Another book by political cartoonist, Polyp.

This one collects examples of his work up to 2016, mainly aimed at debunking conspiracy theories, anti-science, religious and far-right bigotry, racism and homophobia. In good left-wing tradition, he also excoriates hypocritical left-wingers, too.

Polyp kindly tucked some postcards in with the book. Love an unexpected lagniappe! 🎁

Polyp's latest graphic history is about the historical fight for universal suffrage in Britain. 🗳️✊

I like his approach of drawing his text mainly from contemporary accounts of the events & embedding them in his drawings. He's said that he often uses as his models journalistic photos of more recent events (such as the Miners' Strike and Hillsborough) to make the links between past and present protest, oppression & injustice. Powerful stuff.

This is what StoryGraph knows about my February '25 reading, but it's unaware of the magazines I've read 🧐 (though, actually, they would only add perhaps another 150 pages), nor (in terms of page count) the audiobook versions of some Sherlock Holmes short stories I listened to while cooking.
The bird 'book' shown in the graphic is actually an 8-page fold-out field guide of British Park and Garden Birds, which I bought at Martin Mere wetlands 👇🏻

I picked this up from the library a couple of weeks ago, my eye initially being attracted to the Faber Editions styling, as I've enjoyed the other books I've read in that imprint. I was encouraged, also, by my cursory scan of the blurb making comparisons to Dostoevsky, which if only 50% hyperbolic would be positive. Now I've taken it up to read, I see that it's a dual timeline novel, part fictionalisation of Dostoevsky's disastrous honeymoon,👇🏻

"That afternoon, the foggiest that January, felt more like an evening."
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Continues:
"Earlier Mali had hoed the flower-beds, expecting a shower. Pink, yellow, white and azure sweetpeas, in their prime, leaned against the golden bamboo sticks. A gentle fragrance hung in the cold mist. Orange & blue flowers brooded glumly in their heart-shaped beds as smoke curled out of the chimneys against a deep, penetrating silence."

She's on the prowl! 🐈‍⬛🐾🐾📚

#CatsOfLitsy #Shelfie

"As soon as the car crawled out of the gates she swung round to look back. In the dead centre of the beautiful garden of her house she saw flames leap up to consume her innocence and her girlhood. She could see countless spectres of relationships, memories and dreams as they crowded into heaps offering themselves to those flames in silent funeral pyres...She calmly watched the beautiful and stupid world of her maidenhood burning in those flames ⬇️

“I'm only human, and I have no doubt Spock will outlive me by many years. I can only hope that, once in a while, when people look at Spock's visage, they might sometimes think of me.”

- Leonard Nimoy 🖖 LLAP

I must be in a mood today: I DNFed the previous GN I picked up, DNFed a film and a couple of shows on TV, then was underwhelmed by Saga 10, nearly bailed due to boredom but made it through, and found Vol 11 only marginally better.
I think I'm done with Vaughan's and Staples' "Rick the People's Poet" attempts at edginess, and find I care little about the characters, who fucks whom, or who lives or dies.
Will Vol 12 appear? Will I read it? ??‍♂️

I'm not interested in reading a comic full of biblical quotes and Christian moralising. I'm guessing Daredevil shucks off his priestly ordination at some point, but I can't force myself to wade through the religiosity to get there.

Other opinions are available.

I got this book a couple of years ago for a "Read the World" challenge, which was good as far as it went, but it didn't get as far as #Pakistan ! ??
A Muslim family saga told from a female perspective against the tumultuous backdrop of Partition.

#TuesdayTunes @tiedyedude
?️Gorillaz ?
?Demon Days ?
?Iced Lemon Drizzle ?
?Earl Grey Créme ?
?‍⬛ Skye ?

That was a quick read, but an emotional gut-punch all the same.

As a citizen of a nation that was a major trader of enslaved people, with a colonial legacy that continues to negatively impact pretty much everybody on earth, this was a hard read. Désil speaks of the toll it took her to write it, and I can only imagine how it feels to live the consequences of enslaved forebears.
I found this book looking up the meaning of the phrase 👇🏻

Next up, a poetry collection by a Canadian author of Haitian descent, using zombie folklore as a metaphor for slavery, being Black in a White-dominated world, immigration narratives, generational trauma, and healing, the book's title being the traditional remedy for zombiïsm.
🇭🇹 #Haiti 🇨🇦 #Canada

It took me a while to read this, but I really enjoyed it. Maitland mixes personal impressions of British forests with history, ecology, forestry and fairy tales, and does so in an engaging way.
I liked her retelling of the stories, some as storyteller variations of the original, some taking a different narrative perspective, some as sequels, and some reimagined in the modern day.
I particularly liked her Hansel and Gretel, the siblings grown,👇🏻

"I am the man in the book you're reading
Waving to you from the page
I am the man in the book you're reading
Staring into your eyes
....
Books crawl down from the shelves
Read themselves to you
Read themselves at you
In the library of force"

?️ John Cale
? Library of Force (Featuring Man in the Book Excerpt)
? M:FANS
?️ https://youtu.be/gC4wK7FEihI?si=eR-6s3GPIizf01fV

Another bookish song, though a bit unsettling ?

