HAHAHA - yes!

There are ALWAYS an impossible number of books you "should have read" by now and the sooner one is off that "should have read" treadmill the more enjoyable your current book is.

Quite apart from anything else "should have read" is the enemy of re-reading, so fuck that.

There are always an impossible number of books you should have read by now and the sooner one is off the "should have read" treadmill the more enjoyable your current book is.

Quite apart from anything else "should have read" is the enemy of re-reading, so fuck that.

A photo of a golden roan working cocker-spaniel reclining at his leisure on the cushions on a brown leather sofa.

Oh for goodness' sake...

Same. I've tried speed reading but I am both too ingrained in the habit of word by word and too enamoured of the "sounds" and rhythms they make as they go.

Stories were aloud for far longer than they were printed and in my head they still are. If speed is the price to pay for that, then so be it.

Unless it's a book I've read for work I am ALWAYS spectacularly far behind. (Slow reader also.)

A photo of a copy of the 2007 Bloomsbury 21s editions of Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

"...and the conviction came over her once again that this room was no room at all, that the walls had no real solidity but instead the room were only a sort of crossroads where strange winds blew upon Lady Pole from faraway places."

Yes!

Have you read Red Plenty? His fiction/faction about the USSR as a scientific and economic powerhouse in the 1950s? GREAT book.

A photo of the 2005 Canongate edition of the Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. The cover art is by Nina Chakrabarti.

"Making people roll heavy stones up steep hills is another of their favourite jests. I sometimes have a yen to go down there: it might help me to remember what it was like to have real hunger, what it was like to have real fatigue."

"Perhaps he would come into view of his reflection in the mirror that hung on the wall, revealing some unnecessary detail of the pyjamas he had put on the night before little knowing that he would have to walk into a plot turn this morning, and which he was still wearing. Because he was a writer."

"It was with a heart heavier than even his slow, heavy feet that he dragged himself across the thick carpet of foreboding to the door, beyond which lay the plot development that would break that heavy heart. But he knew that those steps needed to be taken, the journey detailed; the transition made.

A photo of three small crocheted pot plants hanging off the dashboard air-vent of a red car.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: crocheted pot-plants hanging on the dashboard air vents of cars..."

Life is a cabaret.

"I have read the birdsong and the fall of the leaves. I have read the factories and the shadow of the walking man."

"It's too late! I've got rabies!"

The rabies episode...

A photo of a copy of the 2022 Faber edition of The Translations of Seamus Heaney. The cover art is by John Wells.

"to make something of the given, to move it through a certain imaginative and linguistic distance"

Nearly 700 pages of Seamus Heaney's translations. Couldn't resist.

We took the funicular to the top of Lycabettus and then walked down when we were in Athens in October. What a wonderful city - we had the best time.

I spy the Acropolis on the distant rise to the right of the central, large dark hill.

A photo of a tree branch covered in white blossom. A park beyond.

Good morning.

Linda & Richard Thompson sat at a table looking very sad.

Monday.

A photo of a copy of the 2016 Gollancz edition of The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. The cover illustration is by Christopher Gibbs.

"Lord, he was peculiar. Tall and skinny and wide-eyed like a bird; but he could move around, even with a broken leg, like a cat. He took pills all the time and he never shaved. He didn't seem to sleep either..."

(See also The Village on the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva.)

This evening I came upon a lunar-like landscape, populated with bone-white mussel high-rises…

Dublin Airport Robot Tray Cat brings the food, waits behind the seated customer piping a repeated "Hello! here I am!" but the customer has their ear pods in and cannot hear Robot Tray Cat. Robot Tray cat does not understand.

And so it was that the great robot uprising began...

It was kind to us.

Sat in Dublin airport waiting for the robot tray cat to deliver our food.

An outlet in a stone wall by a river. Bars like ragged teeth across the opening. Weed on the wall. The outlet is reflected in the river water.

Portal number 997.

Frankenstein (1910). Kind of wild to consider that its release is closer in time to the publication of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel than to the present day