Breathing Just a Little

(NB: Helen MacDonald is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, which I have therefore used throughout this review). This is a memoir about grief, and coming to terms with mortality. This is the story of a falconer and their hunting bird, a person and a goshawk and the delicate, savage, complex relationship between them. This is a fascinating kind of shadow biography of TH White, best known as the author of The Once and Future King, and himself a falconer who trained a goshawk and wrote a book about it. This is a reflection on the nature of wildness and humanity's relationship with it, the ever-changing realities of landscape and place and animal movements. Importantly, this is also a book that asks us to interrogate the danger of constructing a narrative that reifies a fictive "return to nature", and assigns "the wild" a moral weight and power by denying the realities of human ontology. The catalyst for everything that happens in the book is the sudden death of...

I've been thinking about travel a lot lately. Perhaps it's a time of life thing, or perhaps just a time of year thing (end of winter, especially the end of a bitterly cold winter, is often a restless and dreary time for me, doubly so when spring is dragging its heels in arriving). There are many, many places that I haven't been yet and would love to go, and some I've been to and want to revisit. Japan is somewhere I adore and (having been twice) will definitely go again. New Zealand, the site of several prior visits, is a country I intend to go again. Vietnam was beautiful, and I'd love to go back. I saw very little of Canada, and want to see more. There are many places in Australia I want to revisit, and many more I haven't been yet that I want to go to. The countries I have been to (and enjoyed) that I won't revisit now are the USA (which is a shame as it is magnificent in terms of scenery and landscape, but it's just not for me anymore); and Cambodia,...

Booker longlist post three, and I am at the halfway mark with the list (given that it is really a list of 12, as the Desai book isn't released til after the shortlist date), which is not too bad with 4 weeks still to go before shortlist! The two books in this set are very different from each other. Both had points to recommend them and were well-written novels, but once again, I did not fall in love with either one, although I rate one  higher (as will be seen!)  At the halfway mark, there's only one book I've really, genuinely connected with, and that's Seascraper. Several of the others have had points of interest and some are exemplars of excellent craft, but I just haven't felt engaged and absorbed and book-drunk as I do with texts that are (for me) next-level. This is interesting, as it usually doesn't take me this far into the list to hit an undeniable banger (it certainly didn't last year - by this stage I'd read both James and The Safekeep, which ...

Despite evidence to the contrary, I have not abandoned my Agatha Christie re-read project! Life, and other reading challenges such as reading to prizelists, have somewhat derailed me, but I am still turning back to this one when the inclination urges.  This time, I decided I needed a palate cleanser after whipping through the first five books on the Booker Prize longlist and finding all but one of them underwhelming, and starting into books 6 and 7 only to feel myself flagging straight away. Rather than plunging ahead with that list, I gave myself a quiet Sunday and a few pre-bed reading evenings to instead indulge in a Christie re-read, and I AM NOT SORRY :-) I have completely broken with my in-order plan now and am embracing the chaos of just reading the ones I feel like reading, which, this time, was two early-ish Poirots (Peril at End House from 1932 and The ABC Murders from 1936) and a much later Miss Marple, A Caribbean Mystery, from 1964. On the whole, I thought one of the t...

Back with another Booker longlist post! These are the two shortest on the list, explaining why I knocked them over quickly. I am currently listening to the audiobook of The South, which, at the 30% mark, I'm not overly pumped about (but I'll press on, it can be my exercise and driving audio for a few days). After that, I have three more sizeable books to tackle - Flashlight, which is a chonker, and The Land in Winter and Endling, which are both mid (standard) length novels. I'll probably post the next pair of reviews next week sometime, depending how fast I progress. I'm already predicting that the three books I won't get to before shortlist announcement in September are the Adam book, which is proving tough to locate; the Szalay book, because I don't like the premise (it seems to be some kind of reverse Lolita); and the Desai (well, I definitely won't get to that one, as it's not even released until two days after the shortlist). Here is the list with r...

I'm having a tilt at the Booker Prize longlist this year, with a goal to read all 13 novels before the shortlist announcement on 23 September. I most likely won't get there, but if you don't try... I jumped out the gate quickly with these two, but expect things to slow down a bit now as work is pretty busy. (Listening to the second one on audiobook definitely helped, as it was my chores / exercise / driving companion!) Here is the list. I'll highlight the ones I have read in each post as I go. 1. Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian) 2. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (British) 3. Flesh by David Szalay (Canadian) 4. Endling by Maria Reva (Ukrainian / Canadian) 5. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British) 6. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (American / British) 7. Audition by Katie Kitamura (American) 8. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian / British) 9. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American) 10. One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (British) 11. Uni...