We drive cars that run on fuel created by the deaths of dinosaurs...
Bookwomble 🤨 Hmm, no 🙂↔️ 😁 6h
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We drive cars that run on fuel created by the deaths of dinosaurs...
I was surprised when I opened the cover of this: it's a Penguin imprint.
The woman who had stopped to ask Hazel Ware how she was had moved on to a small group of other women, all drinking tea and looking more like the grown-up women I was used to. Knitted skirts, tan tights and hair that had been permed or set. We would see them in the hairdressers on the High Street, Aunty Jean among them, sat under the huge hoods that made them look like rows of Stormtroopers, protecting our town from invasion.
Everyone loves Chiyo, thought Jane, and yet, I wonder if she isn't the loneliest one of all.
so-soIntro level text into a key woman in Roman history (the author argues). Took me a while to get through, and some of the "contemporary" references are already dated (2018). I do love histories that work to reclaim women's stories though.
#RainyReading
In capitalism, people claimed to be free and equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available.....
'Do you remember Black Boy?' teacher Nora asked when we read Richard Wright's autobiography in school. 'In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a poor black person cannot be free. The police are after him. The law works against him.'
Oops!
(Do not make decisions if you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired)
[Question: can I make decisions when I'm asleep?]
I am so impressed by these books, informed by research (and even including unobtrusive references if you want to read more).
The narrator receives a visitor in prison. Lined up next to each other in either side of the bars, so do the other prisoners. The conversations interupt one another. It's hard to talk with his girlfriend.
pickEveryone should read Lucy Caldwell's short fiction.
pickThe manga version.
She'd imagined being a grandma would involve stirring up Christmas puddings, the wains on wee wooden stools with wee matching aprons beside you, taking it in turns to heave round the big wooden spoon. Though where she'd got the notion she hadn't a baldy, for her mother never bothered making a pudding when you could buy a perfectly decent one at the Co-op and her own grandma hadn't been a pudding-mixing sort, not at all.
NO ONE SERIOUSLY QUESTIONS that members of Congress are more polarized than they used to be. This is borne out anecdotally, as social scientists like to say, by watching them on cable television, where you can see the spittle in HD...
'Banned it?' Andrew said with a grin. 'How do you ban being patronizing?'
'Well, there were certain phrases he used that made me mad because they didn't sound rude but you knew they were. You know, things like "If you think about it," which means you're not thinking about it, and "With respect," which basically means without respect. "I think you'll find" is another one. I fined him twenty-five cents every time he said something like that.'
I see,' he said again. You've been planning this for some time, then.'
He made it sound like a bank raid, Megan thought, or maybe premeditated murder. But she would not allow him to make her feel guilty; she had done far more than her share. 'Yes,' she said briskly. I'm twenty-one and I think it's time I started my own life.'
...we passed a colourful mural that depicted the dead and disappeared....
¿Me olvidaste? asked José Carrasco, of MIR. Have you forgotten me?
¿Donde están? asked Ricardo Salinas, of the Socialist Party, who disappeared near San Antonio. Where are they?
Unexpected link to recent fiction reading (On the Calculation of Volume also feels like a rerun, sadly absent Bill Murray)
"Day one felt like Groundhog Day, the film in which a news reporter awakes each morning to a repeat of what has come before. From the outset, however, it was clear that these seven judges would take a different approach..."
"During the intifada. We don't talk about it. The boys with the stones, yes, we talk about them. But not the girls." She assured him that Rita stayed busy..... Then she returned the conversation to Ibn Hanna's wedding, which was coming up, and to life in America, and how had his people really elected that terrible casino owner as president. Didn't Americans know gambling was haram?
"The fine arts are always underappreciated." He sighs. "It's a modern tragedy, really."
"Sure." I say it curtly because I'm thinking how that's not a tragedy. Not really. A tragedy is a double homicide. Or a murder-suicide. Or a pileup on 695 when there are kids in the car. That's tragic...
Visit to one of my favourite bookshops at the weekend. I resorted to taking pictures of shelves because I was interested in so many...
