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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Fifty - Love, Magic, Power, Danger, Bliss, Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora. By Paul Morley. "During the war, she said, there weren't many beautiful things in her life, and the sky became entertainment, art, inspiration, hope, endlessly renewing itself."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Nine - Crazy Genie, Ines Cagnati. "There were also times when she would bend down to me, wipe my face, carry me in her arms. Then I would put my head in the warmth of her neck and cry. Sometimes she would say: "Don't cry." Most often, she said nothing."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Eight - You Dreamed of Empires, Alvaro Enrigue. "The afternoon of the eighth of November 1519, Moctezuma did exactly what he always did after eating, even if the whole world might change forever from the moment he woke up."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Seven - Lori & Joe, Amy Arnold. "He's dead. He's dead up there on our bed, Lori thinks, and she waits to see if she feels anything, something, and well, she doesn't."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Six - Still in a Dream, Simon Reynolds. "It was the most exciting time of my life, the late 1980s and the early 1990s"

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Five - Said the Dead, Doireann Ni Ghriofa. "A knock in the night. Roused from sleep, vision still blurry, I took her in. Dark eyes, dark hood, muddy boots. Rubbed my eyes. Led her to the room." ... And then she spoke."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Four - The Image of Her, Simone de Beauvoir. "Laurence brushes her hair, touches up her face. For me, the die is cast, she thinks, looking at her image in the mirror. She looks pale, drawn. But the girls will have a chance. A chance to do what? She doesn't even know."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Three - Dooneen, Keith Ridgway. "I miss you more and more. That's how it works. That's the direction time travels. We all are older ... Maybe you are grey now. Maybe you have lost and eye. Maybe your memory of me is fading. Maybe you are dead. Maybe I am."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-Two - Angels, Denis Johnson. "She fed Baby Ellen her orange juice and watched the sun as it moved into prominence above the dead cornfields in Indiana, the light striking her face painfully as it ticked over frozen pools and the rows of broken stalks glazed with ice."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty-One - Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, Emily Wilson. "As our world changes, we begin to see new shapes in the ever-shifting and murky waters of the past."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Forty - The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill. "We may be too conditioned by the way the world has been for the last three hundred years to be fair to those in the seventeenth century who saw other possibilities. But we should try."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirty-Nine - Now I Surrender, Alvaro Enrigue. ""Once I moved like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all." ... Saying that is all is to say: My silence is your curse and that will be all. America, America, that is all.”

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirty-Eight - Outline, Rachel Tusk. "I don't know who you are, she said to me, getting to her feet and collecting her things, but I'll tell you one thing, you're a lousy teacher."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

BOKS Six -Hundred and Thirty-Seven - The Empusium, Olga Tokarczuk. "Pale eyes, eyebrows and eyelashes make this face look unhealthy. Against the deep red of western sky the whole figure gives the unsettling impression of having arrived here, in these melancholy mountains, from the world beyond."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

BOKS Six-hundred and Thirty-Six - Pessoa: An Experimental Life, Richard Zenith. "Without knowing what he was doing, he pre-diagnosed us, insofar as his writings speak to our contemporary sense of self-estrangement."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

BOKS Six-HUndred and Thirty-Five - The End of Everything, M. John Harrison. "You can love all you want, she told herself. There are no returns from this strategy, except what's immediate: the light will often fall interestingly on the sea, for instance, and you've been lucky with that."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirty-four - Ambivalence, Brian Dillon. "Breathe in - panic. Breathe out - boredom. These are not so different: both leave him immobile for hours."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirty-Three - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso. "The Linear B tablets include many names of gods: about half were to go on living as Olympian gods, the other half were lost. We know nothing about them."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Six-Hundred and Thirty-Two - Boyhood, David Keenan. "I doubt God zooms, The Precious Gift says. He is more like, what is the word? Omnipresent." Like a Keenan Greatest Hits, if you've read any of his other novels. If not, well, it's as good a place as any to start.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

BOKS Six-hundred and Thirty-ONe - From Manchester with Love, Paul Morley. "Wilson raced through his life as if determined to escape the time of day ... and sometimes in my head the books begins this way: he was a mystery to himself." We are all mysteries to ourselves. This is a very good book

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirty - The City and the World, Gregor Hens. "...the circular motion where gravity and centrifugal forces cancel each other out, forces to which everything is subject, the planets with their satellites as much as the city, its inhabitants, and our thoughts, images and words."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-Nine - Elaine, Will Self. "I'm standing in the road outside my home - our home, one I make lovingly brand-new every day for the husband and son I love ... But is this ... it?" Not as good as the trilogy. But, still good.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-Eight - A Short History of Decay, E.M. Cioran. "In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man projects his flames and flaws into them; ... whence the birth of ideologies." (... and, no, this is not the book of 'Eraserhead', even if it packs a similar punch.)

