Reviews
About
Novels
Poems
Short stories
Blog

Sunset over Gareloch

Novels

Novels

“Some secrets are cruel, unfair. But the story you’re dreaming up might reach fullest bloom in silence, in secret. Shh.”
— Quiara Alegría Hudes

Currently Reading

Donate to Mermaids UK

Donate to UK Black Pride

Donate to the Scottish Trans Alliance

Donate to The Black Curriculum

Donate to charity: water

Donate to ClientEarth

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.

morganicbooks

“For even as you have home-comings in your twili $“For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone” from On Houses by Kahlil Gibran is the epigraph to Wild Fires by Sophie Jai, which I completely devoured this weekend 🇹🇹🍁🔥⁣ ⁣ It’s a story of grief and family and history and how these fundamental threads of any single life and story tangle and tear — how secrets and silence fester, eroding the tapestry one strand at a time.⁣ ⁣ The narrative follows a Hindu Trinidadian family split at the seams when half of them emigrated to Toronto, and then later again when our narrator, Cassandra Mishra, moved to London to pursue her writing career, but the inciting incident that draws her back to Canada is the death of her enigmatic cousin Chevy, who was notorious for the legend he wove around his short, bright life.⁣ ⁣ Cas spends the book trying to piece together the puzzle of her past from the infrequently and torturously yet preciously imparted stories of her aunts, gradually building the jigsaw of the events that led to her cousin’s death almost four decades after his younger brother’s.⁣ ⁣ Sophie Jai stitches this bittersweet swatch together with the most lusciously sensory and evocative imagery, from lips pursed tight as if they were holding a face together like the knot of a balloon, to the balancing of a slice of cake on a saucer like a candle in a chamberstick lighting the way, to an apple core stuck to the sole of a shoe that trails in sleet like a snail.⁣ ⁣ At its own core, it’s an elegy to how families can fracture, and to just how much words matter, how ink can give but also take away, like blades slithering into the soil bound by your roots and slowly severing them forever — how such words can spread like the crackling of a quiet wildfire that turns all to ash and cinder.⁣ ⁣ It’s exquisite — and it’s out next month.⁣ ⁣ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⁣ ⁣ #bookstagram #wildfires #sophiejai$

“You ever read a book so good it makes you want

“You ever read a book so good it makes you want to lie face down on the floor to process”

— Roseanne A. Brown

As someone who grew up constantly cosplaying Heste

As someone who grew up constantly cosplaying Hester Shaw and Anna Fang from Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series in sun-drenched summer holidays with scarves and sticks standing in for steampunk masks and swords, I knew I was going to, at the very least, adore Rebel Skies by Ann Sei Lin…⁣
⁣
My jaw dropped on page 13. By page 339, it cemented itself as one of my favourite fantasy worlds just about ever feat. cloud whales and sky castles and sentient origami monsters from tortoises that can crush villages to dragons that can swallow ships…⁣
⁣
Books like these send me again and again back to one of my favourite lines of literature ever penned, from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot:⁣
⁣
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it” ✨⁣
⁣
#bookstagram #rebelskies #annseilin

“Words lead to things” — Mary Annaïse Heg

“Words lead to things”

— Mary Annaïse Heglar

Two months since first binge of this witchy tome 🔮⁣
⁣
Still thinking about the ending.⁣
⁣
💙💖🤍⁣
⁣
#bookstagram #hermajestysroyalcoven #junodawson

“Fantasy isn’t the absence of political and ph

“Fantasy isn’t the absence of political and philosophical examination, but dissection in the guise of escape.”
— VE Schwab

