Category: Book reviews
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Is this the weirdest book review I’ve ever written?
First off, I’ll need to apologize to the friend who lent me the book. It is not as new as it was. I have wrestled with it, I have wept over it, there was even a stress-related incident with a strawberry jam sandwich. I am not normally like that with books but this was that…
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The Meaning of Everything
Dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive (ie, presenting examples and definitions of how words are being used out in the world) not prescriptive (ie, their job isn’t to tell you what the words ought to mean, or how they ought to be used). What they definitely should not be is proscriptive (ie, they can’t tell…
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A million birds, two books, one life
Imagine you’ve been swept up into a high-flying flock of birds – a flock as numerous as a gathering of every swirl of starlings ever seen on a winter’s night. Imagine flocks of every species spiralling into one; every colour, every aspect and temperament that birds can display flickering around you as you swoop and…
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Mysterious holes in history
“Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is unjust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire There are gaps…
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Just Stop Obfusticating
Last time I saw Stonehenge I was in the modern world. Quite glad of the almost permanent slowing of through-traffic, which infuriates the ‘get there yesterday’ people, and gives everyone else the chance to take a look at the stones in passing. We discussed it a bit, sitting on a picnic bench on the concrete…
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Talk of the Village
When when word got around that William Wood had put together a whole story collection inspired by snapshots of life in the village where he lived, some people were a bit worried. “Am I in it?” “You didn’t write about what happened to X, did you?” “Where do you get your ideas from?” — A…
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Can you keep a secret in a village?
Many years ago on holiday in Cumbria, author William Wood was enchanted by a village not unlike that portrayed in his new book. “Imagine what it would be like to live here,” he said to Anna, his wife. Neither ever dreamed this dream would come true. William was brought up in the South East and…
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Persecution, prejudice and propaganda
What do you make of a situation where a UN investigator reads a certain name, and says “out of nowhere, I was overtaken by a host of disparaging thoughts and almost reflexive feelings of rejection”? He says he didn’t even read the email about that person, because he’d been convinced this wasn’t a topic he…
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The Battle for Home
Imagine this: you’ve been barred from your home district while those who are conducting a war got on with it. You’ve spent your time trying to find food and get on with life in the parts of your town that are still semi-functional, whilst trying to teach your kids to recognize and find shelter from…
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Trespassers Will: a great, long, monster blog-post posing as a book review
“Ownership insecurity”- a fascinating concept that, especially on the topic of land. It’s a vicious form of paranoia that threatens to manifest as soon as someone lays claim to a bit of land larger than the average family allotment. Until recently, most of us were completely baffled by the obsession Israel and its followers had…
Kay Green 