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This section on absence is interesting. I've never thought about technologies for what they exclude by being in the world, more what they create or change.

I bought this with the end of a gift voucher I received from a friend. I loved Enriquez' debut collection of short stories, Things We Lost in the Fire, and was delighted to find this one on the book shelves. Also, it's an appropriate time to read some horror stories!

Sheila Armstrong's debut novel is about a real-life mystery. A John Doe was found in 2009 sitting calmly on Rosses Point beach in Sligo, Ireland. Tracing his family or identity took years, and this novel takes on this strange and sad story.

Each chapter is written from a different person's perspective: those who found the body, investigated its mystery, and those who were on a boat that crashed ashore in the 1990s. Introducing a new character every chapter is a brave approach that could suit this tale of a village and a body, but the execution is a little clunky. Each person is given a back-story including very obvious moments of trauma or trial that alter their lives in very literal ways. Human beings aren't usually like this, and the result ends up feeling like an exercise in writing lots of characters for a play or television, without producing any heart or story in between. Some of the writing, too, is repetitive and clumsy, for example the word 'foreign' pops up to describe non-Irish things far too often.

A couple of the chapters are brilliant, particularly the ones that begin each section of the book, and they are standalone as striking short stories. The potential to go deeper hangs temptingly there, but in the end the story stays in the shallow waters it begins in.

Colum McCann has no fear of taking on novels that involve years of research. Previous works Let The Great World Spin and Apeirogon manage to tie together many fragmented stories and characters into a coherent whole. In Twist, McCann takes a different approach: an insular first-person narrative in a story about subsea cables and the internet.

The first half of the book works very well. Our protagonist, Anthony Fennell, is a writer recovering from past addiction issues. He has been commissioned to write an article for a magazine about subsea cable repair, and gains a berth on a cable repair ship after a major break in a cable off Ghana. He is an unreliable narrator, becoming obsessed with the lead cable repair technician and his love, an actress who is working in England on tour. While at sea, his addictions resurface, not in substance abuse but in data abuse. He becomes obsessed with his moments of internet access and the fragments he pieces together into intrigue, scandal and paranoia. As they search the ocean floor for a cable the width of a drainpipe, the story becomes brilliantly claustrophobic, manic, and desperate.

The second half of the book drops off, and becomes a bit too fantastical. Fennell is not a likeable narrator. His obsession with other peoples' more interesting lives is a good narrative device for the disconnection and individualisation that McCann has decided to write about, but it never really feels true enough and he wraps up his assumptions a bit too easily. For an author who thrives in writing multiple narratives simultaneously, trying to hold it all in one narrator's voice doesn't seem to work as well, particularly when the story becomes mostly speculative. It is a good experiment, and with McCann's sharp style and prose it remains enjoyable, but the result lacks the impact it might have had.

Flights is a story where the protagonist seems to be travel itself. Billed as a novel, the book is split into many short chapters, some only a paragraph long, some many pages. Each chapter visits a specific moment of travel, or some part of the books other linked themes: preservation of bodies, colonialism and hierarchy, or disconnection and disregard of women.

I adore Olga Tokarczuk's writing. Her understanding of the craft and her breadth of imagination are a wonder, and her worldview is so respectfully and carefully entangled in her books that she is one of very few authors I read who can open new worlds in her works. So many moments of this book will stay with me. She builds worlds in moments and then discards them just as rapidly, as if all the stories were constructed out the window of an airplane leaving the runway. Her observations on travel feel like a post-air-travel epithet, recording for future generations what it was once like to fly in airplanes around a world that came to feel so small.

The book is a marvel for all of its small moments and its clever way of putting travel at the centre of a story. At times I felt it a little jarring to leap from one story to the next, although that is clearly the intention of a book written in such an experimental format. On the whole, this is another masterpiece by one of the best living authors in the world.

String figures are temporary artworks made from string, very often known in the western world through the associated children's game 'cat's cradle'. They are a storytelling device, using shapes made from string. Their potential was recently popularised by philosopher Donna Haraway, but their history stretches back centuries and they are still found in almost every country in the world, albeit less common than they may have once been in many cultures. In the early 20th Century, film, photographs and the actual string figures were collected from many places featured in this book, including the Solomon Islands, Nigeria, Brazil and Greenland. These artefacts were collated by western anthropologists for European museums, one colonial hand recording their history while the other erased it.

This book, String Figures, is the research result of an exhibition held in Switzerland in 2024. It combines essays by anthropologists, artists, and other researchers to form a wonderful, broad and coherent history of the artform and a contemporary reflection on it. The book is split into sections: first, a research exploration of string figures including essays on artistic history, mathematical theory and anthropology. The second section features contemporary artist approaches and reflections on the String Figures exhibition, with some high quality photographs. Finally, a series of shorter essays gives some perspectives on string figures today.

The quality of the editing by Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspul throughout is exceptional, and the writing and depth in each essay matches this. Every chapter has something to grab hold of, whether it is another piece of the complex history of string figures, or a personal reflection on how they are made, or a deeper dive into colonial exploitation through museum culture. The result is one of the finest research books I have read on a single topic, and a beautifully in-depth look at an often disregarded artform. As always, there were a couple of essays that were a little forgettable, but none that were of low quality. With so many perspectives and ideas, the book could have been a messy knot, but the result is a beautiful mesh of opinions, perspectives and research that is a joy to read.

Got this from the library after wanting to read it for a long time. It has been referenced in a fair few books I've read.

I am a big fan of McCann's writing, and am doin project on subsea cables, so I pushed this to the top of my list.

I enjoy this writing style and agree with the premise, but I feel I'm deeper into this ethic than the book is offering so am not getting much from it. I stopped reading on the third chapter.

From the essay Hesitant Hands on Similar Loops by Mareile Flitsch, pp151-167 – this observation reflects what I see of postcolonial countries discarding ideas because they are considered old fashioned, and thus a symbol of poverty, including processes and objects of real beauty and deep labour.