“History has failed us, but no matter.” 🌊🍊⁣
⁣
This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read (also featuring one of the top 3 most viscerally devastating twists I’ve ever read… as in threw-the-book-across-the-room-and-stormed-out-into-the-rain-to-howl-at-the-sky twists)…⁣
⁣
It’s been my constant companion these past few weeks, a tempestuous saga following the story of four generations of one Korean family from their origins in an island fishing community off the coast of Busan at the dawn of the 20th century all the way through WWII and then the Korean War and then the Cold War up until their struggles to survive in 1980s Japan against extreme racist discrimination.⁣
⁣
It opens with a Dickens epigraph, who becomes a recurring anchor and motif for a certain character and all he contends with throughout the story: “Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration”. And this is perhaps the central locus of the book, the question of where and/or what home is. In the great game of life, what does home *mean*… what — and where — is it? Where does it reside? For me the final answer that scorches its closing pages is: hope. Life is, at its blazing core, hope. Against all odds. In the face of the most horrific sorrows. To live is to hope.⁣
⁣
In the biblically epic battle amidst the ravages of war and oppression with shame and duty and desire and faith and forgiveness and failure and suffering and salvation through labour, it seems everything is a game of pachinko. Life, love, prosperity, motherhood… with few winners, and far more losers.⁣
⁣
And yet—⁣
And yet—⁣
And yet—⁣
⁣
Hope.⁣
⁣
It’s still sodding there, stubbornly clinging on, sprinting at the tsunami with an umbrella because you’ll always, always believe you’re going to win.⁣
⁣
And what could be more human than that?⁣
⁣
“Beyond the dailiness, there had been moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too, even in this ajumma’s life. Even if no one knew, it was true.”⁣
⁣
#bookstagram #pachinko #minjinlee

“Books aren’t just commodities; the profit mot

“Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”⁣
⁣
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from her 2014 speech accepting The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

So… on quite literally Day 1 of 2022… I found

So… on quite literally Day 1 of 2022… I found out a 2000-word short story I wrote over the course of a few feverish nights in November was selected by one of my favourite writers on Earth to win a $20,000 literary prize…

Still trying to understand how such a sentence could possibly be true.

It’s available to read free at elegantliterature.com along with 9 other international English-language fiction pieces written in response to the prompt: Dark Descent. I printed out Max Gladstone’s concluding commentary (which follows my story in the digital magazine itself) for the photograph above as one of many so far failed attempts I’ve made this past week to try and process the fact that he not only read it? But deemed it of sufficient merit to actually select it as the winner?? And that he wrote this??? In response to it???? Just… referencing a couple of my metaphors… and comparing it to “the finest sense-of-wonder fiction”?????

I will also — in what will undoubtedly be one of the most surreal moments of my existence thus far — be having a video call with him next week, in which he’ll… like… interview me about it? Which will then go on YouTube??

No but literally *what* is happening…

$20,000????????

MAX GLADSTONE?????????

NO ONE WAKE ME PLEASE.

But but but.

Should time’s winged chariot catch up before I’ve shared any other words with the world, it suddenly won’t matter as much, because these ones are out there.

In classic form, I also wrote a 6,500-word version which completes what I’d originally envisioned as the narrative arc after seeing MAX GLADSTONE tweet about judging the inaugural prize (this was the second one), then reading the prompt, coming up with a thing (most self-indulgent soul-baring sanity-restoring thing I’ve ever written), and deciding to use it as a Christmas/Hogmanay present for family. Might pop it on my blog at some point when the 2 months of digital exclusivity for the short version are up if I’m feeling unhinged enough…

Anyway, back to the fever dream.

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”⁣
⁣
— Mary Oliver

“It is better to burn than to disappear.”⁣
— The Outsider, Albert Camus 🔥⁣
⁣
Respect and salutations to @roselianamorgan’s favourite reads of 2021.⁣
⁣
✨The taste✨⁣
⁣
Still battling it out over the 2020 list though, which seems fitting.⁣
⁣
“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”⁣
— The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway 🌊⁣
⁣
#bookstagram

“And just as music is the space between notes, j

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky – so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all. Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”⁣
⁣
— The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt 🍂✨

