Dave C
LightNews LightNews
banner
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Dave C
@duckpondsreview.bsky.social
960 followers 3.1K following 840 posts
Retired and reading quite a lot in a quiet corner of Australia.
Posts Replies Media Videos
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #36
It seems appropriate to post about this, one of the very best Denis Johnson novels, on the day I finished reading the new biography of the author. In this one, a typically dodgy Johnson character travels into the heart of Africa. More in the alt text, definitely...⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The Laughing Monsters, by Denis Johnson. After 10 years’ absence, Roland Nair returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend, Michael Adriko. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune, newly engaged to a college girl named Davidia from Colorado. Together the three set out to visit Adriko’s clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland - but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Adriko, Nair and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.
December 9, 2025 at 6:27 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
A deeply researched and well-written biography of one of America's finest writers of the last half-century. Plenty more detail in the alt text but I will add that my personal bias is probably in play here, as Johnson is possibly my favourite writer of all. Exceptional.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
💡📚
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Flagrant Self-destructive Gestures, A Biography of Denis Johnson. Denis Johnson was at a low point. He caught malaria on a reporting trip into the jungles of the Philippines and was nearly pronounced dead. The disease left him unable to write. His second wife left him. He didn't have enough money to pay his taxes. His publisher was waiting for a book that he hadn't started. But in the life of Denis Johnson, when things were at their bleakest, something good was usually waiting around the next corner. This time, what was waiting was Jesus' Son. When that book hit the shelves of bookstores in 1992, Johnson finally unveiled to the reading public the stories from his life of two decades prior, when he had floated on the fringes of society, flirting with a life of crime and succumbing to his addictions. The stories from those years would become the bones of his masterpiece. Jesus' Son would tap into the zeitgeist of the 1990s and become a bible for Generation X and an American classic. It's hero, known only as Fuckhead, would become the Holden Caulfield of the late 20th Century. And Johnson would reach the greatest heights of American literature. Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures tells the complete story of Johnson's fascinating life, his battles with addiction, his thrill-seeking trips into the war zones as a magazine correspondent, his live-it-before-you-write-it style of fiction. It follows the arc of his tremendous body of work as a novelist, journalist, poet and playwright, and in the process recovers the true stories from the hazy myths that one of our most beloved, yet enigmatic, writers left behind.
December 8, 2025 at 11:18 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #35
An interest in novels set in the modern American West and also odd, outsider characters, brought me to this excellent novel about a bookish girl, raised by her grandfather who gets involved in an old classmates misadventures. The blurb in the alt text says more.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
A Prayer for Travellers, A Novel, by Ruchika Tomar. Cale Lambert, a bookish loner of mysterious parentage, lives in a dusty town near the California-Nevada border, a place where coyotes scavenge for backyard dogs and long-haul truckers scavenge for pills and girls. Cale was raised by her grandfather in a loving, if codependent, household, but as soon as she's left high school his health begins an agonizing decline. Set adrift for the first time, Cale starts waitressing at the local diner, where she reconnects with Penélope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate running mysterious side-hustles to fund her dreams. Penny exposes Cale to the reality that exists beyond their small town, and the girls become inseparable----until one terrifying act of violence shatters their world. When Penny vanishes without a trace, Cale must set off on a dangerous quest across the desert to find her friend, and discover herself. An audacious debut, told in deftly interwoven chapters, A Prayer for Travelers explores the complicated legacy of the American West and the trauma of female experience.
December 8, 2025 at 5:12 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Recent breakfast reading has been this excellent novel following the working life of a French train driver. Based on the author's own experience and delivered in an unusual style, it is a tale of the lives of people we don't usually think of. Blurb in the alt text as usual.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Driver, A Novel, by Mattia Felice. Tr by Jacques Houis. A bracing novel of work, labor, and collective action and a vibrantly written debut. Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails—packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond—Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work. Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.
December 7, 2025 at 8:21 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
December reading 🧵 starts with the second novel by French writers Laurent Binet, a complex and clever work of historic fiction. The blurb in the alt text gives a good guide to where this goes but it really doesn't tell the half of it, it is also very funny at times. Excellent
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The 7th Function of Language, by Laurent Binet. Tr by Sam Taylor. Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. It’s February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand. Barthes dies soon afterwards. History tells us it was an accident.But what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of unbelievable, global importance? A document explaining the seventh function of language – an idea so powerful it gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything.Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a chase that takes them from the corridors of power to backstreet saunas and midnight meetings. What they discover is a worldwide conspiracy involving the President, murderous Bulgarians and a secret international debating society.
