My Christmas read was kind of a dud
Snow by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is a beautifully written but dull book. I didn’t care about any of the characters, and the snowy landscape wasn’t particularly evocative of any specific place (and I did so want it to feel really Irish), and did nothing to heighten tension. It’s really only about two and a half stars worth of the same old story of priests abusing children.
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It’s Boxing Day* so my fancy has lightly turned to thoughts of violence: Chain Gang All Stars is a barely dystopian story of prisoners turned gladiators. It’s a book about our culture of violence, but even though the brutality is written beautifully (something I personally have a problem with) it doesn’t glorify it. Quite the…
Just a quick note to say that I’m delighted to have been chosen Author of the Month by blogger Gina Rae Mitchell! Here’s the post where she features Playing Army. It includes an excerpt and a bonus piece called 10 Things Most People Don’t Know About Me: https://ginaraemitchell.com/playing-army/ Did you know all of it already?…
Remembering Marty Cesana My friend Marty died as a result of a stupid training accident at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, in 1996. Military training itself is not stupid. We train as we fight, which can happen day or night, in the dust and heat of the desert or in the brutal…
Here’s the not-fun news about having a book coming out: you have to get out of your lil bubbly creative comfort zone and ask people for help. The help that you’re not paying for, but people’s time and creative energy. For me, for whom these are my most greedily hoarded resources, this is hard hard hard to do. It’s not my default to ask for things. I always assume the other person will groan inwardly at a request from one more writer coming at them, palm up.
But we all know what happens when you assume, right?
I have often thought that putting together a group exercise class is like telling a story: first, there’s a beginning. There are peaks and valleys and a conclusion you hope feels satisfying. A class literally moves people. It makes them feel things and teaches them something about themselves. Ideally, an exercise class uses its physical…
When I posted about my friend Marty Cesana on Memorial Day, some of you said you’d like to know more about him. We’re all too complex and cool to summarize, of course, and most of what you’ll read about him is that he was a West Pointer and a combat engineer and really good at…