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Cum on feel the noize - Slade

I think he may well have done Madeleine. Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshananthan “Many people have died there: some killed by the Sri Lankan Army and the state, some by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and some by the Tamil separatists, whom you know as the terrorists. Many people, of course, have also lived.” This is a novel set during the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and early 1990s. It concerns Sashi, who is sixteen and her four brothers, charting their progress through the turbulent times of the civil war. The novel won the women’s prize for fiction in 2024. Sashi’s progress towards her goal of becoming a doctor is charted over the years in parallel with the development of the violence and unrest. Although this is fiction, it is very much based on the real events and Ganeshananthan charts the violence from all sides: the Sri Lankan government, the Tamil Tigers and the Indian peacekeepers. Because it is effectively a family saga the impact on the family is at the centre with losses of friends, family and beloved colleagues. The title has some meaning. Ganeshananthan makes the complexities and nuance of the situation clear, all sides have blood on their hands: “I did not wait. Neither did the war. It was with us now. Since Dayalan and Seelan would not tell us, I went out and asked my friends what they had heard or knew, and in that way began to collect information about the new lives people were choosing. Were they responding to the war or were they making it? Boys joined in droves; the ranks of the militant groups swelled. Almost every week now one of our neighbours told Amma about those they knew who were going. People spoke about it more and more freely. Some of the parents were proud. “What did we expect them to do, after all,” said Jega Uncle, Saras Aunty’s husband. His nephew had joined. “After what they did in Colombo, how did they expect us to react?”” Ganeshananthan looks at the space between militarised societies and questions of choice and coercion, In the relationships between the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil population I saw parallels with the IRA and the Catholic population in Northern Ireland. The novel is by no means perfect, but it is very effective and stays in the mind. 8 out of 10 Starting Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

risked developing a nervous

I think Christopher Lee knew M R James when he was at Cambridge.

viscous brew, sozzling this

The Haunted Library edited by Tanya Kirk A Tales of the Weird collection about libraries and books, selected by Tanya Kirk who is a librarian at St John’s College in Cambridge. There are stories by S Levett Yeats, M R James, Algernon Blackwood, H D Everett, Mary Webb, Margaret Irwin, Hester Holland, Alfred Noyes, L P Hartley, A N L Munby, Russell Kirk, William Croft Dickinson, Penelope Lively and C J Faraday. The introduction is good and the whole collection is one of the better ones in this series. The stories vary in date from 1895 to 2020. This is an updated version of a 2016 collection curated by the same author. There is one of M R James’s more well-known stories and a quote in the introduction by actor Christopher Lee illustrates their power: “He writes his stories so that we might feel just as if we were reading a newspaper, and his characters seemed at first impression to be the kind you could meet on any street. Then by dint of one phrase or sentence a very different picture would emerge from such an apparently normal situation. To me, that is the very essence of terror.” There are a couple more stories in the Jamesian tradition and a particularly good one by C J Faraday, written in 2020. She is also a fellow of St John’s College. The Mary Webb story is a rather light-hearted pastiche and is also very effective. There is also humour in Penelope Lively’s contribution when a very snobbish woman buys what turns out to be a haunted typewriter and starts to take on traits of the previous owner who was very loud and gauche. Hartley’s story concerns a writer who starts to realise on of his nastier creations may be alive. The structure of this story is unusual and works well. There are a couple of stories about evil books and evil booksellers. I’ll end this with a quote from M R James on writing ghost stories: “On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories: not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient: while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.” 9 out of 10 Starting Bog People: A working class anthology of folk horror edited by Hollie Starling

a dangerously potent and

Beautiful Noise ~ Neil Diamond

Aww, that's such a good idea!

Beautiful Dreamer - Roy Orbison

Beautiful Stranger - Madonna

Tall Handsome Stranger - Marty Robbins

Long Tall Sally - Little Richard

hammer metres, after swigging

managed to chuck a

Tall In The Saddle ~ Joan Armatrading

She gives very good and detailed instructions and many of the patterns are suitable for beginners. I love her blankets and have made a great many over the years 😊

Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddle - Gene Autry

My son has a new favourite called 'There's a Bear in your Book' by Tom Fletcher. This book is unusual in that it is quite interactive. You have to shake the book, flap the book, rock the book, and imagine sheep, all in order to get the bear ready for bed and off to sleep. I alsk bought him another Julia Donaldson book called The Highway Rat. It reminds me of a poem, but I cannot remember which. Maybe it is The Owl and the Pussycat.

Puss 'n' Boots - Adam Ant

These Boots Are Made for Walking - Nancy Sinatra (Walkin' My Baby Back Home ~Nat King Cole....love this song by Nat King Cole and also love the version by Johnny Ray, who I believe had the original.)

Ozzy Osbourne, Last Rites. Companion to the Daoud and sent to me through the post by a friend of mine.

Walking back to happiness - Connie Francis

Oh what a lovely website, I'm going to follow her on FB, I'm desperately trying to learn how to crochet and made a stripey blanket in double crochet but that's my limit! Her colours are lovely and she's made me want to read Brambly Hedge even more,especially the winter one! Maybe it's a nostalgia thing, as she says there's something very comforting about them, I like to think of Jill Barklem as the Essex equivalent of Beatrix Potter, and it's a shame the books aren't as widely known. Good luck with the blanket, keep us informed of your progress!