HaydninVienna (Richard) is now settled in comfortably ...

Today is my actual Thingaversary. I think it's time for a new thread. My expectations about the pub being a friendly place have been more than met. I think a round of PGGBs, my shout, would be a brilliant idea.

Thank you Richard. Cheers!

Happy Thingaversary, Richard. I am glad you are enjoying The Green Dragon.

Happy Thingaversary! And happy new thread! Very glad that you have settled in to the Pub.

Happy Thingaversary! They sneak up on you, don't they?

Pub life is grand.

Thanks all! >5 Bookmarque: I absolutely agree.

Happy Thingaversary! Aren't you required to tell what books you've acquired in celebration of the date?

Happy Thingaversery!

The pub is a very friendly place. Cheers!

Thanks Busifer and 2wonderY! >7 2wonderY: I put in a list of 15 new ones near the end of the old thread. I'm now on a brief book-buying hiatus while I read some of them, and pending my forthcoming trip to Africa and Australia.

Now finished Something of His Art by Horatio Clare. A really beautiful little book about a journey from Arnstadt to Lübeck following the journey of the young J S Bach to hear Buxtehude. I wish I could write about Bach, and his music, and the German countryside, as beautifully as Horatio Clare does. I bought it on the strength of a mention by Caroline_McElwee. She gave it 4 stars. I give it, oh, say, 18? I put it on the shelf next to John Eliot Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven.

There is an 18th century engraving of a stylised sun, with the rays labelled with the names of the celebrated composers of the time. Mozart and Haydn are there, with a good few who are rather less familiar today. But the centre of the sun, from which all the rays are coming, is labelled Johann Sebastian Bach. That seems about right.

May I be permitted a "proud Dad" brag (cheese is involved)? My younger son is an apprentice in a restaurant in Canberra. This morning he sent me a picture of something he prepared (he does starters, or entrees as they are often called in Australia):


It's tomato crisps (tomato juice and paste plus sun-dried tomato, blended with tapioca flour and dried in sheets, then briefly deep-fried), with boursin cheese and marigold and nasturtium flowers. For a kid who used to live on Burger King, I think that's pretty good going.

>11 haydninvienna:
Congratulations to the Proud Dad and well done to the son who made his dad proud.

Thanks Peter.

Another book done: Logicomix by Apostolos Dioxiadis et al. My first graphic novel (as they insist in the afterword--"it is--and wants to be--a graphic novel", even though it's an account of the development of modern logic). I loved it. I may have taken a BB from it, even, in that when the young Bertrand Russell is contending with despair he is shown as inspired by Shelley's poem "Alastor".

Now beginning Railways by Simon Bradley. What an opening hook: “If you fell asleep on a moving train tomorrow and awoke to find yourself transported back a century and a half in time—say, to 1862—but still travelling onward, what would the differences be?”.

>11 haydninvienna: What Pete said in #12

>14 haydninvienna: Book Bullet! Both for me and for the Railway Society.

>14 haydninvienna: I already had taken a hit on the railway book. This just opened up the exit wound...

>11 haydninvienna: oh how pretty! And quite skillful.

>17 Darth-Heather: It is, isn't it? Not the sort of thing I would have expected him to be producing. I'll be in Canberra next month and will be going there (inshallah). (But I also hope to go to another Canberra establishment that has been in continuous operation since 1962, which makes it a very old one by Canberra standards, and which was and is a temple of the carnivore lifestyle--steak and Australian red wine.)

>18 haydninvienna: I hope to introduce you some decent South African wine on your way from Livingstone to Oz.

>19 hfglen: Looking forward to it!

Slightly belated Happy Thingaversary and congratulations to your son - looks wonderful (no wonder you're proud of him)

Thanks >21 Peace2: !

And another book done--The Railways by Simon Bradley. A terrific book about the railways of the United Kingdom and their effects on their society. Lots of reminiscence for me too, although I grew up on Australia--the ticketing system he describes as in use until 1990 by the private and nationalised railways (invented by one Thomas Edmondson in 1836) was still in use in Queensland in the late 60s. And I remember carriages with facing pairs of seats crossways the full width of the carriage, with a slam door on each side. Steam hauled too!

Busifer and Hugh (and the Railway Society): recommended.

>23 haydninvienna: Thumbs up!

I tried to buy it from a brick’n’mortar bookshop (I work one block from the largest bookshop still in operation in Stockholm), but no.
Placing an order online as we speak!

