by jillemaclean | Nov 30, 2018 | book review, Books Other Than Novels, Novels I’ve Read
Is one of the pitfalls of being a writer that you read differently? In the last couple of weeks, I’ve read Sarah Perry’s historical novel The Essex Serpent, two-thirds of Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity – non-fiction,...
by jillemaclean | Nov 15, 2018 | book review, Novels I’ve Read
If The Dream of Scipio stirred me up, Days Without End almost wrecked me…what is it about a story that seizes you by the throat and won’t let go? First, a digression. After I heard Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding read in Halifax, I reread The English Patient and...
by jillemaclean | Nov 1, 2018 | book review, Books Other Than Novels
Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, chose first person for his semi-autobiographical Holocaust novel Fatelessness, published in 1975 as Fateless. In 1944, aged fourteen, he was one of the 440,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, where...
by jillemaclean | Oct 15, 2018 | book review
What can art do? And what can it not do? Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone asks both these questions, with an added dimension – can we make art when loneliness, to the point of extreme isolation, is the spur? Laing is a British...
by jillemaclean | Sep 30, 2018 | book review
Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, which goes by the title The Other Hand in the UK, is about a very serious subject and at no point as I read it did my eyes glaze over (his phrase). The brief blurb on the front cover is a ploy a publisher can use only rarely....
by jillemaclean | Sep 15, 2018 | book review, Novels I’ve Read
A friend gave me a copy of Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio several months ago because it’s set in Provence, which I’m visiting this year, and it’s partly about the plague of the mid-1300s, a century that has me hooked. I took over a week to read it. In it, the...
by jillemaclean | Jul 1, 2018 | book review
Can art be transformative? At Central Library in Halifax the week of Shakespeare’s birthday (after I’d written the previous Book Talk post on Hamlet), there was a display near the front door of books related to the bard. I picked up Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power...
by jillemaclean | Jun 17, 2018 | book review, Books Other Than Novels
“To be or not to be?” OR, “Is there method in my madness?” This spring the 2015 HD version of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch came to Park Lane Cineplex in Halifax. I read the play first, carefully (no, I’d never read it, and yes, I’m admitting this on a public...
by jillemaclean | May 31, 2018 | The Writing Process, writing inspiration
How do you counterbalance too much time spent at the computer? I vowed I’d never write a blog at the very last minute, and here I am – with three blogs stashed in Microsoft Word – writing one I want to post tomorrow. I’ve started researching a sequel for the as-yet...
by jillemaclean | May 15, 2018 | book review
Do you read book reviews before you read the book or afterwards? I opt for “afterwards.” I want to read the novel, think about it, then check out the reviews to see if I agree with them or if I’ve missed something crucial. I read Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny...
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