August Review: Book Benches, Mudlarks and the Blog Anniversary…

Good evening, fellow Bookworms!

I know… there’s a week left to go, we’re only on 24th August. However, Chief Bookworm is about to enter a busy and unavailable phase, so we’re doing the monthly review a week early. This may also mean that one or two more books might actually be finished off before August is over and done with, but I can update in early September for those.

Thus far, with a week remaining, I have read three books this month, which takes the total for 2022 so far up to 40 books! Yay! Two of the books were from the Little People Big Dreams series by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara, and were the books about Ayrton Senna and Elton John. I saw them in Selfridges one evening when I was at the Trafford Centre and just had a read!

The other finished book this month is Mudlarking, by Lara Maiklem, so that’s the one that’s taken me to the 40 book milestone. A fascinating book about the historical finds that can be found on the foreshore of the Thames. I expect that similar stuff can be found in other rivers, though. There may well be ancient stuff found by the Irwell, for instance, quite possibly Roman artifacts given that Manchester was a Roman settlement at one point.

I have just Googled, and it seems there is a Manchester Mudlarks group and they are active on social media, so I may need to check that out and see what treasures have been found round our way from local rivers and even the canals, as we have a few of those round here! We have the River Irwell, the Manchester Ship Canal, the Bridgewater Canal… So there’s scope for mudlarks to have found some interesting old stuff from our waterways!

While we are mentioning mudlarks, I noticed the other day that one of my current Ongoing Concerns is published by Mudlark Books! I will come on to the OCs shortly and tell you which book it was, but I just thought I would mention it as it was a bit of a coincidence given the subject matter of one of my recent finishes!

Anyway, book benches… The Salford Literacy Trail is still on until 9th September, and earlier this month I did go for a mooch to check out some of the benches. There was a similar trail in Manchester in 2017, and that actually included part of Salford, but now Salford gets a trail of its own. My nephew’s primary school have designed one of the benches, although it was older children, in either year 5 or year 6, I think. Reuben was only in reception class, he will be in year 1 in the coming school year. Charlotte will be in year 8, the second year of high school.

In terms of the blog, August saw a tribute to a few people we have sadly lost recently, including Dame Olivia Newton-John and Raymond Briggs, so we had a Golden Year from 1978. I know we had done that year before, but when I checked, that was June 2020, so I figured that it was long enough ago to do that one again – it was a particularly significant year for both singer and author/illustrator.

We also had the blog’s 12th anniversary on 14th August, with a look back over a dozen years of book blogging – plenty of books that I have mentioned. Many that I enjoyed, the occasional one where I wanted to slap the writer, lol, and all the other stuff – the Handbag Books, the Duplicate Books Saga, and the legal-themed song titles I used for my blog titles in 2017 because I was on jury service at the time, ha ha!

I’ve also used song titles and lyrics for blog titles on other occasions as well, of course, but that particular time, in April and May 2017, was notable for song titles as blog titles! We had “All Rise” by Blue, “Love In the First Degree” by Bananarama, and “Good Morning Judge” by 10cc!

The court case for which I was on a jury ended, though, so I didn’t have to think of any more legal titles as it was back to looking for work, which was ultimately successful given that my current job started in early September of that year – it will soon be my 5th work anniversary! If I had had to think of any more titles, I guess we could have had “I Fought the Law” or “I Shot the Sheriff” perhaps!

I post chemistry puns periodically. When I’m in my element.

Anyway, we need to do the Ongoing Concerns, don’t we? The End of the Road, by Jack Cooke, is now in the lead as that one is 52% read. That’s the one published by Mudlark Books, by the way.

A very interesting read so far, and it mentions the Mary Rose, the Tudor warship from the time of Henry VIII – I remember watching live coverage of the ship being raised when I was a kid, and a significant anniversary will be coming up in the autumn for that! 11th October will be the day, but can you remember which year it was raised? Answer at the end of the blog!

After the Cooke book, we have Thrown, by Sara Cox, at 42% read. Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach, is 34% read and just behind that is Drama Queen, by Sara Gibbs, and I owe that book an apology as it is 33% read, not 30% – it had reached the 1/3 read stage back in early June before I went to Gran Canaria, but for some odd reason, after I came back, I forgot this and kept putting it at 30% on the OC lists, so it HAS reached a third of the way through and it was never intentional to deny this. I genuinely forgot I’d actually got to that particular milestone.

Northerners, by Brian Groom, is 27% read, Leap In, by Alexandra Heminsley, is currently 19% read, and Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf, is 10% read. That brings you up to date with the Ongoing Concerns as things stand right now. Anything can happen in the reading world, so I may have some more August finishes to report in early September.

You may recall me mentioning calligraphy at Oats and Honey on Monton Road in a blog early this month. I went to the event, in case you were wondering! It was a one-off, although there may be another in the run-up to Christmas. I had to go back the next day, though, as I had left my Timberland cap there! Oops!

That next day, the Thursday, I was also out in the evening, but at the church hall of Monton Unitarian Church to try a choir, the Mancunian Singers. That went well, and will go again, but with them being on holiday at the mo, the next time I can go is early September.

The journaling is still going on, both the book journal and the non-book journal, although things do cross over! It’s a way to keep track of stuff, but be creative at the same time! Different themes for different months to brighten things up while I keep a written record of stuff I’ve read, the Ongoing Concerns, and anything else in my life – United fixtures, choirs, concerts, my niece’s performances, etc…

These should give you an idea what I mean about monthly themes – I took the photos before I started writing events in for September, but I have gone with the camera and photos theme with stencils and washi tape. A lot of the stationery is from Oops a Daisy, although I also use other items as well. A fair bit from Under the Rowan Trees and also some things from Kenji and elsewhere.

Probably could do with one or two more songs on a film or photo theme for Clicky’s Charts, though. There is space on there for at least another song title. The cactus is from a separate themed bundle, but as he’s smiling, I thought we would have him posing for Clicky’s photos!

As I mentioned Under the Rowan Trees, a recent item of Happy Mail (my stationery orders get that title, lol) was a greatest hits bundle, so it was a big box of stationery compiled from some of their past monthly boxes, and mine included the journaling stickers from the Whatever the Weather box, which is great as I already have the washi, plus some weather-themed washi from Oops a Daisy, and so weather may well crop up as a theme in the future.

Possibly March – that month is quite notorious for wild and unpredictable weather, so it would fit in. Also, if it’s in my book journal, I can look back at the weather and shipping forecast books I’ve read in recent years and do a spread about those!

The Greatest Hits Bundle from Under the Rowan Trees. Somewhere in all that stationery is a rather nice A5 dot grid notebook, which I may well use as a spread practice and stencil testing book when I run out of room in my current practice bujo! It doesn’t lie flat, and I don’t really think it is big enough to be an actual bullet journal, but it will make a great book for testing themes, spreads, layouts, new stencils, washi and pens…

I think that’s probably about all for now other than to give you the answer from earlier in this blog. I was wiffling on about the raising of the Mary Rose and said that 11th October would be a significant anniversary this year, but invited you to see if you could remember which year it was raised. Well, it will be the 40th anniversary this autumn as it was raised in 1982. Did you guess correctly?

I remember watching that live on telly! I’ve got a feeling that the BBC children’s show “Blue Peter” were covering it. It would be appropriate as the show’s logo was a ship and the theme tune was quite nautical, like a hornpipe. Is Blue Peter still on telly? Just looked it up – yes, it’s still going, and first started way back in 1958! 64 years this October! The longest-running children’s TV programme in the world! Wow!

I still remember the Blue Peter bring and buy sales when I was a kid! In fact, I am pretty sure there was at least one of those held in the hall at my primary school back in the day! I’m sure I bought some Fuzzy Felt sets from one of those events, lol!

I should definitely bring this to a close or I will just end up on a long trip down memory lane, blathering on about more stuff from when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s and we all know it doesn’t take much to set me off on topics like that, lol! Another helping of book news and assorted waffle will be with you early next month, but until then, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Ayrton Senna – Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara
• Elton John – Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara
• Mudlarking – Lara Maiklem
• The End of the Road – Jack Cooke
• Thrown – Sara Cox
• Packing for Mars – Mary Roach
• Drama Queen – Sara Gibbs
• Northerners – Brian Groom
• Leap In – Alexandra Heminsley
• Proust and the Squid – Maryanne Wolf

Twelve Years a Blog: The Anniversary Special!

Hello again, fellow Bookworms!

We have to have some cake, it’s the blog’s anniversary today, hence the pile of books cake above! Twelve years ago today, I published my first book blog entry, wiffling on about whether I should get an e-reader device. Here we now are at 14th August 2022 and I have had a Sony E-Reader and three Kindles since then, lol!

Not only are they very handy for taking on my jollies, they’re also handy for reading in the car on the way home from a match, and for reading when you’re giving blood – if one arm is outstretched as the vampires collect a pint of my O positive, it is much easier to read a Kindle one-handed and tap to turn pages than it is to faff about with a physical book!

I still generally prefer physical books and there’s nothing better than a good browse in a book shop, but there are some times when the e-reader is the more logical and practical option.

As I go through the last twelve years, we will recall how I actually won the first of the Kindles thanks to a chance discovery of a book in a deli in Chorlton!

2010-11 The Early Years. First started blogging in August 2010, not long after I had become an auntie to my gorgeous little niece, Charlotte. The first book I actually mentioned on my blog was Howards End is On the Landing, by Susan Hill, and I think I have remarked at times that this book has been on our landing, lol!

Not at the moment, though, as we’ve had the house decorated and the book cases have not been returned to the landing yet. One of them needs painting to fit the colour scheme anyway.

I was working in Chorlton at the time my blog started and was there until the summer of 2012, so I had easy access to the Chorlton Bookshop and the Oxfam Bookshop on Wilbraham Road, plus a number of other charity shops – it was pretty good for bookworms even if it was a bit of a trek from where I live – used to take me around 50 minutes to an hour on the bus to get to work or back home again.

One lunchtime in 2011, I was at the Barbakan Deli and I found this free book lying around, How to Leave Twitter, by Grace Dent. It was actually this book which led to me getting the first of my Kindles eventually – needed a few emails to sort out, but around November 2011, I had the device in my hands! I did leave Twitter, but not until around 2015-16 when I felt it was becoming a bit toxic on there. Back in 2011, it was still fun.

2012 World Book Night. In the early months, I was considering a Charles Dickens novel as it was a special anniversary, but couldn’t make up my mind which to read, so it didn’t happen. I have read two of his books, though, those being A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. The big book-related event for me in 2012 was World Book Night as I applied and was accepted to be a Book Giver! I therefore spent the evening of my 39th birthday at the Trafford Centre, giving out copies of The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.

2012 was a difficult year personally, though, due to losing my maternal grandad in the April in the run-up to my birthday, and then my redundancy from the civil service in the June. My last blogs in 2012 were in the August and then I think I got distracted by the Olympics and United signing a certain Dutch centre-forward from Arsenal… Then there is a bit of a gap…

2013-14 The Missing Years. I was blogging, but mostly on my football blog, In Off My Chest, so the book blog got a bit neglected at the time. I did still find the time for some reading, though as I hit my Big 40 in 2013 and Robin van Persie helped United win their 20th league title.

I was still very much in the Waterstone’s Deansgate book club at that time, and it was in 2013 that an author came to one of our meetings! The lady was Hannah Kent, and the book was her début novel, Burial Rites, which was inspired by the time she had spent in Iceland on an exchange programme. We decided to read it for our book club choice, and it was one of those rare occasions when we all loved the book!

