Dougie's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 14 May 2025 01:36:02 -0700 60 Dougie's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 193388249
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And this was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered.

As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.]]> 338 David Grann 0593470834 Dougie 0 currently-reading 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Only Good Indians 52180399 The creeping horror of Paul Tremblay meets Tommy Orange’s There There in a dark novel of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.

Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.]]> 305 Stephen Graham Jones 1982136456 Dougie 5 2025-top-5
Were I to pick some nits, the basketball game at the end went on way too long, and the chase that followed could have been shorter. Maybe I'm an outlier but I am not reading books for cinematic action scenes, those scenes I just read through as quickly as possible to get back to the good stuff, of which in this book there is plenty.]]> 3.68 2020 The Only Good Indians
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/11
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: 2025-top-5
review:
This book is great, I love the semi mystical horror vibes, not out and out supernatural for much of the book but not grounded in reality either. It's a really solid story, well told, with well defined characters acting as you expect from their detailed characterisations, everything that happens does so for a reason and it's well told. It's a really thoroughly solid book of a kind it's becoming vanishingly hard to find outside of the good end of Stephen King's work.

Were I to pick some nits, the basketball game at the end went on way too long, and the chase that followed could have been shorter. Maybe I'm an outlier but I am not reading books for cinematic action scenes, those scenes I just read through as quickly as possible to get back to the good stuff, of which in this book there is plenty.
]]> Indelicacy 45892263 her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?

Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.

"Indelicacy isn't merely a book, it's a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever . . . Arch, yet warm; aspiring and impervious; confiding and enigmatic; reposing and intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind and filled my heart." �Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

A ghostly feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.]]> 176 Amina Cain 0374148376 Dougie 2 3.58 2020 Indelicacy
author: Amina Cain
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2025/05/13
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves:
review:
Throughout the middle section of the book, our main character is writing because she loves writing, can't get enough of her writing, knows her writing is great and is compelled to write, but doesn't know what exactly to write or how to make it a book. That is the autobiographical section of this novel.
]]> <![CDATA[The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way]]> 29
From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation; Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use.

Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language.]]> 270 Bill Bryson 0380715430 Dougie 4 3.91 1990 The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
author: Bill Bryson
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1990
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/06
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves:
review:
Fun, if unfortunately now slightly dated, look at the history of the English language, written with the usual wit and charm. No complaints, not quite as funny as some of his books, and not quite as enlightening as others, it sits somewher ein the middle but is worth a read.
]]> The Tyranny of Flies 199865473
Growing up on a Cuba-esque Caribbean island, Casandra, Calia, and Caleb endure life under two that of their parents, and the Island’s authoritarian dictator, Pop-Pop Mustache. Papa was the dictator's former right-hand man. Now, he’s a political pariah and an ugly parody of a tyrant, treating his home as a nation which he rules with an iron fist. As for Mom, his wife and hateful second in command, she rules from the mind. Obsessed with armchair psychoanalysis, she spends her days reading self-help books and seeks to diagnose the kids, and perhaps even herself.

But within these walls, a rebellion is fomenting. Casandra, a cynical, self-important teenager with the most unlikely of attractions, recruits Caleb, meek yet gifted with a deadly touch, to join her in an insurrection against their father’s arbitrary totalitarianism. Meanwhile, Calia, the silent, youngest sibling who just wants to be left alone to draw animals, may be in league with the flies—whose swarm in and around the house grows larger as Papa’s violence increases.

Equal parts Greek tragedy and horror, with a touch of J.D. Salinger and Luis Buñuel, The Tyranny of Flies is a biting and wholly original subversive masterpiece that examines the inherent violence of authority and the frightening and indelible links between patriarchy, military, and family.

Translated from the Spanish by Kevin Gerry Dunn]]> 256 Elaine Vilar Madruga 0063330733 Dougie 5 3.79 2021 The Tyranny of Flies
author: Elaine Vilar Madruga
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Pink Slime 199797823
In a city ravaged by a mysterious plague, a woman tries to understand why her world is falling apart. An algae bloom has poisoned the previously pristine air that blows in from the sea. Inland, a secretive corporation churns out the only food anyone can afford—a revolting pink paste, made of an unknown substance. In the short, desperate breaks between deadly windstorms, our narrator stubbornly tends to her few remaining with her difficult but vulnerable mother; with the ex-husband for whom she still harbors feelings; with the boy she nannies, whose parents sent him away even as terrible threats loomed. Yet as conditions outside deteriorate further, her commitment to remaining in place only grows—even if staying means being left behind.

An evocative elegy for a safe, clean world, Pink Slime is buoyed by humor and its narrator’s resiliency. This unforgettable novel explores the place where love, responsibility, and self-preservation converge, and the beauty and fragility of our most intimate relationships.]]> 240 Fernanda Trías 1668049775 Dougie 4 3.36 2020 Pink Slime
author: Fernanda TrĂ­as
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Eurotrash 205478791
From “the great German-language writer of his generation� (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian� (the first was his best-selling 1995 debut, Faserland). Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has arrived to care for his eighty-year-old mother after her discharge from a mental institution. Reckoning with his family’s dark history—his long-dead grandfather was intimately associated with and unapologetically supportive of the Nazis—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, Christian sets off on a road-trip with her. As they traverse Switzerland in a hired cab, mother and son attempt to give away her vast fortune, which they’re carrying in a large plastic bag, to random strangers. By turns disturbing, disorienting, hilarious, and poignant, Eurotrash tells an intensely personal and unsparingly critical story of contemporary culture; a story that shows us a writer at the pinnacle of his powers of insight and observation.]]> 192 Christian Kracht 1324094567 Dougie 5 3.62 2021 Eurotrash
author: Christian Kracht
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking]]> 195274816 'Kaleidoscopic and beguiling . . . A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics' ANDREW McMILLAN

'Strange, intriguing, exhilarating' CAMILLA GRUDOVA

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.

She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows - almost - about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a on training her body and dreaming only of escape.

Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.]]> 286 Han Smith 1399814265 Dougie 5 2025-top-5
This makes the book confusing at first and almost sterile at first until you start to tune in to its way of imparting the information the reader needs and the whole thing culminates in a sort of joyous explosion where the reader gets their clearest view of what's important to her and how she feels at the moment it comes barreling out of her. That at least was my experience and it was almost euphoric. I loved this book.]]> 4.05 Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking
author: Han Smith
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: 2025-top-5
review:
Such a strange book. We follow our point of view character without being party to most of what she says to people or even a lot of what she's thinking. We're left to infer her state of mind, her thoughts and feelings from what little is imparted. We never even get her name.

This makes the book confusing at first and almost sterile at first until you start to tune in to its way of imparting the information the reader needs and the whole thing culminates in a sort of joyous explosion where the reader gets their clearest view of what's important to her and how she feels at the moment it comes barreling out of her. That at least was my experience and it was almost euphoric. I loved this book.
]]> <![CDATA["Diane..." - The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper]]> 298029 1 Scott Frost 067173573X Dougie 5
There's no big reveals, no extra information on what all happened but there's plenty of little details, asides and observations that are consistent with and add to the portrait of Cooper as an endlessly fascinated and good humoured boy scout making his way through this investigation.]]> 4.02 1990 "Diane..." - The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper
author: Scott Frost
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1990
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
A thoroughly charming addition to the canon of the show, with the audiobook read by Cooper himself it's an entirely worthwhile listen. Roughly half of the content I would gues sis already in the show and the rest of it is easily placed within the series of events by the reader, adding little bits of background.

There's no big reveals, no extra information on what all happened but there's plenty of little details, asides and observations that are consistent with and add to the portrait of Cooper as an endlessly fascinated and good humoured boy scout making his way through this investigation.
]]> Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier 34802642 The crucial sequel to the New York Times bestselling The Secret History of Twin Peaks, this novel bridges the two series, and takes you deeper into the mysteries raised by the new series.

The return of Twin Peaks this May is one of the most anticipated events in the history of television. The subject of endless speculation, shrouded in mystery, fans will come flocking to see Mark Frost and David Lynch's inimitable vision once again grace the screen. Featuring all the characters we know and love from the first series, as well as a list of high-powered actors in new roles, the show will be endlessly debated, discussed, and dissected.

While The Secret History of Twin Peaks served to expand the mysteries of the town and place the unexplained phenomena that unfolded there into a vastly layered, wide-ranging history, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier tells us what happened to key characters in the twenty-five years in between the events of the first series and the second, offering details and insights fans will be clamoring for. The novel also adds context and commentary to the strange and cosmic happenings of the new series. For fans around the world begging for more, Mark Frost's final take laid out in this novel will be required listening.]]> 145 Mark Frost 1250163307 Dougie 3
I very much doubt that was the intent and I'm sure plenty of people will find plenty to enjoy in here but it was just a little bit flat for me.

ETA: I re-read this after another watch through of the series. While I enjoyed the second read through of The Secret History more than I enjoyed it the first time, I enjoyed this less. As a book in its own right it's odd, the framing device of the FBI dossier works well in the first book and not at all here, this is largely local gossip irrelevant to the FBI and their investigations, the justification is tenuous which takes the reader out of it constantly.

The content is largely explaining things that did not need explained, though there was some analysis, extemporising and philosophising about what it could all mean which I did enjoy, but the bulk of the content feels unnecessary. Not bad, it's well written, well put together and I more or less enjoyed it the whole time I was reading it, but I didn't feel like it added anything to the show as a whole and the way the book is put together it doesn't really stand on its own either. Not bad, not great.]]> 3.87 2017 Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier
author: Mark Frost
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed it, it gives resolution to a lot of minor things that were left open but I also found it frustrating. I've always felt like the show explained itself enough to be satisfying and this book, while it doesn't contradict anything in the show or even in how I interpreted the show, by explaining things further it contradicts the very idea there was enough explained already, even while remaining consistent in the universe of the show. Which I found irritating.

I very much doubt that was the intent and I'm sure plenty of people will find plenty to enjoy in here but it was just a little bit flat for me.

ETA: I re-read this after another watch through of the series. While I enjoyed the second read through of The Secret History more than I enjoyed it the first time, I enjoyed this less. As a book in its own right it's odd, the framing device of the FBI dossier works well in the first book and not at all here, this is largely local gossip irrelevant to the FBI and their investigations, the justification is tenuous which takes the reader out of it constantly.

The content is largely explaining things that did not need explained, though there was some analysis, extemporising and philosophising about what it could all mean which I did enjoy, but the bulk of the content feels unnecessary. Not bad, it's well written, well put together and I more or less enjoyed it the whole time I was reading it, but I didn't feel like it added anything to the show as a whole and the way the book is put together it doesn't really stand on its own either. Not bad, not great.
]]> <![CDATA[The Secret History of Twin Peaks]]> 29102955 Twin Peaks comes a novel that deepens the mysteries of that iconic town in ways that not only enrich the original series but readies fans for the upcoming Showtime episodes.]]> 362 Mark Frost 1250075580 Dougie 4
The book itself is quite an odd collection of excerpts, reports and observations, assembled as an investigation by an agent into the circumstances around events in Twin Peaks, going all the way back to the days of the earliest white settlers and carrying on up to Cooper's investigation. There were a lot of additions to the mythology around it all that were interesting, but the book was still frustratingly light on any real details (as I suppose I had expected, it is in keeping with the way the series has handled it's underlying mythology from when it first began to be introduced) but it also rewrote and replaced some things in the histories (which I had not expected, and didn't particularly appreciate). Most notably, there is a long digression on the history of Ed, Norma and Nadine, which wasn't particularly important in the context of the rest of the book, but which is completely counter to Ed's telling of the story in the hospital when Nadine's in her coma. That's one of my favourite stories from the show and to completely excise it and replace it is a odd move, particularly since there seems no reason for it.

There's also a huge focus on a very minor character from the show, which felt quite odd and gave the book a feeling of being scraped and cobbled together, rather than an intrinsic piece of the overall story. It just made the book feel like it stretched a little bit too far and so fell somewhat short of what I hoped for, which was a key piece of the tale, bridging the gap between series 2 and 3 of the show. That said, I enjoyed the book a lot despite its flaws and would definitely recommend it to fans of the show, though not to anybody else. I can't imagine what anyone who hasn't watched the show closely would make of the book, I'm sure it would be bewildering and pointless.

I'll perhaps revise my rating upwards once I read the print version I have waiting for me but for now it's sitting at 3.5 stars. An interesting addendum to the show but a bit weak in its own right.

ETA: I re-read this after another watch through of the series in 2025. I don't disagree with anything I said previously, but I think I was a bit harsh. The book is an interesting assemblage of 'found' documents and I enjoyed it far more this time through than the first read, which was coloured a lot by my (probably unreasonable) expectations of it. I don't think it's necessary to add this to an understanding of the show, I don't particularly think it's necessary to have a one true understanding of the show itself, but I enjoyed the book in its own right this time, which I think is a better way to approach it.]]> 3.95 2016 The Secret History of Twin Peaks
author: Mark Frost
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
I read the audiobook version of this, though I do also have the hard copy, and I expect I will read that before too long. I'm not sure this book is best experienced as an audiobook as the presentation of the physical copy looks like it adds a lot to it. That said, it was nice to hear so many of the original cast on the audiobook doing their bits.

The book itself is quite an odd collection of excerpts, reports and observations, assembled as an investigation by an agent into the circumstances around events in Twin Peaks, going all the way back to the days of the earliest white settlers and carrying on up to Cooper's investigation. There were a lot of additions to the mythology around it all that were interesting, but the book was still frustratingly light on any real details (as I suppose I had expected, it is in keeping with the way the series has handled it's underlying mythology from when it first began to be introduced) but it also rewrote and replaced some things in the histories (which I had not expected, and didn't particularly appreciate). Most notably, there is a long digression on the history of Ed, Norma and Nadine, which wasn't particularly important in the context of the rest of the book, but which is completely counter to Ed's telling of the story in the hospital when Nadine's in her coma. That's one of my favourite stories from the show and to completely excise it and replace it is a odd move, particularly since there seems no reason for it.

There's also a huge focus on a very minor character from the show, which felt quite odd and gave the book a feeling of being scraped and cobbled together, rather than an intrinsic piece of the overall story. It just made the book feel like it stretched a little bit too far and so fell somewhat short of what I hoped for, which was a key piece of the tale, bridging the gap between series 2 and 3 of the show. That said, I enjoyed the book a lot despite its flaws and would definitely recommend it to fans of the show, though not to anybody else. I can't imagine what anyone who hasn't watched the show closely would make of the book, I'm sure it would be bewildering and pointless.

I'll perhaps revise my rating upwards once I read the print version I have waiting for me but for now it's sitting at 3.5 stars. An interesting addendum to the show but a bit weak in its own right.

ETA: I re-read this after another watch through of the series in 2025. I don't disagree with anything I said previously, but I think I was a bit harsh. The book is an interesting assemblage of 'found' documents and I enjoyed it far more this time through than the first read, which was coloured a lot by my (probably unreasonable) expectations of it. I don't think it's necessary to add this to an understanding of the show, I don't particularly think it's necessary to have a one true understanding of the show itself, but I enjoyed the book in its own right this time, which I think is a better way to approach it.
]]> Jawbone 44074748
When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.

Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from from Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft, and anonymous 'creepypastas', Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.]]> 264 MĂłnica Ojeda 1566896215 Dougie 5 2025-top-5
The characters share this real/unreal dichotomy with the facets of their personalities explored here being bot relatable and alien all at once. It's a strange and liminal book that I really didn't want to end.]]> 3.56 2018 Jawbone
author: MĂłnica Ojeda
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: 2025-top-5
review:
This is a strange and dizzying tale weaving together a sort of invented mysticism with adolesence and modern malaise and bringing out of it this weird tale both recognisably real and current and of our time but also utterly otherworldly and primal.

The characters share this real/unreal dichotomy with the facets of their personalities explored here being bot relatable and alien all at once. It's a strange and liminal book that I really didn't want to end.
]]> Room to Dream 35224286 Twin Peaks and writer and director of groundbreaking films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive - opens up about a lifetime of extraordinary creativity, the friendships he has made along the way and the struggles he has faced - sometimes successful, sometimes not - to bring his projects to fruition.

Part-memoir, part-biography, Room to Dream interweaves Lynch's own reflections on his life with the story of those times, as told by Kristine McKenna, drawing from extensive and explosive interviews with ninety of Lynch's friends, family members, actors, agents, musicians and collaborators. Lynch responds to each recollection and reveals the inner story of the life behind the art.]]> 496 David Lynch 1782118381 Dougie 5 2025-top-5
It was deeply moving and endlessly fascinating, I could have kept reading it forever.]]> 4.37 2018 Room to Dream
author: David Lynch
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: 2025-top-5
review:
An absolutely joyful examination of Lynch and his work through both his own eyes and those closest to him. The split chapters giving a factual account of each period based on research and interviews followed by the telling of whichever relevant stories occurred to Lynch himself about the period in question was a novel approach that worked especially well.

