Archive for September 2010
Emma Donoghue’s “Room”
Posted by: danhartland on: September 28, 2010
She moves. “Jack, there’s a lot of things in the world.” “Zillions?” “Zillions and zillions. If you try to fit them all in your head, it’ll just burst.” [Room, pg. 228] My Booker reading continues with Emma Donoghue’s Room, which I can’t help but view as a curious inclusion. It’s a sort of fictionalised misery [...]
Mr Ed
Posted by: danhartland on: September 25, 2010
- In: Politics
- 8 Comments
Ed Miliband has spent his leadership campaign posing as the trendy supply teacher – all informal authority and ideas attractive but somehow received, for which he has a great deal of enthusiasm but possibly not the skill to implement. Having given the supply teacher a permanent contract, Labour now get to see whether he’s as [...]
Howard Jacobson’s “The Finkler Question”
Posted by: danhartland on: September 24, 2010
- In: Books
- 15 Comments
The Finkler Question has been good to me. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in hospitals these last couple of days, and that enables long chunks of reading time. Thankfully, Howard Jacobson’s latest novel – short-listed for the Booker Prize, of course – has been intelligent, amusing, erudite company. It’s a beautifully composed [...]
Labour Leadership: Crunch Time
Posted by: danhartland on: September 21, 2010
- In: Politics
- 5 Comments
The dilemma for the Labour party member in voting for their next leader has been simple: does one vote for success, or for purity? Both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats, in their most recent leadership elections, voted for success: neither Cameron nor Clegg hail from the most dominant wings of their party, yet both [...]
Fractal Geometry: Ian McDonald’s ‘The Dervish House’
Posted by: danhartland on: September 17, 2010
- In: Books | science fiction
- 5 Comments
The place he lives, the dervish house; he never thought about it as more than a place to sleep, smoke, escape but it has a history, it has lives woven through it, it has holy men. [The Dervish House, pg. 206] Not that long ago, I sang the praises of Ian McDonald’s Cyberabad Days over [...]
“A Lousy, Ugly, Unjust World”: Christos Tsiolkas’s ‘The Slap’
Posted by: danhartland on: September 12, 2010
- In: Books
- 6 Comments
I should pause before opening another post with an observation about the Booker – quite how I managed to forget last year’s shortlist so totally as to think Brooklyn got on to it, I don’t know. One thing that is fresh in my memory, though, is this week’s announcement of the 2010 shortlist; and Christos [...]
Back Up In The Country: Ray LaMontagne
Posted by: danhartland on: September 7, 2010
- In: albums | music
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Ray LaMontagne’s career has in some ways been one of self-restraint, if not outright self-denial. His debut album, Trouble, was a pared-down affair, a raw selection of country-soul confessionals made exceptional by a searing, tearing voice. Live, this is the quality which still most characterises his music – he seems at the microphone an almost [...]
‘Love and Summer’
Posted by: danhartland on: September 3, 2010
- In: Books
- 3 Comments
ETA: A basic assumption of this review has been rather conclusively blown out of the water in the comments: somehow, I’d managed completely to misremember 2009′s Booker shortlist. Go me! Still, Love and Summer is still a deeply decent read… Ever since John Self read and rated William Trevor’s Love and Summer last year, I’ve [...]
71 is the number of an apartment we return to regularly in Whinfell Forest, Cumbria. We like it there.
‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Words We Like
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An astounding work of collecting-as-art, this compendium of 800,000 weird words is easily one of the most consistent genre anthologies I have read. Heterodox yet focused, it is fated to be the canonical text of weird fiction studies for some time to come - and deservedly so. The first-rank stories here - and there are many, not a few - are not excellent weird fiction. They are simply some of the best 20th century writing available in any mode. Not without its faults - but that is, ahem, the nature of the beast. Essential.
Sounds We Like
Sonik Kicks, by Paul Weller
I haven't paid much attention to Weller - an artist who hangs heavy in my musical tutelage - since 2000's Heliocentric, an album of diverse interests which felt like a shot of crisp elegance in that year of Steps and 'N Sync. The records that followed it - particularly Illumination - were enough, however, to make those achievements a distant memory. There have been rumblings of a renaissance - 22 Dreams got great reviews - but only the sounds of Sonik Kicks have brought me back. Energetic, fierce and, best of all, creative, this sounds like a record from a much younger man. Weller has a lesson or two in him yet.
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