nitroglycerin's Reviews (952)

Should be called “in defence of grouse/pheasant shooting”.
Misleading title. Very disappointed. Read Guy Shrubsoles Lie of the Land instead. 

A worthy follow up to Who Owns England, Shrubsole takes is through the fallacy of landowners being benevolent custodians of the land, doing what’s right for it. 

Instead Shrubsole shows us how landowners damage, burn, poison and exploit the land they claim to care for, and how politicians and policy have let it get this way. 

But not to be completely out of hope, Shrubsole also introduces us to people who take caring for the land into their own hands, ownership be damned. 

This will be incredibly eye opening to a lot of people who don’t exist in a similar social media ecosystem so myself, where a lot of this is shared and discussed openly. I did still learn a lot from it though, and will no doubt want to reread (or listen) to this again in the future. It will definitely be added to my must read list for anyone who cares for the more political side of how land ownership needs overhauling. 

Guy Shrubsole is a rock star 🤘🏻 

A nature themes memoir is usually my favourite kind of nature book, but I am devastated to say that I didn’t love this. I’m not even sure if I liked it. 

Dochartaigh writes beautifully, of that there is no doubt, and I still intend to read her earlier book, Thin Places, but beautiful writing isn’t enough to sustain a xxx page book about yearning for motherhood when it’s an urge I have not got. 

This is also a “covid” book. A book set chronologically through 2020 and I feel I have read SO many of these now that it’s hard to offer something new. It was a huge thing we all lived through, and everyone’s experience is different. I’m sure there were struggles for Kerri and her partner, but I personally am fed up of reading stories about people privileged enough to have been holed up in the countryside, surrounded by nature and wonder, while I worked daily and the only perk was no traffic on my commute. That sounds bitter in, but unless your 2020 story has something new to offer over the other dozen or so 2020 books then I have little patience for it. 

I can already tell this isn’t a book for me. The writing just screams pretentious male ego to me (intentional or not, it’s not what I like to read). I already hate Campbell. So glad I borrows this from the library and didn’t buy it. 

At this point, I’ve read so many Japanese (and Korean, and even a German) Healing Fiction books that it takes quite a bit to win me over fully now. The Convenience Store by the Sea won me though.

Tenderness, the convenience store at the base of the Golden Villa complex, a living arrangement for retirees that has meeting rooms and dining areas, is open 24/7 and staffed with manager Shibo, and several part timers who provide top notch customer service. The book is full of quirky characters- the type of thing I love in slice of life anime and manga and worked well in this book.

Structurally this is a collection of interconnected short stories which solve a conundrum (like many books in the genre). This is handled well and my favourite two are probably Strawberry Parfait: a young girl learning to leave a toxic friendship, finding her worth, and new friends, and A Soft Egg Porridge for a Hard Old Man: an elderly retiree leaning who to be… retired, while making friends with one of the neighbourhood children. You all know I love old men and children as friends. I blame Disneys Up. 

Overall this is one of the better of the genre that I’ve read this year. I would recommend this to people who love this genre but are, like me, finding it oversaturated and not sure which are worth it. 

Not going to read but own on kobo so marking as DNF - author is a TERF and this is white feminism. Not going to even bother reading it.