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gonna be starting up Gravity's Rainbow as my next long-term read

Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy. This is a strange one. Margaret Kennedy was a prolific author from the 1920's and I've read several of her books before and enjoyed them. This one from 1951 is about Lucy and how she remakes her life after being jilted on her wedding day. Lucy is a survivor and a realistic one, she makes mistakes and isn't good at everything and there's a feel good ending but it's also strangely inconclusive in many ways. I like books where all the ends are not neatly tied up but here there are story arcs which seem to meander into nothing and don't leave you speculating what might have happened. It's an interesting read but is very much of its time.

i should probably skim the wikipedia or something to make sure i at least know what actually happened lol but yeah in retrospect i really should have been referring to some kind of guide as i went. feels like its too late now though. oops.

1. Lucy Carmichael - Margaret Kennedy **** 2. Clown Town -Mick Herron ****1/2 3. An Instruction in Shadow - Kevin >Hearne ****1/2 4. Introducing Mrs Collins - Rachel Parris ***1/2 5. In the Blink of an Eye- Jo Callaghan 4 Peach Street to Lobster Lane - Felicity Cloake

Eleanor was exceptional in that she ruled Aquitaine (her dowry and getting on for 1/3 of present day France) as Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right - her father's will specified that Aquitaine would not pass to her husband on marriage as was the rule in those days and that she would keep it until her death. I read this ages ago as background for my job (tour guide in Bordeaux where she married Louis ) and thoroughly enjoyed it though the sheer unpleasantness of some of the male nobles made it hard reading in places.

Yes Madeleine, Richard was a hostage and cost the country a great deal! The End of Mr Why by Scarlett Thomas “Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.” This is an unusual novel which involves a mystery and an element of detection. This is a significant part of the novel which examines consciousness, quantum physics, time travel, time, the nature of reality, the nature of love and longing, not to mention an awful lot of Deridda (and Heidegger) and the sort of discussions about philosophy of the sort I remember from my university years. There’s a fair amount of sex as well. Ariel Manto is a PhD student whose mentor has disappeared. The mystery revolves around a Victorian book titled as per the title of the novel. There is only one known copy of the book. Ariel happens to stumble across it in a local second-hand bookstore. In it is the recipe for a liquid that will take the person drinking it into a place called the troposphere. The troposphere is not a physical place and yet it feels physical, you can move around it and jump into people in the real worlds minds and see their thoughts. It’s a bit more complex than that. As one reviewer has said it’s a bit like the Matrix but with less guns, more philosophy, more metaphysics and no Keanu Reeves, although the Adam character comes pretty close. The novel is iconoclastic and playful. The real life landscape is bleak and the university is crumbling and Ariel sums up what many feel: "Real life is regularly running out of money, and then food. Real life is having no proper heating. Real life is physical. Give me books instead, give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book". It's actually quite fun and doesn’t take itself and its absurdity too seriously. 7 out of 10 Starting Less by Andrew Greer

This is on my TBR and I’ve been advised elsewhere that in order to better understand Ulysses it’s a good idea to first read The Dubliners. I have not yet done that either 😁 There is also much in the way of online guidance to help as you go along. Well done getting through it, though

#2. Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) Well, after about 9 months of picking away at it I finally got through this and I probably understood like 7% of it. It references a ton of things, none of which I know anything about, not even The Odyssey or Shakespeare and I don't know anything about Ireland or the 1900s or Ireland in the 1900s. Every chapter is also written in a different writing style and some of them might as well have been gibberish to me. That being said, the 7 or so % I did get was usually pretty funny and often enough even the bits I don't get at all have some fun lines. The edition I have has a ton of notes and stuff in the back and I might have referenced those had I known they were there before I got to the last chapter lol. Speaking of the last chapter, gosh I wish the whole book was about Molly Bloom singing songs and whoring around solid ending there and now that I'm on the other side of it I do think of the whole of it a bit more fondly than when I was trudging through it though you can't convince me some of this isn't unnecessarily padded, especially the penultimate chapter written in a Q&A format (I liked the point A and point B but everything in between was mind-numbing). Even though I was grasping at straws a lot the craft of it was never in doubt even if it feels for the sake of itself at times. Hard to rate a book that went this far over my head but I'm gonna say... 7/10

I guess that's why they call it the blues - Elton John

Josie Dew. Long cloud Ride. A woman bikes and hikes across New Zealand.

on his nose, in

I omitted 3 or 4 that weren't quite fitting for this forum. 😁

Summertime Blues - Eddie Cochran

Summertime - Fun Boy Three (my favourite version of the Gershwin song)

Wasn't Richard also a hostage for quite a while, and the English people had to pay a fortune in ransom for him, which didn't make him very popular! I didn't know about the Far Right adopting him,they need to do a bit of research I think! I think he died abroad as well, as you say he spent little time in England at all despite being King.

Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir “A husband or wife did not have the right either to demand sex from his or her spouse or to refuse it, and there was a catalogue of forbidden sexual practices, notably homosexuality, bestiality, certain sexual positions, masturbation, the use of aphrodisiacs, and oral sex, which could incur a penance of three years’ duration. Nor were people to make love on Sundays, holy days, or feast days, or during Lent, pregnancy, or menstruation. People believed that if these rules were disobeyed, deformed children or lepers might result.” Ostensibly a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine who lived in the twelfth century and was the wife of two Kings and the mother of ten (two of whom became Kings) and lived to eighty-two, a great age in those times. She was married to Louis VII of France and Henry II of England. As with the other biography of Weir’s I have read (Katherine Swynford) this is more of a history of the times. That is the history of monarchy and aristocracy of the early Plantagenets and the complex politics of France. There is also a good deal about the mores of the ruling classes and how those interacted with religion as per the quote above. The politics of the time was complex. The English King also owned large parts of France and there were constant minor wars, skirmishes. Weir guides the reader through all of this and Eleanor’s role in it all. At various times she ran her own provinces in France (Aquitaine), ruled England whilst her son Richard was crusading, acted as regent for Henry II when he was warring in France, was imprisoned (in some luxury) by Henry for almost a decade, plotted and schemed with her sons against her husband and lived in a nunnery. It's worth noting a couple of points. There is a fair amount about Richard I (aka Richard the Lionheart). Currently Richard has been one of those adopted by the far right in England to promote and support the current anti migrant anti people of colour messages they are pushing. Ironically Richard spent very little time in England, didn’t speak English, hated the place and spent most of his time in the South of France looking after his possessions there. He did briefly spend some time in Nottingham in the mid 1190s which later was used in the Robin Hood myths. This is an interesting account, but it is very much a political history with Eleanor periodically surfacing in it and playing a significant role. It’s informative if you don’t know much about the early Plantagenets and want to. 7 out of 10 Starting The Duncan Grant Murals in Lincoln Cathedral by Edward Robinson

hand and video camera

In The Summertime ~ Mungo Jerry

I can remember this advice too, I think it's the cold air that helps. I found it worked for one of our children who had mild croup. But I'd definitely get medical advice if it was more severe.

I took Adrian back to hospital because his breathing got loud again. It's called something like 'stator', loud in-breaths. He had to submit to another nebulising. I had to hold a mask over his mouth and noise while he breathed in vapour. An old treatment was to make them breathe in steam or to moisten the atmosphere in the room. He was also given some steroids, which were administered by mouth. As it was the second day he was brought in, he was kept in overnight. He has had quite a good night. He has slept right through and his breathing is quiet.

Best wishes Kev . Thinking of you and Adrian. Sending love to the boy in the struggle with croup.

That sounds very frightening, I hope he gets better soon. I haven't heard of croup for years, I think one of the treatments used to be opening a window, presumably to let in fresh air. I wonder if that's a function that the nebuliser does, getting more oxygen into their system.

One good thing about being wrong is the joy it brings to others. If your outgo exceeds your income, then your upkeep will be your downfall. My wife and I decided to never go to bed angry. We've been awake since Tuesday. My wife said: "That's the 4th time you've gone back for dessert! Doesn't it embarrass you?" I said: "No, I keep telling them it's for you." Being old is when you don't care where your spouse goes, just as long as you don't have to go too. I want someone I can share my entire life with who will leave me alone most of the time.

In the Good Old Summertime - Nat King Cole

One thing that surprised me about the plot was that an injustice was allowed to happen, which would not normally be allowed to happen, at least not in light fiction.