Tangled Mind

He was frightened, and once he recognised that, he realised he'd been frightened for a very long time, at a level so deep he hadn' known i. One of the people he most loved had become a murderer, and he'd never trusted anyone again. [loc. 1548]

1905: Jem Kite is working as a clerk in London, his dreams of academic excellence and a comfortable life shattered ten years before, when he walked out of a final exam at Oxford after the murder of his friend Toby Feynsham. But was Toby really his friend? Who killed him, and why?( Read more... )

“What do you think about everything that's going on, anyway? ... About the city. About beings coming from other planes. About monsters. About all the other weird things.”
Ehann shrugged uncomfortably. “It's Bezim. Everyone comes here, from everywhere. Why shouldn’t they? We have a lot of strange stuff — alchemy, bravi, a cliff through the middle of the city. I don't know, I've never been anywhere else, but this seems fine. Even if it's getting stranger." [p. 269]

The second in the trilogy that began with Notorious Sorcerer, this is as complex and richly imagined as Evans' debut, though the pace seemed slightly less headlong: or perhaps that's because I'm more familiar with the characters, and more invested in what happens to them next.

Colours, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream. [loc. 272]

Seventy-five short essays about the cultural, social and scientific history of 75 colours, from gamboge to heliotrope. St Clair weaves in a vast array of facts, some of which surprised me: 'There is evidence that in the Middle Ages blue was considered hot, even the hottest of colours'; 'Leonhard Fuchs never saw the plant [fuchsia] that now bears his name'; 'French dyers could not touch [indigo], on pain of death, until 1737'. (Copious footnotes and a bibliography support each assertion.)( Read more... )

‘The brain is Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.’ [loc. 455]

Ruby Wax, long an advocate for mental health, enlists the assistance of neuroscientist Ash Ranpura and Buddhist monk Gelong Thubten in this examination of the impact of stress and informational overload on the human mind. Among the topics Wax examines are emotions, relationships, children, addiction and forgiveness. I found the Forgiveness chapter (where Wax forgives her parents, who fled Europe in the 1940s, for her rough childhood: 'Who knows who they would have been if they hadn’t had to run for their lives? The past was not their fault.') really chimed with me: I've been thinking about my parents as they might be now, as I might relate to them if we could meet as adults and equals.

Wax's sense of humour is never too far away, but she's also very honest and open about her own mental health issues. Her conversations with Ash and Thubten, which are included at the end of each chapter, give solid neurological explanations of some behaviour patterns, as well as ways in which to approach and resolve them. (I found Thubten very likeable and quietly humorous: I didn't get as much sense of Ash as a person.) There's a lot of mindfulness in this book, including a whole chapter of exercises -- varied enough that many are new to me.

I found this an enjoyable and thought-provoking read, with lots of brain-snagging ideas: the mind is bigger than its emotions; forgiveness is about releasing ourselves from resentment, rather than letting someone 'get away with' something; we can't deal with abundance ('more people die of overeating than of starvation'), hence addictions; emotional pain activates the same centres in the brain as physical pain. There's a recurrent theme of kindness and compassion, to ourselves as well as to others: I am beginning to think that kindness is more important, personally and globally, than love. And there's a theme, too, of attention: to ourselves, to our bodies, to one thing rather than the plethora of content that's suddenly (in evolutionary terms) available to us via the internet.

I'm inclined to read Wax's other books about mental health issues: luckily there's at least one in the TBR!

Fulfils the ‘By a comedian’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘How To’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

This stylish and elegant typeface is very much suitable for official purposes. [loc. 457]

This book would have been better as a blog post. It's a short overview of font usage on marketing and publicity material, with a focus on web design, and though I'd have found it a useful reference twenty or thirty years ago, it's not saying anything new or interesting.

It would also have benefitted from an editor, or at least a proofreader. 'San serif', 'sans-serif' and 'sans serif' are used interchangeably; Montserrat is spelt three different ways; not all the fonts are illustrated with examples; the author first recommends Arial (yawn) for business purposes but then includes it in a list of fonts (including Comic Sans and Papyrus) that have been 'overused'. The footnotes aren't linked in the main text, and the descriptions of fonts are so repetitive as to be meaningless ('very much suitable for official purposes'... 'one of the most favourite typefaces of all time' ...) Might be a good starting point for a student project but not much use to an industry professional.

Fulfils the ‘Art / Design’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

The boy takes a breath. “Today was a day I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Like everything that was tying me down suddenly got untied.”
“And I the same,” the spirit says. “Today is the day my destiny changed.”
“So did mine.”
“I know,” the spirit says. “I heard it coming. I followed the longing for it.” [p. 275]

Over the course of Saturday in a small town somewhere in Washington State, a gay teenager's life is transformed. Also, the world -- possibly the universe -- is saved.

Adam is seventeen; still half in love with his ex, Enzo; maybe half in love with his current boyfriend, Linus; doing his best to obey his evangelical parents; reliant on his friendship with Angie. ( Read more... )

... when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy, who could bear to be running on all cylinders and locked in like this, you’d go mad, poison yourself with your own fumes. [p. 25]

Kate is desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of the home she shares with her teenaged son, so she goes for a walk. But the country's in lockdown, and Kate is supposed to be isolating after a colleague caught Covid: she's breaking the law just by leaving her garden. And she's heading up to the fells, in November, without her phone and with dusk approaching.

...one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will. [loc. 592]

The first ever Bulgarian winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter deals with nostalgia (in a very different, and much more European, way to Prophet) and features a character who, to a veteran reader of science fiction, appears to be a time traveller. Gaustine, who the narrator isn't sure whether he invented, is 'equally at home in all times'; writes letters to the narrator as if from 1939; and '[jumps] from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport'. Whether this is time travel or delusion or a kind of performative outsider-ness is never explained.

That was the first I saw of the Empire: skill at building, and power, and tolerance. It astonished me -- and I didn't even know that Auzia was just one small fort on the fringe of something so vast a single mind can't know it. [p. 224]

Gillian Bradshaw has taken a single mention of 'an Ethiopian soldier ... a notable jester' in the Historia Augusta and spun a novel around that nameless African man. Dark North is set in Roman Britain in 208AD, during Septimius Severus' efforts to (a) prove that Britain is an island and (b) conquer all of it, even Scotland. The protagonist is a cavalry scout called Memnon: Romans can't pronounce his actual name, rendered here as Wajjaj. We first encounter him in the process of swapping the Second Parthica's standard for a lewder version of the same( Read more... )

[The nurses] may have had their innate sympathy and kindness worn thin by the complete ungratefulness and foolhardiness of the patients, but to me it seemed more likely that they had obtained their vocational training kicking cripples and hitting small children. [loc. 1632]

An account of the author's nine-month stay in a sanitorium near Seattle in 1937-8. This was recommended to me as great pandemic reading. It took me a while to get around to it, but I can confirm that it is witty, dry and very much of its time. ( Read more... )