And another one: The Second Man by Edward Grierson. A short while ago I'd never heard of a "legal procedural", now I've read 2 of them! Grierson was a barrister and boy can he write a courtroom scene. There is a thread going on at the moment about the best description of a judge in fiction. This book has 4 of them--a trial judge, 2 Lords Justices of Appeal and the Lord Chief Justice. It also has an appeal where new evidence is introduced (very unusual), and references to the review of a death sentence by the Home Secretary. Recommended, and thanks to NinieB for the BB.

Lovely dish by your son, how delightful that he has moved on from Burger King and is developing his skill and artistic talents into a career. :)

>10 haydninvienna: That sounds like a lovely book. A concert I attended last night featured works by Haydn, Liszt, and others, but no Mozart, Bach or Beethoven. I suppose one can't have everything. That's what CDs and playlists are for I suppose.

>26 MrsLee: Something of His Art is indeed a beautiful book. He seems to feel about Bach much the same as I do, but expresses it better.
I like the story that Alan Chapman tells from time to time on KUSC. You know that the gold record on the Voyager space probes has the Second Brandenburg Concerto on it? Someone asked why we didn’t put Bach’s complete works on. Answer given was that doing so would be bragging.

>27 haydninvienna: That's a great anecdote! I tried for years to get the full recording, after Murmurs of Earth was published; even writing directly to Dr. Sagan.

It wasn't until 2017 that the collection was commercially released.

As a professional writer of sorts (hey, what I write is rules but it's still prose and I try to make sure it's good prose), I buy books on writing style. So here's another wishlist item from an Economist review: Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer. Going on the Economist's review, it looks just like my kind of grammar and style book. I note that the review also mentions another book that I have and like very much, Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style. Another one, not mentioned, which I love and which is short on grammar but long on style, is Style by F L Lucas. I love this one so much (I have 3 copies, I think) because he considers that one of the essentials of good writing is good manners. As in, it is bad manners to waste your reader's time, therefore be brief. It is bad manners to confuse your reader, therefore be clear.

Amazon keeps recommending Dreyer's English to me. Are you suggesting I should cave in? That said, I've definitely added Style to my wish list.

>30 jillmwo: I can't say for definite about the Dreyer, but if the Economist is prepared to compare it to Steven Pinker's book, I'd say the Dreyer is worth a shot. The Economist's own style guide is not bad either, although I don't know whether they are still publishing it in dead-tree form.

Speaking of bragging, I'm off on an Adventure tonight. Out of Doha to London on the red-eye, to catch up with wife and daughters, then to Zambia for the conference of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel, a professional organisation of which you have doubtless never heard. The conference is being held in a resort hotel right on Victoria Falls. Pictures will be supplied, inshallah. Then to Durban for a quick meet-up with hfglen (again inshallah--the airlines seem to be doing their best to make it impossible), and then on to Australia to catch up with sons (including the Son who Cooks), and hopefully get the remaining books out of storage.

Wow...you are a pro. (bows)

>32 haydninvienna:

Wow!

Any concerts involved?

Say, “Hi!”, to Hugh!

We look forward to the pictures.

>33 Bookmarque: Thanks. I hope I still feel like a pro in three weeks' time ...

>34 pgmcc: No concerts, unfortunately. Books will doubtless be involved though. Hugh has a bookshop crawl of sorts planned. Comair (South African BA franchise operator) changed my flight booking last night "for operational reasons", so that I had only 1 hour layover in Johannesburg Airport on the way to Durban. My understanding is that that isn't enough time to be confident of making the connection, and I hate running through airports, so I've had to re-book my flight to Durban for later, which means no time for a nice dinner in Durban.

Sounds like a wild and wonderful time, may your travels be without any unpleasant surprises.

Good luck with your travels! I hope all goes smoothly and look forward to seeing photos.

Thanks for the good wishes. And since MrsLee outed Busifer about a birthday a few hours ago, I'm going to out myself. It's my birthday on Sunday. A milestone birthday even--my 70th. It's a matter of great satisfaction to me that I share my birthday with:

Joseph Haydn (yes, the one I pinched my username from); and

Johann Sebastian Bach (at least if you calculated by the "new system"--Bach was born in Protestant Thuringia, which had not then adopted the Gregorian calendar reform. If you calculate according to the reformed calendar, his birthday falls on 31 March, which is also Haydn's commonly accepted birthday).

