Hello again, fellow Bookworms!
Yes, another month gone by and thus time for another review blog for books read, bookmarks made, and all sorts of other mad stuff that has gone on during February. There’s also some books bought, and some news of things that Mum found today while continuing her sort-out of The Stuff In the Garage! One of those things may well be familiar to any of you who have been following this blog since at least around 2017 or 2018…
At the end of January, 5 books had been read and one bookmark made, and it is actually the same story for this month, which I will come on to shortly. It does mean I have now read 10 books already this year, and finished two bookmarks. I have some “ongoing concerns” of the bookmark variety which I will feature later, but, anyway, let’s get on with the show and look at what happened and what got read in February…
February started with Chinese New Year as we let in the Year of the Tiger, and there will be a tiger amongst my reading matter so look out for that!
However, the first finish for February was Wintering, by Katherine May, which had been nearing completion by the end of January. I would definitely recommend it.
Next up were a couple of short books, so these didn’t go on the Ongoing Concerns list at all. First of them was The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, by Jon Scieszka, and then, because it is the Year of the Tiger, I read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr. Children’s books, if they’re only short, are read in one sitting, there is no need to class them as an OC.
I was also engaging in the usual silliness which is customary on this blog, and had some fun with a bit of wordplay, hence the poem on the blog and the Winter of our Discount Tents bookmark, which you can see above!
Two more finished books to mention, and both of those are music autobiographies. True, by Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet, was the first of those books, and I finished Face It, by Debbie Harry, at the weekend, so we have reached five books for the month again, and hit our first Goodreads Challenge target for this year. 10 books read, so it’s time to increase the target, and it has now been upped to 15 books.
We have also had the Winter Olympics in Beijing during this month, and Team GB may have had to wait til almost the very end of the Games to get on the podium, but we did end up with two medals, both for curling. Our women won gold, our men won silver, so it is 8 Winter Games on the trot winning at least one medal, and 4 Winter Games on the trot winning a gold.
The weather at present is that well-known technical term, in other words shite, lol! Having said that, at least it’s not another storm. We have had enough of those! Three on the trot, Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin, and they were all about as welcome as a fart in a wetsuit, as Sir Billy Connolly might put it!
The storms caused various items to change gardens, trampolines to roll down the streets, and also led to wheelie bins doing their best impressions of Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen! Cue the bass riff of “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac – the end of that song but the start of the F1 Grand Prix theme!
Anyway, I said I was going to look at the bookmarks in progress as we have a few at various stages of being stitched…
Right, OK… on the left is one I only started on Thursday evening, and it’s a Ukrainian pattern – there will be more blue and yellow added shortly to that. Next to it is a bookmark that isn’t too far from being finished. Think it needs something either side of the crown at the top, and maybe even another row at the bottom, and then a border and tassel, but it is not too far from being stitched. The other three are a bit of a way off yet.
The brown one is going to be shades of brown, three or four shades, the green one with the year will eventually be a garden sampler bookmark, and the one at the end is the Durene Jones flowers and bees one, but is still just a partially-stitched vase at the moment, lol!
I did say, at the top of the blog, that Mum has been in the garage, and is in the process of having a significant sort-out, so let’s get on to that. Eventually, she is aiming to make the Book Chest more accessible, and then yours truly will go in there and have a Book Reshuffle, lol!
What I aim to do is have a clear out, with books being bagged up for the church summer fair, and then some books from inside the house, particularly those on the landing, can go in the Book Chest to replace those going to the church and to charity shops.
I did say that one of the things Mum found might be familiar to those of you who have been following my blog since around 2017 or 2018, and this is the item… the Ongoing Concerns board! I’ve given it a good scrub to get it as clean as I could, and am going to start using it again for the OCs. I got it from The Range on West One near Eccles, although the magnets are my own. There are some emoji magnets as well, but they are around the sides so you can’t see those at the moment.
She also found some souvenirs from 50 years ago… not sure if I have mentioned it on here before, although I probably have given my love of the Olympic Games, but Mum and Dad went to the Olympics the year before I was born! In fact, Mum was expecting me at the time. Dad was working in Switzerland (the first of the two occasions he worked over there) so they went next door into Germany – a friend of Dad’s got them tickets and put them up in Munich and they went to the Olympic Stadium to see heats of the athletics.
Programme from the athletics heats of the Munich Olympics, 2nd September 1972. Thankfully, they were at the Games before the terrorist atrocities on 5th September.
Programme and Mum & Dad’s tickets for the athletics. 2nd September 1972. I would still love to go to the Olympics. I have been in and near some stadia, though. Been outside the stadium in Montreal from the 1976 Summer Games, and past the side of the stadium in Rome from the 1960 Summer Games, and I have been inside four others, a couple of them while watching United in pre-season friendlies and the others just as a tourist.
