Fee
Stephen King is often referred to as a master of his craft and On Writing only serves to reinforce that fact. His lifelong dedication to the art of writing is what radiates past all the anecdotes and advice that are so graciously imparted in this text; that and his deep love for his family, which really made me smile.
Whilst SK's humour often peeks through in his fiction, it took this autobiographical work for me to fully appreciate just how funny he is. I was absolutely howling at points, and moved to tears at others. A rollercoaster of a book, and exactly what a book that teaches you about writing should be like, IMHO, reinforcing the point that there is no magic formula to help you write a good book, and there's no secret idea bank that successful authors have access to and you don't. Good writing is a product of hard work, patience, and practice.
My second Tom McCarthy, which confirmed the tentative opinion I'd formed after the first that Tom McCarthy might be a proper nutter. This is the brilliant but maddening story of a man who, with more money than sense perhaps, engages a team of enablers to help him re-enact, down to the minutest detail, inane events from his life. Completely bizarre. McCarthy's writing is brilliant, pin-sharp, and reminds us of the old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Scottish folklore is one of my favourite things so I was eager to read this book, but it was a bit of a let down to be honest. Despite the main character, Audrey, journeying to the Isle of Skye to ‘collect the word-of-mouth folk tales of the people and communities around her', there was scant mention of folklore in this book. Indeed for most of it, nobody wanted to talk to Audrey. The story was painfully predictable, the mysteries not terribly mysterious, and the ending rushed and overwrought, with all the loose ends tied up in a pretty bow.
If you want to read a better mystery set on an island and featuring Victorian feminism and independent women in the age of man, try The Lie Tree by Francis Hardinge, which this book seemed like a poor imitation of.
NB. This should be marketed as a YA book, not adult fiction.
I had an edition of this when I was wee that said ‘A Boy's Book' on the cover, and that is exactly how it reads - as a book written for boys in the 1900's. I've seen it described as swashbuckling, but my swashes remain firmly unbuckled. I wish I'd loved it more because my Dad adored it, and I definitely caught glimpses of him in these pages, but it just didn't do it for me. After the first third or so I was bored, and the only thing that kept me going were the descriptions of the Scottish landscape and the few encounters with its people. I kept having to check in with the Wikipedia description of the plot because the writing was often so wandering I ended up completely lost. I'll give Jekyll and Hide a go and see if I get on any better with that but I suspect RLS's time has passed for me.
A thorough primer on the history of the remote Scottish island of St Kilda, from its first settlers in Neolithic times to its evacuation in 1930. MacLean's accounts of day to day life on the island are fascinating, particularly the tales of the daily parliaments and the fulmar hunts. This was a simple society, thriving in the harshest of environments, until organised religion arrived in the 1800s and disrupted its well-established routines, and the advent of the tourist trade brought new diseases that the isolated St Kildans had no immunity against. A compelling and ultimately heartbreaking story, and one we should take care to learn from.
A family are enjoying a short break in an Airbnb, just outside NY, when the owners turn up, seeking refuge after a blackout in the city. As communications systems fail and they're completely cut off, an omniscient narrator feeds us snippets of information about what's happening in the outside world that the characters aren't party to, giving us a unique overview of the story. So eerily quiet, the creeping dread in this novel almost makes it a horror. Loved it.
Ugh this book made me feel like someone had been rummaging about in my brain. It's an incredible melting pot of history, myth, folktales and songs, poetry, memoir, and motherhood, all connected to the sea and with a heavy Scottish leaning - the book, not my brain (ᵇᵘᵗ ᵃˡˢᵒ ᵐʸ ᵇʳᵃᶦⁿ). Charlotte Runcie's writing is beautiful, resonant. Straight into my top five. I'll be reading this again soon, and I cannot wait for her to write more.
My second Olivia Laing, her second book, about the alcoholism that wracked the lives of some of the great American writers - Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Berryman, Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever. Laing explores how their addictions affected their lives and by extension their writing, for good and for bad, via a mix of memoir, travelogue, and biography; a style she established in To A River and hones to perfection here. My only complaint about this book is that there were plenty of great American female authors that could have been included - I'd love to have read Laing's take on Anne Sexton, Shirley Jackson, or Dorothy Parker - and I didn't really understand her reasoning for excluding them.
A weird one this, trying so very hard to be postmodern but just not quite hitting the mark. A story within a story that trips itself up by being both over-complicated and too simple at once. The relationships and the dialogue throughout felt forced, and the ending fell flat. I just didn't get it.
David Thomson's account of collecting oral folklore about seals and the seal-folk around Scotland and Ireland in the fifties. You really get a sense of place with Thomson's writing - he makes you feel like you're right there with him sitting next to the fire, the air damp and heavy with stoor, as we listen to an ageing fisherman bring to mind the time he encountered a selkie while he hauled in his nets. A little rambling at times, but that's easily forgivable. Thomson's deep love for his subject shines through the whole of this book.
Following on from The Seven Daughters of Eve, Blood of the Isles takes a closer look at the genetic history of the people of the British Isles, a fascinating mix of history, geology, mythology, folklore, and science, all presented in Sykes's generous and accessible style. I loved this book so much!
It's been a long time since I've fallen asleep reading a book because I cannot bear to put it down, or woken up in the middle of the night thinking about it and had to sneak a chapter in at 4am. This book is divided into four sections: sex robots, vegan meat, birth, and death, and it looks at where we are with technological and scientific advances in each, and our attitudes towards them. Further to that, it asks a much bigger, overarching question - what does it mean to be human? Completely engaging and one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. Please read it!