It was deeply moving and endlessly fascinating, I could have kept reading it forever.
]]> <![CDATA[What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)]]> 58724626
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.]]> 165 T. Kingfisher 1250830753 Dougie 2
It reminds me a lot of books I read when I was fourteen but that was thirty years ago. I also had no idea when I picked it up that it was a retelling of a Poe story, which I am now going to read and I presume enjoy more.]]> 3.86 2022 What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves:
review:
It wasn't exactly bad but I did not like this. The writing is competent though pitched to a young audience. The humour is anachronistic and just profoundly unfunny. The mystery at the centre is teased out a little but then solved all at once and the book grinds on to a by the numbers conclusion in a single straight line with no roadblocks.

It reminds me a lot of books I read when I was fourteen but that was thirty years ago. I also had no idea when I picked it up that it was a retelling of a Poe story, which I am now going to read and I presume enjoy more.
]]> Annie Bot 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Dougie 5 2025-top-5
I found it particularly challenging reading it as a man as part of my brain was viewing this relationship as a sort of ideal, or perhaps something I'm societally conditioned to think of as ideal, even as I was reeling at how nasty it was. It really made me challenge some thoughts I wasn't aware I even had and made me incredibly uncomfortable at times, but I think in a good and positive way.

Very delicately balanced, thoroughly interesting as a concept and really well executed, loved it.]]> 3.81 2024 Annie Bot
author: Sierra Greer
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: 2025-top-5
review:
I loved this book, I thought it was really deft in its framing of the central relationship as one of abuse when the power dynamic inherent in the central premise would almost seem to preclude that. Annie's awakening consciousness slowly reframes the relationship throughout the book so that even as Doug becomes less of a stunted manbaby monster, the abuse becomes worse.

I found it particularly challenging reading it as a man as part of my brain was viewing this relationship as a sort of ideal, or perhaps something I'm societally conditioned to think of as ideal, even as I was reeling at how nasty it was. It really made me challenge some thoughts I wasn't aware I even had and made me incredibly uncomfortable at times, but I think in a good and positive way.

Very delicately balanced, thoroughly interesting as a concept and really well executed, loved it.
]]> Thistlefoot 60018639
Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas' ancestral home in Russia--but not alone. A sinister figure known only as the Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past: fiery memories that have hidden in Isaac and Bellatine's blood for generations. As the Yaga siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family's traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows in relentless pursuit, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide--erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future.

An enchanted adventure illuminated by Jewish myth and adorned with lyrical prose as tantalizing and sweet as briar berries, Thistlefoot is an immersive modern fantasy saga by a bold new talent.]]> 448 GennaRose Nethercott 059346883X Dougie 0 did-not-finish
Too much naked exposition pretending to be dialogue, too many tortured characters straight out of the Writers Almanac of Tortured Characters, too much dialogue that's slightly off and unreal. It's clunky in the extreme, presumably aimed at a younger audience and generally quite annoying to try to get through.]]> 3.92 2022 Thistlefoot
author: GennaRose Nethercott
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: did-not-finish
review:
I won't rate it because I didn't finish it. I didn't finish it because it's not very good.

Too much naked exposition pretending to be dialogue, too many tortured characters straight out of the Writers Almanac of Tortured Characters, too much dialogue that's slightly off and unreal. It's clunky in the extreme, presumably aimed at a younger audience and generally quite annoying to try to get through.
]]> Piglet 127282554 An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.]]> 320 Lottie Hazell 125028984X Dougie 4
A thoroughly effective book really well crafted that I did not enjoy at all for around 90% of it. By the end I felt better about it but it was not a wholly positive experience for me. It was just too close, too real, too wired straight in to my own worries and past experiences for me to not feel incredibly anxious throughout.]]> 3.39 2024 Piglet
author: Lottie Hazell
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
It's very well written, too well written for the time I read it perhaps, it's very easy to slide right in to the mind of our main character, which is a horrible place to be for the two weeks this book covers as her relationship is collapsing. It's all very real, very present and up front and I found the whole experience of reading it absolutely riddled with anxiety.

A thoroughly effective book really well crafted that I did not enjoy at all for around 90% of it. By the end I felt better about it but it was not a wholly positive experience for me. It was just too close, too real, too wired straight in to my own worries and past experiences for me to not feel incredibly anxious throughout.
]]> This Thing Between Us 56269269
“This intense cosmic horror with a touch of Mexican American folklore is incredibly creepy and moving.� —Margaret Kingsbury, BuzzFeed

It was Vera’s idea to buy the Itza. The “world’s most advanced smart speaker!� didn’t interest Thiago, but Vera thought it would be a bit of fun for them amidst all the strange occurrences happening in the condo. It made things worse. The cold spots and scratching in the walls were weird enough, but peculiar packages started showing up at the house—who ordered industrial lye? Then there was the eerie music at odd hours, Thiago waking up to Itza projecting light shows in an empty room.

It was funny and strange right up until Vera was killed, and Thiago’s world became unbearable. Pundits and politicians all looking to turn his wife’s death into a symbol for their own agendas. A barrage of texts from her well-meaning friends about letting go and moving on. Waking to the sound of Itza talking softly to someone in the living room . . .

The only thing left to do was get far away from Chicago. Away from everything and everyone. A secluded cabin in Colorado seemed like the perfect place to hole up with his crushing grief. But soon Thiago realizes there is no escape—not from his guilt, not from his simmering rage, and not from the evil hunting him, feeding on his grief, determined to make its way into this world.

A bold, original horror novel about grief, loneliness and the oppressive intimacy of technology, This Thing Between Us marks the arrival of a spectacular new talent.]]> 272 Gus Moreno 0374539235 Dougie 4
A few too many terrible decisions made for no better reason than plot contrivance was the main let down of the story, but overall a good book.]]> 3.70 2021 This Thing Between Us
author: Gus Moreno
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
Not bad but not great, the passages about loss and grief were vivid and well realised, the horror story they're hung around was a bit more flimsy. The idea of a haunted Alexa is a bit too silly to sit next to the more serious passages, though the cosmic horror it developed in to was better.

A few too many terrible decisions made for no better reason than plot contrivance was the main let down of the story, but overall a good book.
]]> August Blue 62039277 The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living.

At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson―former child prodigy, now in her thirties―walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.

Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.

So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy’s August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.]]> 208 Deborah Levy Dougie 0 currently-reading 3.63 2023 August Blue
author: Deborah Levy
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Borrowed Hills 205325368 “Viscerally vivid…half Tarantino, half pitch-black northern realism.� �Guardian, A Best Book of 2024 * “Resonant and powerful...a saga of intergenerational retribution.� �New York Times

A stunning and “spiky debut� (The Times, London) novel set in the rugged, rural landscape of northwest England, where two sheep farmers lose their flocks and decide to reverse their fortunes by stealing sheep from a rich farm in the south—for fans of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy.

In early 2001, a lethal disease breaks out on the hill farms of northwest England, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke as they burn the carcasses. Two neighboring shepherds lose everything and set their sights on a wealthy farm in the south with its flock of prizewinning animals. So begins the dark tale of Steve Elliman and William Herne.

As their sheep rustling leads to more and more difficult decisions, the struggles of the land are never far away. Steve’s only distraction is his growing fascination with William’s enigmatic and independent wife, Helen. When their mountain home comes under the sway of a lawless outsider, Colin Tinley, Steve must save himself and Helen in a savage conflict that threatens the ancient ways of the Lakeland fells.

Told in the hardscrabble voice of a forgotten England, Scott Preston creates an uncompromising vision of farmers lost in brutal devotion to their flocks, the aching love affairs that men and women use to sustain themselves, and the painful consequences of a breathtaking heist gone bad. The Borrowed Hills “strides confidently across its pages, like the seasoned work of a veteran� (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), a thrilling and gritty adventure that reimagines the American Western for Britain’s moors and mountains where survival is in the blood.]]> 303 Scott Preston 1668050692 Dougie 5 3.86 2024 The Borrowed Hills
author: Scott Preston
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Homegoing 27071490 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.]]> 305 Yaa Gyasi Dougie 5 2024-top-5 4.48 2016 Homegoing
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-top-5
review:
I don’t know a great deal about Ghana, even less about its history, and about our history with Ghana as, presumably, brutal oppressors during colonial times. I know very little about the people and culture of Ghana but this book did what only the very best can and taught me huge amounts about life in those times and places, without ever seeming to teach anything, it’s just a raw, visceral, joyful and tragic tale across generations and it’s utterly amazing, read it.
]]> North Woods 125982404
In his transcendent fourth novel, Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason delivers a magisterial and highly inventive tale brimming with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we're connected to our environment, to history and to each other. It is not just an unforgettable novel about buried secrets and inevitable fates, but a way of looking at the world.]]> 372 Daniel Mason Dougie 5 2024-top-5 4.26 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/02
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-top-5
review:
A long long story spanning hundreds of years but centred on one home and orchard in New England. This book has everything, joy and hope and longing, art and life and love, a bit fantastical, a bit spooky, and with a big arrow of what the hell right through your face out of nowhere more than once. Loved it so much.
]]> Sandworms of Dune (Dune, #8) 42434 Chapterhouse: Dune, a ship carrying a crew of refugees escapes into the uncharted galaxy, fleeing from a terrifying, mysterious Enemy. The fugitives used genetic technology to revive key figures from Dune's past--including Paul Muad'Dib and Lady Jessica--to use their special talents to meet the challenges thrown at them.

Based directly on Frank Herbert's final outline, which lay hidden in two safe-deposit boxes for a decade, Sandworms of Dune will answer the urgent questions Dune fans have been debating for two decades: the origin of the Honored Matres, the tantalizing future of the planet Arrakis, the final revelation of the Kwisatz Haderach, and the resolution to the war between Man and Machine. This breathtaking new novel in Frank Herbert's Dune series has enough surprises and plot twists to please even the most demanding reader.]]> 494 Brian Herbert 076531293X Dougie 1
These novels are the epic conclusion to Frank Herbert's Dune saga which, until it was brutally defiled, ended on a cliffhanger at the end of book six - Chapterhouse: Dune. Reverend Mother Darwi Odrade led an assault on the Honored Matres that resulted in her death but ultimately in Murbella becoming leader of both the Honored Matres and the Bene Gesserit. The new plan for the merging of the two is not universally accepted and a rebel faction led by Sheeana escape the Sisterhood in a no-ship piloted by Duncan Idaho. Right at the last, as Duncan makes the fold space jump in the no-ship, a weird old couple appear to him in a sort of vision, he recognises them as foes of some sort and folds space to avoid them, stranding the ship outside of the known galaxy, or possibly in another dimension, I'm not sure.

So far so good, and for 21 years that was where the series ended because Frank Herbert inconveniently died before writing the rest. He did, it appears, leave notes as to where he was going with this. It is not clear how extensive these notes were but having read closely FH's books several times, and having now read Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson's follow ups, let me tell you I really doubt they were detailed. Interviews with the pair seem to bear this out, saying they were excited about the prospect of finishing the obviously unfinished story but had no idea how they were going to make it work, and ultimately deciding they needed to first write six prequels before carrying on where they left off.

Well, needless to say, you don't need to read those prequels either because they are also awful, and add nothing at all to the two books finishing the story which, as already mentioned, you should also not read.

There are two prequel series, Prelude to Dune (House Atreides ,House Harkonnen, House Corrino) and Legends of Dune (The Butlerian Jihad, The Machine Crusade, The Battle of Corrin). They're all massive and all poorly written, circuitous and dull. In them we learn the history of the Butlerian Jihad which happened just over 10,000 years prior to the events of Dune, but all you need to know is that ChatGPT eventually took over the world, there was a big war and we beat it, AI was eradicated and thus the commandment "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

They also, more importantly to the concluding two novels, introduced the characters of Omnius (Skynet except stupid and pompous) and Erasmus (Commander Data except stupid and pompous) - nothing either of them did in these prequels is important.

These books in place, cementing the events of ten thousand years prior to Dune, fifteen thousand years prior to where Chapterhouse: Dune ended, we are free to return to the current moment, and to the point of my over long review - these concluding books.

Hunters of Dune opens with a massive deus ex machina, I've read books that end with a deus ex machina but this is the first I ever read that starts with one. The Oracle of Time (who I assume is from the prequels as well since I don't know who she is) appears to Duncan Idaho and plonks the spaceship back in normal space. I'm not sure why they chose to open so jarringly with this magical intervention since the denizens of the ship will spend 95% of the remainder of the next two books wandering around the galaxy aimlessly and could as well have been doing it entirely lost in dimensionless space, but she does it and they're back.

On the no-ship is the last Tlielaxu Master, Scytale. I wish he had not been, but he was on board when they ran away at the end of Chapterhouse so we're stuck with him. I like Scytale, he's been with the series since Messiah, a character of good standing, Scytale is not the problem, the problem is what ensues from his presence. The Bene Gesserit on the no-ship use Scytale's knowledge to start a ghola program, bringing back every character of any consequence from the earlier books. More on this later, but it is incredibly, eyerollingly stupid.

Elsewhere, the new Bene Gesserit under Murbella are trying to curb a civil war because the Honored Matres don't want to be part of the Bene Gesserit. We get multiple reports of the same things happening again and again, the Bene Gesserit quell more rebellions somewhere, then somewhere else, then somewhere else, then they get absolutely fleeced by an obvious face dancer selling them non functioning weapons. There's some petty political stuf but without any depth or consequence, indeed virtually everything across these whole two books with the Bene Gesserit (let's not forget they were essentially the main focus of Heretics and Chapterhouse after the Atreides empire fell with the death of Leto II) is a pointless sideplot that will go unresolved or limp to a pointless conclusion.

Back with the no-ship, the space Rabbi and Thufir Hawat are replaced by face dancers - this will be revealed in the next book unless you were paying moderate attention to events, in which case it was revealed here and the hunt for the face dancers will be excruciating and boring while it takes many many more chapters to resolve, all the way in to the next book. This one however concludes with the big reveal in which we discover the elderly couple first glimpsed at the end of Chapterhouse: Dune are Erasmus, the annoying robot, and Omnius, the least intelligent all powerful supercomputer you've ever encountered, and all of us who know who they are let out a collective groan.

The second book carries on where the first left off, people circle about doing not much, the Bene Gesserit are now fighting thinking machines and losing instead of fighting Honored Matres and winning, there's a new Tlielaxu making sandworms in the sea, the thinking machines have a pet face dancer who has made his own gholas of Paul and Baron Harkonnen, though this Paul is called Paolo so we don't get confused, and the Bene Gesserit still haven't realised they're being conned by the people selling them weapons.

Anyway, everyone fumbles around until the thinking machines are ready to obliterate everyone and everything but need a Kwisatz Haderach for reasons which are never explained. All the gholas end up on the machine homeworld with everyone else. Paul fights himself and loses, then he fixes his stabbed heart by thinking about it really hard. Duncan Idaho is revealed to be the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, the Oracle of Time appears and makes Omnius disappear entirely and Erasmus climbs in to Duncan's brain so that man and machine can live happily ever after.

Let's talk about all the ways this is terrible. First of all the gholas - these were introduced in Dune Messiah as a way to bring Duncan Idaho back, then further explored with the endless line of Duncan Idahos spanning thousands of years. It was always a bit silly but it's fine, a bit silly is fine. These books however go absolutely balls out on the gholas.

On the no-ship, the program resurrects Paul, Chani, Jessica, Leto I, Leto II, Miles Teg, Stilgar, Liet-Kynes, Thufir Hawat and even Doctor Yueh. They resurrect Dr Wellington Yueh, for the apparent reason that the authors want him to suffer for being the traitor in the first book.

Please bear in mind this is some 5,000 years or more after the events of the first book. Dr Yueh is cloned 5,000 years in the future and his sole identity is the traitor Dr Yueh, he is raised knowing his history and then awakened to his memories so he can agonise over that time 5,000 years ago when he betrayed his Duke.

He is the silliest example but not the only example. The no-ship is peopled almost entirely with younger versions of characters from better books who lived their lives in satisfying narrative arcs, died dramatically or poignantly and then were resurrected for no reason in this book to have no real impact on anything, just to tool about chatting to each other about things that happened in prior better books.

I liked the muppets, the muppets were great, but Muppet Babies, where all the muppets appeared as younger versions of themselves and didn't act the same as in The Muppet Show, was terrible. This is that but with Dune.

Next issue is that everybody is stupid now. There are all sorts of political and military situations arising that could lead to all sorts of intrigue, tensions, those kind of scenes that Dune was chock full of where two mighty intellects stood across from one another gleaning vital information from the flicker of an eyelid, the inflection on a single word. But there isn't any of that because everybody is stupid now, none of the characters are able to exhibit any intelligence. The facing off between a Reverend Mother and Honored Matre, or the meeting of trade ambassadors brokering important deals, these kinds of interaction that were really the meat of earlier books are just boring dialogues now.

