Excellent in every way. An unusual coming of age story. Just the right mix of troubling and funny. Need to track down the BBC adaptation next.

Everyone else has gone to bed. In the Gladstone Library lounge it's just me, a dying fire, and the wind howling against the walls. And the books. 📚🤓

@scripturient @julesG @squirrelbrain @jenniferw88 @Oryx @TrishB @CGainor3

Absolutely the best thing that could have come out of Lovecraft's messy xenophobic Red Hook story. And finally a story where the reader can see why trying to wake Cuthulhu from his slumber might appeal.

The final volume! For a while I was worried that the series would never get a real ending, but as it turns out 20 volumes was exactly long enough. What a journey. All the feels in this one.
Thank you @LibrarianRyan for sending the first vol. to my (strictly speaking too young at the time!) Firstborn years ago. 3/4 of the fam have been following the children of Grace Field House and their battle for survival & freedom ever since.

Readathon snacks. 😋

#readathon #24hourReadathon #Bingo

@DeweysReadathon

"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."

No dear, that would be Athena.
This character is such a super annoying judgey know-it-all, I'm surprised at that mistake.

Also, bored. I don't think cozy mysteries are my genre, but I need one for a reading challenge and I'm halfway through, so I will persevere in a skim read fashion. 🙄

"There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science."
"What are they?" asked Cotta.
"Ignorance and folly," replied Aristaeus.

I'm about to read a novel with a female protagonist, and the entire introduction is all about what a manly man the author is. From a long line of manly men even. Robust, masculine, sober style and virile impartiality, vigorous language. He was a soldier too. I don't know... Was Gosse trying to reassure male readers that their masculinity would not be harmed by reading a French book about a woman? 😆

Non-fiction in graphic novel form! I've wanted to read this for ages, and finally got around to buying it.

Oh no...

This book is netting me so many squares in the @DeweysReadathon #Bingo!

I should just change into PJs and do a 60min sprint in a different location while I'm at it!

#readathon #goingforblackout

I have my #tbr #stack ready for the weekend‘s #24hourreadathon 😁 Although I might have to expand it as I need a one word title for #Bingo 🧐

#readathon #deweys #allthehashtags

The game board is really conspiring against my return to the Hebrides and the Lewis trilogy. 😆 First book in 3rd person, then graphic novel, then book to movie, and now book with diversity. But at least it's giving me the nudge I needed to finally read The Hate U Give, which has been languishing on my shelf for two or three years. 🙄

"To the person who has anything to conceal - to the person who wants to lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest - to the person who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London.
(...)
London, whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many odd secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London."

"'Was it Voltaire who said that the English had three hundred and sixty-five religions and only one sauce?'
'Judging from the War Tribunals,' said Parker, 'I should say that was an understatement. And then there's America - a country, I understand, remarkably well supplied with religions.'"

Continuing my påskekrim reading after a quick detour to read some Sandman. We're playing the @DeweysReadathon board game, and I landed on graphic novel. Now I'm on book to movie/TV and mysteriously the Lewis trilogy has not been adapted for the screen. I don't get it, it's so visual it's like reading a TV show. But no worries, I have a Lord Peter mystery I don't think I've read yet (or if I did it was years ago).

Meh. Way more romance than murder investigation. Which doesn't have to be a bad a thing, but the writing was all over the place; plot points thrown in left and right and a style that was either purposefully disjointed or accidentally full of tiny continuity errors.

Finished the first book of the Lewis Trilogy, and looking forward to the other two. But first I need a book that's written in the third person for a reading challenge (the Lewis books alternate between third and first). This romantic suspense should be in keeping with my påskekrim theme, (murder victim found on page one), and moves me to the US. Not sure which state.

Next up in my påskekrim reading: Contemporary Scottish crime. Not sure if these are police procedurals, or more psychological like my previous read. Coincidentally both were recommended by my mother.

Usually a crime novel starts with a crime and works up to revealing the perpetrator. The Whisperer is the other way around. A woman is explaining herself to the police. She is the epitome of a grey mouse. She can only whisper. She wants to be invisible. But she has received death threats, and committed a crime, and she wants the investigator to see and hear her. The book takes a bit too long to get to the reveal, but it is refreshingly different.

It is time for #påskekrim (the Norwegian tradition of enjoying crime fiction and mysteries during Easter since 1. April 1923).
I have more tv-shows and books in various crime sub-genres lined up than I can possibly get through over Easter, but I'm giving myself a week to binge. 😁 Starting today, with a Norwegian author. 🕵️

‘If music is not serene, the people grumble and life is deranged. All this arises from mistaking the nature of music and seeking only tempestuous tonal effects.‘

Gifts from the fam! The Book of the New Sun quartet in two vols and Flann O'Brien's complete novels. 😻 I also got a new cover for my Kindle. It's like the kids and the Spouse know me or something. 😆

"No man ever resolved more bravely than he to accept as good nothing that was evil; to banish from him as evil nothing that was good. 'Tis a pity that he should not have recognised the fact, that in this world no good is unalloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not in it some seed of what is goodly."

'When Christ sayd, the kingdome of heaven must suffer violence, hee meant not the violence of long babbling praiers to no purpose, nor the tedious invective sermons without wit, but the violence of faith, the violence of good works, the violence of patient suffering.'

'"How can I tell you everything?" she said.
"Tell it backward," he said.'

'"Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice but to do."'

