Two books I'm starting today: Symphonies for the Soul is a classical music "pharmacy" linking musical pieces to mental health issues, which will probably be a book I'll slowly consume into next year.
The tagged book is Olds' poetry collection about aging during the COVID era - at least that's what I think it is. I've not previously read her work, so unsure if this is a good introduction.

Given its themes of endings, decline, decadence, and life-weariness, and its post-war setting, Dazai's novel cannot fail to be sad. Terminal illness, omens of death, addiction, emotional cruelty and suicide feature prominently, and Dazai died by suicide the year after its initial 1947 publication. But...
Despite her brother's dismissal of the old order as failed, and the new generation as dying on the vine, there is a scintilla of hope in ⬇️

"Mother uttered a faint cry."

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl.

"Man was born for love and revolution." ❤️?

"Many rivers to cross
But I can't seem to find my way over
Wandering, I am lost
As I travel along the white cliffs of Dover

Many rivers to cross
And it's only my will that keeps me alive
I've been licked, washed up for years
And I merely survive because of my pride

But the loneliness won't leave me alone
It's such a drag to be on your own
My woman left and she didn't say why
Well, I guess I have to try"

??? Jimmy Cliff??? ?
#TuesdayTunes

"People always make a serious face when they tell a lie. The seriousness of our leaders these days! Pooh!"

"From that day to the present, we have managed to continue our solitary lives in this cottage in the mountains. We prepare meals, knit on the porch, read in the Chinese room, drink tea - in other words, lead an uneventful existence almost completely isolated from the world."

My idea of paradise! ?

Next up, Dazai's novel of the decline of the Japanese aristocracy immediately following WWII. Published in 1947, the year prior to Dazai's death by suicide, it's tragic in tone.
The translator's introduction in this edition was written in the 1950s, and is itself an interesting, if brief, historical insight into a contemporary Westerner's perception of Japanese post-war culture.

I enjoyed the individual stories in this book, but they were quite different from each other, and that lack of cohesion somewhat affected my overall engagement, so a low pick
That said, the mix of sci-fi, macabre and historical fiction demonstrates a nice range of style, and they were all well written.
The title story is a fictionalised account of the exposure to radiation of a poor Brazilian community due to corporate negligence, which was ⬇️

"She tripped and fell; her swollen belly hit the ground."
- The Cave

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Atomito is the mascot of the Bolivian nuclear energy programme. In Colanzi's short story, Atomito assumes an apocalyptic guise for the poor residents of El Alto, living next to a nuclear power plant.

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
🎵 Blowin' in the Wind
🎙️ Bob Dylan
💿 The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
▶️ https://youtu.be/vWwgrjjIMXA?si=5VGn2dtOuYjZuFj3

🎵💿Red Skies Over Paradise
🎙️Fischer Z
▶️https://youtu.be/GzLLKfqEbbI?si=abznb-Ov5Yp2uWRf

Fantastic book that catches the right balance between scientific and cultural insight. Wallen also avoids sensationalism while retaining a strong sense of the otherness and nonhuman squididity of these fascinating cephalopods 🦑
As with all the Reaktion Animal Series, it's lavishly illustrated, with excellent notes, references and index, and printed on high quality paper. A real pleasure to read 😊

"As the last two centuries have given us the modern world of clear facts and useful knowledge, a vague anxiety exists as a possibility we cannot laugh away. And that possibility is that somewhere in the deepest, darkest, coldest waters something large and predatory is waiting to make itself known."

It's quite an authorial feat to write about a visit to the authoritarian dystopia of North Korea and to leave the impression that you, the author, are the most unsavoury element in the book!
I'm overstating it, I guess, but Delisle's graphic bio of his two month sojourn to North Korea overseeing an animation sweatshop (little evidence of his awareness of the exploitative nature of this) is characterised by his sneery arrogance and lack of ⬇️

I'm finally getting round to reading this book, which Father Squidmas left for me last year! 🦑🎄🦑

(Demure #CatsOfLitsy )

I loved this book! Sword-and-Sleuthing should definitely be a genre ?
The initial 30-or-so pages are rather dense in exposition and set up, but after that, the story moves along smoothly. It's actually "stories", as it's fairly episodic rather than being a single overarching plot, but there's a through line that develops nicely.
Elderly (he's a year younger than me! ?) samurai, Akiyama Kohai gives off Yoda vibes, being a diminutive ⬇️

Doctor Strange has been murdered, and in his absence the Earth is threatened by extradimensional demons and sorcerers, however, the Sorcerer Supreme of Earth-616 has prepared for this eventuality!

