Reviews and Comments

This one has been on my list for a long time. A friend gave me a book token in exchange for some help and I picked this up as one of my gift books.

Max Porter has a truly unique and fascinating process of storytelling. His debut Grief is The Thing With Feathers is one of my highlights of recent years, and this follow-up is just as strong, bleak, compelling and engrossing. It centres on a boy called Lanny, who is not really like other boys, and who begins to learn art from a local artist who himself is a misfit character.

The premise remains narrow, yet Porter's incredible ability to bring flat characters to life is astounding. The green man, a mythical figure, oversees the adventure, and becomes central to it in a hypnotic and dreamlike section near the end. Every page drips with poetry, with each character made flesh through the skill and ability of Porter. A brilliant book, and it is exciting to have a writer like this making work today.

Sofi Thanhauser's deeply researched book Worn explores the contemporary textile industry and how it generates waste, damages societies, and exploits people. While this might come as no fresh news to most people, what Thanhauser has managed here is to compile a deep research project in one place that gives a clear view of the depth of the problem. From histories to contemporary views, each chapter considers a different textile or industry.

It also ends on a hopeful note, with a section on wool and the possibilities for that material's resurgence. Finishing at the wool festival in the UK, woolfest, the book that begins with the industrialisation of linen ends with the handcrafting practices of wool with a view to how things can be done differently.

Peter Wohlleben is an ex-forester who writes beautifully about trees. His first book, 'The Hidden Life of Trees', was a magnificent exploration of what it meant to give up his social biases formed in his years of forestry. This book feels like the same story, but told with a less deft hand. It explores tree reactivity and social resilience to disease, and gives some interesting examples of how trees learn together to withstand sudden climactic shifts, for example by conserving water or food, but ultimately it feels like the same book again, with a little less impact.

Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works considers infrastructure like water, electricity and internet from many angles, taking a critical feminist approach to services often rendered invisible to us unless they stop working. Beginning from a perspective of infrastructure as a social good and a care role, Chachra introduces an interesting angle that draws from her work as an engineer and her upbringing in Canada as the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Entangled within this are anecdotes about how infrastructures were built, and how they are often socially maintained. The perspective reads almost like social philosophy that takes a well considered perspective pushing against accepted political norms, and it is great for this. The conclusion and some of the chapters drag out a little in the writing, but that doesn't take much from the magnificent argumentation.

Randomly borrowed this book of poetry from the library because of the title.

Gifted to us by some friends visiting from Cork last year and just started reading it.

I am a fan of the editors of this book, and ordered a copy as soon as it came out (over a year ago!). I'm only now getting a chance to read it.

This came in the post as a gift from a colleague after they had visited my art studio. The accompanying note suggested I might find some common ground in Anna Chapman Parker's work.

One that has been on my list for a while so I got it from the library.

I loved Porter's first book and my partner found this in a second hand shop.

I'm doing a project on lace, and my partner recommended this book for some useful information on the post-industrial use of textile.

I came across this in a couple of places at the same time. I liked the synchronicity so borrowed it from the library on a whim.