"I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."
- John Keats to Fanny Brawne

While reading some of Keats' poetry this morning, I was visited by these four butterflies: Speckled Wood (top left); two mating Gatekeepers (top right: I think they were more focused on each other!); and a Large White. And some water lilies ???

Sitting with John by a fish-filled, butterfly-haunted pool before the day's workshops beginning 🐟🦋

I loved this! 5🔎😊

I think that most Holmes aficionados would find something of interest here, and personally I enjoyed all the essays, though they're probably not for casual readers of the stories (apologies if that sounds elitist - it does in my own ears!)
The chapters examine a variety of themes including colonialism and Holmes's cultural role in defending and normalising the moral threat to Victorian society of its perpetration of the ⬇️

"Israel, the US's rogue proxy in the Middle East with it's own agenda, initiated the current East by attacking Iran with the declared sin of physically preventing it acquiring the nuclear bomb."

Feels like #1451 of the #SocialistStandard is going to be heavy! ?

I've always felt that counselling is a radical, political endeavour, rather than a "There, there, poppet" tea-and-sympathy stereotype, and the tagged book was a key text for me when I was a student counsellor.
I'm excited for the workshop detailed in the pic this afternoon at the conference I'm attending: The Person-Centred Approach: Is it Political? Does it Matter?
⬇️

I'm attending a weekend conference in Derbyshire and, not feeling the necessity of checking my ticket, I've arrived at 8:30 for a 9:00 start, but it actually kicks off at 11:00! 🤦🏻‍♂️
Oh, well, there's worse ways of spending a couple of hours than sitting in a conservatory with a book and a coffee 📖☕😌

Is there such a thing as an #AntiBookHaul ?

I've taken a deep breath and I'm taking these to my local National Trust second hand book room in order to make space on my shelves for books I want to keep.
(When I say "space on my shelves," I actually mean "marginally reduce the height of the piles of books stacked on the floor," but let's not pick nits!)

“Look for the silver lining
Whene'er a cloud appears in the blue
Remember, somewhere the sun is shining
And so the right thing to do
Is make it shine for you“ 🌤️

🎺🎙️Chet Baker
🎵 Look For The Silver Lining
💿 Chet Baker Sings
📝 Jerome Kern
▶️ https://youtu.be/SpRvuVOCJac?si=Y6t-yyImp2FdShgi

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

A little cheese, bread and olive platter while I read a Holmes essay and start on a set of short stories about the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.
Musical accompaniment by Talking Heads, entertainment by Skye, who is alternately hunting my cheese and a vocal little robin, who is fully aware of what she's up to! 🐦‍⬛🐈‍⬛🧀

"It seems that somehow the hearts of human beings and trees are connected."

- The Princess and the Nutmeg Tree ??❤️?

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

"The ghost stories and strange tales that make up this book are set in the ancient Japanese province of Shinshu, or Shinano (now Nagano Prefecture), located in the center [sic] of Japan's main island of Honshu, a region intersected by three mountain ranges, mist-covered streams and a number of large and fast-flowing rivers."

At about ½ way through, the blurb descriptors of spine-chilling, spooky & terrifying ??

"You are not the sum of the things you do wrong
In the eyes of someone who does not understand you" ❤️

? Kae Tempest
?Statue in the Square
? Self Titled
?️ https://youtu.be/aTDOFaAcEyc?si=V1GW3C_ZrO9B9FLw

I pre-ordered Kae Tempest's new album, Self Titled, with an accompanying zine (so this counts as a book post, yeah? ?), which arrived today, and it is excellent! ✊??️‍⚧️?️‍?

