Category: Friday Finds

Friday Finds: Five Christmas Book recommendations

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Regular readers of the blog will know that I’ve written about Christmas a lot! I’ve shouted from the rooftops about my love for A Christmas Carol (more on that in a moment). I’ve delved into how Christmas was celebrated in 18th century Scotland. Today, I felt like recommending a couple of my favorite Christmas/winter books. These are books that talk about Christmas and/or the season and that I think would make great gifts.

You’ll probably be familiar with some, but I also tried to pick a few that were more off-the-beaten-track. As always, I hope you enjoy.

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Friday Finds: B Movies (Board game review!)

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Hello friends! It has been a minute. My last blog post was back in May and then life swept me up like a giant pterodactyl and deposited me – somehow – at the end of August. Where did the time go? Well, I was teaching a creative writing (fiction and poetry) class this summer at the University of Edinburgh AND finishing the edits on a new book AND hosting friends AND traveling in Sweden AND interviewing and landing a new job (!) which I’ll tell you more about soon. Phew. All of this to say: thank you for your patience during this crazy time. More Madeira Mondays will be back (the first Monday of each month), with a few ‘Friday Finds’ sprinkled in there too.

And this ‘Friday Finds’ is an exciting one for me because it’s a first: my first board game review!

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Friday Finds: The Poetry of Sappho

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Here in garlands, goddess of love, as a sign

to our own festivities, with a graceful hand

in golden cups pour nectar out like wine.

from Sappho: Songs and Poems, translated from the Greek by Chris Preddle

I must admit: I don’t know much about antiquity. Frequent readers of this blog will know that I’m interested in 18th and 19th century history which – believe it or not – is fairly recent (when we take into account all of human history). But what I do know is that there were many complex and vibrant civilizations long before our own and we can still feel their influence today in our beliefs, our values and our art. And how cool is it that one of the most famous and lasting poets in all of Western literature was a woman?

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Friday Finds: Beyond Time, Classic Tales of Time Unwound (Book Review)

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‘I, Doctor Michael Claybridge, living in the year 1926, have listened to the description of the end of the world from the lips of a man who witnessed it; the last man of the human race. That this is possible, or that I am not insane, I cannot ask you to believe: I can only offer you the facts.’ – from ‘Omega‘, Amelia Reynolds Long

The fact that we cannot see the future is perhaps a very good thing. But it means that we sometimes find ourselves in surprising positions, doing things we never would have expected. For example, just a few short years ago, if you’d asked me if I enjoyed science fiction, I would probably have said ‘meh, not really.’ But I find myself currently on a writing residency working on a collection of, as I’m calling it, ‘science fiction poetry’ about cosmic wormholes, and reading books about astrophysics, and Einstein, and time travel.

One of the more interesting fiction books I’ve read during this period was called: Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound, edited by Mike Ashley.

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Friday Finds: Tom Cruise interviews an astronaut

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Nothing is more important than what you are doing right now. – NASA Astronaut Victor Glover

I’ve been listening to Houston, We Have a Podcast (the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center) since it’s very first episode. I think that was back in 2017. I remember it was in the midst of my PhD. I was delighted to discover it, because I’ve always loved space stuff. I remember reading books about the planet Venus on the playground. (Yup, I was a very cool kid.) Houston, We Had a Podcast was such a brilliant find during a stressful time and I’ve kept listening for all these years as they invite on NASA people (scientists, engineers, astronauts) to talk about space flight.

I wanted to share with you a great episode I listened to recently…featuring (randomly) Tom Cruise.

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Madeira Mondays: Last Dance on the Starlight Pier by Sarah Bird (Book Review)

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The only thing I knew about ‘dance marathons‘, prior to reading Sarah Bird’s new novel, was that Lorelai and Rory took part in one during that episode of Gilmore Girls. Turns out, they were all the rage in the 1930’s during the depression in the USA. It was a time when people were down on their luck and wanted something to root for, someone to cheer for, and ultimately something loud, ridiculous, chaotic and fun to distract them from their troubles.

This is the world that Bird’s heroine – Evie Grace – finds herself swept up in. Although Evie dreams of becoming a nurse, when her previous life in vaudeville catches up with her, it’s through dance marathons that she finds a glimmer of hope to regain the future that she lost. This book was fun, picaresque and full of adventure in a way that perfectly suits this glitzy, turbulent time period.

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Friday Finds: I May Destroy You (2020)

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I’ve been meaning to write about ‘I May Destroy You’ for a long time. Actually, it was one of the reasons that I wanted to start this ‘Friday Finds’ series at all. When I watched it last year, based on the recommendation of a good friend, I really wanted to write about it on my blog. But at the time I was writing almost exclusively ‘Madeira Mondays’/historical focused content, so it didn’t feel like I could. But even after I introduced ‘Friday Finds’, it slipped my mind for a while, only to renter it when I was reading about all of the drama surrounding the Golden Globes, and how shows like Emily in Paris received recognition when I May Destroy You (a critical darling, at least in the UK) did not, back in 2020. Anyways: let me tell you about I May Destroy You, which, if you’ve not seen it already, is a really excellent and thought provoking show!

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Friday Finds: Don’t Look Up (2022) film review

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I was on the fence about whether or not I wanted to talk about this film. I hesitated because I like to use these ‘Friday Finds’ posts usually to showcase things that you might not have come across. I’m definitely not opposed to talking about big budget Hollywood movies or famous books (regular readers will know that I definitely have in the past!), but I like to shine a light on worthy, slightly lesser known things whenever possible. That’s what the ‘finds’ in ‘Friday Finds’ is all about: finding cool things that are maybe slightly under the radar. And a film with Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence could never be described as ‘under the radar’. (Apparently it’s also the second most-watched Netflix film in the company’s history!) That being said, this film has been running through my mind a lot recently because it left me with such mixed feelings. And I’d really like to talk about it!

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Friday Finds: The best adaptation of A Christmas Carol?

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My favorite book is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I wrote about how much I love this book in a post last year. Those of you who have been reading the blog for that long (thanks!) might recall it! This year, I was chatting with my friend Cameo about Dickens and all of the many film adaptations of A Christmas Carol. She suggested I watch a few film versions and give a verdict on which one was the ‘best’. I thought it was a great idea. So for this, the last ‘Friday Finds’ of the year, that’s exactly what I’ve done.

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Friday Finds: Revisiting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

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I am part of the generation that ‘grew up’ with the Harry Potter books. I was roughly the same age as the characters as all of the books came out and remember vividly waiting for the final installments to figure out what happened next. And while the series never meant as much to me as it did to some of my friends (it was a formative series for many people my age), I did really enjoy the books. For years I’ve been curious to revisit them as an adult. I finally took the opportunity and, before embarking on a transatlantic flight, I downloaded a Harry Potter audiobook from the library. I chose the one that I remembered as being my favorite in the series: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. After twelve hours of listening to it on planes, trains and automobiles, in airports and coffeeshops, I can say that it was, frankly, pretty incredible and much better than I even expected.

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