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Shake Hands with Santa Claus - Louis Prima

Amazing! Beautiful song.

Swahili or even !Xóõ,

I'm sure you're familiar with Aled Jones and Malakai Bayoh's beautiful rendition of Walking in the Air, but in case anyone hasn't heard it 💕

I liked some things about the book. I liked the Quilp, Swiveller and the Marchioness characters. I think Dickens was still refining his trade, because his later books were better. The humour was good. With the exception of Dick Swiveller, the fun characters were evil and the good characters were boring.

So do I

I also really like "The Power of Love" by Frankie goes to Hollywood.

I agree with you about the choir. We have a lovely boy in our choir, the son of one of the members, who guest sings occasionally and he sang O Holy Night this year - we were his backing singers - and also did Walking in the Air. He has a beautiful voice but he's 12 now and we can hear his voice is breaking, thankfully it lasted until our Xmas concert this week! Hopefully his new voice will be just as good.

Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton “Civilization was a blessing you never truly appreciated until it threatened to collapse around you.” This one weighs in at a mere 1100 pages: there is a second volume, equally long. Hamilton therefore has plenty of space for worldbuilding, characters and description. He makes the aliens suitably alien. I’m not going to detail the plot: that would take a while! Hamilton does play with some ideas about society, capitalism and socialism. As there are many different planets in the Commonwealth there is room for a variety of societies. Hamilton also plays with styles of governance and the cumbersomeness of bureaucracy. He also injects a certain cynical humour: “Wherever you find human misery, you find lawyers, either causing it or making a profit from it.” “That was the trouble with freethinkers, they had overactive imaginations that made them uncertain.” I can anticipate some difficult moral questions coming up in the next one. This is a proper space opera. If you like your sci-fi hefty and complex this may be for you! 9 out of 10 Starting Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

or Greek, Serbo Croat,

if French is preferred

I love 'O Holy Night' too, Madeleine. It's s beautiful song. Boys's choirs singing are my favourite, particularly as you say, the sopranos. Nothing matches their clear soaring voices.

I will put it on my list.

I like Prokofiev’s Troika, which Greg Lake’s tune is based on and not played anywhere nearly enough this time of year, in my opinion. I also like Merry Merry Christmas by Keb Mo (Kevin Moore) And Elvis Presley’s Merry Christmas Baby. Of the Carols, I prefer Silent Night sung by a boy soprano. And it would not be Christmas without King’s College Choir (with much in the way of boy sopranos).

If it's "pop" songs then it would be "I Believe in Father Christmas" by Greg Lake, of the more traditional/classical songs I would choose "O Holy Night", we've been singing it at my choir and it always brings me out in goosebumps!

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I also cannot decide on an absolute favorite but the song that I really, really, like is" Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" as sung by Judy Garland. Absolutely a nice song.

About three more chapters to go. Poor Nell is going to join the angels. Looks like she has consumption. Tuberculosis is an odd diesease. Would she have succumbed to it if she had not been forced to leave home and roam around the country? TB is an infectious diesease, but nobody seems to worry about being in her company. Mayve it is one of those dieseases that everyone is exposed to. I don't think much of the ending. I am not convinced Sampson Brass would have broken down like that. The first reason is that there is no real evidence against him, just the word of a servant girl. The second reason is whether he refeives immunity from prosecution he would be a ruined man if he confessed. I doubt those lawyer friends of Kit could have offered immunity from prosecution. I also doubt they could have got Kit's guilty verdict overturned. The other thing I did not like was the massive coincidende of one of the lawyers' brothers living in the quiet country village the other side of Birmingham where Nell and her grandfather fetched up. I wondered how they would track her down. If the single gentleman had hired some sort of detective I might have believed it.

The Bear, William Faulkner A totally biased review. I’m never quite sure what the difference is between a short story and a novella and don’t want to ponder it just now. This story is part of the novel Go Down Moses, which I’ve never read. It’s in The Portable Faulkner, which is where I read it and it’s 112 pages long. It’s in five parts and the fourth part is usually left out - according to the editor’s notes at the beginning - because not having read the rest of the book it’s held to be confusing, so the editor put in the fourth part and left it up to the reader to decide whether to read it or not. Naturally I decided to read it and it was suitably confusing, but utterly wonderful. As the title suggests, it’s the story of the hunt of a bear but being Faulkner it’s much more than that and, as usual, I got the overall gist of the story and took my time to luxuriate in the sublime prose. Highly recommended

yeah, i'd be hesitant to recommend it but i totally see why its as beloved as it is. i'll have to check out the curious readers tho i have soooo much podcast time at work lol.

You never hear of a book before, then suddenly reviews come along like buses....I've just been hearing about this on the Curious Readers podcast! Not sure it's for me, but fascinating to read about.

Currently reading The Meursault Investigation as a follow-up to L'Etranger. It's also my book for Algeria in Reading the World.

That one's the publisher's fault! They list them with the barcode as belonging there, same for his other scholarly texts. Fair play to them, they'll sell much more that way.

noms de plume- or

I can't decide what my absolute favorite is, but right up there is Little Drummer Boy. Had to giggle at this ...