The other significant book of 2013 was one I discovered in the autumn when I was on my jollies in Mexico, and it was the excellent Attention All Shipping, by Charlie Connelly, a journey around the Shipping Forecast, which I found on a bookshelf at our hotel, and hadn’t finished it when we were flying home, so I brought it home with me to finish off and keep as a souvenir of an amazing holiday.

2015 The Bookworm’s Return. Yep, in the May and June of 2015, there was a return to book blogging, and this is where I mention my Token Annoying Book, lol! Just to prove to you that I don’t always get on with everything I read, this book that was a book club choice… let’s just say I wanted to slap Elizabeth Smart and tell her to stop acting like a sulky teenager! I really did not get why By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept got good reviews as I thought it was awful and whiny! It was like a pity party in writing!

The only good thing was that it was a short book, but I said at the time that you can save time by listening to “Love’s Unkind” by the late great Donna Summer and that would tell a pretty similar story in a 3 minute pop song! Better than wasting your time with Smart’s book and then thinking “there’s a couple of hours I’ll never get back”!

Mind you, it wasn’t all pity parties and wanting to slap authors in the summer of 2015, as there were some good books that I read and loved around that time, including Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple, and Girl With a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier.

There was then another book slump later in 2015, but I ended that slump by enjoying Why the Dutch are Different, by Ben Coates, closely followed by The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein. It was the book about the Dutch that actually got me back reading again, and I have found that non-fiction helps get me out of slumps. I just have to find a subject matter that interests me enough.

2016-17 Duplicate Books Saga and Trips to Wembley. So, back on track with reading, but this was around the time that I noticed that I seemed to have acquired two copies of certain books, hence the Duplicate Books Saga, and it came to a point in 2017 when I had 19 pairs of books, lol! One set of them eventually went to charity shops after offering them on this blog at one stage, lol!

The other concept around this time was Handbag Books, in other words, books that I would take around with me in my handbag. This was particularly pertinent when deciding which books to take with me on the coach to Wembley and back to see United in the FA Cup Final in 2016 and the League Cup Final in 2017 as well as taking my Kindle on both occasions.

At the time of the FA Cup Final in May 2016, I was partway through A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, which is a right chunky monkey of a book, so I got it for my Kindle as well so I could read it on the way to Wembley – there was no way I was taking that bulky paperback with me! I also need to mention that, when I finished A Little Life, I had an absolutely massive Book Hangover, and couldn’t read any fiction for the rest of 2016! How could anything follow what I had just read? So, it was factual stuff for the rest of that year.

One of the books I read when it was the League Cup Final in 2017 was The Pie at Night, by Stuart Maconie, which he signed for me later that year when I met him at Waterstone’s on Deansgate – he was there to promote Long Road from Jarrow, a signed copy of which I also own, but still need to get around to reading that one.

Adam Kay signing my copy of This is Going to Hurt. 2017 was pretty good on the book front, especially for meeting both Stuart Maconie and Adam Kay.

Other stuff in my life in 2016-17 included a couple of months at Marks & Spencer’s in 2016 and the arrival of my baby nephew, Reuben. In 2017, of course, I was on jury service and some of my blogs at the time reflect that with titles which were song titles on a legal theme… we had “All Rise” by Blue, “Love in the First Degree” by Bananarama, and “Good Morning Judge” by 10CC!

I also went to see the Pet Shop Boys twice during 2017, with a Billy Ocean gig in the middle of those occasions! At the second PSB gig, in the June, we were at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, Chris Lowe’s home town, and part way through the gig, this bloke spotted Sarah and I and led us to the front, so we got an unimpeded view of Neil and Chris for the rest of the concert!

Then, in the September of 2017, I was back in work! I started my current job at that time, so we are approaching my 5th work anniversary early next month!

I also got the magnetic noticeboard in 2017 – the one I use for the Ongoing Concerns. I had a work placement at The Range early in 2017 and I spotted it then, in the stationery section, and had to buy one.

2018-2019 Crafts and Another Book Slump. 2018 had been going reasonably OK. I was in work, made permanent, and went on holiday to Boa Vista on the Cape Verde Islands. Went to see Paul Young at the Preston Guild Hall with Sarah (although the less said about getting home from that gig the better, lol, as they’d shut off a lot of exits to the motorway and it took bloody ages!) Also went to Lapland in the run-in to Christmas and had great fun tobogganing in the snow!

I also discovered Pixelhobby at a craft show, and had a go at loom knitting as well, so it was towards the end of 2018 that I was so engrossed in crafts that I went into a book slump again. At the time, I wasn’t too worried, I thought things would pick up in 2019…

However, 12 days into the new year Dad died. I know he’d looked a bit off colour when we were in Lapland, but didn’t think it was anything that couldn’t be sorted out, so this was sudden and unexpected, and meant that the book slump continued for a while longer as I just didn’t feel like reading. I went back too soon to work and then ended up being off longer due to my bereavement.

So, it was April 2019, after we’d been to Disneyland Paris, when I returned to work and also felt like reading again. As per usual, it was non-fiction that got me out of the slump, this time the book was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson which helped me find my reading mojo.

The photo was taken in Mauritius when Mum and I were on our jollies that summer. Shortly after we returned home, Mum celebrated her 70th birthday and we were off down to London for afternoon tea at Claridge’s, travelling there and back by train, in the first-class section with talking loos, lol!

I had an Optical Emergency at the end of July, when an arm came off my specs late at night and I ended up going for an eye test at Boots in the Trafford Centre and this is when I went over to having two pairs of glasses – reading specs and distance specs. I wear my reading ones most of the time, though. Appropriately enough, I started reading Eye Chart, by William Germano, which is one of the Object Lessons books that I discovered in 2019.

Went to the Lake District in the September of 2019 around the time it would have been Dad’s birthday – I knew I would have found it too hard to be in work as I was going through the firsts without him and still having some bad days. Went home via Brockholes nature reserve and then Blackpool, and it was there that I bought Pier Review, by Jon Bounds and Danny Smith, where they go round England and Wales in a fortnight to visit all the piers around the coast! Blackpool has three piers, so it was apt.

We ended 2019 with Mum and I jetting off to Madeira for the new year and some winter sun.

2020-21 Madeira, Ireland and the Coronavirus Years. So, probably a good job we got some overseas travel in at the start of that year as we wouldn’t be doing that again until this present year! After having our heads messed with in a nice way by enjoying hot weather and Christmas decorations in Madeira, we went over to Ireland in the February to see family and visit where Dad’s ashes have been interred.

It was while we were over in Ireland that our Ellie spotted the now legendary Economics for Babies, by Jonathan Litton in the library in Dun Laoghaire!

When lockdown hit in the March, it knocked my mental health quite badly, not knowing when things would be open again really didn’t help, so I went into a bit of a book slump for a couple of months until mid-May when In the Pleasure Groove, by John Taylor, got me out of the slump, so non-fiction to the rescue yet again, this time the autobiography of Duran Duran’s bass player. May was also the time when announcements were made about reopening, so that helped as I felt there were things to look forward to again.

The rest of 2020 and then 2021 meant short breaks at home, here in the UK. When we were able to, between lockdowns, we did get out and about in our own country, with me rocking matching mask and top combos, lol! 2020 saw Mum and I visit St Anne’s on Sea (the Fylde Coast Book Spree of 2020 yielded 22 books), Chester and then Bowness on Windermere in the autumn.

2021 saw Mum and I able to go to Cheshire Oaks on my birthday and have al fresco McDonald’s! We’d started the year in lockdown, but things started opening up again by the end of March and the shops opened on 12th April and also outdoor dining. Indoor dining reopened in the May.

The above photo is of me reading my belated pressie from Ellie for my 2020 birthday – originally, she’d got me a ticket for a show which had initially been postponed due to the pandemic, but was cancelled altogether, so she ordered me a book box with a teabag and block of chocolate. The book was The Last Wilderness by Neil Ansell.

There was also the short break to Llandudno (the North Wales Book Buying Spree saw us return with 30 books in the boot of the car, lol), and in the August we went down to Watford and London for the Harry Potter trip, then Mum and I had a two centre short break – first up a trip to Bowness on Windermere, and from there up over the border into Scotland to stay in Gretna Green and also visit Wigtown, Scotland’s national Book Town.

That’s me with Shaun Bythell, who runs The Book Shop, and has also written a book or two, including The Diary of a Bookseller. He was lovely and signed my books for me, as well as posing for that photo, lol! Another of the books I bought in Wigtown was Devorgilla Days, by Kathleen Hart, which was one of my reads last year.

I also need to mention some of the weather and bread related books that were amongst my 70 books finished during 2021, including The Wrong Kind of Snow, by Antony Woodward and Robert Penn, Slow Rise, by Robert Penn, and The Epic of Gilgamesh, writer unknown. I also read eight of Charlie Connelly’s books, starting with Bring Me Sunshine about the history of weather forecasting in the UK.

2022 Getting Back to Normal… And so, we get to the current year with 39 books read so far this year which is pretty good when you consider that the usual distractions are back… Been to see Fascinating Aida with Mum in February, the Pet Shop Boys at the Manchester Arena in May with Sarah, and then Mum and I went to Gran Canaria in June – all events that should’ve been in 2020 originally, lol! I finished Seashaken Houses, by Tom Nancollas, while I was on my jollies.

Also been to the Lakes again in late July, an overnight stay in Bowness and a chance to stock up on fudge and Kendal Mint Cake, lol! We also enjoyed a complimentary room upgrade, so we had a hot tub!

So, that’s about it, we have covered a lot of ground – had to as there’s been twelve years to blog about! My niece and nephew love books too, particularly Charlotte who takes after me in a lot of ways. I’m about ready to publish this and go and get on with Mudlarking, by Lara Maiklem, but I hope you’ve enjoyed this anniversary special!

I will be back again before August is over, before things get busy, but until then, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Howards End is On the Landing – Susan Hill
• How to Leave Twitter – Grace Dent
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
• Burial Rites – Hannah Kent
• Attention All Shipping – Charlie Connelly
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette? – Maria Semple
• Girl With a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
• Why the Dutch are Different – Ben Coates
• The Art of Racing in the Rain – Garth Stein
• A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
• The Pie at Night – Stuart Maconie
• Long Road from Jarrow – Stuart Maconie
• This is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
• Eye Chart – William Germano
• Pier Review – Jon Bounds and Danny Smith
• Economics for Babies – Jonathan Litton
• In the Pleasure Groove – John Taylor
• The Last Wilderness – Neil Ansell
• The Diary of a Bookseller – Shaun Bythell
• Devorgilla Days – Kathleen Hart
• The Wrong Kind of Snow – Antony Woodward and Robert Penn
• Slow Rise – Robert Penn
• The Epic of Gilgamesh – Unknown
• Bring Me Sunshine – Charlie Connelly
• Seashaken Houses – Tom Nancollas
• Mudlarking – Lara Maiklem

February Review: Tigers, Discount Tents and the Wheelie Bin Grand Prix!

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

The Bookworm Strikes Back!

Good evening, fellow Bookworms!

Happy Star Wars Day! May the 4th Be With You!

Just out of interest, do any of you, my dear followers, work for the UK radio station known as Classic FM? I am so convinced that someone from that station must be reading my blogs, because, with all the classical music on offer, that has ever been composed, how come certain tunes seem to be getting played quite frequently of late?

I am talking about tunes which tie in with the themes of the books I have been reading so far this year, the main themes being the shipping forecast and bread. And what are the tunes that Classic FM keeps playing on a frequent basis?

• Sailing By, by Ronald Binge
• Panis Angelicus, by Cesar Franck
• Largo from the New World Symphony, by Antonin Dvořak

The first of these usual suspects is the Shipping Forecast music, Panis Angelicus translates as “bread of the angels” and, as most of you know, the Largo from the New World Symphony is famous in the UK for being used in commercials for Hovis bread! So, one tune for shipping and two bread-related pieces of music! And they seem to crop up all the time now!