Following in the footsteps of Italo Calvino's 1973 classic, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Tarot Tales is a collection of stories that use the tarot as a tool for storytelling. This was just a bit too heavy on the otherworldly sci-fi for me but the final tale by Rachel Pollack saved it.
This is a beautifully written book tackling some really tough topics. These are difficult poems to read, exploring mental illness, suicide, grief. What saves it, what makes this darkness palatable, is the love that simmers under it all. McMillan's love for his partner, for his family. The best collection I've read in a long time.
I didn't enjoy this at all, unfortunately, and ended up skimming the last third of it just so I could put it down. This book has none of the folk horror charm of its predecessor, instead giving the story over to aliens and computers. A bit too far away from the original concept for me.
An excellent read, absolutely packed with facts about the fascinating histories of coffin roads across Scotland, as well as stories of the folklore and traditions surrounding death across the country. My biggest takeaway from this book was that we should definitely be making efforts to move back towards a way of life where death is not something to be shied away from, and also that the copious consumption of whisky is an important part of the grieving process.
This book is a compelling blend of the history of the Scottish witch trials and Allyson's own personal history as a ‘blow in' from the US to Scotland. It was interesting to have places I'm familiar with, to the extent that I take them for granted, I think, painted in a new light through Allyson's eyes and through the lens of this very human history that is so often treated like a carnival sideshow. In recounting the histories of those accused of witchcraft, dehumanised by time and by those who would capitalise on their pain, Allyson has given these women back a voice, and I finished the book feeling like I knew them, and Allyson, a little better.
The meandering, rambling, bawdy, funny, whisky-steeped story of R. Stornoway and his life in the Outer Hebrides. Reads like a nineties fever dream. I particularly loved the footnotes offering explanations of Gàidhlig slang. If the last fifty pages of this had been torn out, I would have given it five stars.
Rodge Glass's biography of Alasdair Gray is warm and intimate and laugh out loud funny. If you're a fan of Alasdair's I urge you to read it, but only when you don't have any reading plans for the following six months because you're going to come out of it wanting to (re)read everything Alasdair's ever written.
This book is Scotland's answer to the incredible Stoner by John Williams. It's the story of Mat Craig and his struggle to balance his work and family life with his desire to be a writer, a dream at odds with his Calvinist upbringing in working-class Glasgow in the middle of the 20th century. I found Mat so incredibly relatable. His Sophie's Choice is surely one that every creative has had to face at some time in their lives - the curtailed comfort and security of the nine-to-five life, or the freedom and reward of the hand-to-mouth life of the artist?
“Sometimes ... he would feel again his own ridiculousness weakness and inadequacy, the meagreness of his spiritual possessions, his physical poverty, his feeble stumblings and gaucheries, the paucity of this world, the refractory city, the numbing tenements and streets, his crumbling damp rooms, the Scotch sneer on his neighbour's face, the load, the weight, the density, the insistent immediateness of what is called living. His writing would become to him a jeering, ugly travesty. He would feel this sneering disgust which was in itself disgusting, a double disgust. And he was never sure whether his revulsions came from the grim, twisted mockery of life at art, or the inflated, lying mockery of art at life.”
“It just seems like a week or two since the beginning of last spring. Every year gets shorter.” Mat stood for a moment sawing his hand in the air... opening his mouth to speak, changing his mind. Then he burst out, “I mean you have a kind of crazy idea that you are exempt. That you have some kind of purpose. Something which you've forgotten but will remember someday. Then you look out of the window and you see that the light mornings are drawing in again. And you think - another year gone - and faster every time.”
Continuing the themes of artistic freedom vs social responsibility that Archie Hind wrote about in The Dear Green Place, in Fur Sadie we're introduced to a busy housewife who impulsively buys a second-hand piano in a fit of nostalgia.
I am absolutely gutted that Archie didn't finish this novel! The little we do have of it is so beautifully written, and despite only existing in seventy-three pages Sadie is fully realised. Her dedication to her ambition to learn to play the piano, even as she has to navigate around the barely hidden disapproval of her husband and sons, is endearing, and I will always wonder how her relationship with her piano teacher, Mr McKay, might have developed.
“McKay sat down and played Für Elise while Sadie sat stiff and upright on a hard chair, her hand clasped in her lap. ...He had turned to her. ‘You know that wee tune, I suppose?'
‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘Fur Sadie,' and it wasn't until McKay put his head back and laughed that she clapped her hand to her mouth.
‘Fur Sadie,' he said, laughing, missing out the umlaut and so turning the word into Glasgwegian. ‘Fur Sadie.'”
This was a surprising wee novel. Set in a farming community in the northeast of Scotland in a period spanning from pre-war to the 1960s, I'd expected something charming but probably, to be honest, a bit twee. What I got instead was a perfectly framed snapshot of the lives of the inhabitants of a small village, one that didn't shy away from the intimate and often uglier sides of life. The interior monologues of these characters were vivid, raw, and relatable, and much less prudish than I'd anticipated. Jessie Kesson's turn of phrase is just gorgeous, her writing almost stream of consciousness esque in parts, and the circling path of the narrative is cleverly crafted. I note in a few reviews this book is cited as Jessie's weakest work, so I'm very much looking forward to reading more by her.
A great collection of Scottish folk tales by Carl MacDougall, both contemporary tales and retellings of the classics, all accompanied by Alasdair Gray's iconic illustrations. The standouts for me were The Water Horse, a retelling of the kelpie myth, and the genderbending King's Chamberlain.
Nae maiter, frien's, whate'er befa'
The puir folks they maun work awa
Through frost and snaw and rain and wind,
They're workin' life out tae keep life in.