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Continue reading →: Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy
Lesy’s painstaking research through the archives of a rural Wisconsin town between 1890 and 1910 is presented in such a fashion that it becomes a hymn to a forgotten world, a bleak picture of a tough life with harsh working conditions, one in which death is an ever-present, and yet…
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Continue reading →: Columba’s Bones by David Greig
This series continues to go from strength to strength. He wondered if he really needed his axe. Surely the Christians were unlikely to put up a fight? He had a stabbing knife. The axe seemed like extra weight. Still, it looked good and it scared people. He decided to keep…
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Continue reading →: Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
Here’s a delight – a sharp and affecting snippet of life on the edge in rural County Mayo. Riddled with anxiety and in and out of depression is Dev Hendricks, in his early 20s, his mother recently dead and his father semi-committed to the local mental institution. He just about…
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Continue reading →: Santa Sangre
A Mexican and Italian collaboration, in Spanish, with the Director himself from Chile. I’ve been meaning to get to Jodorowsky films for a while, and eventually began with this. With its vivid colours which somehow make the blood stand out more clearly than ever, and its quirky surrealist style, it…
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Continue reading →: La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono
translated from the Spanish (Equatorial Guinea) by Lawrence Schimel Obono’s short, hundred page, novel is the first from and Equatorial Guinea woman to be translated into English. As well as the absorbing story it tells, it provides an insight into the life of the Fang tribe in remote Guinea. Okomo…
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Continue reading →: When The Mountain Fell by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
translated from the French (Switzerland) by Sarah Fisher Scott In the early summer of 1749 in a valley on the south side of the Bernese Alps in Switzerland, at an altitude on 1450 metres, two massive landslides fell. Thousands of tons of rocks tumbled from 500 metres forming a 2…
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Continue reading →: Ticket to Ride by Dennis Potter
I read a few reviews of this from people who wrote that they couldn’t work out what the hell was going on. Those sort of comments attract me. It was swiftly added to my list. A middle-aged man on a train bound for London breaks down in tears, having suddenly…
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Continue reading →: Car by Harry Crews
Crews went through a prolific period of five years leading up to 1972, during which he wrote five novels, each a bit funnier, each a bit shorter, each more inventive, but each with less emotion than the previous. This is a good example, the fifth of those five, as it…
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Continue reading →: The Far Islands and Other Cold Places by Elizabeth Taylor
This was a very suitable read for International Women’s Day, a forgotten jewel in fact, though I can’t claim to have taken it on with that in mind. The book is a memoir or sorts, of Elizabeth Taylor, who in the golden years of Arctic exploration, refused to be put…
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Continue reading →: Extraordinary Places By Bicycle by Pauline & Hugh Symonds
This is a stunningly presented book with breathtaking photography and awe-inspiring descriptions of the decade of cycle touring undertaken by a retired teaching couple from the north of England. Rather than opt for the sort of retirement most people do, Pauline and Hugh embarked on physically challenging adventures that took…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias.
Where is Andy?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 