Hello again, fellow Bookworms!
For those of you on my side of the Atlantic, Happy Bank Holiday Monday! I am back with another blog, the first one for May, and some book news. Progress on some of the Ongoing Concerns, someone I met by chance on Saturday, and some new reading matter, plus the usual sort of waffle and random nonsense that you have come to expect from this blog over the years, ha ha! I mean, this blog will be 14 years old in August and there has been plenty of randomness since the summer of 2010!
I was watching “Pointless” as I do… one of the few TV programmes I actually bother with, and came to think this blog is a bit like Pointless. OK, it’s not a quiz show and there are no prizes on offer, but the whole aim of that quiz is to find the most obscure correct answer. It has to be a correct answer, but one which the fewest people, or preferably no people, had thought of when the surveys were done.
While some of the books I have mentioned since 2010 have been popular ones, at least fairly well-known books, I like to think that I have also introduced my blog’s followers to some reading matter they might not otherwise have heard of. These books are like the pointless and low-scoring answers on the quiz, gems like Economics for Babies, by Jonathan Litton, or even Dark Tide, by Stephen Puleo, which is about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.
Are there any knights from Monty Python here?!
Anyway, on Friday, when watching “Pointless”, the pair who reached the final ALMOST chose the “Belgian Jazz and Pop” category that has been doing the rounds for ages! One of the guys actually thought they should go for it. Unfortunately, his friend put him off! So, now we have to wait for it to come round again in a few shows’ time and see if anyone does choose it! So close, though!
So curious to find out what the questions would be for that one!
Saturday was Star Wars Day, May the Fourth, and the Force was strong with Chief Bookworm, particularly at the bingo but I will come on to that in a bit. I went into town to take the blister packs in to Superdrug to be recycled, we’d amassed quite a lot of them so they needed taking in. I also went to Waterstone’s as I had a National Book Tokens gift card for my birthday last month and so it was time to see if there was any interesting reading matter to spend it on.
Turns out that I also had a tenner on my Waterstone’s card, so with that and the gift card I was able to get £25 off the total cost of my book purchases! Yay! I also had a chance meeting with Stephanie from the now-defunct book club that we used to go to at that Deansgate branch of Waterstone’s! Stephanie is the lady who would always quote Dorothy Parker if she didn’t like the book we’d been reading. “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force!”
So, what reading matter did I purchase at Waterstone’s? Five books in total and I will go through them now. First up, Food of the Cods, by Daniel Gray, a book about how fish & chips made Britain. Obviously, I love a chippy tea, and a good pun, so this book was an obvious choice!
Next up, Car Park Life, by Gareth E. Rees, so the same bloke responsible for one of my current Ongoing Concerns, Unofficial Britain. I will do the OC updates in a bit, but this book is by the same writer, so I have mentioned both books together. Probably a book that I will go onto once I have finished Unofficial Britain as it probably ties in nicely.
The Cabin in the Mountains, is by Robert Ferguson, and is about a couple who buy a cabin in the mountains in Norway. When I saw this book in Waterstone’s on Saturday, its cover reminded me of Lakeland, by Hunter Davies, which was one of last year’s reads, same style of design albeit with a red background rather than blue.
Signs of Life, by Stephen Fabes, is about his journey around the world and how he fetched up using his medical skills and knowledge along the way, as he’s a doctor. Wavewalker, by Suzanne Heywood, is her own memoir of being out on a boat with her parents and brother and how she missed school and friends and fought to return to education. It has been a Radio 4 Book of the Week.
Ignore the cans and glass behind the boxes, but these were my winnings at St Thomas’s Church on Saturday evening when Mum and I enjoyed an evening of bingo with a meal of sausages, mash and peas! Mum also had a win on the bingo and chose some Tunnock’s Teacakes. The Force was definitely strong on Star Wars Day, lol!
However, I should now get on with the Ongoing Concerns as there has been significant progress made on a few of them in the week just gone. Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, is now 51% read, so we have just passed the halfway line with that one!
About Britain, by Tim Cole, was already at the 25% read stage, but three books have joined my current ebook at the quarter-read point during the course of last week. Unofficial Britain, by Gareth E. Rees, was the first to do so, and while I got to that point, I read about the Grimsby Ghostbusters, lol! Don’t want to spoil it for you, though, as you may wish to read this book for yourselves!
T.V. by Peter Kay also reached the quarter-read mark and he is starting to get noticed and some short comedy sketches based on his observations about motorway service stations are getting filmed.
Finally on the 25% read front, we have Abroad in Japan, by Chris Broad, about being an English language assistant in Japanese schools for ten years. This book is now out in paperback and was actually on one of the promotional tables in the travel and travel writing section at Waterstone’s. Certainly very good and very interesting so far.
This just leaves us with two books still at 10% read, those being Dark, Salt, Clear, by Lamorna Ash, and The Lost Rainforests of Britain, by Guy Shrubsole, so I will be looking to get them progressed as well as moving some of the others on further and getting at least one finished, that being Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
The above pictures are from my choir journal. I hadn’t set up May when I last blogged, but with having had no rehearsal on Thursday night, it gave me a chance to sort that out. The song is “A Million Dreams” from The Greatest Showman, as we have been working on that a lot lately. Went a bit mad with the stars, lol!
Still need more tenors, by the way, also some more sopranos and altos wouldn’t go amiss. We are OK for basses, though, at the moment.
This is about all for now, I think, except to say that it’s the final of the Eurovision Song Contest this coming Saturday, 11th May. It’s being held in Sweden this year, in the city of Malmö, and the bookies’ favourites to win are Croatia, apparently. Somehow, I doubt we’ll be hearing “Royaume-Uni douze points” very much. We need Sam Ryder to come back and have another go as he came second when Ukraine won in 2022, our best showing in years.
Until the next blog, take care and Happy Reading!
Joanne x x x
Books mentioned in this blog entry…
- Economics for Babies – Jonathan Litton
- Dark Tide – Stephen Puleo
- Food of the Cods – Daniel Gray
- Car Park Life – Gareth E. Rees
- Unofficial Britain – Gareth E. Rees
- The Cabin in the Mountains – Robert Ferguson
- Lakeland – Hunter Davies
- Signs of Life – Stephen Fabes
- Wavewalker – Suzanne Heywood
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi
- About Britain – Tim Cole
- T.V. – Peter Kay
- Abroad in Japan – Chris Broad
- Dark, Salt, Clear – Lamorna Ash
- The Lost Rainforests of Britain – Guy Shrubsole
Joanne's Bookshelf 