Sometimes the most interesting conversations I have with politicians aren’t about politics at all. Recently I got talking to the Labour MP for Wrexham, Ian Lucas, abut the Norwegian anthropologist-adventurer Thor Heyerdahl. Ian had bought a second-hand copy of Heyerdahl’s account of his famous attempt in 1947 to cross the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft … More ‘The Kon-Tiki Expedition’ by Thor Heyerdahl
If you’ve ever read the Mid Wife Crisis blog you’ll know what to expect from this book because it’s based on that blog although it’s much more than a collection of unconnected posts. One of the things the blog did well was present this story as if it were happening in real time. Events were … More ‘Diary of an Unsmug Married’ by Polly James
This evocative photograph gives you a good idea of what ‘Do Miners Read Dickens?’ by Hywel Francis and Siân Williams is all about. It’s a celebratory coffee-table volume to mark the 40th anniversary of the South Wales Miners’ Library which is part of Swansea University. But in doing that it also tells the story of … More ‘Do Miners Read Dickens?’ by Hywel Francis and Siân Williams
This post isn’t a full review of this book because I’ll be reviewing it for a forthcoming edition of Wales Arts Review. For now, all I’ll say is that its subject matter is a remarkable story of two remarkable people. Actually they think they’re utterly unremarkable which is why what they did raises so many … More ‘Ad and Wal’ by Peter Hain
To read this novel is to experience something remarkable and rare although profoundly discomfiting and emotionally draining. ‘Experienced’ is the apt word because Eimear McBride’s stated intention was to try to immerse the reader in the mind and emotions of her central character, a disturbed young woman whose life is dominated by the effects of … More ‘A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing’ by Eimear McBride
Near the end of ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah,’ Bob Stanley writes that, …the modern pop era was as long as the jazz era; there’s enough in those five decades to spend a lifetime digging through, and even then you’ll never hear all of it. In this book he distills the lifetime that he’s spent digging through … More ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’ by Bob Stanley
I can’t list books of the year in the way that I can with albums and songs because I’m not very good at keeping up with new publications and anyway it takes longer than with music for me to read and re-read in order to work out if I like, love or hate a book. Having … More Books of the year 2013
The fiction of Flannery O’Connor is entirely new to me, but I was tempted by the samples I read and the truly beautiful Folio Society edition which was published recently. I certainly wasn’t disappointed. She depicts brutal events happening to (mostly) unpleasant people, events that are often violent and sometimes bizarre. I’ve long been aware of … More Flannery O’Connor
‘We always did prefer our iconic figures, injured…’ says Rai Merchant, the photographer-narrator of ‘The Ground Beneath her Feet’ and Rushdie certainly provides us with a pair of injured icons, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, the singer and guitarist/songwriter respectively of an improbably popular rock band. If their story is the stuff of myth: all … More Salman Rushdie, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’
I recently re-read Patrick Hannan’s ‘Wales Off Message’. Published in 2000 the events and misadventures in Welsh politics it recounts are all familiar to me although he always managed to find a new angle from which to view those events or a undiscovered nugget of fascination, such as Rhodri Morgan’s unprecedented tidying of his sock … More Patrick Hannan, ‘Wales Off Message’
Adrian Masters 