I want to be charitable and say it's because the authors were going for a more fast paced action oriented type of book but it's not that, it's because they aren't clever enough to put clever people in their books. These stories are full of telegraphed reveals that the lowliest politico in the original books would have seen coming a mile away, yet our heroes are flummoxed by them. The Bene Gesserit are taken in again and again by face dancers, I can accept the new breed being undetectable through the normal means, that's fine, but they know those face dancers exist and yet still trust people at face value and are taken in by obvious lies and subterfuge.

The philosophy of Dune is also largely gone, so much of the core of the story was about destiny, free will, the dangers of charismatic leaders, the importance of the individual and the individual's place in a functioning or dysfunctional system. All of it gone in favour of weird new worms, repetitive battle reports and dunking on Dr Yueh.

There are also multiple sideplots I glossed over or omitted entirely in my summary above. We spend a lot of time with a Tlielaxu administrator bullied in to starting the ghola project for the thinking machines via their super duper face dancer - he does create the Baron and Paolo gholas but we spend an awful lot of time with him with very little happening.

There is the rebellion of the Navigators of the Spacing Guild which is as exciting and interesting as a trade union dispute for one of the unions that don't really make it in to the press. This is important because the Navigators all appear right at the end to shoot something in another big deus ex machina.

There is the terraforming of some earth like planet called Qelso that the no-ship crew find, Stilgar and Liet-Kynes stay there because there's a desert and they're Fremen - this results in nothing.

There's a Tlielaxu master, Waff, on Arrakis, now Rakis, trying to breed sandworms to return it to functioning as it once did. We visit him periodically and he fails, then the sandworms turn out to have been underground all along and they're fine, so as well as resurrecting every character from the previous books, we resurrect the planet Dune.

The issue here isn't the scope or even the wandering nature of these many plots, the story is an epic multigenerational tale on a galactic scale, it's supposed to be like that, it's just that they're all so nakedly one of two things - either "remember this from the old books, let's put that in" and "how about doing that thing again but like, bigger" - they're not clever or interesting, don't expand on anything, don't offer insight and certainly don't help bring any kind of theme for the books to bear.

I could expand on so much of the above but I'm trying to keep this to a length that someone might actually read. I have been a fan of Dune since I was young, when I first read the books Brian Herbert was yet to write any of his prequels and sequels. When they first came out I read the first two and gave up, they were boring and unrecognisable, but the cliffhanger ending of the sixth book has always nagged at me.

Watching the thoroughly excellent Denis Villeneuve adaptations recently I decided to run through the books again, and I enjoyed them more this time than I ever had before, and so this time, when I got to that cliffhanger ending I decided I wanted to at least find out what the end of the story is.

Well let me tell you, I did not need to. All I needed was someone to tell me the following:

The enemy Duncan caught a glimpse of before folding space was a projection by a thinking machine force from a distant world. In the scattering the Honored Matres discovered thinking machines from the time of the Butlerian Jihad who were colonising worlds and amassing forces in preparation for their return.

The Honored Matres attacked the thinking machines who fought back with biological warfare nearly wiping them out. The Honored Matres returned to our galaxy in the hope of learning the Bene Gesserit means of fighting disease in the body.

After this initial contact, the thinking machines are coming in search of the rest of humanity, now seen as a threat again, with the intention of wiping them out. Had Frank written the last book he'd have had a clever way of stopping this from happening but unfortunately we'll never know what that was because it definitely wasn't in the notes that were used to write these books.

Everything else in these books is garbage that will waste your time. If you have a friend thinking of reading these terrible books please send them the preceding three paragraphs and beg them not to bother. Friends don't let friends read Hunters or Sandworms of Dune.]]> 3.64 2007 Sandworms of Dune (Dune, #8)
author: Brian Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2007
rating: 1
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:
This is a review of both Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune which are one book split in two, which should have been edited back down to one, or preferably zero books. First up the spoiler warning, this is going to contain a bunch of spoilers for these two books (which you should not worry about because you should not read them) but also a few for earlier books in the series, so maybe don't read on if you haven't read all of Frank's books - if you love the series you should read all of Frank's books, then once you've done so read this review I guess, it'll be better than the last two books, I promise. It'll definitely waste less of your time.

These novels are the epic conclusion to Frank Herbert's Dune saga which, until it was brutally defiled, ended on a cliffhanger at the end of book six - Chapterhouse: Dune. Reverend Mother Darwi Odrade led an assault on the Honored Matres that resulted in her death but ultimately in Murbella becoming leader of both the Honored Matres and the Bene Gesserit. The new plan for the merging of the two is not universally accepted and a rebel faction led by Sheeana escape the Sisterhood in a no-ship piloted by Duncan Idaho. Right at the last, as Duncan makes the fold space jump in the no-ship, a weird old couple appear to him in a sort of vision, he recognises them as foes of some sort and folds space to avoid them, stranding the ship outside of the known galaxy, or possibly in another dimension, I'm not sure.

So far so good, and for 21 years that was where the series ended because Frank Herbert inconveniently died before writing the rest. He did, it appears, leave notes as to where he was going with this. It is not clear how extensive these notes were but having read closely FH's books several times, and having now read Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson's follow ups, let me tell you I really doubt they were detailed. Interviews with the pair seem to bear this out, saying they were excited about the prospect of finishing the obviously unfinished story but had no idea how they were going to make it work, and ultimately deciding they needed to first write six prequels before carrying on where they left off.

Well, needless to say, you don't need to read those prequels either because they are also awful, and add nothing at all to the two books finishing the story which, as already mentioned, you should also not read.

There are two prequel series, Prelude to Dune (House Atreides ,House Harkonnen, House Corrino) and Legends of Dune (The Butlerian Jihad, The Machine Crusade, The Battle of Corrin). They're all massive and all poorly written, circuitous and dull. In them we learn the history of the Butlerian Jihad which happened just over 10,000 years prior to the events of Dune, but all you need to know is that ChatGPT eventually took over the world, there was a big war and we beat it, AI was eradicated and thus the commandment "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

They also, more importantly to the concluding two novels, introduced the characters of Omnius (Skynet except stupid and pompous) and Erasmus (Commander Data except stupid and pompous) - nothing either of them did in these prequels is important.

These books in place, cementing the events of ten thousand years prior to Dune, fifteen thousand years prior to where Chapterhouse: Dune ended, we are free to return to the current moment, and to the point of my over long review - these concluding books.

Hunters of Dune opens with a massive deus ex machina, I've read books that end with a deus ex machina but this is the first I ever read that starts with one. The Oracle of Time (who I assume is from the prequels as well since I don't know who she is) appears to Duncan Idaho and plonks the spaceship back in normal space. I'm not sure why they chose to open so jarringly with this magical intervention since the denizens of the ship will spend 95% of the remainder of the next two books wandering around the galaxy aimlessly and could as well have been doing it entirely lost in dimensionless space, but she does it and they're back.

On the no-ship is the last Tlielaxu Master, Scytale. I wish he had not been, but he was on board when they ran away at the end of Chapterhouse so we're stuck with him. I like Scytale, he's been with the series since Messiah, a character of good standing, Scytale is not the problem, the problem is what ensues from his presence. The Bene Gesserit on the no-ship use Scytale's knowledge to start a ghola program, bringing back every character of any consequence from the earlier books. More on this later, but it is incredibly, eyerollingly stupid.

Elsewhere, the new Bene Gesserit under Murbella are trying to curb a civil war because the Honored Matres don't want to be part of the Bene Gesserit. We get multiple reports of the same things happening again and again, the Bene Gesserit quell more rebellions somewhere, then somewhere else, then somewhere else, then they get absolutely fleeced by an obvious face dancer selling them non functioning weapons. There's some petty political stuf but without any depth or consequence, indeed virtually everything across these whole two books with the Bene Gesserit (let's not forget they were essentially the main focus of Heretics and Chapterhouse after the Atreides empire fell with the death of Leto II) is a pointless sideplot that will go unresolved or limp to a pointless conclusion.

Back with the no-ship, the space Rabbi and Thufir Hawat are replaced by face dancers - this will be revealed in the next book unless you were paying moderate attention to events, in which case it was revealed here and the hunt for the face dancers will be excruciating and boring while it takes many many more chapters to resolve, all the way in to the next book. This one however concludes with the big reveal in which we discover the elderly couple first glimpsed at the end of Chapterhouse: Dune are Erasmus, the annoying robot, and Omnius, the least intelligent all powerful supercomputer you've ever encountered, and all of us who know who they are let out a collective groan.

The second book carries on where the first left off, people circle about doing not much, the Bene Gesserit are now fighting thinking machines and losing instead of fighting Honored Matres and winning, there's a new Tlielaxu making sandworms in the sea, the thinking machines have a pet face dancer who has made his own gholas of Paul and Baron Harkonnen, though this Paul is called Paolo so we don't get confused, and the Bene Gesserit still haven't realised they're being conned by the people selling them weapons.

Anyway, everyone fumbles around until the thinking machines are ready to obliterate everyone and everything but need a Kwisatz Haderach for reasons which are never explained. All the gholas end up on the machine homeworld with everyone else. Paul fights himself and loses, then he fixes his stabbed heart by thinking about it really hard. Duncan Idaho is revealed to be the Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, the Oracle of Time appears and makes Omnius disappear entirely and Erasmus climbs in to Duncan's brain so that man and machine can live happily ever after.

Let's talk about all the ways this is terrible. First of all the gholas - these were introduced in Dune Messiah as a way to bring Duncan Idaho back, then further explored with the endless line of Duncan Idahos spanning thousands of years. It was always a bit silly but it's fine, a bit silly is fine. These books however go absolutely balls out on the gholas.

On the no-ship, the program resurrects Paul, Chani, Jessica, Leto I, Leto II, Miles Teg, Stilgar, Liet-Kynes, Thufir Hawat and even Doctor Yueh. They resurrect Dr Wellington Yueh, for the apparent reason that the authors want him to suffer for being the traitor in the first book.

Please bear in mind this is some 5,000 years or more after the events of the first book. Dr Yueh is cloned 5,000 years in the future and his sole identity is the traitor Dr Yueh, he is raised knowing his history and then awakened to his memories so he can agonise over that time 5,000 years ago when he betrayed his Duke.

He is the silliest example but not the only example. The no-ship is peopled almost entirely with younger versions of characters from better books who lived their lives in satisfying narrative arcs, died dramatically or poignantly and then were resurrected for no reason in this book to have no real impact on anything, just to tool about chatting to each other about things that happened in prior better books.

I liked the muppets, the muppets were great, but Muppet Babies, where all the muppets appeared as younger versions of themselves and didn't act the same as in The Muppet Show, was terrible. This is that but with Dune.

Next issue is that everybody is stupid now. There are all sorts of political and military situations arising that could lead to all sorts of intrigue, tensions, those kind of scenes that Dune was chock full of where two mighty intellects stood across from one another gleaning vital information from the flicker of an eyelid, the inflection on a single word. But there isn't any of that because everybody is stupid now, none of the characters are able to exhibit any intelligence. The facing off between a Reverend Mother and Honored Matre, or the meeting of trade ambassadors brokering important deals, these kinds of interaction that were really the meat of earlier books are just boring dialogues now.

I want to be charitable and say it's because the authors were going for a more fast paced action oriented type of book but it's not that, it's because they aren't clever enough to put clever people in their books. These stories are full of telegraphed reveals that the lowliest politico in the original books would have seen coming a mile away, yet our heroes are flummoxed by them. The Bene Gesserit are taken in again and again by face dancers, I can accept the new breed being undetectable through the normal means, that's fine, but they know those face dancers exist and yet still trust people at face value and are taken in by obvious lies and subterfuge.

The philosophy of Dune is also largely gone, so much of the core of the story was about destiny, free will, the dangers of charismatic leaders, the importance of the individual and the individual's place in a functioning or dysfunctional system. All of it gone in favour of weird new worms, repetitive battle reports and dunking on Dr Yueh.

There are also multiple sideplots I glossed over or omitted entirely in my summary above. We spend a lot of time with a Tlielaxu administrator bullied in to starting the ghola project for the thinking machines via their super duper face dancer - he does create the Baron and Paolo gholas but we spend an awful lot of time with him with very little happening.

There is the rebellion of the Navigators of the Spacing Guild which is as exciting and interesting as a trade union dispute for one of the unions that don't really make it in to the press. This is important because the Navigators all appear right at the end to shoot something in another big deus ex machina.

There is the terraforming of some earth like planet called Qelso that the no-ship crew find, Stilgar and Liet-Kynes stay there because there's a desert and they're Fremen - this results in nothing.

There's a Tlielaxu master, Waff, on Arrakis, now Rakis, trying to breed sandworms to return it to functioning as it once did. We visit him periodically and he fails, then the sandworms turn out to have been underground all along and they're fine, so as well as resurrecting every character from the previous books, we resurrect the planet Dune.

The issue here isn't the scope or even the wandering nature of these many plots, the story is an epic multigenerational tale on a galactic scale, it's supposed to be like that, it's just that they're all so nakedly one of two things - either "remember this from the old books, let's put that in" and "how about doing that thing again but like, bigger" - they're not clever or interesting, don't expand on anything, don't offer insight and certainly don't help bring any kind of theme for the books to bear.

I could expand on so much of the above but I'm trying to keep this to a length that someone might actually read. I have been a fan of Dune since I was young, when I first read the books Brian Herbert was yet to write any of his prequels and sequels. When they first came out I read the first two and gave up, they were boring and unrecognisable, but the cliffhanger ending of the sixth book has always nagged at me.

Watching the thoroughly excellent Denis Villeneuve adaptations recently I decided to run through the books again, and I enjoyed them more this time than I ever had before, and so this time, when I got to that cliffhanger ending I decided I wanted to at least find out what the end of the story is.

Well let me tell you, I did not need to. All I needed was someone to tell me the following:

The enemy Duncan caught a glimpse of before folding space was a projection by a thinking machine force from a distant world. In the scattering the Honored Matres discovered thinking machines from the time of the Butlerian Jihad who were colonising worlds and amassing forces in preparation for their return.

The Honored Matres attacked the thinking machines who fought back with biological warfare nearly wiping them out. The Honored Matres returned to our galaxy in the hope of learning the Bene Gesserit means of fighting disease in the body.

After this initial contact, the thinking machines are coming in search of the rest of humanity, now seen as a threat again, with the intention of wiping them out. Had Frank written the last book he'd have had a clever way of stopping this from happening but unfortunately we'll never know what that was because it definitely wasn't in the notes that were used to write these books.

Everything else in these books is garbage that will waste your time. If you have a friend thinking of reading these terrible books please send them the preceding three paragraphs and beg them not to bother. Friends don't let friends read Hunters or Sandworms of Dune.
]]> <![CDATA[Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future]]> 51257337
The first step on the road to change is to imagine possibility.

Imagine a Country offers visions of a new future from an astonishing array of Scottish voices, from comedians to economists, writers to musicians. Edited, curated and introduced by bestselling author Val McDermid and geographer Jo Sharp, it is a collection of ideas, dreams and ambitions, aiming to inspire change, hope and imagination. Featuring:

Ali Smith, Phill Jupitus, A.L. Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Kerry Hudson, Greg Hemphill, Carol Ann Duffy, Chris Brookmyre, Alison Watt, Alasdair Gray, Leila Aboulela, Ian Rankin, Selina Hales, Sanjeev Kohli, Jackie Kay, Damian Barr, Elaine C. Smith, Abir Mukherjee, Anne Glover, Alan Bissett, Louise Welsh, Jo Clifford, Ricky Ross, Trishna Singh, Cameron McNeish, Alexander McCall Smith, Carla Jenkins, Don Paterson, and many more . . .]]> 272 Val McDermid 1838851690 Dougie 4 3.86 2020 Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future
author: Val McDermid
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:
As with any collection of writings from a wide range of authors some of these pieces were much better than others but on the whole it was all thought provoking and interesting, even some of these pieces ones I disagreed with.
]]> Greek Lessons 63132065 A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.]]> 149 Han Kang 0241997070 Dougie 4 3.55 2011 Greek Lessons
author: Han Kang
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:
Beautiful and incredibly painful. Short but very dense like the other books I’ve read of hers. I enjoyed it a lot but was left at the end not quite sure what I got from it exactly. One to think on a bit more and perhaps revisit.
]]> Medea 752900
Euripides' masterly portrayal of the motives fiercely driving Medea's pursuit of vengeance for her husband's insult and betrayal has held theater audiences spellbound for more than twenty centuries. Rex Warner's authoritative translation brings this great classic of world literature vividly to life.

