Unexpected link to recent fiction reading (On the Calculation of Volume also feels like a rerun, sadly absent Bill Murray)
"Day one felt like Groundhog Day, the film in which a news reporter awakes each morning to a repeat of what has come before. From the outset, however, it was clear that these seven judges would take a different approach..."
"During the intifada. We don't talk about it. The boys with the stones, yes, we talk about them. But not the girls." She assured him that Rita stayed busy..... Then she returned the conversation to Ibn Hanna's wedding, which was coming up, and to life in America, and how had his people really elected that terrible casino owner as president. Didn't Americans know gambling was haram?
"The fine arts are always underappreciated." He sighs. "It's a modern tragedy, really."
"Sure." I say it curtly because I'm thinking how that's not a tragedy. Not really. A tragedy is a double homicide. Or a murder-suicide. Or a pileup on 695 when there are kids in the car. That's tragic...
Visit to one of my favourite bookshops at the weekend. I resorted to taking pictures of shelves because I was interested in so many...
Stats on original language of books I've read (so far) in 2025... (books in translation)
Harry was defensive about some of the methods he had used to get his stories. At one point, he turned on the reader, who he imagined censuring him for how he had obtained the Christie exclusive: 'Sit down there, you, that man in the back row, he admonished. 'I'll have no hypocritical comment! How many murderers' stories have you read, sir, in the Sunday papers? If you've never read one, then I'll listen to you. If you have read one, then shut up!
According to the constitutional law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment were "written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations."
We took almost nothing when we left. Mum kept saying, Don't worry we'll come back we'll come back so soon, and it was a lie. I think now to how they found that house with everything still in it, Papa's book still left open on the page where he stopped, and I am sick I am sick to my stomach. Whose stuff did they think that was? They must have known I can't imagine they didn't know. Who doesn't know a thing like that? They must've known.
Goodreads (via google) says this is "comforting manga for pet lovers..." I don't disagree.
One of those books that makes me wish for something between "so so" and thumbs up.
(Not) a little light reading.
Do love a historical map! Check out these endpapers 😍
My vulgar language also caused problems when I went to Cecilia's. Her father was a stern, distinguished, imposing man... Though he never missed his chance to intimate that he'd been particularly active in the years of armed struggle in the seventies and eighties, enjoying the astonished look on my face when his stories suddenly mentioned guns or kneecappings, he wasn't as indulgent when it came to another kind of violence: foul language.
When we finally discovered books, it wasn't a form of escapism, but rather the reassuring coalescence of boredom. I could almost picture it in my mind, white and miry: reading was like sinking into a pool of milk. I would stay immersed for hours, until even my body grew flaccid, the stagnant liquid seeping into my pores. It felt like everything suddenly acquired meaning, a phenomenon of transubstantiation, my flesh changing into boredom.
....there is no objective, capital T Truth about Agrippina. There is only a series of stories, drawn from other people's stories about men. The only way through is to be hon-est about that. This story is as much mine as it is Agrippina's, because I have chosen how to present the information I have. But it is a good story about a woman who deserves her own place in history.
...made the three sisters the first living women ever to be identified by name on a Roman coin.
I wasn't expecting David Cameron to turn up in the first few pages of this....
pickBeautiful book about Nicholson's paintings of Scotland.
I find Switzerland most appealing between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one. Much younger than that, and the clean air, healthy living, reserved manners and somewhat bland cooking puts me off.
---
Probably not for the Swiss tourist board, this one...
He put the phone down and tapped his fingers on the desk. The alibi thing was annoying when the video call would so easily prove his whereabouts, but the police clearly hadn't even bothered to check it with his nana yet. A single person, living alone, not going to stupid neighbour fireworks things, and suddenly you were a murder suspect.
Wow - the bookmark auction project has already raised over £7000 for charity - a school in Zimbabwe ??
"Famous" children's illustrators' work going for ££ - Axel Shaeffer was over £150 the last time I looked, but many beautiful ones are less than £15. One of the ones above I've got a bid on- any guesses?
Check out the art https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/auction/detail/auction_id/1754479/
Gary Younge giving a rousing argument for political engagement (instead of the history talk I was hoping for: but it was excellent anyway).
