Sit back with a cup of tea and enjoy this one. It's a compilation album inspired by the themes and evocative words in celebrated nature writer Robert MacFarlane's book Landmarks. The book focuses on showcasing poetic landscape words, gathered from the dialects of Britain and Ireland. Ambient Album Review: Place Language by Various Artists The…
Continue reading ➞ Ambient Album Review: Place Language by Various Artists @RobGMacfarlane
Landschapspijn comes from Dutch and translates to “landscape-pain”, “place-pain” (Dutch). This is a word with no real equivalent in English.
A book must be the axe to crack open the frozen sea within us. We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves. We need books like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. Five Creepy Islands in…
*Contains no spoilers This is a slim book. In little more than 200 pages you are able to sink into a well-rounded and thoroughly immersive story. In the hands of a less-skilled writer, this would be impossible. For Murakami though, 200 pages is more than enough to captivate and absorb. Big in scope, the story…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review – South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
"The Nekyia is no aimless or destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis ... its object the restoration of the whole man. Carl Jung
According to the Romans, every sound and motion the bird made had a different meaning according to different circumstances, times of the year and other factors.
In November 2016, the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, renowned for his melancholic and romantic ballads, died a few months after the woman who inspired many of his famous songs - his Norwegian lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen. On the summery idyll of Hydra, Greece in 1960, there was a bohemian community of artists and musicians living…
Continue reading ➞ So long, Marianne: Leonard Cohen and his muse Marianne Ihlen
Origin: 1650s. Cumulus " a heap, pile, mass, surplus " in Latin *keue "to swell" in Latin. Cirrocumulus are flocks of fleecy clouds that whisk past us on a glorious spring day. Often their appearance in the evening foretells of a stormy morning the following day. At least thats old shepherd’s wisdom. German Schäfchenwolken: Little…
Nemophilist - a haunter of the woods, one who loves the forest for its beauty and solitude.
The odd and wonderful bibliomat book vending machine
Why do we say a gaggle of geese, a flock of sheep, a pride of lions or a swarm of bees? Well it harks back to medieval times when sportsmen grouped together collectives of beasties to refer to them in movement or attributing a quality to them - presumably while the poor creatures ran away…
Continue reading ➞ Thirty great medieval epithets for people and beasts
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world. As a warm up, here's a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won't be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is…
Continue reading ➞ The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
^ Contains no spoilers Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez is more known for his stunning works for fiction. However this short novella his first published peice of work is non-fiction. Garcia wrote this essay in a series of newspaper articles in Bogota over 30 years ago. He tells the dramatised story of a sailor Luis…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The narrator of this novel is an elderly Eileen who looks back on her mis-spent youth in 1964. This book is the blackest kind of noir, but does away with the usual noir narrative tropes. It tells the story of Eileen's entanglement with the enigmatic and beautiful Rebecca who is more a mythological figure than…
“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.” – Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou has been one of the most influential literary voices of our time. Born in 1928 she has been in turns a poet, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, historian, film-maker and civil rights activist. She worked for Malcolm X…
Continue reading ➞ Ten Life Lessons We Can Learn From Maya Angelou
This memoir and first book by American author Margaux Fragoso was veritable literary dynamite when it came out in 2011. Or you could call it literary vegemite, in that you will either love the book or hate it. Tiger Tiger charts the complex sexual relationship of the author Margaux with Peter Curran, which began when…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: Tiger Tiger by Margaux Fragoso
Stuck on what to read next? Hate judging books by their covers? Then the Recommend me a book app will delight you. The app takes you headlong into reading the first few pages of a book without knowing anything about the author, title or context of the book itself. This allows you to gain some traction and…
His Bloody Project by author Graeme Macrae Burnet recounts the story of the triple murder and subsequent trial of accused 17 year old crofter Roderick McRae, who brutally slays three people in his remote village in 1896. Roderick lives with his family in a tiny croft on a property and land owned by the laird. His…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: His Bloody Project by Graeme MacRae Burnet
You know how you sometimes have those days, or even weeks or months when you feel un-moored to the shoreline and adrift in a lost world, floating aimlessly, feeling sad or morose? This is the kind of book every woman needs to feel found again. It's that miraculous book that brings you right back to…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: Today, Tomorrow and Everyday by M.H. Clark
Eowyn Ivey is a master craftswoman and her sentences are smooth and flowing like treacle. Her debut the Snow Child was one of my favourite novels. It told the magical tale of a child that emerges out of the icy Alaskan tundra and provides an ageing couple yearning for a baby, with the promise of…
Continue reading ➞ Book Review: To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
