I too wanted to be a detective...
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I too wanted to be a detective...
What're you doing?
You know the Zodiac Killer?
.............
More not-festive reading
pickNot sure what made me pick this up, police procedural based around cold cases. Will look to read the next one when it comes out.
More not-festive reading...
'Sorry. I didn't mean...' She took a breath. 'I just sometimes think you don't really get...' She glanced across at him. 'Look, you know the numbers, guv. Two women are killed every week in the UK by a current or an ex partner. Stuff like that makes you second-guess yourself. It makes you scared.'
The coins that most spark my imagination are the worn silver ones that have been bent into a crude 'S' shape... They became fashionable around the end of the seventeenth century. The sixpence... was bent by the young man in front of his intended.... If she liked him, she would keep it. If she didn't, she would throw it away. Many must have been thrown into the river, because I have found a good handful of them on the foreshore.
I wasn't expecting quite so much detail about classic cars....
For me, the audiobook % asleep is much higher...(it's how I get to sleep, so not a reflection on the authors!)
In the shallow water where Cannon Street Bridge is today, there is a man with what looks like a hoe and two packhorses or donkeys. I don't know what he's doing, perhaps he's watering his beasts, or maybe he's searching the mud. Whatever he's doing, I've mudlarked his spot on many occasions...
('Agas' Map from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm )
I did not dare tell him that the secularists and the communists are all out to get at Islam with this intellectual assault on the minds of young people, and that Islam has come to be a stranger in the world, as it was in the beginning...
All those ideas were hanging on banners around the university for him to see and could be heard everywhere on the tapes and cassettes the Islamic bookstalls were playing.
In 1872 the wonderfully named Hiram Codd patented his solution to the problem of sealing fizzy-drink bottles. The marble in his bottle sat on a glass 'shelf' within a specially designed pinched neck...
To pour the drink the marble was pushed back into the bottle using a little plunger or by giving it a swift bash on something, which is said to have given rise to the term 'codswallop'.
Went to See It's a Wonderful Life at the cinema. Of course, as powerful as ever.
This scene made me laugh though: instead of marrying George, "poor" Mary became a librarian... ?? So she gets to read all day instead of bringing up four kids whilst G is stuck at the Saving & Loan?
#Unpopular opinion. Finding this a bit trite.
The camp's sandy alleyways have so far only led her round in circles, like a maze, always back to where she started. The only route that didn't feel like it was a trick was the one to school each morning. She strode towards it, proudly, rebelliously, convinced it would lead her out of there, in the end, to finish her studies elsewhere.
She cannot hear the chaos of her five sisters running around her....
She is too engrossed in her books.
I went to do some Xmas shopping, and somehow also came home with some books for me...
The letter writer suggests some New Year's Resolutions...
Not exactly "festive" reading!
[It's] Les Misérables, it was taken off the market, I managed to get a few copies before they shredded them...
What's it about?"
"A man who, out of starvation, steals a loaf of bread and is hounded by the police for the rest of his life. SAVAK thinks the book might miror some things in our society."
I put it in my scholbag and headed home....
How strange that in our culture books were considered dangerous...
Visit to a beautiful bookshop in #Chorley
Bonus: a 3 piece band playing Xmas songs. Upstairs there was a wreath making class. Got started on the Xmas presents.
https://www.ebbandflobookshop.co.uk/
Even in the seemingly endless terror of middle school...
When the final report of the Commission of investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was published in 2020 it caused an outcry, because of its assessment that those who bore the greatest responsibility for the horror and cruelty experienced by so many women and their children were not officials of the Catholic Church and the state, but the women's families instead.
She [Clair's mother] has built her sense of herself through these stories and at this stage - she's over ninety... questions aren't helpful. I ask them anyway, my sceptical, disenchanting questions. I go further and I actually check facts... Sometimes I come back to her with evidence that proves that what she remembers or what she heard can't have happened that way. She is never pleased about this. Yet she keeps feeding me stories.
pickHonest account of breast cancer treatment on the NHS, with humour but still pretty brutal. The author was 37 when diagnosed.
