A collection of dark, often bleak, frequently sad, and sometimes grotesquely humorous stories.
A couple of the stories have a supernatural element, but mainly they're about mundane neurosis, psychosis, malice and confabulation.
⬇️

"At last he was close to her again, close to his love, lovely still as on the day he had killed her.
Killed her. How thankful he was, now, that he had done it! That he had killed her, then, on that moonlit autumn night, in the full flower of her loveliness, more than seventy years ago! A murderer in shining armour, he had saved her from this Old People's Home as surely as St George had saved his princess from the dragon."

- Lilac Time

Great artwork, as expected with Ito, with a narrative that doesn't entirely hold together, as expected with Ito. I need to remember this next time I see one of his wonderfully produced books in a shop, and then get it from the library.
A low pick, but a pick.
Not as graphic with the body horror as he can be, heavy on themes of suicide.

"The android whose name was Boy set out on an adventure."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

I've been reading M. R. James's Complete Ghost Stories, classics of the Victorian-Edwardian genre, and I'm starting Celia Fremlin's By Horror Haunted, stories of domestic, psychological horror with little of the supernatural, but much of the unsettling if the last collection of hers I read is anything to go by.

#MerryCatmas #CatsOfLitsy

Our local animal sanctuary posted this picture earlier today of some kittens they've just rescued. Squeeee! 🎄😻😻😻🎄

Merry Festivus everyone! 🕯️🎁🎄🕯️

My #Christmas #BookHaul Pride of place to The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien, a three volume box set edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond ❤️📚❤️
Christmas Mouse was crocheted by my son, and has interchangeable clothes for year-round adventures. They look like a Clanger to me 🌛🌝🌜😊

If a history of the astronomical observation of Jupiter, an overview of its likely formation, tabulation of its physical metrics, a summary of the characteristics of its major satellites, a review of planetary probes that have visited it, details of Jovian meteorology, and tips on amateur observation and recording of its changing features, all illustrated with photos and diagrams, sounds interesting, then this is a book for you. And for me 😁

After reviewing my decision to read a book likely to focus to some degree on trauma and marginalisation, I decided to switch to this illustrated book about the planet Jupiter, and open myself to the wonders of nature and the universe 🌌
In the cup is a cinnamon and plum green tea 🍵
I'll get to the other book next year.

The slight discomfort I feel in picking up this book is an indicator that I need to read this book, or at least if not this book, then to learn more about the issues surrounding sex work from somebody who has done it, and so whose views are informed by experience as well as moral ideology, ethics and politics. But, it is, in fact, this book I'll be reading 😏📘

"It is far from easy to comfort a Fillyjonk who is stricken with panic and doesn't know why."

- The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters

Well, I see from a previous post that seven years ago when I bought this book, it was my intention to read it "soon"! Better late... ⏳?

#BooksAndMusic
I've got up to Iggy and The Stooges in this music history, and I've been listening to the less-than-festive Raw Power album, co-written by Iggy and Stooges' guitarist James Williamson, and co-produced by Iggy and David Bowie ????‍??
Today, I think "Shake Appeal" is my favourite track, but tomorrow it could be something else - love this album!
https://youtu.be/RmzwDdg184U?si=W8LRbB2K_G4sQRj9

I enjoyed this more than I'd anticipated from the first few pages.

MC, Lena, has completed her PhD, but still works minimum wage in a bookshop run as an affectation by a design studio, dodging the microaggressions of a crypto-fascist manager, struggling with an eating disorder, supported by her best friend, and navigating the well-intentioned hectoring of her parents' texts.
Lena's efforts to escape wage slavery through writing classes and ⬇️

"He looks at me with the wide eyes of a toddler who's been reprimanded by his parents for not sharing his toys."
- COOP: A Novelette, by Nida Sajid

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

A shortish book from Hajar Press.

Lena is a minimum-wage bookseller in a boutique bookshop in the basement of a London design agency run by "upper middle-class Oxbridge types", who pay lip service to social progressiveness, while passive-aggressively maintaining their privilege.
It's choppy, narrated through little scenes and text messages, which I'm not usually a fan of, but so far (25%), it's engaging.