Madame Elysé spoke for three minutes and forty-seven seconds. The silence that followed seemed interminable. As I stood at the podium, a gentle sound filled the Great Hall of Justice, the sound of tears.
I waited to address the Court.
Later, after the morning session was over... Madame Elysé... turned to me.....
'May I ask a question?'
'Yes.'
'Why did it take so long for us to come to The Hague?'
So many cute, original works-of-art bookmarks... I can't choose!
https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/bookmarkproject2025
Apple TV Release date is tomorrow! Woo! 😍
so-soMixed feelings about this one. Covering the 100 years of Rosa's life, from a Polish pogrom to a garden in Morningside in the early 2000s. Wonderfully Scottish (well, mostly Edinburgh), and with a message surely no one can argue with: conflict is bad.
For me, a bit too ambitious - and heavy on the historical exposition.
Edinburgh skyline (near Dean Village)
#WomensPrizeLL25
'Things will get better now, won't they, Mummy?' says Jan. 'Now that we have a Labour government.'
Muriel smooths a sleeve with her left hand and plies the iron with her right. 'Yes, things will get better.'
'I like Mr Attlee. He has a nice face.'
'They'll have to work fast,' Bruce says. 'Five years isn't very long to make everything happen that they've promised.'
>>>>>
Did you get that at the back? A new Labour Government! Fancy that!
A book I bought in Edinburgh and couldn't resist picking up to read straight away.
Reading my own shelves!
Nora looks out at the priceless view. There‘s a break in the cloud and enough blue to clothe any number of sailors.
----
My gran used to say this - an expression I've not heard in a while.
On the platform below, the bookstall's yellow awning
reads Hachette: Banish Monotony and Ennui. The word banish makes Maurice think of villains sent abroad and never allowed to return to France. Georges says if Maurice listens to his elders and reads every spare minute he gets, one day he'll know all the words there are and could even be a school-teacher.
Part of a piece by Ciara Phillips as part of "Undoing It"
https://galleryofmodernart.blog/exhibitions/
"This is not just a grab bag candy game. This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently.... This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain..."
A few lovely bookish places in Edinburgh, including the displays at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/visit/scottish-national-gallery-modern-art and https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/venues/gallery-of-modern-art-goma
During victory marches, captured enemy warriors walked along as proudly as they could... but with their hearts in their throats: dying on the sacrifice stone was no picnic...
...they would watch the crowd waving their little flags and tossing flowers, imagining that eventually one of these bastards would buy a strip of warrior arm or loin in the marketplace to eat in magic tomato salsa on a tostada.😪😬🤮🔪🥣🍖
You who take so much for granted, with your sound walls, rich food and fine jewels and books, especially books do you truly begrudge the people of this or any other lowly parish their little scraps of coloured glass, their painted saints, their confidence in prayer? How cruel you are, if you do.
These blue flowers obey no man; they come to no one's bidding and they die in their own season, their beauty while they live a careless rapture.
Stripped of the bleak comforts of such an illusion, she has simply been done to, which makes her a victim.
She doesn't know if she'd give it a lower-case or capital V if.she had to write it down unsure if it's an identity, a predicament or both. All she's certain of is that decades of defying the definition have ended, so that things which used to seem inevitable now feel intolerable.
It hurts so much to realise she deserved better...
so-soI picked this up as it had been LL for the Booker international prize for fiction, and I've not read anything by an author from Reunion before (pictured, via Unsplash).
Relentless book that simultaneously describes a child growing up and events in the surrounding community, from weddings to violence. I thought it was going in the direction of the typical "but I made good" narrative, so the ending caught me out!
So when nothing's going right, when the walls get so high that even prayers can't help you scale them, I open a comic book. As if leaning over a precipice, I dive right in, seeking a different world where no one can find me and I can forget. I have a book on my bedside table. Because I don't have a gun.
From then on, I demanded that the Dessaintes call me Ratus, much to their dismay! And I began to regularly commit a crime that neither of them would have dreamt of: I read! Worse still, I enjoyed it! Thoroughly. So thoroughly that I worked out how to beat those scoundrels: I would read, and invent stories, and make my own books. I would rise above my station and go places people couldn't imagine me in.
