Birthday #bookhaul ❀️
These should keep me busy for a while! πŸ˜„

With gratitude to @squirrelbrain @Caroline2 @TrishB and (stubborn non-Littens) Mr and Miss K.

My oracle card course has me picking up all kinds of books I'd not have considered previously. (KG is one of the teachers.) My rational, analytical side questions how sane this actually is, but concedes that it is surprisingly fascinating. Kyle explains his specific way of wording prayers to angels, gives the lowdown on each archangel in turn and ends with a directory of life-situations with a suggested angel to call upon and a sample prayer.

I did a fair bit of cord-cutting during a stint as a shamanic practitioner: in this book Denise Linn shared a tonne of stuff not taught in my training. She's thorough! As well as discussing what energy strands are, and how to clear the detrimental ones (take your pick of many methods), she also talks about strengthening beneficial ones, and why and when energy-protection techniques aren't always advisable... . Not a book so much as a compendium!

If ever a world was in need of Tesco's "Plant Chef" range, it was surely Rakhat!
Seriously though, these books wreck me... and it's great. I read The Sparrow some years ago and still think about it often. I put off reading this sequel as I was afraid of being disappointed and couldn't bear to send Emilio back to Rakhat. Well, my fears were unfounded and, I think I can say without a spoiler alert, there's a whole world to suffer over. Brilliant!

Hey, hey: look what I've stumbled upon! #storygraph
I'm in pie-chart paradise! πŸ˜„
If anyone else wants to say hello, I have the same username there, too.

Well, this is a conundrum: wtf have I just read?!
A public health official escapes the city after a Biblical apocalypse that has angels carrying out quasi-Stalinist purges. This narrative is bracketed by a mystical prose poem and a biographical essay on Hildegard. It sounds weird enough but felt oddly prosaic. Named as co-author, I expected more Hildegard. The *ideas* may be hers; perhaps I just wish she'd been allowed to articulate them herself.

My first completed read of 2023! It's a wholly unexpected choice: Radleigh is a teacher on a course I'm studying (I'm dusting off my oracle card reading skills). In truth, the subject he talks about is almost secondary to the vibe of kindness and genuine care he gives. Audio was definitely the right way to go, then. I found spending more time in his company did great things for my mood and outlook. (Honestly, who even AM I, anymore?! πŸ˜†)

Happy New Year, dear Littens! πŸŽ‰
Would you just look at this fabulous t-shirt my lovely daughter gave me!

Good old Uhtred; he never fails to deliver! He struts about, trips over his humongous ego at least once per book, gets all uppity with King Alfred, does "the right thing" in spite of himself, and always saves the day.

In recent years it has become a tradition of mine to read the next in the series between the winter solstice and New Year.
(Whatever floats your longboat...) I'm much obliged to BorrowBox this year. ?

I'm over the moon with my mighty Christmas book haul! πŸŽ„πŸ“šβ€οΈ (Volodya is presiding over the festivities, as usual, and is making sure I don't try to gobble all the books at once!)

Happy Christmas, dear Littens!
How are you doing? I'm on kitchen duty now but wanted to take a moment to enjoy my pretty tree.
I'll see if I can pop back again later.
#holidayfriends

At last, Uhtred son of Uhtred!
The presents are wrapped: now nothing can come between us... until tomorrow when I need to make the Christmas pudding (it's a "magic" recipe, done in the microwave: worked a treat last year)!

Sorry, book, but you're not the one for me. There may well be good strategies and insights here, but the assumption throughout is that the reader has "made it" in the corporate world. Cannot relate: all I've made today is multiple mugs of tea.

I think the book I'm really looking for is called "The Bumper Book of Burn-Out for the Chronically Self-Disappointed" (Please, God, can someone write it soon: don't make me have to do it!)

Happy Solstice, all ye who celebrate!
I made a caraway rye bread, rum and raisin fruitcake, and a spiced apple hot toddy. And, to top it off, BorrowBox had my next "Uhtred book" (tagged) available, so I can partake of another of my Solstice traditions! ?

I first read this 22 years ago (!) and recently picked it up again on an impulse. I'm glad to say it still holds water after all this time. Oriah can be relied upon to "keep it real": she's grounded, she's authentic, and she didn't throw her analytical mind out the window when she determined to live her life oriented towards Spirit.

Rumi is great! Here, Anton Lesser reads Book One of his epic, the Masnavi. (Sadly, subsequent volumes don't appear to have followed.) These teaching stories deserve and repay contemplation but they also make for fine entertainment.

If you want a damn good story with plenty to think about, Ursula Le Guin is a great choice.
Here are two companion worlds, one much like the contemporary West (declared a paradise by the Terran ambassador, whose Earth was wrecked by our current dominant culture) and the other a breakaway non-authoritarian communist society. Shevek is the scientist caught between them: regardless of ideology, people go on being the best and worst of themselves.

