celticman's blog

Derren Brown is magic. He writes stuff too. Much of which I’ve read. Here he condenses 17 chapters of his international bestseller, Happy . I’ve read that too. I’m unhappy that 99.99% of the stuff I read, I instantly forget. That should worry me. But you know what Derren Brown said? Well, if you don’t, I’ll remind you (and myself). ‘None of this is real.’ Happiness does not exist, but it’s one of those stories we make up and remind ourselves...

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon. One of the 200 brain surgeons in Britain. I should use the past tense because he’s retired. He wrote a book about that too in 2023, And Finally . His fist book was the 2014 bestseller, Do No Harm . As well as being a master surgeon, he’s a competent DIY craftsman and a master wordsmith. This is the in-between book of his trilogy, I hadn’t read. Or at least thought I hadn’t. But when Marsh relates confessing to a...

Reading is what I do. That’s the explanation I often give for my views. I sometimes add, I also write. But most readers aren’t interested in that. Lucy Mangan does both. She shares her home with her Bookworm husband and child and around 10 000 books. I love books too, but I’m not allowed to love them that much. ‘Books have not isolated me, they have connected me,’ Mangan tells us. Reading is an unnatural act. Think of it in analogous terms of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_(2023_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden Walden is a good name for a film. A good name for an American character. Walden (Emile Hirsch) is a court stenographer in a small southern town. The film was shot in Atlanta. Everyone knows each other. Everyone knows Walden. But he’s really not worth knowing. Penny dreadful. I was going to explain the plot. But if you’ve watched as many Scooby Doo cartoons as I...

Comfort Women by Nora Okja Keller began as a short story. Keller turned it into an acclaimed debut novel. Comfort Women sounds kind of nice. A pseudonym for mass rape, torture and mass murder by Japanese soldiers who invaded Korea in the same way England invaded Ireland. Japanese Imperialism, claiming to be ‘for the good of Koreans’, failed when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The roots of genocide remain because some...

I don’t usually read books twice. But I was browsing and picked Władysław Szpilman’s autobiography again. He was born in 1911. He had two sisters and a brother. They were taken with his mother and father, East, for resettlement. They were killed by the Nazis. Wladyslaw survived the Warsaw ghetto. The Warsaw uprising. He was almost killed by his Russian saviours. He was one of the few Jews to survive. He needed not just one miracle but many...

Henry Marsh was once part of an elite group of around 200 neurosurgeons in England. Not only that, he’s a Sunday Times Bestseller. His focus here is letting go. With the help of an editor, this is his diary written over a year from the Covid-19 epidemic. His fears and doubts as he moved from being part of the establishment to just another NHS patient. A fearful old man with cancer of the prostrate. ‘Although I was to come to terms fairly quickly...

In the introduction, Bill Bryson explains to the editor of the Mail on Sunday , who is an old friend, the reasons he can’t write a weekly column for the magazine Night & Day . Notes from a Big Country are a collection of these columns published in the Mail on Sunday , 1996-1998. It would be the equivalent of me publishing my blog column. The Big Country Bryson refers to is America. He is a returning citizen taking with him an English wife,...

Crossing the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s not one book, but many stories linked to what it means to be human, to be black and bought and sold, to be despised because of your skin colour. I wasn’t paying much attention to the story’s through-line or theme. ‘A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember. I led them (two boys and a girl)…My Nash. My Martha. My Travis. Their lives fractured.’ ‘The...

‘Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.’ Carter specialises in the wrong side of the track. If it’s not circuses, it’s showbiz, which is just a different kind of circus. Dora has taken on the task of writing her autobiography. Well, not just hers, but her twin sister, Nora. It’s their seventy-fifth birthday. Same birthday as William Shakespeare (assuming we know who that is). Same...