Scott – Page 8 – Scott's Book Review

At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

For many years Andrew Greig (https://andrew-greig.weebly.com/biography.html) saw the poet Norman MacCaig (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/norman-maccaig) as a father figure. Months before his death, MacCaig’s enigmatic final request to Greig was that he fish for him at the ‘Loch of the Green Corrie’; the location, even the real name was mysterious. His search took in days of outdoor living, […]

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Broken Ground

CRIMINALLY MINDED - Tales of the behaviourally challenged

Val McDermid (https://www.valmcdermid.com/) has established a loyal readership for her crime fiction over the last 31 years since the publication of her first novel in 1987. In a Radio 4 broadcast of 23 September 2018 (‘A Point of View‘ – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bkpszm) she argued that crime fiction is not predominantly about murder or the grisly details

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Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra

PAST PRESENT - What's new in History

The latest outpouring of resentment and anger happens to be in Chemnitz in eastern Germany (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fear-and-loathing-in-neo-nazi-chemnitz-cvzmw52fx), but it’s only an example of what’s cropping up all over the world. In this case, something truly horrible – the resurrection of the fascist far right in Germany – should set all sorts of alarm bells ringing. What

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Past Tense by Lee Child

FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Lee Child (http://www.leechild.com/) sells crime thriller novels on a shipping container scale. His legion of devoted readers mark their diaries with the expected date of character Jack Reacher’s next outing. This one will be November 2018. Library shelves are empty at the places where his fiction is stored, and reservation lists are long. There is

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New Dark Age

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

The breakneck rush into digital technologies has delivered much that is useful, impressive and dazzling. But what have we lost, and what are the dangers? James Bridle (http://jamesbridle.com/) takes on these concerns here. We live in times of increasing bafflement. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by

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Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Psychological research has been digging about in that highly subjective matter – personal happiness. It’s against a background of consumer culture which offers ‘solutions’ about how we can be ‘made’ to be happy. These offers come in various forms of chemical compound, guru generated bullshit and lifestyle choices which (not co-incidentally) cost a lot of

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The Story of Looking

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

‘Art’ is one of those notoriously elastic terms and ideas. It’s very difficult to establish any fixed or simple definition for what art is, or should be. Hence the endless, and mostly fruitless, debates about what constitutes art. Every year we get the stage-managed and media driven hype of bewilderment when the exhibits are shown

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The Dry by Jane Harper

CRIMINALLY MINDED - Tales of the behaviourally challenged

Jane Harper (http://janeharper.com.au/About-Jane) is an Australian citizen of UK birth. Her 2017 novel The Dry won the Crime Writers’ Association Awards Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the Year. The summary is as follows. Melbourne cop Aaron Falk has reluctantly returned to Kiewarra, the remote Australian farming community he left as a teenager 20 years

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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Long on the ‘to do’ list for reading fiction, I’m delighted to have completed Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/06/fiction.impacprize) over the Easter break 2018. An American novelist and short story writer, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this novel in 2003. Not many multi-generational American novels are narrated by an omniscient hermaphrodite. Cal Stephanides

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Author name: Scott