How was my book? A hot mess, that's how! It reads like a first draft: verbosity; confusing metaphors; deplorable grammar; inaccurate punctuation; a digression towards the end into instructions for doing the Buddhist tonglen practice ... And the "friendly" tone just came across as over-familiar and therefore creepy.
There were some thought-provoking (and suitably uncomfortable) journalling questions. I'll leave it at that.

Audiobook read by the author.
The first half might have been called "Reasons Why It's Bloody Difficult To Stay Alive": obviously that wouldn't sell many copies! I commend him for writing so clearly about combined anxiety and depression. It's an invaluable book, one that reminds you you're not alone in this and that all the weird things you're thinking and doing (and all the crap you tell yourself) is not YOU being mad: it's the depression talking.

Navigating the female midlife burnout of being all things to all people whilst holding to a sense of self formed in scraps of leftover time. I liked that she shares her experience as it unfolds; it feels more inclusive than handing down wisdom after the event: the reader walks with her, too. The downside is that it gets a bit "samey" and part of me wanted a plan to follow. I'm up for the journalling, oracle cards and time alone in nature but... 3*

Creepier and creepier! (I'm kind of horrified at myself for guessing the closing scene pretty much exactly.)
Not something I often say but this would make a compelling drama - the sort of thing the BBC sometimes puts on of an evening in that week between Christmas and New Year to jolt us out of mince pie-stuffed drowsiness.

Well that was a blast from the past! Twenty years ago I taught myself Persian so I could read Rumi's actual words. This book is two parallel narratives, that of the extraordinary friendship between Rumi and the dervish Shams of Tabriz, framed as a novel read by unfulfilled middle-aged housewife Ella. It was all rather "romantic" but I enjoyed catching up with an old friend!?

It's taken me over a month to read all 1,325+ pages of this hefty tome, but I think that suited the slow pace of the story: exciting stuff doesn't really get going until the final quarter. That doesn't bother me. I'm interested in the domestic details, and enjoyed my extended visit with Claire and Jamie and everyone.

Dystopia? Straight-up horror, more like! Artists and writers who persist in creating are maimed (like some kind of Dantean contrapasso); people who live alone are forced to relocate to windowless, doorless communal "retreats" where the TV is always on; those who show emotion are "cured"; mindless cruelty to animals... thank goodness this disorienting novella in connected stories wasn't any longer 'cause it's given me the heebie-jeebies, big time!

I'm rather proud of this! I tweaked the Hairy Bikers' beetroot chocolate cake recipe and made a vegan Black Forest gateau, for Samhain. Yum!

I celebrated the return of my reading mojo with the purchase of two tomes, a pot of tea and a slice of cake made by someone else. πŸ˜„

Yep, that's about the measure of it! πŸ˜‚
In fact, on my way back from the woods earlier, I stopped by a handwritten sign that offered free cooking apples. I thought two or three would make a nice crumble: the chap kindly gave me 5 KG! 🍎

"Uplifting" books are hit-and-miss with me: sometimes they're too sweet to stomach and make me miserable. This isn't all sunshine and lollipops, though. For one thing, RG's delights are celebrated in the face of systemic racism. He has a boundless capacity for being genuinely delighted by the little daily things. It's a book that piques a renewed appetite for life, regardless of all the deep shit and buttock-quaking chaos we're currently mired in.

Fascinating stuff! This one gave me a delightful case of deep-time vertigo. He recreates various eras of prehistoric life on Earth, through the fossil record, going right back to the stromatolites. My dino-nerd self loved it (though how could he talk about the Permian without featuring dimetrodons?! πŸ˜‰). I just wish there were more of the grey-scale illustrations that open each chapter, so as to better imagine the creatures that were new to me.

I'm beyond dismayed that it's three months since I was last here. 😱
Possibly, maybe, hopefully, I am now back.
(Thank you @Bookwomble and @TrishB for your kind comments.)

It's been AGES since I was last here!
I haven't had the mental bandwidth recently to read much (partly due to my usual summertime dysphoria) which is frankly a horrifying state of affairs. Let's hope this #libraryhaul comes to the rescue.

#bookhaul
Miss K and I carried out a successful raid on Waterstones! "The Luminaries" is mine; all the rest are hers. ?

Aside from a, frankly, disturbing story about a self-immolating monk, this is a refreshingly sane and helpful book. Yes, it is about being mindful of all the external "noise" in our lives, but the real focus is on the power of tuning out from "Radio NST": non-stop thinking.

My third Richard Powers, and the earliest and longest (675 pages) of his that I've read, this one had the least favourable effort to reward ratio. The plentiful, and lengthy, discussions of molecular genetics largely went over my head. (I didn't fare a whole lot better with the Bach.) The fact of someone's thinking to make this a major theme of their novel is strangely pleasing to me, but in practice reading it was hard work. Still a pick, though.

