Fee
This was a surprising wee novel. Set in a farming community in the northeast of Scotland in a period spanning from pre-war to the 1960s, I'd expected something charming but probably, to be honest, a bit twee. What I got instead was a perfectly framed snapshot of the lives of the inhabitants of a small village, one that didn't shy away from the intimate and often uglier sides of life. The interior monologues of these characters were vivid, raw, and relatable, and much less prudish than I'd anticipated. Jessie Kesson's turn of phrase is just gorgeous, her writing almost stream of consciousness esque in parts, and the circling path of the narrative is cleverly crafted. I note in a few reviews this book is cited as Jessie's weakest work, so I'm very much looking forward to reading more by her.
Rodge Glass's biography of Alasdair Gray is warm and intimate and laugh out loud funny. If you're a fan of Alasdair's I urge you to read it, but only when you don't have any reading plans for the following six months because you're going to come out of it wanting to (re)read everything Alasdair's ever written.
The meandering, rambling, bawdy, funny, whisky-steeped story of R. Stornoway and his life in the Outer Hebrides. Reads like a nineties fever dream. I particularly loved the footnotes offering explanations of Gàidhlig slang. If the last fifty pages of this had been torn out, I would have given it five stars.
Continuing the themes of artistic freedom vs social responsibility that Archie Hind wrote about in The Dear Green Place, in Fur Sadie we're introduced to a busy housewife who impulsively buys a second-hand piano in a fit of nostalgia.
I am absolutely gutted that Archie didn't finish this novel! The little we do have of it is so beautifully written, and despite only existing in seventy-three pages Sadie is fully realised. Her dedication to her ambition to learn to play the piano, even as she has to navigate around the barely hidden disapproval of her husband and sons, is endearing, and I will always wonder how her relationship with her piano teacher, Mr McKay, might have developed.
“McKay sat down and played Für Elise while Sadie sat stiff and upright on a hard chair, her hand clasped in her lap. ...He had turned to her. ‘You know that wee tune, I suppose?'
‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘Fur Sadie,' and it wasn't until McKay put his head back and laughed that she clapped her hand to her mouth.
‘Fur Sadie,' he said, laughing, missing out the umlaut and so turning the word into Glasgwegian. ‘Fur Sadie.'”
The publishing world is saturated with LGBT fiction these days but no one writes Queer as well as Kirsty Logan. This is another absolute banger from oor Kirsty, about the spaces between need and want, power and helplessness, reality and myth. Her prose has taken on a wonderful Angela Carter-esque self-assuredness with this book, and I look forward to reading whatever she does next, as always.
This book is Scotland's answer to the incredible Stoner by John Williams. It's the story of Mat Craig and his struggle to balance his work and family life with his desire to be a writer, a dream at odds with his Calvinist upbringing in working-class Glasgow in the middle of the 20th century. I found Mat so incredibly relatable. His Sophie's Choice is surely one that every creative has had to face at some time in their lives - the curtailed comfort and security of the nine-to-five life, or the freedom and reward of the hand-to-mouth life of the artist?
“Sometimes ... he would feel again his own ridiculousness weakness and inadequacy, the meagreness of his spiritual possessions, his physical poverty, his feeble stumblings and gaucheries, the paucity of this world, the refractory city, the numbing tenements and streets, his crumbling damp rooms, the Scotch sneer on his neighbour's face, the load, the weight, the density, the insistent immediateness of what is called living. His writing would become to him a jeering, ugly travesty. He would feel this sneering disgust which was in itself disgusting, a double disgust. And he was never sure whether his revulsions came from the grim, twisted mockery of life at art, or the inflated, lying mockery of art at life.”
“It just seems like a week or two since the beginning of last spring. Every year gets shorter.” Mat stood for a moment sawing his hand in the air... opening his mouth to speak, changing his mind. Then he burst out, “I mean you have a kind of crazy idea that you are exempt. That you have some kind of purpose. Something which you've forgotten but will remember someday. Then you look out of the window and you see that the light mornings are drawing in again. And you think - another year gone - and faster every time.”
An excellent read, absolutely packed with facts about the fascinating histories of coffin roads across Scotland, as well as stories of the folklore and traditions surrounding death across the country. My biggest takeaway from this book was that we should definitely be making efforts to move back towards a way of life where death is not something to be shied away from, and also that the copious consumption of whisky is an important part of the grieving process.
This book is a compelling blend of the history of the Scottish witch trials and Allyson's own personal history as a ‘blow in' from the US to Scotland. It was interesting to have places I'm familiar with, to the extent that I take them for granted, I think, painted in a new light through Allyson's eyes and through the lens of this very human history that is so often treated like a carnival sideshow. In recounting the histories of those accused of witchcraft, dehumanised by time and by those who would capitalise on their pain, Allyson has given these women back a voice, and I finished the book feeling like I knew them, and Allyson, a little better.
