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
2020 #47
I grew up in a culturally-comatose corner of Australia and missed the whole punk/post-punk thing so this fabulous debut from @reversediorama.bsky.social was not just a great novel but a bit of cultural enlightenment as well. Definitely on a roll in this part of 2020.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
This is Memorial Device, David Keenan. Ross Raymond and Johnny McLaughlin are two fanboys dedicated to the Airdrie post-punk scene of the early '80s - the glory years - when anything and everything seemed possible. Looking back on that time - the people, the bands, the underground legends - they piece together a story which has at its core Memorial Device, the greatest band you've never heard of. Featuring a cast of misfits, artists, drop-outs, small-town visionaries and musicians, This Is Memorial Device is a dark, witty novel depicting a moment where art and the demands it makes are as serious as life itself.
December 19, 2025 at 10:46 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
...and the same to you sir. 🎊
December 19, 2025 at 9:56 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
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 7:13 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
My new exclamation of choice will be Holy Dipstick!!!
December 19, 2025 at 3:27 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Another breakfast read, the third of Nicholas Royle's collections of stories of cities where he has lived. This time it's Paris and the author's unsettling fictional take on life in these cities continues. Excellent from @confingopublishing.bsky.social &
@nicholasroyle.bsky.social
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🖋️📚
#booksky
Paris Fantastique, Short Stories, by Nicholas Royle. In the third and final volume in his series of story collections inspired by cities in which he has lived – Paris Fantastique follows London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – Nicholas Royle searches for signs that the fantastique, which flourished in the nineteenth century, is still alive in the twenty-first. Fourteen stories, including eleven that are brand new, demonstrate the startling originality of Royle’s ideas and his willingness to experiment with form. He explores the magnetic attraction of the streets, parks, cafés, apartments, railway tunnels and covered passages of Paris, his characters often drawn there and unable to leave – or forever returning.
December 19, 2025 at 3:24 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
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 12:29 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
...a lot!😋
December 18, 2025 at 11:33 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #45
I was definitely on a @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social thing back in 2020 having found them the previous year. Being home to one of my favourite writers, Esther Kinsky, helped this trend. A tale of grief set in a beautiful landscape, there's a blurb in the alt text.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Grove, by Esther Kinsky, tr by Caroline Schmidt. An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to Olevano, a small village south-east of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it. Written in a rich and poetic style, Grove is an exquisite novel of grief, love and landscapes.
December 18, 2025 at 2:49 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #44
In what I believe was his longest published work, Denis Johnson finally came to that seminal event in American history, the Vietnam War. It follows the fate of a CIA officer and also a pair of army grunts, one of whom will be familiar to readers of earlier Johnson.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson. Tree of Smoke "is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA - engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong - and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away.
December 16, 2025 at 9:49 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #43
Another gem from the @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social stable. A turbulent coming-of-age story set amidst the political and religious tensions of the Mediterranean world in the time of the Arab Spring and the GFC. Blurb in the alt text as usual but this is peak Enard.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Street of Thieves, by Matthias Enard. Tr by Charlotte Mandell. Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona, hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts, a group he worked for in Tangier, Morocco, not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father. Lakhdar's transformations, from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner, take place against the backdrop of some of the most important events of the past few years: the violence and exciting eruption of the Arab Spring and the devastating collapse of Europe's economy. If all that isn't enough, Lakhdar reunites with a childhood friend, one who is planning an assassination, a murder Lakhdar opposes.
December 16, 2025 at 5:46 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
That is an excellent book.
December 15, 2025 at 10:10 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
I was wondering if you knew him. He's another who has a touch of Johnson in his work, particularly The Litten Path. As a reader, I still liked his last novel btw, but it was definitely not quite the finished item the other two are.
December 15, 2025 at 9:03 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #42
Another personal favourite. A tour of lighthouses, both actual and fictional, becomes something of a personal memoir and literary history as the author reflects on isolation and finding meaning in it, and much else besides, all packed into a beautiful little book.
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#booksky
#books
On Lighthouses, by Jasmina Barrera, tr by Christina MacSweeney. 'After spending sufficient time inside a lighthouse, who wouldn't begin to hear a song in the sound of the machinery, a voice in the wind or the waves?' Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses - those structures whose message is 'first and foremost, that human beings are here.' Starting with Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather, an engineer charged with illuminating the Scottish coastline, On Lighthouses artfully examines lighthouses from the Spanish to the Oregon coasts and those in the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others. In trying to 'collect' lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone - from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one - concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.
December 15, 2025 at 7:20 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
Sat down and read this fantastic little book from @confingopublishing.bsky.social this morning. Ranging from Jamaica to New York to Paris to Manchester and its near neighbour, the old industrial town of Stockport, this is an amazing tale of cultural connections. Almost flawless.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
💡📚
#booksky
Strawberry and the Big Apple, Grace Jones in Stockport, 1080, by Dave Haslam. In ‘Strawberry and the Big Apple’, the eighth short-format book in his acclaimed Art Decades series, Dave Haslam explains a seemingly unlikely scenario: the day in November 1980 when Grace Jones – a spectacularly glamorous jet-setting singer living and working in Paris and New York, and recording in the Bahamas – pays a visit to Stockport (a post-industrial town seven miles south of Manchester, with crumbling infrastructure and rising unemployment). Her quest that day? To meet A Certain Ratio, a group then signed to Factory Records. This tale of worlds colliding includes Tony Wilson’s fascination with New York; an intriguing portrait of the early life of Grace Jones; a twist in the tale, and more than a couple of mysteries; plus walk-on parts for 10cc, Robert De Niro and Jerry Hall.