Incidentally, my wife isn't coming on this jaunt. She has a heart condition, and when she went to her doctor to get travel vaccinations, he heard where she was proposing to go and said Oh no you're not. Not prepared to countenance even the slightest risk of her being exposed to malaria. She keeps telling me she isn't in the least jealous. Mind you, she went to Machu Picchu a few years ago without me, so fair's fair.

>38 haydninvienna: Hippo Birdie Two Ewe!

>39 haydninvienna: Have a fantastic day on Sunday.

>40 hfglen: >41 pgmcc: Thanks gentlemen. On Sunday, inshallah, I will be viewing wildlife on a day tour in Zambia. The conference starts the next day.

I hope you'll have a fabulous day on Sunday.
Looking forward to pictures, and I hope your travels will be the right sort of interesting!

>32 haydninvienna: What a whirlwind itinerary! I am in awe. I suspect I would lose patience after the first week. And I hope you'll enjoy some fabulous birthday celebration. (Not forgetting a book buying binge as a part of that celebration.) Perhaps hfglen will barbeque a wildebeast in your honor?

>44 jillmwo: I certainly did think of a braai as an option, but Richard's airline banjaxed that one. All that's left is a quick lunch at an Italian joint in town between a bookshop visit and taking him to the airport. The Italian place is conveniently on the floor below the bookshop.

I didn’t actually say how long it was going to take but I’m to be back in Doha on 16 April and back at work the next day. I get the time at the conference /plus an extra day at each end) as being “on duty”, so the trip only cost me 2 weeks’ leave credit.

Anyway now in Bicester and Dickens as a Legal Historian was waiting. Interesting book physically—it’s a perfect bound hardback, and it has obviously been photo set from the edition published in 1929 by Yale. I wish it were economic for more classics to be republished like this. I have a copy of the book universally called “Quick & Garran” by Australian lawyers—The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth by John Quick and Robert Garran, originally published in 1901. The copy I have is of a photo-reproduction published in about 1970. So it can be done, but it’s time consuming and expensive to do it properly.

Now in Johannesburg on the first leg of the Adventure. I started to read In Matto’s Realm on the flight from London, and it’s looking good so far, but I didn’t get very far into it before going to sleep. I’ll report in more detail about the book, but the only thing of importance that happened on the flight (other than BA’s excellent dinner) was that I spilt some water and didn’t realise until too late that I had ruined my boarding passes. Fortunately I had electronic ones as well so it didn’t matter much.
Humblebrag: I was in First on BA, because I scored a ticket for ridiculously cheap on BA’s own website. Maybe it was a mistake or something but nothing was said and they honoured the booking as made. So I got the excellent dinner and some sleep.

>47 haydninvienna: Nice one on the ticket.
Safe journey snd have a great birthday tomorrow.

Thanks Peter. Tonight is for sleeping, tomorrow for animals—that is, I’m going on a tour. Having said which, I’ve just gone for a short walk around the grounds and seen a small group of antelope grazing the lawn, and a troop of monkeys being monkeys. There are signs all over the place reminding us that the animals are wild and should not be approached or fed.

I hope the animals tomorrow have the wit to arrange themselves into a tableau for you: Hippo Birdie Two Ewe.
Have a great tour anyway.

Thanks Hugh. I doubt that they will be so obliging, but you never know.

Now back from the tour. Hippo birdie definitely but no 2 gnu. Or 2 ewe either.

Happy jam day! ;-)

>53 -pilgrim-: Thanks, I think. Jam day?

The afternoon session at the conference was Brexit-related so I cut it. Went back to my room and finished In Matto’s Realm. It was a BB from someone but I can’t remember who. Mystery story which is set in a Swiss mental hospital—“Matto” is the spirit of insanity. It’s hard to describe this book: it’s certainly not a classic murder mystery although there is at least one murder in it, and a policeman, who is apparently unsuccessful in solving the mystery. I say apparently because there are two solutions given for the mystery and I’m still unsure which was the real one. But this is part of the point—we are in Matto’s realm where strange things happen, and who knows what is real? Oh, and the voice on the radio? In 1936? We aren’t told who it was, but it’s not hard to guess. More of Matto’s realm.

All up, a strange and interesting book.

Glauser was a Swiss who was apparently a really messed up person, and spent time in both prison and psychiatric hospital. I think I might see if any other of his books have been translated.