Reprint of the John Lane, The Bodley Head Limited, London, 1944 edition.]]> 59 Euripides 0486275485 Dougie 5 2024-top-5 3.93 -431 Medea
author: Euripides
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.93
book published: -431
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: 2024-top-5
review:
I've struggled a little to get in to Euripides's plays, Andromache was good, Hippolytus less so, but neither I thought were really enjoyable, I felt quite separate from them, I could appreciate elements but they felt a bit distant. I put that down to their age, it seemed reasonable that something so old should be quite distant. That is not the case with Medea though, it's visceral and alive, full of rage and spite and vitality, I loved it. Loved Medea's fury, the brutality was shocking but not unexpected or over the top, just expertly crafted, built up and released, great play. I also watched Pasolini's film adaptation which is very true to the play and a masterpiece in its own right.
]]> <![CDATA[The Other Name: Septology I-II]]> 46024004 The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours� drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.]]> 351 Jon Fosse Dougie 4 4.04 2019 The Other Name: Septology I-II
author: Jon Fosse
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
review:

]]> The Great Fire of London 486850 176 Peter Ackroyd 0226002640 Dougie 4 3.44 1982 The Great Fire of London
author: Peter Ackroyd
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
This book is nuts, I’m not entirely sure what it was saying with its weird and twisting story but it was a lot of fun getting there. An extensive list of characters, all of them more or less mad, and a satisfying, unexpected, tragically comical ending.
]]> Bacchae 17316483 100 Euripides 0099577372 Dougie 5 3.99 -405 Bacchae
author: Euripides
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.99
book published: -405
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
A dizzying lyrical work examining both the dangers of turning your back on tradition, the old gods and the old ways while simultaneously showing the danger of following them. The vengeance of Dionysus, the destruction of Pentheus, the desolation of Agave are all mighty, wild, visceral and tangible. Amazing.
]]> Weaveworld 22118808
Barker turns from his usual horror to epic-length fantasy for this account of the Fugue, a magical land inhabited by descendants of supernatural beings who once shared the earth with humans. The Fugue has been woven into a carpet for protection against those who would destroy it; the death of its guardian occasions a battle between good and particularly repulsive evil forces for control of the Fugue. Weaveworld is rich with memorable characters, exciting situations, and pockets of Barker's trademark horror.]]> 648 Clive Barker Dougie 5 2024-top-5 4.18 1987 Weaveworld
author: Clive Barker
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: 2024-top-5
review:
A thoroughly wonderful book, familiar in the tropes and rhythms of fantasy but with strange idiosyncrasies all of Clive Barker’s own. Love it, masterfully told, neatly plotted with each twist unpredictable but satisfying.
]]> The Book of Disquiet 45974 The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague." Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.]]> 544 Fernando Pessoa 0141183047 Dougie 4
The pieces muse on the nature of art, writing, what it means to be alive. They are an almost complete dissection of the self, a destruction of ego and a rebuilding in a more simple form, sometimes contradictory, sometimes with such precision in its description that the scales just fall from your eyes.

That's the good side of it, it does wander a lot though, it's hard to hang on to it as Soares rambles in places and repeats himself. Any single chunk of the book, and there are over four hundred chunks, is brilliant on it's own, packed with enough quotable lines for a dozen Instagram quote accounts, but taken all together it's easy to get lost.

Also, the book, or at least the edition I read, not sure if it's universal, ends with some collections of other writings, stuck in because Pessoa died before they became their own books. They weren't bad exactly but they were not as good as The Book of Disquiet and didn't fit well with it, they would have been better left out imo.]]> 4.46 1982 The Book of Disquiet
author: Fernando Pessoa
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:
A dizzying collection of loosely connected bits of writing, written by Pessoa under the alias of Bernardo Soares, presented as if Pessoa met Soares and was given these texts, a life's work, to assemble.

The pieces muse on the nature of art, writing, what it means to be alive. They are an almost complete dissection of the self, a destruction of ego and a rebuilding in a more simple form, sometimes contradictory, sometimes with such precision in its description that the scales just fall from your eyes.

That's the good side of it, it does wander a lot though, it's hard to hang on to it as Soares rambles in places and repeats himself. Any single chunk of the book, and there are over four hundred chunks, is brilliant on it's own, packed with enough quotable lines for a dozen Instagram quote accounts, but taken all together it's easy to get lost.

Also, the book, or at least the edition I read, not sure if it's universal, ends with some collections of other writings, stuck in because Pessoa died before they became their own books. They weren't bad exactly but they were not as good as The Book of Disquiet and didn't fit well with it, they would have been better left out imo.
]]> <![CDATA[If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English]]> 57693584
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?]]> 186 Noor Naga 164445081X Dougie 3
Through the first section, particularly with the rhetorical-questions-as-epigrams conceit it felt heavily style over substance to the point of being grating and I thought I was going to hate it, but as we eased in to the story I found myself enjoying it more and more. I much preferred the parts from the point of view of the girl, I'm not sure if it's my western bias or something in the writing but I found them much more relatable.

The end of the book moved in to a metatextual analysis portion which I also thought I really disliked, but by the time it got to the end I could see how it was justified and worked to conclude things.

So I started out disliking it, then grew to like it, then it changed and I disliked it all over again before coming round once more. I did come round to it both times but the fact remains for a lot of the book I just wasn't enjoying it, I don't think changing my mind about it eventually changes the overall experience from being, while not wholly negative, substantially unenjoyable. There was a lot that was interesting, I can very much understand how someone else could love this, but I did not.]]> 3.95 2022 If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
author: Noor Naga
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/24
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves:
review:
I didn't dislike this book by the end of it.

Through the first section, particularly with the rhetorical-questions-as-epigrams conceit it felt heavily style over substance to the point of being grating and I thought I was going to hate it, but as we eased in to the story I found myself enjoying it more and more. I much preferred the parts from the point of view of the girl, I'm not sure if it's my western bias or something in the writing but I found them much more relatable.

The end of the book moved in to a metatextual analysis portion which I also thought I really disliked, but by the time it got to the end I could see how it was justified and worked to conclude things.

So I started out disliking it, then grew to like it, then it changed and I disliked it all over again before coming round once more. I did come round to it both times but the fact remains for a lot of the book I just wasn't enjoying it, I don't think changing my mind about it eventually changes the overall experience from being, while not wholly negative, substantially unenjoyable. There was a lot that was interesting, I can very much understand how someone else could love this, but I did not.
]]> Hippolytus 1485 No play of Euripides is more admired than Hippolytus. The tale of a married woman stirred to passion for a younger man was traditional, but Euripides modified this story and blended it with one of divine vengeance to create a masterpiece of tension, pathos, and dramatic power. In this play, Phaedra fights nobly but unsuccessfully against her desire for her stepson Hippolytus, while the young man risks his life to keep her passion secret. Both of them, constrained by the overwhelming force of divine power and human ignorance, choose to die in order to maintain their virtue and their good names.]]> 90 Euripides 0941051862 Dougie 2 3.63 -428 Hippolytus
author: Euripides
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.63
book published: -428
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/13
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves:
review:
It'd be profoundly weird to give a lengthly negative review to Euripides, but I did not enjoy this much as a casual reader. Hippolytus doesn't work well as a sympathetic character but nor does he deserve the insane stuff that happens to him. The deception and unravelling of events at the centre of the play feels weak and its conclusion unearned, but like I said, it's Euripides, I've not studied the play, I'm reliant on one of hundreds of translations I read and I don't think my review is indicative of much beyond my own experience with one specific version, so I'm not going to assert it's rubbish.
]]> Child of God 293625 197 Cormac McCarthy 0679728740 Dougie 5 3.82 1973 Child of God
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves:
review:
Disgusting but compelling, descriptive prose that is achingly beautiful but describing a hard inhospitable place and the utterly horrible acts of Lester Ballard. Incredible, read it twice back to back.
]]> Matrix 150778355 270 Lauren Groff Dougie 3 3.44 2021 Matrix
author: Lauren Groff
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:
There’s nothing particularly wrong with this book, there wasn’t anything I specifically didn’t enjoy, but there’s no getting away from the fact it’s a book about twelfth century nuns. If that’s your thing this is a pretty good one, there wasn’t a lot in it that gripped me though, but definitely a few good moments I enjoyed.
]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what � or who � is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Dougie 5 4.03 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:
Set in an alternate present or near future Ireland on its way to a dystopian society uncomfortably close to our own here and now. This is a book primarily about family, the fears of parenthood, the pressures the world outside puts on our worlds inside. I loved how carefully the ideologies of the warring factions that caused the troubles were omitted from the story, the causes they were fighting for being entirely irrelevant to the people the fight was destroying.
]]> In the Distance 34381330
At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days.

Hernán Díaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.]]> 256 Hernan Diaz 1566894883 Dougie 5 4.11 2017 In the Distance
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves:
review:
A painful tale of suffering and deprivation, Håkan’s struggles are relentless but told with a quiet beauty that permeates the whole book. It’s brutal and unrelenting but never miserable.
]]> Open Plan Living 19613101 At times very funny, it is also full of devastating sadness. Gemmill’s book takes you through the life of a man on the edge, trying to balance compulsions and battle the repetition of certain male pathologies while attempting to maintain high standards for his life and those in it.]]> 161 Sam Gemmill 1618425366 Dougie 3
I quite enjoyed a lot of it but would be hard pushed to explain why, and by the end was just left a bit confused.]]> 2.50 2011 Open Plan Living
author: Sam Gemmill
name: Dougie
average rating: 2.50
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:
A fragmented hallucinatory sort of story, elements of Irvine Welsh and Brett Easton Ellis in its mania and clear disdain for modern middle class city living, but ultimately none of it seems to be in service of anything. Nobody does anything, learns anything, goes anywhere, realises anything, or changes at all. There’s just a series of barely connected events and then it stops.

I quite enjoyed a lot of it but would be hard pushed to explain why, and by the end was just left a bit confused.
]]> <![CDATA[The Talisman (The Talisman, #1)]]> 59219
You are about to take a journey... a terrifying trip across America where young Jack Sawyer is searching for the Talisman, the only thing that can save his dying mother. His quest takes him into the menacing Territories where violence, surprise and the titanic struggle between good and evil reach across a mythic landscape... a journey into the dark heart of horror.]]> 656 Stephen King 0375507779 Dougie 4
The pacing is odd, some parts that might have been short drag on and get in the way, other events built up in the foreshadowing blaze by at speed. It seems not to have been too carefully planned out and later parts were shortened just to make the story fit in one book. Both Jack’s� struggles with Wolf and his struggles getting Richard to believe what’s happening are long enough to be annoying and seem to only exist to get in the way, but not in a way that’s useful to the story.

These are minor gripes though, it’s a great tale, a proper beginning middle and end, all wrapped up nicely.]]> 4.13 1984 The Talisman (The Talisman, #1)
author: Stephen King
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves:
review:
More fantasy than horror, a classic hero’s-journey-come-Bildungsroman. The ideas, mythology and world building are fascinating with more than a few pointers to ideas that later became part of The Dark Tower.

The pacing is odd, some parts that might have been short drag on and get in the way, other events built up in the foreshadowing blaze by at speed. It seems not to have been too carefully planned out and later parts were shortened just to make the story fit in one book. Both Jack’s� struggles with Wolf and his struggles getting Richard to believe what’s happening are long enough to be annoying and seem to only exist to get in the way, but not in a way that’s useful to the story.

These are minor gripes though, it’s a great tale, a proper beginning middle and end, all wrapped up nicely.
]]> <![CDATA[Borges, Between History and Eternity]]> 14619945 208 Hernan Diaz 1441188118 Dougie 0 to-read 4.20 2012 Borges, Between History and Eternity
author: Hernan Diaz
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Thrust 59089701 carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries: a French sculptor; a woman of the American underworld; a dictator's daughter; an accused murderer; and a squad of laborers at work on a national monument. Through intricately braided storylines, Laisve must dodge enforcement raids and find her way to the present day, and then, finally, to the early days of her imperfect country, to forge a connection that might save their lives--and their shared dream of freedom.

A dazzling novel of body, spirit, and survival, Thrust will leave no reader unchanged.]]> 352 Lidia Yuknavitch 0525534903 Dougie 4
The book is a dizzying mishmash of time travelling, circular narratives, stories within stories, stories about stories, and strange digressions in to nature, geology and the history of the world, often told by random animals that appear then disappear. It's all loosely bound by the story of Laisve who travels between time periods bringing important objects and showing up in others' lives just when most needed, and by themes of liberty (and specifically the Statue Of), belonging, and stories.

I think, by the end of it all, I've enjoyed it, but I really wasn't sure if I was enjoying it for quite a long time in the middle. I will likely read it again to find out more.]]> 3.50 2022 Thrust
author: Lidia Yuknavitch
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/10
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves:
review:
I wasn't too sure about this book the whole way through, and having finished it I'm still not 100% on what I think of it. While I was reading it felt like a lot of different bits without any whole, now that I'm finished I think it might be a lot of different wholes that I only have parts of in my brain.

The book is a dizzying mishmash of time travelling, circular narratives, stories within stories, stories about stories, and strange digressions in to nature, geology and the history of the world, often told by random animals that appear then disappear. It's all loosely bound by the story of Laisve who travels between time periods bringing important objects and showing up in others' lives just when most needed, and by themes of liberty (and specifically the Statue Of), belonging, and stories.

I think, by the end of it all, I've enjoyed it, but I really wasn't sure if I was enjoying it for quite a long time in the middle. I will likely read it again to find out more.
]]> Andromache (Drama Classics) 664965 128 Euripides 1854596381 Dougie 3
It’s hardly a criticism though, I can’t very well criticise the author because writing in general has changed stylistically in the last 2450 years, long monologues are, I’m sure, fine for Euripides and I should just be marvelling at reading something written so long ago. As indeed I am.]]> 3.88 -425 Andromache (Drama Classics)
author: Euripides
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.88
book published: -425
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves:
review:
It’s Euripides, I can’t really review Euripides. I listened to this twice, then read the text. There were definitely elements I liked, Peleus’s speech to Menelaus upbraiding him for making them all go to war was a highlight, but there were a lot of long monologues that, in their length, were hard to follow.

It’s hardly a criticism though, I can’t very well criticise the author because writing in general has changed stylistically in the last 2450 years, long monologues are, I’m sure, fine for Euripides and I should just be marvelling at reading something written so long ago. As indeed I am.
]]> Revival 20926278
In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie's mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.

Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family's horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil's devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written. It's a masterpiece from King, in the great American tradition of Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.]]> 405 Stephen King 1476770387 Dougie 5 2024-top-5
Loved it, loved everything about it, one of the very best of King's, highly recommended.]]> 3.78 2014 Revival
author: Stephen King
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: 2024-top-5
review:
Easy five stars for this. It's just so comfortable getting immersed in a good Stephen King book, despite the skin crawling horror at the core. This is a particularly good one, a good heft but never overlong or dragging, a core mystery expertly teased out and satisfyingly resolved and a masterful little turn at the end implicating the reader in the same morass our protagonist finds himself in.

Loved it, loved everything about it, one of the very best of King's, highly recommended.
]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Dougie 4 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves:
review:

]]> The Guest 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 Dougie 3
However, there were two significant issues. There's a constantly pervasive sense of anxiety throughout, despite nothing really overtly bad happening. This in itself isn't a bad thing, it's really quite a feat from the author, it's very hard to pin down exactly how or why it exists, and were it not coupled with the other issue it wouldn't even be a downside, but the other problem is that almost nothing happens. Again it's not necessarily a problem on its own if nothing much happens in a plot, but by the end I felt like the constant anxiety in service of nothing really as nothing was resolved by the end, there was no culmination, no closure, meant I arrived at the end of the book feeling like I hadn't enjoyed it.

There's a lot in this that is expertly crafted, well put together, insightful and effective, but I didn't enjoy reading it.]]> 3.29 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves:
review:
It's hard to know how to rate this one. The writing is very accomplished, it has the same visceral and dreamy feeling of The Girls which I love, and the characters and situations are all expertly rendered, I felt very present in the story throughout. I think the setting and themes of the book were interesting, I saw it as a sort of examination and decrying of wealth, capitalism, the commodification of people and the disparity in economic circumstances that goes almost entirely unacknowledged by those not disadvantaged by it, and the story as a vehicle for examining all that was really well put together.

However, there were two significant issues. There's a constantly pervasive sense of anxiety throughout, despite nothing really overtly bad happening. This in itself isn't a bad thing, it's really quite a feat from the author, it's very hard to pin down exactly how or why it exists, and were it not coupled with the other issue it wouldn't even be a downside, but the other problem is that almost nothing happens. Again it's not necessarily a problem on its own if nothing much happens in a plot, but by the end I felt like the constant anxiety in service of nothing really as nothing was resolved by the end, there was no culmination, no closure, meant I arrived at the end of the book feeling like I hadn't enjoyed it.