I’ve seen the Reds play at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was the venue for both the 1932 and 1984 Summer Games, and then a couple of years after seeing a match in that venue, I saw the Reds in the original Olympic Stadium in Tokyo which hosted the 1964 Summer Games – I think it was altered significantly for the more recent Games which eventually took place last summer, a year late.
With the other two stadia, there wasn’t an event on, I was just being a tourist, lol! Actually, when I went to the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, which had hosted the 1992 Summer Games, I was actually over in Spain with the City of Salford Youth Concert Band in 1997, staying in Tossa de Mar, but we had a day trip to Barcelona and we were having our lunch in the Montjuic Olympic Park. You could actually just wander into the stadium at that time, so some of us did!
My most recent brush with Olympic history, though, was ten years ago in February 2012, when Mum and I had a short break in Berlin and went to see the Olympic Stadium there, pictured above, which had hosted the 1936 Summer Games, where Jesse Owens famously won 4 golds in the athletics, which pissed Hitler off big time, ha ha! Served Adolf right for being a fascist knobhead!
There are still plenty of other stadia to be visited, and although I didn’t go in the stadium, I have been in the gymnastics and trampolining venue from the Sydney Olympics of 2000 as the 1998 World Trampoline Championships were held there as a warm-up event for the venue and my sister was competing for Great Britain and it was thus our perfect excuse to go to Australia!
I still have plenty more Olympic venues to visit, and wouldn’t mind seeing a winter venue, particularly Sarajevo as that’s the Games that actually got me into the Olympics thanks to Torvill & Dean winning gold there in 1984.
Time to get back to some recent purchases and also the Ongoing Concerns shortly, though. This is supposed to be the February Review, after all, but here I am waffling on about the Olympics, lol!
The main Ongoing Concern is now Life’s What You Make It, by Phillip Schofield, which I am really enjoying. Definitely a good read for those of us who grew up in the 80s! I have read 61% of it thus far, and there is one part when he said that when it came to being interviewed, his favourite interviewers were from Smash Hits, which he described as “always a bit random and bonkers” which is how I like to see this blog, really, lol!
I was a Smash Hits reader in the late 80s, early 90s, during my teens, and the fact that it was random and bonkers was precisely what made it so special and why it appealed to me so much! There was also the fact that Neil Tennant had been the assistant editor before he became the singing half of the Pet Shop Boys, of course, so they were always very pro-PSB and thus got my approval for that reason.
So, if you have ever wondered why this book blog is so random, and why I like to bring a sense of eccentricity to the whole proceedings, then the fact that I was a teenage Smash Hits reader in the late 80s should tell you all you need to know, ha ha! They had their quirky little sayings, such as “a snip”, “down the dumper” and “pop tome” and I have mine, such as “shite is a technical term” and concepts such as Handbag Books, the Literary Slap List and the legendary Ongoing Concerns!
Anyway, talking of the Ongoing Concerns, as well as the Phillip Schofield book, the other one I have been focusing on has been I Named My Dog Pushkin, by Margarita Gokun Silver. I guess that, as she got the hell out of the USSR (back in the days when it was still the Soviet Union) to become American, and she doesn’t exactly have a particularly positive opinion of Vlad P, it should be ethically OK to continue. Needless to say it would be a different matter for any writer who was a member of Vlad’s fan club, so to speak…
The other OCs are still only in the 10% to 24% read range and not advanced enough for me to think, right now, that they’ll be finished soon. Phillip Schofield and Margarita Gokun Silver are a different matter. Phil’s book is 53% read, Margarita’s is 39% read, so there’s a decent chance of getting those read in March. We shall see what else crops up, but there are also some new purchases from the Trafford Centre on Thursday which I want to list before I bring this blog to its conclusion.
Devotion is the third novel by Hannah Kent, an author I have actually met, and whose first two books I really enjoyed, so that purchase was pretty inevitable. Two other novels purchased are The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah, and The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, by Marianne Cronin. That one, in particular, looked interesting.
There are also two non-fiction books, those being Complications, by Atul Gawande, and The Secret Lives of Planets, by Paul Murdin. There’s nearly always non-fiction, as I read more factual books than fiction these days.
Well, for a short month, that was quite a long monthly review, wasn’t it?! I think we have covered the main things, though, so we shall see what March has to offer… it will start with Pancake Day tomorrow, that one day of the year when you can call someone a “complete tosser” and mean it as a compliment, lol! Until then, take care and Happy Reading!
Joanne x x x
Books mentioned in this blog entry…
- Wintering – Katherine May
- The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales – Jon Scieszka
- The Tiger Who Came to Tea – Judith Kerr
- True – Martin Kemp
- Face It – Debbie Harry
- Life’s What You Make It – Phillip Schofield
- I Named My Dog Pushkin – Margarita Gokun Silver
- Devotion – Hannah Kent
- The Four Winds – Kristin Hannah
- The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot – Marianne Cronin
- Complications – Atul Gawande
- The Secret Lives of Planets – Paul Murdin
Joanne's Bookshelf 