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Continue reading →: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
American Literature – published 1985 or, The Evening Redness in the West This is my second reading of this epic book, this time with Richard Poe reading it on audiobook. It’s the way to take it in, occasionally rewinding it by 30 / 60 seconds as you can’t quite believe…
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Continue reading →: Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser
American Literature – Novella – published 1999 Fourteen year old Laura Engstrom wakes in the early hours of the morning and drowsily wanders her neighbourhood. A struggling middle aged writer, Haverstraw, keeps his midnight tryst with an older woman who is his unlikely intellectual companion. Lonely Janet Manning fantasises about…
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Continue reading →: Little Lazarus by Michael Bible
American Literature – Published April 2025 Little Lazarus takes a look at life through the perspectives of two giant tortoises and their caretakers. The story is told across multiple perspectives so as the reader sees the events unfold in a non-linear format, but returns to the plot point having receiving…
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Continue reading →: Queen by Birgitta Trotzig
translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel This is a 1964 novella about the harsh lives of a farming family in the south of Sweden in the early 1900s. 62 years later, and it receives its first English translation from Saskia Vogel.I had this recommended to me a while back,…
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Continue reading →: A Week in SnowdoniaAfter some pondering I realised that I first visited Snowdonia in 1984, as a teacher, though not leader, of a school course when I was working in the Wirral in my first teaching job. For the next twenty years I must have led about eight courses each year there, probably…
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Continue reading →: Holy Boy
By chance, yesterday I read a book called Holy Boy, and watched a film called Holy Boy. Both are recently out, and both, I can recommend.. Yosep, a 21 year old Korean pop idol, seems to already have everything he could dream of, but the idolatry gets to him and…
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Continue reading →: Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera
written in English with some untranslated Spanish – published May 2026 This is the coming of age story of Ignacio, who grows up in a rural town near Bogotá in Colombia. Despite a physically abusive and alcoholic father, as an adolescent he is crazy about football, and dreams of a…
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Continue reading →: Event Horizon by Balsam Karam
translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel – published March 2026 Milde was eight years old when the tropical country she lived in declared a large number of women and their children to no longer be citizens. They were deporting to a borderless zone between the mountains and the sea.…
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Continue reading →: Bannau Brycheiniog National ParkTwo fine days here wandering in the Bannau Brycheiniog, formerly know as the Brecon Beacons, though today a storm is moving through. The locals here seem not too pleased about the name change, because it is complete, or ‘formerly known as’.. They point out that Eryri National Park is ‘also…
To live more widely
supera superiora sequi
SafeReturnDoubtful is my alias.
Where is Andy?
I was so much older then…
Quote of the Week
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’
Lewis Carroll
Safe Return Doubtful 