December 13, 2025 at 11:30 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #41
James Clarke's follow up to the superb "The Litten Path" is a wonderful set of loosely connected stories set in a single Lancashire valley, a style of novel that I rather like when it's done as well as this. A lovely portrayal of life in a forgotten of the land.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
The Hollow in the Land, by James Clarke. Welcome to the Hollow in the Land: a Lancashire valley no more than ten miles end to end. From its neglected high streets and cluttered front rooms to the isolated wilderness of the surrounding moors, this is England at the margins. In James Clarke's hands, this forgotten corner of the world becomes the backdrop to regional lives bursting with the rich strangeness of existence.
December 13, 2025 at 11:20 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
University of Iowa Press if you're interested.
December 13, 2025 at 6:59 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
The month continues with an excellent whodunit from the west of Kansas. A hand, and then a body, are found along a quiet road near a dying town and the local sheriff sets out to find out what happened. A great set of local characters and I think some pertinent politics. A fine novel
⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
The Illusion of Simple, by Charles Forrest Jones. In a dry Kansas riverbed, a troop of young girls finds a human hand. This discovery leads Billy Spire, the tough and broken sheriff of Ewing County, to investigate and confront the depths of his community and of himself: the racism, the dying economy, the lies and truths of friendship, grievances of the past and present, and even his own injured marriage. But like any town where people still breathe, there is also love and hope and the possibility of redemption. To flyover folks, Ewing County appears nothing more than a handful of empty streets amid crop circles and the meandering, depleted Arkansas River. But the truth of this place—the interwoven lives and stories—is anything but simple.
December 13, 2025 at 6:54 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #40
This was the first time I'd read any Theroux in 20+years and I'd forgotten just what a good travel writer he is. If this journey into Mexico was his last then it is a worthy final outing as this is a superb book and I'll have to add some more of his to my TBR list.🙄
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
💡📚
#booksky
#books
On the Plain of Snakes, A Mexican Road Trip, by Paul Theroux. Paul Theroux has spent his life crisscrossing the globe in search of the histories and peoples who gives life to the places they call home. Now, after journeying through the heart of the Deep South in his last book, he crosses the border, into Mexico, one of most vibrant, complex and at times dangerous countries in the world. Traversing first the entire length of the US-Mexico border, on the contested track of Trump's mythic wall, he then turns south, deep into the hinterland, following the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, eyes and ears ever attuned to the people and the places he encounters. In the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with charm, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol to the north and mounting discord from within. He visits Zapotec mezcal distillers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista Party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north. What begins a ls a simple journey in the Mexican sunshine becomes a leap in the dark - a compulsion to 'keep going until I ran out of road', across a landscape and terrain of extremes, from sheer beauty to stark poverty. Compassionate, insightful and iconoclastic, this is Mexico as encountered by perhaps the finest living travel writer.
December 12, 2025 at 11:06 PM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
One of the most overrated acts of modern times, never heard one thing of theirs that I ever wanted to hear again.
December 12, 2025 at 6:37 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #39
Toni Morrison's Beloved is a book that I'm glad to say is as profound and brilliant as all the hype around it suggested. A story of the damage wreaked by slavery on it's survivors even after slavery itself is ended, and a genuine, often gut wrenching masterpiece.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
#books
Beloved, by Toni Morrison. It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece.
December 12, 2025 at 1:59 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #38
Having created a record label and brought us the likes of Roots Manuva, then written one of the very best books on hip-hop with his story of the Wu-Tang Clan's seminal first album, now Mr Ashon takes us into the history and folklore of Epping Forest, a gem of a book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
💡📚
#booksky
#books
Strange Labyrinth, Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London's Great Forest, by Will Ashon. In litter-strewn Epping Forest on the edge of London, might a writer find that magical moment of transcendence? He will certainly discover filthy graffiti and frightening dogs, as well as world-renowned artists and fading celebrities, robbers, lovers, ghosts and poets. But will he find himself? Or a version of himself he might learn something from? Strange Labyrinth is a quest narrative arguing that we shouldn't get lost in order to find ourselves, but solely to accept that we are lost in the first place. It is a singular blend of landscape writing, political indignation, cultural history and wit from a startling new voice in non-fiction.
December 11, 2025 at 3:44 AM
duckpondsreview.bsky.social
2020 #37
Another foray into the eclectic world of @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social , this time a complex and multi-layered novel that I will admit I struggled with at the first time of asking but which I will be returning to, hopefully soon. There's a good blurb in the alt text for more.
⭐⭐⭐
🖋️📚
#booksky
Insurrecto, by Gina Apostol. In 1901, Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison in Balangiga, on the island of Samar, and American soldiers created `a howling wilderness' of the surrounding countryside in retaliation, mudering thousands of the inhabitants of Balangiga. In the 1970s, the American filmmaker Ludo Brasi went missing in Samar while shooting a movie, THE UNINTENDED, inspired by these events. In 2018, his daughter Chiara and the Filipino translator Magsalin go on a road trip in Duterte's Philippines. Chiara is working on a film about the Balangiga massacre, when Magsalin reads Chiara's film script and writes her own version of the story. Within the spiralling voices and narrative layers of INSURRECTO are stories of women - artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters - finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, INSURRECTO is a startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful novel which twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, Julio Cortazar's HOPSCOTCH, and Vladimir Nabokov's PALE FIRE. By pushing up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, Gina Apostol shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war.
December 10, 2025 at 1:23 AM