
Good evening, fellow Bookworms!
Welcome to the first monthly review blog of 2023 now that January is almost over, lol! Got Sky Sports News on for transfer deadline day as Marcel Sabitzer, an Austrian central midfielder, is set to join United on loan from Bayern Munich for the rest of this season due to Christian Eriksen getting injured during our recent FA Cup 4th round win over Reading.
Will keep you posted on the footy, but got a month’s worth of the usual nonsense to get through, so let’s get through it, starting with the start of the year when it was a few days into 2023 before I felt well enough to blog. I came down with the lurgy just before new year and Mum and I had to have our New Year’s Eve meal from La Turka as a takeaway rather than heading down the road to our local restaurant.
I did get a book read while recovering from the lurgy, though, as I had a re-read of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy due to the animated version having been shown on BBC1 over the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Second week of the month, two more books joined my re-read on the finished books list, as I polished off Wall and Piece, by Banksy, and then the sheet music from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. That came about because of my choir audition, as I chose to sing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” – I am now an official member of the choir, and have an absolute shedload of music, lol, which is in two concertina file boxes!

A postbox on a postbox, lol! We’ve already had some good ones as we started 2023, including some new year toppers, Chinese New Year toppers and one for Burns Night with a haggis being piped in as per the tradition in Scotland.
Also had a couple of rants already this year. We are now in 2023, almost a quarter of the way into the current century, and yet some people still need to be told that ALL formats of book count as reading, and, yes, that DOES include audiobooks, and it’s very ableist to say they don’t count as they are a major way in which blind and visually-impaired people can enjoy books.
The other rant was aimed at spammers on Farcebook and their creepy way of replying to people’s comments with their bullshit about how they tried to send a friend request but FB wouldn’t let them. They always target females, so I’m going to have to change my profile pic back to something that’s not a photo of me, that should help reduce the number of requests to me from these pricks, but why do they even do it?
Do they actually get anyone who’s dim enough to fall for that shite? Do they actually get anyone who’s even remotely flattered by some creepy stranger putting a shit ton of flower emojis in their comment? I’ve seen forests less shady than these knobheads! Maybe that toxic ex-friend of mine might be gullible enough to fall for their smarm disguised as “charm”, but I can’t think of anyone else offhand who’d find that crap anything other than creepy and an insult to their intelligence.

Some of my happy mail this month – biscuits stickers and parcel tape. Also got wash tapes with the biscuits (cookies) on. They’re from Nikki’s Supply Store, but I have also had mail from the regulars – Oops a Daisy and Under the Rowan Trees, plus some from Gretel Creates and some stickers from The Dotty Room. I have a theme in mind for one of my journals which will include the biscuits!
The biscuits on the stickers are a Bourbon, a Jammie Dodger, a Custard Cream, a Party Ring (that pink circular one) and three Iced Gems. That’s for any of my followers outside of the UK who might not be familiar with certain popular British biscuits.
Back to the books, though, and there’s a couple more finishes to mention. Northerners, by Brian Groom, was polished off last week, and The Wood Age, by Roland Ennos, was finished in the wee small hours of Monday morning!
There was some crossover in what I was reading, and while coming to the end of The Wood Age, where Ennos was talking about trees taking over, I was reminded of Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn, which I was reading around this time last year. That book, a former BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, was about how nature eventually returns to places abandoned by humans and pretty much takes over that corner of the world. Would definitely recommend.

So, with some books OFF the Ongoing Concerns, there is space for books to go ON the list! Bearing in mind that Days Like These, by Brian Bilston, will become an Ongoing Concern at the weekend when it reaches the 10% read stage on 5th February, it meant that there was space for another book, so one of my recent purchases has joined the list although I think it will be a fairly quick finish.
That book is Mother, Brother, Lover, by Jarvis Cocker, and it is the lyrics from a sizeable selection of his Pulp hits with some background note from Jarvis about the songs, how they came about and some places in Sheffield and local expressions that we would not otherwise be familiar with. You may recall that one of my 60 books read last year was Good Pop Bad Pop, in which Jarvis went exploring the contents of his loft and deciding whether to keep or cob – cob being a Sheffield term for “throw out”.
Mother, Brother, Lover is one of six books I have purchased in January, and you do know about one of the other ones, as I mentioned Dark Tide, by Stephen Puleo, in my blog on Sunday – that’s the book about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. I will get round to mention of the other books in due course, but I will add that one of the other four is by a non-fiction writer I have already mentioned in these blogs a few times as I have read a few of her other books.

So, The Wood Age is a finished book, so comes off the OC list. Mother, Brother, Lover is 52% read already so well on the way to being an early finish in February. Dead Wake is 51% read, followed closely by The Man Who Tasted Words and Proust and the Squid, both 50% read. Buzzin’ by Bez is now at 37% read as I was reading some of that this evening, and Charles: Heart of a King is still 25% read. Days Like These will become an OC on Sunday.
That’s it for this month, then. Marcel Sabitzer is at the Carrington training ground and has had his medical. Just waiting for official confirmation that it has been passed and that he can be announced as a Manchester United player, but there will be more book news and waffle in February, which will hopefully contain news about the Read for 15 competition in Alberta, Canada.
As my friend Liz said, it’s a province-wide initiative, so they need to count up all participants from all libraries in that province, thus it takes a few days to add all that up. What we can tell you, though, is that Bashaw Public Library has over 60 children signed up to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library since they signed up to the initiative in late November.
I will be back again soon enough with the usual nonsense, and hopefully some more finished books, so until then, take care and Happy Reading!
Joanne x x x
Books mentioned in this blog entry…
- The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – Charlie Mackesy
- Wall and Piece – Banksy
- Jesus Christ Superstar – Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice
- Northerners – Brian Groom
- The Wood Age – Roland Ennos
- Islands of Abandonment – Cal Flyn
- Days Like These – Brian Bilston
- Mother, Brother, Lover – Jarvis Cocker
- Good Pop Bad Pop – Jarvis Cocker
- Dark Tide – Stephen Puleo
- Dead Wake – Erik Larson
- The Man Who Tasted Words – Prof. Guy Leschziner
- Proust and the Squid – Maryanne Wolf
- Buzzin’ – Bez
- Charles: Heart of a King – Catherine Mayer