It's pretty good, if fairly standard, magical superheroing. Low pick 3.5 🪄

Next up: Set in the 10th shogunate, 1737-1786, The Samurai Detectives is a historical crime novel starting when a young swordmaster, Akiyama Daijiro, declines a dishonourable offer to work as an enforcer by breaking someone's arms. Seeking to discover the conspirators, Akiyama recruits his retired samurai father and Mifuyu, a female warrior, who find themselves drawn to Edo, and the city's political intrigue and criminal underworld!

This 44-page zine draws out the anarchist ideas explicitly and implicitly embedded in the Star Wars canon, focusing on season 1 of the Andor TV series.
I was interested to learn that the show's Aldhani heist subplot was inspired by Stalin's IRL bank heists to fund the nascent Russian Revolution.
The examination of Saw Gerrera's (a name deliberately metred to suggest Che Guevara) and Luthen Rael's approaches to insurrection was fascinating, too.
⬇️

"Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is a mask of fear."
- Nemik's Manifesto: The Trail of Political Consciousness (Screenwriter, Tony Gilroy)

"Democracies aren't forcibly overthrown; they are willingly relinquished."
- George Lucas, 2002

Good news! The days of grief & pain
won't stay like this-
As others went, these won't remain
or stay like this.
🌹
Don't put your trust in all the tricks
And games that you've created;
It's said there are a thousand ways
For kings to be checkmated. 🚫👑
🌹
Go easy on yourself - the world's
Harsh nature is to be
Hard on the man who's hard upon
Himself continually.
🌹

"If you can find a wine jug and a friend,
Drink sensibly, and with discretion,
Because the dreadful days we're living through
Are rife with mischief, and oppression.

See that you hide your wine-cup in your sleeve;
Your jug's lip sheds its wine, blood-red -
And, in the same way, these cruel times ensure
Red blood is copiously shed."
❣️?❣️

"That you're a pious prig by nature
Doesn't mean you have to blame
Libertines for their faults; those sins
Won't be imputed to your name.

