Dave C
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duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Dave C
@duckpondsreview.bsky.social
940 followers 3.1K following 800 posts
Retired and reading quite a lot in a quiet corner of Australia.
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duckpondsreview.bsky.social
This, the 27th book I've read in this superb series from @commapress.bsky.social , is undoubtedly the most poignant and difficult as I suspect many of not all the places portrayed have been hit in Israel's obscene bombardment of recent years. Still an excellent selection.
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The Book of Gaza, A City in Short Fiction, from Comma Press. Bringing together a dozen of Palestine’s greatest modern prose writers, this unique anthology sets contemporary stories against the backdrop of one of the world’s most talked-about cities, presenting them in English translation for the first time. Together, these stories will enable English-speaking readers to go beyond the global media coverage and enter into the daily life of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what is effectively the world’s largest prison. The authors range from highly acclaimed writers to exciting new voices in Arabic literature, including the “Father of the Palestinian” short story, Zaki Al Ela, and a new generation of young women bloggers and activists, such as Mona Abu Sharikhm, Dawlat Al Masri, and Najla Attalah.
November 17, 2025 at 5:54 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #13 & #14
My first two Cities in Short Fiction, a brilliant idea from @commapress.bsky.social and I started with two British cities that I have past associations with. Currently reading my 27th in this series and I have one more on the shelf and another on pre-order.
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The Book of Birmingham & The Book of Newcastle, Cities in Short Fiction, from Comma Press. Birmingham is a writer's city with a long tradition of distinctive literary subcultures. Long-established novelists such as David Lodge and Jim Crace have spent most of their writing lives there, and the city continues to support and inspire a new generation of voices. Bringing together fiction from some of the city's most talented writers, The Book of Birmingham showcases and celebrates original and unusual writing, in all its forms. The original Northern Powerhouse, Newcastle-upon-Tyne has witnessed countless transformations over the last century or so, from its industrial heyday, when Tyneside engineering and innovation led the world, through decades of post-industrial decline, and underinvestment, to its more recent reinvention as a cultural destination for the North. The ten short stories gathered here all feature characters in search of something, a new reality, a space, perhaps, in which to rediscover themselves: from the call-centre worker imagining herself far away from the claustrophobic realities of her day job, to the woman coming to terms with an ex-lover who’s moved on all too quickly, to the man trying to outrun his mother’s death on Town Moor. The Book of Newcastle brings together some of the city’s most renowned literary talents, along with exciting new voices, proving that while Newcastle continues to feel the effects of its lost industrial past, it is also a city striving for a future that brims with promise.
November 17, 2025 at 4:15 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #12
A fascinating book that introduces the reader to the ongoing work to understand the Periodic Table by continuing to expand it with heavier and heavier elements, and the people behind that effort. Well researched and written and well worth a read if it interests.
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Superheavy, Making and Breaking the Periodic Table, by Kit Chapman. Creating an element is no easy feat. It's the equivalent of firing six trillion bullets a second at a needle in a haystack, hoping the bullet and needle somehow fuse together, then catching it in less than a thousandth of a second - after which it's gone forever. Welcome to the world of the superheavy elements: a realm where scientists use giant machines and spend years trying to make a single atom of mysterious artefacts that have never existed on Earth. From the first elements past uranium and their role in the atomic bomb to the latest discoveries stretching our chemical world, Superheavy will reveal the hidden stories lurking at the edges of the periodic table. Why did the US Air Force fly planes into mushroom clouds? Who won the transfermium wars? How did an earthquake help give Japan its first element? And what happened when Superman almost spilled nuclear secrets? In a globe-trotting adventure that stretches from the United States to Russia, Sweden to Australia, Superheavy is your guide to the amazing science filling in the missing pieces of the periodic table. By the end you'll not only marvel at how nuclear science has changed our lives - you'll wonder where it's going to take us in the future.
