6 November - day of the literary dead
Melnik and other creepy churches made of bones
The 20th century comprised 100 years of horrors. The fault was not fear, greed, jealousy, or love of power. Ideas were to blame. Isaiah Berlin explains... Cold Rivers
Not salacious, as we’d think, they describe the mundane: trees, trousers, puddles. The surprisingly pretty love letters of Vladimir Nabokov... Turning leaf in the grave
~ Poetry brothel putting bawd in bard
Teach Us To Sit Still
I must give a hearty “thank you” to Ian Darling for telling me about Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks after I read The Miracle of Mindfulness. When you read a book like Thich Nhat Hahn’s on meditation and he is telling you how good it is and how it will change your life it is easy to dismiss it because of course this Buddhist monk is going to say that. To then read a book like Parks’s, a personal story that leads him kicking and screaming to meditation where he discovers that it really does work, it makes you pause and think.
absinthe the new european writing
Karen Joy Fowler - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves As surprise inclusion, I think, on the Man Booker shortlist and probably the most commercial title in the running for the prize. It famously has a massive twist on page 77 which makes it a very difficult novel to review, at least for an amateur like me, because I cannot really discuss the main themes of the book without giving it all away. Suffice to say, I liked the twist and the stuff that followed but I don't think the author quite made the most of them. A cracking read, very entertaining, but not something that will stay with me for too long. - See more at: http://meandmybigmouth.typepad.com/#sthash.oqwcj5n7.dpuf