Category: Review (Page 41 of 132)

3.5 out of 5 stars

The Japanese have a unique culture that is unlike almost any other on this planet. It has been influencing the world since the end of the Second world war too, partly through the high quality and reliable cars and electronic products that they make and that have become household names, but also things like anime, Hello Kitty, the cherry blossom and their distinctive gardens to name but a few. Their tiny archipelago of islands is home to 120 million people. I have never yet been fortunate to visit, one day perhaps.

One man who has lived there for over 30 years is Pico Iyer. He is married to a Japanese lady who has taught him Japanese, even though he still considers himself a beginner when speaking. But that length of time that he has spent immersed in the culture means that he has a rich seam of information to draw on for this book.

‘Emotions’ writes the Zen philosopher, D. T. Suzuki, ‘are just the play of light and shadow on the sea’

Written in a series of small observations and vignettes, Iyer explores what makes the Japanese and their culture so very different from all that he has grown up with and experienced in the UK and America. In each of these sentences or paragraphs are nuggets of information or insight into the country he has chosen to make his home. There is no middle ground, he can either be or not be Japanese.

They are a people constrained by tradition, a people who prefer to be a player rather than be seen to be a leader. It is as he describes it, a land of hesitation. Even though tradition is important, they are constantly reinventing themselves. Partly because this is a land of earthquakes and things are never permanent, there is a shrine at Ise that is rebuilt around every 20 years. The trees used are 300 – 500 years old, so it is simultaneously new and ancient at the same time.

‘The contradictions that the mind comes up against,’ writes Simone Weil, ‘these are the only realities.’

This is not a travel book in the conventional sense. These shards of his observations of the country are bought together in the style of kintsugi, the technique that the Japanese repair broken ceramic with gold and resin to often make a more beautiful object. It might not be for everyone, but I have found that reading four books on one country from very different perspectives has given me a range of insights and perspectives on the place and I would love to visit it one day.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

There are two short novellas in this book. The first is about a man called Taichi who was forced to cease work a number of years ago. They have somehow managed to survive on his wife, Natsuko’s wages from her part-time job. This is nothing unusual for her; she had a tough upbringing when her mother had almost no money and she and her brother live a hand to mouth existence.

She happens to see an advert for a spa and then realises that it is now based in a luxury hotel that her grandfather had taken her mother to when she was little. She rashly decides to treat her husband to a trip there even though she knows it is going to cost her a small fortune that she can ill afford. What she doesn’t expect is the waves of memories of her once comfortable life, that wash over her causing anguish and chasing lingering regrets.

She could hear the sound of the waves. Her tears, the waves of her emotions, had taken the form of a deep, soughing basso continuo. There was a sea in her heart, always undulating.

The second novella is about four sisters who are still living at home in their Tokyo apartment. Nanako is the youngest and still at college and they have all made a vow not to ever marry. All the sister have a close and intimate, relationship, almost bordering on obsession in Nanako’s case.

This changes when a man called S is new in the neighbourhood. The older sisters had first seen him at the Azalea Festival at the Nezu Shrine and from what Nanako could gather all three of her sisters had fallen in love with him. It goes from being a fairly harmonious and close family to one where they all want to be with this guy.

I have read a little Japanese fiction in the past, in particular, Murakami and Ishiguro. I always find that Japanese fiction has a slightly surreal way of looking at life. This book has that same otherworldly feeling too, because I get a slightly disconcerting feeling observing a very different culture to mine. I think that it is a good thing to have my perceptions broadened and challenged with regards to literature. I quite liked these stories and Kasimada has a way of getting these reflections of her society through her characters. The second story might not be for everyone though. It might not be for everyone, but I have found that reading four books on one country from very different perspectives has given me a range of insights and perspectives on the place and I would love to visit it one day.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

This is Hemery’s second collection of stories that have trees in the story in some way or other. His imagination is broad, mixing stories about ecology with science fiction, a court case following a murder and a magical story about how oxford got its name. There are poems in here too, as well as a disturbing story about a man falling for a girl in the opposite flat. The Coopers Tale is a story about a cooper who been asked by a woman wearing a hooded cloak to make a barrel that would be used to hold a most unusual item.