Even in the early hours of this morning, we had the Largo. I didn’t really sleep properly last night, it’s a wonder I wasn’t nodding off doing my job, as I had a bit of discomfort in my right ear. Probably because of my long-running ENT issues. Anyway, I was trying to nod back off having had some painkillers and put some Otex in my right ear and a cotton-wool ball to keep it in overnight. I wasn’t fully asleep as I could still hear the music. Usually I would drift off and stop noticing what was being played, but I heard most of it in the wee small hours of this morning, and one of those pieces was the Largo.

Before the Largo, however, when I was still more awake, I was actually following a score in one of my recent purchases. If you recall that I got a couple of music books from Forsyth’s the Monday after my birthday, one of those was for the Piano Concerto No 5 in E-flat major by Ludwig van Beethoven. Well, part of that concerto was played last night so I was able to get the book out and follow the music! Therefore, I think we could really class that as book number 22 read for the year!

As far as I’m concerned, if it has an ISBN, it’s a book and it counts. Books of sheet music, including orchestral scores, count, so if I have played some of the music, or listened to the music and followed the score, I count it as being read. If people want to include recipe books and suchlike, I also say that counts. Everything counts in large amounts, as Depeche Mode would put it, lol!

Last year we had Greatest by Duran Duran and the score for The Nutcracker Suite by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on the books read list, and we have had other music books on here before that. It was around this time last year, certainly around May, when my brief reading slump was ended, and that was thanks to John Taylor from Duran Duran, as I read his autobiography, In the Pleasure Groove.

Talking of autobiographies, I did decide to resume My Side, by David Beckham, so that is now up to 38% read. Bread: A Global History, by William Rubel, is now up slightly to 15% read. Incidentally, that was one of the books which mentioned The Epic of Gilgamesh, and thus introduced me to my new literary pals, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, lol! I still think Humbaba is a daft name, especially for what is essentially a baddie!

So, here’s a little challenge for you to consider… can you find me a work of literature where the main bad guy (or creature) has a sillier name than Humbaba?!

Back again now. Had a bit of a nap and then my tea, so I’m here to resume the blog. I mentioned earlier that in May last year, I was getting out of my book slump, thanks to Duran Duran’s bass player, lol, but what about blogs from other years? Was I blogging in May in previous years? Not in 2010, obviously, as I didn’t start this blog until the August of that year.

Although I was blogging in 2011 and 2012, there were no blogs in May. In 2013 and 2014, I was more focused on my football blog, so the first May blog entries came in 2015. I was saying that I hadn’t blogged about books for a while but had still read a few that I enjoyed. I think I was about to resume The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin, which is a good book. It’s about books and a book shop, so enough said, lol!

Unfortunately, it was also around this time that my book club book was By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart, which I described as a pity party in writing, and said that you should not waste your time on this book, you should just listen to “Love’s Unkind” by the late great Donna Summer and that would tell a pretty similar story in a 4 minute pop song! The book does have a good cover, though, probably the one good thing about it.

On to May 2016. We had a book unwrapping, in which the book was The Girl of Ink & Stars, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. United were on their way to Wembley for the FA Cup Final vs Crystal Palace, which we won 2-1 in extra-time. On the way down to Wembley I finished off The Reader on the 6.27, by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent, which I really enjoyed, and I was part-way through the legendary novel that is A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, so I had that on my Kindle as I was NOT about to drag that chunky monkey down to Wembley with me, ha ha!

I had a book called How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup, by J. L. Carr, but I had already read that one before I had to decide which books were coming to Wembley with me. In the actual final, Palace scored first with a Jason Puncheon goal on 78 minutes, but we were level three minutes later thanks to Juan Mata. As it was 1-1 at the end of normal time, we went into extra time, and I feared we were going to cock it up when Chris Smalling got himself needlessly sent-off for being dumb enough to rugby-tackle a Crystal Palace player! Utter numpty! Thankfully, despite being down to ten men, we got the win courtesy of Jesse Lingard with 9 minutes to go.

May 2017 now, and I was still doing jury service around this time four years ago, although it did come to an end in early May. Some of my blog titles in April and May of 2017 had a legal theme, i.e. “All Rise”, “Love in the First Degree” and “Good Morning, Judge”! The month would end with United completing the set of European silverware by winning the Europa League (best known as the UEFA Cup to many of us) by beating Ajax 2-0 in Stockholm. We had already won the League Cup in the February of that year. To me, these cups are the best bit of our time with the Bus Parking One as manager. That and having Zlatan Ibrahimović at United. I had just finished reading I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović around this time and lent it to our Ellie.

I was reading Pet Shop Boys, Literally, by Chris Heath ahead of going to see Messrs Tennant and Lowe in the June of 2017 at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, Chris Lowe’s home town. The above photo is from that gig. Part-way through the concert, some very kind bloke saw me and my friend Sarah and led us to the front so we had an unimpeded view of Neil and Chris for the rest of the gig, including “It’s a Sin”, so I got some awesome photos!

As it was May and thus time for the Eurovision Song Contest, one of my other reads at this time in 2017 was Nul Points, by Tim Moore, which, as you may have guessed, was about all the acts who went home from Eurovision without having been given a single vote! I can recommend Tim Moore, not just for Nul Points, but also French Revolutions, where he cycles the route of the Tour de France. Very funny!

May 2018 now, and I was getting ready to go to the Cape Verde Islands the following month on my jollies, to the island of Boa Vista to be exact. I took Dune, by Frank Herbert so that I could read Dune on a dune in June, lol, but I still haven’t read it yet, just the start of it. I should really get back to some science fiction. I did read a bit of that in 2018, including two classics by H. G. Wells, those being The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.

Of the stuff I was reading in the May of that year, though, the only one I got round to finishing was Twisting My Melon, by Shaun Ryder, which I finished off later that year as I would read it on my Kindle on the way home from Old Trafford. It was a matchday ebook for part of that year. Another matchday ebook was The Man in the Middle by former referee Howard Webb.

So, how about blogs from May 2019? I only started reading and blogging again in the April of that year. I went into a book slump around November 2018, and thought things would pick up in the new year, but then, of course, my dad died in the January of 2019, so I was too upset to read for a while. However, just before my birthday, I felt like reading again, and it was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson, which got me out of the reading slump.

I had also discovered the Object Lessons books around this time and had read Souvenir, by Rolf Potts, which I could relate to as I buy a right load of souvenirs when I go on my jollies! Not long to go now until hospitality can reopen this year, 17th May is less than a fortnight away. Like last year, I will just be doing domestic tourism around the UK, which you will find out about in due course, lol! The above photo is a hotel reception, or lobby for my US followers – just to remind us all what such things look like as they prepare to reopen over here!

I will be taking the legendary sudoku pad, lol! I might just be having some short breaks within the UK, rather than venturing abroad just yet, but that pad still comes with me. I bought it on holiday in Portugal in 2007, so I’ll have had it 14 years next month!

So, we’re pretty much up to date as you know that this time last year I was about to get out of my slump with a little help from Duran Duran, and you know where we’re up to this year as I have just finished The Epic of Gilgamesh, and have also read the music for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 5. I will be back again soon enough with more waffle, but until that time, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

The Force was strong with these books during this blog entry…

• Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major – Ludwig van Beethoven
• Greatest – Duran Duran
• The Nutcracker Suite – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• In the Pleasure Groove – John Taylor
• My Side – David Beckham
• Bread: A Global History – William Rubel
• The Epic of Gilgamesh – Unknown
• The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry – Gabrielle Zevin
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart
• The Girl of Ink & Stars – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
• The Reader on the 6.27 – Jean-Paul Didierlaurent
• A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
• How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup – J. L. Carr
• I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović – Zlatan Ibrahimović
• Pet Shop Boys, Literally – Chris Heath
• Nul Points – Tim Moore
• French Revolutions – Tim Moore
• Dune – Frank Herbert
• The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
• The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
• Twisting My Melon – Shaun Ryder
• The Man in the Middle – Howard Webb
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
• Souvenir – Rolf Potts

The Sunday Book Blog Club…

Good afternoon, fellow Bookworms!

Barometer has been up as far as 1,010 today, but has now dipped to 1,009. Still, it’s higher than it has been of late. Weather is still the usual February stuff, always threatening to live up to that well-known technical term of “shite”!

We have Book Mail again, as you can see, and I will come on to that in a bit, lol! I still find it odd to get post on a Sunday, but parcel deliveries can happen any day. Ordinary post doesn’t come on a Sunday over here unless it’s the last one before Christmas.

I was going to look at some February blogs from previous years when I have blogged in this particular month, so let’s have a shufty at what I was blogging about…

February 2012. I was having a bit of a rant, lol, mostly about politicians and z-list “celebrities” and how there were so few people worth admiring these days, with the honourable exceptions of Paul Scholes and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. I had started reading Twisting My Melon, by Shaun Ryder, which I would later resume and finish off in 2018 if I’m not mistaken! It was also an anniversary for Charles Dickens in February 2012, 200 years since his birth, although I didn’t end up reading any of his books. I have read two of his, though, those being A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations.

It was also Chinese New Year at the time, and I was wishing followers Kung Hei Fat Choi as we let in the Year of the Dragon, my sister’s year. This coming week we will be letting in the Year of the Ox, as of Friday 12th February 2021. The Ox is both mine and my mum’s Chinese year.

February 2016. I was having a shufty at books on my Kindle, and also mentioned the concept of Handbag Books. I also expressed the view that, to me, a “life-changing” book is one that makes you fall in love with reading, therefore mine was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle, way back when I was a toddler.

You can also include books that rescue you from book slumps, of course, so some of those, for me, would include Why the Dutch are Different, by Ben Coates, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson, and In the Pleasure Groove, by John Taylor.

There was also a Glossary I came up with in my blogs that month.

February 2017. This was the time when a couple of piles of books fell over with excitement due to United scoring a goal away to Leicester, lol! I would be giving serious thought to my Handbag Books as Mum and I would be off to Wembley at the end of that month for the League Cup Final, in which we would beat Southampton 3-2, largely thanks to Zlatan Ibrahimović. I was also reading his book, I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović around that time, a very good read even if it didn’t cover his time at Old Trafford.

It was also around this time, in early 2017, when the infamous Duplicate Books Saga reached its conclusion. I ended up with 19 different titles where I had two copies of those books. A set of them ended up being given to local charity shops.

At the moment, those are closed, but I do have a couple of duplicates to donate, so I will have to see when the “non-essential” shops can reopen again. I have duplicates of Mad Girl, by Bryony Gordon, and When All is Said, by Anne Griffin, but they will have to stay here for now. I’ve booked some annual leave at the end of this month, start of March, a long weekend as it were, so if things are open by then, I might be able to donate them.

February 2017 also saw the themed blog Back In Time for a Good Book, based on an idea I saw on Facebook around that time. It was to go back to your 12 year old self with 12 books from their future, so I turned it into a bit of time travel on this blog and went back to 1985 when I was 12, the year Norman Whiteside won the FA Cup in extra time for United, and the summer of Live Aid. This blog would also inspire the Golden Years that I have done every now and then on my blogs since around May last year.

One of the books that I brought my 12 year old self was Attention All Shipping, by Charlie Connelly. If you want to read that blog, check out the February 2017 archives.

I also reached 100 book blogs in that month! Not sure how many I have done by now, but probably somewhere between 200 and 300. I could look it up, it’ll be on the stats on Word Press. The other news from February 2017 was that I was finishing off I Know This Much, by Gary Kemp, so that I could give it back to Sarah when we went to see the Pet Shop Boys at the Manchester Arena later that month. I had already read Faster Than Lightning, by Usain Bolt, which was the other book she’d lent me at the time.

