A witch-adjacent cat-botherer and firebrand based in Orkney--a voracious reader across genres. 🏳️⚧️ ally. I am the author of Ashes & Stones: a Scottish Journey in Search of Witches and Witness. 🏳️🌈🐈⬛🔮🐈⬛🕸️🐈⬛❤️🔥
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35% complete! NorthSea Witch has read 21 of 60 books.
This is the third time I have read this book. It was once sort of escapist 'comfort' reading for me but some how this time I lost patience with the melodrama and histrionics and the weird pacing at the end.
I have re-read this book perhaps twice. This is not the same edition I have--which I purchased in Rome in 1999. It is fascinating to revisit this, now that I am the age of Mrs. Dalloway, and having lived in London for so many years--the book feels like it is part of me.
In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic …
The author's recordings in photos notes and artwork of the sunrise entering the neolithic Tomb …
An extraordinary work of experiential archaeology & archeological psychogeography. Barthelmess' work with the sun and the tomb is groundbreaking in terms of our understanding of these ancestral spaces.
Revisiting this--the racism is really hard to get around, despite it being such a formative work for my younger self. Not sure about the forward by Frieda Hughes, though her anecdotes are useful in understanding some of the ghoulish obsession with Plath's death among certain people. But none can approach the work as anything but a critical reader--no one owns the meaning of the work, not even people related to the poet, especially Hughes. There is a lot to think about here.
Sly, surprising, and razor-sharp, Natural Beauty follows a young musician into an elite, beauty-obsessed world where perfection comes at a …
Revisiting this after 25 years. I still have my copy from 1999, purchased in Rome, with the price sticker on it-- 14000 lire.
When I read this as a young woman I thought more about London and Septimus' suicide. Now I see the book is really about menopause.
A narrative investigation into the new science of plant intelligence and sentience, from National Association of Science Writers Award winner …
A beautiful book about looking, surviving and flourishing.
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by American poet Sylvia Plath. It is …
This was a reread--it felt so modern--disturbingly so. I read it as a teenager and I was way too close to the narrative. So little has changed around mental illness and the medical profession. The prose is so good. I relished it and its angry humour. The only thing dated in it would be the racism of the narrator.
London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately …
I read this in preparation to my visit to the newly reopened Hunterian in London. This short, brutal novel weaves the lives and deaths of John Hunter and one of his specimens--all were reluctant but O'Brien requested specifically not to end up in Hunter's hands after his death. For years, even in my lifetime, his skeleton was displayed int the museum against his wishes. Perhaps one of the few improvements in the new museum's curation--he is no longer exhibited. His wishes finally respected. POSSIBLE SPOILER? The women characters in the book (2-3 minor characters) endure the most horrific sexual violence and humiliation. I don't even know how that was adding to this grim book in any way. I really dislike the idea that women characters have to endure rape and torture to convince a reader that things are 'really dark'. I love Mantel's writing but because of this I feel …
I read this in preparation to my visit to the newly reopened Hunterian in London. This short, brutal novel weaves the lives and deaths of John Hunter and one of his specimens--all were reluctant but O'Brien requested specifically not to end up in Hunter's hands after his death. For years, even in my lifetime, his skeleton was displayed int the museum against his wishes. Perhaps one of the few improvements in the new museum's curation--he is no longer exhibited. His wishes finally respected. POSSIBLE SPOILER? The women characters in the book (2-3 minor characters) endure the most horrific sexual violence and humiliation. I don't even know how that was adding to this grim book in any way. I really dislike the idea that women characters have to endure rape and torture to convince a reader that things are 'really dark'. I love Mantel's writing but because of this I feel it difficult to recommend the book.
London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately …
There is a point -- and you may know it yourself--a point in fatigue or pain when logic slowly crumbles from the world, where reason's bricks sieve to crumb.Where content flits from language, goes its way and departs, its pack on its back; you take the high road and I'll take the low. Where meaning evaporates into the air like ether. The Giant has reach this point. When he seals his senses, he's sealing out the meaninglesss, because inside he's trying to preserve some sense of what meaning means.
— The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel (Page 190)
This is such a perfect description of chronic pain. Mantel suffered from endometriosis--undiagnosed and misdiagnosed for much of her life. The suffering of the Giant is perhaps informed by her own .
London, 1782: center of science and commerce, home to the newly rich and the desperately poor. Among whom is the …
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