Welcome to Litsy!

It took me a while to get through "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". It's a slow paced novella that I found rewarded my patience with it. There's an initial section focusing on the eponymous man, a retired forester whose cottage on the edge of the New Forest allows him access to the trees he loves, and which come to love him in turn with an inhuman jealousy that threatens to possess and subsume him into themselves.
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11th October is Thich Nhat Hanh's birthday, in commemoration of which the Plum Village Band has released an album of devotional and contemporary classical music, chants and prayers, produced by Jack Penate (Mervyn Peake's nephew).
The track "Arrived" is gorgeous: https://youtu.be/wbtWMiz8nXU?si=wjPgcYu9dTkC5Z5m

I've a couple of Thich Nhat Hanh's "How to..." books, and it seemed appropriate to order "... Listen" ?

#BooksAndMusic

“It's the aim of existence
to offer resistance
to the flow of time“

🎶I Believe🎶
📀A Different Kind of Tension📀
🎸Buzzcocks🎸
🎤Pete Shelley🎤

https://youtu.be/DRzScthaPOE?si=G6085Ylt31CXdfcU

#BooksAndMusic

Lemmy! 🤦‍♂️ He's the obvious casting choice for Hell Tanner! And Motörhead the ultimate soundtrack! #BooksAndMusic
This was definitely a B-movie vibe, but amongst the general mayhem & violence, Zelazny slipped in some social commentary about war, human shortsightedness, & the brutalising effects of social deprivation. Writing in '69, he also anticipated the state response to pandemic being a mix of concern for the populace & profiteering off ⬇️

Wow, the Casting team for the movie adaptation sure goofed when they cast Jan Michael Vincent as bearded, cigar-chomping, neo-nazi Hell's Angel, Hell Tanner. Even doing his best Clint Eastwood impression, he's too clean-cut. I had more a sense of him looking like Snake Plisken from the Escape from New York/Los Angeles films, but while he's a better fit, Kurt Russell is still too pretty. The perfect casting decision would definitely have been ⬇️

Reading while listening to music. I don't always have music playing while reading. If I do, I usually like listening to either jazz or classical music.
What do you usually do? Do you like listening to music while reading?
#cats #catsandbooks #readingcats ##TuxedoCats #booksandmusic #readingandmusic

"The Vikings were a fierce seafaring people originating from Scandinavia who long ago raided and traded with the British Isles."
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
It seems that while I wasn't looking, two of my current reads, The Prose Edda (Viking literature) and Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North, have spawned an offspring in the guise of Viking DNA: The Wirral and West Lancashire Project!

The best thing about this GN was the excuse it gave me to listen to the original Blade Runner soundtrack, and as I actually don't need much of an excuse for that, my overall feeling for this one was - meh 😑 That's the same feeling the Blade Runner 2049 film gave me, so I won't be rushing to pick up any more adaptations based on the franchise, which rather saddens me on behalf of PKD's legacy.
#BooksAndMusic

#ClassicLSFBC
I enjoyed these stories more than I recalled, so an upgrade to 5⭐ for me.
The last couple of stories deal with the political and economic consequences of robotic contributions to human culture and governance, with the rise of a fundamentalist Pro-Human faction being harnessed to electoral manipulation and (kind of) culture wars that sparked with contemporary relevance.
I may read "The Rest of the Robots" before the year's end.

This afternoon I'm sunburning my knees in the back garden with a previously unread edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in honour of the Persian tentmaker's birthday today, listening to Beth Gibbons's excellent new album, Lives Outgrown, with its matching themes of death and the transitory nature of life (I'm a happy bunny, really, honestly!🐰), and wishing I had another Twister ice lolly to replace the one I've just finished.
#BooksAndMusic