Oh yeah, it’s book time.
Read MoreThe Bookies
in list
Top Albums of 2021
It’s that time of year again: Welcome to my breathlessly awaited review of music I either loved or kind of enjoyed in 2021.
Read MoreChart / November
I swear that as soon as I’m done churning out novel after novel like I’m Barbara Cartland with a moustache, I’ll put together a few essays tackling the noble art of Writing, if for no other reason than this blog section doesn’t just become a parade of Chart entries. Fortunately, I’m almost done with the next draft of The Distance, so expect a treatise on why Henry Miller’s writing laid the blueprint for Coltrane’s Interstellar Space next month. I’m kidding. Even I’m not that much of a pipe-smoking, beard-stroking Whitester.
In pleasant Reality Testing news, I received a highly complimentary review from Justin over at 23rd Legion. The highlight: “This dystopia is an absolute chef’s kiss of “wow, everybody got fucked really badly.”” Now, this is going to sound a little bitter, but isn’t it funny how I can find people willing to read the book over in deepest, darkest USA, yet not a single publication I’ve written to in Berlin has responded to my noble entreaties? It was the same old situation with By the Feet of Men, but I thought that was because the book wasn’t set in Berlin. This time, though, I gots da proof: Unless you’re a cocktail maestro who thinks it’s a good idea to add a shiitake mushroom reduction to a rusty nail or a fashion designer whose latest collection is modelled on the balletic movements of the Brazilian wandering spider, this city’s blogging elite gives approximately zero shits about Berlin-based artists. Yes, yes, like I said, very bitter.
Book of the month: Slim pickings. I read The Warriors by Sol Yurick, which was disappointing (don’t get me started on the Afterword, in which he decides to start dissecting The Stranger for who-the-hell-knows-what reason) and Women Talking by Miriam Toews, which was, for my taste, poorly written. Let’s say this short story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar instead.
Album of the month: Hushed and Grim by Mastodon. One and a half hours of twisty riffs, three dudes singing and guitar solos. Just mainline it into my eyeballs.
Musique concrete:
mellow yellow.
Chart / October
Quick, somebody make me contact reviewers and publications. What a drag that part of the writing cycle is. I have like 50 copies of Reality Testing sitting here from the publisher waiting to be sent out around Europe. Haven’t done it. It’s funny how with By The Feet Of Men I jumped into doing it 12 months in advance, and now there are just three months until release and I’m putting it off like Procrastinor, King of Mañana. Writing and editing are just so much more rewarding.
Quick, somebody get me an agent.
Book of the month: Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese. A study of masculinity released through the small publisher Milkweed that could easily sit alongside Cormac McCarthy at Penguin. The writing is similar in its cadences and stripped-back elegance, but it lacks the harsh nihilism of McCarthy. There’s a real love to the writing and in the characters, and Wagamese celebrates nature from the first page to the last. Parts of it remind me of Walden in that sense. I can also see shades of Faulkner and Steinbeck. It’s just brilliant from start to finish. I wish I could write to Wagamese and say so, but he sadly passed away in 2017. In the next life, I suppose.
Album of the month: I’ll go ahead and say MY ONE. The Old Colossus by Redscale. 10,000 plays on Apple Music and 10,000 plays on Spotify can’t be wrong…except for the artists and their ability to make a buck from their art, obviously. Anyway, it rocks.
Movie of the month: The Man Who Would Be King. Sean Connery! Michael Caine! Christopher Plummer! John Huston in the director’s chair! A critical look at the pomp and circumstance of British colonialism! This seems like a film I would have watched on a rainy afternoon as a kid with my Dad making a comment on the accuracy of the drills and rifles and uniforms every thirty seconds, but no. It slipped through my radar. What a hidden gem. I love the Kipling short story, but I think the movie manages to outdo it.
Metal militia music:
1 Testament - Return to Serenity
the man in the high castle