*Reviewing after an initial read through: I'll need to go back and take my time over the exercises.*
Mr K and I have been together since the Cretaceous and neither of us has stellar relational skills so... the upshot is I made a unilateral decision to "do something" (I know, I know! ?).
The scripted conversations are cringey (can't imagine us talking like that!) but she's given valuable insights into present difficulties and how to solve them.

Lovely book! Inviting photographs of plentiful recipes for detox, digestion, immune support, stress relief, sleep....
The recipes are easily do-able without heaps of weird ingredients: in the UK, all but a couple of things are available online from Baldwin's (for example) but I was delighted to discover, for the recipes that especially appealed to me, many of them are growing in the wilder edges of my garden. I'm looking forward to a taste test!

#libraryhaul
Getting my art on! πŸ˜„

🐣 Happy Easter, dear Littens! 🐣
In our house, we don't get eggs: we give each other books instead. I am proper chuffed with mine! πŸ˜€

Ted Hughes reflects in later life upon his marriage to Sylvia Plath.
SP (or "my bride" as she is, distractingly, referred to throughout) is a feckin' nightmare but TH himself doesn't fare much better, coming across as a posturing, self-mythologising, pompous arse. As for the "perfect" marriage... it struck me as a horror-show from the outset. I ended up feeling yucky reading about it, glad not to have to spend time in the company of either party.

Lunchtime #libraryhaul !
I reserved the Asperger's book a few weeks back. The others were simple opportunism πŸ˜€.
I couldn't even read the blurb of the Richard Powers one as I'd forgotten my glasses, but no way was I leaving that on the shelf!

I can only surmise that the acoustics must be amazing. (Why else would he stick his head so far up his backside and throw his voice around like that?)

(Anyone else have those little houses as a kid?)
There's two novellas here, bookending a collection of short stories, a couple of which surprised me by being a tad woman's magazine-ish. Let's face it, I don't suppose anyone goes to Lionel Shriver for feel-goods and uplift. None of her characters is revealed by her critical eye to be a shining paragon of humanity: everyone's a bit crap, really. Sharp, incisive, just shy of merciless, it's good.

It's book-hangover time again!
A reporter on a local paper investigates a claim of immaculate conception in 1950s Sidcup? Well, Clare Chambers, you've a hard sell on your hands there! Or so I thought: I loved it. She wrote her characters with real pathos amidst the shitty compromises of their lives. Not sure how I feel about that ending, though.

I set an intention, for Lent, only to buy necessities. Honestly, if we were to discuss the relative elasticity of the term, we'd be here all day! πŸ€”

What a deplorable family! If AM was in any way a decent human being, it's no thanks to them. The Old Boss routinely uses his vast wealth and connections to ensure he and his eldest son evade facing the consequences of their actions (circa WW2). As for the way they treat Wera, AM's mother...🀬. I know these things occur, but seeing them put so matter-of-factly made my blood boil. Yet it's written in such a way that I couldn't lob it out the window!

I wish I'd had this book 25 years ago: hell, I wish I'd had it ONE year ago! I'd have been much kinder to myself. Written as an insider's take on life diagnosed late as on the autism spectrum, my over-riding response is "oh, thank God!". So many random things I thought were me being weird (e.g the contorted posture I prefer to sit in = seeking proprioceptive feedback!) or just baffling ineptitude (verbal pragmatics, anyone?) now make sense to me.

I love the sea: I didn't love this book. It reads more like an extended dissertation than a book, per se. It's all beautifully cross-referenced but, ironically enough given the subject matter, rather dry. And I found the suggestions of things to do intolerably patronising. (For the love of God, do not talk to me as if I'm stupid!) I thought the photos were the best bit.

I loved it until I didn't. 😞 It's like the Lindt chocolate shop but for word-nerds. I loved EW's playfulness with language but I wanted more than confectionery. Some of the plot points came randomly from nowhere, and I still don't get what Sofia's character was all about. And the pelican?
It's good enough for a ⭐⭐⭐ pick, but I'm frustrated that it didn't deliver on its promise.

Fabulous book! Bird nerd wonderland! So good that I'm willing to overlook the occasional wild anthropomorphism (e.g. referring to bird partnerships in terms of marriage/divorce). It's not all feathered grace and cute chicks: some of the bird behaviour is brutal, though nothing matches the mindless cruelty of some of the human actions cited.

I'm sure my dear ones are delighted with the albatross facts I've been compelled to share with them! πŸ˜‰

#bookhaul
I've been spending my birthday money! πŸ˜„

(I also got a Kindle book about menopause, but that's a whole other story.)