Each one of us will reap the seeds
He sows, so what is it to you
Whether I'm good or bad? To work on who
*You* are should be your aim.
~~~~~~~~
If this is who you are, the nature
You were given, then bravo!
And good for you if your fine character's
Exactly as you claim!"

Now, November leaves,
Autumn's cooper-costume leaves -
Melancholy leaves ?

#HaikuHive @dabbe

? Taken in the gardens of Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire, when we visited a couple of days ago ?

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
?Sand River
??‍? Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man
? Out of Season
▶️ https://youtu.be/88QqgiFL3b0?si=L3SARKqas5-Op-H8
"Autumn leaves
Beauty's got a hold on me
Autumn leaves
Pretty as can be"
???

I think this was less a #BookHaul and more a #BookSpree 🤭 Especially if the other five books I bought while we were away are added in! 😳
• I have the Gormenghast trilogy (+Maeve's sequel) already, and have read them many times as they are amongst my very favourite books and Peake is a favourite author and poet, but only in a collected edition, so now I have the individual editions in a 1973 printing.
• The Detective in Film is a 1972 vintage, ⬇️

Not exactly book related, but then not exactly not-exactly-book-related, too 😏 📚

Mostly bought as little extras to go in Christmas present bags for various family members, but the frog and neurodiversity stickers are for me 😊 🐸🍄🌈

Magpie, sit with me -
The bronze-edged November wood
speaks to our sorrow.

#HaikuHive @dabbe

A few bits I picked up today #BookHaul
• The Elizabethan World View is a study of how the universe was understood by the immediately pre-enlightenment English.
• Poisonous Plants in Great Britain is what it says it is! ☠️🪴☠️
• The Samurai Detectives is a 1973 Japanese crime novel set in the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the first English translation in a series.
• Japanese Tales of Fantasy and Folklore is what it says it is! 👺🦊👹

I saw this game yesterday in Odyssey Games, Ely: "A Place for All My Books", described as "The cozy game of gathering, organising & admiring good books", which I wanted to buy, but Mrs. B was insistent that I gather and organise my actual books before playing at it! It would be good practice though, wouldn't it? ?‍♂️?

"So, she went from being the child of a village, loved and nurtured by all, to being a child of nothing and no one, with a swiftness that left scars so deep they might never heal."

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

The book isn't a novelisation of the 2025 movie, but it was released at around the time it was in production, so I've borrowed a film poster image ?

We're visiting our son in Ely for his birthday, and popping into Toppings for a Christmas present for my great-niece, I made an impulse purchase of the tagged.
It's based on the comics version of the character - sword-and-sorcery in Conan the Cimmerian's Hyborian Age - rather than R. E. Howard's prose version - historical adventure in medieval France - and I'm prepared to allow it a degree of schlock latitude, so anything better than that will ⬇️

"If unity is a song, then let it be loud enough to drown the sound of bullets. Let it be a hand extended, pulling us from the brink into the light of ourselves."

- "A Country That Carries Its Dead Like Firewood" by Oladosu Michael Emerald

"The wound remained. The feeling of being less - because we had no home - hung in the air. The weight of loss settled into our lives like dust in the corners of our fragile houses. We were a word written before we were born - refugee - an identity imposed, printed on the UNWRA ration card, carried like a birthmark." ??
- "In the Absence, Fire", by Malak Hijazi

"If you think you can build distance, craft an architecture to shield your eyes from the wreckage, convince yourself the violence is far away - then believe this: the same system will one day reach you. What devours us now will hunger for you later - if not in blood, then in silence, numbness, or the slow decay of all that makes you human.
You are not safe in your forgetting.
And we are not gone." ??
- "In the Absence, Fire", by Malak Hijazi

When you inadvertently colour-coordinate with the book you're reading!
We've all done that, yeah? 💛💙📙💙💛 🤭

"We can argue that high control approaches to classroom discipline are inappropriate in a democratic society... Control-oriented approaches to classroom discipline serve to support the teachers' tendency to believe that behaviour problems arise because there is something wrong with the children rather than because there is something inadequate about the teaching, schools, or broader non-cooperative, hierarchical society."

Some really nice-looking illustrations of tasty food, but when your recipe for vegan sausage, mash and gravy runs to three pages and has 34 ingredients (ok, that does include seasonings and water), you lose the right to describe this as "quick, simple meals". I will, however, make something from it when I'm on holiday, rather than when I've just got home from work.
(It's possible that I'm just a lazy cook!)

14 Batman stories set in 14 countries by creative teams from those countries: neat idea, ok execution.
With about 15 pages per story, there's not much space for development, even bearing in mind most readers will have some immersion in the Bat-milieu, so minimal set up is needed.
A quick, easy read with some good bits, but it's like those pizzas that show piled toppings on the packaging, but there's hardly any cheese and only one olive inside 🍕🫤

"Home? Come on, Batman. I'm not needed there.
A mad clown has already taken a dump on the desk of the Oval Office, and people still love him."

? Why, Mr. Joker, to whom could you possibly be referring? ???

“It is the essential work of therapy to challenge the lies we tell ourselves.”

Quotation not necessarily in the tagged book (which is on my wishlist), and is taken from Neville's 1999 paper, "The client-centered ecopsychologist".

"Our decision to launch the 'elements' anthology series with "Rage" was unanimous.
- Editor's Note, Farhaana Arefin

"An urgency wrapped, packaged
in sheets of doubt
conveyed to you
through
commerce and you want to shout -
No."
- Untitled, Rasheed Rollins

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"I am a huge fan of science fiction!"
- Foreword, LeVar Burton

"When Galactics arrived at JFK they often reeked of ammonia, sulfur, and something else Tavi could never quite put a finger on."
- The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex, Tobias S. Buckell

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"When a world leader advocates for the creation of a militaristic Space Force to exercise "dominance" in the heavens, we are moving further than ever from Gene Roddenberry's United Federation of Planets."

- LeVar Burton

Next up, a SciFi short story anthology edited by a non-binary person of colour, with a foreword by LeVar Burton 🖖😊, and written by people of colour. 🖤🤎🩷🤍🩵❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
#BookmarkMatching 🔖👽

This was good! 4.5⭐
Cristoff spends time in small towns in the Patagonian meseta (plateau lands), getting to know the rhythms of life and the locals, staying long enough to become a recognisable, if temporary, community feature to whom people open up about their lives.
Cristoff augments testimony with some historical research and, probably, a degree of literary licence, which coheres into a picture of brittle lives dwarfed by a vast landscape, ⬇️

"Haikus of horror":
An evocative phrase, but -
children are dying.

#HaikuHive

With apologies that my first entry is rather grim.

I loved this! Neville looks at the emerging trends of the COVID pandemic as they appeared in 2020 via the lens of Jungian psychology mediated by the Ancient Greek pantheon. His insights are fascinating, and his predictions and cautionings largely accurate, which is unfortunate given the post-pandemic exacerbation of authoritarianism.
It's interesting to be reminded of the strangeness of the period, and of the prevailing hopes and fears. 5⭐

"The #COVID19 crisis seems to be demanding what is conventionally referred to as 'strong leadership'. However we may reasonably be concerned that it is also contributing to a phenomenon which is already manifest - a global inflation of the Zeus archetype, observed in the deterioration of democracy and the increasing power of people described by Noam Chomsky as "sociopathic buffoons"."

"If we take the lead from archetypal psychology, the Greek pantheon can provide us with a language for talking about a wide range of distinct philosophies, value systems, energies, feeling states, habits of behaviour and political ideologies. It enables us to avoid accepting a single perspective on the climate crisis or the COVID19 crisis and our psychological response to them as representing the whole truth about these phenomena. ⬇️