Book Recommendations -- MouthoftheMersey

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I'd like to offer four book recommendations to the discerning readership here.

1. The Borribles Trilogy - I've read these once to myself and once to my elder boy and no praise is too high. After a slightly laboured first fifty pages, the trilogy expands into the best evocation of urban life I can recall reading. It is everything The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books aren't, with the wikipedia article providing an excellent introduction.

2. The Damned United - believe the hype. A dizzying re-animation of the Brian Cloughs now enshrined in English folklore. But it's the writing that really makes this book stand out from the pack - a worrying, disorienting voice that gets into your head and stays there long after you turn the last page. In some respects it is like Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers, the sordid subject matter of which does not detract from the literary achievement.

3. The Indian Mutiny by Saul David. - I loved this wonderfully evocative history of what Indians call the First War of Independence. Its politics is worn lightly, playing second fiddle to unwrapping the ties that bound the British to the Indians and why they snapped where and when they did. I came to it through my favourite Flashman novel - Flashman in the Great Game. Now if you're prepared to leave a little of your political correctness to one side and embrace humanity in all its faults, the Flashman novels are a delight - but they won't be to all tastes.

4. Peanuts - Hard to believe that something so simple and so popular can be so rewarding. I've read this collection aloud to both my kids and had them read back in return and we pick up stuff in libraries from time to time. There's real anguish and poignancy in the strips and, in Snoopy, an extraordinary character on whom Charles Schulz projected so many hopes and fears.


All will be available for er... peanuts second-hand from Amazon, or you could support your local book shop.
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Double-bills Should Return to the Cinema: Discuss -- by MouthoftheMersey

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Cinemas have never been more comfortable – big seats that wouldn’t shame the first class section of a jumbo jet, air conditioning and even a holder for your packet of popcorn. So why are we only allowed to sit in such opulence for two hours or so, meaning that a night out needs a lengthy prelude or long post-cinema spell in a restaurant or pub?

Money, of course, since the reason cinemas are able to supply such comfort is the throughput of punters from mid-morning to very late, each handing over £7 or so.

But the cinema is in competition with DVDs and movies on-demand, so must always provide a premium product - there is no room for apathy.

When I first went to the cinema, it really was a night out with a second feature at 7.20pm, Pearl and Dean and Kia Ora at 9.00pm and the main feature at 9.15pm, giving just enough time for a quick drink before last orders.




And what second features they were. A Roger Moore era Bond might be supported by a Connery outing, hollowed-out volcano and all. A standard Hollywood buddy comedy starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte might be supported by a film of Eddie or Richard doing stand-up – what a shock to the system that was! Or a Hollywood horror might be supported by a low budget Italian zombie fest with a visual and spoken language all of its own.

I miss those long afternoons and evenings in the dark watching two movies in the collective concentration a cinema audience provides – one so absent from the living room “Love Film” DVD evening in, before switching to Desperate Housewives. It was an education and a pleasure now gone forever.

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10 or Less: Supercat -- by Mouth of the Mersey

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i-ku by MouthoftheMersey

50 word story -- by Mouth of the Mersey

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I look into his eyes, and I see my own. I watch his walk, and I see my own. I note the successes and the failures, for they are my own. I remember the father, for he was my own. I wonder at the son, for he is my own.

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