so-soI assume that as a Chair of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain and Curator of Gemstones for the Natural History Museum, Oldershaw is deeply passionate about her subject. I do, however, have to make that assumption as, sadly, there is no passion in her writing.
There's a lot of dryly-delivered facts themed into chapters, but often little connection between one paragraph and the next. There is no sense of wonder about the depths of 👇🏻
Of course, I'll be using a dragon bookmark wit this new read! 😁😆
I've been cat-sitting for my son while he and his partner were visiting friends, and taking advantage of being in the city, I'm having breakfast at Gran T's in Ancoats.
I'm enjoying Gossip from the Forest, with its blend of nature writing & the author's riffs on fairy stories.
It's a two-bookmark-book: the red for the page I'm on, the black for the notes, in, If I do say so myself, an excellent example of #BookmarkMatching 🔖🔖😁
#BooksAndCoffee
pickI enjoyed Wassef's memoir of balancing private life and co-managing a chain of independent bookshops in Cairo as much as I'd hoped, and more than I expected. I don't think I'd have liked to work for her though!
It was an engaging insight into recent Egyptian society and culture, as experienced by an educated, middle class, liberal woman in a patriarchal and increasingly conservative country.
Although I didn't get to her shop, Diwan, when we ⬇️
pickI thoroughly enjoyed Helen Wilson's cultural history of the robin. Focusing on the European robin (Erithacus rubecula), it includes the American robin (incongruously Disneyfied into Mary Poppins's London in A Spoonful of Sugar, though not as alarmingly as Dick van Dyke's cockney accent), the Asian magpie robin, & other species unrelated genetically but which have been given the name.
Lots of wonderful photos & illustrations: a quick, light read.
pickThe last book I'll finish in 2024 was Simenon's tale of a marriage marred by family interference, bourgeois suspicions, emotional betrayals and psychological abuse.
Set in the claustrophobic environs of a seagoing freighter, dogged by bad luck and paranoid tensions, it's a bit like the film "The War of the Roses" at sea. The story builds to a climactic sea rescue with inevitable tragic consequences.
⬇️
Having just finished the almost pastoral post-apocalypse novel, Earth Abides, I thought I'd stick with the genre but go to the other end of the spectrum: Damnation Alley is from the "sawn-off shotgun, kick 'em in the nuts" school, featuring MC Hell Tanner, "Last of the Biker Angels", on his mission to cross the radioactive wasteland of Damnation Alley, domain of firestorms and hostile mutants, to deliver a plague vaccine to Boston. ⬇️
I've read retellings of these stories since I was a kid, and I read the Prose Edda a few years ago, so feeling it was time to read the Poetic Edda. This Oxford World's Classics edition looks like it has good explanatory notes, but not too extensive for the dilettante reader that I am.
#BookmarkMatching Accidentally, a reasonable colour match to the book with this bookmark showing Nordic artefacts, which I bought from the Jorvic Viking Museum 🔖
#BookmarkMatching ?
Hmm, I don't have many megalithic/Neolithic themed bookmarks as the sites tend to be in isolated muddy fields without tourist gift shops (obviously a good/bad situation), but I'm pleased to have the ones I've got. La Hougue Bie is a fantastic "passage tomb" on Jersey, the others speak for themselves ?
I've decided to use the Stonehenge one for this book - I mean, it's the Guvnor isn't it?! ?
So, mildly disappointed by the contents of this beautifully manufactured and illustrated book. I didn't waste my time in reading it, but neither was I particularly elevated by it. 3⭐
Still, an opportunity for #BookmarkMatching 🔖 1mo