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-Seven - William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, Philip Hoare. "I knew, secretly, that my friend was right. I didn't know anything about Blake. So I started to write this book." Luminous stuff. A magnificent delve into the murky depths of Blake's imagination.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-Six - Journals, RF Langley.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-Five - Pragmatism and Other Writings, William James.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-Four - First Love and Other Novellas, Samual Beckett. "The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-three - The Course of the Heart, M. John Harrison. "Then the light passed, the wind dropped and the train began to move again. The trees were dusty and birdlimed. All they had hidden was a housing estate, allotments, a light engineering plant."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty-One - The Son of Man, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo. This is amazing writing. It hits on a basic, primal level. I don't care about the story. It's all about the feeling and I heartily recommend it as a bracing read to shake a little bit of your soul awake.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twenty - The End of the Poem, Paul Muldoon. "... our only decent end is to let the poem have it way with us, just as the poet let it have its way with her or him." Muldoon takes apart a great selection of poems and investigates loads of connections. A wild adventure!

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Nineteen - Seeing Further, Esther Kinsky. " ... they said you only needed to climb on a pumpkin to be able to see all the way to Budapest. Imagine that, she said, shivering, just imagine it: You climbed on a pumpkin and up there you could see further, on and on and on."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Eighteen - How to Research Like a Dog, Aaron Schuster. "The possible is impossible. Reality is split from the inside. The world is not defined by the transcendence of another world, nor by the immanence of this world alone, but by a crack within this one-and-only world."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

BOKS Six-Hundred and Seventeen - Distance and Memory, Peter Davidson. "The southern sky changed from overshadowed grey to cobalt half and hour ago ... But, as I write, light and time and summer are unstill, and the instant has passed into memory even as it is described."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

BOKS Six-HUndred and Sixteen - Paradise Lost, John Milton. "Obedience to the law of God, impos'd On penaltie of death, and suffering death, The penaltie to thy transgression due, And due to theirs which out of thine will grow: So onely can high justice rest appaid."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Fifteen - London Orbital, Iain Sinclair. "... the idealised borough. Without crime and drugs and craziness. Without sound or smell. Drills or dogs. The secret city in which a couple will sit smiling on a sofa: for ever. In which there is no weather, just drawings of weather."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Fourteen - Beckett's Dying Words, Christopher Ricks. "one can't go on one can't stop put a stop"

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Thirteen - Maiden Voyage, Denton Welch. "Sitting upstairs on the bus I felt light, as if I were hollow and empty. Something inside was churning in me too, like a sea-sickness."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Twelve - Los, A Chapter - Helene Cixous. "... I'm sure I hadn't feared for him, I now realise that I thought of him as immortal, someone I had no fear of losing ..." Reflections on love and loss. Fragile threads form a delicate web. Human and heartbreaking.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Eleven - The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig. "War was here again, a war more terrible and far-reaching than any conflict had ever been on earth before." How quickly things can fall apart.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Ten - Omnibus, B.S. Johnson "Yes, yes, all those loves and wished for loves, I need never think of you again ... you will never enter my thoughts again in the same way ... I am glad to be rid of you." Three novels by the great B.S. Johnson. Basically, amazing.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

BOKS SIX-HUNDRED AND Nine - Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes . "What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past?" Roland Barthes writes about himself. Or, often, the impossibility of writing about himself.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Eight - Mansfield Park, Jane Austen. "" We shall probably see much to wish altered in her, and must prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions, and very distressing vulgarity of manner ..."" Austen again. Fantastic and funny as usual.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Seven - Valis, Philip K. Dick. "I am, by profession, a science fiction writer. I deal in fantasies. My life is a fantasy." Fantasies have a lot to answer for. This is a rollicking and very entertaining bok.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Six - The Dyer's Hand, W.H. Auden. "To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally." A wonderful mind.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Five - Milton's Grand Style, Christopher Ricks. "To me, Milton is a great poet ... comparable as it is to Shakespeare and Dante." Why did Milton need defending? Well, it seems he did. And that spurred Ricks to write this grand book.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Four - Volcanic Tongue, David Keenan. "Beyond meaning, outside the realm of language, there is no past and no future, hence rock music's obsession with the immediacy of experience, with the now." A beautiful, wonderful, life-affirming read.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

BOKS Six-hundred and Three - Voices of the Old Sea, Norman Lewis. "Life had always been hard - an existence pared to the bone - and local opinion was that it was getting harder, purely because mysterious changes in the sea were directing fish elsewhere."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and Two - A Time in Rome, Elizabeth Bowen. "Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, and tastes of different dusts."

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

BOKS Six-Hundred and One - Careless Love, Peter Guralnick. "This is a story of fame. It is a story of celebrity and consequences. It is, I think, a tragedy." The second part of this massive, amazing, awesome, tale of strange, extraordinary life.

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Andrew Bentley @andybley.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

BOKS Six Hundred - Pariah Genius, Iain Sinclair. "Memory is contained in architecture: doors, walls, high ceilings. secret spaces without names."

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