"It seems that somehow the hearts of human beings and trees are connected."

- The Princess and the Nutmeg Tree ??❤️?

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

"The ghost stories and strange tales that make up this book are set in the ancient Japanese province of Shinshu, or Shinano (now Nagano Prefecture), located in the center [sic] of Japan's main island of Honshu, a region intersected by three mountain ranges, mist-covered streams and a number of large and fast-flowing rivers."

At about ½ way through, the blurb descriptors of spine-chilling, spooky & terrifying ??

"You are not the sum of the things you do wrong
In the eyes of someone who does not understand you" ❤️

? Kae Tempest
?Statue in the Square
? Self Titled
?️ https://youtu.be/aTDOFaAcEyc?si=V1GW3C_ZrO9B9FLw

I pre-ordered Kae Tempest's new album, Self Titled, with an accompanying zine (so this counts as a book post, yeah? ?), which arrived today, and it is excellent! ✊??️‍⚧️?️‍?

StoryGraph highlighted two perennial favourites in my June summary: one of the Sherlock Holmes short story audios I'm listening to on BBC Sounds, and a '50s Folio Society edition of FitzGerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Cats in Spring Rain is a neat book of new translations of cat-themed haiku paired with classic Japanese artworks featuring felines. What's not to love?😻

The blurb says that these are traditional stories of yokai, spectral apparitions of varied kinds, which Wada retells in "spine-chilling" & "terrifying" fashion ?
Some I'm partially familiar with (the Snow Woman, the kappa, & the tengu ?) but I'm hoping to encounter lots of ghosts that are new to me ?
The book is copiously illustrated by the author's daughter, Haruna Wada, who really deserves a cover credit.
I think I'm going to enjoy this one!

"In 2017, President Trump signed an Executive Order banning people from 7 Muslim-majority countries - Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan & Libya - from entering the US for 90 days...The writers were asked to develop a fictional response to Trump's discriminatory ban.
Reading can be an escape, something transportative that takes you to different countries & states of mind. It can take you to all the places that Trump doesn't want you to go."

I was pleasantly surprised by Taylor's book, enjoying it more than I'd anticipated. It combines her accounts of travels in the Scottish Highlands to spot wildcats in their natural environment with details of their evolutionary and cultural histories, their conservation status and the efforts being made both to save them and, sadly, exterminate them, the latter more through negligence and indifference, perhaps, than intent.
👇🏻
#CatsOfLitsy #Skye

“Heading back, a couple of cars and a van have joined our own in the small carpark, and standing beside the van is a man with waist-length dreadlocks, a beard and a camera with a very long lens... He turns to us as we approach, ambles over, and we get talking. It's quickly evident that this man, Hamza, is highly knowledgeable about the peninsula and its wildlife, and he's soon advising us...When I mention wildcats, he goes quiet... 👇🏻

This is most of the rest of my holiday #Bookhaul 📚I really should stop now! 😏

• Vol. 5 of Jansson's Moomin comic strip
• Short stories with an existentialist theme
• A pamphlet on anarchism
• A J.B. Priestley memoir
• An illustrated book of Japanese demon tales
• How the Greek tragedies can inform the modern experience of depression and suicide
• A feminist perspective on women in Greek myth
• Korean aboriginal folklore and memoir
👇🏻

"Sherlock Holmes has a fair claim to being the most immediately and widely recognisable fiction character in English literature, even if this recognition often depends on mythologised versions of Doyle's texts."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

As well as the heritage breed soay sheep 🐏 and replica Bronze and Iron Age roundhouses 🛖 at Flag Fen, they do have a small selection of books in the visitors' centre, so I picked up a couple by two of my favourite TV archeologists: Tamed by Alice Roberts, who unaccountably hasn't including cats in her list of ten species 🤷🏻‍♀️ (but I'm kvetching), and Paths to the Past by Francis Pryor, who actually discovered and excavated the Flag Fen site.