February 2018. So, moving on 12 months and another book lent to me by Sarah, that being Not Dead Yet, by Phil Collins, which I got finished off so I could return it to her when we went to see Paul Young at the Preston Guild Hall that month – don’t get me started on the journey home from that gig, though, lol! They’d shut a lot of the exits of the motorway without any notice, for repairs and stuff, and it took bloody ages for Sarah to get me home and then get back to Preston herself!

In sports news three years ago, it was the 60th anniversary of Munich, so special commemorations took place at Old Trafford and I was showing what we fans received at the nearest home game, which was against Huddersfield Town, and included a little book, and also a badge, which is on my scarf from the 50th anniversary in 2008.

(It was the 63rd anniversary yesterday, and as we fans can’t go at the moment, it was shown on MUTV with just the club chaplain and one or two performers at the stadium.)

It was the Winter Olympics in February 2018, and they were taking place in PyeongChang in South Korea. Great Britain came home with a record haul of 5 medals from a Winter Olympics, 1 gold and 4 bronze, although our 4 medal tally from Sochi 2014, was later upgraded to 5 due to failed drugs tests by Russian bobsledders which saw one of our teams upgraded to bronze. The amended tally from 2014 of 1 gold, 1 silver and 3 bronze is our best-ever, although 2018 is still the best for at the time results, if you know what I mean.

On the reading front in 2018, Phil Collins wasn’t the only one whose autobiography I was reading, as I was also enjoying Russian Winters, by Andrei Kanchelskis at the time. I was also in science-fiction mode, too, and reading The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, having already read The Time Machine.

There were no blogs in February 2019 as I was still too bereaved at the time to be in the mood for reading. I lost my dad in the January and the funeral was on 5th February, so I had just said goodbye to him this time two years ago. The first blogs of 2019 wouldn’t happen until April, the first one just before my birthday, when I had finished the Mark Manson book that I mentioned earlier in this blog.

February 2020. Right then, this time last year… we had a palindromic date at the start of the month when it was 02/02/2020 so I had to mention that, lol! We had Storm Ciara, so the weather was shite, to use that well-known technical term, lol, and towards the end of February we went over to Ireland to see family and to see where Dad’s ashes had been interred. When it is eventually safe enough to go abroad again, after all this crap, I want to go over to Ireland again.

Of course, it was while we were over in Ireland that my sister spotted the brilliant Economics for Babies, by Jonathan Litton, as shown in the above photo, and it’s exactly the sort of mad and random book that you find out about in my blogs, lol! One of my other book highlights of February 2020 was Gulp, by Mary Roach, which I read on my Kindle and really enjoyed. I would later read Stiff during the course of 2020 and I enjoyed that one, too.

This kinda brings us back to February 2021 and the current state of affairs. Kensuke’s Kingdom, by Sir Michael Morpurgo, is 73% read so that looks like being February’s first finish (good bit of alliteration there, lol), and I have had book mail, as I said at the start of this blog, and we have poetry and a novel in our package that came earlier this afternoon…

The poetry anthology is Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic, by Simon Armitage, the current Poet Laureate here in the UK. The title is in keeping with all the recent Shipping Forecast stuff, as Sandettie is listed on the reports from coastal stations on the 00:48h forecasts on BBC Radio 4. I am pretty sure I also have another of his anthologies, Paper Aeroplane, but it might be in the garage. I did think it was in one of my book boxes here in my room, but can’t seem to find it, so maybe I swapped it last time I had a Book Reshuffle.

The novel is The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman, best known as a quiz host on TV – he co-hosts “Pointless” with Alexander Armstrong, and is the solo host of “Richard Osman’s House of Games” which is on telly after “Pointless”. This is his first novel, although he and Alexander Armstrong have been responsible for some books relating to their quiz series, of which I read one last year, The 100 Most Pointless Things in the World.

Well, I think that’s about it for now. I have gone through some previous Februaries on here, and you can always check the archives if you want to read old blogs of mine! Until next time, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Twisting My Melon – Shaun Ryder
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar – Eric Carle
• Why the Dutch are Different – Ben Coates
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
• In the Pleasure Groove – John Taylor
• I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović – Zlatan Ibrahimović
• Mad Girl – Bryony Gordon
• When All is Said – Anne Griffin
• Attention All Shipping – Charlie Connelly
• I Know This Much – Gary Kemp
• Faster Than Lightning – Usain Bolt
• Not Dead Yet – Phil Collins
• Russian Winters – Andrei Kanchelskis
• The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
• The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
• Economics for Babies – Jonathan Litton
• Gulp – Mary Roach
• Stiff – Mary Roach
• Kensuke’s Kingdom – Sir Michael Morpurgo
• Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic – Simon Armitage
• Paper Aeroplane – Simon Armitage
• The Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
• The 100 Most Pointless Things in the World – Alexander Armstrong & Richard Osman

Preparations Under Way…

Good evening, fellow Bookworms!

Just 11 days to go now! No, I’ve no idea who those people are in the photo, lol, but I just wanted an image of people getting ready for some sort of celebration, and that one fits the bill very well.

Ordered a new charger for my Kindle Paperwhite – have found that sometimes when I plug it in, the light doesn’t come on and it’s not charging, so there may be a dicky connection. Don’t want that once I start going away again, so I thought it best to get a new one.

Talking of my Kindle, I resumed another ebook the other day, a book about books, funnily enough, lol! The book is called Bookworm, A Memoir of Childhood Reading, by Lucy Mangan, and it was 16% read when I resumed it. It is now at the 50% stage so we are exactly halfway through it now. A good chance of it being finished this month.

However, it does face a bit of a challenge to be my 20th finish of 2020, because I have resumed another Ongoing Concern, indeed one of the Object Lessons books that I mentioned frequently last year. The book is Hotel, by Joanna Walsh, and it has been in my handbag for ages, partially finished. This is largely because I felt the writer didn’t like hotels all that much, whereas I love them, and also due to all the philosophy-related waffle. 57% of that book has been read now.

I love hotels, as I have mentioned before. For me, they represent holidays and short breaks, time when I am staying somewhere different, even if that is still within my own country. After all, Mum and I had a short break in the Lake District last year, which you can read about in the September 2019 archives should you wish to!

Of course, we started this year off in Madeira, and also got in a visit to Ireland to see our family at the end of February before things went Pete Tong and everywhere here shut down in March, so you have my January and February 2020 archives, too, which have more mentions of hotels. I even mention the bookshelves at the VidaMar in Funchal!

It’s a pretty common thing for hotels to have bookshelves, and the books are a right mixed bag, not just in genres, but also often in languages! Hotel guests will often leave books they have finished with, and may well take others. As is well-documented on these blogs, one of my holiday souvenirs from my 40th birthday holiday in Mexico in 2013 was my copy of Attention All Shipping, by Charlie Connelly, which I brought home from the El Dorado Seaside Suites on the Mayan Riviera, because I hadn’t quite finished it when we had to head home after a fortnight of luxury and a good percentage of the cocktail menu sampled, lol!

I did finish the book off when I got home, though! One of my favourites, not just because it is a souvenir, but it is a really good book anyway!

Mr Loverman, by Bernardine Evaristo, is now at 10% read, and definitely very enjoyable. I do still read fiction, lol! It will be my 5th fiction read of the year. Departures, by Tony Parsons, was my first fiction of 2020, and my last three finishes have been fiction, but we are returning to the factual matters now, and a book about music…

I am 18% of the way through How Music Works, by John Powell, which I only actually bought at the weekend. Those familiar with my blogs will know I have already read another of his books about music, as Why We Love Music was finished early in 2017, but this book is about the science of music, the physics of how sound is produced by instruments and heard by our ears.

I do know some of it. After all, I can play several musical instruments, and I did take physics for my science when I was doing my GCSEs at Wentworth High School all those years ago in the late 1980s, lol, but I’m considerably more of a musician than I am a scientist! Science was my dad’s department, his responsibility, ha ha! Chemistry was the main one, that was his job, but if there was anything scientific I needed help with, mostly my physics homework, lol, I knew Dad would know the answers!

I saw and shared something the other day which reminded me of doing music at high school. It was on Facebook, and it was a performance of Dido’s lament, “When I Am Laid In Earth” from the Baroque opera, Dido and Anaeas, by Henry Purcell. It will forever remind me of studying the history of music for my GCSEs, and the fact that Mrs Gajda, our music teacher, pointed out that it was a classic example of a ground bass!

A ground bass, as a musical concept, is a tune of about 4 to 8 bars long, in the bass clef, which is repeated throughout the piece of music. This is an idea which has clearly been revived since rock & roll began in the late 20th century, particularly in genres where there is a huge emphasis on melodic and driving basslines. Reggae springs to mind here. Think of “Stir It Up” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Also think of house and dance music from the late 80s and early 90s. Those tunes were based on melodious basslines which repeated throughout the songs! There is nothing new under the sun, as they say!

OK, so 1980s acid house is a far cry from Dido’s Lament, lol, but take a Baroque idea about how to write a bass part, and just shift it to a major key and a higher tempo, and you have the modern dance music bassline! House music owes a lot to Purcell, more than its creators realise!

Right, anyway, enough about music history for now, ha ha, back to the books! I haven’t forgotten other Ongoing Concerns, but I think I’d like to start August by getting through Bookworm and Hotel, and also making further progress with How Music Works, and Mr Loverman. There’s also The 33, as we are almost at the date ten years ago where the mine caved in and the miners were trapped. I have read 23% of it so far, so nearly a quarter of the way through it.

Ideally, with two books at the halfway stage, or just over halfway, I would like to get at least one of those finished in time for the blog’s 10th birthday bash next Friday, 14th August. Not beyond the realms of possibility! I get to publish THE LIST next Friday! Woo hoo! Yeah, that’s right, the massive one!

Maybe I might have some transfer news on the footy front?! I may well have some footy news anyway, as European football is about to be finished off at last for this season! United are in action on Wednesday at home to Lask Linz of Austria. If you can remember as far back as early March, United won the away leg 5-0, so this is the home game that should originally have been played the following week. We are finally getting around to it in August! Mad old season, eh?!

I think that’s probably about all for now. There may or may not be blogs before next Friday, but I definitely aim to blog on 14th August as it is the 10th anniversary, or birthday. Either will do! This blog was “born” on 14th August 2010. Until my next blog, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Bookworm – Lucy Mangan
• Hotel – Joanna Walsh
• Attention All Shipping – Charlie Connelly
• Mr Loverman – Bernardine Evaristo
• Departures – Tony Parsons
• How Music Works – John Powell
• Why We Love Music – John Powell
• The 33 – Jonathan Franklin

Chief Bookworm’s Interim Review

Wish you were here? Me reading in the sun on Wednesday

Good evening, fellow Bookworms,

Wish the weather was still as good as it was during the week, when I was able to sit outdoors and read after work, but unfortunately, to use that well-known technical term, the weekend’s weather has been utterly shite!

That photo was taken by Mum on Wednesday afternoon, while I was having a Pimm’s, and reading Wish You Were Here, by Mike Gayle, which I am enjoying, and I am just over a quarter of the way through it now. There is a bit I particularly liked from when Charlie, Andy and Tom are at Gatwick Airport, before they head off to Crete, and Charlie has gone shopping in the departure lounge…

“And although I didn’t actually need anything at all, I still managed to return from my sojourn with several packs of fruit pastilles, two bottles of mineral water and three books from Waterstone’s.”