December 7, 2025 at 1:16 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #34
A chartered ship of refugees from Spain arrive in Chile as WW2 starts in Europe and we follow the fate of some of the passengers over four generations after their arrival. My first Isabel Allende novel and it was a delight. Blurb is in the alt text as usual.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
A Long Petal of the Sea, by Isabel Allende. Tr by Nick Caistor & Amanda Hopkinson. September 3, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles' splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe. Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, the pianist Roser, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into exile. When opportunity to seek refuge arises, they board a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to Chile, the promised 'long petal of sea and wine and snow'. There, they find themselves enmeshed in a rich web of characters who come together in love and tragedy over the course of four generations, destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world. A masterful work of historical fiction that soars from the Spanish Civil War to the rise and fall of Pinochet.
December 7, 2025 at 1:05 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Post a book you love from the 80s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky #bookchallenge #readingchallenge #readingcommunity #booktok #bookish #books
December 6, 2025 at 1:28 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
😄
A fellow Johnsonian then. The new biography is well worth getting if you haven't got it already btw.
December 6, 2025 at 1:26 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #33
Denis Johnson's longest novel, and definitely the most complex with multiple plots revolving around the disenfranchised heir to a land fortune in California, I've put a decent blurb in the alt text. I think Johnson was at his best in shorter novels but it's still ... ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Already Dead, A California Gothic, by Denis Johnson. A contemporary noir, Already Dead is the tangled story of Nelson Fairchild Jr., disenfranchised scion to a northern California land fortune. A relentless failure, Nelson has botched nearly every scheme he's attempted to pull off. Now his future lies in a potentially profitable marijuana patch hidden in the lush old-growth redwoods on the family land. Nelson has some serious problems. His marriage has fallen apart, and he may lose his land, cash and crop in the divorce. What's more, in need of some quick cash, he had foolishly agreed to smuggle $90,000 worth of cocaine through customs for Harry Lally, a major player in a drug syndicate. Chickening out just before bringing the drugs through, he flushed the powder. Now Lally wants him dead, and two goons are hot on his trail. Desperate, terrified and alone, for Nelson, there may be only one way out. This is Denis Johnson's biggest and most complex book to date, and it perfectly showcases his signature themes of fate, redemption and the unraveling of the fabric of today's society. Already Dead, with its masterful narrative of overlapping and entwined stories, will further fuel the acclaim that surrounds one of today's most fascinating writers.
December 6, 2025 at 12:40 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #32
Was definitely on a @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social role in 2020 having discovered them the previous year. This troubling story of a families' collapse in modern Cuba is another great find, fluently translated by Frank Wynne. @terribleman.com .
Alt text for more info.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The Fallen, by Carlos Manuel Ãlvarez, tr by Frank Wynne. A powerful, unsettling portrait of ordinary family life in Cuba, Carlos Manuel Alvarez's debut novel THE FALLEN is a masterful portrayal of a society in free fall. Diego, the son, is disillusioned and bitter about the limited freedoms his country offers him. Mariana, the mother, is unwell and forced to relinquish her control over the home to her daughter, Maria, who has left school and is working in one of the state-owned tourist hotels. The father, Armando, is a committed revolutionary who is sickened by the corruption he perceives all around him. In meticulously charting the disintegration of a family, THE FALLEN offers a poignant reflection on contemporary Cuba and the clash of the ardent idealism of the old guard with the jaded pragmatism of the young.
December 5, 2025 at 1:06 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #31
A candidate for best novel I read in 2020 and definitely the best novel set around the great Miner's Strike of 1984-85 in the UK. A superb debut from one of my favourite British writers and I've put the blurb in the alt text. Get it at
@saltpublishing.com
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The Litten Path, by James Clarke. March, 1984. Britain's miners face political opposition. Soon, the State will confront them, violent forces will be unleashed and the country will change forever.The Newmans have enough on their plate without a strike to contend with. Arthur hates working at the pit, his unhappy wife, Shell, doesn't know what she wants and their lonely son Lawrence has no say in anything - especially a late night mission to Threndle House, home of disgraced politician Clive Swarsby and his two mysterious children. When Lawrence and Arthur take an abandoned rug from the house, their family is plunged into crisis. Then there is the small matter of the pickets . . .Taking in controversial events such as the Battle of Orgreave, The Litten Path is an exceptional debut set against the sunless landscapes of a country now lost in time. Grimly honest and tender, tough and lyrical, comic and painful, it is about class friction, the clash between the urban and the rural. It is about what happens when a decision is made, when one cannot turn back.