And now I’m at dinner. When I walked the 30 metres or so from my room to the restaurant, there were 3 zebra and a small group of impala grazing or chewing the cud. Idyllic.

Another book! This time it was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This was my introduction to the loony world of Flavia and the other de Luces. I enjoyed it very much, but OMG isn’t Flavia terrifying? Actually, all the sisters are terrifying in their different ways. My goodness, what a family.

I was reminded somewhat of The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies, mostly because schoolboy conjuring figures in both and both authors are Canadian.

Oh and Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian for a change of pace. It’s short and quite interesting, but not really a comprehensive study of the topic—which is fair enough because I find that it originated as a series of lectures.

>56 haydninvienna: I enjoyed the first two; must revisit. How could one go wrong with a character named Flavia de Luce?

As noted by hfglen, he and I hit up the bookshops in his beautiful home town of Durban. My haul was as follows:

From Ike’s Books:
Knight of the Air by Maxwell A. Smith
Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W Service
Hitler’s Private Library by Timothy Ryback

From the charity shop at Kloof SPCA:
Searle’s Cats by Ronald Searle
The Door into Fire by Diane Duane.

Ike’s Books was apparently a significant centre of the anti-apartheid movement back in the day, and is a great bookshop anyway. As Hugh has noted, I spotted a first edition copy of Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould But neither of us felt able to unbelt 1200 rand for it. I remember seeing Ryback’s book mentioned in a book my wife gave me about the esoteric roots of Nazism, Hitler’s Monsters. And finding Songs of a Sourdough in Durban, 10,000 miles from Service’s Yukon, was just too good to miss.

The shop at Kloof (a Durban suburb) is set in some spectacular scenery. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t particularly kind, but visit any of hfglen’s threads for some pictures. I thought Searle’s Cats was just asking to be bought given the venue, and The Door into Fire was the copy with the best of at least 3 covers for this book (see http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/?p=5421, which links to the others). I actually do intend to read it though.

I came away from Zambia and the conference with lots of pictures, but most of them are on the SD card in the “big camera”, and it will take some organising to get them from there to here. At the moment it’s close to 4 am in Canberra and I’m a trifle jet lagged after the flight from Durban via Johannesburg and Sydney. British Airways (which in Southern Africa is actually Comair, a South African company unrelated to the former US airline by that name) and Qantas have in common a slight problem with punctuality but the actual flights were smooth and fuss-free.

Qantas must have been having a couple of bad days in Durban—the flight due out on Thursday evening didn’t happen, apparently because both captains fell ill, so nobody to fly as captain, so that there were 2 Qantas 747s leaving JNB on the same (Friday) evening, and some passengers for the delayed one ended up in the wrong aeroplane. Then the 747 that I was correctly on had an unserviceable auxiliary power unit, which normally provides power for ground air conditioning and for starting the engines. Because of the dud APU, they intended to start one engine at the gate and use that power to start the other three. But that requires a ground power supply and the first one the airport provided wasn’t working either. Eventually a working one turned up and we were on our way, and the flight was fine from there on. An hour and a half late starting, but made up most of that on the way and I made my Sydney connection without any trouble.

Pity about those 747s—Queen of the Skies in their day, but getting pretty tired now. I’ll still be sorry to see the Qantas and BA 747 fleets pass into history. Most of the others are gone already.

>58 haydninvienna: Congratulations on such a successful trip and commiserations on such an eventful return journey!

Your mention of Hitler's Monsters piqued my interest. I first heard of the occult interests of parts of the Nazi hierarchy from Barbara Hambly, who used her Sun-Cross novels to discuss that mentality. Since then I have wanted to read a factual account, but this is "yellow press" territory too, so one needs to be careful. Can you recommend Kurlander's book?

>58 haydninvienna: Could it be that Nature was telling you to stay put in Durban for a while longer? (A propos the weather, we had a bit of watery sun this afternoon but overall it's still overcast to rainy.)

As it happens I have a daughter, her husband and one year old daughter in Australia at the moment. They flew into Brisbane on 29th March, then to Cairns on 2nd April, and are flying to Melbourne today. They have built the holiday around a seminar that our son-in-law is involved with. They appear to be having a ball.

Ah the 747...I couldn't agree more with your characterization of them. A few years ago my hubby and I took a flight on one just because it would be one of the last times one was flown on a domestic US flight. We booked first class and the second story just because we'd never be able to do it again. It was cool.