November 15, 2025 at 10:59 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I only discovered Jonathan Buckley through his two latest novels ( @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social ) but now I'm digging into his back catalogue and finding out just what I've been missing. This is a contender for best of the year for me. See alt text for some blurb. Brilliant
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Nostalgia, by Jonathan Buckley. The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio - as in the wider art world - he has his enemies, and his niece - just arrived from England - is no great admirer either. At the same time a local girl is missing, a disappearance that seems to implicate the artist.But the life and art of Gideon Westfall form just one strand of Nostalgia, a novel that teems with incidents and characters, from religious visionaries to folk heroes. Constantly shifting between the panoramic and the intimate, between the past and the present, Nostalgia is as intricately structured as a symphony, interweaving the narratives of history, legend, architecture - and much more - in a kaleidoscope of facts and invention.
November 15, 2025 at 10:52 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #11
A writer creates a small world, an island off the coast with it's own ways of being...then bodies start to wash up on it's shore...
This is another personal favourite, the story of how an isolated community is exposed to the outside world and the price it pays.
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A Happy Little Island, by Para Sunday, tr by Peter Graves. An elaborate tale told with style and intelligence. Sund's writing is the perfect stage for an encounter between common humanity and the insularity and fear of change that affect all cultures. In the beginning, the scribe sat in front of a blank screen, a world forming inside his head. The world spilled onto the screen and the scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagero, populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes. Then the dead bodies began to arrive. The island was changing, and the small-town quirkiness becoming less restrained, forcing Fagero's inhabitants to confront the unhappy truth that, even on their remote island, the world's horrors and injustices could not be ignored. Translated from Swedish by Peter Graves.
November 15, 2025 at 12:05 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #10
Continuing with another Fitzcarraldo edition, this time one of my favourite novels, a work of strange Polish Noir with a seriously big twist in the ending. The blurb from the back cover is in the alt text for more info but this is Tokarczuk at her very best.
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, tr by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she's unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by 'one of Europe's major humanist writers' (Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination - and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk's native Poland.
November 14, 2025 at 6:11 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
This is true, but as with these they had to count them all.
November 13, 2025 at 12:15 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
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An excellent collection of writings, from travel to politics to book reviews, written over 20 years after Raban's move to Seattle in 1990. The later essays are dominated by the run up to the 2008 election and make an interesting read in the light of later developments.
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Driving Home, by Jonathan Raban. Charting a course through the Pacific Northwest, through American history and recent world events, Driving Home is a must for fans of Jonathan Raban, as well as the perfect introduction to anyone not yet familiar with his writing. For over thirty years now, Jonathan Raban has written about movement; about people and places in transition, of journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached but, also, of what it means to belong, to feel rooted. Yet if these themes are evident in any one of Raban's books, then it is Driving Home - a collection of pieces spanning two decades - where we can see Raban's preoccupations most clearly. Writing about public, personal and political spaces, about books, current affairs and literature, his tone is intimate yet, with an outsider's eye for the absurd, never nostalgic, and always fresh. Variously frank, witty and provocative, Driving Home is part essay collection, part diary - and wholly engrossing.
November 13, 2025 at 10:33 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I always thought these were in Blackburn, Lancashire... IYKYK
November 13, 2025 at 8:38 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #9
Just weeks away from the start of the COVID-19 fun and games and my first encounter with another outstanding German author courtesy of Fitzcarraldo Editions. A fine collection of short stories from the margins of modern German society. Great stuff.
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Dark Satellites, by Clemens Meyer, tr by Katy Derbyshire. International Booker-longlisted author Clemens Meyer returns with DARK SATELLITES, a striking collection of stories about marginal characters in contemporary Germany. A train driver's life is upended when he hits a laughing man on the tracks on his night shift; a lonely train cleaner makes friends with a hairdresser in the train station bar; and a young man, unable to return to his home after a break-in, wanders the city in a state of increasing unrest. From the home to places of work, Meyer transforms the territories of our everyday lives into sites of rupture and connection. Unsentimental and yet deeply moving, DARK SATELLITES is a collection of stories from our time, as dark as the world, as beautiful as the brightest of hopes.
November 13, 2025 at 12:30 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #8
A series of sketches of L.A. in the 1960s and 70s by a woman who was at the heart of the social and cultural scene throughout that time. Just a ripping good read and a great portrait of a particular time and place and the people who she shared it with .
