craig robert martin

Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars In the introduction to the collection, Timothy Webb writes that ' Yeats maintained that poetry should be a revelation of hidden life' (and not a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold felt). There is certainly a lot of revelation. Yeats wipes the layers of dust off mythology and Irish history and opens a box hidden in plain sight. I started the collection after a journey from Dublin to Belfast, and slowly dipped into its pages over a couple of months. Some of the poems remain a mystery, with references to names and places familiar to the poet, but not to the reader, and others echo history that is painful to many after more than four centuries in Ireland. My absolute favourite is 'Stolen Child' , but the haunting verses were already imprinted on my memory. In 1998, at the university halls of residence (Derwent D Block), Rachel, Neil, James, Ray, and I would cook Sunday lunch in a Baby...

Selected Poems by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

The Outsider by Albert Camus My rating: 5 of 5 stars 'My Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know.' Short, dispassionate first-person sentences take us straight into the detached mind of the protagonist, Mersault. He’s not quite all there, something like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, but without the warmth. A blank page of a man. His subsequent trial, ostensibly about a murder, is really about his emotional flatness and his failure to grieve his mother. Morality, it seems, is more about appearances than acts. As with much of the Algiers of Camus' novels, the heat is relentless. Not just the sun, but the pressure. He seems dazed by it, like a man in a desert. And yet, no one else really sweats it. Unlike The Plague or The Myth of Sisyphus, where the whole town bakes, this is solitary heat. Internal, almost metaphysical. In modern psychiatric terms, you’d wonder about affective disorders or dissociation: impairment of social re...

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews

Always carry a book, don’t look so stupid As a student, I read voraciously. I joined a mail-order book club. I wandered lonely as a cloud among the University library shelves. I started at the Gs. Graham Greene and Günter Grass. I skipped the H’s and worked through Ishiguro and James Joyce. Garrison Keillor, CS Lewis, Vargas Llosa, and then the Ms. I stayed with the Ms for a long time, savouring Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I shared a house with two English Majors, and even cut some classes on opto-electronics to sit on tutorials about magical realism in Latin American literature.   I travelled for a year around Asia when I was 22, trading books in every bookstore on the backpackers' trail from India to Indonesia. Joyce’s Ulysses swapped in Jogyakarta for several Julian Barnes after friendly negotiations - not on the quality of writing but the sheer size of the book. I finished up with Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy when I arrived in Cambodia in early 1993. I relished the Nimbu Pani in Ca...

The Outsider by Albert Camus My rating: 5 of 5 stars <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18214704-the-outsider" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Outsider" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543535274l/18214704._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18214704-the-outsider">The Outsider</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/957894.Albert_Camus">Albert Camus</a><br/> My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7796587139">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /> <i>'My Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know.'</i><br /><br />Short, dispassionate first-person sentences take us straight into the detached mind of the protagonist, Mersault. He’s ...