Amazingly for me, I've started my Christmas shopping before December! 🎁
The lamp is a gift for our daughter's partner, the books are (for no special reason) for me 😁
• Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope: amusing poetry about relationships (it appears from a quick browse) 💔
• The Best of Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis: more amusing poetry, written by a cockroach 🪳
• Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland: nature writing and folklore 🌳🧚🏻‍♀️

In his Introduction, Asimov makes the following inaccurate prediction about AI:

"If robots are so advanced that they can mimic the thought processes of human beings, then surely the nature of those thought processes will be designed by human engineers and built-in safeguard will be added."

I tend to read a lot of sci-fi, but 2024 seems to be a bumper year for it!

I read "I, Robot" earlier this year, so here I go with the follow up collection. ? v.2.0

#ClassicLSFBC @Ruthiella @RamsFan1963
I first read Ringworld when I was 12, and it's been a favourite novel in a favourite sci fi universe ever since, so I really enjoyed this revisit to one of the galaxy's most amazing structures.
The Ringworld itself dominates the story. Niven tried to make it as scientifically credible as possible, having to conjure "magical" materials to create his vision, but that's the "fiction" part of SciFi. Famously, ⬇️

The Kzin are one of my favourite alien species, which I'm reminded of while reading Ringworld, which features Kzinti warrior-diplomat, Speaker-to-Animals. Think Klingons crossed with tigers and you're somewhere close (but don't get too close!).
Speaking of Klingons, the Kzin are an official Star Trek race as they appear in the Animated Series episode, The Slaver Weapon, an adaptation by Niven of his classic story, The Soft Weapon.

Having bailed on my previous SF read, I'm picking up Ringworld, the #ClassicLSFBC November pick.
It's the first in a series, and part of Niven's Known Space universe, knowledge of which enhances the enjoyment, I think, but this can comfortably be read as a standalone.
The art book at back is "Alien Landscapes" and shows a painting of Louis Wu's spaceship, Lying Bastard, approaching the Ringworld with his team of human and non-human ⬇️

#LitsySciFiBookClub
I don't particularly like reality TV shows, so I guess I'm not the right reader for a book about a reality TV show.
I appreciate that this is a critique of the genre, of consumerism, the increasing monetisation of all aspects of life, the intrusion of governments and private companies into personal spaces, and the intensification of the Society of the Spectacle, but 81 pages is enough for me to know I don't need this object ⬇️

I've done less reading than I might have this week as I've been doing this jigsaw, titled "The Secret Garden". Although it wasn't intentional, I've coincidentally been reading stories with a nature setting, so there's been a synergy between my reading and puzzling.
The animals were fairly easy to get done as the pieces were quite distinctive, but those little leaves and the twigs were slow going! ??????‍⬛???️??

In a dystopian Britain under late-stage capitalism, where childcare costs can be over £20,000 per child per year, many people can no longer afford to have children, and those unable to fulfil their wish for parenthood are driven to desperation and despair.
So, to distract myself from that, I thought I'd read this book, the #LitsySciFiBookClub November pick.

Not all of the stories were 5 ⭐, but those that were were *so* 5⭐ that I've no hesitation in giving a maximum rating to the collection as a whole.
Blackwood's ability to evoke a liminal sense of something other impinging on the ordinary is wonderful, and this overlay of one reality with another is probably most fully developed in the classic "Ancient Sorceries", but is evident throughout in degrees. ⬇️

People wander through the snow in despair; a strange bird accosts two fur-coated gentlemen; random objects fall from the sky; an orphan child freezes to death by the roadside; vague figures lurk at the peripheries; there is no narrative, nor any explanation other than those the reader willfully imposes or has unwillingly evoked.
Yes, it's Edward Gorey 🪦

"The Occupant of the Room" is one of the shorter stories in this collection, so Blackwood doesn't mince words on poetic descriptions of the Swiss Alps or the quaint mountain village hotel, he just gets on with making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and with sending shivers down the spine ?
Featuring an otherworldly wardrobe, but, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Narnia anymore!"
CWs in comment.

"Fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge."
- The Occupant of the Room

When will people in ghost stories realise that they should avoid the fortuitous turn of events that must surely end in terror?!
I'm at the start of the story, but I'd definitely advise Minturn, a tourist in the Swiss Alps, not to accept the hotel room of the woman who went missing in the mountains a couple of days previously, whose return is surely inevitable, alive or dead! ?

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
🎙️ Suede
💿 Head Music
🎵 Electricity
⚡We got a love that's cold as stone
We got a love from our violent homes
We got a love and it got no name
We kiss our love with lips like pain
We got a lotta electricity
We got a love like AC/DC
We got a love and it got no shame
We kiss our love with lips like pain
Kissing our love with lips like pain
I said, oh it's bigger than the universe
It's bigger than the universe
⚡

"Through the confusion upon his faculties, rose a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies twilight on an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past."

- The Tryst

I received Socialist Standard #1443 on 1st November, but couldn't face reading it then. As the strap line says, whoever would've won workers would've lost, but by far the worst of the possibilities happened.

"The main effect of capitalist elections is not to bring about real change but to promote the illusion of change."

"If capitalist democracy is a rigged circus anyway, some will think, why not elect the most outrageous clown?" ?

Inspired by @The_Book_Ninja 's post, I decided to pick Planet of the Apes to while away my ironing chores. I have box sets of the classic movies & the '70s TV show, but decided to go with the OG (Original Gorilla? ?), so gun-totin' Charlie H it is!
The "shock" ending of the film is given away only by its own promotional material, & was already a scifi cliché from the cover of 100 different issues of pulp SF mags from the 40s/50s. Still a classic!

This was the perfect follow-up to the previous story I read, Blackwood's "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". Another tale in which the forest is alive and holds communion with souls sensitive to its slow, vital energy.
Merowdis is the beloved sister of Ysolde, an unearthly child whose connection to animals & the woods is discouraged by her parents, and enabled by her sister.
The story is a gothic fairytale full of Jungian archetypes, interweaving ⬇️

"A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really." ???

It took me a while to get through "The Man Whom the Trees Loved". It's a slow paced novella that I found rewarded my patience with it. There's an initial section focusing on the eponymous man, a retired forester whose cottage on the edge of the New Forest allows him access to the trees he loves, and which come to love him in turn with an inhuman jealousy that threatens to possess and subsume him into themselves.
⬇️

Two books I bought today judged solely by their covers.

The Alien Way has a cover by my favourite sci fi artist, Bruce Pennington, so the contents are secondary, but for what it's worth, it's an alien invasion story which sounds like it could be pretty good.
A Book of the Sea beguiled me with that sailing ship, but the contents are not short stories, which I'd assumed, but extracts from longer works, which I tend not to like, but 🤷‍♂️

"The forest held her with its giant fascination. In this secluded breathing-spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad sight upon the intruder... And their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so much of her: she saw of them - so little."

They made their world so hard
Every day we got to keep on fighting
They made their world so hard
Every day the people are dying
For hunger & starvation
Dread, dread, it dread, oh dread, Lamentation
And then you give us the teachings of His Majesty
For we no want no devil philosophy

So feel this drumbeat
As it beats within
Playing a rhythm
Fighting against -ism & schism ✊❤️

🎶One Drop🎶
https://youtu.be/u8n_14AsBKs?si=X55a4HGWuxI-nrjd

Some new ones 📚

•Life as a Late-Identified Autistic is aimed at a somewhat younger target audience than the title led me to believe, but it still looks interesting, and as a quicker read than I'd anticipated, one I might get to sooner.
• The Wood at Midwinter I'll read immediately. Big font, wide spacing, lots of illustrations, so it's even shorter than its already scant 64 pages might suggest. ⬇️

“It's all a little grim. 🇺🇸
I know, it's familiar.
I've found myself in your place. 🇬🇧
Let me assure you
things will turn out some way
better, worse or in unexpected ways. 🤷‍♂️“

- A Little Grim, by Ólöf Arnalds

https://youtu.be/d6ATijj_QjU

“She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.”

