The Deceptagram

Charlotte Wood : Stone Yard Devotional

Stone Yard Devotional is the second book on the list for my self-appointed task of reading about women who step out of the mainstream of everyday life and choose to live simply and as self-sufficiently as possible.

Joan Barfoot : Gaining Ground

.Every now and then I like to set myself another reading project. I’ve had Great Works, Old Women, and now I’m embarking on a little journey into books written by women about women living alone in remote areas.  There are any number of books written about people taking to the simple life, leaving the everyday world, and living self-sufficiently.

My Father’s Guru : Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

 

Jeffrey Masson’s father’s guru PB Brunton, known in the family as PB, unlike Sri  Ramakrishna, was not given to ecstatic fits or animal possession. A small neat man with a pointed beard he inspired the devotion of Masson’s father Jacques and his uncle Bernard without performing any spectacular feats.

Helen Garner : The Children’s Bach

Well, which is it? In 1986 Don Anderson (Australian academic and critic) wrote, ‘There are four perfect short novels in the English language. They are Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Garner’s The Children’s Bach.’

Anthony McGowan: How To Teach Philosophy To Your Dog

We’re doing philosophy now, and that means following the argument wherever it leads, like that time you chased a rabbit and ended up with your head stuck in a hole.

Stately houses, goff and pterodactyls’ hooves

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re a schoolgirl in an English boarding school in the 1950’s.  You’re out walking in the woods and you run into an escapee from the Broadmoor Psychiatric hospital ten miles away.  What do you do?

Michel Tournier – Friday or the Other Island

 

I am happy to report I have read the third in my (self-imposed) Great Twentieth Century Writers task.  After reading two large philosophical tomes originally written in German, I now move on to a slender book originally written in French. But for all its seeming smallness and two-hundred-page length, this book required as much mental focus as its German predecessors. For Friday is a deeply philosophical book. A book about a man stripping away layers of personality and conditioning, in the most extreme fashion.

Kikuko Tsumura: There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job

Burned out from her previous job, our nameless narrator wants “a very uneventful job….Ideally there would be events of some kind from time to time, but nothing too sudden.”

A. N. Wilson – The Healing Art

A N Wilson is a tricky writer; one who publicly changes his views and who some regard as deliberately provocative and contrarian. He can be ruthless in his critiques of the works of other authors. Of Richard Adam’s Watership Down  he said, ‘I thought it was possibly the worst thing I had ever read.’ and of Bevis Hillier’s biography of John Betjeman, ‘a hopeless mishmash of a book.‘