#TuesdayTunes @tiedyedude

I came across Penny Nichols a few years ago when searching for versions of one of my favourite Nico songs, her cover of Jackson Browne's "These Days" from her "Chelsea Girl" album.
Penny released one album in the '60s, sang backup with a few big acts of the day, focusing on songwriting and vocal coaching for many years, with occasional album releases, this one in 2012 collecting some of Browne's songs.

The 3rd episode of Charles Dickens Ghost Stories is The Signalman. A classic ghost story, 5⭐, you should read it!
What fascinated me about this reading was the introduction, in which Dickens's experience as a survivor of the 1865 Staplehurst rail crash is cited as an inspiration for the story. Dickens helped to treat casualties, nearly lost an installment of Dombey and Son, and was said by his son to have never really recovered from his trauma.

"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."

I enjoyed Ellis Peters's The Trinity Cat, sad and sordid though it was. The 2nd story, A Happy Solution by Raymund Allen, was a Country House mystery written, I think, more for the chess problem it features than the mystery, but it was ok. The third story is The Blue Carbuncle, one of my favourite Holmes adventures, so this feels like comfy slippers ????❤️

"He was sitting on the top of the rear gate-posts of the churchyard when I walked through on Christmas Eve, grooming in his lordly style, with one back leg wrapped round his neck, and his bitten ear at an angle of forty-five degrees, as usual."
- The Trinity Cat, Ellis Peters

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Next up, a short story anthology of Christmas-themed crime stories, with contributors including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, Thomas Hardy and Wilkie Collins ??️?
The first story is by the dependable Ellis Peters: "The Trinity Cat" opens with a description of a wily semi-feral cat, which has me hooked in straight away!

"Mostly interesting" is, I guess, damnation by faint praise, but it's the best I can muster. The COVID poems that start the collection were interesting accounts of an individual experience; the Dickinson homage poems left me ? and after the first couple, I skipped the rest. At times my mind drifted, and I felt little inclination to re-read. The sections about her childhood abuse were affecting as testimony, but not so moving as poetry, as was ⬇️

"How much longer can I live without touch?
It's a sweet sentence, that at 75
'I'm between boyfriends,'
and maybe in a way I'm like a crone goddess, ish,
the Sun-Kissed Matron in gray braids,
holding my tray out to you, chest-
high, rich with night-dark California raisins."

- 5 O'Clockface

@bibliothecarivs I've finally got my prevaricating punk-ass in gear and I'm posting your books today!
Hoping they arrive safely, and that I've made good choices! 😁📚

I love this performance of Elkie Brooks fronting blues-rock band Vinegar Joe: Proud to Be (A Honky Woman).
🎶
I'm sorry
If I wear mascara and I paint my toenails red
I'm sorry
If I use bad language and I smoke cigarettes in bed
But I was raised in the city
On the wrong side of the tracks
No-one ever did nothing for me
I never give no thanks
I'm a proud
Proud to be a honky woman
Proud
To be who I am

https://youtu.be/ySSeC5V2-1M?si=M85L-BycO3yM9QLE

"I want a no-bullshit, working class band—I've had enough of all this pseudo peace crap." - band manager, John Fenton
One of the artists Stanfield has introduced me to is Third World War, a band which in 1970 rejected rock's excesses and pop's saccharin sweetness, with songs embracing the hard realities of working class life from a revolutionary perspective. This is punk seven years before punk! ?✊
https://youtu.be/ffwGc5sjoVI?si=fGifz9-Ki3LvS7di

One of the author's choices for music that captures the spirit of adolescence is Felix Mendelssohn's String Octet, written when he was 16 years old!
This performance features Janine Jansen and a group of mainly young musicians, who all look like they're immensely enjoying themselves 😄🎻
https://youtu.be/Vw1kcQ-QbZw?si=4sXcxrYMM8gWf_QP

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

"While images, music and words can be legislated against, controlled by censors and the police, what cannot be suppressed is the way you walk, hold yourself and speak. Style and attitude matter and have force for someone like Farren."