Happy Hogmanay 🎆🥂⁣ ⁣ A digital raindrop-

Happy Hogmanay 🎆🥂⁣
⁣
A digital raindrop-in-the-ocean love letter to my favourites of 2021…⁣
⁣
Time War will forever be scribbled all over my psyche, as will many of the short stories in Ken Liu’s peerless collection The Paper Menagerie, from souls disembodied as cigarette boxes and ice cubes to metallic centaurs and vast solar sail arks soaring through interstellar space…⁣
⁣
The Vanishing Half also caught me totally by surprise, one of the most universally lauded books of the past two years that somehow still concealed scintillating unseen depths.⁣
⁣
No surprises however from evergreen auto-buys Angie Thomas and Casey McQuiston, who were both as viscerally and spiritually healing as expected 🖤⁣
⁣
Honourable mentions again to those corkers consumed via ebook and audiobook and thus not represented here: A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi, The Gender Games by Juno Dawson, Black and British by David Olusoga, and A Life On Our Planet by David Attenborough.⁣
⁣
🎶 Song of the year: Bad Love, KEY (almost overtaken twice in the *eleventh* hour by Sting’s What Could Have Been feat. Ray Chen then LAY’s Flying Apsaras 🙌🏻)⁣
⁣
🎬 TV show of the year: Dickinson (podium positions also to Arcane, We Are Lady Parts, My Name, and It’s A Sin)⁣
⁣
RIP 2021 ✨⁣
⁣
“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.”⁣
— This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone⁣
⁣
#bookstagram

“There is no Frigate like a Book⁣ To take us L

“There is no Frigate like a Book⁣
To take us Lands away⁣
Nor any Coursers like a Page⁣
Of prancing Poetry –⁣
This Traverse may the poorest take⁣
Without oppress of Toll –⁣
How frugal is the Chariot⁣
That bears the Human Soul –“⁣
⁣
— Emily Dickinson 🐝🧜🏻‍♀️

Ahead of my Hogmanay shout-out into the void to so

Ahead of my Hogmanay shout-out into the void to some of my favourites of 2021… a shout-out into the void to some of my favourites of 2020, who went unshouted-out (unshout-outed?) last Hogmanay because, well, *gestures at everything*.⁣
⁣
The star feature is of course the virtuosic Poppy War saga, immortalising in the canon one of the most soul-shredding character arcs ever penned.⁣
⁣
That most trashfire of years also saw me finally get up to speed on Queen MM, on whom I’ve endlessly and unabashedly wept and raved elsewhere. In short: the woman owns me.⁣
⁣
As does Carrie Fisher, whose three memoirs, in a year of similarly eviscerating non-fiction, reached straight into the storm, gathered up every broken bleeding shard of me, and stolidly marched right back to the blazing brink of the hearth.⁣
⁣
Honourable mentions too to those god tier gems consumed via ebook and audiobook and thus not represented here: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab, Loveless by Alice Oseman, and a certain someone’s unpublished yet unforgettable contemporary YA fantasy fusing fiercely original magic with an effervescent found family and the most quirkily irreverent and irresistible humour (the world is not ready!!).⁣
⁣
🎶 Song of the year: Criminal, TAEMIN⁣
⁣
🎬 TV show of the year: The Haunting of Bly Manor (podium positions also to Hospital Playlist and Feel Good)⁣
⁣
RIP 2020 ✨⁣
⁣
“Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned grey and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”⁣
— Circe, Madeline Miller⁣
⁣
#bookstagram

“It is not simply a question of finding time to

“It is not simply a question of finding time to write—one also writes against time, knowing that life is short...that life is not promised—that it is crucial for a writer to respect time.”⁣
⁣
— bell hooks

Load More... Follow on Instagram

“For it would seem – her case proved it – that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”

— Copyright © 1928 Virginia Woolf from Orlando: A Biography

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.

Tags

A Song of Ice and Fire beowulf books censorship Chaucer China classics climate activism comics death by owls Dickensian Marathon Donna Tartt dragons drama fantasy film greek mythology history Homer journalism Kuang London magic memoirs Miller philosophy Plato Poetry politics Redwall Rembrandt Schwab scifi Shakespeare short stories superheroes The Secret History Travel Wales

“And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

— Copyright © 2014 Donna Tartt from The Goldfinch

morganicbooks

“For even as you have home-comings in your twili $“For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone” from On Houses by Kahlil Gibran is the epigraph to Wild Fires by Sophie Jai, which I completely devoured this weekend 🇹🇹🍁🔥⁣ ⁣ It’s a story of grief and family and history and how these fundamental threads of any single life and story tangle and tear — how secrets and silence fester, eroding the tapestry one strand at a time.⁣ ⁣ The narrative follows a Hindu Trinidadian family split at the seams when half of them emigrated to Toronto, and then later again when our narrator, Cassandra Mishra, moved to London to pursue her writing career, but the inciting incident that draws her back to Canada is the death of her enigmatic cousin Chevy, who was notorious for the legend he wove around his short, bright life.⁣ ⁣ Cas spends the book trying to piece together the puzzle of her past from the infrequently and torturously yet preciously imparted stories of her aunts, gradually building the jigsaw of the events that led to her cousin’s death almost four decades after his younger brother’s.⁣ ⁣ Sophie Jai stitches this bittersweet swatch together with the most lusciously sensory and evocative imagery, from lips pursed tight as if they were holding a face together like the knot of a balloon, to the balancing of a slice of cake on a saucer like a candle in a chamberstick lighting the way, to an apple core stuck to the sole of a shoe that trails in sleet like a snail.⁣ ⁣ At its own core, it’s an elegy to how families can fracture, and to just how much words matter, how ink can give but also take away, like blades slithering into the soil bound by your roots and slowly severing them forever — how such words can spread like the crackling of a quiet wildfire that turns all to ash and cinder.⁣ ⁣ It’s exquisite — and it’s out next month.⁣ ⁣ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⁣ ⁣ #bookstagram #wildfires #sophiejai$

“You ever read a book so good it makes you want

“You ever read a book so good it makes you want to lie face down on the floor to process”

— Roseanne A. Brown

As someone who grew up constantly cosplaying Heste

As someone who grew up constantly cosplaying Hester Shaw and Anna Fang from Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series in sun-drenched summer holidays with scarves and sticks standing in for steampunk masks and swords, I knew I was going to, at the very least, adore Rebel Skies by Ann Sei Lin…⁣
⁣
My jaw dropped on page 13. By page 339, it cemented itself as one of my favourite fantasy worlds just about ever feat. cloud whales and sky castles and sentient origami monsters from tortoises that can crush villages to dragons that can swallow ships…⁣
⁣
Books like these send me again and again back to one of my favourite lines of literature ever penned, from The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot:⁣
⁣
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it” ✨⁣
⁣
#bookstagram #rebelskies #annseilin

“Words lead to things” — Mary Annaïse Heg

“Words lead to things”

— Mary Annaïse Heglar

Two months since first binge of this witchy tome 🔮⁣
⁣
Still thinking about the ending.⁣
⁣
💙💖🤍⁣
⁣
#bookstagram #hermajestysroyalcoven #junodawson

“Fantasy isn’t the absence of political and ph

“Fantasy isn’t the absence of political and philosophical examination, but dissection in the guise of escape.”
— VE Schwab

“History has failed us, but no matter.” 🌊🍊⁣
⁣
This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read (also featuring one of the top 3 most viscerally devastating twists I’ve ever read… as in threw-the-book-across-the-room-and-stormed-out-into-the-rain-to-howl-at-the-sky twists)…⁣
⁣
It’s been my constant companion these past few weeks, a tempestuous saga following the story of four generations of one Korean family from their origins in an island fishing community off the coast of Busan at the dawn of the 20th century all the way through WWII and then the Korean War and then the Cold War up until their struggles to survive in 1980s Japan against extreme racist discrimination.⁣
⁣
It opens with a Dickens epigraph, who becomes a recurring anchor and motif for a certain character and all he contends with throughout the story: “Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration”. And this is perhaps the central locus of the book, the question of where and/or what home is. In the great game of life, what does home *mean*… what — and where — is it? Where does it reside? For me the final answer that scorches its closing pages is: hope. Life is, at its blazing core, hope. Against all odds. In the face of the most horrific sorrows. To live is to hope.⁣
⁣
In the biblically epic battle amidst the ravages of war and oppression with shame and duty and desire and faith and forgiveness and failure and suffering and salvation through labour, it seems everything is a game of pachinko. Life, love, prosperity, motherhood… with few winners, and far more losers.⁣
⁣
And yet—⁣
And yet—⁣
And yet—⁣
⁣
Hope.⁣
⁣
It’s still sodding there, stubbornly clinging on, sprinting at the tsunami with an umbrella because you’ll always, always believe you’re going to win.⁣
⁣
And what could be more human than that?⁣
⁣
“Beyond the dailiness, there had been moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too, even in this ajumma’s life. Even if no one knew, it was true.”⁣
⁣
#bookstagram #pachinko #minjinlee

