Brian.

The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through thr glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort. The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett.

No, it’s the Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition. I tend to only buy Folio Editions of books I love and I haven’t read this one yet.

It was my birthday last week so I treated myself to some new books. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson The Unwomanly Face of War - Svetlana Alexievich The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire The Earth is Weeping - Peter Cozzens A Storm of Swords pt 2 - George R.R. Martin hmmm It, I’ll Start Tomorrow - Action Bronson Fighting for the French Foreign Region - Alex Lochrie How to Read and Why - Harold Bloom Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before - Dr Julie Smith

Old thread I know but I thought I would revive it. 51.

I’m taking a bit of a risk with my next book, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. I picked it up a while ago to complete a ‘Buy One Get On Half Price’ deal at Waterstones. Hopefully I’ve not chose a stinker.

Tonight’s dram of choice is Deanston 18, Bourbon barrel matured. It’s absolutely lovely.

My go to crime fiction recommendations are anything by Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, and Val McDermid. They all write series and standalone books so check to make sure you don’t pick one halfway through a series.

First Costa Rico beat Japan and then Morocco beat Belgium. It’s really good seeing the less fancied sides putting in such good performances.

This morning I ran my first race for quite a few years, a MoRunning 5k for charity. I wasn't expecting to perform particularly well and I was right, but somehow still managed to come in 4th overall. We were blessed with the perfect weather for it which always makes it more enjoyable.

Three more books finished in the last two weeks. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (4/5) Time for one of my pet hates. I don't like it when publishers, and too a lesser extent writers, adopt something from a book which has had recent publishing success. I remember a glut of book titles along the lines of 'The Girl Who' or 'The Girl On' after The Girl on the Train proved to be a runaway hit. Similarly, ever since the success of The Tattooist of Auschwitz there has been a spate of titles following 'The (insert job or title) of (somewhere significant)' format. This irritates me to such an extent that I will purposefully avoid these kind of books. Ok, rant over. Despite my reservations about the title, the synopsis sounded interesting enough that I decided to give this one a go. The fact that the book is partly based in Syria also helped sway me. The book starts with husband and wife Nuri and Afra in the UK awaiting processing for their application for asylum. The rest of the book tells the story of their journey to this point and also their application process. This is a book packed with emotion and really puts into perspective the suffering many asylum seekers go through. Throughout the book I was struck as to how much detail there was in the asylum seekers journey so it wasn't a surprise to find out that Lefteri volunteered at a migrant camp in Athens in her earlier life. There is no doubt that this helped her shape the characters and the plot in a way that really tells their story. Before the Frost by Henning Mankell (3/5) Almost exactly four years ago I read the last book in the Kurt Wallander series and said goodbye to a character I had come to love reading about. I knew that Kurt appeared in this book which is about his daughter Linda and her becoming a police officer but as the time line was jumbled I decided to give it a few years before picking it up. When I finished The Troubled Man, Kurt had retired and was slowly losing his mind and his health. It felt odd reading a book set before this time period and I was also aware that this was meant to be a trilogy that stopped after one book. These things all combined to make me concerned that this book wouldn't live up to my hopes. I'll start by saying that this isn't a bad book and I don't think Mankell could write a bad book, but it just didn't feel write. Linda as a character is pretty annoying and constantly makes really bad decisions. Perhaps this was Mankell's way of portraying her as someone who has little experience with police work. Kurt was always a bit of a grumpy git when he was struggling with things, but in this book he comes across as completely unsociable and impossible to work with. There is a real disconnect between Kurt in this book and Kurt in the other books which I did not get on with. Despite these failings (in my eyes at least) I have given it 3 stars because the plot works well and it is well written. I have really struggled to read in recent weeks but this book kept me interested throughout when many others have been put aside. Das Reich by Max Hastings (2/5) This is one of the earlier books written by Hastings and is about the 2nd SS Panzer division. To achieve this aim Hastings doesn't concentrate soley on the Panzer division but jumps between the perspective of French resistance fighters and British SOE operatives. It's an admirable attempt but I feel as though it just doesn't work as desire. Around the time this book was written Hastings also wrote The Battle for the Falklands, and Bomber Command. Both of these books follow a much more tradition format and timeline and as a result felt a like a more cohesive work when I read them. I persevered with it despite getting a bit bored with it at times and I've never done that with a Hasting book before.