- Algernon Blackwood, "The Man Whom the Trees Loved"

Sophie Bittacy learned her religion at her minister father's knee, accepted this heritage wholesale, without reflection or consideration, and her reaction to non-Biblical ideas put me in mind of Asimov's words on anti-intellectualism.

"Running Wolf" is a vivid story of an encounter between a lone huntsman in the Canadian backwoods and a timber wolf with strangely human behaviours.
Blackwood builds the tension from the outset, with vague warnings from local hunters about the areas around Medicine Lake that Hyde should avoid, through to the unsettlingly gradual approach of the preternatural wolf and its silently urgent appeal.

One of the things I miss about Broadhurst's Booksellers is that they would've drawn this to my attention at publication. As it is, publication was 24 October 2024, so I'm not too far behind the curve, and it's on its way to me from Blackwell's.
It's a 64 page short story originally written in 2022 for a BBC audio broadcast. I'd love to have another novel from Susanna, but with her chronic fatigue syndrome I'm grateful for anything she publishes.

“1865: The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution is made, abolishing slavery throughout the country. Four states reject ratification of the 13th Amendment at the time. (New Jersey ratified in 1866; Delaware ratified in 1901; Kentucky ratified in 1976; and Mississippi lawmakers finally ratified in 1995.)“

1866? 😐 Tardy, but ok, New Jersey; 1901? 🧐 Really, Delaware!; 1976? 😯 Shocking, Kentucky!!; 1995?!!! 😳🤯😰😱 Fucking hell, Mississippi!!!

"Aaaaiiiiiiieeeeee"

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

I thought I'd have a change of pace with this local history book, focusing on the sand dune and coastal ecology of the Sefton Coast, a Site of Special Scientific Interest running from my home town, Southport where the tide goes out literally for miles, down to Crosby, now adorned with Anthony Gormley's Another Place installation. It is full of wonderful photography, and I'm looking forward to immersing myself in it.

"Ancient Sorceries" is one of my favourite stories. It is redolent of cats, and feline imagery is woven throughout it, but how many actually appear? ?
Meek suburbanite, Arthur Vezin feels overwhelmed by the raucous behaviour of fellow English tourists aboard a train travelling through Northern France, and takes the uncharacteristically spontaneous step of debarking at a medieval village, becoming enmeshed in an autumnal twilight world, where ⬇️

Yay! #BookMail 📬📚🐝 Three of the four books I ordered, plus an unsolicited honey dipper! 🍯🐝😃🤔🤨🤷‍♀️🐝

Looking through a list of works by Algernon Blackwood on Wikisource, I saw the evocative title of an article published in 1901, and collected in Macmillan's Magazine Volume LXXXIV: "Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe". Lo, and behold! The answer to my idle speculation as to whether his Cosmic Horror story, The Willows, was based on an actual journey he'd undertaken! Here it is, his account of the six week, 1000 mile journey he and his unnamed ⬇️

Onto the next story, “Ancient Sorceries“, a classic that includes cats🐈‍⬛, a psychic detective (Dr. John Silence), cats🐈‍⬛, an eldritch French village, cats🐈‍⬛, witches, and cats🐈‍⬛. Did I mention cats?🐈‍⬛
I love the facing illustration and decorated title for this story.

"Here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we would be drawn across the ⬇️

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes."
"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood, illustration by Sidney Stanley

The tales are "queer" as in "peculiar", and with that wonderful name and that characterful face, what other kind of tale was Algernon going to write?
I've read the title story and "Ancient Sorceries" in a modern edition, the edition I'm reading now being the 1925 one shown in the image, though sadly my copy no longer has that excellent dust jacket. It is illustrated, though, and I'll post some of them as I go along ?

As an editor, Singer kinda phoned this in, as the stories were all first published in 3 or 4 editions of Weird Tales magazine, so I assume he'd picked those up second hand and selected a few out of each. However, the stories he picked included some excellent ones, so that's to his credit.
Bradbury needs no help from me 🌟
Bloch's werewolf tale is interesting, with a misogynistic MC I assume we're not supposed to like (I didn't, anyway), if ⬇️

Another Ray Bradbury, this one a 1945 offering called "The Dead Man".