“Books aren’t just commodities; the profit mot

“Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”⁣
⁣
— Ursula K. Le Guin, from her 2014 speech accepting The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

So… on quite literally Day 1 of 2022… I found

So… on quite literally Day 1 of 2022… I found out a 2000-word short story I wrote over the course of a few feverish nights in November was selected by one of my favourite writers on Earth to win a $20,000 literary prize…

Still trying to understand how such a sentence could possibly be true.

It’s available to read free at elegantliterature.com along with 9 other international English-language fiction pieces written in response to the prompt: Dark Descent. I printed out Max Gladstone’s concluding commentary (which follows my story in the digital magazine itself) for the photograph above as one of many so far failed attempts I’ve made this past week to try and process the fact that he not only read it? But deemed it of sufficient merit to actually select it as the winner?? And that he wrote this??? In response to it???? Just… referencing a couple of my metaphors… and comparing it to “the finest sense-of-wonder fiction”?????

I will also — in what will undoubtedly be one of the most surreal moments of my existence thus far — be having a video call with him next week, in which he’ll… like… interview me about it? Which will then go on YouTube??

No but literally *what* is happening…

$20,000????????

MAX GLADSTONE?????????

NO ONE WAKE ME PLEASE.

But but but.

Should time’s winged chariot catch up before I’ve shared any other words with the world, it suddenly won’t matter as much, because these ones are out there.

In classic form, I also wrote a 6,500-word version which completes what I’d originally envisioned as the narrative arc after seeing MAX GLADSTONE tweet about judging the inaugural prize (this was the second one), then reading the prompt, coming up with a thing (most self-indulgent soul-baring sanity-restoring thing I’ve ever written), and deciding to use it as a Christmas/Hogmanay present for family. Might pop it on my blog at some point when the 2 months of digital exclusivity for the short version are up if I’m feeling unhinged enough…

Anyway, back to the fever dream.

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”⁣
⁣
— Mary Oliver

“It is better to burn than to disappear.”⁣
— The Outsider, Albert Camus 🔥⁣
⁣
Respect and salutations to @roselianamorgan’s favourite reads of 2021.⁣
⁣
✨The taste✨⁣
⁣
Still battling it out over the 2020 list though, which seems fitting.⁣
⁣
“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”⁣
— The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway 🌊⁣
⁣
#bookstagram

“And just as music is the space between notes, j

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky – so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all. Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”⁣
⁣
— The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt 🍂✨