On the last day of our holiday in Cambridgeshire, we visited Flag Fen archeological site, where a Bronze Age wooden ritual causeway was found preserved in situ, and which was fascinating to learn about. However... [1/3]

@TieDyeDude I saw this poster advertising evening bat spotting tours on the River Cam and immediately thought of you! 😄🦇🚣🏻‍♀️

I went to the Cambridge University Bookshop yesterday, which prides itself on inhabiting the oldest bookshop site in Britain & being the oldest publisher in the world, so fine credentials!
I picked up the Sherlock Holmes number in their critical series "The Cambridge Companion to...", which I've seen reviewed as dry and academic, so sounds like my kind of book ?
The first essay is on the history of detective fiction & Doyle/Holmes' place in it.

A book I did buy from The Haunted Bookshop, Cambridge is yet another edition (my twentieth) of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald.
This is a 1955 Folio Society edition, different to the other, later edition I have by them.
This one is bound in red brocade with a gold and silver floral pattern, and comes in a gold-paper covered box, rather than the gold slipcase of the later edition. Small, but perfectly formed 💖

The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge! 👻📚👻

I'm haunted by the books I didn't buy in there! 🧐

While visiting Ely, we're visiting Cambridge, and I could spend the rest of my life in the Fitzwilliam Museum!

Picked up a couple of books, and a couple of bookmarks. (Not my only #BookHaul 📚 don't tell! 🤫)

We're in Ely as our son recently moved here and we've come to visit. Mrs B. has booked us into a lovely B&B above a tea shop, which is full of little book nooks! 😍📚
Coffee and cake upon arrival (I had vegan lemon and lavender, Mrs. B had mocha), and a shufty at the shelves.
We had a stroll up the high street and I popped my head into a perfect Toppings and Co. bookshop - proper visit tomorrow, and a tour for any others I might find 😊

"Timing a trip to look for Scottish wildcats is difficult in a way, but in another way it's not: no matter what time you go, you're almost guaranteed not to see one."

About halfway through, and I'm really enjoying this book ?
???????????????

The lovely Aubrey Beardsley frontispiece and title page of Beatrice Clay's retelling of Arthurian stories.
Although written for older children of the Edwardian era, and therefore removing certain "unsuitable" elements, it's not as moralistic as I'd feared it might be. Her afterword about knightly privilege being predicated on exploitation and enslavement of peasants is rather forward-thinking. 4.75 ?

Skye does *not* pose for photographs! I had to edge as close as she'd tolerate to take this. She's not a wild "Highland Tiger", but she doesn't mess about either. She is often playful, but absolutely on her own terms. We're loving getting to know her idiosyncrasies? #Caturday
The book is about the natural history of and conservation efforts for the Scottish wildcat, of which few now survive that aren't hybridised with domestic cats ?

Last post (I promise!) about my walk today in & around the former Roman fort town of Ribchester.
The White Bull pub has a 1707 construction date, but the pillars in the portico are Roman, recovered from the River Ribble.
Lots of wildlife, including ducks & beautiful damselflies by the river, with a nice shady path through some woods.
The distant view of Pendle Hill, where I walked last week, I sighted just before I lost the route!
#WednesdayWalks

Second Refreshment! A pot of Earl Gray tea and summer berry crumble with custard, before I drive home. At a lovely tea shop / cafe /gift shop, Potter's Barn in Ribchester.
#WednesdayWalks

After walking up Pendle Hill last week, I chose a low lying route this week, along the River Ribble from Ribchester. Although I've enjoyed the walk, it was only half the route in the book due to vague directions (e.g., "head towards the two mature trees" in a landscape full of mature trees) leading me astray (I'm totally blaming the book, not my reading comprehension!).
Stopped off at the White Bull for a non-alcoholic refresher.
#WednesdayWalks

This 1934 edition of Beatrice Clay's Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion is an Edwardian retelling of the main Arthurian stories. I've had it for decades, so it's time is come to be read!
Written for children, the first 1901 edition left out Morgan le Fay, what with their relationship being "complicated", I suppose, but this reprint of the 1905 edition incorporated Morgan in suitably bowdlerised form.
⬇️

