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offered it to Cressida

rank already so I

Thank you for reading this book so the rest of us don't have to! Hope your next read is better.

Good Times - Chic

Light Years (1975) James Salter Nope! There are certain books that just rub you up the wrong way. And my god, this book really rubbed me up the wrong way. I think the three reasons it irritated me so much was due to the stylised writing (loathed it), the incessant and banal dialogue (I'd say the book is 80% dialogue) and the story itself (utterly dripping with middle-class tedium). It reminded me of an article I read years ago about literary genres and tropes, one of which was the stream-of-consciousness novel about the bored couple getting a divorce. Well, get ready for some immensely dull middle-class people and their kids. (An additional gripe would be how horrifically American this book is but we'll ignore that since we've got so much else to work with). So the writing style is basically lots of short sentences occasionally interspersed with sudden endings that contain verbs and adjectives. Such as: 'The autumn came. Light danced over the crisp leaves. Marjorie was holding a cup, casually, alone, pale. The house was alone. It stood in shadows. Outside there was a name being called, silently, briskly, hard. Clouds gathered.' I'm not sure how you would describe this style (or if it even has a name) but I found it painful to read. The stop/start nature of it, the jarring means of staggering along with such limitation and simplicity was awful. It's almost as if the book was written for children with simplistic prose and obvious platitudes (things glitter a lot, the light shines a lot, leaves crunch under feet). It's just very dull, obvious, and uninteresting but (like stream-of-consciousness writing) has the distracting effect of appearing clever and fluid when it's actually quite bland and prosaic. Then we come to the dialogue (of which there is a LOT). The book is more play than novel but again the conversations are tedious. "These are beautiful," Eve said. "I think these are better." "Sixty dollars a dozen. What will you use them for?" "You always need wineglasses." "Aren't you afraid they'll break?" "The only thing I'm afraid of are the words ordinary life,'" Nedra said. "Too bad about Arnaud," Neil said. "It's horrible." "Eve says he... may never talk right again," he said to the water glass. He gad a thin mouth, the words leaked out. "They don't know." "Would you like some tea?" Eve asked. "Let me make it," Nedra said, rising quickly to her feet. She disappeared into the kitchen. "Rotten weather, isn't it?" Neil murmured after a pause. "Yes." "It's a lot colder than... last winter," he said. "I guess it is." "Something to do with... the earth's orbit... I don't know. We're supposed to be entering a new ice age." "Not another one," she said. It's essentially that kind of thing for 300 pages. Meandering, dull, middle-class conversations that reiterate the banal state of their lives. And while that might be the point of these conversations, an author really ought to be able to convey the tedium of life without forcing me to experience it for myself. And while we're on the subject of life being boring and pointless, why do so many authors who want to explore this particular theme (won't somebody please think of the poor middle-class people) always seem to imply that there is an alternative? There isn't. That's life. You haven't discovered anything we didn't already know. I truly loathe this kind of middle-class navel-gazing. That it came wrapped in such infantile writing, such a mundane dialogue-heavy narrative, only increased my anger. That all being said, however, there are some who will probably love this book. It takes no time to read and that might be enough to convince you it was good (rather than simplistic and empty). 3/10

but discovered it was

I bought more cream

upset with Cressida and

Sally Was a Good Old Girl - Conway Twitty

Mustang Sally - The Commitments

Ballad of Sally Rose - Emmylou Harris

I never promised you a rose garden - Lynn Anderson

tin. I was really

confront my good self with his findings. 'It says in a book, God exists, Mr Decadent, and so..God exists..do look around you good man, and see the wealth and abundance of His signs..the bees,, the sun, the trees. ' 'Is death part of God's plan.. famine..war..or pestilence..and when are you helping me shift a ton of cat litter frm the entrance?', I enquired, secretly laughing 😃 as my severe countenance hid it expertly.

straight out of the

to volunteer at Johnny and Rosie's Cat Cafe. He was sure he could round up a few more ne'er-do-wells who needed gainful employment. However, that would have to wait. He was heading back to the vicarage to track down his hefty volume of 'Perspicacious Theological Apologist Debates the Existence of God vs Atheism' by Ino Imright. Heaving it into his backpack, he trudged back to the cafe to ...

Red Roses For A Blue Lady ~ Bert Kaempfert

Red On a Rose - Alan Jackson

The Next Day- David Bowie

Bed of Roses - Bon Jovi

I saw a funeral notice for my father's first cousin. She died in 2022, aged 92. She still had her maiden name and there were no tributes, so I suppose she had no children. I found another funeral notice for another first cousin. However, on his funeral notice there were tributes from four children, and he had grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He also had a tribute from his sister and three nephews and nieces. I am using the FindMyPast website. It is better for finding ancestors than living relatives.

Currently reading The Silence Factory, Bridget Collins. Crikey, Andre Agassi's biography Open took a very long time to read!

Roses Are Red (My Love) - Bobby Vinton

9. Ballpark: Baseball in the American City - Pete Goldberger - 4/5 - I really liked this book as it "started" with baseball being played in the 1840's - 1850's and how the ballparks came to being bult. Primarily though it is about the Ballparks that baseball has been played in over the years including detailed descriptions of the parks and their surroundings. Baseball was truly the American pastime for many, many, years though the 1950's and 1960's and then the game started to change. it is still a good game but has lost so much.

Heresy by S J Parris “I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.” A slice of Tudor crime based around an actual historical figure, Giordano Bruno. He was an Italian former monk who left the cloister and escaped the Inquisition. He had unorthodox cosmological views. He also had views on religion and the afterlife that ran counter to those of the Catholic Church. He was in England from 1583 to 1585 and then wandering around Europe for the next seven years. He knew Sidney and Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymasters. Parris manages to hang the whole novel on this relationship. This is set in 1583 and focusses on Oxford. Quite a few of the characters are historical. The disputation with Dr John Underhill was an actual event. There are a series of gruesome murders (when aren’t there) in the college where Bruno is staying. He finds himself having to investigate at the behest of Sidney. There’s a fair amount of philosophising, any number of secretive Catholics, several banned books, priest holes, secret midnight meetings, atmospheric rooms and weather. It’s quite predictable and Bruno does run around hopelessly for a while before he stumbles over the truth. It’s well written with a first person narrator, but it’s nearly 500 pages long. 5 out of 10 Starting The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin