My thoughts about books, writing, life and so many other things….Judy Leigh/ Elena Collins.
So many crises have been screamed from newspaper headlines this summer. We’ve read about the post-Brexit panic and the disharmony in both major political parties as new leaders put themselves forward. Politicians have been maligned and rejected and new leaders have emerged. We’ve read about the queues at Calais, the dreadful attacks in Nice and …
Continue reading Happy September! Let’s bottle summer and keep it alive through the cold months
A writer never stops learning. I always feel that I have so much more to learn about the skill, the art, the craft of writing, and reading widely is always a good way to prompt thinking, learning and improving. I've just read three books, each good in its own right, each very different. Ian McEwan's …
Continue reading McEwan, Cannon, Kent: it’s all in the writing.
Mary and Max is a 2010 stop motion animated film by Adam Elliot. It is narrated by Barry Humphries: Mary is voiced by Toni Collette and Max is voiced by Philip Seymour-Hoffman. Mary is a young Australian girl with a distant, overworked father and a kleptomaniac, alcoholic mother. Mary is bullied at school and lonely. …
Continue reading ‘Mary and Max’ – ‘All humans are imperfect’
Have you ever seen a trailer for a film and thought 'This looks brilliant. I must watch it.' Then you watch it and all the best bits were in the trailer and the rest of the film is just not for you? That's Francis Ford Coppola's black and white film, 'Tetro'. It's quite an old film now …
Love the poem, love the man, love the film. 'Howl' is a 2015 film about the landmark obscenity trial in 1957, concerning 'Howl', Allen Ginsberg's signature poem. It features excerpts from the poem as we see beat poet Ginsberg reading his work to an adoring audience of famous writers such as Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. …
I read Game Girls by Judy Waite in two hours, trying to imagine myself as a fourteen year-old reader. I was lying in a hammock in the sunshine and there was nothing to disturb me but a few tweeting birds, yet I still managed to slip from my idyllic setting into the whirling world of …
Continue reading ‘Game Girls’: a tough tale for today’s young readers.
In the blurb on the back cover of The Fishermen, New York Times suggests that 'Chigozie Obioma truly is the heir to Chinua Achebe.' I read Things Fall Apart years ago and loved it: it was the archetypal 'modern' African novel and the title comes from a wonderful W. B. Yeats' poem The Second Coming. …
Continue reading ‘The Fishermen’: everything about Obioma’s novel is superb.
When it came out on DVD, I bought a copy of The Brothers Grimsby because the two main actors are both highly skilled. Mark Strong is a ubiquitous performer who has excelled in so many films, from Our Friends in the North to Sherlock Holmes, from Kingsmen to Anna Karenina and RocknRolla. He has been …
Continue reading The brothers Grimsby: definitely mad for it.
I'm still on my quest to read books by authors I wouldn't usually choose, looking at genres which are new to me, discovering what I can learn as a writer from them. I recently heard a keynote speech by Meg Rosoff at a writers' conference and I decided she clearly knows and can explain fluently …
Several years ago I saw Ralph Fiennes as Prospero in The Tempest. It was directed by Trevor Nunn, at the Theatre Royal, in 2011. Ralph, as in Salph and Sound, had only been on stage for twenty seconds. He hadn't spoken a word. He simply raised a digit slowly into the air and -pow! Thunder …
That quintessence of dust 