There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. He'd homed in on that flag issue, the flags-and-emblems issue, instinctive and emotional because flags were invented to be instinctive and emotional - often pathologically, narcissistically emotional - and he meant that flag of the country …
May was for me a month when I read more about the Troubles. Ever since moving to the UK I always wanted to find out more about that dark time, but as it usually is life was getting in the way. In the end, my project from last year, 12 bookshops for 12 months, helped me …
And another reread from my mother's library. I've read Eureka Street several times and always loved it. This time I read it as a part of Ireland related reading-spree. Since I moved to the UK I was saying I should learn more about The Troubles, as the only thing I remember is vague mentions of IRA on …
Art takes time. To spend an hour looking at a painting is difficult. The public gallery experience is one that encourages art at a trot. The average reader (and we must remember that the average reader does not exist before the late nineteenth century) is a product of modern schooling and conservative taste. T be …
Continue reading Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery – Jeanette Winterson – Quotes
I do love the title of this book, with its subtle double meaning that is accentuated more and more in every single essay. This book is a collection of ten essays by Winterson on art, writing, reading, creating and collecting. To be honest, I expected it to be more focused on art in the classic …
Continue reading Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery – Jeanette Winterson
I've spent a few weeks in my family home in June and as I finished the book I brought with me I ventured into my mum's library, you'll see several reviews of the books I picked up there. This time I found a reread, I've read Little Altars Everywhere years ago, either towards the end of …
I am not a big science fiction fan, though I was lucky and the several sci-fi classics I read were brilliant books indeed. Because of that, the only other book by Dick I read was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I came across this one while at my family home, as usual, I finished the book …
Continue reading Confessions of a Crap Artist – Philip K. Dick
If we don't count Macbeth, for it's a retelling of a story that is not only about crime, and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, which is a play with genres, not a straight crime story, then The Abominable Man is the first crime book I read in 2019. I find it …
Continue reading The Abominable Man – Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
Let's start with a bad translation of the title, to give you an idea what it's about: Polish ghostology: Things and people in the years of transformation. A bad one, I know... but bear with me. The years of transformation in Poland denote the period when communism ended and democracy started, there are no strict …
Continue reading Duchologia polska: Rzeczy i ludzie w latach transformacji – Olga Drenda
It was one of those books that lingered on my Kindle for years, waiting for its time. It finally came in February, during my vacation on Tenerife. In the last few years I've been mostly reading paper books, so my Kindle typically only gets looked at when I'm on holiday. We're moving to Baton Rouge, …
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