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The Flight of the Falcon Daphne du Maurier It’s very difficult to summarise this book, especially without giving away the plot. However, The Flight of the Falcon does play a large part in the story. It’s set in the fictional town of Ruffano, somewhere in Italy, around 20 years after the Second World War – people have telephones and drive cars, and the war is mentioned slightly. The main character is a courier, what we would call a tour guide, and his life is bowling along as such until a crime takes place. Some of the tourists that he is escorting insist that he reports said crime to the police, and he does so, but goes on the run immediately afterward because he thinks that the police will find him guilty, as he had a brief but innocent contact with the victim (he believes, at first, that it was this contact that caused the crime). He goes back to his hometown of Ruffano, and the story unfolds from there. The more he finds out, the worse he thinks it will be for him. Until the very end, when all is explained. I didn’t guess any of the story except the very last bit, and was gripped throughout. Recommended

to men who love

fraught with perils unknown

Some Velvet Morning ~ Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood

liaison of dangerous dimensions,

International Velvet - Catatonia

I'm sorry to hear that Adrian hasn't been very well, Kev! Poor thing . It's nowhere near on the same level, but Olle had a little cough and stuffy nose last month and I bought this Vicks Cool Mist thing for him: Vicks Mini Cool Mist Ultrasonic Humidifier (compact, quiet, for better sleep, cough and cold, comfort, essential oils, humidity, rooms up to 15m2) VUL525 : Amazon.co.uk: Home & Kitchen I wonder if it might help a little bit when Adrian is home? I had the same cold and it actually helped me too 😅

Blue Velvet - Bobby Vinton

Poor big fella, he can't believe it 😯

femme fatale, risking a

Tangled Up In Blue ~ Bob Dylan

Song Sung Blue - Neil Diamond

Why I Sing the Blues - B.B. King

attention from Dolly the

Watch the little dog. 90269-6ecf06f9c473c1cde76224b3710d562e.mp4

the hopes of capturing

Deacon Blues ~ Steely Dan

Custard Pie Blues - Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (two of the best)

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