"Do It For Mama!" by Jerrold J. Mundis

In an American city riven by factional tensions, fuelled by hard-line conservatives and stoked by media disinformation, with riot police on the streets to enforce authoritarian legislation, the Home Guard is controversially ordered in to quell protests, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
So to take my mind off all that, I've read Mundis's prescient 1971 story set in a New York in which dog ownership becomes ⬇️

One of the more successful walking books I've used, possibly because I paid attention to the directions this time!
I did the "easy" route up Pendle Hill, easy being a relative term! My leg muscles will know tomorrow that they did something today!
It was a fantastic walk, soundtrack by skylarks, aerobatic display by swifts, and incredible views from the summit.
No witches as far as I could tell, though I was nearly pixie-led at one point ??‍♀️

Pendle Hill looks big from far away - it looks bigger close up! This walk does start part way up the hill at the Nick of Pendle, so it should be doable for me🤞🏻
See you at the top!⛰️🚶🏻‍♂️
#WednesdayWalks

A trio of second hand books I found today in a trio of places. 📚
I've been listening to classicist-comedian Natalie Haynes's podcast about Greek and Roman writers and mythology, so added the Oresteian plays of Aeschylus to the tbr, though I'll probably read one of her books first.
The Long Farewell is 15th (or 17th 🤷‍♂️) in Innes's Appleby series, none of which I've read, so hopefully that won't matter. A modern-day (well, 1950s) ⬇️

#SocialistStandard #1450
"Commiserations to you job-seekers out there who fancied themselves as Chief Executive Officer of the international corporation RCC Inc. The position has been filled. There were 135 internal candidates vying to fulfil it with an external individual, Trump, suggesting that he should get the job because he was already running America and as the job involved a one-day week, Sundays, it would be a doddle to do.

⬇️

Simon's poems are nice rather than profound or moving; coupled with Beth Munro's colourful prints, they are evocative, though.
Commissioned to be installed at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, they're inspired by the homes and shelters animals create, hence the title, Dwell. Simon and Beth offer a natural space for the mind to dwell and feel connected 💚

As someone who has Harding's "A Year Unfolding: A Printmaker's View", I was initially excited to see this newly published book of her wonderful prints, and so brought it home to the disappointment of finding much (though not all) of the contents are lifted from the book I already own.

Had I not already got her earlier book, I would love this. As it is I feel ripped off and taken for a mug ?

Colquhoun covers a lot of territory, geographically and thematically, in her survey of the Western Cornish peninsula, as indicated by the tags I used on my Library Thing record:
• travel
• biography-memoir
• history
• nature
• birds
• mythology and folklore
• ghosts
• food
• arthurian
• occult-esoteric
• witches and witchcraft
• non-fiction

Her writing folds together personal memoir of her post-war removal to Lamorna Cove to focus on her ⬇️⅓

Anybody else having a problem with StoryGraph?

"I like knowing stuff. I like learning. I like being more than I was yesterday. If I am giving future me a gift, it is reading a book for an hour instead of sleeping."

This #BookMail arrived unexpectedly yesterday: I won it in a Library Thing #EarlyReviewers giveaway. Gonna see if I can squeeze it in as my final book for May ?
It says it deals with "the darker side of being #neurodivergent " but also that it is "hopelessly optimistic," so perhaps the darkness isn't entirely unrelieved.
#NonbinaryAuthor ????

