"Have you ever been scared by a monster?"
- Introduction

"Two years before the outbreak of the First World War, brothers Max and Louis were on an autumn adventure together."
- Chapter 1

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

A graphic history of the development of drawing from prehistory to the present sounded like it was right up my street, but having persevered through 132 pages (58%), I was bored and bailed.

One from the library: collecting a 2022 six-issue mini-series, the cover artwork is gorgeous, though I didn't care much for the cartoony interior artwork. The story covers the ten-year span leading up to the destruction of Krypton, focusing on Jor-El's unsuccessful attempts to save the planet (I assume that this cannot be a spoiler to anyone! 😊).
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Next up, an examination of how mythical monsters have sublimated, symbolised and expressed human existential angst across history and culture.
Much as I love Classical and Scandinavian mythology, I'm hoping the author also ranges further afield for her examples.

A lovely little book of the author's photographs in and around the Rhinogydd mountains of the Meirionnydd area of Gwynedd, North Wales, along with her descriptions of walks she's made.
The chapters focus on Neolithic sites, the history of the cattle drovers, some of whom emigrated to the USA in the 19th century to become cowboys, gold and slate mines, and lakes and rivers.

"It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you."

The three short stories in this collection are sad and strange, the protagonists living liminal existences which alienate them from the rest of humanity. There's a feel of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" in the changes that the characters undergo: surreal and tragic.
The longest (but still fairly short) story, "Nami, Who Wanted to Get Hit (and Eventually Succeeded)" is the saddest, dealing with bullying, child sexual exploitation and abuse, ⬇️

"Asa lived with her mother in a small rented apartment."

#FirstLineFridays @Shybookowl

Mrs B loves Bodnant Garden, so being close we couldn't not visit. My photos can't do justice to the plantings: it's a beautifully thought out "garden" (there's eight miles of pathways!) set in beautiful Welsh landscape. The formal rose beds look and smell beautiful, and the mature trees are majestic. Loads of habitat for birds, bees and butterflies (this one is a small tortoiseshell?). Well worth a detour!
I'll get back to book posts, now ?

#BookHaul
Our last stop off in Wales was Bodnant Gardens, which, as many National Trust properties do, has a second hand book room, where I picked up these treasures ?
Shop Fronts is a book of interesting store facades (the word "interesting" could be doing some heavy lifting there!).
The Tolkien study was more to compare to other ME guides I have, but I find that Duriez is an Inklings scholar, so it may be better than I'd anticipated.
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And now, for something completely different!

Three short stories, large font to make it look more substantial than it is 🧐, but it looks pretty, so, like Dr. Frank N. Furter, we'll forgive it.
I bought this RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) bookmark today. It doesn't fit the criteria for #BookmarkMatching , but there it is, anyway 🔖

3.75?
Most of the stories were good and fit the stated theme of strange places in new corners of the galaxy, though not the last two. These were "The Live Coward" by Poul Anderson, which read a legal conundrum dressed up as sci-fi, but if you set the parameters of the problem yourself, there's little credit in talking your way out of it. Also, the attempt at humour didn't work for me. The last story was "Still Life" by Eric Frank Russell, a ⬇️

Just to prove that the sun does shine in Wales, our shadows on Benllech beach 🌞
We started the day with a boat trip around Puffin Island, though at this time of year all the puffins are out at sea! We did see guillemots, shags & a lone gannet, along with lounging Atlantic seals 🦭
We've also seen herons, red squirrels & a great spotted woodpecker, along with more common birds, including a harem of mallards on the lake by where we're staying 🦆

Our last full day in Anglesey, and I picked up a few little books and a couple of bookmarks (negligently, only one shown in the photo).
I spent the other night updating the Library Thing entries for Anglesey's independent new and used bookshops, which sadly entailed marking them all as defunct 🫤 Obviously, there are books to be had on the island, but they are touristy & small charity shop fare. But for beautiful scenery and nature, it's lovely 😌

J. F. Bone's story, “Insidekick“, from the February 1958 edition of Galaxy magazine, is a light-hearted interplanetary spy caper, which deals with heavy subjects involving corporate tax fraud and the capitalist/colonial exploitation of indigenous communities. Throw into the mix an alien symbiont and the development of agent Albert Johnson's psionic powers, and you get a fun, interesting journey. Good one 😊

