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Scottish author Jim Murdoch discusses writing, his own and other authors, and muses at length about his fascination with the perversity of language. Veering from the nostalgic to the acerbic his blog will amuse anyone with a love of language.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'book review'
Death of a Superhero
Not since Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum has the pains of growing up been rendered this powerfully – Blick, Zurich I'm a kid at heart. Any book with the word 'superhero' in the title, the tag line, the blurb or in a review of the aforement...
The Wrong Miracle
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar – Pablo Picasso This is book about ordinary things, getting you hair done, having breakfast, going to church and eating gobstoppers. It's ab...
The Search
Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of reviewing this novel we need a short history lesson: Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Czech Republic just north-west of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same...
Travels in the Scriptorium Part II
I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing. - from Paul Auster's acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters I...
Travels in the Scriptorium Part I
I knew very little about Paul Auster when I bought this book. I knew the name. I knew of him and that he was a respected, probably American, author. It was certainly why I picked the book up although I suspect its size – it's only 130 pages long â...
The Master and Margarita
When God created light, the first shadow was born – tagline to the film Shadow Builder This is a very long review so for those of you reading this in your lunch hour let me cut to the chase. The Master and Margarita can be reaso...
Black Spring
Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip. – Henry Miller I have had a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn on my bookshelf for years, twenty years at least withou...
Dead End Road
A poem should be able to skim the surface before descending underwater – Richard Wink You notice this especially in winter. You're on a bus, all is dark outside, and then you pass someone's house or flat, the curtains are open, the ligh...
Aggie and Shuggie 20
Maggie: Ma! Ah'm seein stears. Aggie: Ah've taud ye befair, ye spend fear too much time in fronta tha comptuta. ...
The Shadow of a Smile
I've been quite lucky over the past few months to receive a goodly selection of recently published books to review. This has exposed me to writers I might never have read otherwise and, for the most part, I've been enriched by the experience...
Aggie and Shuggie 19
Sketch of a haggis in the wild (Marag fabulosus) Maggie: Da! Shuggie: ...
Balancing on the Edge of the World
I wanted this book twice. It comes from having a failing memory. I don't remember the first time I wanted it but I found it lying at the bottom of my Amazon shopping basket so somewhere along the line I'd read something about this book and d...
98 Reasons for Being
Having recently read about the experience of a young schizophrenic on the loose in New York – and subsequently thinking over what books I'd read about mental health (and realising there weren't that many) – it seemed like a good time to pull C...
Aggie and Shuggie 18
Aggie: Shuggie! Shuggie: … Aggie: Shuggie! Are yoo in thur? ...
Fists
Initial impressions are important. And we can't do much about them. The problem is they often set us up for a fall once the wrapper comes off and we see what we have to contend with. Or it can work the other way, we can be pleasantly surpris...
Doctor Brodie's Report
In his short essay on Borges (pronounced Bor'hes in case you're in any doubt), Gabriel Josipvici opens with this sentence: The name of Borges, among readers of modern literature, has always been synonymous with labyrinths, babelic libraries, g...
The Poison that Fascinates
Woman, divine woman, you have the poison that fascinates in your eyes, woman you have the perfume of an orange tree in bloom. - Agustin Lara There are no real coincidences in a fable. Everything happens for a re...
Time Out of Joint
If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who use the words – Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later It's 1959. Vic and Margo Nielson live in an unnamed American to...
Personal Velocity
Not that I needed to seek out books to review but I actually asked for this one. I felt sorry for it. You see the author, Rebecca Miller, has just had a film made of her novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and the book is just out and I thought tha...
Shadow
Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their fathers’ sins they will waste away - Leviticus 26:39 Since my knowledge of the crime fiction is based almost s...
Lowboy
I have not encountered the subject of mental illness very often in literature – films, yes, they're full of deranged individuals. The first time was in Gogol's short story, Diary of a Madman, generally regarded as one of the earliest portrayals ...
The Very Thought of You
I swithered when I was first offered this book for review. It looked like it might be sentimental slush. It has one of those tug-at-the-heart-strings covers, a child, lagging behind, staring forlornly back as she heads off into the unknown w...
The Plains
I'm not really a fair dinkum writer. I've stopped short of writing everything I could have written - Gerald Murnane Widely studied in Australian literature departments in the late seventies and eighties, Gerald Murnane was touted as a...
Winged with Death
Other music exists to heal wounds; but the tango when sung and played is for the purpose of opening them, for the purpose of sticking you finger in the wound and to tear them until they bleed – Unknown If you're like me probably all y...
The Optimist
Ooooooo K. Let’s get a couple of things straight here before we start. I would never have brought this book in a month of Sundays. Had I seen it lying on one of the 3 for 2 tables in Waterstones I wouldn’t have given it a second glance. ...
Fup
The blurb at the back of Fup, a novella by Jim Dodge, says: "Fup is a contemporary fable that inspires an almost evangelical fervour in all those who read it." I've read it – it was one of my Xmas presents – and I'm still waiti...
No one belongs here more than you
The first thing I knew about Miranda July, even before I learned her name, was that she owned a fridge only I thought it was a whiteboard till she told me it wasn’t. Very shortly after that I learned that she owned a cooker and a white han...
Laidlaw
"Who thinks the law has anything to do with justice? It's what we have because we can't have justice." – William McIlvanney Over the past month my wife and I have been watching repeats of Rebus on one o...
Aggie and Shuggie 15
Duggie: [Knock! Knock!]Shuggie: Oh, syoo. Whitya afta? Oor Maggie's no in.Duggie: Aye Ah know that n at. Ah wis achally lookin t'see yoo.Shuggie: Me? Whit fer?Duggie: Well, Ah heard oan the grapefine yoo wisa wee bit doon in the dumps cos yoor Jim ad...
When I Was Five I Killed Myself
When I Was Five I Killed Myself is an odd little book. Let me address the little first of all. The book is: 15.2 x 9.6 x 1.4 cm in size. My novel is 19.3 x 13 x 1.3 cm in size. In other words it is two-thirds smaller than the average book not that my...