December 3, 2025 at 10:58 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #30
This award-winning novel from 1985 is a wonderfully sinister tale about a detective investigating a series of gruesome murders around certain London churches while the reader is also taken to the 18th century when the churches were built with some dark intent...
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd. "There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe" So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . .
December 3, 2025 at 1:45 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
A gorgeous early summer day made even better by a package from Manchester with new stuff from @confingopublishing.bsky.social including the latest collection from @nicholasroyle.bsky.social
Happy days.
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
New arrivals from Confingo Publishing, Strawberry and the Big Apple by Dave Haslam and Paris Fantastique by Nicholas Royle.
December 3, 2025 at 1:28 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #29
Amongst the most original of the many modern interpretations of Greek mythology that have appeared in recent times, this collection gives voice to the many female characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses. All are memorable but the tale of Medusa really stands out. Excellent.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
Wake, Siren, Ovid Resung, by Nina McLaughlin. A powerful, feminist retelling, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung channels the fierce, textured voices of the women in Ovid's Metamorphoses, as they claim their stories and challenge the power of myth I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I’ll tell it myself. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.
December 2, 2025 at 2:24 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #28
The tale of a librarian dealing with family, a podcaster who wants to employ her, and a world going mad. The blurb in the alt text says more about the plot but I'll just add that the writing is excellent and the novel is a delight to read.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Weather, by Jenny Offill. 'What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says what are your most useful skills? People think I'm funny' Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As she dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to acknowledge the limits of what she can do. But if she can't save others, then what, or who, might save her? And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.
December 1, 2025 at 3:14 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
To end the month, having read the same author's superb biography of Caravaggio earlier in the year, I had no hesitation tackling this, his latest effort on one of art's great enigmas, Johannes Vermeer. A deeply researched and well-written re-examination of his life and work.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
💡📚
#booksky
#books
Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. The paintings of Johannes Vermeer of Delft are some of the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art. Yet like the life of Vermeer himself, they are mysterious and have for centuries defied explanation. Following new leads, and drawing on a mass of historical evidence, some of it freshly uncovered in the archives of Delft and Rotterdam, Andrew Graham-Dixon paints a dramatically new picture of Vermeer, revealing many of the painter's hitherto unknown friendships as well as his previously undetected allegiance to a radical movement driven underground by persecution. The author sets Vermeer firmly in the context of his time, revealing the patterns of patronage that make sense of his work. Vermeer was also deeply affected by the struggles that shook his world, the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence and the yet more terrible Thirty Years War, which ravaged the neighbouring German lands and resulted in the deaths of millions. The author shows how he was moved to become a pacifist by such atrocities, and thereafter made many of his closest friends in the ranks of Europe's first peace movement. A further revelation is that Vermeer's closest collaborator and chief patron was a woman, as were many others in his immediate circle. These are all previously untold stories. The many piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer's pictures, which are the heart of the book, shed new light on the intentions of the artist. Nearly all of his best loved works, Graham-Dixon shows, were originally painted for a single significant location in Delft. In light of such discoveries every one of Vermeer's major paintings, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A View of Delft and The Milkmaid, are reassessed and their meanings rethought. As a result the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer - why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? - are persuasively answered here for the first time.
November 30, 2025 at 5:06 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #27
An amazing book, a stream of words often visceral and violent but also a moving portrait of life in the further reaches of modern Mexico. The story of the aftermath of the murder of a local woman in a Mexican village is a challenging but definitely also a superb read.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchior, tr by Sophie Hughes. The Witch is dead. After a group of children playing near the irrigation canals discover her decomposing corpse, the village of La Matosa is rife with rumours about how and why this murder occurred. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, Fernanda Melchor paints a moving portrait of lives governed by poverty and violence, machismo and misogyny, superstition and prejudice. Written with an infernal lyricism that is as affecting as it is enthralling, HURRICANE SEASON, Melchor's first novel to appear in English, is a formidable portrait of Mexico and its demons, brilliantly translated by Sophie Hughes.
