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One brief book recommendation, once every month. Fiction and non-fiction, for the casual or voracious reader.Subscribe.
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Deborah Levy – August Blue (2023)
JAN 2024A blue-haired concert pianist, Elsa M. Anderson, walks off stage in the Golden Hall in Vienna. She’s gone off script and played a few minutes of her own composition, because her fingers refused to play what the conductor of the orchestra, and the many people who bought a ticket to witness her immense talent in person, so desperately wanted her to play—Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2. Continue reading →
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This month I read this book by Joan Didion for the third time. I found myself sat at a bar while on vacation, with this book in my pocket, and I read it cover-to-cover before I got up and left. It is a captivating read: a meditation on grief unlike anything I've ever read. Continue reading →
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I was once told that, if I'd like to write, or write well, it's best not to read any books on writing and just sit down for an hour every day to plow right ahead. Needless to say, I've ignored that advice and read a great number of them; books by writers like John McPhee, Brian Dillon, Vivian Gornick and Annie Dillard, covering a variety of ideas and tools—things to remember, and things to forget. Continue reading →
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Janina Duszejko lives in a remote Polish village in the Klodzko Valley where you're unlikely to find cell reception, and where only two of her neighbours, Big Foot and Oddball, stick around for the winters. She's a bit of a recluse. A former engineer of bridges, she likes to translate the poetry of William Blake with her friend Dizzy, teaches English now and again, studies astrological charts (writing down the dates and places of birth of everyone she meets, when possible), and is what many would consider an oddball, herself. Continue reading →
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John Hersey – Hiroshima (1946)
AUG 2023‘In referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term “survivors”, because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead. The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, “hibakusha”—literally, “explosion-affected persons.”’ Continue reading →