>62 Bookmarque: The upper deck on a 747 is the absolute best! I’ve been on the upper deck on both Qantas and BA 747s. I particularly like the BA one because the window seats face backwards and you get a unique view of the world and the aeroplane itself. The A380, comfortable as it is, just isn’t the same.

>59 -pilgrim-: I’m not enough of a historian to be sure, but Hitler’s Monsters I remember as being plausible and well argued. Despite the yellow-press title, I’d say it is worth investigating.

>61 pgmcc: Great time to be in Australia! My best wishes to them.

>60 hfglen: Hugh, the weather in Canberra today was absolutely marvellous. What does that mean?

I had been in Canberra about 12 hours when I bought another book, Tales from a Tall Forest by Shaun Micallef. Micallef is an Australian comedian and media personality (no relation of the Canadian of the same name) who has written several books, and I was looking for one of them, Preincarnate. It’s been out for several years and of course the shop didn’t have it, but they had this one which I bought partly because the assistant had been very helpful and I thought she deserved to sell me a book!

>63 haydninvienna: Thank you Richard. You have got me there... I will be looking out for that one.

Still hanging around. My mission in Canberra was, apart from hanging out with my sons and a former colleague, to clear out a storage unit that has been (let’s be frank) eating money for far too long. It has a literal shed-load of household stuff, much of which is junk, cleared hastily when I sold a house years ago. Some of the stuff had sentimental value and there’s an unknown but possibly large number of books in there.

My elder son and I made some minor inroads yesterday and I brought away some papers to sort out. Ninety-five percent of the papers went into the recycling, but I found a few things that either the kids might like or that might be of interest to local historians, and those have been put in the mail.

Canberra has a useful institution called the Green Shed, which raises money for charities by selling stuff that would otherwise be landfilled. I have arranged with a removal firm to clear the heavy stuff on Thursday morning, and in the afternoon and Friday, elder son David and I will sort out the books and anything else left. Some books will certainly go either to the Green Shed or the Lifeline Book Fair, and the rest will go back to Bicester.

Since I will be sending some boxes of books by sea freight, I don’t have to worry about airline baggage limits so much now, and I have actually bought a few books, and have already picked a couple of loose ones out of the storage.

The ones from the storage were:

Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials by Wayne D Barlowe
and
The Graphic Work of M C Escher by, apparently, the man himself.

This afternoon the Red Cross charity shop was having a 2 for $5 sale. I bought:

The Gone-away World by Nick Harkaway
and
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecky.

The Green Shed has a shop in the city. Books are normally $5 each but if you sign up as a member (free) the price goes down to $2 each. It’s a frustrating place to buy from because there is almost no sorting done, so that it’s very hard to look for anything you specifically want. However, that’s never stopped me before. I bought:

Tetrarch by Alex Comfort
A Dog Called Demolition by Robert Rankin
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (it’s the Vintage paperback, evidently used for a course of some sort, with many coloured tabs attached to the page edges, and signed ”Katarina Throssell”, a surname with some resonance in Canberra history)
and
Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, the Everyman edition (it has a cash register slip in it from the University Cooperative Bookshop, recording the date of the sale as 22 July 1966 and the total price for 2 books as $2.85–happy days!).

>65 haydninvienna: I will be interested to see what you make of The Gone Away World. I liked it a lot, but then I am weird that way. It will take a degree of going with the flow. Watch out for the "sheep in war-time" piece and the state of "un-war".

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow made a big splash when it came out. I read it and enjoyed it at the time. I do not recall be overwhelmed by it but enjoyed it.

>65 haydninvienna: Knowing Jess as I do, "Demolition" seems like a very apt name for a dog ;-)

>66 pgmcc: I bought The Gone-Away World partly because I tried to read it when it first came out, but didn’t get very far with it. The book seems to be universally admired now and I thought I’d give it another go. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow seems to be less universally admired but still worth a look.

>67 hfglen: We used to have a couple of “white heelers” for both of whom “Demolition” would have been an appropriate name too.

Lifeline Book Fair is another Canberra charity that runs a suicide hotline. Their main fundraiser is an annual book sale which normally runs over a long weekend, in a venue that currently is one of the exhibition halls at the Canberra Show (State Fair for US-ians). They take donations all the year round.

OOh and French Lieutenant's Woman is fab even with colored tabs.

I’m now in the restaurant that employs Son Who Cooks. This is a really, really good place.

