I do like Jennifer Crusie's humour/crime/romance mashups. Reminds me of #StephaniePlum

I even went to the bookshop - it's called The Owl Service and it's very cool...

#Bookshops #London

He traced the first stirrings of his Doubts to buying a copy of Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers at Waterstones in Bradford, whilst supposedly on his way to a retreat. He remembers the shop itself, as beautiful as any cathedral, appearing like a cornucopia of temptation.

An anger stoked by that long parade of preachers and teachers and Prince Charmings, wannabe puppeteers all. At every stage of her life, Eve had met them. But nowhere had she encountered as many puppeteers as in Hollywood. Every agent and manager, every director, producer, and studio chief had his arms out and his fingers extended, looking to grab a woman by the strings.

I have to thank my work bookclub for this one!

A story of male friendship in two parts.
Youthful friendship marked by absent parents and a love of music. In the second half the friends reunite due to a tragedy. I loved the writing, the way the characters of the teenagers were so vividly drawn, the humour.

I'm looking forward to discussing with the group how the adult characters' partners were portrayed.

Finally got a dry day and time to read my book in the garden at work.

#MaleBonding #Manchester #WheresthePlaylist

A week until the #Booker24 longlist announcement.

Any predictions?
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/2024

As recommended by Curtis Sittenfeld, so I picked it up..

But I think Hornby's blurb captures it for me. Brilliant, but ouch.

The title: when you talk on the phone to someone you just don't want to explain it all to.

My mother wraps me up in a large towel, like a cylinder, and I undress and put on my swimsuit. It's one my mother has knit for me - the oddest garment, all sorts of colors - and it extends all the way up my neck and well down my thighs. I run to the sea like that, like some strange sea animal of my mother's creation.

Before we go further, perhaps I should mention that I love Tommy. I loved him the first night we went out; I loved him when he got down on one knee to propose in his pajamas; I loved him when he almost missed the birth of our daughter....; and I love him right now at this very minute. But when a man is paid to provide his opinions and he's had some success in doing so, he is bound to become a little insufferable.

__
No idea what he means. 🤣🤣

I loved this, more than the Blue Beautiful World. After a disastrous event, the remnant of a community move to a new planet. Their attempts to work out a new way of ensuring the community survives, when most of the women were killed.

Lord explains in the afterword that this was inspired by the 2004 tsunami, when far more many women died than men, something that I had missed.

LT also recommends Becky Chambers, which feels apt.
Recommended.

When we landed, a part of me almost expected the Sadiri priest to come flying out, grab Dllenahkh by the head, look deeply into his eyes, and exclaim, "My God, get this man to a meditation chamber, stat! Can't you see his rudimentary telepathic in- tegument is about to disintegrate?"

Or not. But the image almost made me giggle, which would have been unfortunate

I pull out my phone, texting Eden. Having a Pretty Woman moment.
Be more specific, she answers. Were you shunned from stores or are you in a bubble bath?

(Random shot of LA train station)

...she recalled: 'From the picturesque point of view, I most enjoyed the boat trips on the Thames, and excursions to Greenwich and Kew.'

Morisot's oil The Thames (1875) is now in the Museum Barbarini, Potsdam

(Image: detail from The Thames)
Via https://sammlung.museum-barberini.de/de/

The American Centre used to send scholars to lecture us on this. To the extent that we've heard lectures where [American] scholars have told us how great Saudi Arabian society was, and that women could operate within their own sphere of life. After a while people said, well, if it's such a great and romantic system, perhaps the United States needs to import it themselves.

Thanks to @Kitta for posting hers.

Are the best lists the ones you disagree with?
(I'm never going to be 100% behind any list with this #1)
#NYT

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html?unlo...

This book is more well travelled than me!

Next up - bookgroup book that comes highly recommended.

I was struck with the realization that everyone around me had, at least at one time, had all the depth it takes to give themselves away. It was troubling in a way; I rolled the other gals over in my mind, and the sleeping Queen suddenly felt very crowded with so many beating hearts.

"What do you do that for?" I asked her one time, after a couple of weeks of watching her flip some novel open and shut eight or nine times a night...

She... thought a moment before answering me. "Some time ago, when I was a little younger than you are now, I realized I've only the one life to live. It rankled me then, and it rankles me now," she said. "At least this way I can taste a few others."

Flukily coordinated book and (corporate) bag...

I've taken my time with this one. Thoughtful look at (as the UK subtitle says) "what do we do with great art by bad people". But more than this: questions why "bad" women and "bad" men artists are working to different criteria. Questions the role of redemption / forgiveness. Relates it all to Capitalism and consumerism - and still manages to end with hope (and Miles Davis).
Recommended.

No, what I reference is the force of me, you, us a power of breath to fall and rise without issuing demands. Being here, colouring a lyric's final iteration: high notes fading against a cupola, the roof of a tin shed, the gambrel of a village hall, all the mercury bubbles unleashed.

From "Lyrical invention" by Nerys Williams

The Mill at Tidmarsh is beautiful, and only strange when studied up close, like Tidmarsh itself: an ordinary country house that once entered revealed a radical reinterpretation of domesticity.

/Detail from "The Mill at Tidmarsh", Dora Carrington

I don't read a lot of short stories, but these came highly recommended.

Loved this collection. The humour, the variety, the memorable ideas. Going to try and find more of her work to read. The good news is that she has a backlist so I don't have to wait for her next book!

8000 books!

A dense bubble of resentment began to form beneath her breastbone as she stared at the sum: $24,900. This was the approximate amount that she had spent on friends' bridal showers, engagement and bachelorette parties, hotels, plane tickets, dresses, and other wedding- related expenses over the past eight and a half years.....she had been working as a high school French teacher and had earned an average annual salary of thirty-nine thousand dollars.

I love this time of year in the garden, but it does leave less time for books...

In A Pillow Book....the poet Suzanne Buffam defines another kind of silence: the hush of motherhood: "A Great Book can be read again and again, inexhaustibly, with great benefit to great minds, wrote Mortimer Adler, co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. Among the five hundred and eleven Great Books on Adler's list, updated in 1990 to appease his quibbling critics, moreover, only four, I can't help counting, were written by women..."

Had to look up Leona Helmsley, had passed me by.

#Ambitious

Fascinated by the discussions here.
The illusion that things that have taken place in "the Past" are separate from us, that things are getting "better".

Did pretty well at two bookshops during a flying trip to Edinburgh. Reminded I don't have any steps (and hardly any inclines) at home....

I've taken my time with this one, and added lots of places to my wishlist for a return visit to Berlin. Including the pictured museum, Berggruen, filled with modern art.

(Picture from Wikipedia)

Almost instantly after injecting one syringeful of two-per cent solution, a state of calm sets in which turns straight away into delight and bliss. But this continues for only one or two minutes. And then it's all lost without trace, as if it had never been. Pain, dread, darkness set in. The spring roars, black birds fly from bare branch to bare branch, while in the distance the forest reaches towards the sky like bristles, broken and black...

Incredibly sad diary from her mother's last years.

My mother's neigbour is in tears... I offer her a chocolate but she shakes her head, raising her ugly, puffed face. It breaks my heart. So does the following scene: as I bend forward to check the safety catch of my mother's wheelchair, she leans over and kisses my hair. How can I survive that kiss, such love, my mother, my mother

...she undid a package, and out of it fell a long, snow-white towel with an artless red cockerel embroidered on it....

And for many years it hung in my bedroom in Muryino, and then it went with me on my wanderings. Finally it grew ragged, faded, became full of holes, and finally disappeared, fading and disappearing just like memories.

She was not the only woman in the world with a teenage son. Millions of other women had survived the same affliction. Just barely, she thought bitterly.

Remember what I read to you in the first class, that excerpt from Kafka's letter?" Michael closed his eyes and quoted from memory: " "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If he book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? "

The Käthe Kollwitz Museum combined her art with her political activism. It was housed in a building next to the Literaturhaus on Fasanenstrasse, one of Charlottenburg's most elegant buildings on one of its most elegant streets; both opened at roughly the same time and share a similar history. ... with one of the district's most refined cafes and courtyards.

I went here! Fascinating museum #Berlin (not my pic)

Werner Hegemann, in his 1930 book, Das Steinerne Berlin (Berlin of stone), described the city as the largest tenement in the world. He drew a straight line between city planning, impoverishment and susceptibility to dictatorship.

Unsurprisingly, his books were publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933.

Only this moment is certain, both of us here and alive...

#Poetry

As the author points out, Camelot stories have been retold and reshaped many times over the years. Here is another old/new version for now.

I can remember being terrified by Morgan le Fay on "Storyteller" tapes as a kid.

Here she gets to be more than the evil witch determined to destroy Arthur.

"Quests are very dull for the most part....
No one ever talks about toilets on quests now, do they?"

I love this author.

Ugh, this is so depressing," said one. "What a disgusting creep," said the other. "Can't we leave?" And we went out for ice cream, blinking as we stepped from the cavernous dim of the museum lobby into the bright thin northern sunlight.
-
Tempting to think the teenagers have a point! (On a Picasso exhibit about his relationship with women)

Madison's also-ran touched my arm. I flinched, and he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don't like you.

Cormac McCarthy on writing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/books/booksupdate/cormac-mccarthy-roger-payne...

'...And he mentioned the possessions at Louviers. I wanted to know if it was true.'
Again she smiles, but now her eyes are sparkling with...it's malice, I think that's what I see.
'And why do you think that a man of the Church would lie to you?'
'Have you ever tried walking on water?'

A very sunny day to read such a gloomy-sounding book.
(It's not gloomy, it's about women's art)

I'm on #18 - I continue to be charmed by the quiet romance of the characters' development.