‘How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another — then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being laid.
Of course they were right. Women were likely, as women, to take the next generation‘s part, not this one‘s; they wove the links men saw as chains, the bonds men saw as bondage.‘

#QuotsyFeb21 @TK-421 #stage

I don't know if this quote is from one of Sean O'Casey's plays or just something he said once, but it seems an accurate observation.

The #Reading1001 group on #Goodreads are reading two German books this month. Because the English translation was so expensive and English translations of German bug me anyway, and since this is a short book and I have more enthusiasm than sense, I decided to try reading it in the original. 😬 It's only 6pg per day... Only I didn't think to check if German has changed much since 1797. 🧐 Has it? Wish me luck, and fortitude. 😅

'Alder said reluctantly, "It is a great deal to ask of a kitten, to defend a man against the armies of the dead."'

I was a bit surprised to see John Fowles in the Women's Fiction Classics. Granted, I haven't read The Magus, but in The French Lieutenant's Woman the title character was only there to prompt and further the development and journey of the male protagonist. Maybe Fowles does a better job of it in this one? I hope so, because I do like his writing. I guess he deals with gender issues and women's rights, he's just surprisingly male centric about it.

" ... and lives there the man of so iron and adamantine an heart, as not to be enchanted with listening to the love of Theagenes and Chariclea, though the story were to last a year?"

The Spouse: More books?! All those books you got at Christmas that you haven't even opened, and you're already buying more?
Me: I needed this one!
The Spouse: You have so many unread books!
Me: Ah! But not in German! This one is in German. So I needed it.
Spouse: You need another set of book shelves. Which means a bigger house.
Me: I know, right! 😃

(I should probably intercept the post as I have two more books on the way - in English) 🤣

Our holiday in Norway got extended due to quarantine, lockdown, and snowfall. Not too bad since it's all home learning and home office anyway. Finally made it back home last night, and we had Xmas gifts waiting for us. 😄 Very happy with this haul, (although I hate the layout of the SF Masterworks series, with tiny print and almost no margins). Especially excited that I got the translation I wanted of Madam Bovary (Adam Thorpe) 😁

Norwegians open presents after dinner on Christmas Eve, and I am super happy with my book haul. 😍 If there's one thing I've needed this year, it's an endless supply of books to get lost in. God Jul and Happy Holidays to you all. 🎄📚

It's gone midnight and the rest of the family has called it a night. Just me now, working my way through Sandman and enjoying a glass of Brains Black with ambient jazz in the background. Perfect.
#readathon
@DeweysReadathon

I never got the reference to the saucepan song, but I'm currently reading this out loud to the rest of the family, who have only seen the movie, and the kids immediately exclaimed "SOSPAN FACH!" It is apparently a song every school child in Wales knows - even those in English medium schools. And yes, sospan means saucepan. ?

This counts as "animal on cover - real or imaginary", right? ?

#OutstandingOctober

This is my fave kind of vampire book. The kind with a moral dilemma. Yes, they are thoroughly inhuman and alien. Yes, they murder people. And yet... this vampire is quite likeable, and currently the lesser evil. But teaming up means he'll be around to kill more people.

#OutstandingOctober

Ugh. How is this a feel-good romance? One MC is a grieving widower, the other was abandoned at the altar and is channeling Miss Havisham. I'm 19 pages in and the writing style has me bored already. No one is feeling good here!

#OutstandingOctober

I just don't have any spring-like covers, and haven't found any books set in the spring either. So I did a desperate search on Kindle Unlimited. I normally stay well clear of anything with cursive writing, but it's only 130 pages long. And who knows, maybe a feel-good romance is just what is needed on a rainy October day in 2020.

#OutstandingOctober

Have finally found a book of suitable spookiness in this Maori/Chinese forensic investigation from New Zealand. Matiu senses events and emotions from rooms and objects. His sister Penny believes only in what she can measure in her lab. I‘m on board with the paranormal elements, they‘re creepy but not too scary, but I‘m not sure I buy the near-future setting. Still, I‘m entertained.

#OutstandingOctober

DNF at 13% because the writing is just plain lacking and 90% of the first two chapters ought to be mercilessly edited away.

Making another attempt at "spooky" for the @DeweysReadathon pre-readathon challenge. This one promises to be "chilling, gruesome, and truly haunting" and with a twist!

#OutstandingOctober

This title seemed perfect for the prompt "read a spooky book". Except it wasn't spooky at all. There were ghosts sure, but the scare factor was 0. The ghosts are on their best behaviour because a medium is hard to find, and they really want messages delivered to loved ones and their murderers brought to justice. So it's a cold case mystery with a bit of romance and an FBI profiler who is a reluctant ghost wrangler. OK enough, but some plot holes

I need to read the following by the 24th, as a pre-readathon challenge for @DeweysReadathon

1. Book over 500p.
3. Randomised genre: supernatural/cosmic horror
4. A spooky book
5. 75% one colour on cover
7. Published more than 100y ago
9. Set in spring/spring-like cover
12. Animal on cover
15. Set in location I wish to visit or live in.

Goal for #OutstandingOctober is to complete at least five of these!

@Andrew65

I'm currently scrambling to get through 15 prompts in the Dewey's pre-readathon challenge, so a choose-your-own-goals readathon in the run-up to the 24h readathon sounds like a good idea.

It should also get me posting more. I've been really letting my Litsy activity lapse!

#OutstandingOctober

@Andrew65

Pretty sure they're both doing it wrong. The sequence should be salt-tequila-lime.

("Starting From Here" by Lane Hayes. Not in db.)