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Slow Days, Fast Company, by Eve Babitz. There was a time when no one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated "its own kind of moral laws," spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. But there was one man who proved elusive, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. She also pulled off a remarkable sleight of hand: Slow Days, Fast Company far exceeds its mash-note premise. It is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success; socialites on three-day drug binges, evading their East Coast banking husbands; soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off; Italian femme fatales even more fatal than she is. And she even leaves L.A. sometimes, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn't matter if Babitz ever gets the guy--she seduces us"
November 12, 2025 at 12:21 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #7
I had never really thought about how we came to use the word "cool" in a cultural context before I came across this fascinating and remarkably detailed and complex account of the terms emergence in Postwar America. There's a long blurb in the alt text. Recommended.
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The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, by Joel Dinersteen. Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among John-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white negro" and Black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock-and-roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new and that something is cool.
November 10, 2025 at 11:01 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #6
I'm going to admit to a general indifference to Norwegian fiction but Vigdis Hjorth is perhaps the one writer from that neck of the woods that I've liked to any degree. More in the alt text but this is a a good, and quite intense family drama, well-worth a read.
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#booksky
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Will and Testament, A Novel, by Vigdis Hjorth, tr by Charlotte Barslund. "Four siblings. Two summer houses. One terrible secret. When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favouritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different-a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured. Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive and be believed.
November 10, 2025 at 12:11 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #5
An excellent collection of writings from one of the best and most interesting writers of music and cultural criticism, with subjects ranging from Charlie Parker to Prince and much more in between. Not sure what I spilt on the cover of this.😬
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It Gets Me Home This Curving Track, by Ian Penman. When all else fails, when our compass is broken, there is one thing some of us have come to rely on: music really can give us a sense of something like home. With IT GETS ME HOME, THIS CURVING TRACK, legendary music critic Ian Penman reaches for a vanished moment in musical history when cultures collided and a certain kind of cross-generational and `cross-colour' awareness was born. His cast of characters includes the Mods, James Brown, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, John Fahey, Steely Dan and Prince - black artists who were innovators, and white musicians who copied them for the mainstream. In `prose that glides and shimmies and pivots on risky metaphors, low puns and highbrow reference points' (Brian Dillon, FRIEZE), Ian Penman's first book in twenty years is cause for celebration.
November 9, 2025 at 2:49 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I had heard of this story by Jean Giono some years ago and was amazed to find it now, in its own little volume, when visiting the Bookshop at Queenscliff yesterday. A tiny work of genius from one of the great French writers with a useful afterword from his daughter Aline.
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The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono, tr by Barbara Bray. 'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns' In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again and sees the young forest he has created spreading slowly over the valley. Elzéard's solitary, silent work continues and the narrator returns year after year to see the miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct.
November 8, 2025 at 3:49 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #4
A beautiful little novel about the vicissitudes of marriage, quite poetic, quite philosophical. An immensely promising introduction to Offill's writing for me.
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Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill. They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation. They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now. Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept. of Speculation navigates the jagged edges of a modern marriage to tell a story that is darkly funny, surprising and wise.
November 8, 2025 at 1:07 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #3
A big, comprehensive biography of one of the most important individuals of the late 20th century. Thoroughly researched and well-written, a solid and informative read.
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Gorbachev, His Life and Times, by William Taubman. This is the definitive biography on one of the most important and controversial figures of the 20th century. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, as well as foreign leaders, Taubman's intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev's remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved, and to the family that they raised together. Nuanced and poignant, yet unsparing and honest, this sweeping account has all the amplitude of a great Russian novel.90 illustrations When Mikhail Gorbachev became its leader in March 1985, the USSR was still one of the world's two superpowers. By the end of his tenure six years later, the Communist system was dismantled, the cold war was over and, on 25th December 1991, the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. While not solely responsible for this remarkable upheaval, he set decisive changes in motion. Assessments of Gorbachev could not be more polarised. In the West, he is regarded as a hero. In Russia, he is widely hated by those who blame him for the collapse of the USSR. Admirers marvel at this vision and courage. Detractors, including many of his Kremlin comrades, have accused him of everything from naivete to treason.