#BooksAndMusic

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

♥️🧙🏻‍♂️🧑🏽♥️

"While companies like Meta employ the services of fact-checking organisations, they do very little else to resolve the problem of misinformation."

#NewInternationalist #552 published Nov 2024, & already superceded by the continuing erosion of reporting standards as the "very little else" social media platforms were doing is now extinct.
When voters don't have access to reliable information, democracy is undermined, which is, of course, the point.

I enjoyed all seven stories to some degree, so overall 4⭐

My favourite two were "Bazaar of the Bizarre" by Leiber, with his humorous take, before that was a thing, on a more typically grim genre &; Mazirian the Magician by Vance, which is just classic low fantasy, and makes me regret having let go of his Dying Earth books sometime in my prehistory.
Editor, de Camp's, offering was interesting in his intention of making his story more realistic,⬇️

An exciting night of intrigue, murder & theft for Conan in a desert oasis town inhabited by cannibals & strange cults.

An opportunity for Howard to demonstrate some of his worst racism, with a seasoning of predatory sexism. Apologists say it's of its time: it's still 💩

My 4⭐ rating is based solely on the fantasy/adventure elements I read Howard for, & that while Conan is, famously, savage, he also isn't as thick as he's sometimes portrayed.

The penultimate story is Jack Vance's "Mazirian the Magician", which I read around 1980 in his "The Dying Earth" collection. It's a wonderful story of the Magicians' Duel variety, in an exotic far-future setting. Vance's magic system inspired Gary Gygax's AD&D wizardry, with mages able to memorise a set of spells which they forget as they cast them and have to relearn from grimoirs.
Mazirian is an interesting character of an unpleasant kind ??

#CatsOfLitsy
I am honoured that Skye has chosen to sit next to me while I read (yes, a cat post, but there's a book in the photo so don't @ me! 😏)
She's a rescue cat who is still settling in with us, & while she's sweet she's also excitable & scratchy (her tail is lashing as I write & I'm suppressing my urge to stroke her!). She does like being picked up & held & will allow strokes then, so I wander around the house like a mad cat-person!👨🏻‍🍼

I didn't find the book I went looking for today, but better than if I'd found it, I found a book I didn't know I was looking for 😊

"She's psychokinetic
And you're really gonna get it,
She's a teenage rock and roll girl.
She's a mistress of chaos
And she's here to dismay us,
Oh, Carrie you're a rock and roll girl"

Listening to Sultans of Ping, and this bookish song came on ?
? Teenage Rock and Roll Girl
? Teenage Drug
?️https://youtu.be/O4GSvGlkFoE?si=18sfKFeei9ipLg5O

Now, then, where's me jumper? ?
#BooksAndMusic

'Since colonization, the spurious voice of the white man has attempted to define the history of Australia."
- Editorial, Zoe Holman, #NewInternationalist #554

Focusing on Indigenous rights in Australia. Other stories include a profile in the "Hall of Infamy" section on RFK Jr.; Trump and Palestine (have recent events overtaken or confirmed this article?); a Cartoon History of the Suffragettes; and the survival of social movements in Sudan's war.

"A young boy, Zein Yousef, sleeps on the grave of his mother who died in an Israeli air strike in Gaza."
- Editorial, Amy Hall, #NewInternationalist #553

This edition focuses on the arms trade, so, as usual, not a barrel of laughs. Other stories include oil imperialism, ElΩn Mμsk vs. Brazil, and the role of British propaganda in controlling the narrative of the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising.

"The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man."

- The Hoard of the Gibbelins, Lord Dunsany

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

"Litten" ?

Well, there's a word you don't often meet in the wild!

The first of the stories is a Fritz Leiber tale of Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, with the added bonus of featuring their wizardly patrons, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes & Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
In decadent Lankhmar's Plaza of Dark Delights, a gaudy new shop appears overnight. The wizards separately dispatch their protegés to end this extradimensional threat, the Mouser, typically, letting his curiosity & sybaritic tastes get the better of 👇🏻

Second edition of this collection of seven sword and sorcery tales. Published 1968, bought 1979, finally made it off Mount TBR 2025. 49 years of well-aged magic and mayhem! 😄

This is a comfort read as I've actually read many of the stories in other collections. Some favourite characters here, including Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric of Melniboné and Conan the Barbarian. Let the swashbuckling begin! ⚔️

I 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 👇🏻

"Criticism of the traditional male role is often mistaken for criticism of men themselves. When this happens, men understandably become defensive, push away any discussion of gender, and are unable to hear women's appeals for change. Any gender-role discussion quickly becomes a "women's" problem, and the issue is repressed by men who feel unjustly accused, and by women who are afraid of men's disapproval and anger.”

- Peggy Natiello

I'm a third of the way through a 12-hour online conference: "The Future of the Person-Centred Approach: How to Serve a Changing World" and it's been by turns intense, dull and fascinating. A bit hard for my ADHD to maintain focus when people are rambling, despite being totally focused on another person is what I do for a living (or perhaps because of ?)

Having opened her short review of English diarists by categorising them as bores, O'Brien proves to be a lively guide to those of us who omit no detail of an anecdote, commenting that those qualities which in person are deadly dull as we have no polite escape, in written form are fascinating as we have the choice of reprieve & of skipping over.
The only diarist I'm inclined to explore further is 19th century governess Ellen Weeton, though her 👇🏼

"Let me begin with the hard saying that the best English diaries have been written by bores."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

A little #BookMail
I'm enthused to read On Being an Autistic Therapist, but it may have to queue for a bit! Chapters written by autistic therapists about their experiences doing the work.
The Red Pavilion is a Judge Dee mystery, and thanks to World of Books' annoying practice of rarely sending the edition they display on their website, not a match to the others in the series I have shelved 🙄😮‍💨😤 (On Being an Autistic Bibliophile!).

A brief (48 pages) overview of some key diaries and journals from English history up to contemporary (i.e., 1943) times by Irish writer, Kate O'Brien.
It has 8 colour plates and 19 b&w illustrations, and is number 55 in an extensive series of books covering many aspects of English culture and history. Trying *very* hard for this series not to become a collecting "special interest"! ???

Reading "Fantastic Voyage" reminded me of my love of the miniaturised humans genre, of which there is too little written, and not enough in my collection, so I ordered some more, which arrived today ?
As well as FV, I've read Lindsey Gutteridge's Cold War in a Country Garden series, both authors using an espionage setting. The blurb for Gordon's Micronaut series gives the setting as an incipient overpopulation/food scarcity crisis, but
??

A fun novelisation of the 1966 movie by Asimov, who does what he can within the scifi premise to include realistic science as problems to be solved by the crew of scientists and technicians, miniaturised in a nuclear-powered submarine and injected into the bloodstream of a defecting physicist with an inoperable brain tumour to save his life and the knowledge he has in order to maintain a cold war stalemate.
👇🏼

I love a "micronauts" story, and I guess this is one of the most famous (perhaps alongside Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man", oh, and Honey I Shrunk the Kids, oh, and Inner Space, ok there's loads!). The trope is ancient, though, being found in folklore tales such as Tom Thumb.
The front cover of my edition (1966 first UK edition, for what that's worth) is slightly boring, but I like the back cover Technicolour movie still.

'"how could you do this to me?" said the Sun to the Moon
"how could you steal my light?"
a tear rolled down her pale cheek.
"i just wanted to be seen," said the Moon'

- siblings ☀️?️‍⚧️?

"As I write this book in the spring of 2019, it has become something of a truism among my community of queer people of colour that the end of the world is nigh."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

? Book with Late-Winter Evening Half-Moon ???

The first essay in this collection of nonfiction and poetry is a critique of "the leftist social justice community" by a writer who identifies with that community, while acknowledging its problems.
An encouraging start ?

#CatsOfLitsy

Introducing Skye, whose adoption into the family happened today 😻

She's 2 years 4 months old, and was rescued from a building site about a year ago, where sadly she was being stoned by children 😡 This has made her nervous and scratchy-bitey around children, so she's been a bit of a revolving-door cat for the animal shelter. Luckily, I don't mind the odd mauling, so she's in her forever home now 😊

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"On 20 January Donald Trump officially became president of the United States, much to the consternation of almost 50 percent of the US electorate, and many others around the world."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"SecUnits don't care about the news."

I feel that, Murderbot ?‍?

This is a re-readable series; I'm enjoying it more the second time around ?

At the risk of gorging myself, I'm going to re-read the first four Murderbot books before reading the following two for the first time, after which I will buy the latest one.

Also, I am well peeved that "Network Effect" is marginally larger in length and breadth than the other books. Who the fuck okayed that? ?‍♂️???
#BookPeeves

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

"In my eyes
Indisposed
In disguises no one knows
Hides the face
Lies the snake
And the sun in my disgrace
Boiling heat
Summer stench
Neath the black, the sky looks dead
Call my name
Through the cream
And I'll hear you scream again

Black hole sun
Won't you come
And wash away the rain?
Black hole sun
Won't you come"

?️Soundgarden
?Black Hole Sun
?Superunknown
?️ https://youtu.be/3mbBbFH9fAg?si=AtF6fUIXaUwPTFfr

"Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack...in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world."

"Of all kinds of human weaknesses, the craze for collecting old books is the most excusable. During the early phases of the disease, the book-lover is content to purchase only books which he [sic] reads. Next he buys books which he means to read; and as his store accumulates, he hopes to read his purchases; but by-and-by he takes home books in beautiful bindings and of early date, but printed in extinct languages he cannot read." ????????

A little #BookHaul from my morning in Manchester, and a visit to the Queer Lit bookshop. I hope to read these all in the first quarter of 2025. Well, I can dream, can't I? 🤔💭🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