"A tour of the National Library of Scotland in 300 book spines. Part of the 2025 Festival Fringe"
Apparently the speaker does this talk by invitation as well, (Graeme Hawley), so if you get the chance to hear him (and see the slides...)
https://www.nls.uk/whats-on/joy-of-spines/
Recommended.
'God planted a fruit garden,' he said. There was profit and pleasure to be found in an orchard: the smell of almond blossom, the birdsong and the buzzing of bees, the cool shade offered on a hot summer's day. All of these delights are 'the Good of every thing, and a pattern of Heaven', Austen wrote.
Part of a lovely collection of books based on a call out to the public for influential reads.
#AudreLorde
Someone who had also kept (and had far more) library cards...
(How many do you have?)
#JosephCoelho
Ultimately, Anna looks as though she is thinking of something else but thinking about it as if she is in a painting by a very early modernist: late Schjerfbeck, for instance.
'Coming to church now, Uncle?'
He reminded her of the creatures in the only books she'd liked that Aunty used to have. Written by a doctor from America, they were full of tall, squiggly creatures who were skinny and fat at the same time, mostly with one strand of hair sticking up from the tops of their heads.
#DrSeuss
Cricket in the background.
The boiler technician has been. A large quote is expected..😱
All About Sarah (2020), Pauline Delabroy-Allard
Négar Djavadi, Disoriental
Alice Zeniter, The Art of Losing
Selfies, Sylvie Weil
The Years, Annie Ernaux
Self Portrait in Green, Marie NDiaye
Jakuta Alikavazovic, Night as it Falls.
"That Bouraoui's work sits so well with such a range of titles (commissioned in translation by a variety of publishing houses) is testament to both its literary merit and its universal appeal."
#WomeninTranslation
pickShort but powerful GN imagining the life of a young Japanese-American woman during WW2.
For a book that kicks off with the narrator's lack of interest in being a mother, there's a lot of childcare.
The entire budget of the National Archives is about the cost of a single C-17 military transport plane. In 2018, when Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the National Archives... processed twenty thousand pages of documents relating to.... the Clinton administration but was unable to get through all the requested documents from his work in the Bush administration in time for the Senate to review them.
Nigeria Prize for Literature longlist announced...
https://www.writingafrica.com/nlng-nigeria-prize-for-literature-2025-longlist-an...
Half of the people believe that they know how the other half lives, and deem them enemies.
Freedom was the name for the dizzying power that lasted through her library expeditions. No pleasantries ever needing to be exchanged with the librarian on duty. Even the round clock at high noon on the wood-panelled wall had no claim on her. From the first second she entered the building she was in other times, other dimensions. She was other Naoises.
Up next (when I remember to step away from the visiting pooch and the garden).
pickThis series set in 1970s rural Minnesota just goes from strength to strength. Described as "gritty Native American noir" by Oscar Hokeah.
I am already looking forward to the next one!
pickRecommended
A GN that ticked all my boxes in terms of a successful read. Based on true events (the English FA decided in the 1920s to ban women's matches from their grounds). The black and white illustrations are charming.
The story is about more than football: the possibilities that can open up through sport (Amazon are currently billing it as "the perfect love story for fans of the Women's Euros"). I'd add also for non-football fans!
She was certain her father wouldn't like it...
Florrie found other ways to spend her weekends...
Ma Mussolini ha fatto anche cose buone, 'But Mussolini also did good things': a common phrase in Italy, increasingly so as distrust in democracy grows and social media creates fertile ground for historical revisionism. Spend enough time in the country and you will hear the words....
Imagine it being slipped into conversation casually, muttered wistfully, like the refrain of a half-remembered hymn.
Sage blinked. 'So?"
"Oh, I just find it fascinating - the idea that people pin the unpredictable nature of life onto something so easily proved wrong. It would make just as much sense to blame the fae folk.'
'Exactly,' said Max, skimming the words but gathering the general point Richard was making. He drained his can. 'In other words, it's all a load of bollocks.'
'See, this is why I like astrology,' Sage said to the psychic. 'It annoys men.'
I think I left my hat at the library....
The author suspects there is another story behind the carrier pigeon awarded a medal...
That's a lot of books you got there..
(Katie is researching a graphic novel on WW1)
Over the years the Guerrillas have grown, become many, and their projects have travelled all over the world...
In its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box...
(Nodding so much am giving myself neckache.)
Where is this train of thought taking me?
