celticman's blog

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03n1svn/midnights-children I like films, but I love books, but I don’t love Salman Rushdie’s books. I read about the first fifty pages of Midnight’s Children and didn’t go any further. But I enjoyed the film. It’s a simplified version of the book, and being quite simple that’s the version for me. I get the same kind of thing with Shakespeare. It’s not something I’d read for pleasure. And when you get to a...

The same, but different. Most writers write the same book again and again. (I do that too). Publishers like that. It’s an easy sell, especially if your debut novel won the Booker Prize. Different characters, different haircuts, the same predicaments, with much the same outcomes. Write what you know. Young Mungo (Hamilton-Buchanan) is Shuggie Bain . A rundown housing estate in the Dennistoun, East End of Glasgow (of course) after Thatcher...

‘We elected a meme.’ Conspiracy beliefs eat you from the inside. I know this having been brought up a Roman Catholic. Guardian journalist Van Badham tells the reader her book is about two things, i) the internet, ii) belief. It was personal for her. ‘My interest in the internet’s extremist underworld resulted from my experience of its attacks…I found myself on the very public online radar of misogynists, racists, homophobes and outright fascists...

This is a big book in lots of ways. 720 pages. There’s nothing little about A Little Life . I’d picked up hints about this book in my reading. The Great American Novel. It made it a must read. Yanagihara’s second novel won acclaim from all the major players in literary fiction. The Wall Street Journal , for example, ‘Announces [on the flyleaf] Yanagihara as a major American novelist. The New York Times bestseller. A panegyric from Edmund White...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0019n5y/the-mule Based on a true story (kinda, but not really). An article in The New York Times reported that Earl Stone, aged 90, had been convicted for transporting drugs for a Mexican cartel. If Earl Stone had been aged 30 or 40, or even 50, there’d be no story. The story is in his age. He was just doing what a man gotta do. You have, for example, Brian Cox leaving the Scottish islands and chasing...

The Slowworm’s Song begins with ‘Start,’ and ends with ‘Start’, and in between there is a ‘Stop’. I guess that’s true of most of life, although there might be a lot of hanging about in between. Ex-soldier Stephen Rose lives in Somerset, which is home of sorts. It was where he was brought up by his father. Quakers don’t join the army, but Stephen went against the grain of his father’s pacifist beliefs and that decision defined his adult life. He...

Google announced they would delete data. Algorithms rule the world. And their algorithm made Sergey Brin and Larry Page the richest men in the world. That’s the equivalent of an oil company announcing it would no longer produce petrol. Google would not cooperate with law officials who sought to prosecute women seeking abortion in lieu of Roe versus Wade after searching online, using Google. Google is a noun and verb. Google trends offer the...

Robert Edric is six or seven years older than me, but scenes of a Sheffield childhood are remarkably similar to mine. A writer’s job is to remember. I remember my da punched my mum. My sisters would probably make some excuse, as if it never happened. I don’t remember me wee brother setting his jammies on fire, and him being rushed to hospital. I was only a kid, but I find it strange I forgot what happened that day. Edric does remember everything...

Poets make the best writers. Ways To Fold a Swan is a chapbook. I remember Rachel Smart from when she was an editor at ABCtales (she probably still is). I read everything she wrote. Poetry mostly, but also prose. Story of the week stuff. I like her writing because she writes about people I recognise. People like me. Working class, and unashamedly so. Words she recognises come preloaded with meaning. ‘Rouse, ravish, rape.’ Roe versus Wade. Tens...

Girl, Women, Other won the Booker Prize for Bernardine Evaristo in 2019. This mimics one of her twelve characters, Amma. Her play at The National, The Last Amazons of Dohomey is a popular and critical hit. Amma, the outsider, has become Amma, the insider. Bernardine Everisto, playwright, poet, author and critic has become part of the cultural elite. An insider and outsider. Four chapters, twelve characters. Each chapter giving verse of their...