This is a grimly fascinating, empathic, and provocative examination of the killing of six year old Jeremy Guillory by Ricky Langley, a troubled paedophile who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder. Marzano-Lesnevich dives into Langley's past, exploring his upbringing and the possible motivations behind Jeremy's murder, whilst also reflecting on and discovering parallels with her own childhood, which was wracked with sexual abuse by her grandfather. She details how her family dealt with this revelation when she finally worked up the courage to tell them, and perhaps the most poignant part of the book recalls Marzano-Lesnevich returning to her family home after some time away to find that every photo of her grandfather had been removed, plucked from every frame and album and destroyed, even from her parents wedding photos.
“I found love letters between my parents, and fighting letters, reminders that we are all mysteries to one another.”
I did not like this book, which I'm disappointed about because I really enjoyed Convenience Store Woman. This story just didn't work for me. It seemed gratuitously outrageous purely for the sake of being outrageous, which should work in contrast with Murata's signature detached writing style, but all it does is draw attention to the fact that the interestingly aloof narrative is masking a pretty boring story that's already been done better by other people (see Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite, for example).
James Gleick explores time travel as a cultural idea through literature and film, from The Time Machine to Groundhog Day, with a little philosophy and physics thrown in for good measure. Much of the book is focused on how the understanding of time has changed through... time, concentrating particularly on how ideas of chronological and historical time developed in the nineteenth century and paved the way for future philosophers to posit why time exists and how it functions. The chapters about the complicated science behind time travel were easy to understand - always a bonus - and the bits about Kurt Godel were my fave.
“I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn't send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.” –Stephen Hawking
I was all over the place with this book. Loved the start of it, got bored in the middle (just too much monologue/dialogue), then loved it again when it redeemed itself entirely in the final paragraph. I think this is an exploration of dementia from the point of view of the person suffering from it, but you might think differently. You might think this is a horror novel, and really both opinions are right. Iain Reid's ingenuity in this book, as in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, and Foe, lies in these forking paths, and I am here for it. I look forward to seeing where the path takes him next.
I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading Sappho but it was worth the wait. I loved this collection. It's a slice of Lesbian life circa 600BCE; Sappho's job, her everyday worries, her loves. I particularly loved Pieria's Rose, which gave me major Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Whitman vibes.
And men, I think, will never quite forget
My songs or me; so long as stars shall set
Or sun shall rise, or hearts feel love's desire,
My voice shall cross their dreams, a sigh of fire.
This is a beautifully written book tackling some really tough topics. These are difficult poems to read, exploring mental illness, suicide, grief. What saves it, what makes this darkness palatable, is the love that simmers under it all. McMillan's love for his partner, for his family. The best collection I've read in a long time.
This is a novelisation of the 1977 TV series of the same name, one of my faves. I generally find novelisations of TV shows a little lacking because the visual doesn't translate well to text. In this case it's difficult to convey the uncanniness of the show without experiencing its tense atmosphere, conveyed through long, quiet shots of the village that houses the eponymous stones, but other than that the writing was pretty good, and gave some extra insights into the motivations of the characters.
The narrative voice in Langan's The Fisherman is so quiet and intimate that you feel like perhaps you're the only person in the world to have been told this weird, Lovecraftian tale. It's a story within a story within a story, about the wrenching grief and aching emptiness that follows the death of a loved one. It's also about fishing, sacrifices, resurrection, and the monsters that lurk in the deep if you just soften your gaze a little. It is dark and seeping and hair-standing-on-end terrifying, and I loved it.
This is the novel that James Robertson so skilfully pays homage to with The Testament of Gideon Mack, and it is equally as brilliant. Like The Testament, Confessions recounts a mere mortal's meeting with the devil and all its consequences, and despite being published in 1824 it teeters bizarrely on the edge of postmodernism. Hogg's dense, florid writing makes this a challenging read at times but it's worth sticking with, if only to marvel at the fact that such a book could have been written and published at the beginning of the 19th century.
Starting off the third year in a row with a book that will undoubtedly be in my top five, if not my book of the year. This is the story of when Gideon Mack cheated death and met the Devil, and it ticked all my boxes:
found text - check!
unreliable narrator - check!
the uncanny - check!
footnotes - check!
set in a wee village in Scotland - check!
folklore and local customs - check!
standing stones - check!
religion vs the de'il - check!
ambiguous ending - check!
cantankerous but soft hearted auld wummin character I'm probably going to grow into - check!
James Robertson is an incredible storyteller, and I can't wait to read more of his work.
I'm hoping to get through as many folk horror classics as I can this year, and what better place to start than with Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, a Christmas gift from my youngest (thank you Beano!). It quickly became apparent while I was reading this why Machen is held in such high regard among horror writers. His prose is insidious, carefully measured, the plot unfolding at just the right pace to keep the reader hooked, and the endings suitably, delightfully, quietly horrific. The second story in this collection, The White Powder, could have been written by Lovecraft, and I wasn't surprised to learn that old Howard considered Machen an important influence. The final story, The White People, is pure folk horror - bucolic setting, burial mounds, nymphs, rituals, local lore, and a mysterious statue in the woods. Loved it.