Limburg's grief at her brother's death by suicide makes up the poignant first sequence of poems, The Oxygen Man, reflecting on life as a surviving sibling ❤️‍🩹
The Autistic Alice is the second sequence, on Limburg's life as an autistic woman in a society that others both of those threads of identity, using Carrol's Alice books as a reference.
The final sequence is a collection of Other Poems, which are funny, touching & observant. Loved this: 5♾️

Well, I'm giving this four (red) stars based on the concluding section in which Sève summarises his preceding thesis and where I got a glimmer of light, though I suspect Sève would give me one star for comprehension due to my sketchy knowledge of the concepts he takes for granted his reader will understand, which is forgivable as he originally delivered this as a presentation at a Marxism conference. I think bits may adhere in my mental miasma 😏

You're Not My Dad, John Inman

"Got lots of Dads beside my Dad -
television's full of Dads.
Mr Corbett, he's my Dad,
Michael Bentine, also Dad.
Roy Castle is the Singing Dad
and Brian Cant the Voice of Dad,
Play School, Play Away teem with Dad.
John Inman, though, he's not my Dad -
not everyone I love is Dad."
#Poetry ❤️

"She will harrow this town, she will turn him up, whole or in pieces."
- Sister, from The Oxygen Man

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
#Poetry

'Excuse me,' says Alice.
'May I say something?'

'Of course,' says the Caterpillar -
'You may say something-'

'Yes,' says Humpty Dumpty,
'and we'll tell you why it's wrong.'

- The Alice Case

The #neurodivergent person's experience of assessment by neurotypical "experts". ♾️
#Poetry

"The Yiddish proverb that made them laugh so much was: 'Your health comes first: you can always hang yourself later.'"

- Notes on an Unwritten Eulogy, The Oxygen Man

#Poetry

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
Peter Sellers imitating Lawrence Olivier's characterisation of William Shakespeare's King Richard III, reciting The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" with a salacious twinkle in his eye.
Everything has been downhill since this ?

https://youtu.be/PLjA331K4YI?si=NEr9HFrgDLwB1fGd

This is one of those short books (59 pages) that takes me ages to read as I have to keep looking up concepts, theories and references to parse the meaning, and then reflect upon and integrate the information before I can move on to the next paragraph 😮‍💨
Once I've done that, I'll hold onto the information until I have to sleep, and tomorrow it will be🎈💢😳 gone! 😄

26th May is #DraculaDay ! Commemorating the first publication of Stoker's novel.
Imagine my delight at (rather belatedly) finding out that before he was Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett was The Count! 🦇🧛🏻‍♂️🦇 And even better, in the 1978/79 USA touring production with Edward Gorey designed sets! 🖤❤️🖤
I would definitely have gone to see this had I not been at school and 4000 miles away!

I check the charity book table at my local shop more in hope than expectation of finding anything I'd be interested in amongst the old cook books, mountains of Jeremy Clarkson drivel and biographies of disgraced celebrities, but today I was rewarded for my perseverance with these two schlocky '70s tomes! 🖤🧌💚💀❤️🧛🏻‍♀️💚🧟‍♀️🖤 😱😁

"Now, in 1971, it isn't possible to look the other way. It is the daytime, suburban side of our existence that has become our nightmare...These are not catastrophes of the imagination - they are what's happening...I get the feeling I'm playing Russian roulette: each passing month that the Worst hasn't happened is an empty chamber of the revolver. But one of them, sure as hell, *is* loaded."

- Introduction, Thomas M. Disch

I fancied some scifi, and this 1973 collection of stories came to mind as I've just finished reading about the ruins of ancient Athens. Some of the Greats contribute to the anthology.
I started reading this in 1981 and paused it, but it's fair to say at this point that I'm starting it anew!
The cover blurb is sad from the current historical perspective, as we continue to head in the direction predicted in these tales of ecological apocalypse.

On 28th May, 2022, Andrea Marcolongo spent a night at the Acropolis Museum, looking onto the Parthenon, ruined by Lord Elgin, whose biography she brought with her. Inspired by her impressions of that night, Shifting the Moon is a blend of histories: art history, colonial history, personal history, classical history.
While never condoning Elgin's theft, Marcolongo, presents him as a tragic figure, ruined by the act of ruination he committed.

"On the last week of May, in an outdoor gear shop in Paris, I bought a camping bed, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight."

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl