Books were their drugs, the magic carpets onto which they flung themselves in order to be borne away somewhere else, books lifted them up like powerful caressing hands and cradled them like mothers do, as though they were babies to be held and fed, they fell asleep, sated with reading, then woke again, into pages of words, unknown, beckoning, a new world, and started another book.
Pic from the Hardmans' House, Liverpool.
Rousseau addressed the paradox of his position as a novelist in two prefaces, which explained that novels were bad in themselves because they caused corruption, yet salutary in that they could inspire virtue among those already trapped in a corrupt society.
He also added a further paradox: "This novel is not a novel.
-----
!!! Cake and eating it!?
pickSo sad. Beautifully written, a lovely tribute.
The poet and writer Thomas Hood produced Hood‘s Magazine and Comic Miscellany in which he created a fictional mourning warehouse. Customers on uncertain ground were advised by knowing salesmen, in comedic exchanges:
Lady. Is it proper, sir, to mourn in velvet?
Shopm. O quite! – certainly. Just coming in. Now here is a very rich one – real Genoa – and a splendid black. We call it the Luxury of Woe.
Lady. Very expensive of course?
🤣🤣🤣
Take away the balconies, and the bombed building looks just like my cousins'. Lop it down to five stories, and it could be my grandfather's Khrushchev-era apartment building in Kherson, another city under siege. Cruel, how Soviet apartment blocks look alike. I've been watching the same building get bombed, resurrected, bombed, over and over on my phone, laptop, on the TV screen at the corner store.
#Booker2025
Fascinating GN with hardly any words, a house through time. Reminded me a bit of the BBC series Ghosts.
Have you read all 30? Which ones would you recommend?
#WomensPrize30
https://www.librarything.com/award/1353/Womens-Prize-for-Fiction
https://womensprize.com/product-category/30th-Anniversary/
I paused, mid-step, at the sound of a low hum. A hummingbird, not much bigger than a bumblebee, withdrawing itself carefully from one of the trumpet-shaped flowers. I watched the little glittering body, the blur of wings. It held itself steady for a moment, as if considering the options, and then it moved towards the next flower, the petals splayed open in welcome. It disappeared inside, became a shadow behind the bright yellow petals.
I had no idea this was a thing...
https://bookclubhub.co.uk/news/join-in-with-book-club-day-uk
#Bookclub
pickHurray! Finally a #Booker25 longlist book I want to make the shortlist.
Thoughtful and relevant novel. After the last read, beyond glad that (unlike another longlisted novel I could mention) it didn't make me want to ask the narrator to Just Stop Already...
In front of us, someone was saying to their relative, 'You know who causes most of the traffic problems? Foreigners or returning immigrants like you. You stop when you're supposed to, give the other cars the right-of-way, allow crowds of pedestrians to cross the street.'
'We follow the rules, you mean?'
'Exactly. It causes confusion.'
The visiting immigrant became silent. He was finally home, he realised.
#Booker2025
Always rather be reading.
Distractions from CV editing at the library.
Houses don't have a back step here in England, which is a real shame. It's the ideal place for children to sit. You're out of the way of all the hot oil and sharp knives, but you hear all kinds of gossip not meant for children's ears: who's horning who; who's infertile, or impo-tent; who's been to visit obeah because of too many miscarriages; who's never gotten over a father's early death.
#Booker2025
'You ever see Now, Voyager? 'Ten times,' I said.
"This is where Bette Davis and Paul Henried sat having a love lunch early in the film....
We were in San Diego by three and outside the bullring in Tijuana just at the hour of four. "Think you can stand this?" asked Constance. 'I can only try,' I said.
...we went north and drove out onto the island and sat in the sunset at the Coronado Hotel. We didn't say anything...
So tempted to DNF...
Does it miraculously improve in the last fifty pages?
#Booker2025
@JenP @AnneCecilie
@TheKidUpstairs @Leniverse
@Chelsea.Poole @rmaclean4
@JamieArc @BarbaraBB
@Graywacke @Ruthiella
@ChaoticMissAdventures @vikaplus321 @squirrelbrain
But it was not so much the presence of nine hundred or a thousand books, as it was their titles, their subjects, their incredible dark and doomed and awful names.
On the high, always midnight shelves stood Thomas Hardy in all his glooms next to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which leaned on dread Nietszche and hopeless Schopenhauer cheek by jowl with The Anatomy of Melancholy, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Freud....and on and on.
When you go to a National Trust place and just want to be left alone to look at the books... (But no! The tour must go on...🫤)
Every time anyone drops dead of a heart attack or trips over his shoelaces in Venice, there's someone there the next day to tell me sixteen to the dozen, how to solve the stopped heart or retie the shoelaces. You've got the heart attack shoelace look about you, and I didn't sleep last night.
'Do you know much of the marsh?' I ask. 'Sweet has always warned me not to go alone. The ceorls obey this rule also. Why?'
Oswy's face pales.
'It is dangerous,' he says, 'the paths....
-----
😱😱
pickI don't usually pick up books about the environment, but this was a fascinating look at our changing oceans.
A thanks to the Women's Prize for NF as I wouldn't have picked it up otherwise!
...efforts are already underway to clean up the plastic debris floating in the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organisation, was founded in 2013 by a then-teenage entrepreneur, Boylan Slat, from the Netherlands. Outraged by disastrous plastic pollution... began sending out ships towing U-shaped barriers to skim floating plastic from the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch....
https://theoceancleanup.com/
Elsewhere, coral species are gathered up, and their cells, sperm, and eggs are frozen. It's a similar scheme to seed banks, which aim to preserve all the world's plants, so people in the future can use them to breed the crops they need or replant species that are lost from the wild. Coral DNA is also being sequenced and archived to preserve the genetic codes that would be lost forever if those species went extinct.
Some fascinating art at the Manchester City Art Gallery. Sorely tempted by the books in their shop, too.
Cosimo de' Medici, Duke of Florence, to Giorgio Vasari
Livorno, 20 March 1557
So, if I understand correctly, Florence, the city that God entrusted to my care, is now infested not only with conspiracies of murderous nuns but with seditious plebs too? Enough. I must put an end to all this. Find me this Marco Moro, arrest him and throw him in a damp cell.
I regret getting rid of those lions that were stinking up the palace.
The puffadder shyshark lives on coasts around the tip of South Africa. They are small and slender, brown with rusty orange saddles resembling the markings on their namesake, the puffadder snake. When disturbed, these sharks curl up in a tight circle and hide their eyes with their tails....
😍
(Also known as Happy Eddie...
https://saveourseas.com/worldofsharks/species/puffadder-shyshark)
If corporations and governments do nothing to decelerate the climate crisis, emperor penguins will dwindle within the lifetime of human babies now being born. Not long after 2100, the species will most likely be extinct-if not sooner. But this is not an unstoppa-ble fate for these giant, ice-walking birds. There is still a chance to prevent them from becoming little more than memories of a species that people knowingly allowed to disappear.
Such a lovely library!
Paddington is by a local design student, one of numerous artworks around the building.
pickAt the heart of this amazing novel is the work of the IRC to help track and reunite missing children with their families at the end of WW2.
How do you find parents when a child is too young to speak, and hostile forces have forced their separation, in a time before DNA or email?
Unfortunately not just needed in the past - work continues. 🇺🇦
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/central-tracing-agency-missing-persons-ukraine
Wouldn't they have to trek all this way back again to get the one sailing home this afternoon? And even if she caught it, Hanne knew she'd be late back to the Heide; she'd be out after curfew, so Gustav would fret until he saw her and likely for a good while afterwards. He hadn't liked her coming to Hamburg, and she was uncertain herself now: what might she find out?
Image of present-day Hamburg via Wikipedia
The car drove through the gate of a big park and cruised down a wide avenue....We came to a stop where huge ginkgo trees lined the road on both sides.
It was a breathtaking sight. Fallen leaves formed banks on the ground beneath the trees leading into the distance, and everything was yellow. The whole scene was bathed in sunlight, and drifts of leaves covered the road surface delicately, like a golden snowfall, and disappeared into the distance.
Now, I can imagine your surprised expressions: wait, Iranians watched Columbo? Just think about it: from the moment the United States rests one authoritative hand on a country's politics, with the other hand it loads the people with all sorts of military, industrial, cultural, and food products. Imperialism is no joke! Not only did Iranians watch Columbo, they also watched Bewitched, Little House on the Prairie, Peyton Place...
While I was writing this book, my attention was immediately caught by any news item... attributed to the year 1952.... I felt that these events brought home the reality of that far-away year and my identity as a child. In his novel Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shohei Ooka writes: 'All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category'
Includes
Mark Kermode
Emma Jane Unsworth
Juno Dawson
Nussaibah Younis
https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2025/08/18/liverpool-literary-festival-is-back-for-...
I cross the Place Saint-Michel in the rain, listening to Nathalie Quintane on France Culture. She thinks we need to get over the idea that literature is there to save us, to heal or repair us: 'As the world falls flat on its face and we become increasingly troubled, unsettled, worried, nervous and stressed [...], literature[....] is seen as a personal, private aid to feeling better. [...]
I think it shouldn't just be that. [...]
panThis is what the publisher has to say about this #Booker25 longlisted novel.
For me, not so much. This is a subject I'd rather read NF on (as it's bonkers enough) or listen to a discussion podcast. I'd have liked more about Hannah or any of the characters really: they felt like little more than caricatures to voice particular views. Not for me! (YMMV).
I complained about the way that the leadership used its authority; the way that we teachers made space for it, despite ourselves; about the lack of horizontality. I complained about the students, and how they acted like visitors in their own school; I found that the very idea of pedagogy was losing its meaning.... These criticisms spoke rather to the extent to which cracks and imperfections are the starting point that make work possible.
so-soWow, what a chunkster of a crime novel. A historic, unsolved kidnapping case continues to shape the politics of a Japanese police force. One officer, recently moved to lead the press team, is also dealing with a crisis at home as his teenage daughter has gone missing.
600+ pages later, I've heard a *lot* on inter-departmental conflict between different police teams, promotion opportunities, attitudes towards women officers...😮
Interesting concept - Arthur's daughter tries to rescue the kingdom after he loses his way.
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