That’s the way to do it, lol! It just reminded me of my shopping habits when I’m in the departure lounge at Manchester Airport prior to going on my jollies! We don’t have a Waterstone’s there, but we do have a W H Smith’s, and I get sorted out there for my boiled sweets (a necessity for takeoff and landing), the bottle of mineral water, and the inevitable book!

I only usually buy one. I will already have my Kindle with me, and some books I’ve brought with me from home. Plus at least one travel guide to whichever part of the world Mum and I are jetting off to, so I usually manage to stick to just one book from the shops in the departure lounge, lol!

As the weather was too crap yesterday to venture out, I have yet to return to Waterstone’s to pick up the book I ordered, but Dear Martin, by Nic Stone, should be there waiting for me when I do head into town again. Maybe next weekend if it’s better. Might be quite busy next Saturday, as it’ll be the first day that a lot of dining establishments can offer the opportunity for people to eat in since things shut up in March.

Can’t wait until I’m enjoying this sort of thing again!

Anyway, as well as being 26% of the way through Mike Gayle’s book, I am now 20% of the way through Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, which was a departure lounge purchase from 2019, lol! Am on for page 94 in both books at the moment, but Sapiens is a bit chunkier, so I have read a smaller percentage of it than I have of Wish You Were Here.

In that novel, the main protagonist, Charlie, has mentioned one of the books he bought at Waterstone’s in the departure lounge. This is Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson. He’s not mentioned his other purchases yet, though. Will be interesting to see if he does.

Not been many books finished so far this year, I think Coronavirus is very much to blame as it caused me a lot of stress back in March when stuff shut down and I didn’t feel like reading until mid to late May when John Taylor’s autobiography rescued me from the book slump! Six books read so far this year, and one of those was a book of sheet music, but I have books on the go now, several ongoing concerns like the old days, lol, so I may well get some of those read and have a list to publish at the end of this year, even if it’s a pretty short one. A list on List Challenges needs at least ten items. I need four more at the very least.

I was doing OK at the start of this year… Managed four books by the end of February, thought stuff was going OK, and then it went Pete Tong! So, it may not be a vintage year on the book front, but let’s see what we can do to rescue things during the second half of 2020. As things open up more, and return to some semblance of “normal”, I might get more stuff read. At least I feel like reading again, and I am back to my old habits of having a few books on the go at any time. This is so I can read something according to my mood. And the fact that one of the books I’m currently into is fiction is encouraging.

Most of them are still non-fiction, and in the last year or so, the vast majority of my books have been factual ones. I have needed to get out of a few slumps, though, so the non-fiction helps on that front. Might even resume The Edible Atlas, by Mina Holland, especially as travel opens up again and chances improve with respect to going away somewhere. I still think that won’t be until 2021, though. I would like things to be as close to normal as possible before considering jollies overseas. Doesn’t mean I won’t go somewhere else here in the UK, though…

I’ve read 12% of Dead Wake, by Erik Larson, the book about the Lusitania, so I have that one to get on with. Sunny Side Up, by Susan Calman, is at 59% so really good prospect of that being finished soon. Let me check Face It, by Debbie Harry… ‘scuse me a minute… page 95 of 360… 26% so, again, a quarter of the way through that one. Am on page 100 of 338 in The Edible Atlas, so that’s around 30%

Now for the ebooks on my Kindle, as there’s at least a couple I could resume which are already a good chunk of the way through. This is why I work out percentages even for my hardbacks and paperbacks – because I don’t get to see page numbers in ebooks, it just says the percentage for how much of the book I have read. Stiff, by Mary Roach, is at 63% and My Autistic Fight Song, by Rosie Weldon, is at 66%, so getting those two read and finished soon might be a good idea…

Getting Sunny Side Up and those two ebooks I have just mentioned finished off would take the total up to nine. Just seen that I’ve got All Quiet on the Western Front nearby, of which I am on page 46 of 200, so that’s up for resumption with 23% of it read so far. I think I started it in 2018 hoping to get it read by November for the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and bookworms go oft awry, and I went into a book slump at the end of that year, and then the slump went into the literary equivalent of extra time and a penalty shoot-out in 2019 as my dad passed away and I was too bereaved to read until the April, just before my birthday.

Just remembered I’ve got a half-read Object Lessons book in my handbag! Hotel, by Joanna Walsh, is still in there. Page 72 of 157. 46% read so far, but I recall I wasn’t enjoying it as much as the other Object Lessons books I’d previously read. She didn’t seem to like hotels, and she kept putting this bizarre philosophy stuff in it for some weird reason, so was finding it a bit of a slog for a short book. There’s a boarding pass at the back of this book – Jet2.com boarding pass, Manchester to Funchal, from when we went to Madeira at the end of last year.

On the footy front, Anthony Martial scored a hat-trick in midweek as we beat Sheffield United 3-0 at Old Trafford. It was the first Premier League hat-trick by a Manchester United player since 22nd April 2013, the night before my Big 40, when Robin van Persie’s hat-trick against Aston Villa meant that United had won their 20th league title! We had had a couple of hat-tricks in Europe since then, RvP against Olympiakos in the Champions League in 2014 and Zlatan Ibrahimović against St Etienne in the Europa League in 2017, but we had been waiting over 7 years for one in the Premier League until Tony Martial blunted the Blades on Wednesday and went home with the match ball!

Yesterday, we made hard work of it, but beat Norwich City 2-1 in extra time at Carrow Road to book our place in the semi-finals of the FA Cup. We have been drawn against Chelsea in our semi, the other is Arsenal vs Manchester City. Our goals against Norwich were scored by Odion Ighalo and Harry Maguire, our captain getting the winner with about two minutes of extra time left to go!

So, that’s the footy news and pretty much all the book news for now. Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache, by Martin Aston, is at page 84 of 538, which makes it 16% read. The books on the A Round Tuit list remain as yet unread, although I think I may have started Gould’s Book of Fish some time ago, lol. This is basically a bit of a review of where some of my Ongoing Concerns are up to at the moment as we reach the halfway stage of the year.

I’ll be back again soon enough with the usual waffle, probably at least one new book to mention that I’ve not mentioned on here before, and some more Golden Years for you to guess. We’ve not had one for a blog or two, so perhaps I might do one in the next blog! Until then, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Wish You Were Here – Mike Gayle
• Dear Martin – Nic Stone
• Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
• Touching the Void – Joe Simpson
• In the Pleasure Groove – John Taylor
• The Edible Atlas – Mina Holland
• Dead Wake – Erik Larson
• Sunny Side Up – Susan Calman
• Face It – Debbie Harry
• Stiff – Mary Roach
• My Autistic Fight Song – Rosie Weldon
• All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
• Hotel – Joanna Walsh
• Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache – Martin Aston
• Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan

Last Book Blog of the Decade!

Crossy Road Christmas: My nephew, mum, niece and myself on our iPads, lol!

Hello there, fellow Bookworms!

It has just dawned on me that this is not just the last blog of this year, but it is also the last blog of this decade as the 2020s start very soon! Tomorrow, I’ll be busy preparing for an upcoming event, and then I will be unavailable due to that, so I am blogging today for the final time this year and indeed for the 2010s. I started this book blog back in the summer of 2010, not long after I became an auntie, so you have been hearing from me on here for the best part of the decade, give or take a few months, and the occasional gap in blogging due to book slumps and stuff.

Thus I shall start by looking back on this year’s books that I’ve read, and then we can have a look at stuff from across the decade…

I have managed to read 20 books this year, which is not bad considering that I didn’t get a book finished until April, just before my birthday, as I didn’t feel like reading prior to that having lost my dad in January. I had already been in a book slump at the end of 2018, but bereavement added a few more months to that, before I felt ready to read again in April. The first one I finished was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, which I really enjoyed. As I have said on here, many times, I am not a fan of self-help books in general, but I find the odd one or two which are relatable.

I then got into the Object Lessons books, a series of non-fiction books about various objects or things, so I am going to list those here, including my current one, Hotel, by Joanna Walsh, which I have started, although that may well be finished off in 2020 as my first book of next year.

• Souvenir – Rolf Potts
• Luggage – Susan Harlan
• Personal Stereo – Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
• Bookshelf – Lydia Pyne
• Sock – Kim Adrian
• Eye Chart – William Germano
• Hotel – Joanna Walsh

So, six Object Lessons books read during the course of this year, and a seventh one started. I don’t need to list the OL books at the end of this blog now, as I’ve done that up here. Gets those mentioned.

Some poetry was read in 2019, three anthologies made my list. You Took the Last Bus Home, by Brian Bilston, The Luckiest Guy Alive, by John Cooper Clarke, and One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, by Neil Tennant, as I am classing song lyrics as poetry for the benefit of this blog. Neil came to the Royal Northern College of Music in October as part of the Manchester Literary Festival, so me and my friend Sarah, fellow Pethead, went to see him. Brian Bilston is coming to Manchester in February, so I will have to sort that out and look at tickets for that. I think that is near the universities in town. Then I can take my books with me and have them signed. He’s the guy who often posts his poetry on social media -I’ve seen him on Facebook and Instagram regularly.

You Do You, by Sarah Knight, was next on the finished list after Brian Bilston and John Cooper Clarke. By the way, I particularly recommend the poem “Pies” by John Cooper Clarke. I think there’s even a YouTube clip available of him reading that poem out on TV quiz show, Countdown! Then came a couple of books on the disability/medical condition front. First up, The Girl With the Curly Hair, by Alis Rowe, which I read on my Kindle, and which deals with her autism. I have been following her posts on Facebook for some time now. Then came I’m Only In It For the Parking, the autobiography of Lee Ridley, the Lost Voice Guy who won Britain’s Got Talent a few years ago.

Ole, by Ian Macleay, was next, which I finished when I was on my jollies in Mauritius. A biography of our current manager, the Legend who put the ball in the Germans’ net in the Nou Camp on 26th May 1999. He scored against them again in May this year when we had the 20th anniversary match at Old Trafford and our old boys stuffed Bayern Munich’s old boys 5-0!

Four Object Lessons books followed, from Luggage through to Sock, then came The Prison Doctor, by Dr Amanda Brown, which I think I got from Asda if I’m not mistaken. That was a very interesting read. Then came the first of only two works of fiction I have read this year, Trinkets, by Kirsten Smith, a YA novel about a trio of teenage shoplifters who end up as unlikely friends because the cops send them on a course to try to stop them being a bunch of tea leaves!

Adam Kay‘s book, ‘Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas, was next. Very funny, my only complaint being that it was too short! Then I finished Pier Review, which was one of the books I bought in September when Mum and I went to the Lake District and then came home via Brockholes and Blackpool. I bought Pier Review, by Jon Bounds and Danny Smith, at Waterstone’s in Blackpool, as it seemed appropriate due to the town having three piers. Really enjoyed that book. I think my late Dad might even have enjoyed that one! Wish he was still here so I could tell him about it and lend him my copy.

I have added the Neil Tennant book around this point on my finished books list, as it was the autumn when I went to see him at the RNCM. It’s a book of song lyrics, so I’m classing it as poetry, and you can just dip into poetry books. After that comes Eye Chart, by William Germano, which I started around the time I needed new specs! As you may recall, I had an optical emergency at the end of July and had to take a day off work to go to the optician’s and have an eye test. I ended up with two pairs of specs, one for distance, one for reading. I’ve got my reading specs on at the moment as I type this blog.

So, we now come to my most recent reads, which are Me, by Sir Elton John, which I totally recommend, and A Man Walks Into a Kitchen, by Robert Graham, which is my work book club’s current reading matter. That one is really short, probably only really a novella or short story, so I was able to finish it pretty quickly and get a 20th book finished this year.

Right, so let’s now look back on the whole time I’ve been blogging! I started in August 2010, just after I’d become an auntie to Charlotte, Junior Bookworm. I currently have 93 followers, so thank you so much for reading my waffle!