Everyone of us should be a forester

I really liked the Oxbridge Environmental Dictionary, it is a fast-paced story about one of the last books in the world that had been stolen and one man’s drive to reclaim it. As with every collection that I read, there are stories that I prefer over others and this was not an exception. There is lots of variety in the stories that Hemrey has penned here, there is more sex in them too, which might not be for everyone.

Three Favourite Stories
Fulcrumosity
Petrified
Tree Angel

3 out of 5 stars

Symbols are ubiquitous now, Almost like a modern-day hieroglyph, they are universal and it doesn’t matter what language that you speak they are easily understood.

They have been used for thousands of years too, Piercy begins his book looking at the Palaeolithic art that has been found in caves all over the world. The artworks mentioned in the book were found in a cave in Ardeche, France and were behind a rockfall. These show depictions of various animals and are around 30,000 years old. The Rosetta Stone is his next subject and he explains how this tablet was the key to understanding the hieroglyphs.

Symbols are very important in religion and there are short essays about the symbols used in the three Abrahamic religions, the Cross, the star and crescent and the Star of David. In this second section, he includes the swastika and details how this originally was a symbol of good luck and how it was appropriated by the Nazis and is now rightly much-reviled. Two much nicer symbols are the Smiley and the classic I ? NY and I learnt a little about their history.

Money may not make the world go around, that is physics, but it is an invention that we cannot do without in the modern world. There are short pieces on the £, $ and € and a brief mention of the ¥. There is a brief sojourn into the mathematical world and a little about symbols used to define ownership, © and TM. There are also modern symbols, Bluetooth and WiFi and a little on their creations

There is an interesting essay about how the UK road signs went from being a jumbled mess of all sorts of different fonts and sizes to a super clear and organised system. He also mentions the Tube Map, not really a symbol in my opinion though. I did like the bit on the signs that the hobo’s used in America.

Not a bad little book overall, Piercy has uncovered all sorts of details about the origins of the symbols that he has included. It has a much wider scope than Hyphens and Hashtags which I read recently, but in any book like this it is only ever going to be an overview of the subject rather than an in-depth analysis.

3.5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Letters are combined to make words and sentences are the lifeblood of our language, but to make sense of things that we write we need those symbols that are scattered or frame the edges of our sentences. But there are far more than the full stops, commas and question marks that we currently use.

In this delightful little book, Cock-Starkey is on the search of the origins of thirty-eight different symbols in our language, mathematics and online world. There are essays on brackets, the copyright symbol, the equals sign and then even on some of those that are now falling out of use now.

I love the fantastically named interrobang, a symbol that is a combination of the exclamation and question marks and could frankly be often used when commenting on social media posts. Most people are aware of the hashtag # now (which as I am writing this on a Mac is always a pain to find). On Twitter and other social media sites is acts as a mini search engine that put you in contact with other thinking along the same lines. One tip I learnt recently is that for multi-word hashtags always capitalise #EachWord as some hashtags can look very rude out of context!

One of my favourite punctuation marks is the little-used semi-colon; I think that they’re great and add in that extra pause in the prose. The ampersand or & is a funny character, it looks like a number 8 that someone didn’t finish properly, but its origins can be traced back to the city of Pompei where an early example was discovered on a wall. Pi is one of those mathematical symbols that is literally infinite it goes on forever without any form of repetition forever and ever and ever… Another thing that I learnt was that I have been looking at the pilcrow for years in word documents and did not know what it was let alone what it is called.

If you are fascinated by languages then this book is a good sideways step to take to learn about some of the symbols that we use in our daily conversations. The essays are light and fun to read, they don’t go overboard with reams of information, but have enough detail to make them interesting.