StoryGraph highlighted two perennial favourites in my June summary: one of the Sherlock Holmes short story audios I'm listening to on BBC Sounds, and a '50s Folio Society edition of FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Cats in Spring Rain is a neat book of new translations of cat-themed haiku paired with classic Japanese artworks featuring felines. What's not to love?😻

The blurb says that these are traditional stories of yokai, spectral apparitions of varied kinds, which Wada retells in "spine-chilling" & "terrifying" fashion ?
Some I'm partially familiar with (the Snow Woman, the kappa, & the tengu ?) but I'm hoping to encounter lots of ghosts that are new to me ?
The book is copiously illustrated by the author's daughter, Haruna Wada, who really deserves a cover credit.
I think I'm going to enjoy this one!

"In 2017, President Trump signed an Executive Order banning people from 7 Muslim-majority countries - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan & Libya - from entering the US for 90 days...The writers were asked to develop a fictional response to Trump's discriminatory ban.
Reading can be an escape, something transportative that takes you to different countries & states of mind. It can take you to all the places that Trump doesn't want you to go."

I was pleasantly surprised by Taylor's book, enjoying it more than I'd anticipated. It combines her accounts of travels in the Scottish Highlands to spot wildcats in their natural environment with details of their evolutionary and cultural histories, their conservation status and the efforts being made both to save them and, sadly, exterminate them, the latter more through negligence and indifference, perhaps, than intent.
👇🏻
#CatsOfLitsy #Skye

“Heading back, a couple of cars and a van have joined our own in the small carpark, and standing beside the van is a man with waist-length dreadlocks, a beard and a camera with a very long lens... He turns to us as we approach, ambles over, and we get talking. It's quickly evident that this man, Hamza, is highly knowledgeable about the peninsula and its wildlife, and he's soon advising us...When I mention wildcats, he goes quiet... 👇🏻

This is most of the rest of my holiday #Bookhaul 📚I really should stop now! 😏

• Vol. 5 of Jansson's Moomin comic strip
• Short stories with an existentialist theme
• A pamphlet on anarchism
• A J.B. Priestley memoir
• An illustrated book of Japanese demon tales
• How the Greek tragedies can inform the modern experience of depression and suicide
• A feminist perspective on women in Greek myth
• Korean aboriginal folklore and memoir
👇🏻

"Sherlock Holmes has a fair claim to being the most immediately and widely recognisable fiction character in English literature, even if this recognition often depends on mythologised versions of Doyle's texts."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

As well as the heritage breed soay sheep 🐏 and replica Bronze and Iron Age roundhouses 🛖 at Flag Fen, they do have a small selection of books in the visitors' centre, so I picked up a couple by two of my favourite TV archeologists: Tamed by Alice Roberts, who unaccountably hasn't including cats in her list of ten species 🤷🏻‍♀️ (but I'm kvetching), and Paths to the Past by Francis Pryor, who actually discovered and excavated the Flag Fen site.

On the last day of our holiday in Cambridgeshire, we visited Flag Fen archeological site, where a Bronze Age wooden ritual causeway was found preserved in situ, and which was fascinating to learn about. However... [1/3]

@TieDyeDude I saw this poster advertising evening bat spotting tours on the River Cam and immediately thought of you! 😄🦇🚣🏻‍♀️

I went to the Cambridge University Bookshop yesterday, which prides itself on inhabiting the oldest bookshop site in Britain & being the oldest publisher in the world, so fine credentials!
I picked up the Sherlock Holmes number in their critical series "The Cambridge Companion to...", which I've seen reviewed as dry and academic, so sounds like my kind of book ?
The first essay is on the history of detective fiction & Doyle/Holmes' place in it.

A book I did buy from The Haunted Bookshop, Cambridge is yet another edition (my twentieth) of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald.
This is a 1955 Folio Society edition, different to the other, later edition I have by them.
This one is bound in red brocade with a gold and silver floral pattern, and comes in a gold-paper covered box, rather than the gold slipcase of the later edition. Small, but perfectly formed 💖

The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge! 👻📚👻

I'm haunted by the books I didn't buy in there! 🧐

While visiting Ely, we're visiting Cambridge, and I could spend the rest of my life in the Fitzwilliam Museum!