Odd Martin mainly sits quietly on an old tar barrel on the main street of a little Mid-West town. When he does speak, he says he's dead, and although he kinda smells like it, the townsfolk consider him to just be, well, odd! If they knew they were in a Ray Bradbury story, they might well reconsider their opinion ??‍♂️

"Information is the raw material for society. It is information that turns us from individuals operating in isolation into communities... Authoritarians know this. That's why they spend so much time and energy trying to control the media and our ability to connect with each other. The more we know the less likely we are to tolerate tyranny."
- Editorial, Nanjala Nyabola, #NewInternationalist #552

Carroll John Daly's "Outside of Time" is ok, more suggestive of possibilities than delivering on promise, with its narrator telling of immortal beings and their power over the flow of time.

Margaret St. Clair's "The Family" is shorter and more suggestive, but also more effective. A family of vampires gathers for dinner before their annual sacrificial offering and blood feast. Things both do and don't go to plan!

Ah, Ray Bradbury! ??‍♂️? "The Watchers", 1945.

If the powers of Good and Evil are omniscient, how might They know all that we do? Bill Tinsley thinks he's figured out how universal surveillance is achieved, but who will believe him, and to what lengths might the Watchers go to preserve their secret? ?????

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

Dusty's voice makes my heart melt 🫠💛🫠
1968's Dusty... Definitely has some wonderful Bacharach/David covers, alongside blue-eyed soul & orchestral pop tracks, & if it's an album secondary to Dusty in Memphis, it's still a slice of awesomeness.
Particularly apt tracks for today are the lush I Think It's Going To Rain Today ☔[it has been for nearly 24 hours!] &, as I'm reading some horror stories, the groovy Spooky 🎃

Well, that's a cover image to conjure with!

I've had this 1968 edition since about 1980, my copy being rather more battered than the one pictured, and about time I read it, I guess.
Mostly written in the '40s, with a couple from the '50s, and some reliable authors, starting with the magnificent Ray Bradbury, and including Robert Bloch and August Derleth, so should be some good chills! 🥶💀🥶

The better of the final few stories:
"The Recurrent Suitor" by Ron Goulart almost successfully combines the time travel and occult detective tropes. Perhaps not including humour as well would have been best, but it's still an interesting story, set in 19th century San Francisco.
"Third Offense" by Frederik Pohl features an alien penal system in which entities are punished by inhabiting human bodies in distress. It's a chilling evocation of ⬇️⅓

My last post having been an anti-capitalist one, I have to admit that I made a rare purchase from Am@zon for this one 😞
Checking out bibliographic details of the book, I saw that they had a returned copy at a ridiculously low price and, as I definitely wouldn't have paid full price anywhere, I gave in to temptation! 🧚‍♂️🪄
Stableford edited a series of 18th century French contes de fées, which weirdly have overly-sexualised images of ⬇️

#Positive_Things_I_Have_Done_Today

Although I haven't actually used Twitter/X for a long time, I have formally deactivated my account today. Take that, Elon!🖕

#NoPlaceLikeHolmes
Holmesian detective Solar Pons & his chronicler, Dr. Lyndon Parker, are consulted by a multiversal agent to help confound the depredations of trans-dimensional art thief, Professor Moriarty & the Club Cerise. So far, so good, but at 8 pages, the narrative never leaves the parlour of the 7B Praed Street rooms, & Pons retains his title of *consulting* detective. It's an interesting germ of an idea that could've made a great novel.

"There are those among us who are immune to tragedy. They are pitiless where its comprehension would require pity of them, idiot-blind to the inwardness even of its bull-ring drama. They are aware of others' pain only as a narcotic more and more diluted, less and less adequate to slake their thirst for pain.
Mrs. Emily Molbert was one of these."

- The Past and Its Dead People, by R. Bretnor