While Mrs B has gone out to get her remaining steps in for the day (1400 - 700 out, 700 back, not a step more! 👣😄), I'm staying in with a book, wild garlic Cornish Yarg cheese & a splash of wine 📖🧀🍷
We spent some time today at the Pili Palas, a small nature park with a heated room, where the free-flying tropical butterflies are magical. I had a hand-sized brilliant blue butterfly settle for a few seconds on my nose, which was amazing! 💖🦋💖

Imagine, if you can, what interstellar colonisation might look like if it was organised by an authoritarian, sexist global government that considered only men capable of doing the work of settlement, while women, with their weak bodies being susceptible to adverse alien environments, only allowed into colonies once *one million* men have established themselves, when *one* woman will be sent as a planetary Eve. If that's hard ⬇️

Second story, "Big Sword" by Paul Ash (aka Pauline Ashwell, actually Pauline Whitby) was a really enjoyable First Contact scenario with a unique and well thought out alien species.
Human/alien and human/human miscommunication leads to interesting situations involving potential extinction, reproduction, gender, evolution and intergenerational relationships.

The first story in the collection, "The Red Hills of Summer" by Edgar Pangborn, had its initial publication in the September, 1959 edition of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and I think the cover art illustrates this story.
300 colonists from a dying 21st century earth, many of whom have grown up aboard ship, arrive at the planet Demeter, a pilot mission of four crew landing to check habitability, with no rescue option available ⬇️

#TuesdayTunes @tiedyedude
I came upon Japanese composer/musician Stomu Yamashta due to director Nicholas Roeg's inclusion of his music in the soundtrack to the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth," finding his avant-jazz tracks the most interesting on the album.
His stuff is hard to find, but I did track down his album Raindog a while ago, and recently this one, Sea & Sky, a 1985 album variously categorised as ambient jazz, orchestral jazz, ⬇️

Plas Newydd is a stately home on the Anglesey shore of the Menai Strait, established in the 15th C, its current form being late 18th. The 1st Marquis distinguished himself at Waterloo, earning the title, despite being out of favour with Wellington as he'd had an affair with the Duke's sister-in-law, who, to be fair, the Marquis went on to marry.
I feel conflicted in stately homes: I love the history and art, while deploring the elitist privilege.

#BookHaul
Yesterday, I bought "Introducing the Medieval Dragon", "The History of Wales in 12 Poems", and a couple of bookmarks from Beaumaris Castle. I already have a couple of ?s from BC, but not *these* ones! ?
Today, at Plas Newydd, seat of the Marquises of Anglesey, I replaced a previously owned and given away copy of "Mist Over Pendle" with this 2nd✋? copy, and got another ?

I'm reading Weird Walk #5 while in Anglesey, & although the island doesn't feature, it has made me come over all Neolithicy, so I took the opportunity to visit Bryn Celli Ddu burial mound. It's the only solar-oriented monument on the island, & in fine fettle for c.4000 years.
Amongst the butterflies on the walk up, I spotted this pretty speckled wood ? It was nice, too, to meet another "henge-whore" for a few minutes pleasant talk about stones.

I snuck in a Murderbot 🤖❤️🩶🤍
This one was something of a murder mystery 🫆 & I enjoyed it, but it didn't have quite the same degree of characterisation, and being set in a place we've come to know fairly well, Preservation Station, there was little exploration of strange new worlds. It definitely wasn't bad, it just didn't strike the same chord for me as the previous books. Still a pick, & I'm looking forward to reading the next, & final, book.

Holiday reading 🚀🌌
If the stories are as groovy as the cover on this 1966 sci fi short story collection, I'll be ok! 😎

We're away in Anglesey 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 for a few days to celebrate Mrs B's birthday with our children and their partners. Chilling out in a lakeside lodge, with food, wine, music and boardgames (we really know how to celebrate! 😅).
I love Anglesey, but it has a dearth of bookshops, so I'm not likely to be posting any book hauls, which is probably a good thing!