4 out of 5 stars

Wandering through the library just before they shut for the latest lockdown after Christmas, I spotted this on the display table and thought I would grab a copy. I had a vague recollection that it was on my TBR and it turned out that it was.

It is a strange collection in some ways, there are poems he imagines an abandoned AI would write, poems on bluebirds and foxes, a poem about a conversation with time and another on waking. The form of each poem changes from short stanzas to long more immersive writing, some of them flow like water over rocks, in others, he has chosen words that deliberately jar against each other.

sunbeams at your fingers

are all the words you wish on me

the patterns of your dust

with nowhere to land,

no page or port or platform, no

whiteness to be seen

nor silence to be heard by,

no form on earth to catch them

as they fall, they still fall

I first read this a little while ago and have only got around to reviewing it recently. I looked a the scant notes that I had made and went back through looking at the poems that I liked and found others that when I first read it, hadn’t had an impact on me that they did the second time of dipping into the book. It is probably a sign of a good collection that each time you venture within the covers something different is revealed. I didn’t really notice it at the time, but the cover in itself is quite shocking, I find the image of a scarecrow with a gas mask has an element of folk horror; having the dog there diffuses it a little. I think that I might have to get my own copy of this.

Three Favourite Poems

The Forecast

Anniversary

Blank Pages Dream

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

As I am sitting here early in the morning writing this review I am watching a couple of blue tits feeding themselves from the coconut that is hanging outside my office window. They are fascinating little birds to watch, especially their acrobatics on the feeders. But where did their name come from? I can understand the blue part and the top plumage is a lovely sky blue However, there are also yellow and green feathers. What about the tit part? (Stop sniggering at the back). It turns out it means small.

Long time birder, Stephen Moss has been fascinated with the origins of birds manes since he first came across a bird from Africa called Mrs Moreau’s Warbler, a bird that he first came across in a weekly magazine called Birds of the World. It would drop onto his doormat early on a Saturday morning and he would spend the rest of the day engrossed in its contents. There was a clue in its Latin name, Scepomycter winifredae, it was named after someone called Winifred Moreau. But who was she? And how did she come to have a bird named after her? It was a story that he would keep returning to and it was also a bird that he hoped to travel all the way to Tanzania to see one day.

There are some birds where the common name that they have ended up with seems obvious, blackbird for example. But other birds are black, like ravens and crows, why are they not blackbirds too? It turns out that the explanation behind this is not much to do with the actual birds rather it comes from language and more specifically the melding of two languages, Germanic English and Norman French and how the meanings changed over time.

It is a natural thing for humans to want to label the things that they see around them each day. Because of this, bird names have not just come from language but have been named after people and places as well as their habits and how birds have also named other things, like a once-popular football game.

Moss’s writing is as good as ever. He mixes well-researched facts with personal stories and interesting anecdotes tracing the origins of the names of the birds that we see every day. Whilst it is not a comprehensive guide to every single one of the 10,000 or so species there is enough in here for the reader to begin their own searches for the bird names that fascinate them.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

One of the places that we spent a lot of time when my children were grown up was Wimborne model town, we even bought a season ticket. They were fascinated by the tiny shop windows and the even tinier items displayed inside. There was a touch of humour for the adults if you knew where to look. This fascination with all things reduced in size is not just for children though, there are many grown-ups who share that same feeling

In this book on all things tiny, Garfield is seeking all those people that share these interests or to be franker, in a lot of cases, obsessions. Garfield travels will take him to different model towns around the country, a Blandford gentleman called Philip Warren who has built hundreds of boats out of matchsticks. The display he had at the corn exchange there was enough to fill it and that was only half the boats that he had made.

Model railways are a passion for a lot of people (mostly men) and one person who I hadn’t expected to be a fan, is 1970’s pop star, Rod Stewart. He has a massive model railway and loves the hobby so much that he takes s small layout on tour. Doll Houses can be works of art in their own right, and the one he writes about in the book was one made by Sir Edward Lutyens for Queen Mary. It is huge too, 5 feet high and 8 feet long with working electricity and pipes and even a library with 700 readable books.

