Reviews and other ramblings
A quick post to say that my review of the play My Perfect Mind from Told by an Idiot theatre company at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatre last week has been posted over at Theatre Writers Bristol. It was a very entertaining and very different night at the theatre. Thanks to Theatre Writers Bristol for arranging the tickets for me.
The results are in! I pulled names out of a hat used random.org and can now reveal the three winners of a copy each of Sensation by Thalma Lobel:
Jo Jones
Georgina Allen
Jeanette Kemp
Congratulations! I’ve dropped you all an e-mail, so look out for that.
Thank you to everyone who entered. If you missed the competition and are curious what on earth this is all about, check out my review of the book here.
We have had a lovely, if busy, September. We started the month on holiday, which is a pretty good start to anything! I didn’t get much reading done there, but when I came home I started whizzing through books. I still haven’t posted about the second half of our holiday because I haven’t finished going through my photos still, but I’ll get there eventually. I think my next free evening is in about a fortnight…
What I did find time for this month was a giveaway of a new popular-science book called Sensation: the New Science of Physical Intelligence by Thalma Lobel, which you can still enter until midnight tomorrow. It’s a really interesting look at a new area of psychology, though I have a few caveats.
And finally, tomorrow sees the release of the For Books’ Sake poetry collection Furies, which should be a fantastic read as well as raising money for the charity Rape Crisis England & Wales. Check it out.
Books
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (My review)
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
Z: a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler (My review)
The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe (My review)
Sensation: the New Science of Physical Intelligence by Thalma Lobel (My review)
Improper Stories by Saki
Short stories
“The assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983” by Hilary Mantel (available online)
“In dreams begin responsibilities” by Delmore Shwartz (Selected Shorts podcast)
“The lover of horses” by Tess Gallagher (Selected Shorts podcast)
Here’s to a wonderful October all round.
This competition is now closed.
Icon Books have kindly offered me three copies of fascinating new book Sensation by Thalma Lobel to give away to you, my lovely readers. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
With Sensation, the world’s leading expert on the new science of physical intelligence, Thalma Lobel, brings us the first ever popular psychology book on “embodied cognition”: how the body profoundly affects our thoughts, emotions and decisions about everything from the people we like to the ways we work.
By sharing fascinating new findings – like how clean smells promote moral behaviour and sports teams in black jerseys are given more penalties than teams in other colours – Thalma Lobel reveals how shockingly impressionable we are to sensory input from the world around us.
Sensation is the first book to show how vulnerable we are to the unconscious influence of our senses over our minds.
To WIN a copy of this book, just leave a comment before the end of Wednesday 1 October, and then I will pick out three random winners.
If you want to find out what I thought of Sensation, keep an eye on the blog for my review, coming shortly.
A week after getting home from a fortnight in France, it doesn’t quite feel like I never had a holiday at all, but the holiday relaxation is certainly fading fast.
As I mentioned while I was away, I didn’t get much reading done on holiday. I don’t know if that was because the books I read weren’t very absorbing, or because I was distracted by holiday stuff (Places to see! People to spend time with!) or because I’ve given myself too much reading that had to get done this year and not enough reading for fun, so that relaxing on holiday meant doing less reading. Whichever it was, I was disappointed to have only read a book and a half in two weeks. But since coming home I’ve powered through two and half books, all of which have pulled me right in and been a delight. So was it the choice of books after all, or did I need a reading break?
What about you? Do you ever need a break from reading? Does it worry you when it happens?
One of the good things about being home is that we can throw ourselves into the life of the city again. Friday night I went to see a production of Macbeth at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatre. It was innovative, using electronic music and other modern effects to heavily cut the running time and really concentrate on the themes of madness, ambition and guilt. It was strange, intense and moving. Kudos to Filter theatre company for such a bold adaptation.
I’m going to get back to reading now. Maybe I can make it three books in a week!
A friend suggested I blog about this after it was almost all I talked about when summarising our holiday! It certainly made a big impression on me.
It started with a small memorial outside a museum in Bayeux to Robert Capa, a photographer whose work Tim and I are familiar with and admire, so we were interested to see something about him but also curious what claim Bayeux had to him. We continued along the path in grounds opposite the Commonwealth war cemetery and next we came to two marble slabs that said they were the entrance to a memorial to “journalists killed all over the world since 1944”, a joint project between Bayeux and Reporters Without Borders. Which seemed like a very good idea, and I walked on expecting just a peaceful garden of some kind. I hadn’t read the text properly (I think I’d tried to understand the French rather than looking at the English) so I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
A long, tree-sheltered footpath flanked on both sides by marble slabs listing the name of every journalist killed under the year of their death (the photo above shows only a small section). It’s simple and powerful and heartbreaking, because there are so many names, and the numbers seem to be increasing. So much so that a second path has been started.