November 7, 2025 at 5:10 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Marshland is a huge and hugely impressive work of literature that I could not do justice to in 300 characters but I've put a good long blurb in the alt text and add that this is a serious candidate for best novel read this year. A masterpiece from
@dalkeyarchive.bsky.social
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Marshland, by Otohiko Kaga, tr by Albert Novick. Otohiko Kaga's Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar past as a petty criminal. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakako Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakako find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train. During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakako are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes. Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, though only the second to be translated into English: the wealth of Kaga's work in fiction remains to be discovered by the Anglophone world
November 6, 2025 at 2:08 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #2
A collection of essays released after the success of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy gives excellent insight into her influences and approach through writings on gender, culture and literature. Has stood up well to multiple readings, thoroughly recommended.
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Coventry, by Rachel Cusk. After the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance returns with a series of essays that offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her life's work. Encompassing memoir and cultural and literary criticism, with pieces on gender, politics and writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Olivia Manning and Natalia Ginzburg, this collection is essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, both startling and rewarding to behold. The result is a cumulative sense of how the frank, deeply intelligent sensibility - so evident in her stories and novels - reverberates in the wider context of Cusk's literary process. Coventry grants its readers a rare opportunity to see a mind at work that will influence literature for time to come.
November 6, 2025 at 1:49 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2019 #99
So the final book finished in 2019 is in fact, one of the best novels I read that year by one of my favourite writers outright. A wonderfully slow and deliberate meander along the banks of London's River Lea with reflection on so much besides. An absolute delight.
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River, by Esther Kinsky, tr by Ian Galbraith. 'After many years I had excised myself from the life I had led in town, just as one might cut a figure out of a landscape or group photo. Abashed by the harm I had wreaked on the picture left behind, and unsure where the cut-out might end up next, I lived a provisional existence. I did so in a place where I knew none of my neighbours, where the street names, views, smells and faces were all unfamiliar to me, in a cheaply appointed flat where I would be able to lay my life aside for a while.' In River, a woman moves to a London suburb for reasons that are unclear. She takes long, solitary walks by the River Lea, observing and describing her surroundings and the unusual characters she encounters. Over the course of these wanderings she amasses a collection of found objects and photographs and is drawn into reminiscences of the different rivers which haunted the various stages of her life, from the Rhine, where she grew up, to the Saint Lawrence, the Hooghly, and the banks of the Oder. Written in language that is as precise as it is limpid, River is a remarkable novel, full of poignant images and poetic observations, an ode to nature, edgelands, and the transience of all things human.
November 4, 2025 at 12:51 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
😂
Just snorted into my cup of tea dammit!
November 3, 2025 at 12:19 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2019 #98
The second last entry for 2019 is this great collection of short stories from the late Frank Soos, originally published 25 years ago. There's plenty more info in the alt text but I remember this as a particularly strong set of stories.
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Unified Field Theory, Stories, by Frank Soos. The short stories in Unified Field Theory capture characters in the middle of their lives as things fall apart. Jobs, marriages, and hopes disintegrate under people while they seek strategies and explanations. Some look for something larger than themselves, while others get in their cars and drive as if motion alone might offer a solution. In "When the Hoot Owl Moves Its Nest," a surveyor blames the wreck of his marriage on his inability to interpret old-fashioned signs. In "If You Meet Buddha by the Road," a bicyclist seeks peace, and perhaps finds it, in Buddhism, while his ex-wife grieves for her lost youth. In the title story, a warehouseman seeks to overcome resignation through his misconception of particle physics: "We all hold that plane up there by an act of collective concentration. Each and every one of us looks into the sky as we drive along in our cars, go to the bank, mow the grass; and, with our looks, little by little, we help that airplane make its way." Frank Soos' stories do not move towards epiphany. The men and women in Unified Field Theory have moments of emotional or intellectual recognition, but their lives are too complex for these moments to suggest long-term alterations. Plots double back on themselves, portraits are enriched through layers of detail, and readers achieve a growing understanding of each character's possibilities and limitations. The stories suggest a way of thoughtfully and emotionally participating in other people's worlds.
November 3, 2025 at 12:18 AM