There's a lot in this that is expertly crafted, well put together, insightful and effective, but I didn't enjoy reading it.
]]> The Mars Room 36374421
It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner’s work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined.]]> 10 Rachel Kushner 1508244383 Dougie 4
This is the second book from the 2018 Booker longlist I've read and I think I preferred it to The Water Cure, though not by much. I'm very interested in the American prison system and what it does to people, there have been many many media stories and exposés that shed a light on the inadequacies of the current system and this book does a particularly good job of that. It is necessarily focused on the prisoners' point of view but does a good job of just touching on how the guards are victims of the system as well so it doesn't come across as a one sided portrayal.

The book itself starts out as somewhat oppressive and I was worried it might be a non-stop misery porn tale of woe, it's certainly not a cheerful book but my fears were unfounded. There's a lot to recommend the book, the writing was excellent, the viewpoints throughout were distinct and separate and the characters were all interesting in their own right. I found some of the shifts difficult to follow in the audiobook as there's often next to nothing to denote when the changes from one character to another occur but other than that Rachel Kushner did an excellent job as narrator.

There really wasn't very much wrong with the book so I suppose I'm being quite restrained in my rating, there just wasn't a lot that really grabbed me about it either. The prisoners are lost in a vast oppressive machine with no hope of redemption or escape and it's clear from the very beginning nothing good can happen for them, any reprieve will be fleeting at best. For me that undercut the final stretch of the book and removed what thrill or tension there may otherwise have been in the finale because the book would have been ruined with any other ending than what we got. That said there was a final little twist that I didn't see coming and appreciated.

I enjoyed reading the book and will definitely look out for more from this author but it was a solidly good book for me, not quite excellent.]]> 3.27 2018 The Mars Room
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/24
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars rounded up.

This is the second book from the 2018 Booker longlist I've read and I think I preferred it to The Water Cure, though not by much. I'm very interested in the American prison system and what it does to people, there have been many many media stories and exposés that shed a light on the inadequacies of the current system and this book does a particularly good job of that. It is necessarily focused on the prisoners' point of view but does a good job of just touching on how the guards are victims of the system as well so it doesn't come across as a one sided portrayal.

The book itself starts out as somewhat oppressive and I was worried it might be a non-stop misery porn tale of woe, it's certainly not a cheerful book but my fears were unfounded. There's a lot to recommend the book, the writing was excellent, the viewpoints throughout were distinct and separate and the characters were all interesting in their own right. I found some of the shifts difficult to follow in the audiobook as there's often next to nothing to denote when the changes from one character to another occur but other than that Rachel Kushner did an excellent job as narrator.

There really wasn't very much wrong with the book so I suppose I'm being quite restrained in my rating, there just wasn't a lot that really grabbed me about it either. The prisoners are lost in a vast oppressive machine with no hope of redemption or escape and it's clear from the very beginning nothing good can happen for them, any reprieve will be fleeting at best. For me that undercut the final stretch of the book and removed what thrill or tension there may otherwise have been in the finale because the book would have been ruined with any other ending than what we got. That said there was a final little twist that I didn't see coming and appreciated.

I enjoyed reading the book and will definitely look out for more from this author but it was a solidly good book for me, not quite excellent.
]]> Red X 56703017 A hunted community. A haunted author. A horror that spans centuries.

Men are disappearing from Toronto's gay village. They're the marginalized, the vulnerable. One by one, stalked and vanished, they leave behind small circles of baffled, frightened friends. Against the shifting backdrop of homophobia throughout the decades, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and riots against raids to gentrification and police brutality, the survivors face inaction from the law and disinterest from society at large. But as the missing grow in number, those left behind begin to realize that whoever or whatever is taking these men has been doing so for longer than is humanly possible.

Woven into their stories is David Demchuk's own personal history, a life lived in fear and in thrall to horror, a passion that boils over into obsession. As he tries to make sense of the relationship between queerness and horror, what it means for gay men to disappear, and how the isolation of the LGBTQ+ community has left them profoundly exposed to monsters that move easily among them, fact and fiction collide and reality begins to unravel.

A bold, terrifying new novel from the award-winning author of The Bone Mother.]]> 280 David Demchuk 0771025017 Dougie 4
I’m still pondering on it, having just finished it ten minutes ago, but I think I enjoyed it a lot, just not quite enough to forget that for roughly half the book I was mostly bored.]]> 3.73 2021 Red X
author: David Demchuk
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
shelves:
review:
It took a while but I did end up enjoying this quite a lot. The initial few victims� stories felt repetitive after a while, broken up by interludes from the author that oscillated wildly from mundane and dry to deeply personal, to self insertion. While engaging in places it was largely confusing and a bit dull. As we got more into it, hearing more of the story of the antagonist, or at least the personification of the antagonist, the structure of the book became much less rigid, the different elements more entwined, the confusion began to feel more deliberate and the book became vastly more enjoyable.

I’m still pondering on it, having just finished it ten minutes ago, but I think I enjoyed it a lot, just not quite enough to forget that for roughly half the book I was mostly bored.
]]> Private Rites 203579085 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sisters� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]> 291 Julia Armfield 125034431X Dougie 3
[spoilers removed]

Anyway, I mostly enjoyed the book, for about two thirds of it I was on board with the struggles of our protagonists, could appreciate everyone's position, flaws and all and was interested in what the book had to say. I thought it was well written, if overdoing the "here's something mysterious I'm not going to explain" bits. The last third got boring and wandery and I was losing interest until the very end when I was just annoyed. I think it's stupid.

I'm leaving it at three stars because I thought it was mostly really well put together, but ultimately I did not like it. I'm willing to accept some of that might just be me though]]> 3.57 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves:
review:
Well where to even start on this? I'm going to spoiler this, which I don't usually do because if you care about spoilers you shouldn't read reviews, but this book takes such a swerve that I don't want to put front and centre but which has to be where I start, so:

[spoilers removed]

Anyway, I mostly enjoyed the book, for about two thirds of it I was on board with the struggles of our protagonists, could appreciate everyone's position, flaws and all and was interested in what the book had to say. I thought it was well written, if overdoing the "here's something mysterious I'm not going to explain" bits. The last third got boring and wandery and I was losing interest until the very end when I was just annoyed. I think it's stupid.

I'm leaving it at three stars because I thought it was mostly really well put together, but ultimately I did not like it. I'm willing to accept some of that might just be me though
]]> Bad Habit 181110022 Combining the raw realism and vulnerability of Shuggie Bain and Detransition, Baby with the poignant sensibility of Pedro AlmodĂłvar, a staggering coming-of-age novel deeply rooted in the class struggles of a trans woman growing up in Madrid in the last decades of the twentieth century.

"I saw a whole generation of boys fall like irredeemable angels."

Told in the heartrending voice of a girl trapped within the body of a boy, Bad Habit is a story of coming-of-age in working class Madrid–in a godforsaken neighborhood ironically named after a saint. Alana S. Portero's spunky protagonist struggles to make sense of herself and the world she inhabits, conveying her surroundings with mythic allusions and a poetic vitality absent from everyday life.

Set against the heroin epidemic that ravaged Madrid in the 1980s and the city’s vibrant party scene that dominated its nightlife in the 1990s, Bad Habit follows Portero’s unnamed protagonist as she grows up in a blue-collar suburb that has no place for her. Forging ahead, she discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a lively party scene animated by junkies, pop divas, and fallen angels. But with each step she takes forward, she finds herself confronted by a violence she does not yet know how to counter; in this exciting, often terrifying, world each choice can truly be a matter of life and death.

Blistering and compassionate, Bad Habit illuminates the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of sisterhood. Shimmering in its lyrical beauty, vivid in its realism, autobiographical in its detail, it is a mesmerizing story of self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us.

Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem]]> 240 Alana S. Portero 006333612X Dougie 5
I imagine this story is quite true to life though very much altered to work as a book, some of the key conversations our protagonist has didn’t feel quite as real as the rest of the book simply because they’re so beautifully written. The book skirted the edge of overdoing this, a book needn’t be true to life to say something important but this one feels like it mostly is, barring a few stand out moments that felt a bit over the top but it never crossed the line, I think it remained emotionally solid and an author needs to be allowed a little licence.

Engaging, emotional, heartbreaking in places, I really loved this.]]> 4.22 2023 Bad Habit
author: Alana S. Portero
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/08
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:
A highly emotional story recounting a trans girls early years growing up in Madrid. I don’t know a great deal about either Madrid or growing up as a trans girl and the author’s insights, and more importantly the way she presents those insights really brought both the setting and her story to life.

I imagine this story is quite true to life though very much altered to work as a book, some of the key conversations our protagonist has didn’t feel quite as real as the rest of the book simply because they’re so beautifully written. The book skirted the edge of overdoing this, a book needn’t be true to life to say something important but this one feels like it mostly is, barring a few stand out moments that felt a bit over the top but it never crossed the line, I think it remained emotionally solid and an author needs to be allowed a little licence.

Engaging, emotional, heartbreaking in places, I really loved this.
]]> The Wind That Lays Waste 41940243 A taut, lyrical portrait of four people thrown together on a single day in rural Argentina

The Wind That Lays Waste begins in the great pause before a storm. Reverend Pearson is evangelizing across the Argentinian countryside with Leni, his teenage daughter, when their car breaks down. This act of God or fate leads them to the workshop and home of an aging mechanic called Gringo Brauer and a young boy named Tapioca.

As a long day passes, curiosity and intrigue transform into an unexpected intimacy between four people: one man who believes deeply in God, morality, and his own righteousness, and another whose life experiences have only entrenched his moral relativism and mild apathy; a quietly earnest and idealistic mechanic's assistant, and a restless, skeptical preacher's daughter. As tensions between these characters ebb and flow, beliefs are questioned and allegiances are tested, until finally the growing storm breaks over the plains.

Selva Almada's exquisitely crafted debut, with its limpid and confident prose, is profound and poetic, a tactile experience of the mountain, the sun, the squat trees, the broken cars, the sweat-stained shirts, and the destroyed lives. The Wind That Lays Waste is a philosophical, beautiful, and powerfully distinctive novel that marks the arrival in English of an author whose talent and poise are undeniable.]]> 124 Selva Almada 1555978452 Dougie 3
The writing is good, great in places, the characters are well realised and the atmosphere is palpable, but ultimately it's four people having half a dozen conversations in a single day in which little happens. I enjoyed it well enough, I would have been happy if it were longer and, indeed, I would have preferred it, I wanted more about the people, their backgrounds, their emotions, and more than just the one day.]]> 3.57 2012 The Wind That Lays Waste
author: Selva Almada
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:
Some books are short because they pack everything they need to say in to a dense multilayered portrayal that you unpick in to something far deeper and richer than its small size would lead you to expect. This isn't one of those books, it's short because very little happens.

The writing is good, great in places, the characters are well realised and the atmosphere is palpable, but ultimately it's four people having half a dozen conversations in a single day in which little happens. I enjoyed it well enough, I would have been happy if it were longer and, indeed, I would have preferred it, I wanted more about the people, their backgrounds, their emotions, and more than just the one day.
]]> Queen Macbeth 205744339 Shakespeare fed us the myth of the Macbeths as murderous conspirators. But now Val McDermid drags the truth out of the shadows, exposing the patriarchal prejudices of history. Expect the unexpected . . .

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions � a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her � because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth.

As the net closes in, we discover a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.]]> 122 Val McDermid 1788856724 Dougie 3
It feels like there was enough research done for this for a longer book, and as it was done it was all used, but this is not a longer book and it rather crowded out the good bits. Everything went by in a rush with little pause to soak up the details.

Fun for what it is, I enjoyed it well enough, worth a wee read but it’s not going to trouble any prize lists.]]> 3.68 2024 Queen Macbeth
author: Val McDermid
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves:
review:
There is much to recommend in this book, it’s a more realistic feeling depiction of an era that seems to be further removed from the present than it really is, since our relation with it is through the theatricality of Shakespeare. This is a more grounded tale, and does well with it, but it’s just all a bit too plain. There’s flurries of romance and emotion in the tale of Gruoch and Macbeth, but much of the events fall a bit flat. The end of the story comes a good chunk before the end of the book, then we are treated to a list of â€and then this happened, and this, and thisâ€�.

It feels like there was enough research done for this for a longer book, and as it was done it was all used, but this is not a longer book and it rather crowded out the good bits. Everything went by in a rush with little pause to soak up the details.

Fun for what it is, I enjoyed it well enough, worth a wee read but it’s not going to trouble any prize lists.
]]> Dark Neighbourhood 58349688 139 Vanessa Onwuemezi 1913097706 Dougie 5 3.37 2021 Dark Neighbourhood
author: Vanessa Onwuemezi
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:
How do you even explain what this is? Ostensibly five stories, each one contains about three sentences of plot but are so rich and dense with feeling and imagery that whole lives are in there too. A prose style that’s highly unusual and poetic, it’s difficult to read at times, for me at least, requiring a slow pace and multiple re-reads in places, but all worth it. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything quite like it.
]]> Stone Yard Devotional 168632462 A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good', from the award-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia's most acclaimed and best loved writers.

"Wood joins the ranks of writers such as Nora Ephron, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout." THE GUARDIAN UK]]> 320 Charlotte Wood Dougie 4 3.73 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:
Really enjoyed this, a meditation on grief and on the events that shape us. I enjoyed the writing and how unflinching the narrator was with self criticism, I did not enjoy the grisly details of the mice, their habits and their deaths, nor the story of the lamb who died or the weird scatalogical turn at the end, all elements that could be excised without losing anything from the point of the book.
]]> Poem Strip 6488554
ĚýThere’s a certain street—via Saterna—in the middle of Milan that just doesn’t show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it’s there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, “like a spirit,â€� through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out.

Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, Poem Strip—a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s—is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde.

Cover: Including an Explanation of the Afterlife]]> 218 Dino Buzzati 1590173236 Dougie 5 3.75 1969 Poem Strip
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves:
review:
Very strange and sexy, the writing was a mix of brilliant and a slightly stilted sort of odd, I found bits hard to read and had to go over them three or four times, but the art is stellar and on the whole I very much enjoyed it.
]]> Study for Obedience 123636870
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.Ěý

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.' And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother's property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 192 Sarah Bernstein 1039009069 Dougie 4
As we proceeded things got more absurd, not out and out wild but funny and seemingly lighter in tone now I was taking it less seriously, until it started to seem serious again and, by the end of it, had gotten really quite creepy.

It's a bizarre book, it's subtle in how it changes to the extent I'm not 100% sure if the three layers were always there and my awareness changed or if the book was guiding me through the different perspectives. It never seems to overtly shift tone and is told in the same language throughout but it seemed all the same to swing about wildly.

4 stars for now, maybe 4.5, maybe I'll be back later to raise it to a five, I'm not sure, I'm still processing.]]> 3.02 2023 Study for Obedience
author: Sarah Bernstein
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves:
review:
This was an extremely strange book. Short, but exactly as long as it needed to be, it started out somewhat sad, the tale of a poor unfortunate girl, put upon by those around her. I thought it quite dismal, though beautifully written. After a while I came to realise it was not the dour and mournful book I thought and was in fact surprisingly funny, casting not only the part of the story I was reading but everything before it in a whole new light.

As we proceeded things got more absurd, not out and out wild but funny and seemingly lighter in tone now I was taking it less seriously, until it started to seem serious again and, by the end of it, had gotten really quite creepy.

It's a bizarre book, it's subtle in how it changes to the extent I'm not 100% sure if the three layers were always there and my awareness changed or if the book was guiding me through the different perspectives. It never seems to overtly shift tone and is told in the same language throughout but it seemed all the same to swing about wildly.

4 stars for now, maybe 4.5, maybe I'll be back later to raise it to a five, I'm not sure, I'm still processing.
]]> Glorious Exploits 127278133 An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.]]> 304 Ferdia Lennon 1250893690 Dougie 5 4.15 2024 Glorious Exploits
author: Ferdia Lennon
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves:
review:

]]> The Island in the Sound 204474351 96 Niall Campbell 1780377215 Dougie 0 0.0 The Island in the Sound
author: Niall Campbell
name: Dougie
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> Orbital 123136728
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?]]> 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Dougie 4
However, and it's quite a big however, nothing happens. We have a day in the life of six people on board the International Space Station, and they chat a bit, check on their experiments, eat a bit, sleep a bit, undergo some testing and radio people on the planet.