"I opened the telegram and said, "He's dead -" and as I looked up into Graham Mill's gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"Time is change: we measure its passing by how much things alter. Within this particular latitude of space, which is timeless, one meridian of the sun identical with another, we changed our evil innocence for what was coming to us."

"Some men live successfully in the world as it is, but don't have the courage to even fail at trying to change it."

Wikipedia tells me that Gordimer was a white South African of Jewish heritage who was a tireless anti-apartheid campaigner, political activist and HIV/AIDS advocate. She was an ANC member who advised Nelson Mandela on his 1964 defence speech, and was one of the first people NM asked to see upon his release from prison. No suprise, then, that this was one of the #BannedBooks under the apartheid regime.

It helped that while reading this book, I had Alexei's voice in my head, from deranged apoplexy to soft thoughtfulness. He's humorous, but as with much comedy adapted from standup routines, it's infinitely better hearing it being performed, so I again recommend checking out his radio show 📻🤣
#AntifaBookClub 🚩🏴

"Here, I'll tell you what I hate - Fascism! I can't stand it, me, I think it's really, really terrible. I do. I think it's bang out of order. That's just me, though. You might like it, you might think it's OK. Indeed, you might be a fan of radical authoritarian nationalism but I think you'd be wrong."
[Said in a loud, thick Scouse accent, softening to a matey tone, one eyebrow raised ?]

How to respond to Reform UK and MAGA ??s
#AntifaBookClub

"John Maynard Keynes said, "When the facts change, I change my opinion." But when you're in a cult, when the facts change, you change the facts! To the end of her life my mother would never admit that there was anything wrong with the Soviet Union. The most she would admit was, "Mistakes were made." But as she used to say, "You can't make an omelette without murdering forty million people.""

I love Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar radio show. There isn't much Marxist comedy on the BBC (or anywhere else, probably!), so where else am I going to get ideologically sound laughs? ✊🏻🚩😂
Most of all, he's funny, and if you need some dark, absurdist humour in your life, I encourage you to listen to Alexei:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b084bmn9?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

#BookHaul
Back home, and my trip to Didsbury netted me these six tomes, five from EJ Morten and one from a well-stocked Oxfam ( @rwmg that's the Judge Dee 😊).
I set a budget, I kept to the budget: winning at life! 💷📚🏅🏆👏🏻🫠👏🏻

I'm on annual leave this week and next. I have a few unsupervised days before I go away with family, and decided to visit independent bookseller, EJ Morten's in Didsbury, Manchester. I saw it listed in a 1982 book of secondhand bookshops of England that I read earlier this year and - miracle of miracles! - it's still trading. Not as mazy as I was expecting, but a nice setting in a cobbled lane just off the high street.
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S.C. Roberts didn't invent the Holmesian Game of treating the Canon as a factual subjects for critical analysis, but he is credited as having popularised it, so it was reasonable to assume his story, "The Adventure of the Megatherium Thefts" would feel authentic, and it does (phew! ?)
Rather than featuring a paleontological crime, the Megatherium in question is a gentleman's club similar to the Diogenes, but allowing more conversation between ⬇️

Stuart Palmer was a screenwriter and detective fiction writer, whose series of "spinster sleuth" mysteries featuring Hildegarde Withers sound interesting in both book and film form, and I'm minded to seek them out.
His Holmes pastiche, "The Adventure of the Marked Man" sees H&W in Cornwall investigating a series of death threats against an unassuming man. I don't think all the ends were quite gathered together, but it was still a good story 4?

Vincent Starrett was an important Sherlockian scholar, so I had high hopes for his "Adventure of the Unique 'Hamlet'", and while it was fun, it was a little too fun-ny. Written for private circulation to a group of like-minded Sherlock aficionados, I think there are some in-jokes that don't land so well for a general audience, & the amusing comments about eccentric bibliophiles edge into self-referential indulgence. But - it was still fun ? 3.5?

#BookHaul Part 2 (with pigeon droppings ?️)
Two Arnold Bennett novels, and an Andre Gide volume of two novellas.
I love the Penguin covers, and initially thought the orange?logo on the 1963 Gide was a recent sticker, it's so vibrant, but it's actually part of the original design ?
"The Grand Hotel Babylon" has lovely Impressionistic cover art by Charles Ginner, and it sounds like it will be something of a satirical farce.