I’m not sure why this moved me more than the thousands of graves of soldiers just over the road (which was also pretty disquieting), but somehow it did. I could argue that soldiers sign up for the possibility of death, but of course in World War Two most of them didn’t get a choice. In fact, reporters have more choice about whether or not to go to a war zone, but then not all of these deaths were in a war zone. For those who want more than a list of names, there is an online archive.
I suppose I can relate to the reporters, to their decision to tell the truth about the world. Not that I in any way consider myself worthy to stand alongside the men and women who risk their lives to make corruption, injustice and other important news known to the world, but I admire them in a way I just can’t admire a soldier. I can be (and indeed am) sad about the massive loss of life during war, but it’s not the same thing.
I don’t understand war, how anyone could take a fight to the level of massive loss of human life, and it is only through writing, both journalism and fiction, that I can at least try to comprehend. For anyone interested in what it’s like to be a reporter on war zones and other dangerous regions, I highly recommend the work of Joe Sacco, who is honest about the draw and the thrill, as well as the need to tell the stories of the real people affected.
(Back to more cheerful things, and maybe another book review, soon I promise!)
I’m posting this a few days late as I’m on holiday, which unusually has so far decreased my reading, not increased it. I think I may be discouraged as I’ve been reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing for book club for about three weeks and it’s a huge book so I’m still barely a third of the way through. I wonder how many of us will have made it to the end when book club meets next week? Also, Tim recommended one of his books for me to read on holiday so I’m about a third of the way through that as well. Between them I’m sure I read at least as much as one normal-length book last week!
Still, this week is a quiet one with the in-laws, so I’m hoping to get plenty of uninterrupted reading time. As long as I don’t get too distracted by photographing wildlife! More on that next week once we’re home again.
Books read
Sun Alley by Cecilia Ştefanescu (review here)
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (re-read for book club)
Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: the Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science by Zoe Cormier (review over at For Books’ Sake)
Faces of Love and the Poets of Shiraz by Hafez, Jahan Malek Khatun and Obayd-e Zakani (review here)
Fighting on the Home Front by Kate Adie (review here)
Short stories read
“Yesterday” by Haruki Murakami (New Yorker, available online here)
“Picasso” by César Aria (New Yorker, available online here)
“Last meal at Whole Foods” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (New Yorker, available online here)
“Apple cake” by Allegra Goodman (New Yorker, available online here)
“You can find love now” by Ramona Ausubel (New Yorker, available online here)
“The waitress” by Robert Coover (New Yorker, available online here)
“The fugitive” by Lyudmila Ulitskaya (New Yorker, available online here)
“The man in the woods” by Shirley Jackson (New Yorker, available online here)
“Box sets” by Roddy Doyle (New Yorker, available online here)
“Pending vegan” by Jonathan Lethem (New Yorker, available online here)
Happy September!
This week we’ve been on holiday in Normandy with friends. Weather’s been, er, iffy but we managed to grab a couple of afternoons in the pool/on the trampoline (I love that the gîte has a trampoline!) in-between road trips. I have somehow read only half a book, despite plenty of suitable reading weather, but with 13 other people providing distractions I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.
We figured we couldn’t come to Normandy without taking in some of the World War Two sites. We stopped by Omaha Beach and the war cemetery at Bayeux, which was on reflection a bit sad and serious for the hottest day of the week and I was near tears many times during the day, but I’m glad I went.
We also visited Fougères, which boasts the largest medieval castle in Europe and also has links to many famous writers. I really enjoyed the Circuit Litteraire. I’m not sure I enjoyed the climb to the top of the bell tower – the staircase was tall, steep and open so you could see how far there was to fall!
There have been plenty of other visits, plus barbecues, drinking, playing pool, playing in the pool and just generally having fun with friends we don’t get to see nearly enough of the rest of the year.
Also, yesterday Tim and I celebrated 12 years together. In many ways it felt appropriate to celebrate while on holiday with friends who have known us since the start of our relationship. I wonder where we’ll celebrate 24 years?
Today, if you hop on over to For Books’ Sake, you can read my review of Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: the Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science by Zoe Cormier, a scientist and writer/communicator for Guerilla Science. I think it’s a fascinating topic…but please do go take a look to find out what I thought of the book!
“The hardest button to button” is not just a great song that reminds me of university and the friends I made there, it’s also a great video by one of the masters of music-video directing: Michel Gondry. I’m really pleased he’s come back to music videos this year (for Metronomy’s “Love letters”) after a few years’ hiatus. His creative genius works so well in this format.
But it’s also a really good song.