celticman's blog

Kirsty Logan is appearing in Dalmuir Library as part of West Dunbartonshire Libraries’s Festival of Words. Her novel The Gracekeepers is currently novel of the month. I usually have a crack at novel of the month, having been nominated myself, but also because my reading tends to be predictable and sometimes it’s good to shake it up and try something new. I wouldn’t usually have picked the The Gracekeepers and I certainly wouldn’t have finished...

On the eve of President Trump’s ‘working visit’ to the United Kingdom this is a handy book to read. President Trump features more than Putin, or other twenty-first century despots. I guess this short book is a riposte to that shock election result, which wasn’t a shock to Snyder. Depots don’t read books. And Trump doesn’t read. His library consists of stored Tweets. Snyder’s lessons On Tyranny shifted through the sands of the mass killings of...

I’ve read Morvern Caller, The Sopranos, The Stars in the Bright Sky, and The Deadman’s Pedal . I liked them all, or I wouldn’t have finished reading them. Life’s too short to mess about reading shite. The Deadman’s Pedal , when we take the foot off the gas the train comes to a halt. There’s a metaphor there somewhere. The Deadman’s Pedal is my favourite Warner book of this collection. The other books involved gaggles of young girl narrators from...

The librarian said you’re going to love this book. It’s exactly how young girls behave when they go on holiday. She was buzzed about it and even smiled. And it was longlisted for the Man Brooker Prize in 2010. But any good stories got a BUT, I use them a lot. The laws of diminishing returns apply here. I did love Morvern Caller , Alan Warner’s debut novel. The Sopranos was great, six eighteen-year old girls from a Catholic school and a wee town...

BBC 2, BBC iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09wfrk0 Hatred has no country. Ironically, I watched this programme on BBC Catch-up on Easter Sunday in memory of the resurrection. I read in The Observer about Israeli snipers on Good Friday shooting Palestinian demonstrators, or terrorists, depending on how those shot are defined. Around 16 dead. Hospitals in Gaza report 284 injured people, the majority with bullet wounds. 70 wounded,...

BBC 1 Scotland, 10.45. BBC iPlayer https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p060xfr6/unsolved-the-man-with-no-alibi-1-the-night-of https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0618hs2/unsolved-the-man-with-no-alibi-2-no-smoke-without-fire https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p061bm2d/unsolved-the-man-with-no-alibi-3-the-truth-and-other-lies https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p061bmtv/unsolved-the-man-with-no-alibi-4-hot-shoe-shuffle https://www.bbc...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09xptp8/reggie-yates-searching-for-grenfells-lost-lives?ns_mchannel=email&ns_source=pan_newsletter&ns_campaign=PANUK_NLT_13_SCO_HospitalComeHome&ns_linkname=bbctwo_reggieyatesgrenfellsearchingforlostlives_FactualCurrentaffairs_reggieyatesgrenfellsearchingforlostlives&ns_fee=0 I write stuff, which nobody much reads, but I’ve got a roof over my head and I’m not hungry or cold and need to queue...

I rattled through this book in no time. A simple story told in the first person voice of Tom Hazard who was born on the 3 rd March 1581 and is now—I’m crap at arithmetic, so I’ll jump from page 1 to page 316, near the end of the book—and say Tom is around 439 years old. He’s done a lot of living. And his daughter, Marion, who is also over 400 years old, calls the American President ‘a motherfucker’. Wisdom comes with age. Only it doesn’t. Look...

The Sopranos is a cumming-of-age novel. Let’s start at the beginning. Page 1. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls. Fionnula tells us the school motto, ‘Noses up…knickers DOWN!’ Warning, this novel contains a rape scene, but it’s wee Orla that’s doing the raping. The Sopranos are the elite of the ‘Hoors of the Sacred Heart’. These are the girls in the fifth-year school choir that can hit the highest notes. There’s Fionnula, Orla, (Ra)...

I loved this book. It should really be read in conjunction with Jed Mercurio’s debut novel Bodies . Yeh, that Jed Mercurio that writes scripts for the BBC, Bodies and Line of Duty . Adam Kay is following a similar trajectory, half way between the drama of Jed Mercurio and the upbeat chortleness of Harry Hill. You’re probably thinking why should the tax payer should spend all that money training junior doctors, indirectly subsidising the...