They used to meet here outside the Konsum when they came home from work, from the cooperative or the fields. They used to drink beer and talk, sometimes they drank beer and didn't talk, before they went back to their farms and into their houses. Fred, Wee Henry, Walfried, Jochen Schuster and Jochen Meyer - all long gone now or dead.
He wants to remember their faces and their voices...
"Yeah, that's how to do it, Duffy," I said to myself. Maybe my last case, like Poirot's would be the one where the bloody detective did it.
"What are you thinking, Sean?" Crabbie asked.
"Heat death of the universe, entropy, decay, the utter pointlessness of police work."
"The usual then?"
"Aye."
Before I discard my past I'll write it down...
We couldn't provide any services, since there was hardly any social housing left and a million people were on the waiting list, but we could increase the paper trail...
It had been the logic of bureaucracy since time immemorial...The Pharaohs... only undertook vast, pointless construction projects like the Pyramids of Giza in order to keep the populace busy during flood season....
to make sure they didn't start asking existential questions
The protagonist wants to find out more about the French colonial past...
#GN #InTranslation
Feels like commentary on the scoreline... Poor 🏴
pick
I love books about books - this is a fascinating, anecdotal wander through histories of collectors, libraries and ideas.
As early as 1806 the traveller John Lambert noticed... [NYC] bookshops were 'numerous' and that a lot of people seemed to be reading in coffee shops. Two early characters were Emanuel Conegliano, one of Mozart's librettists, who ran a specialist Italian bookstore so compendious that Columbia University bought [it and] ...William Gowans, parts of whose shop, with its piles of books up to ten feet high, had to be navigated with sperm-oil lamps.
Martha Nussbaum argued... Western concern with cleanliness is ' a refusal to... be contaminated by a potent reminder of one's own mortality and animality'.
.....The Finnish philosopher Olli Lagerspetz takes comfort from the idea that hygiene can be suspect:
As a sometimes negligent householder... I am naturally soothed by the idea that exaggerated cleanliness is not next to godliness but to fascism and xenophobia.
Mark O'Connell of the New Yorker likes the idea that 'a nicely sharpened HB' can be so powerful, and is funny about it:
"I tend to slot mine behind my right ear, carpenter style; I like to think this lends a somewhat rough-and-ready aspect to my appearance as I sit reading Middlemarch on the bus home.
Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress....
However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.
pickIf you couldn't already guess from my litsy spam, I loved this graphic novel. About a young man moving to New York to explore his dream of dancing on Broadway. Wonderful illustrations.
"I have had my dream-like others-
And it has come to nothing so that
I remain now carelessly
With feet planted on the ground,
And look up at the sky-
Feeling my clothes about me,
The weight of my body in my shoes,
The rim of my hat, air passing in and out
At my nose-and decide to dream no more."
"Thursday" by William Carlos Williams
Beautifully illustrated GN: this is a wordless depiction of one character's trauma.
Kerouac's inspiring tips for life...
[And I realised no matter what you do, it's bound to be a waste of time..]
Loved the way the author used these line drawings as chapter breaks.
I really liked how this biography of Mary included the wider political context: Mary as figurehead for political protests.
King Henry (VIII) attempts to censor public criticism...
This way of collecting books for their look, rather than content, is a perennial cul-de-sac of collecting, observed by Seneca of scroll collectors in Roman times: 'Many use books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining room! [Some] get their pleasure merely from bindings and labels.'
Image Abbey Library of St. Gallen via https://www.1000libraries.com/post/2025-top-10-most-beautiful-libraries-in-the-w...
pickWonderful look at language communities in New York.
Recommended!
![[tagged book]](https://image.librarything.com/pics/litsy_webpics/icon_taggedBook@3x.png){kind=icon}