November 30, 2025 at 1:03 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #26
An excellent little novel that was a chance find in a Melbourne bookshop. A NY teenager recounts his friendship with Lou Reed when he finds himself living in the same Manhattan apartment building in the 1970s. Better info in the alt text and well worth a read.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
The Perfume Burned His Eyes, by Michael Imperioli. Matthew is a sixteen-year-old living in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1976. After he loses his two most important male role models, his father and grandfather, his mother uses her inheritance to uproot Matthew and herself to a posh apartment building in Manhattan. Although only three miles away from his boyhood home, "the city" is a completely new and strange world to Matthew. Matthew soon befriends (and becomes a quasi-assistant to) Lou Reed, who lives with his transgender girlfriend Rachel in the same building. The drug-addled, artistic/shamanic musician eventually becomes an unorthodox father figure to Matthew, who finds himself head over heels for the mysterious Veronica, a wise-beyond-her-years girl he meets at his new school. Written from the point of view of Matthew at age eighteen, two years after the story begins, the novel concludes with an epilogue in the year 2013, three days after Lou Reed's death, with Matthew in his fifties.
November 28, 2025 at 10:54 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #25
In another short but superb novel from Denis Johnson we follow a Midwest Professor, four-years widowed, as he reconnects with the world around him. As the rather long blurb in the alt text says, both intense and poignant. Johnson at his best.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson. A beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances - he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life - he is a dead man walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war." Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known.
November 27, 2025 at 11:38 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #24
A semi-autobiographical account of life and declining mental health for a woman in 1950s English society which remains a landmark work delivered in beautiful prose.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into mental illness. The Bell Jar broke the boundaries between fiction and reality and helped cement Sylvia Plath's place as an enduring feminist icon. Celebrated for its darkly humorous, razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, it continues to resonate with readers today as testament to the universal human struggle to claim one's rightful place in the world.
November 27, 2025 at 3:57 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I don't always agree with the general acclaim that accompanies some novels but Stoner really is as good as the hype suggests. A remarkable work of literature full of wonderful prose bringing a quiet dignity to the sometimes difficult life of a Midwest farm boy turned academic.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
Stoner, by John Williams. William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.
November 26, 2025 at 12:35 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #23
Another fine collection of short stories from an excellent American writer. The strength of short fiction out of the USA never ceases to impress me.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
Every Human Love, Stories, by Joanna Pearson. The fourteen stories in EVERY HUMAN LOVE redefine our sense of reality. Set seemingly in the quotidian, these tales veer into the unexpected, the uncomfortable, occasionally the eerie, thrusting characters in crisis into still greater quandaries, where the world of weddings and work, of frustrated hopes and mundane dissatisfactions, collides with a realm of legend, of fairy tale, of nightmare.
November 26, 2025 at 12:26 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #22
A collection of more than 30 essays by one of the great writers of non-fiction. I am yet to read a bad book or essay by Carrère and there are some real gems in here. A great way to introduce yourself to his work if you haven't read him already.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
97,196 Words, by Emmanuel Carrère. No one writes nonfiction like Emmanuel Carrere. Although he takes cues from such literary heroes as Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm, Carrere has, over the course of his career, reinvented the form in a search for truth in all its guises. Dispensing with the rules of genre, he takes what he needs from every available form or discipline-be it theology, historiography, fiction, reportage, or memoir-and fuses it under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, intellect, and wit. With an oeuvre unique in world literature for its blend of empathy and playfulness, Carrere stands as one of our most distinctive and important literary voices. 97,196 Words introduces Carrere's shorter works to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary essays written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrere's creative life, this collection shows an exceptional mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, and treating everything from American heroin addicts to the writing of In Cold Blood, from the philosophy of Philip K. Dick to a single haunting sentence in a minor story by H. P. Lovecraft, from Carrere's own botched interview with Catherine Deneuve to the week he spent following the future French president Emmanuel Macron, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity as it explores remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrere's own.
November 25, 2025 at 1:46 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Into the final week of November with a day spent out on the deck finishing this big, comprehensive biography. Hopper is a favourite artist of mine and this excellent book reveals much about the man, his work and his long and sometimes fiery marriage to the artist Jo Nivison.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
Edward Hopper, An Intimate Biography, by Gail Levin. Edward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself-and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.
November 24, 2025 at 6:18 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #21
The author's first novel written in English and a remarkable work. A family in New York packs it's bags and heads off on a road trip to the South-west of the country while from the other direction, thousands of children are moving towards the US border. Superb.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky
#books
The Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then? A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head south west, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they're hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they're wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other. Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border. In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections - a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
November 23, 2025 at 11:26 PM