Bon appétit!

>72 pgmcc: Thanks, Peter. It was a really, really good dinner. When I asked Philip this afternoon to book a slot for me at 7 pm, he said there were only 3 bookings. But they got quite a few walk-ins, and by about 7:30 the place was pretty well full. I noticed that the guy at the next table who had had the veal backstrap, same as I did, had cleaned his plate very, very thoroughly.

The professionals cleared the heavy stuff out of the storage this morning, and David and I spent the afternoon sorting out the boxes. We took two carloads of boxes of books to the Lifeline warehouse, and there will be more of that tomorrow. In between I managed to find a bookshop at a shopping centre, and bought:

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley,
and
If This is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi.

>73 haydninvienna: Ah, clearing out old books to get new books - I know a bit about that ;-)

The restaurant sounds like a treat; now I'm getting hungry!

Having more or less finished the clearing-out, I am now reading one of the books I bought from Ike’s in Durban: Hitler’s Private Library by Timothy W Ryback. It would almost function as a biography of Hitler, but of course the emphasis is on what he was reading at various stages of his career, as far as can be determined. As I mentioned above, I saw this book mentioned in Hitler’s Monsters, and the details of Hitler’s reading given by Ryback seem to support Kurlander’s theory about the occult roots of the Nazi ideology.

>75 haydninvienna: I always thought it was Himmler, rather than Hitler, who was supposed to be both the architect of Nazism as an ideology, and the one with an interest in the occult. The Ahnenerbe was attached to the SS, and it was Himmler who made the occultist Karl Maria Wiligut an SS Brigadeführer.

You are increasing my desire to read Hitler's Monsters.

>76 -pilgrim-: I don’t think either I or Kurlander would disagree. Hitler certainly seems to have been interested in occultism and in particular astrology, but he wasn’t a serious scholar of it, or anything much else. The surviving books that Hitler definitely appears to have read (as shown by marginal jottings etc) appear to be mainly on German nationalism and racial identity. Kurlander (if I remember correctly) traces the toxic blend of Germanic racial mythology, mystical nationalism, and antisemitism but does not ascribe it specifically to Hitler.

It’s now a couple of years since I read Hitler’s Monsters, but I believe I remember Willgut playing a significant part in the story.

>75 haydninvienna: And by a curious coincidence I'm reading Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell, which I found in the library.

>78 hfglen: I skimmed the LT reviews. It appears that the book could be called controversial, and that Cornwell himself may have backed away from it somewhat.

>78 hfglen:, >79 haydninvienna: I remember reading a book from about the same era that posited the opposite thesis. It argued that, by maintaining political neutrality, Pope Pius evaded giving Hitler any grounds for expelling Vatican representatives, who were then ordered to provide as much protection for Jews as possible, through using diplomatic privileges etc. And that the sheltering of Jewish children in convent schools etc. was done with the full knowledge, and encouragement, of the papacy. The author had gone into the Vatican archives expecting to find material backing Cornwell's arguments, but found instead unexpected evidence of a concerted effort on the part of the Vatican to use its international organisation as a network for rescuing Jews. Pope Pius considered public silence the price of keeping this network in place, and was haunted for the rest of his life by doubts as to whether he had made the right choice - whether speaking out to Germany's Catholics about the incompatibility of Christianity with Naxism would have saved more lives than the practical, pragmatic approach that he, as a professional diplomat by training, had resorted to.

Or at least, that is a summary of the argument as I remember it. I read the book over a decade ago, and cannot remember anything as useful as a title or author!

>80 -pilgrim-: I have a vague recollection of something similar, but can’t remember any details either. A quick read of the long Wikipedia article on Pius XII (noting that there is a separate article relating to the Papacy and the Holocaust) suggests that Cornwell loaded the scales at least somewhat.

Another Canberra bookshop this morning. I bought:

Pure Pleasure by Professor John Carey
The Chymical Wedding by Lindsay Clarke
and (a semi-deliberate tease for hfglen) The Poetry of Railways edited by Kenneth Hopkins.

ETA This last one appears to be the only copy on LT.

>81 haydninvienna: I do hope this last includes 'Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat' from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Not doing so would be an automatic fail IMHO.

>82 hfglen: Only a quick inspection so far, but yes, “Skimbleshanks” is in there.

I’ve wondered before why printed texts of Eliot’s Complete Poems never seem to include Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Can it be that Old Possum ... isn’t “poetry”? Silly idea.