#BookHaul Part 1 😊 Took four books to the charity bookstall, came back with seven! Oops 😬
But, who in their right mind, decided to give away a four-volume box set of illustrated books about the Beatles' solo careers? 🤷🏻‍♂️
Whoever it was, I thank them for their incomprehensible decision, as I now own it! 🤓

Some years after ACD's death, a typewritten, unpublished Holmes story was found amongst his papers, titled “The Case of the Man who was Wanted“. Its discovery was reported, but the ACD estate said it would not see print as it was a somewhat inferior work. Outraged readers campaigned for its release and so persuaded (🤑💵) it was first published in USA.
Retired English architect, Arthur Whitaker, recognised the story as one he'd sent to ACD years⬇️

The first story, "The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage" is by Monsignor Ronald A. Knox, a Catholic priest who wrote and critiqued detective fiction during the Golden Age of British crime writing, and is perhaps best known for his 10 rules of detective fiction. He also wrote a BBC radio play about a fictitious armed revolution in London in a documentary style which fooled many listeners into believing it was factual, and which Orson Welles ⬇️

Lancelyn Green's story-by-story introduction is an informative read, setting the stage for his selection of homages to Holmes. He states that he has been careful to collect stories that are written as serious 'apocrypha' rather than parodies, so I'm hoping for some quality entries 🔎📖
Paganini's violin concertos 1 & 2 seemed an appropriate musical accompaniment 🎻
#BooksAndMusic

I see from my previous post for this book from two years ago that I celebrated finding it with a chippy dinner of pie, chips & gravy, seeing which has given me the midnight munchies! 😋
This anthology of pastiches was first published in 1985, the stories being drawn from the 1920s onwards.
Editor, Richard Lancelyn Green, was an acknowledged Holmesian expert, who at age 50 was found garroted to death with a shoelace tightened by a wooden spoon. ⬇️

The younger generation of indigenous Paiwan people of the author's home village, Lalaoran in south east Taiwan, had largely forgotten their culture at the time he was growing up in the late '70s & '80s. In this collection of short chapters, he writes of his recovery of traditions from his own childhood memories of his elders' stories and reminiscences, and later work collecting oral histories.
There's an interesting mix of myth & folklore with ⬇️

I enjoyed the stories collected in Omnibus 2 slightly more than those in Omnibus 1. There's the same violence (often focussed at women), gore, sex and swearing as in the first collection, but the stories seem a little more thoughtful and, within the brutal world of the narrative, a bit more acknowledgement that people are inclined to help/heal each other if given the opportunity.
CW in comment.

Oof! That's an emotional gut punch. Can I only give it five stars?
Una sets her experience of child sexual abuse, bullying, "slut-shaming", rape and victim-blaming against the violently misogynistic social attitudes towards the victims of woman murderer Peter Sutcliffe* in the '70s and '80s. As a child branded a slut, Una describes her fear that she would become another murdered "woman of poor reputation," who the police and media judged ⬇️

While I was on Leyland for a dental appointment, I popped into the library & came away with a graphic novel #LibraryHaul 📚
Becoming Unbecoming is a memoir about abuse, misogyny and victim blaming in the '70s, set against the incompetent police hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Sounds heavy.
To lighten up, I've the 2nd volume of a Star Trek series set in the final year of the NCC-1701's original mission. I haven't read the beginning of the story ⬇️

Two free book exchanges in repurposed telephone boxes in Bretherton village 😊 I already knew of the one pictured at top, and picked up the tagged book from there today. The other box I 'discovered' on the way to the first, located on the wonderfully named road, Pompian Brow. Nothing in that one to pique my interest on this occasion, but I'll stop by occasionally to see what's appeared 😊📚

🎵 Underwater
💿 Sun's Signature
👩🏻‍🎤 Sun's Signature
📽️ https://youtu.be/e0f-gwU5dhI?si=uhiq2D2vuaQM8YZu

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

This is the first track off Sun's Signatures 2022 EP, and it's transcendent! If you decide to listen to it, please stick with it until at least 2:10, when it switches up, but frankly the whole 6:44 is glorious.
The band are duo Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins 💜 and her partner, Damon Reece of Spiritualised.