structred so that it moves only to the impersonal third person in the last paragraph: He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army...