I just finished Das Reich by Max Hastings and picked up my next book, The Tesseract by Alex Garland.

Check out This thread.

👏 Bravo Japan, very well done.

The opening game was atrocious.

I did have a feeling that when they moved to a 6 episode season they had moved away from the books. I’m quite happy to hear the books are different as that means I can read them without knowing too much about the plot etc. Shame about Tosh not being in the books though.

I've been binge watching Shetland recently and I'm really enjoying it. I didn't realise that they are based on books until after I had watched the first episode and by that point there was no point in stopping. The 3 main police characters are really good and I think that Tosh is superbly played by Alison O'Donnell.

How far in to it are you? I usually advise people to give a book 50-100 pages before abandoning it but with Crime & Punishment I would probably give it a bit more time. I’m currently reading it for a third time but I do remember struggling with it the first time I read it. However, once I had finished it I just couldn’t get it out of my head and it’s a book I still think about on a regular basis 10 years after the first read.

Can I suggest you use spoiler tags going forward as it’s very easy for someone to inadvertently read something they don’t want. Ta.

I've only managed 6 so far.

Time for my next update and another two books completed. A Murder of Quality by John le Carre (3/5) This is George Smiley book number 2 and we still haven't got to the world of espionage yet. In this book George Smiley is asked to do a favour for a friend and look into a letter she had recieved. The writer of the letter says that she thinks her husband is trying to kill her. By the time George arrives at the posh school the letter came from the wife is already dead. This was a pretty decent read, helped in no small part by it's brevity (150 pages). There is nothing amazing here but I did enjoy le Carre's criticism of the private schooling. The Vaccine by Joe Miller, Ugur Sahin, and Ozlem Tureci (3/5) Another Kindle book, this one is about how a small company in Germany called BioNTech developed the first Covid-19 vaccine. An interesting book because it investigates not only the technological side of developing a vaccine but also how international politics game into play. It also stands out that the two people behind BioNTech, husband and wife paring of Sahin and Tureci have Turkish roots. Another very interesting part to the story is how BioNTech were a cancer treatment company and not into making vaccines. At the outbreak of Covid-19 they decided to put what they know into trying to develop an MRNA vaccine for Covid. This was a huge risk for the company but it clearly paid off.

I've recently had a hankering for the sort of old british TV I watched as a kid so I subscribed to Britbox. To my surprise I found a recently made TV show with a name familiar to me, Karen Pirie. For those who don't know Karen Pirie is the main character in a crime series written by Val McDermid. It's a series which I really enjoyed reading so I watched the show with a bit of worry about how it would be. I have been pleasantly surprised to be totally honest. It's not great and there are some bits of acting which probably should have been re-shot but on the whole it's been good. The casting of both Karen Pirie and Jason Murray is spot on with both actors really doing their characters justice. So far there are only 3 episodes which forms a mini season covering the first book, A Distant Echo. Hopefully they decide to carry on as I think they've done a decent job.

Mostly ok. I’ve got it up and running but I’m having issues getting an LCD display on the water cooling pump to work. It seems to be a common issue so I’ll have to try again tomorrow. I also need to stress test the system before I throw any heavy processing or graphics tasks at it.

An autocorrect mistake 😁 It should say PC.

I try to do the same thing at least once a year if I can. I always feel that it's the ideal way for me to decompress and kind of reset. I'm currently waiting around for a delivery of parts so I can build my new PM tomorrow.

No, I used Amazon.