also published as Beartown I was going to say that I recently read Backman’s breakout novel A man called Over, but then I checked the blog and discovered that it was back in 2015! well I suppose that’s very recent if you are talking about the age of the world. Ove was a book club […]
If you want to read a book that’ll really show how horrific people can be to one another then this is it. It tells the story of the murders of Mollie Burkhart’s family. They were all members of the Osage tribe; in the 1920s they were among the richest people in the world. And yet […]
Published in Apex Magazine, August 2017 This is one of those short stories that I just didn’t gel with, I think I needed it to be longer… defeats to purpose of a short story, I know, but I needed to know a bit more about the ending. This isn’t, I don’t think, and problem with […]
How many harmless young black men have been injured or killed in modern cities in white countries this year, for the crime of exciting someone else’s racism? Too many, and it must end. Harkaway, Nick, Gnomon (William Heinemann, 2017)
Wow. This is such a great film. I mean, it is so intense and gripping that I never once wanted to look away. It tells the story of a group of people caught up in the riots in Detroit in 1967, and how police corruption and racism resulted in murder and horrible terrible injustices. I’ll […]
Oh, I really enjoyed this film. So much more than I thought I would. I mean a story based on maths doesn’t sound all that entertaining. But I suppose that isn’t really what this is about, it is about the women who fought to show NASA just how vital they were to the space program. […]
Wyoming, just after the US civil war, and bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is bringing in his prisoner, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). He is known as The Hangman, because when a warrant says “dead or alive” he always brings them in alive. His bounties don’t escape the noose. And his current prisoner has […]
When Lula Ann is born her mother is horrified by how dark she is. Sweetness is light skinned. So is her husband. The baby becomes a source of tension, and he leaves them both. Sweetness is determined to protect her daughter from the world and so she intends to make her better, to ensure that […]
I would guess that almost everyone reading this blog is familiar, to some degree, with Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird. The classic story of a good man (Atticus) in a bad world, trying to do his best, as seen through his young daughter (Scout’s) eyes. And of course, then there is Boo Radley, the […]
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a name that has floated around me for a while now. Often in discussions on Metafilter about racism and America and what it is to be black, or what it is to think yourself white in the US. But I’ve never really read his work before, so this year’s Diversiverse [ref]What is […]
Tolly has returned to Green Knowe, his great-grandmother’s house, for the Easter break. But he is disappointed to discover that something is different. The painting of his previous playmates has been sent on loan, and may have to be sold in order to finance repairs to the house. And with the painting gone so too […]
Part of my 2015 Sci-Fi Experience. Made in the mid-nineties this is a film set in the final few days of 1999. It’s a sort of a dystopian film in that society has certainly gone downhill, although it hasn’t yet reached end of the world or total breakdown. Not as the film opens at any […]