I started off in 2010 looking at e-readers, of which I have since owned a few, including my current Kindle Paperwhite, and such themes as books set in different countries, and the fact that you always seem to find the same books in lots of charity shops. There are certain titles which always seem to be on the shelves in those places! Never did get round to the reading around the world thing that I mentioned back then, though, but I may have covered a fair few countries in the books I have read and mentioned on here since that summer.

2011 saw me, evetually, receiving my original Kindle, which I won as a result of finding a book at Barbakan Deli in Chorlton on my lunch hour one day. The book was How To Leave Twitter, by Grace Dent. I’ve seen her on Masterchef a few times, actually, as she’s a food critic and restaurant reviewer. I also blogged about growing up as a bookworm and the books I read as a kid, some of them being those I had to study at school and college, and then at uni in my early adult life. There’s also a blog about footballers’ autobiographies as I had met Paul Scholes at a book signing in the Trafford Centre and got my copy of My Story signed.

2012 marked 200 years since Charles Dickens was born, but I didn’t actually get around to reading any of his works that year. I have read Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol, but not in that particular year. Incidentally, I bought my niece a copy of A Christmas Carol – it was one of the books I bought her for Christmas just gone! She has seen an adaptation of it and talked about it at school, so I felt she was ready for a copy now.

It was also in 2012 that I took part in World Book Night, and spent the evening of my 39th birthday, 23rd April, giving out copies of The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, in the Trafford Centre. I ended up giving them to various members of staff in shops. It was a Monday night that year, and things were pretty quiet, so I think people were quite pleased that they were getting a free book. I also had one of my rants about book snobbery in this year, and also about why some books have different titles in different countries, which just confuses people! I mentioned The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave, which is known as Little Bee in the USA and New Zealand. I am putting both editions on my List Challenges list. Feel free to tick off which one you’ve read. Or both, as it’s the same damn story anyway!

There are no blogs in 2013 or 2014. I was having something of a book slump at times, and at others, I was just so busy doing other stuff that I forgot to blog! I hit my Big 40 in the April of 2013, and Manchester United won their 20th league title. In fact, the title was declared the night before my birthday thanks to Robin van Persie’s hat-trick at home to Aston Villa, so the title celebrations and my birthday kinda merged into one! In the October of that year, Mum and I went to Mexico – one of the best holidays I’ve ever had! That’s where I discovered Attention All Shipping, by Charlie Connelly, which I have mentioned on a great number of occasions since, lol! I had read I Am the Secret Footballer, by The Secret Footballer, while I was in Mexico, but finished that while I was over there. I hadn’t finished Attention All Shipping, so I brought it home with me.

I think it was in 2013 that Hannah Kent came to one of our book club meetings – pretty sure it was around that time. Burial Rites had just been published and she was promoting it, so she came to our meeting and she was lovely. Told us all about the background behind it. She’s Australian, but had gone on this one year exchange programme to Iceland. While she was in Iceland, she found out about the last woman to be executed in that country, and that’s what formed the basis of her historical fiction novel. We read it for our book club and loved it.

So, the next time I blogged, we were in 2015, and I was not enamoured with Elizabeth Smart, as I had had to read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for my book club, and I thought it was just a pity party in writing! I just wanted to slap her and tell her to stop sulking like an overgrown teenager! That book may have been short, but it really wasn’t short enough! I didn’t understand at all why it got such rave reviews. All you need to do is listen to “Love’s Unkind” by Donna Summer, and it would tell a pretty similar story in a 3 to 4 minute pop song, and spare you having to read Ms Smart’s book!

On a better note, though, I did read some good books at that time, including Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin, and Girl With a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, all of which I definitely would recommend to my followers! There was another book slump, but then I enjoyed Why the Dutch Are Different, by Ben Coates, and The Art of Racing In the Rain, by Garth Stein at the end of 2015, and I was back in reading mode.

2016 saw a glossary on the blogs, and the introduction of the concept of Handbag Books! I also came up with Chunky Monkeys, I think, for some of my large books, particularly anything with 500 or more pages. A lot of historical fiction novels are chunky monkeys, although not all of them. Tracy Chevalier writes historical fiction and her books are not bulky.

I had a massive rant about self-help books at one point in 2016, and about how ableist they are. Too many of them seem to be written by some top sports coach or some sergeant in the armed forces or whatever, and they are used to dealing with super-fit people on a day to day basis, so I don’t think it occurs to them that there are people out there whose bodies are not as capable as those of the people the writers deal with! There are plenty of bookworms out there with various medical conditions and/or disabilities and I don’t think self-help books really take any of that into account.

Plus, of course, there was the notorious Duplicate Books List! Yep, over the course of several blogs, particularly around 2016 and 2017, I blogged on a number of occasions about the fact that there were several books of which I owned two copies! I think it got to the stage where there were 19 books on that list! I ended up giving one set of them away to various charity shops in the area.

There were some photos of my cross-stitched bookmarks, including one which was a tribute to David Bowie who had died in the January of that year, and a Blind Date With A Book was unwrapped on the blog for Valentine’s Day. It was also in 2016 that an Oxfam bookshop hit the news – their bookstore in Swansea, South Wales, had been donated so many copies of the Fifty Shades trilogy that they’d been able to build a fort out of them in their back room! They were saying that they were happy to receive donations of any other books, but please, pretty please with a cherry on top, no more Fifty Shades books!

I had a go on an accordion at Forsyth’s in March 2016 as part of their Learn To Play Day. Seriously? That was 2016? Wow! Longer ago than I thought. I actually took part in Learn To Play Day again this year, although this time I had a lesson on the cello. I have played quite a lot of musical instruments over the years, as regular followers will know, lol! I don’t just read books, I also read music! That’s for another blog another day, though. When the topic gets back round to music again, which it often does with me, I will no doubt blog about all the instruments I’ve ever had a go of, whether they’re ones I’ve had a one-off go at, or those that I have played frequently and attained a decent level of proficiency on.

I took some books and the Kindle down to Wembley in May 2016 to see United beat Crystal Palace 2-1 in extra-time in the FA Cup Final. On my Kindle, I had downloaded A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, as I was not willing to lug my paperback edition to Wembley and back!

Talking of Manchester United…

Burnley 0 Manchester United 1. Anthony Martial 44 minutes. Woohoo! Get in!

Tony Martial came from France

English press said he had no chance

Fifty million down the drain…

Tony Martial scores again!!!

Sorry, not sorry! Just getting a bit excited as my lads have scored just before half time at Turf Moor in tonight’s evening fixture. I’m a Stretford Ender as well as a bookworm! Half-time now and it’s 1-0 to Manchester United. So far so good.

Anyway, I was on about A Little Life, wasn’t I? Oh, blimey! That was a book and a half, wasn’t it?! 720 pages! I really enjoyed it, but it was such a big pull emotionally that I ended up with a massive Book Hangover afterwards and really couldn’t bring myself to read any more works of fiction for the rest of 2016! Good job I also like non-fiction books! Spent the remainder of that year reading factual stuff, including Faster Than Lightning, by Usain Bolt, which my friend Sarah had lent me, and The Rules of the Game, by Pierluigi Collina, the former referee, the guy who reffed the 1999 European Cup Final in the Nou Camp when United did the Treble.

Before we move on to 2017, must mention that I gained a nephew in 2016 when Reuben was born that October, Junior Bookworm’s baby brother! Charlotte has been reading to her brother from the start, thus ensuring he also likes a good book! If the book is about dinosaurs or diggers, better still! He LOVES dinosaurs. He has so many of them that you could easily recreate a model version of Jurassic Park at my sister’s house! Charlotte is very much into Harry Potter, I am proud to announce! She is also into her music, she sings, and also learns violin and piano. She has just had a violin exam before Christmas, although I think we will get to hear how she’s done in her Grade 1 some time in the new year.

OK, on to 2017 in our book blog review… A year in which some of my books got rather over-excited at a United goal and fell over, lol, and I went down to Wembley again, this time for the League Cup Final, which we won 3-2 against Southampton. We also won the Europa League that season, although I didn’t go to that final in Stockholm. As for the toppling books, it was early February, United were away to Leicester City and when we got our first goal, two piles of books fell over! We ended up winning 3-0 as I recall.

There was also some literary time travel in 2017 after I got an idea from Facebook. I went back in time to 1985 with 12 books for my 12 year old self. This is also the year I finish off Pet Shop Boys, Literally, by Chris Heath, ahead of seeing Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in concert twice that year! I saw them in the February at the Manchester Arena, and then in the June at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool, Chris Lowe’s home town. I also saw Billy Ocean in concert that year, that was in the April at the Lowry Theatre on Salford Quays.

And, of course, 2017 saw me back in work! Yay! In September 2017, I started my current job as an administration officer for my local council. At first it was 6 months, but my manager kept extending it, and then it became permanent. So I’ve been there two and a bit years now. Reading time is often lunchtime or after work these days. And on my jollies, obviously. Being back in work, I have the pleasure of annual leave once again.

Couple of notable author events in 2017 at Waterstone’s on Deansgate. Stuart Maconie was there to talk about Long Road From Jarrow, so I met him and he also signed my copy of The Pie At Night as well as the aforementioned book. I still need to read Long Road From Jarrow, actually. Anyway, the other event was Adam Kay promoting This Is Going To Hurt, so I was able to meet him and get my copy signed. That was my favourite book of 2017! Very moving in parts, hilarious in others!

OK, what did 2018 bring on the book front? Another autobiography lent to me by my friend Sarah, this time Not Dead Yet, by Phil Collins, which was a really good read. I also read some science fiction classics, The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds, both by H. G. Wells. Science fiction was probably created with that novel – certainly the idea of alien invasion as a theme. I also enjoyed Russian Winters, by Andrei Kanchelskis, our former winger. It covered his whole career in football and pretty much brought me up to date on what happened after he left United in 1995. He was one of my favourite players back in the day.

And on the subject of football…

Burnley 0 Manchester United 2. Marcus Rashford scored 5 minutes into stoppage time and that is now a full-time score, so we end 2019 with a nice away win! Yay!

Right, OK, back to books again, lol! This is what it’s like when I am blogging and there’s footy on… blogs get interrupted by goals! At least none of my books fell over this time, ha ha, unlike that time in 2017 when we won away to Leicester, lol!

We were on for 2018, which was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Space Invaders, and I cross stitched some bookmarks with space invaders on them to mark the occasion. I also finished off Twisting My Melon, Shaun Ryder‘s autobiography, which was on my Kindle. I had started it some years ago, but got that finished. At one point it was my match-day read, and I would read it in the car coming home from Old Trafford when we would be stuck in the inevitable traffic trying to make our way out of the ground and through Trafford Park after the game…

I also got a new Kindle in 2018, a Paperwhite, and got it from a colleague at work through Yammer, which is like an internal social media thing for council staff with noticeboards so there are buying and selling notices on there. I got that in time for my jollies that summer, as we took advantage of me being back in work by going off to the Cape Verde Islands for a week at the Riu Karamboa on the island of Boa Vista. While I was over there, I got Mum to take a photo of me reading Dune on a sand dune, although I still actually need to read the Frank Herbert novel.

