Tangled Mind

Simon’s been trying to keep things friendly, neutral, light, to act like they didn’t spend two days presenting one another with secrets like outdoor cats gently placing mangled rodents at one another’s feet. [p. 205]

Simon Devereaux is thirty-four, prone to migraines and anxiety attacks, and for seven years one of the two stars of Out There, a sci-fi show described as 'Twin Peaks in space, leaning hard into the camp'. Simon's antisocial tendencies are acknowledged and accepted by the rest of the cast, and he has a comfortable enmity going with his co-star Charlie Blake, who's improbably good-looking and highly gregarious. Now Simon's thinking of leaving the show. ( Read more... )

Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be. [p. 409]

Reread for book club: first read in 2014. I remembered very little except Triss' true nature and the scissors. That said, I find that my Kindle highlights match quotes from that earlier review... And I'm not sure I have much more to say about it, other than ( Read more... )

Mercutio has never been in love. Not unless you count a boy whose face he can barely remember. Not unless you count the world. [loc. 2328]

Mercutio Guertio (yes, that Mercutio) meets Dante Alighieri at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289: they are caught in a freak storm -- where they glimpse spectral armies, and becomes certain that there is a third man with them -- but stumble back to the carnage of the battlefield, and subsequently become friends. Mercurio, though, has been changed: he sees people who are not there, and does not recognise the stars in the night sky. Then Dante, grieving the death of 'his' Beatrice, is pulled into Faerie, where he wanders in a dark wood...

‘I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.’ [p. 27]

Baghdad, 2005: after the American invasion and occupation, just as the sectarian civil war is kicking off. Antique (junk) dealer Hadi, trying to retrieve a friend's remains after a car bomb, finds that body parts at the mortuary are all jumbled together, with little effort to reconstruct each corpse. He begins to assemble a body, picking and choosing from the scraps of anatomy that are in plentiful supply on the streets of Baghdad. ( Read more... )

How can we leap back up? Get back on our feet, grab a cart, and start gathering the debris, both physical and emotional. Crush it into small stones, then pulverize them and as the dust settles, dance upon it. How do we do that? By returning to our child self, weathering our obstacles in good faith. For children operate in the perpetual present, they go on, rebuild their castles, lay down their casts and crutches, and walk again. [loc. 2494]

Another memoir from Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train (the latter of which I have not read). Bread of Angels (the title refers to 'unpremeditated gestures of kindness') covers Smith's childhood, her years as a pioneering punk artist, and her 'walking away' from success to have a real life, marrying Fred 'Sonic' Smith and having children.( Read more... )

...here they still were, since they were not the dead ones, under the weary yellow lighting, sharing the unspoken knowledge that, every night the bombers came, ten thousand possible exits from life opened silently, and unpredictably, and without appeal, down which anyone and anything could fall. [loc. 4817]

My initial review: rereading for this 'proper review' was sheer delight, and I am eager to read the second half of this duology.

The story begins in August 1939. Iris Hawkins lives in a Clapham boarding house, works at a City brokerage, and is fascinated by economics. One evening, she flees a disastrous date and ends up at a bohemian dance club, where she encounters the other two protagonists: Geoff Hale, a gawky engineer who works for the BBC, and Lall Cunningham, the icy recipient of Geoff's unrequited love. Iris intends her seduction of Geoff to be a one night stand, but things become more complicated ( Read more... )

... all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. [p. 130]

Technically a reread, but when I read this at the age of 14 or 15,  I didn't really understand it: I recalled very little of characters, themes or incidents.

The brilliant physicist Shevek comes to realise that the collectivist society of Annares, a moon colonised by an anarchist movement, is not conducive to his work. He travels to the 'home world', Urras, which is ebulliently capitalist. Eventually he realises that Urras, too, stifles his scientific creativity.

What allowed some people to ‘make it’ while others faded away, as Hannah herself almost had? She knew it wasn’t a matter of hard work; she couldn’t have tried any harder than she did those last few years. Luck was a possible answer, but it seemed too callously random. Increasingly, Hannah felt another, truer word burning in her throat: class. The invisible privilege that everyone tried to pretend didn’t exist, but – it did. Hannah knew it did. She recognised it, and saw its grubby stains all over her own life. [p. 63]

A short novel about class, truth and culture wars. ( Read more... )

“The fact of your existence is a miracle,” Harding said in a tone that brooked no argument. “... the scrutiny that you must have lived under...”
“Well, I also have pots of money,” Christopher pointed out, “so let’s not pretend it’s all been a chore.” [loc. 3139]

Delightful and cheering Regency romance. Lord Christopher Eden must, according to the terms of his inheritance, marry before his twenty-fifth birthday. That gives him four months to find a bride -- which is the last thing he wants. For Christopher is no ordinary man: he has a singular secret, which only his tailor is privy to.

There they are, the exuberant, flamboyantly dressed couple, petting beneath a gargantuan inflammable. Helm is buoyed by the aerial company, and oddly nauseated. Something about the creepy, crêpey surface of the inflatable, and the oo of the balloon, and the balloon itself, its potential to burst and issue forth a loud, deflationary, unfunny raspberry. Cue, globophobia. [loc. 1090

A luminous wild tale whose protagonist is Helm, Britain's only named wind, an accident of geology and meteorology who's as vivid a character as the humans with which Helm interacts. (Helm's pronouns are Helm/Helm's.) After an intensely lyrical opening that depicts Helm's existence before the coming of humans, the novel skitters backwards and forwards in time ('Time happens all at once for Helm, more or less') focusing on a handful of individuals. These include a Neolithic seer, a medieval warrior-priest, a nineteenth-century meteorologist and his wife, a neurodiverse child growing up in the 1960s, a glider pilot, and a researcher studying microplastics in the environment.( Read more... )