Picked up a couple of books, and a couple of bookmarks. (Not my only #BookHaul 📚 don't tell! 🤫)

We're in Ely as our son recently moved here and we've come to visit. Mrs B. has booked us into a lovely B&B above a tea shop, which is full of little book nooks! 😍📚
Coffee and cake upon arrival (I had vegan lemon and lavender, Mrs. B had mocha), and a shufty at the shelves.
We had a stroll up the high street and I popped my head into a perfect Toppings and Co. bookshop - proper visit tomorrow, and a tour for any others I might find 😊

"Timing a trip to look for Scottish wildcats is difficult in a way, but in another way it's not: no matter what time you go, you're almost guaranteed not to see one."

About halfway through, and I'm really enjoying this book ?
???????????????

The lovely Aubrey Beardsley frontispiece and title page of Beatrice Clay's retelling of Arthurian stories.
Although written for older children of the Edwardian era, and therefore removing certain "unsuitable" elements, it's not as moralistic as I'd feared it might be. Her afterword about knightly privilege being predicated on exploitation and enslavement of peasants is rather forward-thinking. 4.75 ?

Skye does *not* pose for photographs! I had to edge as close as she'd tolerate to take this. She's not a wild "Highland Tiger", but she doesn't mess about either. She is often playful, but absolutely on her own terms. We're loving getting to know her idiosyncrasies? #Caturday
The book is about the natural history of and conservation efforts for the Scottish wildcat, of which few now survive that aren't hybridised with domestic cats ?

Last post (I promise!) about my walk today in & around the former Roman fort town of Ribchester.
The White Bull pub has a 1707 construction date, but the pillars in the portico are Roman, recovered from the River Ribble.
Lots of wildlife, including ducks & beautiful damselflies by the river, with a nice shady path through some woods.
The distant view of Pendle Hill, where I walked last week, I sighted just before I lost the route!
#WednesdayWalks

Second Refreshment! A pot of Earl Gray tea and summer berry crumble with custard, before I drive home. At a lovely tea shop / cafe /gift shop, Potter's Barn in Ribchester.
#WednesdayWalks

After walking up Pendle Hill last week, I chose a low lying route this week, along the River Ribble from Ribchester. Although I've enjoyed the walk, it was only half the route in the book due to vague directions (e.g., "head towards the two mature trees" in a landscape full of mature trees) leading me astray (I'm totally blaming the book, not my reading comprehension!).
Stopped off at the White Bull for a non-alcoholic refresher.
#WednesdayWalks

This 1934 edition of Beatrice Clay's Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion is an Edwardian retelling of the main Arthurian stories. I've had it for decades, so it's time is come to be read!
Written for children, the first 1901 edition left out Morgan le Fay, what with their relationship being "complicated", I suppose, but this reprint of the 1905 edition incorporated Morgan in suitably bowdlerised form.
⬇️

"Do It For Mama!" by Jerrold J. Mundis

In an American city riven by factional tensions, fuelled by hard-line conservatives and stoked by media disinformation, with riot police on the streets to enforce authoritarian legislation, the Home Guard is controversially ordered in to quell protests, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
So to take my mind off all that, I've read Mundis's prescient 1971 story set in a New York in which dog ownership becomes ⬇️

One of the more successful walking books I've used, possibly because I paid attention to the directions this time!
I did the "easy" route up Pendle Hill, easy being a relative term! My leg muscles will know tomorrow that they did something today!
It was a fantastic walk, soundtrack by skylarks, aerobatic display by swifts, and incredible views from the summit.
No witches as far as I could tell, though I was nearly pixie-led at one point ??‍♀️

Pendle Hill looks big from far away - it looks bigger close up! This walk does start part way up the hill at the Nick of Pendle, so it should be doable for me🤞🏻
See you at the top!⛰️🚶🏻‍♂️
#WednesdayWalks

