Wow, this was really good.

A brave and honest portrait of living with a mental illness and how that intersects with being an artist and being creative.

Great art that can really capture a mood and gives you lots of stuff to think about. And despite the subject matter this is very readable and even funny.

Highly recommended.

This is a collection of Jansson's semi-autobiographical prose. I wanted to like this, because Moomins, but I just didn't get on with her authorial voice, at least as translated here. I'm not sure I can articulate my reasons any more than that.

I used to be very into ballet stories, not so much because I was keen on ballet, but because they tended to be about people knowing what they wanted, and getting it. Though this is a true story, it's no exception. Firstly, it's about Jin Xing's ambition to be China's greatest dancer. Secondly, it's about her identity as, and journey to become, a ( Read more... )

The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic - Lucy Jane Bledsoe:The crew here at South Pole Station has a somewhat tense relationship with the handful of expeditions that come through each year. There are no spare beds and little extra food. Usually the United States Antarctic Program makes them stay in their own tents but ( Read more... )

If you've seen "Cabaret" then you're familiar (at a remove) with the work of novelist Christopher Isherwood, who documented the doings of interwar Berlin in Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to BerlinThis novel, an autobiography so thinly disguised that the narrator is also named Christopher Isherwood, closes just on the eve of his departure for ( Read more... )

Ethel Smyth is probably one of the most important female composers of whom you've never heard. Born in 1858 to a middle-class English family, she had to fight against strong parental opposition to be allowed to go to Leipzig to study composing. She wrote six operas, a mass, and many chamber works. As well as her involvement in music, she was active ( Read more... )