I don't know, but nevertheless the train continues its march that journey that began in the green gardens of Silihdar and passed through the literary salons of Constantinople, Cairo's orphanages, Paris's universities, the brilliant minds of Yerevan, and Stalin's concentration camps, all the time heading towards the steppes of eternity...
Photo of Yerevan via Unsplash
Shushanik Kurghinian [published in 1947 but not until] half a century after her death that serious literary critique and publication around her work began to form.
....it was a careful, intentional, and organized disavowal. First, in the form of tsarist censorship because of her socialist and revolutionary material, then by Soviet Armenian intellectuals because she was a rebel; and finally, by literary criticism...
One girl, Aurelia, whose father owned the best gelateria in the nearby city of Pordenone, used to buy all the latest romances, read them, then pass them on, first to her sister, then to her mother, before, finally, handing them over at the school gates to Dirce, who would pay half the original price. 'It was our little system. A trickle-down as suspenseful and sweet as ice cream melting down a cone.
Detail from Barbara Regina Dietzsch, Dandelion, Butterflies, Snail and Beetle, c. 1750. Fine Art Museums of San Francisco.
... I have printed out the sombre mid-eighteenth-century studies of Barbara Regina Dietzsch and pinned them on a cork-board beside Jean-François Millet's drooping specimens from a century later, Monet's plump orbs, and Van Gogh's snowy heads, bobbing in the overgrown gardens of the Saint-Paul Asylum.
As these and other critics have demonstrated again and again, a sizable number of people polled either know nothing about the matters those polls purport to measure or hold no opinion about them. "The first question a pollster should ask," the sociologist Leo Bogart advised in 1972, is "'Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?"
Ballots were often printed in newspapers: you'd cut one out and bring it with you. With the turn to the secret ballot, beginning in the 1880s, the government began supplying the ballots, but newspapers kept printing them:; they'd use them to conduct their own polls, called "straw polls." Before the election, you'd cut out your ballot and mail it to the newspaper, which would make a prediction.
#learning
"Things aren't good here, Gul. Even our books could get us thrown in jail now."
"Our books?" I said, confused.
"In Kashgar, they've been burning books, thousands of them. Even Turghun Almas's histories! Dad's put his history books behind some Chinese dictionaries, but if they start looking...
so-soInteresting look at the author's family history, heavily affected by mental illness.
For me, it was overlong, but judging from the comments on here this is a minority opinion!
"But the craziness was starting to get really bad.... She kept thinking people were chasing us..."
...the rulers would certainly have no reason to place blame upon me.
Long ago, something happened and she lost her mind...
pickA look back at the artist's work visiting activists across the former Soviet Union. A reckoning with the pressures and cost of protest against a dictator (Putin). Ultimately, and sadly, an account of disillusionment.
Lomasko escapes a Russian crackdown against protest, and is all but banned from working in "the West" by states that previously took corrupt Russian money.
I spent a few hours at the demonstration. I didn't try to get close to the monument to Aleksandr Pushkin. where people were being violently arrested. Standing in the crowd, watching the beautiful youth who wished for the best, it felt like a swarm of colorful birds had landed on the snow and that there was nothing at all in common between them and the approaching black phalanx of riot police.
In Belarus.
"...Minsk can seem like a sleepy place...
On a street full of half-empty establishments, there's a tiny coffee shop with an incredibly long line out the door. A few days ago, O'Petit had sheltered protesters fleeing the police. One of the officers broke the café's glass door as revenge.
Now people stand in line for up to an hour and a half at a time, just to have a cup of coffee here and leave a generous tip."
The artist documents visits across the former Soviet Union, here in Yerevan.
Previously based in Moscow she is now in exile.
What the @#£% happened at the end? Is there another one? Does Jane meet him again?
Is this how we are going to spend the rest of our lives? Kudirat hiccupped.
'How else are we to live? We are expected to spend our entire lives dodging penises and drudgery. It's why we were born, what we were born to do. We are girls, we shall not be sexed!' That thought sobered them up faster than a bucket of cold water.
Through the windshield of the car they could see the forests of bare trees dusted lightly with snow, and towering above them, the gloriously white peak of Mt. Fuji. Miraculously, the peak was not hidden by clouds and the entire mountain was visible. As the car approached Lake Yamanaka, they looked directly at the eastern slope of Mt. Fuji; viewed from here.... the whole mountain seemed dignified and resolute
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