Happy Hogmanay 🎆🥂⁣ ⁣ A digital raindrop-

Happy Hogmanay 🎆🥂⁣
⁣
A digital raindrop-in-the-ocean love letter to my favourites of 2021…⁣
⁣
Time War will forever be scribbled all over my psyche, as will many of the short stories in Ken Liu’s peerless collection The Paper Menagerie, from souls disembodied as cigarette boxes and ice cubes to metallic centaurs and vast solar sail arks soaring through interstellar space…⁣
⁣
The Vanishing Half also caught me totally by surprise, one of the most universally lauded books of the past two years that somehow still concealed scintillating unseen depths.⁣
⁣
No surprises however from evergreen auto-buys Angie Thomas and Casey McQuiston, who were both as viscerally and spiritually healing as expected 🖤⁣
⁣
Honourable mentions again to those corkers consumed via ebook and audiobook and thus not represented here: A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi, The Gender Games by Juno Dawson, Black and British by David Olusoga, and A Life On Our Planet by David Attenborough.⁣
⁣
🎶 Song of the year: Bad Love, KEY (almost overtaken twice in the *eleventh* hour by Sting’s What Could Have Been feat. Ray Chen then LAY’s Flying Apsaras 🙌🏻)⁣
⁣
🎬 TV show of the year: Dickinson (podium positions also to Arcane, We Are Lady Parts, My Name, and It’s A Sin)⁣
⁣
RIP 2021 ✨⁣
⁣
“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.”⁣
— This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone⁣
⁣
#bookstagram

“There is no Frigate like a Book⁣ To take us L

“There is no Frigate like a Book⁣
To take us Lands away⁣
Nor any Coursers like a Page⁣
Of prancing Poetry –⁣
This Traverse may the poorest take⁣
Without oppress of Toll –⁣
How frugal is the Chariot⁣
That bears the Human Soul –“⁣
⁣
— Emily Dickinson 🐝🧜🏻‍♀️

Ahead of my Hogmanay shout-out into the void to so

Ahead of my Hogmanay shout-out into the void to some of my favourites of 2021… a shout-out into the void to some of my favourites of 2020, who went unshouted-out (unshout-outed?) last Hogmanay because, well, *gestures at everything*.⁣
⁣
The star feature is of course the virtuosic Poppy War saga, immortalising in the canon one of the most soul-shredding character arcs ever penned.⁣
⁣
That most trashfire of years also saw me finally get up to speed on Queen MM, on whom I’ve endlessly and unabashedly wept and raved elsewhere. In short: the woman owns me.⁣
⁣
As does Carrie Fisher, whose three memoirs, in a year of similarly eviscerating non-fiction, reached straight into the storm, gathered up every broken bleeding shard of me, and stolidly marched right back to the blazing brink of the hearth.⁣
⁣
Honourable mentions too to those god tier gems consumed via ebook and audiobook and thus not represented here: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab, Loveless by Alice Oseman, and a certain someone’s unpublished yet unforgettable contemporary YA fantasy fusing fiercely original magic with an effervescent found family and the most quirkily irreverent and irresistible humour (the world is not ready!!).⁣
⁣
🎶 Song of the year: Criminal, TAEMIN⁣
⁣
🎬 TV show of the year: The Haunting of Bly Manor (podium positions also to Hospital Playlist and Feel Good)⁣
⁣
RIP 2020 ✨⁣
⁣
“Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned grey and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”⁣
— Circe, Madeline Miller⁣
⁣
#bookstagram

“It is not simply a question of finding time to

“It is not simply a question of finding time to write—one also writes against time, knowing that life is short...that life is not promised—that it is crucial for a writer to respect time.”⁣
⁣
— bell hooks

Load More... Follow on Instagram

Search

Search for:

“Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

— Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin from her acceptance speech for The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

Recent posts:

“That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love”: Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’
Be The Rain: C.L. Clark’s ‘The Unbroken’
Evanishing Amid the Storm
To Live Is To Hope: Min Jin Lee’s ‘Pachinko’
“Like there are infinite possibilities out there and I could be part of any one of them”: Dr Becky Smethurst’s ‘Space | 10 Things You Should Know’

“I don’t know you, but I wish I did; I wish I could tell you how much I love you, love your eyes for reading this, love your hands for holding my words. I wish I could tell you in a way you would understand that so long as you read this, the world is not so terrible a place; that so long as we speak to each other, so long as there is love in the movement of a pen over paper and love in the movement of eyes over words, we will be all right, we will know each other, we will learn each other like songs.”

— Copyright © 2015 Amal El-Mohtar from her short story Pockets, published in Issue #2 of Uncanny Magazine

© 2024 Morganic Books | Powered by Outstandingthemes