Dave C
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duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Dave C
@duckpondsreview.bsky.social
980 followers 3.1K following 860 posts
Retired and reading quite a lot in a quiet corner of Australia.
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duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Another post where I ran out of characters and couldn't fit a tag for the author.
@jrobertlennon.com
duckpondsreview.bsky.social Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 9h
I seem to quite often finish two books on the same day. Spent the day in this fine novel from one of the best and most interesting writers currently in America. A woman finds herself in what seems to be an alternate universe, trying to make sense of the changes, not least to herself
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
Familiar, by J. Robert Lennon. Elisa Brown is driving back from her annual, somber visit to her son Silas' grave when something changes. Actually, everything changes: her body is more voluptuous; she's wearing different clothes and driving a new car. When she arrives home, her life is familiar―but different. There is her house, her husband. But in the world she now inhabits, Silas is no longer dead, and his brother is disturbingly changed. Elisa has a new job, and her marriage seems sturdier, and stranger, than she remembers. She finds herself faking her way through a life she is convinced is not her own. Has she had a psychotic break? Or has she entered a parallel universe? Elisa believed that Silas was doomed from the start, but now that he is alive, what can she do to repair her strained relations with her children? She soon discovers that these questions hinge on being able to see herself as she really is―something that might be impossible for Elisa, or for anyone. In Familiar, J. Robert Lennon continues his profound and exhilarating exploration of the surreal undercurrents of contemporary American life.
December 19, 2025 at 10:56 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I usually like to tag the authors if I'm saying nice things about their work but I ran out of characters and missed @kerryhp.bsky.social off when I posted this one.😬
duckpondsreview.bsky.social Dave C @duckpondsreview.bsky.social · 16h
2020 #46
The debut novel from another real favourite of mine, a Black Country writer who brings us dark tales from that oft ignored part of the English Midlands. Also debuts the author's distinct and unsettling narrative style, the blurb gives a hint.
@saltpublishing.com
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The Black Country, by Kerry Hadley-Price. Plot Maddie and Harry: she's an estate agent, he's a teacher. They'll say they live in the Black Country. They'll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they'd killed someone. Thought they had. And as they search for a truth, they'll tell us their secrets, their mistakes. And we'll judge them. We'll judge Harry's fling with a schoolgirl and Maddie's previous life. We'll judge the nature of love and violence, good and evil. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it's darker than it should be.
December 19, 2025 at 10:51 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I had to go and pick up something for my partner's Christmas present this morning from one of my favourite bookshops and the idea was to go in...and come out with just one book...not three...🙄
@fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social
@joannapocock.bsky.social
💡📚
#booksky
Greyhound, by Joanna Pocock & House of Lilies, by Justine Firnhaber-Baker
December 18, 2025 at 2:37 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
December reading 🧵 starts with the second novel by French writers Laurent Binet, a complex and clever work of historic fiction. The blurb in the alt text gives a good guide to where this goes but it really doesn't tell the half of it, it is also very funny at times. Excellent
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The 7th Function of Language, by Laurent Binet. Tr by Sam Taylor. Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. It’s February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand. Barthes dies soon afterwards. History tells us it was an accident.But what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of unbelievable, global importance? A document explaining the seventh function of language – an idea so powerful it gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything.Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a chase that takes them from the corridors of power to backstreet saunas and midnight meetings. What they discover is a worldwide conspiracy involving the President, murderous Bulgarians and a secret international debating society.
December 7, 2025 at 1:16 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Post a book you love from the 80s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky #bookchallenge #readingchallenge #readingcommunity #booktok #bookish #books
December 6, 2025 at 1:28 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
A gorgeous early summer day made even better by a package from Manchester with new stuff from @confingopublishing.bsky.social including the latest collection from @nicholasroyle.bsky.social
Happy days.
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
New arrivals from Confingo Publishing, Strawberry and the Big Apple by Dave Haslam and Paris Fantastique by Nicholas Royle.
December 3, 2025 at 1:28 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Meet Monty, he's been living around us for the last 15 years (we can hand feed him) but he is currently suffering from a totally dislocated lower hip joint which means he's helping raise two youngsters on one leg. Comes for a rest on our deck every afternoon on this chair.
