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. ⬇️

This quarter's Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies journal is a tribute edition to Australian psychologist-therapist Bernie Neville, who died in 2021. I haven't come across his work before, but it sounds interesting as he blends the Jungian archetypes of the Ancient Greek gods with the person-centred psychology of Carl Rogers.
He wrote the tagged book in 2020, his perspective on how these processes were playing out during the pandemic.

Is being trapped under a cat sufficient reason for calling emergency services? #CatsOfLitsy #Caturday
Luckily, Skye has trapped me with the tagged book, which I'm really enjoying. Cristoff merges travelog with her literary perspective on the lives of the ordinary people she meets, with vignettes of Patagonian history, relating these to the books she's reading.
Hearing of the mass murders of immigrant Arab traders in the 1900s by bandits who ⬇️

"My father was born in the middle of Patagonia, but everybody around him spoke Bulgarian."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Next up, "False Calm" by María Sonia Cristoff, the title of which has me on edge! ? It's suggestive of emotional undertow and brittle tension.

It's a travelogue \ reportage \ revisiting of her Patagonian homeland, specifically seeking out the less populous, less thriving, more isolated and ailing towns.

Adjectives from the blurbs included: magical, intimate, humane, bold, beautiful, artful, atmospheric. I hope it lives up to expectations ?

It is unreasonable of me to rate this 5⭐, and yet this is where we find ourselves! 🧐
Of the 144 pages, about 35 contain Tolkien's words, but they are interesting in being post-apocalyptic science fiction! Set hundreds of years in the future following an environmental catastrophe, archeologists/philologists draw comically inaccurate conclusions about mid-20th century Oxford based on fragmentary documents relating to the consumerist worship of ⬇️

?Lovely Tolkien-painted endpapers at the front of the book, which continues on the back endpapers. It's a watercolour of Oxford and surrounding countryside, not produced specifically for "The Bovadium Fragments", but in keeping with it, according to the publisher's note. Also, the book ribbon is almost exactly the perfect colour green ? There are other illustrations by Tolkien, some not previously published, also with contemporary ⬇️

After the dark vibes from my last few books, my next is a bit of whimsy from under Professor Tolkien's bed, about town planning, urban sprawl, mechanisation, and the sacrifice of human living spaces to the Almighty Automobile 🙇‍♂️👑🚘👑🙇‍♂️

This is the composite image of the cover art by JaeHoon Choi for the eight books in the Korean horror series, Lovecraft Reanimated, three of which have been translated into English, and I hope more of them will be despite a bit of unevenness in the current offerings.
The top right cover with the image of an Elder Thing from HPL's "At the Mountains of Madness" looks especially intriguing!

Seoyoung Yi's Lovecraftian novella is intense, merging body horror with patriarchal, sexist attitudes towards women's bodily functions and, possibly with a patriarchal, sexist reaction, I was put off my breakfast yoghurt! This one could have been called "The Yeast from Yuggoth"!
Despite the gross-out factor that doesn't normally appeal to me, I enjoyed (if that's the right word) this entry in the Lovecraft Reanimated series: a stench-filled 4?

This is my third in the Lovecraft Reanimated series, another text-based story rather than a graphic novel, and I'm hoping it's as good as "Alien Gods" after the rather disappointing "The Call of the Friend"?
There are eight of these books in the original Korean series, and the cover art by Choi, who drew TCotF, is excellent, regardless of my view of his narrative skills in his own offering.
Cover gallery link in comments... ?️

I read this a couple of days ago and had to let it rest a bit to re-read it and see if it struck me any differently.
I was not unpleasantly surprised upon opening it to find it is a manhwa rather than a text story, and there are some nice set-piece illustrations in it, particularly Choi's representation of the cult statue of Cthulhu. However, the story itself is almost opaque and I couldn't clearly understand what Choi is trying to suggest ⬇️

Written in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War, this starts out as good-guy-vs-evil-robot Heinleinian military sci-fi, but through flashbacks we quickly see that the human MC is a symbol for US imperialist aggression, & the "good guy" is as much a Killing Thing as the robot, which is reacting (albeit with overwhelming violence) to threats made to its existence.
There's a general styled on Curtis "bomb them back into the Stone Age" LeMay, who ⬇️

"There was the desert, glittering white sand that shifted like talcum when touched, cottony white sky, a quarter of it glaring with the white heat of the sun."

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

Although it's not a comedy or satire, this is hitting the same anti-militarisation vibe for the Vietnam War that Dr. Strangelove hit for the nuclear arms race and Mutually Assured Destruction. I'm about ⅓ through and really enjoying it so far.

@TieDyeDude I apologise, Andrew, for always being a day late for #TuesdayTunes
This week, though, I hadn't heard/seen this dub poetry performance by Benjamin Zephaniah until today, so hopefully on this occasion I'm excused 🙂‍↕️
It's called Big Brother and is about the surveillance society, and though recorded in the '90s is still relevant 👁️‍🗨️
▶️ https://youtu.be/4JYYZD9REck?si=Ua3dM-QUNgVHlnmq

A very quick read (as long as you don't start watching videos of Benjamin's performances and interviews as you go along! But, also, you should do that, too) at 27 pages, but gives an insight into the development of the poet's class and race consciousness, and why he's an Anarchist (spoiler alert: don't read the zine title! 😉).
I'm somewhat mortified at never having read any of his books, just an awareness of him from TV, which I need to rectify.

"I'd like there to be a revolution, but everybody's too busy shopping."

The last essay in this little book of articles about Benjamin's anarchist beliefs is a transcript from an interview he did with journalist Kishnan Guru-Murthy. This 4 minute video clip from the full 45 minute conversation covers most of what's in this section of the book: https://youtu.be/MxTg1yseV-s?si=TSu8nuZiCBrRpwDK

"If you need a book, you need a book. And it doesn't matter what you need it for; to pass an exam, to learn to read, or to keep your mind exercised, they are all important to you, at that time, when you need a book."

Yeah, this☝️on a t-shirt ? ?

“Fuck power, and let's just take care of each other.” ✌️🫂✌️

I've been wanting to re-read the Alice books for a while, and perhaps doing this new jigsaw will be the impetus I need! 🐰🧩

What I intend to be my last #BookHaul 📚 of October consists of two more volumes in Honford Star press's Lovecraft Reanimated series of Korean authors' takes on the Cthulhu Mythos 🐙, and a travel memoir by an Argentinian writer visiting Patagonian ghost towns 👻 🏚️

This is a graphic history focusing on the origins of the British police as protectors of capitalist interests (the first recognisable police organisation being set up in docks to protect cargo being scavenged by poor workers), and the long history of undercover police as agents provocateurs to infiltrate, radicalise and demonise anti-establishment movements.
A little disjointed at times, but nonetheless an interesting insight into social control.

Just when you think the world is going to hell in a handcart, what should arrive to cheer you up but Anarchist #BookMail 😁🏴 Obviously, the world is still in that handcart, but at least I've got something for the journey!
• Spycops is about the scandal of that name, that proves Britain is a surveillance society with secret police.
• Warp and Weft is hefty study of how wellbeing is affected by oppressive social systems.
⬇️