Two of my favourite chapters were on books and art. There is even a convention in America for enthusiasts of these tiny works of literature. The smallest at this event measured 0.7mm x 0.7mm and had twenty-two pages. The art chapter has an image of Ronald McDonald on a crucifix, which I must admit I wasn’t expecting. This is the work of Dinos Chapman and his studio has lots of these macabre models around.

Models are often used to sell an idea, I remember seeing these in public places in 1970 as the council was trying to explain how they were going to squander your money on a swimming pool no one really wanted. It was a model that changed a lot of people’s mind on the slave trade too, Wilberforce has a model made showing the way that our fellow humans were crammed into these ships and taken across the Atlantic.

I really enjoyed reading this. Like the other books of his that I have read, this is a well researched and thoughtful exploration of his chosen subject. Like many others, me included, he is as fascinated with parts of our world reduced down to these miniature boats, houses and trains. He acknowledges the ways that it reflects something about our society and those people who use it as some form of personal escapism from the pressure of the real world.

3 out of 5 stars

5 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

As tough as the various lockdowns have been on people this is a mere inconvenience compared to what the populace of Daraya has had to put up with. It was in this town that the Syrian Civil war began. It has been under siege for years; the Assad regime trying to starve and boom the people into submission or death. Thousands of bombs have rained down on the city reducing almost everything, including the hospitals to dusty smoking ruins. They were not even allowed basic aid from neutral independent organisations.

Somehow they kept going, helping each other out and making sure that people were looked after. After one bombing run, one group of young men were looking for survivors in amongst the chaos and they discovered and cache of books that had survived the destruction of the building. They collect the books and make the decision to look for more. A week later they have collected six thousand volumes and in a month they have fifteen thousand. The addresses of where they find the books are written on the inside covers should the previous owners ever wish to claim them back again. They create a library for the people of the city-based in a basement of a building, it is safe from the barrel bombs and becomes a place of learning and sanctuary for the oppressed people.

I listen to these poems like you’d listen to a secret voice whispering things you’re unable to express. The way someone sings what you’re incapable of singing. I find myself in every word, in every line.

A chance find on a Facebook page showing this secret library, inspired French-Iranian journalist Delphine Minoui to find out more about it. She manages to track down one of its founders, twenty-three-year-old Ahmad and started to ask him questions about it. Those questions become a wider conversation and in the end a friendship. She learns why they have done it, how they are using the books to further their educations and the hope that they get from the project.

They communicate via WhatsApp and Facebook, and she sees them at their most vulnerable, hunched in the basements of shattered buildings hearing the dull thuds of yet more explosions. Sometimes there was almost no communication, a message she sent would not have a reply for days until suddenly a happy or sad-faced emoji would pop up on her phone. Then nothing again. She would worry about them even though she was incapable of doing anything to help. Minoui longed to meet them, but never tough that this was going to be possible at all.

At the end of the line, he’s unable to speak. He’s lost his voice. His throat is empty. I can tell that he is beaten, depressed. From all the time I have spent talking to him over the internet, I’ve learned to read between the lines, to anticipate his responses. This isn’t a normal silence. For the first time, he’s run out of things to say about Daraya.

At times this is a heart-wrenching read. I cannot even imagine what life, such as you can call it there, was like. But in amongst all the death and destruction, there is hope; the hope that they find within the pages of the books, the hope that this time will end and the hope that they can build a democracy in the country that they love. The book conveys the reality of what life was like there at the time and the fear that every message to her would be their last. Minoui’s writing is sharp and pithy. It feels like the short chapters were written as notes after each time she contacted the men as her emotions come across as raw and reactions to the situations as they happen. It is a wonderful book about the generosity of the human spirit and however bad life is there is still some solace within the pages of a book. There is a video about the Book Collectors of Daraya, here (£)