I am sure this is a realistic depiction of life aboard the space station, it definitely feels very real in how it's described, but this is a novel and without a plot I can't help but feel most of what's been covered is just going to slide back out of my brain. Maybe that's fine, I enjoyed reading the book while I was reading it, it's just difficult to hang on to exactly what it was I enjoyed.]]> 3.55 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves:
review:
This is a beautifully written work that covers a lot, musing on humanity's existence, our place in the universe, our relationship with our planet, the differences and similarities between people of different cultures, the jarring inconsistencies between how our nations and governments act towards one another and how we act towards one another, and so many little insights into interpersonal relationships of all types. All of this is brought to life vividly in excellent writing, and very neatly.

However, and it's quite a big however, nothing happens. We have a day in the life of six people on board the International Space Station, and they chat a bit, check on their experiments, eat a bit, sleep a bit, undergo some testing and radio people on the planet.

I am sure this is a realistic depiction of life aboard the space station, it definitely feels very real in how it's described, but this is a novel and without a plot I can't help but feel most of what's been covered is just going to slide back out of my brain. Maybe that's fine, I enjoyed reading the book while I was reading it, it's just difficult to hang on to exactly what it was I enjoyed.
]]> Mexican Gothic 53152636
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And NoemĂ­, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 320 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0525620788 Dougie 3
Here is where we meet our protagonist, she is plucky and smart and pretty and slightly anachronistic. Here is where we hear about where we're going. Here is the spooky house, isn't it spooky. Here are each of the people she will need to side with or against. The good one is good, the evil ones are evil. Some vague spookiness ensues, why is it happening? Oh, well let's explain all that in a convenient info dump confirming all the quite obvious foreshadowing, now that's out of the way build to the climax, kill everyone, and we're done.

It reads like YA in its simplicity which is fine if that's your bag, it's not mine though, it's just too simple, predictable and easy. Definitely competently put together and well written in the details, but the overarching plot, themes and structure were just too paint by numbers to be interesting.]]> 3.66 2020 Mexican Gothic
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/08
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:
It's not a bad book as such but there's nothing new or different in here. I appreciate by it's very title it's set up as a gothic horror tale in the mould of so many others but it does very little with the tropes that come along with this other than line them up quite neatly for you too look at.

Here is where we meet our protagonist, she is plucky and smart and pretty and slightly anachronistic. Here is where we hear about where we're going. Here is the spooky house, isn't it spooky. Here are each of the people she will need to side with or against. The good one is good, the evil ones are evil. Some vague spookiness ensues, why is it happening? Oh, well let's explain all that in a convenient info dump confirming all the quite obvious foreshadowing, now that's out of the way build to the climax, kill everyone, and we're done.

It reads like YA in its simplicity which is fine if that's your bag, it's not mine though, it's just too simple, predictable and easy. Definitely competently put together and well written in the details, but the overarching plot, themes and structure were just too paint by numbers to be interesting.
]]> 'Salem's Lot 5413 Also contains: One For the Road, Jerusalem's Lot. For standalone novel see ISBN 9780450031069.

Stephen King's second novel, the classic vampire bestseller 'Salem's Lot, tells the story of evil in small-town America. For the first time in a major trade edition, this terrifying novel is accompanied by previously unpublished material from King's archive, two short stories, and eerie photographs that bring King's fictional darkness and evil to vivid life.

When Stephen King’s classic thriller 'Salem's Lot hit the stands in 1975, it thrilled and terrified millions of readers with tales of demonic evil in small-town America. Now, thirty years later and still scaring readers witless, 'Salem's Lot reemerges in a brilliant new edition, complete with photographs, fifty pages of deleted and alternate scenes, and two short stories related to the events of the novel.

While the original edition of 'Salem's Lot will forever be a premier horror classic, 'Salem's Lot: Illustrated Edition, with the inclusion of material from King’s archive, is destined to become a classic in its own right and a must-have for all Stephen King fans. In this edition, the hair-raising story of Jerusalem’s Lot, a small town in Maine whose inhabitants succumb to the evil allure of a new resident, is told as the author envisioned it, complete with fifty pages of alternate and deleted scenes. With a new introduction by the author, two short stories related to the events and residents of Jerusalem’s Lot, the lavishly creepy photographs of Jerry Uelsmann, and a stunning new page design, this edition brings the story to life in words and pictures as never before.

No library will be complete without this ideal collector’s item for any King aficionado, the definitive illustrated edition of the great 'Salem's Lot.]]> 594 Stephen King 0385516487 Dougie 3 4.28 1975 'Salem's Lot
author: Stephen King
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1975
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> The Ritual 10239382
Lost, hungry and surrounded by forest untouched for millennia, they stumble across an isolated old house. Inside, they find the macabre remains of old rites and pagan sacrifices; ancient artefacts and unidentifiable bones. This place of dark ritual is home to a bestial predator that is still alive in the ancient forest. And now they’re the prey.

As the four friends struggle for salvation, they discover that death doesn’t come easy among these ancient trees...]]> 418 Adam L.G. Nevill 0230754929 Dougie 2
The second half of the book is after he is taken prisoner by a death metal band. It’s as stupid as it sounds. It’s also where the pacing problems become evident as every point where tension mounts and things ought to speed up it all slows right back down. Luke is trapped in the house for several days but it feels like a solid month when you’re reading it and it’s just annoying. He slowly picks apart the extremely flimsy mythology of the story that, given it’s so vague, is guessable from a couple of clues given early on, and there’s no satisfaction whatsoever in its revelation.

It takes too long, the characters are awful, the story is stupid, the pacing is bizarre and a special shout out to the narrator of the audiobook who has the most comical Norwegian accent ever and uses it as much as possible. Not incompetent enough for one star but nothing worth reading imo. Had the second half been trimmed down to the last quarter and the primary antagonist been brought back earlier this could have been a far better book, as it was the whole period in the house was interminably long and stupid with no redeeming features.]]> 3.57 2011 The Ritual
author: Adam L.G. Nevill
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves:
review:
Close to a good book this really fell down on the extremely weird pacing of the story. It’s split in two, almost half and half, the first half being four friends hiking in the woods, getting lost, finding creepy things, then being picked off one by one. This was more or less effectively written, though riddled with cliches and the character emerging as our main POV is unlikable in an uninteresting way.

The second half of the book is after he is taken prisoner by a death metal band. It’s as stupid as it sounds. It’s also where the pacing problems become evident as every point where tension mounts and things ought to speed up it all slows right back down. Luke is trapped in the house for several days but it feels like a solid month when you’re reading it and it’s just annoying. He slowly picks apart the extremely flimsy mythology of the story that, given it’s so vague, is guessable from a couple of clues given early on, and there’s no satisfaction whatsoever in its revelation.

It takes too long, the characters are awful, the story is stupid, the pacing is bizarre and a special shout out to the narrator of the audiobook who has the most comical Norwegian accent ever and uses it as much as possible. Not incompetent enough for one star but nothing worth reading imo. Had the second half been trimmed down to the last quarter and the primary antagonist been brought back earlier this could have been a far better book, as it was the whole period in the house was interminably long and stupid with no redeeming features.
]]> Priestdaddy 35056023 The childhood of Patricia Lockwood was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange riddles and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and found a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI, despite already having a wife and children.

When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity - and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.

]]> 320 Patricia Lockwood Dougie 5 3.85 2017 Priestdaddy
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Hunters of Dune (Dune, #7) 20249
At the end of Chapterhouse: Dune-- Frank Herbert's final novel--a ship carrying the ghola of Duncan Idaho, Sheeana (a young woman who can control sandworms), and a crew of various refugees escapes into the uncharted galaxy, fleeing from the monstrous Honored Matres, dark counterparts to the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. The nearly invincible Honored Matres have swarmed into the known universe, driven from their home by a terrifying, mysterious Enemy. As designed by the creative genius of Frank Herbert, the primary story of Hunters and Sandworms is the exotic odyssey of Duncan's no-ship as it is forced to elude the diabolical traps set by the ferocious, unknown Enemy. To strengthen their forces, the fugitives have used genetic technology from Scytale, the last Tleilaxu Master, to revive key figures from Dune's past--including Paul Muad'Dib and his beloved Chani, Lady Jessica, Stilgar, Thufir Hawat, and even Dr. Wellington Yueh. Each of these characters will use their special talents to meet the challenges thrown at them.

Failure is unthinkable--not only is their survival at stake, but they hold the fate of the entire human race in their hands.]]> 524 Brian Herbert 0765312921 Dougie 1
I have many annoyances, some minor and some major. In no particular order:

Bene Gesserits have often in the original series referred to the Honoured Matres as "whores" - this is fine, it reflects their supercilious nature and is entirely in character given their condemnation of the HMs methods. This book we switch to the Honoured Matres being called "whores" in the author voice, this is less ok.

I have read many books that end with a Deus Ex Machina. Sometimes this is ok, sometimes it's frustratingly bad. I've never read a book that started with a Deus Ex Machina though, until now. At the end of the sixth book, Duncan jumps the Ithaca through fold space to a completely separate unknown place. At the start of this book "woops, here's The Oracle of Time to show you how to immediately get back". I presume the Oracle of Time is from the prequels but it seems, without knowing all the details, a very stupid creation.

Gholas have been used somewhat sparingly over the series. Duncan Idaho has famously come back a presumed multitude of times, hundreds of times maybe, and in FH's final book, the Bashar Miles Teg came back, which was a nice reversal because he was the one who awoke Duncan's memories the last time he came back. In this book almost every major character from the original Dune comes back as a Ghola. I was immediately put in mind of the Muppet Babies which is a bad look for what used to be fairly serious sci-fi. We have Baron Harkonnen, two Pauls, Jessica, Chani, Liet-Kynes, Thufir Hawat, Leto II and even Dr Yueh. Presumably they're going somewhere with it in the next book because all they do in this one is wander round being 12 year old versions of their old characters.

There was a flash of a mysterious enemy right at the end of Chapterhouse. These are fleshed out into the two characters who are simultaneously the main villains of the story who will go on, I presume, to murder billions, and also the comic relief. They are characters from the prequel books who were awful then and I am sure will be awful in the follow up, which I am still going to read anyway.

Really though, these are disagreements I have with where they chose to take the story, they are not the fundamental problem with the book. Dune, as a series, is quite complex, people succeed by out thinking and out manoeuvring their enemies. There's a lot of philosophising to the point where it gets very dry in places. Nobody in this book seems at all clever though, they have powers they use to defeat one another but it's not really their mental acuity in the same way it was in previous books.

I'm not going to insult the authors and say I think they're just not that smart, I'm sure they're plenty smart, but it really feels like the book is written for an audience who are less smart than the targets of the older books. Characters frequently stand around and recap events that they are both already aware of, both from the previous books and from earlier in this book. They shouldn't need to explain what happened on a previous occasion the two people talking were both present for, it's clumsy, unnecessary, it makes the story drag, the dialogue feel unnatural and, to me at least, seems written from the presumption I'm stupid and need to be reminded of things. It's constant, pervasive, reminiscent of the very worst of American TV and really really annoys me.

Also nothing happens in this book until the last ten percent and I fully expect if I had skipped it entirely and picked up the next one instead I'd have anything important I missed filled in for me by two characters standing around telling each other what they did together.

I wish they'd just published Frank Herbert's notes and outlines that were used to construct this rather than using them to write such a pointlessly long and borderline insulting book, or indeed two books, because I'm sure the next one is as bad.]]> 3.67 2006 Hunters of Dune (Dune, #7)
author: Brian Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2006
rating: 1
read at: 2024/05/18
date added: 2024/05/21
shelves:
review:
Well twenty years after I first read the extremely annoying ending to Frank Herbert's Dune series I finally got to pick up the story where it left off with his son's follow up and find out where it went. And where it went was somewhere stupid and poorly written.

I have many annoyances, some minor and some major. In no particular order:

Bene Gesserits have often in the original series referred to the Honoured Matres as "whores" - this is fine, it reflects their supercilious nature and is entirely in character given their condemnation of the HMs methods. This book we switch to the Honoured Matres being called "whores" in the author voice, this is less ok.

I have read many books that end with a Deus Ex Machina. Sometimes this is ok, sometimes it's frustratingly bad. I've never read a book that started with a Deus Ex Machina though, until now. At the end of the sixth book, Duncan jumps the Ithaca through fold space to a completely separate unknown place. At the start of this book "woops, here's The Oracle of Time to show you how to immediately get back". I presume the Oracle of Time is from the prequels but it seems, without knowing all the details, a very stupid creation.

Gholas have been used somewhat sparingly over the series. Duncan Idaho has famously come back a presumed multitude of times, hundreds of times maybe, and in FH's final book, the Bashar Miles Teg came back, which was a nice reversal because he was the one who awoke Duncan's memories the last time he came back. In this book almost every major character from the original Dune comes back as a Ghola. I was immediately put in mind of the Muppet Babies which is a bad look for what used to be fairly serious sci-fi. We have Baron Harkonnen, two Pauls, Jessica, Chani, Liet-Kynes, Thufir Hawat, Leto II and even Dr Yueh. Presumably they're going somewhere with it in the next book because all they do in this one is wander round being 12 year old versions of their old characters.

There was a flash of a mysterious enemy right at the end of Chapterhouse. These are fleshed out into the two characters who are simultaneously the main villains of the story who will go on, I presume, to murder billions, and also the comic relief. They are characters from the prequel books who were awful then and I am sure will be awful in the follow up, which I am still going to read anyway.

Really though, these are disagreements I have with where they chose to take the story, they are not the fundamental problem with the book. Dune, as a series, is quite complex, people succeed by out thinking and out manoeuvring their enemies. There's a lot of philosophising to the point where it gets very dry in places. Nobody in this book seems at all clever though, they have powers they use to defeat one another but it's not really their mental acuity in the same way it was in previous books.

I'm not going to insult the authors and say I think they're just not that smart, I'm sure they're plenty smart, but it really feels like the book is written for an audience who are less smart than the targets of the older books. Characters frequently stand around and recap events that they are both already aware of, both from the previous books and from earlier in this book. They shouldn't need to explain what happened on a previous occasion the two people talking were both present for, it's clumsy, unnecessary, it makes the story drag, the dialogue feel unnatural and, to me at least, seems written from the presumption I'm stupid and need to be reminded of things. It's constant, pervasive, reminiscent of the very worst of American TV and really really annoys me.

Also nothing happens in this book until the last ten percent and I fully expect if I had skipped it entirely and picked up the next one instead I'd have anything important I missed filled in for me by two characters standing around telling each other what they did together.

I wish they'd just published Frank Herbert's notes and outlines that were used to construct this rather than using them to write such a pointlessly long and borderline insulting book, or indeed two books, because I'm sure the next one is as bad.
]]> Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune #6) 105
The desert planet Arrakis, called Dune, has been destroyed. Now, the Bene Gesserit, heirs to Dune's power, have colonized a green world--and are turning it into a desert, mile by scorched mile.
Here is the last book Frank Herbert wrote before his death. A stunning climax to the epic Dune legend that will live on forever...]]> 436 Frank Herbert Dougie 3
To be honest, things were already running out of steam a little. The galactic politics are still at the forefront, the factions and their fantastical abilities shuffle their way around, manoeuvring and out-manoeuvring one another while pontificating on the over arching themes of fate and destiny, good and evil, the folly of hubris, the nature of sacrifice, and it's all good, it just does rather seem to all blend in to one if you read the entire series back to back. Some good rousing action scenes but they're written in Herbert's odd way of eliding over a lot of the details. It really represents the chaos of war well but does leave you a little lost at times.

Sheeana and Murbella are great characters, Darwi Odrade is a great Mother Superior, the space jews are a stupid idea and the child sex bit is quite weird. I read this when I was younger and remember being very impressed by the Honoured Matres as a mysterious and powerful adversary, now twenty years later reading the same book they seem undeniably silly.

B+, worth reading for completionists but I would recommend most stop the Dune series either after the first book or after the fourth unless you're really really keen to see where it all goes. For the first time I'm going to press on and read the two follow ups by Herbert the Younger and KJA, which, having read 1 1/2 of the many prequel books I am not looking forward to. But I have to know.]]> 3.90 1985 Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune #6)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/11
date added: 2024/05/21
shelves:
review:
Frank Herbert's final book but annoyingly not the final in the story. Each of the preceding five books could have been an end to it, but this one ends on a cliffhanger and was only resolved by his son Brian and Kevin J Anderson many years later. More on that to come.

To be honest, things were already running out of steam a little. The galactic politics are still at the forefront, the factions and their fantastical abilities shuffle their way around, manoeuvring and out-manoeuvring one another while pontificating on the over arching themes of fate and destiny, good and evil, the folly of hubris, the nature of sacrifice, and it's all good, it just does rather seem to all blend in to one if you read the entire series back to back. Some good rousing action scenes but they're written in Herbert's odd way of eliding over a lot of the details. It really represents the chaos of war well but does leave you a little lost at times.

Sheeana and Murbella are great characters, Darwi Odrade is a great Mother Superior, the space jews are a stupid idea and the child sex bit is quite weird. I read this when I was younger and remember being very impressed by the Honoured Matres as a mysterious and powerful adversary, now twenty years later reading the same book they seem undeniably silly.

B+, worth reading for completionists but I would recommend most stop the Dune series either after the first book or after the fourth unless you're really really keen to see where it all goes. For the first time I'm going to press on and read the two follow ups by Herbert the Younger and KJA, which, having read 1 1/2 of the many prequel books I am not looking forward to. But I have to know.
]]> Heretics of Dune (Dune #5) 117
Leto Atreides, the God Emperor of Dune, is dead. In the fifteen hundred years since his passing, the Empire has fallen into ruin. The great Scattering saw millions abandon the crumbling civilization and spread out beyond the reaches of known space. The planet Arrakis—now called Rakis—has reverted to its desert climate, and its great sandworms are dying.

Now the Lost Ones are returning home in pursuit of power. And as these factions vie for control over the remnants of the Empire, a girl named Sheeana rises to prominence in the wastelands of Rakis, sending religious fervor throughout the galaxy. For she possesses the abilities of the Fremen sandriders—fulfilling a prophecy foretold by the late God Emperor....]]> 471 Frank Herbert 0441328008 Dougie 4
This removal of the need to keep scaling the Atreides story helps bring the ongoing story back down to a more manageable scale which is all to the good. Following on from The Scattering we have new factions, new intrigues and a shift to put the focus on the Bene Gesserit which is a good choice, more insight into their workings is very welcome, they remain one of the strongest elements narratively and thematically of the Dune universe.]]> 3.85 1984 Heretics of Dune (Dune #5)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves:
review:
The first book in the series to abandon nearly all links with the original, save for the ever present Duncan Idaho.

This removal of the need to keep scaling the Atreides story helps bring the ongoing story back down to a more manageable scale which is all to the good. Following on from The Scattering we have new factions, new intrigues and a shift to put the focus on the Bene Gesserit which is a good choice, more insight into their workings is very welcome, they remain one of the strongest elements narratively and thematically of the Dune universe.
]]> God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4) 42432 454 Frank Herbert 0575075066 Dougie 4
It satisfyingly ups the stakes from previous books without getting too silly, quite an achievement when the main character is a man who is turning in to a giant worm.]]> 3.84 1981 God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/30
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves:
review:
The first of the Dune books without Paul et al and it perhaps suffers a little from this, but at its heart it’s still the same mix of philosophy, musings on fate, destiny, agency and identity, mixed with plots and intrigue and devious machinations that the series is built on.

It satisfyingly ups the stakes from previous books without getting too silly, quite an achievement when the main character is a man who is turning in to a giant worm.
]]> Children of Dune (Dune #3) 44492286
The Children of Dune are twin siblings Leto and Ghanima Atreides, whose father, the Emperor Paul Muad'Dib, disappeared in the desert wastelands of Arrakis nine years ago. Like their father, the twins possess supernormal abilities--making them valuable to their manipulative aunt Alia, who rules the Empire in the name of House Atreides.

Facing treason and rebellion on two fronts, Alia's rule is not absolute. The displaced House Corrino is plotting to regain the throne while the fanatical Fremen are being provoked into open revolt by the enigmatic figure known only as The Preacher. Alia believes that by obtaining the secrets of the twins' prophetic visions, she can maintain control over her dynasty.

But Leto and Ghanima have their own plans for their visions--and their destinies....

Includes an introduction by Brian Herbert]]> 609 Frank Herbert 0593098242 Dougie 4
As a whole the three together are as solid an epic space fantasy as I've read and in it's own right this book is up there with the first in terms of plotting, the schemes within schemes are satisfyingly devious and there are multiple excellent scenes of conflict, however like Dune Messiah there is still a bit too much philosophising about the nature of precognition, some is fine but too much swiftly gets boringly circular.

A definite step down from the first book, still worth reading though.]]> 3.96 1976 Children of Dune (Dune #3)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/20
date added: 2024/04/22
shelves:
review:
A return to form after the oddly flat Dune Messiah, Children of Dune has a bigger scope and involves more of the characters from the first book who were rather absent in the second. The plot encompasses the ascendancy of Paul's children, the end of Paul's story and the twin threats of House Corrino and Alia, so across it all provides a conclusion to the events begun in the first book.

As a whole the three together are as solid an epic space fantasy as I've read and in it's own right this book is up there with the first in terms of plotting, the schemes within schemes are satisfyingly devious and there are multiple excellent scenes of conflict, however like Dune Messiah there is still a bit too much philosophising about the nature of precognition, some is fine but too much swiftly gets boringly circular.

A definite step down from the first book, still worth reading though.
]]> <![CDATA[The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story]]> 61034098
A train crash, a department store fire, an assassination.

What if you could share your vision, and prevent a disaster?

In 1966, John Barker, a British psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate this very idea. He would find a network of curious correspondents, and among them two highly gifted 'percipients'. Together, they predicted calamities and international incidents with uncanny accuracy. And then, they gave Barker their most disturbing that he was about to die.]]> 229 Sam Knight 057135758X Dougie 4
There’s little resolution to this, in fact very little theorising at all about how this might have happened, but just the reporting that it did, the details of those predictions and the look into Dr Barker’s professional life and work makes for a fascinating read.]]> 3.42 2022 The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story
author: Sam Knight
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves:
review:
Fascinating look into a little known group in 1960s England led by Dr Barker who attempted to formally engage in predicting disasters. The book never comes down on either side of the fence, neither skeptical nor fully believing but presenting just the recorded facts, these people made reports in advance of disasters which bore striking resemblances to the events when they occurred.

There’s little resolution to this, in fact very little theorising at all about how this might have happened, but just the reporting that it did, the details of those predictions and the look into Dr Barker’s professional life and work makes for a fascinating read.
]]> <![CDATA[Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2)]]> 106
Dune Messiah continues the story of Paul Atreides, better known—and feared—as the man christened Muad’Dib. As Emperor of the known universe, he possesses more power than a single man was ever meant to wield. Worshipped as a religious icon by the fanatical Fremen, Paul faces the enmity of the political houses he displaced when he assumed the throne—and a conspiracy conducted within his own sphere of influence.

And even as House Atreides begins to crumble around him from the machinations of his enemies, the true threat to Paul comes to his lover, Chani, and the unborn heir to his family’s dynasty...]]> 331 Frank Herbert 0441172695 Dougie 3 3.88 1969 Dune Messiah (Dune Chronicles, #2)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars. More a sort of coda to the first book than a full new story, this is oddly subdued in comparison with the grandeur of the original. Focusing on a plot to assassinate Paul, the plot relies mainly on a series of meetings that are thick with intrigue and hidden motivations and low on action. Enjoyable enough but a noticeable step down from the first book.
]]> The End of Days 20724710 The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,� each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there�.

A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.]]> 239 Jenny Erpenbeck 081122192X Dougie 3
This is the best written of the three but for all it’s very pretty writing it’s interminably dull and I don’t really see the point of the constant “she died� but if she hadn’t…�. I suppose to be fair it’s a book about death and multiple different deaths of one character is a different take than deaths of multiple characters so it makes sense thematically, but my issues with the book are not to do with the multiple deaths. Despite giving the characters names they are rarely named in the text making it hard to read, the middle section about life in the newly formed USSR is blindingly dull and after that I just couldn’t wait to be done with the whole book.

Nice bits, nice writing, dull story, felt like I got next to nothing from it.]]> 3.78 2012 The End of Days
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/07
shelves:
review:
I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and thought “this is an interesting idea but it’s not that good� then I read Life After Life and thought “this is an interesting idea again but it’s really not very good at all� and then I read this and thought “maybe it’s just not that interesting an idea because that’s three very different books with the same premise and I don’t like any of them�.

This is the best written of the three but for all it’s very pretty writing it’s interminably dull and I don’t really see the point of the constant “she died� but if she hadn’t…�. I suppose to be fair it’s a book about death and multiple different deaths of one character is a different take than deaths of multiple characters so it makes sense thematically, but my issues with the book are not to do with the multiple deaths. Despite giving the characters names they are rarely named in the text making it hard to read, the middle section about life in the newly formed USSR is blindingly dull and after that I just couldn’t wait to be done with the whole book.

Nice bits, nice writing, dull story, felt like I got next to nothing from it.
]]> Arcana: Musicians on Music 341393 320 John Zorn 188712327X Dougie 0 currently-reading 3.97 1999 Arcana: Musicians on Music
author: John Zorn
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Body Artist 11767 The Body Artist begins with normality: breakfast between a married couple, Lauren and Rey, in their ramshackle rented house on the New England coast. Recording their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words, Don DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of our idiosyncratic relationships. But after breakfast, Rey makes a decision that leaves Lauren utterly alone, or seems to.

As Lauren, the body artist of the title, becomes strangely detached from herself and the temporal world, the novel becomes an exploration of a highly abnormal grieving process; a fascinating exposé of 'who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are'; and a rarefied study of trauma and creativity, absence and presence, isolation and communion.]]> 128 Don DeLillo 0743203968 Dougie 5 3.30 2001 The Body Artist
author: Don DeLillo
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/29
date added: 2024/03/29
shelves:
review:
A profoundly strange book, a meditation on grief and on time and memory that moves about in tone and subject wildly, sometimes mid sentence. The reader is taken along with the protagonist in her grief, often feeling as lost as she is and finding strange comfort in her rituals. It’s a short book but dense and beautifully written.
]]> The Memory Police 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 YĹŤko Ogawa 1101870605 Dougie 4
The main story was interesting in concept and themes, and well told, and the conclusion ultimately quite emotional despite its extremely flat tone, however the middle two quarters of the book were excessively repetitive with very little changing for the characters and setting. The book felt really wandery through this part with the highlights being the book within the book but it did pull it back at the end and ultimately overall I quite enjoyed it.]]> 3.72 1994 The Memory Police
author: YĹŤko Ogawa
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves:
review:
A deeply strange book in which our protagonist, in the midst of her own strange story also writes an even stranger book of her own. I enjoyed both the story of the novel itself and the book within the book, though I enjoyed the latter more, it was more concise with a stronger progression and through line.

The main story was interesting in concept and themes, and well told, and the conclusion ultimately quite emotional despite its extremely flat tone, however the middle two quarters of the book were excessively repetitive with very little changing for the characters and setting. The book felt really wandery through this part with the highlights being the book within the book but it did pull it back at the end and ultimately overall I quite enjoyed it.
]]> Bullet Park 873967 245 John Cheever 0679737871 Dougie 5 3.77 1967 Bullet Park
author: John Cheever
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves:
review:
A wonderfully excoriating dissection of mid century American suburbia, the mundane and fantastic jammed together in a haze of alcoholism and lust and fantastic writing.
]]> <![CDATA[Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories]]> 89727 The Haunting of Hill House—classics ranking with the work of Edgar Allan Poe—Shirley Jackson blazed a path for contemporary writers with her explorations of evil, madness, and cruelty.

Soon after her untimely death in 1965, Jackson’s children discovered a treasure trove of previously unpublished and uncollected stories, many of which are brought together in this remarkable collection. Here are tales of torment, psychological aberration, and the macabre, as well as those that display her lighter touch with humorous scenes of domestic life.

Reflecting the range and complexity of Jackson’s talent, Just an Ordinary Day reaffirms her enduring influence and celebrates her singular voice, rich with magic and resonance.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 417 Shirley Jackson 0553378333 Dougie 4 4.20 1996 Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/02/12
shelves:
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]]> Tender Is the Flesh 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Dougie 4 3.75 2017 Tender Is the Flesh
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/02/04
shelves:
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]]> Under The Jaguar Sun 103273 “The thought . . . called up the flavors of an elaborate and bold cuisine, bent on making the flavors� highest notes vibrate, juxtaposing them in modulations, in chords, and especially in dissonances that would assert themselves as an incomparable experience.� � From Under the Jaguar Sun
Ěý
These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses. Taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico’s fiery chilies and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, “Under the Jaguar Sun.� In “A King Listens,� a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant’s thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. “The Name, the Nose� drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them. Mordant and deliciously offbeat, this trio of tales is a treat from a master of short fiction.

“[Calvino is] a learned, daring, ingeniously gifted magus . . . Under the Jaguar Sun . . . fuses fable with neuron . . . The reader is likely to salivate.� � Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review]]> 96 Italo Calvino 0156927942 Dougie 4 3.81 1986 Under The Jaguar Sun
author: Italo Calvino
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves:
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]]> News of the Dead 55877523 'To tell the story of a country or a continent is surely a great and complex undertaking; but the story of a quiet, unnoticed place where there are few people, fewer memories and almost no reliable records - a place such as Glen Conach - may actually be harder to piece together. The hazier everything becomes, the more whatever facts there are become entangled with myth and legend. . .'

Deep in the mountains of north-east Scotland lies Glen Conach, a place of secrets and memories, fable and history. In particular, it holds the stories of three different eras, separated by centuries yet linked by location, by an ancient manuscript and by echoes that travel across time.

In ancient Pictland, the Christian hermit Conach contemplates God and nature, performs miracles and prepares himself for sacrifice. Long after his death, legends about him are set down by an unknown hand in the Book of Conach.

Generations later, in the early nineteenth century, self-promoting antiquarian Charles Kirkliston Gibb is drawn to the Glen, and into the big house at the heart of its fragile community.

In the present day, young Lachie whispers to Maja of a ghost he thinks he has seen. Reflecting on her long life, Maja believes him, for she is haunted by ghosts of her own.

News of the Dead is a captivating exploration of refuge, retreat and the reception of strangers. It measures the space between the stories people tell of themselves - what they forget and what they invent - and the stories through which they may, or may not, be remembered.]]> 384 James Robertson 0241401992 Dougie 5 3.76 2021 News of the Dead
author: James Robertson
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When Einstein Walked with łŇö»ĺ±đ±ô: Excursions to the Edge of Thought]]> 36794489 From Jim Holt, the New York Times bestselling author of Why Does the World Exist?, comes an entertaining and accessible guide to the most profound scientific and mathematical ideas of recent centuries in When Einstein Walked with łŇö»ĺ±đ±ô Excursions to the Edge of Thought.

Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who've tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction--and whether the universe truly has a future.]]> 368 Jim Holt 0374146705 Dougie 5 4.05 2018 When Einstein Walked with łŇö»ĺ±đ±ô: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
author: Jim Holt
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Burr 8722
Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr's past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.]]> 430 Gore Vidal 0375708731 Dougie 0 to-read 4.08 1973 Burr
author: Gore Vidal
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Lincoln 8716
To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal's Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it. Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections. Brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed, Gore Vidal's Lincoln allows the man to breathe again.]]> 672 Gore Vidal 0375708766 Dougie 0 to-read 4.23 1984 Lincoln
author: Gore Vidal
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Bell in the Lake (Hekne, #1)]]> 50157931 The engrossing epic novel—a #1 bestseller in Norway-of a young woman whose fate plays out against her village’s mystical church bells
Ěý
As long as people could remember, the stave church’s bells had rung over the isolated village of Butangen, Norway. Cast in memory of conjoined twins, the bells are said to ring on their own in times of danger. In 1879, young pastor Kai Schweigaard moves to the village, where young Astrid Hekne yearns for a modern life. She sees a way out on the arm of the new pastor, who needs a tie to the community to cull favor for his plan for the old stave church, with its pagan deity effigies and supernatural bells. When the pastor makes a deal that brings an outsider, a sophisticated German architect, into their world, the village and Astrid are caught between past and future, as dark forces come into play.
Ěý
Lars Mytting, bestselling author of Norwegian Wood, brings his deep knowledge of history, carpentry, fishing, and stave churches to this compelling historical novel, an international bestseller sold in 12 countries. With its broad-canvas narrative about the intersection of religion, superstition, and duty, The Bell in the Lake is an irresistible story of ancient times and modern challenges, by a powerful international voice.
Ěý±Ő±Ő> 400 Lars Mytting 141974318X Dougie 5 2023-top-5
It’s uncompromising and difficult but incredibly rewarding, I loved the folkloric magical overtones that were never particularly overt, I loved the church as a character and I loved seeing a very basic existence through the eyes of our characters turned into a whole world of high drama and emotion, even as they downplayed every bit of it.]]> 4.17 2018 The Bell in the Lake (Hekne, #1)
author: Lars Mytting
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/04
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: 2023-top-5
review:
A dense book about a small rural community in Norway around 100 years ago doesn’t sound like a recipe for a great book, but the setting isn’t what it’s about. This is the story of Astrid Hekne, daughter of a farmer who works hard, is a pragmatist at heart, but loves the world of books and reading, and has a spiritual side rooted in deep folklore. It’s also the story of a young German architecture student who comes to the small parish to study the church, and of the minister of same parish and church, both with an interest in Agnes. More than that, it’s a story about the weight of life, how hard just making day to day life carry on can be, and about finding enough space in your life for more than just toil.