Well, it’s now done. The storage is cleared and 11 remaining boxes of books are on their way to England. Given that some of the stored boxes got a rather cursory examination before being consigned to Lifeline, I wonder what I’ve unintentionally discarded. Most likely nothing of importance. I’m going to have an interesting time unpacking those boxes though.

Despite everything that was going on this week, I managed to finish 3 more books.

First was As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley--my second Flavia. I described Flavia as "terrifying", and see no reason to change that description. The writing is as clever as it was in the first book, but I found it kind of difficult to follow what was going on, allowing that I was reading at a disadvantage since I was on a long aeroplane flight at the time. There are 3 more books to come in the series and that might account for the book also having a kind of transitional feel about it--there is obviously more of the story to be told, and this book seems to be setting us up for something rather than being complete in itself. Mind you, I'd give a quid or two to be able to write a sentence as good as "It was like riding bareback on an enormous steel angel doing the breast-stroke." For anyone who hasn't read the book--what was Flavia describing?

Next was Pure Pleasure by John Carey. Carey was the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. I've read a couple of his other books and enjoyed them. This book is Carey's list of 50 books which in his opinion deserve to be read for the sake of the pleasure they give, rather than being books you "must read". Well, everyone necessarily has their own views about which books give what degree or kind of pleasure, I suppose. Carey might possibly convert me on a few of the books on his list (such as The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man), and there are several others about which I agree with him enthusiastically. For example, Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James is in his list. So is The Man Who Was Thursday, and Edward Thomas's Collected Poems. The attraction of Carey's book is that he tells you clearly what books pleased him and why, without any critical baggage. (Clive James grew up in Sydney just before and during the Second World War; I grew up in Brisbane almost exactly 10 years later. James's descriptions of his childhood brought back lots of reminiscence.)

Last was Tales from a Tall Forest by Shaun Micallef. I don't quite know what to make of this. It's 3 stories each of which is a mash-up of a number of traditional "fairy tales"--for example, "Little Red Riding Hood" is mashed up with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Hansel and Gretel". The writing is clever and funny but it's hard to work out who the book was intended for. Or are kids today much more sophisticated than the kids of 50 or 60 years ago? Mind you, the art work, by Jonathan Bentley, is gorgeous. I even thought of posting a picture of the cover, but it's mostly dark tones and wouldn't photograph well.

I'm dipping into The Poetry of Railways in little bits. Here is G K Chesterton writing about King's Cross Station:

This circled cosmos whereof man is god
Has suns and stars of green and gold and red,
And cloudlands of great smoke, that range o'er range
Far floating, hide its iron heavens o'erhead.

God! shall we ever honour what we are,
And see one moment ere the age expire,
The vision of man shouting and erect,
Whirled by the shrieking steeds of flood dn fire?

Or must Fate act the same grey farce again,
And wait, till one, amid Time's wrecks and scars,
Speaks to a ruin here, "What poet-race
Shot such cyclopean arches at the stars?"

I think it's fair to say that it isn't great poetry, but the last line is pretty striking.

Yet another book finished: A Dog Called Demolition by Robert Rankin.

Rankin's books are a bit like Vegemite: dark, weird, and a little tends to go a long way. I have seen him compared to Terry Pratchett, but I can't see how Rankin's dark whimsy is in any way similar to anything that Pterry has written except possibly the Rincewind books, and even then the similarity is pretty faint. This book is Rankin's take on the "we have mental parasites" trope. It plays out in much the same way as all the others of its kind, except that I haven't encountered one where God Himself may have stepped in to sort things out. Plus there's Rankin's peculiar style, like a cross between the red-top press and a British version of Dame Edna Everage, and his cheerful disregard of the fourth wall. If you haven't the taste for Rankin's books, get one from the library or second-hand before investing any serious money. I buy them second-hand when I see them.

Any Pub denizen with nothing better to do may remember an exchange about Martin Farquhar Tupper in my previous thread (see here). During the Great Clear-Out I actually found the book that has in it the play I referred to, and like an idiot put it back in the box rather than bringing it with me. To be fair, I did have rather a lot to bring back--in fact, on that flight back to Doha I tested the limits of airline luggage allowances fairly severely. However, memory and a bit of subsequent googling suggests that the play was "Royal Favour" by Laurence Housman. If you have too much time on your hands, Housman had several collections of plays published and there seem to be copies in quite a few large libraries.

