Michael J. Ritchie's Blog, page 24
July 10, 2020
“Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” by Douglas Adams (1987)
“This time there would be no witnesses.”
I’m an enormous fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. It’s probably the best series in the world about an Englishman travelling the universe in his dressing gown. Somehow, though, I had entirely bypassed Douglas Adams’s other series about holistic detective Dirk Gently. I did watch the Netflix series a couple of years ago which, it turns out, bears absolutely no relation to the novel, but I thought it was time to finally fall into a new worl...
July 4, 2020
“The Man Who Loved Books Too Much” by Allison Hoover Bartlett (2009)
“At one end of my desk sits a nearly four-hundred-year-old book cloaked in a tan linen sack and a good deal of mystery.”
If you are a book lover and ever find yourself in the vicinity of King’s Cross, London (assuming non-pandemic times), I urge you to drop into the British Library. The reading rooms and the knowledge you’re sharing space with every book ever published in the UK in the last few hundred years are enough, but there’s also the Treasures Room. Here you’ll find some truly remarkable ...
June 30, 2020
“The Library Of The Unwritten” by A. J. Hackwith (2020)
“Books ran when they grew restless, when they grew unruly, or when they grew real.”
Jorge Luis Borges once said, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”. I share in this hope. An eternal afterlife will only be tolerable if I’ve got access to everything ever written. For every book that has been written, however, there are dozens that have not. In this novel, we head down to the Library of Hell and explore the Unwritten Wing, where everything that was never written is sto...
June 25, 2020
“A Book Of Book Lists” by Alex Johnson (2017)
“This is a book of book lists.”
I never really understood that cliche of making a habit of looking in someone’s medicine cabinet when you first visit their house. What I do believe in studying, however, is people’s bookshelves. You can tell a lot about people by what books they own, and sometimes even more by how they’re arranged, how well-thumbed they are, and what sort of topics take centre stage. And as John Waters said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em...
June 23, 2020
“The Guest Cat” by Takashi Hiraide (2014)
“At first it looked like low-lying ribbons of clouds just floating there, but then the clouds would be blown a little bit to the right and next to the left.”
Being the biggest reader by far in my family, it is unusual to receive a recommendation from my sister about what to read. Nevertheless, she’s related to me, so her taste isn’t bad and when she does suggest something, I know she’s usually talking sense. This brings me to The Guest Cat, another journey into the weird and wonderful world of J...
June 16, 2020
“The QI Book Of The Dead” by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson (2009)
“The first thing that strikes you about the Dead is just how many of them there are.”
I love a bit of trivia, and lockdown has definitely been an opportunity to use that muscle with the amount of quizzes we’ve all been doing. This book has, somehow, been sat on my shelf since its publication but I’ve only just got around to it, maybe because it’s quite a big hardback and I’m not having to carry it around at the moment. Never mind, we got here at last – a series of short biographies about some of...
June 10, 2020
“Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race” by Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017)
“It wasn’t until my second year of university that I started to think about black British history.”
There are three non-fiction books that I think should be compulsory reading. The first is Sara Pascoe’s Animal. The second is Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive. This is the third.
In this pioneering book, journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge explores the history of British race relations and the racism inherent in every system of the country, also dealing with the intersectionality of it aligned with gender...
June 7, 2020
“The Future Of Another Timeline” by Annalee Newitz (2019)
“Drums beat in the distance like an amplified pulse.”
The global conversation is seemingly in unison right now. Everyone is either arguing that they should all have the same rights in whatever country they live in, or they’re somehow holding on to outdated, nasty and horrible views that suggest people should be treated differently based on something like race or gender. It staggers me that we still have men’s rights activists who apparently believe that treating women the same as them is somehow...
June 4, 2020
“Lord Edgware Dies” by Agatha Christie (1933)
“The memory of the public is short.”
What I find when it comes to re-reading all the Christie novels is that I often think I remember the solutions. Lord Edgware Dies, it turns out, I haven’t read since 2012, so it’s one of the handful that aren’t on the blog yet. I thought I remembered it really well, and was content to settle down and see how it was done, rather than worrying about who the killer was. Unfortunately, it turns out my memory was not quite as good as I thought it was.
After a nigh...
June 1, 2020
“Dream London” by Tony Ballantyne (2013)
“Crunch crunch crunch.”
Many of the world’s finest cities are built on grids: New York, Barcelona, San Francisco, Paris, parts of Edinburgh and much of Rome. London, however, is not quite like that. With so many dead ends, cut-throughs, alleys, curves and very little regulation regarding street naming, there’s a theory that it’s been built like that specifically to confuse tourists. Or maybe it’s just to slow down any army that returns to take its nations stuff back from the museums. Dream Londo...
