2025 Books
- A Lesson in Violence – Jordan Harper - 7/10
- The Silverblood Promise – James Logan 9/10
- Exiles – Jane Harper 9/10
- Palace of Shadows – Ray Celestine 6/10
- The Wager – David Grann 8/10
- Grimdark Magazine Issue #40 – 6/10
- Grimdark Magazine Issue #41 – 6/10
- The Trials of Empire – Richard Swan – 7/10
- George Harrison - Philip Norman – 8/10
- Go to War: Football on the Brink in the 80s – Jon Spurling – 8/10
- Chasing the Light - Oliver Stone – 8/10
- The Narrows – Ronald Malfi – 7/10
- The Siege – BenMacintyre – 9/10
- The Devils – Joe Abercrombie – 9/10
- The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt – 8/10
- The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All – Josh Ritter – 7/10
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Josh Ritter is my favourite singer-songwriter of the past two decades, his songs unfolding like mini novels brought to life and set to music. So when I saw that his second book was available on Kindle, it seemed a good way to finish off the reading year.
The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All features Weldon Applegate, a 99-year-old former lumberjack dying in his hospital bed, who is telling us both the tale of his life and how he came to be in his current predicament.
Much of the story flashes back to when Weldon was a 13 year-old and inherited his father’s cursed lot, a treacherous forest in the cold, bleak north of Idaho, where many lumberjacks had perished. Despite the unwanted attention of famed lumberjack, Linden Laughlin, who seeks to force the boy off his land, Weldon is determined to make a success of his life by working the Lost Lot.
It's a well put together tale full that unspools much like one of Ritter’s epic songs, and you definitely feel the harsh reality of a lumberjack working out in a freezing forest in the 1930s.