I hadn't heard of Mick Farren (r. holding bullwhip) before, nor his band, The Deviants. Stanfield touts him as a key British underground figure, whose counter-cultural attitude prepared the ground for the ⬇️

Continuing my effort to read all my 2024 Christmas books before Christmas 2025, the penultimate one is a social history of London's post-Beatles emerging alternative rock scene, dubbed by Alice Cooper Third Generation Rock, being the arty end of Glam Rock 🎸🪩💄💋🧑🏼‍🎤

I expected to like Asylum Magazine, but turns out I loved it!
This Winter 2025 edition had a focus on the (mis)use of AI in therapy and mental health support, reflecting on the depersonalisation of state responses to impaired wellbeing, and the continued encroachment of corporate techbros and capitalist-patriarchal systems into our psyches.
There's also an article about the use of AI to assist self-expression of institutionally unacceptable ⬇️

"Sadly, a small minority of lesbian and gay organisations are trying to distance themselves from trans liberation. In my view, the LGBT+ movement deciding to exclude trans people would be like the psychiatric survivor movement excluding ‘schizophrenics‘, as people with that diagnosis have often been associated in the media with violent crime. Trans people, especially trans women, have been central to the gay liberation movement, just like ⬇️

This magazine dropped through the letterbox the other day: I'd forgotten I'd subscribed to it a couple of months ago, this being the first edition I've received.
It's a journal focusing on radical mental health perspectives, seeking to demedicalise mental health. The first article is an interview with a former clinical psychologist, who suffered a breakdown due to the stress of working in a micromanaged and target-driven, rather than wellbeing ⬇️

The BBC is releasing an audiobook/podcast series of Charles Dickens ghost stories, read by David Suchet.
The first episode is part one of Dickens's own abridgement of the story which he would read to audiences, so while it's not the full book, it's still authentic 😊
And then, David Suchet is so perfect a choice to narrate - well, it's actually a performance 🎭❤️ Can't wait for part 2 to be released in a few days.
Link in comments 🛜

At the intersection of JRRT's "The Lord of the Rings" and Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" is cartoonist Tom Racine's "Doomed to Die: An A-Z of Death in Tolkien".
It starts with, "A is for Arwen broken by sorrows", and continues through the alphabet showing the demise of Legendarium characters, with illustrations and rhyming captions in Gorey's style.
⬇️

This was an interesting little book (58 pages), with a short description of poisonous plants and fungi, their effects if ingested, and bits of folklore, each with a facing illustration taken from old herbiaries.
Amongst the useful information is: "Always remember that poisons are poisonous," which is legit.
At the end there's a glossary of plant and fungal toxins, and a table summarising toxicity to animals. 4?

I thought I'd combine my blood donation in Formby today with a pre-veinous visit along the coast to Pritchard's Bookshop in Crosby, where I kidded myself I might buy somebody else a Christmas present, and kidded myself further that I'd save these books for myself until Christmas! 😏📚
#LitsyBloodDrive @TieDyeDude

As I've just received December's number of the #SocialistStandard I thought I'd best read November's! ?

There's an article, "Is Capitalism Dead?" reviewing Varoufakis's book "Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism", which mordantly answers the question that if so (which isn't accepted), this alternative is no better. See the film Blade Runner, the Aliens franchise, & Murderbot Diaries as fictional examples of what this economy might look like.

I've two more short stories to read in New Suns, the one I've just read being my favourite so far: One Easy Trick by Hiromi Goto which includes an encounter with a spirit bear. Synchronistically, reading on in Sharon Olds collection was a poem, A Song Near the End of the World, which is also about a bear encounter and its meaningfulness. I love when readings resonate and reinforce each other 🐻😌

"...my taxes are spent, by the orange
cockatoo in the White Man House,
on bailing out bankers."

I think Sharon and I will be getting on ok together ?

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