#australia #birds
Male Australian Magpie resting on a seat back.
November 11, 2025 at 4:43 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #1
The first novel from one of the great writers of the 20th century. In 1940s Ohio, a poor black girl wishes for the blue eyes of her white schoolfellows leading us into a tale of racism, sexual abuse and self-hate. A most assured debut.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
📚💙
#booksky
#books
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison . Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.
November 5, 2025 at 12:28 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Post a book you love from the 80s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky #bookchallenge #readingchallenge #readingcommunity #booktok #bookish #books
November 4, 2025 at 10:54 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
November reading 🧵
Started the month with this, undoubtedly the strangest work from Thomas McGuane. Follows the misadventures of the highly dubious Nicholas Payne with plenty of strange goings-on and equally strange language. Witty and weird, more in the alt text.
⭐⭐⭐
📚💙
#booksky
#books
The Bushwhacked Piano, by Thomas McGuane. As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn't counting on Nicholas's wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane-highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and an apprenticeship to the inventor of the world's first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.
November 1, 2025 at 11:39 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Usually see 8 or 9 species of Orchids in a given year while walking in the Brisbane Ranges and here's a few of the best seen so far (names in alt text). #orchids #wildflowers #australiannativeflora
Spotted Sun Orchid Slender Sun Orchid Leopard Orchid Waxlip Orchid
October 31, 2025 at 1:56 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
New resident in the kitchen. She was eyeing up my breakfast for some reason...
#spider
Huntsman Spider
October 8, 2025 at 9:50 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Ordered these from the publisher in the UK just 7 days ago and they've already turned up down here. Nice! More Recovered Books from Boilerhouse Press and @neglectedbooks.com and they haven't let me down with anything in this series yet.
#booksky📚💙
#books
And So Did I, by Malachi Whitaker. Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney. Trance by Appointment, by Gertrude Trevelyan.
October 8, 2025 at 6:07 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
20/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Palaeolithic cave paintings, Altamira, Spain. Artists unknown.
October 5, 2025 at 10:09 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
19/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
The company of Frans Banning Cock preparing to march out, known as the Nightwatch , by Rembrandt van Rijn.
October 5, 2025 at 1:14 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
18/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
The Plain by Mont St.-Victoire, by Paul Cezanne
October 3, 2025 at 9:24 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
17/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Studio in Rue de La Condamine, by Jean Frédéric Bazille.
October 2, 2025 at 9:38 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
So October starts with this fine set of stories from Chile's Alejandro Zambra. There's a nice blurb in the alt text and as always Megan McDowell's translation helps bring the writer into our language very nicely indeed. Just more excellence from @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social
⭐⭐⭐⭐
#booksky💙📚
#books
My Documents, by Alejandro Zambra, tr by Megan McDowell. My Documents is the latest work from Alejandro Zambra, the award-winning Chilean writer whose first novel was heralded as the dawn of a new era in Chilean literature. Whether chronicling the attempts of a migraine-afflicted writer to quit smoking or the loneliness of the call-centre worker, the life of a personal computer or the return of a mercurial godson, this collection of stories evokes the disenchantments of youth and the disillusions of maturity in a Chilean society still troubled by its recent past. Written with the author's trademark irony and precision, humour and melancholy, My Documents is unflinchingly human and essential evidence of a sublimely talented writer working at the height of his powers.
October 2, 2025 at 1:59 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
16/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gate St. Lazare, by Claude Monet
October 1, 2025 at 9:56 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
15/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper.
September 30, 2025 at 10:04 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
14/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Adoration of the Magi (1475), by Botticelli (Alessandro Filipepi - that's him on the right.)
September 29, 2025 at 10:54 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
13/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh.
September 28, 2025 at 10:29 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
12/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
In England (Eugene Manet on Isle of Wight), by Berthe Morisot
September 28, 2025 at 3:02 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
11/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
The Bar at La Folies-Bergiere, by Eduard Manet.
September 26, 2025 at 11:07 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.
10/20

#blueskyartchallenge #art #painting
Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Carda at the Battle of San Romano, by Paulo Uccello.
September 26, 2025 at 12:11 AM