2018 was the summer when the giant bees were in town, so I was bee spotting on a number of occasions, and there was also a heatwave, and a fire on Saddleworth Moor. Even though we don’t live near there, the smoke carried on the wind, and you could smell it in the air even where we lived – I could smell it in Swinton while waiting for a bus home after work…

Oh, and England amazed me at the World Cup. Prior to the tournament, my expectations of my national football team were pretty low to say the least! I would tell anyone that we would be rubbish and that the Three Lions would be home from Russia before the proverbial postcards! I was not expecting them to get past the group stage, as they had been utter shite in previous tournaments! (Shite is a technical term, by the way!) However, inspired by Gareth Southgate and his magic waistcoats from M&S, lol, England actually made it to the semi-finals! Football wasn’t coming home, though, and we lost the semi and the playoff. Still, we came 4th which equals our performance at Italia 90 under the late great Sir Bobby Robson as the two best World Cup performances in my lifetime for the England team! Sadly, I’m not old enough to have seen them win the World Cup – 1966 was before I was born!

Besides cross-stitch, there was some loom knitting and some Pixelhobby on the crafting front, so I was getting creative, particularly towards the end of 2018. Sadly, the former book club at Waterstone’s petered out. However, a book club did form at work, and they have the benefit of being loaned sets of books by the library service! I haven’t always been able to make it, but it’s up and running and quite well attended.

So, that’s pretty much up to date, really, as we then go into 2019, but I’ve been through this year’s events and books already.  The photo at the top was taken by my sister just before Christmas as my nephew, mum, niece and I all sit on our settee, playing Crossy Road on our iPads! Charlotte has introduced us to this game! One of my fave characters in it is the Thesaurus – a dinosaur with a book, who goes along letting words out! When he eventually gets run over, the words are usually those such as stomped, or flat, lol!

Well, I think that is about all for now, and therefore for the year and the decade! I will get the lists published shortly on List Challenges, and wish all my followers all the best, and plenty of good books, for the coming year!

Have a Happy and Book-filled New Year!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry (other than the Object Lessons ones)

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – Mark Manson
• You Took the Last Bus Home – Brian Bilston
• The Luckiest Guy Alive – John Cooper Clarke
• One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem – Neil Tennant
• You Do You – Sarah Knight
• The Girl With the Curly Hair – Alis Rowe
• I’m Only In It For the Parking – Lee Ridley
• Ole – Ian Macleay
• The Prison Doctor – Dr Amanda Brown
• Trinkets – Kirsten Smith
• ‘Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas – Adam Kay
• Pier Review – Jon Bounds and Danny Smith
• Me – Sir Elton John
• A Man Walks Into a Kitchen – Robert Graham
• How To Leave Twitter – Grace Dent
• My Story – Paul Scholes
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
• The Other Hand – Chris Cleave
• Little Bee – Chris Cleave (US and NZ editions)
• Attention All Shipping – Charlie Connelly
• I Am the Secret Footballer – The Secret Footballer
• Burial Rites – Hannah Kent
• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – Elizabeth Smart
• Where’d You Go, Bernadette? – Maria Semple
• The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry – Gabrielle Zevin
• Girl With a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
• Why the Dutch Are Different – Ben Coates
• The Art of Racing In the Rain – Garth Stein
• A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
• Faster Than Lightning – Usain Bolt
• The Rules of the Game – Pierluigi Collina
• Pet Shop Boys, Literally – Chris Heath
• Long Road From Jarrow – Stuart Maconie
• The Pie At Night – Stuart Maconie
• This Is Going to Hurt – Adam Kay
• Not Dead Yet – Phil Collins
• The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
• The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
• Russian Winters – Andrei Kanchelskis
• Twisting My Melon – Shaun Ryder
• Dune – Frank Herbert

 

 

 

Getting A Round Tuit…

Good evening, fellow Bookworms!

Back again, and a bit of catching up to do as I’ve not blogged for a bit. Meant to, but didn’t get around to it, or even a round tuit, lol! I do hope I will get at least another blog in before the end of the year, although I’m pretty busy around new year, so the usual List Challenges lists that relate to this blog and to what I’ve read this year might have to be published either just before new year or in early January. So, I’m sitting at my laptop, listening to Absolute 80s, and United are winning 2-1 against Spurs, both our goals by Marcus Rashford, and I’ve got some updating to do on the book front…

Think the last blog was August or September? I had been to Power Up at the Museum of Science and Industry in town, had some ear discomfort, a bit of vertigo and dizziness, and then a touch of the notorious Badger’s Arse with a stupid cold.

Don’t think I’d been to the Lakes at that point, no I hadn’t. So that’s the next bit, around mid September around the time of what would have been Dad’s birthday, when Mum and I had a short break in the Lake District, and also stopped off at a couple of other places on the way back on the Tuesday, so we covered Bowness, Brockholes and Blackpool in one day!

As you can imagine, I purchased a few books during this break, and I have read one of them! It was one of the books I bought at Waterstone’s in Blackpool, and it seemed apt given that the seaside town has three piers… the book was Pier Review, by Jon Bounds and Danny Smith, and it is their account of their road trip around the coast of England and Wales to visit all the piers! They’re from Birmingham, about as far from any seaside resort as you can get in mainland Britain, lol, and they rope in this friend, Midge, to do the driving, only this means they have to get round the country within a fortnight because Midge needs to be back in Brum in time to get his arse to the job centre and sign on!

In October, my friend Sarah and I went to the Royal Northern College of Music in town for an event which was part of the Manchester Literary Festival. Prior to this, I hadn’t actually been to the RNCM for donkey’s years – not since I was at high school, doing GCSE Music, and me and Dad went to a big band concert at the college. However, the reason Sarah and I were at the RNCM in October was because one half of our favourite duo was talking about the literary influences on his lyrics! Yep, Neil Tennant, the singing half of the Pet Shop Boys, was in town, so Sarah and I were there to see him, and the ticket price included a copy of his book, which was published late last year, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem. For the purposes of this blog and literature, I am classing that book as a poetry book anyway, as song lyrics are essentially poems with music added!

Of course, there has been a lot of PSB news since the autumn. First, they announced the greatest hits tour, Dreamworld, and Sarah and I will be off to the Arena in May 2020 to see Neil and Chris once again! Also, there was a new album announcement. At that time, the title wasn’t revealed, just the first single, Dreamland, and recently Burning the Heather has been released, but they have since revealed that the album title will be Hotspot, another one-word title to the surprise of absolutely nobody who knows anything about Pet Shop Boys albums, lol! I don’t think it was intentional at first, but after about 3 or 4 albums, when either Actually or Introspective came out, I think someone mentioned it to Neil and Chris, and it has been a tradition ever since! Hotspot will be released in January.

You may recall that, back in the summer, I had an optical emergency, and needed new specs, which resulted in me having two new pairs of glasses, distance and reading. At that time, I started on the Object Lessons book, Eye Chart, by William Germano. I have now finished this book, meaning I have read 6 Object Lessons books this year. In total, I have managed 18 books this year with 4 weeks remaining of 2019. Considering that I didn’t start on the books until April, that’s not too bad.

For anyone interested in the Gallagher Girls series, by Ally Carter, about the spy school, and my ongoing challenge to get the series via charity shops, I have now got the fourth book, Only the Good Spy Young, which I found at the Age UK shop on Monton Road recently, so I only need the 5th book now to complete the set, as I own books 1 to 4 and also book 6. I plan to read the series once I have them all, although I probably could start sooner.

9th November marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that time, as a 16 year old at sixth form college, it took us all by surprise, although I since learned that a lot of stuff was going on in the Eastern Bloc which kinda led to the events in Berlin in 1989, events which actually started in Hungary in 1988 when their head honcho realised that their economy was stagnating and he went off to see Gorbachev in Moscow. He was a bit concerned about Soviet history of sending the tanks in, but he needn’t have worried this time. The Soviet premier knew the same stuff was happening in the USSR and things would need to change soon, so he wasn’t going to send the tanks in to Budapest if Hungary wanted to go all Western and open their borders up. I have made a start on The Berlin Wall, by Frederick Taylor, but that might be an Ongoing Concern for some time, lol, as it’s a bit of a chunky hardback and not really a book I want to lug around with me.

While we’re on the subject of the 30th anniversary of the end of the Iron Curtain, I really could do with finishing 1989: The Year That Changed the World, by Michael Meyer. I started that book quite some time ago, but really need to resume and finish it! I still can’t believe the 1980s are so long ago now! Mind you, even the 1990s are a while back. This year marked 25 years since I graduated from university in 1994! In May this year, it was 20 years since United won the Treble when Ole put the ball in the Germans’ net on 26th May 1999!

Funnily enough, United have won 2-1 this evening, as well, although against Tottenham Hotspur, not Bayern Munich! Marcus Rashford got both our goals this evening. Ole’s our manager these days, but did score another against Bayern when we had the Treble Anniversary match in May and stuffed Bayern’s old boys 5-0 at Old Trafford twenty years to the day that he made history in the Nou Camp.

On the Ongoing Concerns front, one hardback I am taking around with me is Me, by Sir Elton John, his autobiography. Very enjoyable and quite funny. Need to get on with it, my sister has put in a request to read it when I’ve finished with it! I could go on to Face It, by Debbie Harry, which I got at the same time as Sir Elton John’s book. They were on offer at Asda in Swinton not long ago.

I picked up something of an interesting book at Waterstone’s the other week, the premise of which sounded like a good laugh. The book is Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente, and it sounds as though someone has combined The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, with the Eurovision Song Contest, which has resulted in a pan-galactic version of Eurovision with it’s dodgy songs and biased voting, and set it, musically, in the 70s glam rock era! Showing my age here, lol, but glam rock was in when I was a baby! Slade and Wizzard were doing battle for the Christmas number 1 spot back in 1973. So many of the best Christmas records came out in the 70s and 80s, actually! One or two before or since, but the vast majority of classic festive records for this time of year came out during the 70s and 80s! My all-time fave Christmas song came out 32 years ago in 1987, and is the legendary Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl.

Absolute 80s currently playing Don’t Leave Me This Way by The Communards, one of my all-time favourite songs! Not much of a dancer, lol, but this one is practically guaranteed to get me up on the dancefloor at a disco! Number 1 and best-selling single of 1986, pop pickers!

I started out this blog with the Round Tuit, and perhaps I should make that some kind of theme on this blog when I get around to any book that I have had knocking around for some time! There are quite a few that I have had for absolutely ages and not read, so we shall start a new category… the “A Round Tuit” book list for books I’ve eventually got around to reading! Some of them might be half-read books that I get around to resuming and finishing off. Perhaps Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières, for instance.

Busy with the steel band tomorrow night and Wednesday next week, then my team’s Christmas meal next Thursday, so we will finish work early and head off to eat. I will also have to get some more Christmas shopping in and do some pressie-wrapping while wearing my United Santa hat and listening to festive songs, so I may or may not get a blog in before Christmas, but I hope I will get one in between Christmas and New Year. I will probably stick to not bothering with the Goodreads Challenge. I think challenges like that skew reading habits. You feel like you need to read a lot of short books so that you can get as many in as you can during the year, and therefore it discourages the reading of chunky monkeys. If you stop giving a toss, it’s very freeing, as it says in those books I’ve read about not giving a f**k! You’re not skimming, you’re not sticking to short books, you are taking your time and savouring what you read, and if you read an epic novel or two, and it takes you a while to get through them, so what?!

Maybe one day, I will go back to that, but I rather like not giving a shit about targets! Reading should be about pleasure and enjoyment. Even when I read non-fiction, it’s still for pleasure, I read factual stuff I’m interested in and most of my reading in 2019 has been factual. I did my fair whack of having to read books by a certain time when I was a student and what happened back in those days was that I was left, after graduation, with quite a few books I can’t really remember! I can certainly remember some of those I did read in their entirety, such as The Magic Toyshop, by Angela Carter, Death In Venice, by Thomas Mann, and The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, but some of the others, particularly the classics and chunky novels, I have a hard time remembering anything about the plots because I had to skim-read! Even though this one wasn’t particularly chunky, I just cannot remember anything about the plot of Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood! Sorry, Margaret! It was on one of my literature modules for my degree, but I can only remember the title and author.