Stats on original language of books I've read (so far) in 2025... (books in translation)
Harry was defensive about some of the methods he had used to get his stories. At one point, he turned on the reader, who he imagined censuring him for how he had obtained the Christie exclusive: 'Sit down there, you, that man in the back row, he admonished. 'I'll have no hypocritical comment! How many murderers' stories have you read, sir, in the Sunday papers? If you've never read one, then I'll listen to you. If you have read one, then shut up!
According to the constitutional law scholar Carl Bogus, at least sixteen of the twenty-seven law review articles published between 1970 and 1989 that were favorable to the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment were "written by lawyers who had been directly employed by or represented the NRA or other gun rights organizations."
We took almost nothing when we left. Mum kept saying, Don't worry we'll come back we'll come back so soon, and it was a lie. I think now to how they found that house with everything still in it, Papa's book still left open on the page where he stopped, and I am sick I am sick to my stomach. Whose stuff did they think that was? They must have known I can't imagine they didn't know. Who doesn't know a thing like that? They must've known.
Goodreads (via google) says this is "comforting manga for pet lovers..." I don't disagree.
One of those books that makes me wish for something between "so so" and thumbs up.
(Not) a little light reading.
Do love a historical map! Check out these endpapers 😍
My vulgar language also caused problems when I went to Cecilia's. Her father was a stern, distinguished, imposing man... Though he never missed his chance to intimate that he'd been particularly active in the years of armed struggle in the seventies and eighties, enjoying the astonished look on my face when his stories suddenly mentioned guns or kneecappings, he wasn't as indulgent when it came to another kind of violence: foul language.
When we finally discovered books, it wasn't a form of escapism, but rather the reassuring coalescence of boredom. I could almost picture it in my mind, white and miry: reading was like sinking into a pool of milk. I would stay immersed for hours, until even my body grew flaccid, the stagnant liquid seeping into my pores. It felt like everything suddenly acquired meaning, a phenomenon of transubstantiation, my flesh changing into boredom.
....there is no objective, capital T Truth about Agrippina. There is only a series of stories, drawn from other people's stories about men. The only way through is to be hon-est about that. This story is as much mine as it is Agrippina's, because I have chosen how to present the information I have. But it is a good story about a woman who deserves her own place in history.
...made the three sisters the first living women ever to be identified by name on a Roman coin.
I wasn't expecting David Cameron to turn up in the first few pages of this....
pickBeautiful book about Nicholson's paintings of Scotland.
I find Switzerland most appealing between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one. Much younger than that, and the clean air, healthy living, reserved manners and somewhat bland cooking puts me off.
---
Probably not for the Swiss tourist board, this one...
He put the phone down and tapped his fingers on the desk. The alibi thing was annoying when the video call would so easily prove his whereabouts, but the police clearly hadn't even bothered to check it with his nana yet. A single person, living alone, not going to stupid neighbour fireworks things, and suddenly you were a murder suspect.
Wow - the bookmark auction project has already raised over £7000 for charity - a school in Zimbabwe ??
"Famous" children's illustrators' work going for ££ - Axel Shaeffer was over £150 the last time I looked, but many beautiful ones are less than £15. One of the ones above I've got a bid on- any guesses?
Check out the art https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/auction/detail/auction_id/1754479/
Gary Younge giving a rousing argument for political engagement (instead of the history talk I was hoping for: but it was excellent anyway).
Madame Elysé spoke for three minutes and forty-seven seconds. The silence that followed seemed interminable. As I stood at the podium, a gentle sound filled the Great Hall of Justice, the sound of tears.
I waited to address the Court.
Later, after the morning session was over... Madame Elysé... turned to me.....
'May I ask a question?'
'Yes.'
'Why did it take so long for us to come to The Hague?'
So many cute, original works-of-art bookmarks... I can't choose!
https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/bookmarkproject2025
Apple TV Release date is tomorrow! Woo! 😍
so-soMixed feelings about this one. Covering the 100 years of Rosa's life, from a Polish pogrom to a garden in Morningside in the early 2000s. Wonderfully Scottish (well, mostly Edinburgh), and with a message surely no one can argue with: conflict is bad.
For me, a bit too ambitious - and heavy on the historical exposition.
Edinburgh skyline (near Dean Village)
#WomensPrizeLL25