It’s uncompromising and difficult but incredibly rewarding, I loved the folkloric magical overtones that were never particularly overt, I loved the church as a character and I loved seeing a very basic existence through the eyes of our characters turned into a whole world of high drama and emotion, even as they downplayed every bit of it.
]]> <![CDATA[Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery]]> 29328188
Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

Beautifully written, honest and very moving, Hidden Nature is also the story of Alys Fowler's emotional journey: above all, this book is about losing and finding, exploring familiar places and discovering unknown horizons.]]> 320 Alys Fowler 1473623006 Dougie 3
The issue was with quite a lot of repetition, the author’s messy garden was a metaphor for her mental state multiple times, as was her messy house, overgrown canals, anything untidy she came across on her journey. Once we get to the point early on where her reason for her state of anxiety and restlessness is revealed, the rest of the book moves in repetitive circles of her feeling a little better, but she’s still a mess, but she’s a little better, but she’s still a mess.

It felt very honest, I’m sure it’s a very true recounting of her experience and I hope it was cathartic writing it, but it makes for a poorly structured book.]]> 3.79 2017 Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery
author: Alys Fowler
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/27
date added: 2023/12/27
shelves:
review:
This wasn’t a bad book as such, the premise of urban exploration via canals in a paddle boat was interesting, the personal story at the heart of the book was emotionally engaging and there was a lot of information about nature that was interesting and well presented.

The issue was with quite a lot of repetition, the author’s messy garden was a metaphor for her mental state multiple times, as was her messy house, overgrown canals, anything untidy she came across on her journey. Once we get to the point early on where her reason for her state of anxiety and restlessness is revealed, the rest of the book moves in repetitive circles of her feeling a little better, but she’s still a mess, but she’s a little better, but she’s still a mess.

It felt very honest, I’m sure it’s a very true recounting of her experience and I hope it was cathartic writing it, but it makes for a poorly structured book.
]]> <![CDATA[If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler]]> 374233 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration�"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.

The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches—stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."]]> 260 Italo Calvino Dougie 5 4.05 1979 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
author: Italo Calvino
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves:
review:
I got to the end of this book, and I loved it, but I think I’m still reading it, I think I’ll be reading it for a while yet.
]]> Marcovaldo 18929 128 Italo Calvino Dougie 5
It reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons, the kind that in your memory seemed to last hours and hours but really were only fifteen to thirty minutes long, which often carried a message woven throughout the story that, as a child, you were completely oblivious to but which sunk in nonetheless.]]> 3.83 1963 Marcovaldo
author: Italo Calvino
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/13
date added: 2023/12/13
shelves:
review:
Nobody does a series of vignettes like Italo Calvino does a series of vignettes. At times unbelievably whimsical, at times absurd, funny but with real heart and depth, this whole short book is just joyful. I've given it five stars but it's not as good as his very best, I just couldn't rate it any lower.

It reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons, the kind that in your memory seemed to last hours and hours but really were only fifteen to thirty minutes long, which often carried a message woven throughout the story that, as a child, you were completely oblivious to but which sunk in nonetheless.
]]> The Hand 31579323
'I had begun, God knows why, tearing a corner off of everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces'

Confident and successful, New York advertising executive Ray Sanders takes what he wants from life. When he goes missing in a snow storm in Connecticut one evening, his closest friend begins to reassess his loyalties, gambling Ray's fate and his own future.]]> 162 Georges Simenon Dougie 5
I think the book is open to a lot of interpretations and doesn't try too hard to force the author's own view on how the reader ought to think about it all, I loved it. It's a deft sort of book written in the first person but with enough little details in how it's told to give the reader a parallel narrative along with the story on the surface, affording you that extra insight and letting you form a different view of events to the narrator. Which is just as well as our protagonist is deeply unlikeable, but the book is a fascinating look at the mind and the feelings of him and those around him.]]> 3.93 1968 The Hand
author: Georges Simenon
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/11
date added: 2023/12/12
shelves:
review:
An excellent book, the only Georges Simenon book I've actually read, though I always meant to try a Maigret after reading Graeme Macrae Burnett's takes on Simenon's style of detective story. This book is nothing like that though, it's a deep dive into the psyche of a comfortable middle class lawyer living a comfortable life in a comfortable house with a comfortable wife and how uncomfortable he is with it all.

I think the book is open to a lot of interpretations and doesn't try too hard to force the author's own view on how the reader ought to think about it all, I loved it. It's a deft sort of book written in the first person but with enough little details in how it's told to give the reader a parallel narrative along with the story on the surface, affording you that extra insight and letting you form a different view of events to the narrator. Which is just as well as our protagonist is deeply unlikeable, but the book is a fascinating look at the mind and the feelings of him and those around him.
]]> The Lottery and Other Stories 89723 The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.]]> 302 Shirley Jackson 0374529531 Dougie 5 4.05 1949 The Lottery and Other Stories
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1949
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/09
shelves:
review:
A great collection of stories, some are weird and unsettling, verging on bizarre or experimental, some are long form jokes, many are sharply observant of people and peculiarities of life. All are expertly constructed and an absolute joy to read.
]]> The Bird's Nest 131179 The Bird's Nest, Jackson's third novel, develops hallmarks of the horror master's most unsettling work: tormented heroines, riveting familial mysteries, and a disquieting vision inside the human mind.]]> 276 Shirley Jackson 1567230644 Dougie 4
I loved almost everything about it, the character of aunt Morgan vs aunt Morgan in the eyes of those around her, likewise Dr Wrong's own opinion of himself vs the reality of his character and the distinct differences and similarities between Elizabeth's split selves were all rendered with a great deftness.

The only issue, but a big one, was that the second and third sections, the doctor's first section and Betsy's escape to New York were so so so long, it felt like everything they had to accomplish could have been done in less than half the words and it felt particularly out of character for Shirley Jackson who is normally so adept at rendering a thing fully in the minimum of words. The book only dragged for maybe 1/3 of its length, but when it dragged it really really dragged.]]> 3.72 1954 The Bird's Nest
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/06
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves:
review:
This is an almost excellent book, the examination of people and personality through the device of a woman undergoing a breakdown brought on by multiple personality disorder is fascinating, restrained, compelling and feels years ahead of its time.

I loved almost everything about it, the character of aunt Morgan vs aunt Morgan in the eyes of those around her, likewise Dr Wrong's own opinion of himself vs the reality of his character and the distinct differences and similarities between Elizabeth's split selves were all rendered with a great deftness.

The only issue, but a big one, was that the second and third sections, the doctor's first section and Betsy's escape to New York were so so so long, it felt like everything they had to accomplish could have been done in less than half the words and it felt particularly out of character for Shirley Jackson who is normally so adept at rendering a thing fully in the minimum of words. The book only dragged for maybe 1/3 of its length, but when it dragged it really really dragged.
]]> Meantime 60066611
Their investigation sends them on a bewildering expedition that takes in Scottish radical politics, Artificial Intelligence, cults, secret agents, smugglers and vegan record shops.]]> 359 Frankie Boyle Dougie 4
I like as well that he's not gone with a straight detective/crime type story, I don't know how well that would work with the comedy, but this book is extremely weird in how it flows, how it's structured, the events and characters. Nobody comes across terribly realistic, not in any kind of way that undercuts the pathos of the real emotional core, but it is bizarre nonetheless.

Ultimately though, the book lives and dies on the strength of the comedy, which is very good indeed, I had moments where I struggled to continue, but by the end, in service to the weird plot, the comic side of it is somewhat suppressed and it ends up slightly on the unsatisfying side, there's not enough else to it to make it a thoroughly satisfying book despite it being a very good book.]]> 3.53 Meantime
author: Frankie Boyle
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.53
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/05
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves:
review:
There is much to recommend this book. First of all, and probably most importantly, it is extremely funny, not just in the jokes inserted which are very clearly Frankie Boyle jokes, regardless of which character they come from they all land in his voice, but there's other jokes that work in the format of a book that wouldn't work at all in stand up, so there's clearly a good amount of comedic writing talent here, not just an obvious comic talent.

I like as well that he's not gone with a straight detective/crime type story, I don't know how well that would work with the comedy, but this book is extremely weird in how it flows, how it's structured, the events and characters. Nobody comes across terribly realistic, not in any kind of way that undercuts the pathos of the real emotional core, but it is bizarre nonetheless.

Ultimately though, the book lives and dies on the strength of the comedy, which is very good indeed, I had moments where I struggled to continue, but by the end, in service to the weird plot, the comic side of it is somewhat suppressed and it ends up slightly on the unsatisfying side, there's not enough else to it to make it a thoroughly satisfying book despite it being a very good book.
]]> Hangsaman 131177 Hangsaman is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen.

The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.]]> 191 Shirley Jackson 0445031174 Dougie 5 3.78 1951 Hangsaman
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/16
date added: 2023/11/19
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]]> The Death of Francis Bacon 55941909 A bold and brilliant short work by the author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny.Madrid. Unfinished.Man Dying.A great painter lies on his deathbed.Max Porter translates into seven extraordinary written pictures the explosive final workings of the artist's mind.]]> 47 Max Porter Dougie 3
One to revisit at a later date once I’m better equipped to make more of it.]]> 3.21 2021 The Death of Francis Bacon
author: Max Porter
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/13
date added: 2023/11/13
shelves:
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I expect this is an excellent book but it’s not one I got on with. I loved the language and flow of the writing but I never really got a hold of what it was really about, largely I think because I don’t know very much about Francis Bacon and his art.

One to revisit at a later date once I’m better equipped to make more of it.
]]> Holloway 18747124 Wildwood - travelled to explore the holloways of South Dorset's sandstone. They found their way into a landscape of shadows, spectres & great strangeness. Six years later, after Roger Deakin's early death, Robert Macfarlane returned to the holloway with the artist Stanley Donwood and writer Dan Richards. The book is about those journeys and that landscape.

Moving in the spaces between social history, psychogeography and travel writing, Holloway is a beautiful and haunted work of art.]]> 41 Robert Macfarlane 0571310664 Dougie 5
The book itself is a Holloway, the reader starting on firm ground in the daylight but descending quickly with the author into the liminal space and uncertain figures within, before emerging blinking at the other end.]]> 4.16 2012 Holloway
author: Robert Macfarlane
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves:
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A different sort of book from McFarlane’s usual factual but lyrical nature writing, this starts on similar territory to those other longer books but quickly becomes more poetic and abstract.

The book itself is a Holloway, the reader starting on firm ground in the daylight but descending quickly with the author into the liminal space and uncertain figures within, before emerging blinking at the other end.
]]> <![CDATA[Five Letters from an Eastern Empire]]> 980545 1982 Janine, Poor Things, Ten Tales Tall & True and Unlikely Stories, Mostly, from which Five Letters from an Eastern Empire is taken.]]> 54 Alasdair Gray 0146000447 Dougie 5
It’s allegorical to an extent, covering a lot of ground about the inherent issues of authoritative governments, but is also engaging, funny and full of odd joys from this weird place. Love it.]]> 4.14 1995 Five Letters from an Eastern Empire
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves:
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A very strange little book, this story comprises five letters written in a somewhat fantastical kingdom, describing the social and political situation of this extremely weird place, as told by Bohu, a ten foot tall imperial poet.

It’s allegorical to an extent, covering a lot of ground about the inherent issues of authoritative governments, but is also engaging, funny and full of odd joys from this weird place. Love it.
]]> The Waste Land 34080 The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is often regarded as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, as well as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.

The work, divided in 5 sections, juxtaposes the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, with a snapshot of early twentieth-century British society. In contemporary times, it is often read published within The Waste Land and Other Poems and has come to be Eliot's most popular poem.

T.S. Elliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Born in 1888 in St. Louis (MO, USA), he is considered one of the 20th century's major poets, and a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry."In ten years' time," wrote Edmund Wilson in Axel's Castle (1931), "Elliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English." In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Price "for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry."]]> 288 T.S. Eliot 0393974995 Dougie 5
I have no analysis to offer at this time, just a feeling of nostalgia for something I don’t yet understand.]]> 4.11 1922 The Waste Land
author: T.S. Eliot
name: Dougie
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1922
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves:
review:
Perhaps the most dense work I have ever read, it’s nigh on impossible to read it slowly enough. I read it three times through in this sitting, and with all my wife’s wonderful annotations which added so much context, but I expect I’ll carry on reading it for a while.

I have no analysis to offer at this time, just a feeling of nostalgia for something I don’t yet understand.
]]> The Black Eden 62898930 'Action packed and panoramic.' Guardian

1956, the Scottish Highlands: Aaron and Robbie, a schoolmaster's son and a farmer's boy, are fast friends with a shared passion for diving, but very divergent ideas of what they will do with their lives.

Meanwhile, Mark and Ally, bright pupils at Edinburgh's grandest private school, are aspiring to make change in the world - one through high finance, the other on the political stage.

And Joseph, heir to an Aberdeen trawler-fishing dynasty, is brooding over whether his true ambitions are set higher than his father's succession plan.

For each of them, the discovery of oil under the North Sea will make their dreams achievable. But behind the promise and temptation of 'black gold,' there is a price to be paid. Over the passing years, they will discover that oil can overthrow relationships, turn friends into foes, and even put lives in peril.]]> 451 Richard T. Kelly 0571346588 Dougie 4 3.72 2023 The Black Eden
author: Richard T. Kelly
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/11
date added: 2023/11/11
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]]> The Sundial 131181 (Chicago Tribune): When an aging heiress learns of an impending apocalypse while on a garden walk, her family becomes fixated on preparing for the imminent doom. “One of the premiere gothic horror writers of the 20th century’s funniest and strangest endeavors� Think P. G. Wodehouse meets The Twilight Zone� (AudioFile).

Before there was Hill House, there was the Halloran mansion of Jackson’s stunningly creepy fourth novel, The Sundial. Aunt Fanny has always been somewhat peculiar. When the Halloran clan gathers at the family home for a funeral, no one is surprised when she wanders off into the secret garden. But then Aunt Fanny returns to report an astonishing vision of an apocalypse from which only the Hallorans and their hangers-on will be spared, and the family finds itself engulfed in growing madness, fear, and violence as they prepare for a terrible new world. For Aunt Fanny's long-dead father has given her the precise date of the final cataclysm!]]> 245 Shirley Jackson 0140083170 Dougie 5 3.83 1958 The Sundial
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/11
date added: 2023/11/11
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]]> The Driver's Seat 668282 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0141188340

Lise is thin, neither good-looking nor bad-looking. One day she walks out of her office, acquires a gaudy new outfit, adopts a girlier tone of voice, and heads to the airport to fly south. On the plane she takes a seat between two men. One is delighted with her company, the other is deeply perturbed. So begins an unnerving journey into the darker recesses of human nature.]]> 103 Muriel Spark Dougie 4 3.62 1970 The Driver's Seat
author: Muriel Spark
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/03
date added: 2023/11/06
shelves:
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]]> Poor Things 72355 Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter - a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.

The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.]]> 318 Alasdair Gray 0747562288 Dougie 5 2020-top-5, favourites 3.92 1992 Poor Things
author: Alasdair Gray
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: 2020-top-5, favourites
review:

]]> Love in the Time of Cholera 9712 348 Gabriel García Márquez 140003468X Dougie 5 3.92 1985 Love in the Time of Cholera
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves:
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]]> A Winter Grave 62058590
By contrast, melting ice sheets have brought the Gulf Stream to a halt and northern latitudes, including Scotland, are being hit by snow and ice storms. It is against this backdrop that Addie, a young meteorologist checking a mountain top weather station, discovers the body of a man entombed in ice.

The dead man is investigative reporter, George Younger, missing for three months after vanishing during what he claimed was a hill-walking holiday. But Younger was no hill walker, and his discovery on a mountain-top near the Highland village of Kinlochleven, is inexplicable.

Cameron Brodie, a veteran Glasgow detective, volunteers to be flown north to investigate Younger's death, but he has more than a murder enquiry on his agenda. He has just been given a devastating medical prognosis by his doctor and knows the time has come to face his estranged daughter who has made her home in the remote Highland village.

Arriving during an ice storm, Brodie and pathologist Dr. Sita Roy, find themselves the sole guests at the inappropriately named International Hotel, where Younger's body has been kept refrigerated in a cake cabinet. But evidence uncovered during his autopsy places the lives of both Brodie and Roy in extreme jeopardy.

As another storm closes off communications and the possibility of escape, Brodie must face up not only to the ghosts of his past, but to a killer determined to bury forever the chilling secret that George Younger's investigations had threatened to expose.]]> 368 Peter May 1529428483 Dougie 3 3.89 2023 A Winter Grave
author: Peter May
name: Dougie
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/03
date added: 2023/10/04
shelves:
review:

]]>