I’d better get this finished as Match of the Day is coming on soon! In case I don’t get another blog in this side of 25th December, I will finish by wishing all my followers a very Merry Christmas and hope you get lots of books, or at least bookstore gift cards!

Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Pier Review – Jon Bounds and Danny Smith
• One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem – Neil Tennant
• Eye Chart – William Germano
• Only the Good Spy Young – Ally Carter
• The Berlin Wall – Frederick Taylor
• 1989: The Year That Changed the World – Michael Meyer
• Me – Sir Elton John
• Face It – Debbie Harry
• Space Opera – Catherynne M. Valente
• The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
• The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
• Death In Venice – Thomas Mann
• The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins-Gilman
• Surfacing – Margaret Atwood

Floating Islands and Local Plays By Local People!

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Hello again, fellow Bookworms!

That dessert in the photo is the Floating Island I mentioned in my last blog. Mum and I had these at Ponte Vecchio on our first full day at our resort in Mauritius. The usual Grand Port buffet restaurant needed to be closed for some reason, so they opened up the Italian restaurant for lunch, and Mum and I had a lovely meal there, especially this dessert. However, that meant we wanted this dessert again, but it wasn’t on their evening menu, and led to this, which would not be out of place as a Monty Python sketch…

Mum: We would like the Floating Island, please.

Waiter: I’m very sorry, that’s only on our lunch menu.

Mum: When are you open for lunch?

Waiter: We’re not.

See what I mean?! Don’t get me wrong, we did enjoy our accommodation for the most part, but there were some areas for improvement on their part! So, I still think, of all the jollies I’ve ever been on, the El Dorado Seaside Suites on the Riviera Maya in Mexico still tops the list. That’s where we went in 2013, as you may recall, as part of my 40th birthday celebrations that year. I certainly think, for free onsite activities, the Shandrani has plenty going for it. The setting is beautiful too. We were there in their winter, as it’s in the southern hemisphere, so there were some issues with finding one of the restaurants, Le Sirius, when some of the lamps had their timings wrong and were off when it was dark. As I said, I would tell them, if they ask, that we enjoyed it on the whole, but I would give some constructive criticism around areas which need improving.

I did like the Beachcomber travel wallet we got before we went on the holiday, though. That was a lovely touch when our documents came with about a fortnight to go before the hols. I will be using that for future holidays for tickets and stuff!

Let’s get on with some book stuff now, and we can return to jollies later. Sock, from the Object Lessons series, is still an ongoing concern. I get bits read when I’m on my lunch at work. They are only short books, though, so they don’t take too long to read. As the book talks about socks and other similar items of footwear and foot wrapping, it also mentions puttees, which, for me, was a reminder of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières. I was reading that back in the day, back in the 1990s, and got halfway through it, my bookmark is still in there between pages 206 and 207, but I don’t know what happened, perhaps I got distracted by other things and haven’t finished it off. I should do, but part of me wonders if I need to re-read up to that point to refresh myself of what happened, as it’s been a bloody long time!

As I recall, I was enjoying it at the time, although I had to look a lot of things up, especially Greek words! I have been to a couple of Greek islands since then, though, so that may help, although I’ve not been to Kefalonia, which is where this novel is actually set. I have been to Santorini, which is beautiful and I would recommend it to anyone, and also to Kos for the day when we were on holiday in Turkey. The novel was hugely popular back then, seemed like everyone was reading it at that time! It appealed to me on the music front.

As we’re on books I’ve had for ages, here we have one that I’ve had for quite some time, although not as long as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Have any of you read this one?

We have English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale. Published in 2000, so it’s more recent, only 19 years old, lol, and I’m not sure I’ve had it a full 19 years. On the back of my copy is a price sticker for £1.00, so I got it from a charity shop when I bought it, I didn’t pay the full £8.99 that was the RRP when it came out and is stated on the back of the book. Obviously, something appealed to me at the time when I bought it, but it has been around amongst my TBR Library for some time and has not yet been read. OK, the same can be said of a lot of books, lmao, but for some reason, this one does keep catching my eye and sticks out as a Book I’ve Had For Donkey’s Years But Not Read Yet!

I’ve still not read any fiction this year, just been poetry and non-fiction, but I went back to the staff book club at work the other day, and our next book is actually a play, so we have drama on the cards here!

The last time I studied a play, I was at university, so it’s a pretty long time ago as I graduated 25 years ago! My final year dissertation was about plays, as it was on the theme of lies and liars in the plays of Henrik Ibsen. I know two of the three plays I based my thesis on were A Doll’s House and The Pillars of Society. I think the other one may have been The Wild Duck.

However, the book club reading matter is rather closer to home. In fact, I doubt it could be any more local than A Taste of Honey, by Shelagh Delaney! Delaney wrote this play when she was only 19 years old. She was from Salford, from the Broughton area, and the play is also set here. I know this might make me sound like those two weirdo shopkeepers from The League of Gentlemen, but A Taste of Honey really is a local play by a local person! I may even see if there’s any performances on YouTube as I think you really need to see a performance if you’re studying a play. It does help. You are reading something which is meant to be acted out.

Just pulled a book out of my purple Kipling bag. All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. I had started reading that last year, given that 2018 was 100 years since the end of the First World War. I got myself a new handbag though, so changed over to that mostly. My current bag fits the Object Lessons books, but I would need to go back to bigger handbags, really to start having Handbag Books again, or take them with me in an extra bag. That has been known. Maybe I should start a Backpack Books list? I have a Hogwarts backpack that I bought myself not long ago for the trip up to North Shields with Salford Steel, so sometimes I take that with me to places as well as my handbag, and there are often books in my backpack! Sometimes I set off with them, sometimes I come home with them!

Just how bloody hot was it on Thursday?! It was crazy! I would love to know what temperatures it reached in Salford and Manchester on Thursday, because it was still bloody boiling even in the evening! After work, I went into town for an event organised by Cruse – UK readers may know of Cruse, they’re an organisation who provide bereavement support, and this was a group for adults who have lost a parent. The meet up was at Manchester Central Library, and by the time it was over, I came out of the library around quarter to eight in the evening and it was still absolutely boiling! Then I crossed the tram lines and went to Wagamama to eat. Came out of there around an hour later… still pretty damn warm! Quarter to nine at night and still ridiculous temperatures! If it weren’t for the familiar surroundings, I would have questioned if I was in Manchester! Perhaps it was a parallel Manchester, but with hot weather?! It certainly wasn’t the usual weather for my neck of the woods, lol!

When I had got to town from Swinton on the bus, I had time for a quick visit to Waterstone’s before heading to the event, and purchased a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole – the edition with the red cover and yellow hot dogs on it – I love that cover, and believe the book is meant to be very funny. If I am going to get back into fiction, I think I want something that’s going to give me a good laugh! Actually, when I looked it up on Amazon just now, there was a glowing review of it by Sir Billy Connolly, who said it was his favourite book of all time, and I think you all know I’ve been a big fan of the Big Yin for donkey’s years! My all-time favourite comedian.

I have actually got his Made in Scotland book, which I started a while ago, so I can continue with that, but that’s not fiction, so wouldn’t get me back into made up stuff.

On the List Challenges list for this blog, I now have 82 different books listed for the things I’ve mentioned so far this year on my blogs, which means we’re into our third page in terms of published lists. When a list is published, there are 40 items to a page. Given that I didn’t start blogging this year until April, that’s not too bad, really. This list is going to be shorter than usual, I suspect, but probably as random as ever! We have poetry, plays, books about the art of not giving a f**k, children’s books, historical fiction, science fiction, books about medical conditions and disabilities, autobiographies, object lessons, travel, and books about books! Bit of young adult, too. My lists have a lot of random stuff on them. I am a very random person. You might have noticed, lol!

You may recall from previous blogs, way back in 2012, after the London Olympics and Paralympics, that I put a photo up of me with a gold postbox. I think I did, anyway. Royal Mail painted postboxes gold up and down the UK in places of significance relating to athletes who won gold for Great Britain in those home Games, and we have one in Salford in honour of Dame Sarah Storey, the cyclist who won multiple golds in the Paralympics that summer. I think she won 4 golds if I remember rightly.

Anyway, Royal Mail have now painted some other postboxes white with cricket bats and stumps to celebrate England’s victories in the Cricket World Cups for our women’s team in 2017 and our men’s team this year, and as Old Trafford, Lancashire’s ground, was a host venue, there is a celebratory postbox in town. Possibly there isn’t a postbox near the cricket ground itself, maybe there is, but there is now a cricket-themed postbox in town and I saw it on Thursday night, so I thought you might like to see it. I’ve only read one book that’s cricket-related, but that was the hilarious Penguins Stopped Play, by Harry Thompson! I definitely recommend it. Even if you’re not into cricket, it is so funny! It is on my list of books which made me laugh my arse off while reading them!

Another funny book I can recommend, one that I read a couple of years ago now, is Round Ireland With a Fridge, by Tony Hawks. I remembered it again recently because of Mr Hawks’ previous claim to fame before he became a published writer… as a pop star, albeit a one hit wonder. He and a couple of mates teamed up in the late eighties and, under the name of Morris Minor and the Majors, reached number 4 in the UK singles charts in early 1988 with a comedy rap hit called Stutter Rap (No Sleep ‘Til Bedtime), a send-up of the likes of the Beastie Boys who were hugely popular back in 1987-88! As BBC4 shows old Top of the Pops on Friday nights, they’d got to the stage where it was late 1987 and early 1988, and this song was being performed on the show on some of the TOTPs that I had recorded and watched on my Sky+ box, and that reminded me that this was the first bit of fame enjoyed by Tony Hawks before his writing career!

Incidentally, BBC4 are now up to April 1988 in terms of Top of the Pops, and thus Heart by the Pet Shop Boys is number 1, so I was a very happy bunny watching it last night! The main reason I was particularly keen on watching the shows from December 1987 and into January 1988 was that Always On My Mind was number 1 for four weeks, so I was basically watching those shows because of Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe! There were other good tunes as well, including Stutter Rap, which was quite witty for a daft novelty record, but I admit I was watching because I’m a PSB fan!

So, what other things have I bought recently on the book front? There’s Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch, and the much talked-about Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens. Feels like every book group on Facebook mentions that novel! Perhaps I should see what it’s like? I’m not really one for much talked about books, but then a lot of those seem to be crime thrillers, so that’s not really my genre anyway. This seems a bit more general fiction even if there is crime and mystery in it.

Wonder what the Booker Prize nominations are for this year? I tend to find winners of such prizes off-putting. I did enjoy Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, but I’ve attempted one or two others that have won the Booker Prize, and didn’t get very far with them. Found myself plodding and wondering if the plot was going to get moving at all! It was The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, that I found hard-going, and I did swap my original copy at a pub restaurant some years ago in exchange for Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, which I loved! I did get another copy of The Luminaries, though, thinking I might try it again, as I was having a book slump at the time we attempted it for our book group.

Well, the list on List Challenges is now up to 89 books, lol! I think that’s about it for now! More about books, holidays and other waffle coming soon, but until then, take care and Happy Reading!

Joanne x x x

Books mentioned in this blog entry…

• Sock – Kim Adrian
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
• English Passengers – Matthew Kneale
• A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen
• The Pillars of Society – Henrik Ibsen
• The Wild Duck – Henrik Ibsen
• A Taste of Honey – Shelagh Delaney
• All Quiet On the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• Made in Scotland – Sir Billy Connolly
• Penguins Stopped Play – Harry Thompson
• Round Ireland With a Fridge – Tony Hawks
• Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch
• Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton
• Girl With a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier