Welcome to Litsy!

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 🐻😌

I loved it. Everything I look for in horror/fantasy big books.
It‘s great bookmark matching 😁

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 🔖👽

Next up, Alan Garner's Red Shift: a time-slipping tale of generational trauma set in his native Cheshire, from the present day (as it was in 1973), to the English Civil War period, to Roman-occupied Britain.
Garner's love of astronomy is embedded in the title, and the opening dialogue about the relativistic motions of the planet, solar system, galaxy and local galactic cluster sets the scene for the permeability of space-time 🌌
#BookmarkMatching

Professor Dallerhyde spends his afternoons outside the London Zoo cage of a pair of Hackenfeller's Apes, Percy and Edwina, frustrated in his attempts to study their mating habits by Percy's dolorous indifference to his companion. Then Kendrick arrives, informing Dallerhyde that Percy has been requisitioned for a one-way experimental trip on a space rocket, and the Professor's morals and sentimentality mix to formulate an escape plan... 4🐒
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I‘ve finally finished our #FurrowedMiddlebrowClub pick. It was a lowish pick for me (is that a real rating? 😆). Like @quietjenn said, I went in with low expectations and it wasn‘t as bad as I thought it would be. And her work definitely doesn‘t have the charm of her neighbour, DE Stevenson … as @CarolynM said! You‘ve all pretty much summed up my thoughts on this book (and that‘s what I get for chiming in late 😆).

I didn't read last month's #ClassicLSFBC selection due to a library delay, but I am reading this month's (not least because I nominated it, so I really should! ?).
I had an uncertain feeling that I had a "Potteries" bookmark that would be an appropriate match, and I was right - in my uncertainty! I don't have one. So the pictured is not the best example of #BookmarkMatching but it shows elements from the baked clay Minoan Phaistos Disk ⬇️

And now, for something completely different!

Three short stories, large font to make it look more substantial than it is 🧐, but it looks pretty, so, like Dr. Frank N. Furter, we'll forgive it.
I bought this RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) bookmark today. It doesn't fit the criteria for #BookmarkMatching , but there it is, anyway 🔖

Lancelyn Green's story-by-story introduction is an informative read, setting the stage for his selection of homages to Holmes. He states that he has been careful to collect stories that are written as serious 'apocrypha' rather than parodies, so I'm hoping for some quality entries 🔎📖
Paganini's violin concertos 1 & 2 seemed an appropriate musical accompaniment 🎻
#BooksAndMusic

“O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.“

My day off: done some gardening (unusual behaviour!), now sitting in the shade out of the sun 🌞🌡️🥵 with a light lunch, some Blake poetry and Bowie's Hunky Dory.
I have to admit that my choice of reading was influenced by an excellent #BookmarkMatching opportunity🔖🌹😊