A trio of second hand books I found today in a trio of places. 📚
I've been listening to classicist-comedian Natalie Haynes's podcast about Greek and Roman writers and mythology, so added the Oresteian plays of Aeschylus to the tbr, though I'll probably read one of her books first.
The Long Farewell is 15th (or 17th 🤷‍♂️) in Innes's Appleby series, none of which I've read, so hopefully that won't matter. A modern-day (well, 1950s) ⬇️

#SocialistStandard #1450
"Commiserations to you job-seekers out there who fancied themselves as Chief Executive Officer of the international corporation RCC Inc. The position has been filled. There were 135 internal candidates vying to fulfil it with an external individual, Trump, suggesting that he should get the job because he was already running America and as the job involved a one-day week, Sundays, it would be a doddle to do.

⬇️

Simon's poems are nice rather than profound or moving; coupled with Beth Munro's colourful prints, they are evocative, though.
Commissioned to be installed at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, they're inspired by the homes and shelters animals create, hence the title, Dwell. Simon and Beth offer a natural space for the mind to dwell and feel connected 💚

As someone who has Harding's "A Year Unfolding: A Printmaker's View", I was initially excited to see this newly published book of her wonderful prints, and so brought it home to the disappointment of finding much (though not all) of the contents are lifted from the book I already own.

Had I not already got her earlier book, I would love this. As it is I feel ripped off and taken for a mug ?

Colquhoun covers a lot of territory, geographically and thematically, in her survey of the Western Cornish peninsula, as indicated by the tags I used on my Library Thing record:
• travel
• biography-memoir
• history
• nature
• birds
• mythology and folklore
• ghosts
• food
• arthurian
• occult-esoteric
• witches and witchcraft
• non-fiction

Her writing folds together personal memoir of her post-war removal to Lamorna Cove to focus on her ⬇️⅓

Anybody else having a problem with StoryGraph?

"I like knowing stuff. I like learning. I like being more than I was yesterday. If I am giving future me a gift, it is reading a book for an hour instead of sleeping."

This #BookMail arrived unexpectedly yesterday: I won it in a Library Thing #EarlyReviewers giveaway. Gonna see if I can squeeze it in as my final book for May ?
It says it deals with "the darker side of being #neurodivergent " but also that it is "hopelessly optimistic," so perhaps the darkness isn't entirely unrelieved.
#NonbinaryAuthor ????

Limburg's grief at her brother's death by suicide makes up the poignant first sequence of poems, The Oxygen Man, reflecting on life as a surviving sibling ❤️‍🩹
The Autistic Alice is the second sequence, on Limburg's life as an autistic woman in a society that others both of those threads of identity, using Carrol's Alice books as a reference.
The final sequence is a collection of Other Poems, which are funny, touching & observant. Loved this: 5♾️

Well, I'm giving this four (red) stars based on the concluding section in which Sève summarises his preceding thesis and where I got a glimmer of light, though I suspect Sève would give me one star for comprehension due to my sketchy knowledge of the concepts he takes for granted his reader will understand, which is forgivable as he originally delivered this as a presentation at a Marxism conference. I think bits may adhere in my mental miasma 😏

You're Not My Dad, John Inman

"Got lots of Dads beside my Dad -
television's full of Dads.
Mr Corbett, he's my Dad,
Michael Bentine, also Dad.
Roy Castle is the Singing Dad
and Brian Cant the Voice of Dad,
Play School, Play Away teem with Dad.
John Inman, though, he's not my Dad -
not everyone I love is Dad."
#Poetry ❤️

"She will harrow this town, she will turn him up, whole or in pieces."
- Sister, from The Oxygen Man

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
#Poetry

'Excuse me,' says Alice.
'May I say something?'

'Of course,' says the Caterpillar -
'You may say something-'

'Yes,' says Humpty Dumpty,
'and we'll tell you why it's wrong.'

- The Alice Case

The #neurodivergent person's experience of assessment by neurotypical "experts". ♾️
#Poetry