It’s time for a spin! Choose 20 titles from your original Classics Club list, number them 1-20 and on Sunday August the 16th the numbers will be spun and whichever number is chosen the corresponding book needs to be read and reviewed by Sunday October the 4th.
I have 11 books left on my current list and I need a push to focus on getting them read, so I’m quite hoping that the spinners spin a real chunkster to get me moving! Here’s my list:
Continue reading “Classics Club Spin #45”
Barcelona, 1974 and Natalia Miralpeix, almost 40, has arrived home after twelve years of voluntary exile in Paris and London. She left the same year as the miners strike, when she had sung loudly, filling the air of La Rambla with the anthem ‘Asturias, patria querida’, the students voices growing in confidence; shouting until her voice is hoarse with her friend Emilio; a year before Julián Grimau, the last of the communists was executed. And now she’s returning just as the regime unbelievably has executed Salvador Puig Antich.
Continue reading “The Time of Cherries”
How neat that the 1st of August is the first Saturday of the month, and so time for Six Degrees of Separation hosted by Kate at books are my favourite and best. Every month Kate chooses the first title and we can then create a chain by linking 6 books, not every book has to link back to the first, just to the title that went before it.
This month we begin with Land, which I haven’t read yet but see from the blurb that it’s partly about Tomás, a tough, brusque mapmaker. On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic ,Tomás is part of the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland, painstakingly charting a country that has been devastated by the Great Hunger. My first link is to A Fortunate Man where the engineer Per takes a job as an assistant highways engineer in a remote area of the Jutland peninsular, a barren waste of sand dunes and icy sea fogs that roll across the landscape amid the wild storms of the North Sea.
Continue reading “Six Degrees from Land”
I haven’t kept up with the ReadChristie challenge so much this year, but when I saw that June’s read was celebrating the centenary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd I leapt at the excuse to read it. I last read it in 1991 when I was on my first Christie binge and luckily couldn’t remember anything about it and found it full of surprises.
The first and possibly biggest surprise is that Poirot has retired to The Larches, a cottage in the village of King’s Abbot and is growing vegetables in his garden! This is how he meets his neighbours, Dr Sheppard and his sister Caroline, talking about marrows over the fence!! In fact they have no idea who their new neighbour is and think his name is Mr Porrott or something!
But then Dr. Sheppard receives a phone call from Parker, the butler at Fernly Park to say that Roger Ackroyd his boss and the owner of Fernly has been found murdered. Flora Ackroyd his niece, is immediately on the ‘phone excitedly demanding they get their neighbour on the case. No he isn’t a hairdresser he’s the most wonderful private detective – Hercule Poirot!
Continue reading “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”
Written, directed, produced, and starring as The Alchemist, this is an avant-garde, surrealist dreamscape from Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky.
It begins with The Thief (Horacio Salinas), a Christ like outcast who befriends a dwarf and together they entertain at a circus. When he sees a crowd standing around a tall tower where a hook holds a bag of gold, the thief ascends the tower to find out where the gold has come from. Representing the seeker, he becomes apprentice to the alchemist, the representation of spiritual truth and inner transformation.
The Alchemist gathers eight powerful, wealthy individuals, each one representing a different planet and embodying society’s corruption, ruthless capitalism and superficial beauty. Together they’ll shed ego, greed and all earthly baggage as they face their deepest fears and obsessions and climb the Holy Mountain in search of immortality.
Continue reading “Just Watching: The Holy Mountain”
It’s Vienna in 1966 when 31 year old Robert Simon takes over the café opposite the market.
Orphaned in the war, Robert lived with the Sisters of Mercy. At 15 he left school able to read and write, took up odd jobs and then began working in the market, unloading crates, chopping vegetables or mending hinges. He’s practical, conscientious, punctual and likeable. He lodges with a war widow, Martha Pohl and keeps himself to himself.
As soon as he gets the keys for the café he begins work; scrubbing the walls, painting the furniture, cleaning the stove, burning pieces of bark and fir to rid the kitchen of its sour smell and decides what he’ll serve – beer and wine, coffee and lemonade; bread and dripping with or without onions and freshly pickled gherkins. But what should it be called? he discusses names with Johannes Berg, the butcher, but they all seem a bit conceited until they agree:
‘”Maybe it doesn’t matter after all,’ the butcher said, thinking it over. ‘I mean, the Danube existed long before anyone called it the Danube. So your café can just have no name, and that’s fine.'”
Continue reading “The Café With No Name”
It’s the last few days of August, the holiday in the Langueduc is over and it’s back to work in the stifling heat of Paris. Johar’s been offered the promotion she’s always wanted but playing it cool, she’s told the boss she’ll let him know her decision later. Hot and uncomfortable in her to-tight suit worn to impress, Johar makes her way to Étienne’s apartment forty five minutes late.
Her husband Rémi, an economics teacher, arrived on time, and is settling into a bottle of whisky from the depths of a sofa.
She’s arrived! Étienne is delighted, he’s been suffering Rémi all evening, waiting for Johar, the one person who might save him. He’s made some terrible decisions at work that have lost him clients; he could lose his job and with that his lifestyle. Could Johar and the enormous company she works for become his clients? He’s going to smooch and simper, suck up and flatter for all he’s worth.
The food is in the kitchen with Claudia, Étienne’s girlfriend of two years, she’s cooking and hiding in a black dress and a face of stone.
Continue reading “Just A Little Dinner”
The first Saturday of the month is time for Six Degrees of Separation hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and this month Kate has chosen Yesteryear as our starting point.
A ‘tradwife’ influencer, living the rustic dream with her handsome husband and six gorgeous children wakes up to find herself in the harsh reality of 1855 – is it a nightmare, an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister? I haven’t read this but it does sound fun. ‘A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood’
Continue reading “Six Degrees from Yesteryear”
This is a book I had never heard of until I joined the Classics Club, where it seemed to be everywhere, so I added it to my second list, based really on its lovely title, the colours of the cover and curiosity.
Written in 1943 it’s the story of New York, its people, trade and local politics at the turn of the 20th century. It’s a domestic history told through the Nolan family who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and primarily Francie, who’s 11 when the novel opens in 1912 and we meet her sitting on the fire escape, reading her Saturday library book by the tree that grows in the yard.
‘The one tree in Francie’s yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.
It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.’
This award winning documentary is a co production between Palestine and Norway and is the directorial debut of four activists, journalists and filmmakers from both sides of the political divide. Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal are Palestinian; Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Israeli.
Basel Adra, has been resisting the forced displacement of his people by Israel’s military in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank since he was a child. Yuval Abraham, a Jewish Israeli journalist joins him and together they form an unexpected friendship. Using film recorded by Adra of his family and neighbours and fresh film shot by cinematographer Rachel Szor, the phone footage and handheld camera gives a searingly personal record of the destruction.
As bulldozers tear down their homes and school, soldiers declare the area a designated Israeli military firing zone; and families who have ties to the land lasting centuries, watch in disbelief before they move into the caves.
This is a vital, urgent, documentation of conflict where the personal is very much the political. Adra, under constant threat as he continues to film, and Yuval in a quieter moment wonder about the huge gap in their living conditions. Will Adra ever be able to visit Yuval in his home where he enjoys freedom and security? ‘Maybe’ says Adra.
Shocking and heartbreaking, moving and poignant; No Other Land was selected for the Panorama section at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere in 2024, winning the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. It also won Best Documentary Feature Film at that year’s Oscars.
Just Reading A Book 