Authors Electric

                                                  Reading Reviews for Online Living                                                 Since the pandemic I have noticed something interesting that has emerged online connected with books. Several dedicated readers have been reviewing books sent to them by publishers and posting the reviews for their followers to beg, borrow, or buy in order to read. These reviewers have a variety of handles: There is  Findingtimetowrite , by Marina Sofia. This deals mainly with books in translation which she publishes;  Adventures in reading, running and working from home  by Liz Dexter who likes non-fiction and who has commented on my own and others’ Authors Electric posts;  Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramb...

"A Day in the Life"*   The Black Dog lurks, what am I to write about this month?  Friday was bad but today is better. Tuesday is usually my favourite day and Thursday can be good, with the poetry group later after the washing and shopping is finished. Thursday then - today. It's not a good drying day - much too cold and misty. A bit of tumble drying - hang the expense. I’ll put the shirts on the chairs around the table; the duvet cover always does well over the bannister. The supermarket won’t be busy until later and there is always coffee to look forward to.   You can have too much of that. This morning after collecting my new glasses I go into Costa. A long queue, probably because the rival shop is closed. Not that I mind too much. It is often full of dogs and crying children there, and the staff are constantly changing. Eventually I am served. There are no empty tables. I pick up a full tray of dishes from one of them and carry it around for a bit, searching, but there...

Macbeth: unlikely to turn readers into mass murderers Today’s post may well raise a few eyebrows, coming as it does from a keen fiction writer and reader. Because I want to talk about something that’s increasingly been bothering me: the power of fiction to corrupt.  I don’t mean that reading Macbeth might turn you into a mass murderer; nor am I talking about mingling fiction with history to make a better story (eg Netflix’s The Crown )  –  though that habit is problematic in the way it plants events in the public’s unconscious that never took place.  What’s got me going is a superb series on BBC 4 called Wild Brazil . The programmes are beautifully made, with extraordinary photography, closely following animal activity in the stunning Pantanal and wild mountain regions of Brazil, focussing on three species in particular: giant otters, coatis and capuchin monkeys. Giant otters  So what’s my problem?  Here’s a clue: the BBC website describes the series as ‘an...

Because it was on display for such a short time, on a picture-postcard Spring day I went to Trafalgar Square to see the Palmyra arch. I haven't posted an image, partly because there are so many online, but also because it would have been spoilt by so many people posing for selfies. The replica looked so startlingly new, but then as a colleague on Facebook so  wisely pointed out, that's how it would have looked when it was first built, only then it wouldn't have had the small missing bit at the top. I was surprised to find it so apparently, unprotected and open to the public, although there were one or two 'heavies' walking around. Curious about Digital Archeology, I walked over to the information centres and had a look around. Apart from the technical stuff (which was fascinating - the amount of work that went into this project was phenomenal), there were two stacks of cards. On one, you could write a general message of peace etc in Syria; on the other, you coul...

At the end of last year, a birthday gift – the DVD of “Roman Polanski’s Film of MACBETH”, as the cover has it. There, too, on the cover, a robed, crowned, bearded and enthroned Martin Shaw, holding what could be a shield, or a mirror, or a scrying glass, turned outwards and away from  himself. Of course, in the film, Martin Shaw plays Banquo, not Macbeth. I assumed that Shaw was on the cover because his fame nowadays is greater than that of the late Jon Finch, who did play Macbeth in this film, and that this was an attempt to shift DVD copies to Shaw fans. Google suggests otherwise, though, with the consensus seeming to be that the company which produced the DVD had mistaken Shaw for Finch/Macbeth, and put him on the cover by accident, lifting the first still image they found on a scan, of an actor wearing a crown in the film. I watched the DVD just after Christmas, with the friend who had bought me it. We watched it in Inverness where it seems the real h...