While back in Bicester over the weekend I picked up something that I had pre-ordered: The Best of R A Lafferty, supposedly containing the best of Lafferty's short stories. If there's anyone left who hasn't heard of Lafferty despite Neil Gaiman's efforts (Gaiman wrote the introduction, and has been making his opinion of Lafferty known for quite some time now), this might be one place to start. (The best place is still Nine Hundred Grandmothers, available on Kindle for something like a sensible price or as a used copy for a ridiculous price.) Most of the stories in Nine Hundred Grandmothers are also in The Best ..., so if you haven't already met Lafferty, you may as well start here. However, The Best ... doesn't contain one of my personal favourites, "Hog-Belly Honey", about a genius who invents a perfect garbage disposal.

But having met Lafferty, will you like him? Read comments by Gaiman and David Langford, extensively quoted here. As well read the review of Nine Hundred Grandmothers by "Akethan" on Amazon. The very fact that he could write a short story, a very funny one with a dark twist at the end, about a genius who invents a perfect garbage disposal should tell you something.

It just occurred to me that Lafferty and Robert Rankin have a good deal in common--much humour with a decidedly dark undertone--but they differ in that Rankin has no clear philosophical direction, whereas Rafferty's Catholic faith tends to come through (one of his novels, Past Master, even has a reincarnated St Thomas More as a hero). I am not a Catholic but I don't find Lafferty's Catholicism, or his admiration for G K Chesterton, a problem. In fact if you like Chesterton, you may find Lafferty congenial also. One of the stories even quotes the last line of Chesterton's poem on Kings Cross Station that I quoted in #85.

>76 -pilgrim-: , >77 haydninvienna: I brought Hitler's Monsters back from Bicester. A quick check of the index confirms that Wiligut is mentioned in connection with Himmler and in other places, but I haven't had time to do any re-reading yet.

This is something I've just noticed on the net.

I expressed agreement with this comment by scaifea on Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. In the course of trying to explain why I felt so strongly, I did a quick Google search for the phrase "pure Northernness", which C S Lewis uses in Surprised by Joy. One of the hits was this. On the home page there is this remarkable paragraph:

We are a new publishing company, but we have classy ideas. We are a company that exists to tell stories the watchful dragons would never publish. Do you have a book that you always wanted to publish but couldn't get it to an agent? Send us a first chapter, synopsis—really just send us your best idea about the book you care about writing or are writing. If we accept it, we will let you know as soon as possible if we will take it on to publish it. We do not except anything vulgar, inhumane, portrayals of anything indecent or the like. The imagination is sacred. Nuf said.

Now I ask you, as literate people. Would you want your pride and joy published by a company that could put that paragraph on their home page?

In fact, the whole thing looks shady. The links for "about" and so on all return an error page. Bet you that if "Northernness Press" ever publishes anything the author will pay for it.

ETA: On reflection, the literacy of the author probably isn't important. If they are in fact a vanity-publishing outfit, literate authors are probably not their target market.

>90 haydninvienna: There is a chapter in Umberto Eco's Faucault's Pendulum that is a masterful and humorous description of vanity publishing. I think it may be chapter 11.

>91 pgmcc: Thanks Peter. Now if only I could find my copy ...

>92 haydninvienna: Well, on the bright side your recent exercise in Australia has reduced the number of locations across the globe that you will need to search.

>93 pgmcc: I've actually got a feeling it's here. But I quail at the thought of sorting through the piles.

>94 haydninvienna: My copy contains 700 pages, so if your copy is there it might stand out from the crowd.

I’m in the queue to get into Livraria Lello in Porto. Is there another bookshop anywhere that you have to queue (and buy a ticket) to get into?

OMG that's funny. It turns out I have a whole day in Porto to check it out.

I’m now out of it. Of course I bought a book! Details tonight.

>97 Bookmarque: I was going to post tonight but then I saw your comment. By all means do so but I have 2 bits of advice/warning. First, you need to queue, as I mentioned. I was in the queue for 15 mins or so. Maybe go first thing in the morning? Second, it gets crowded, and there are far too many people taking pictures and too few actually buying books (although people do actually buy books). They have books in all the major European languages including English. Finally, it’s still beautiful but the constant foot traffic is taking its toll just a tiny bit.

I hear you. I'll scope it out and see how I feel. Is it worth the wait in line?

>100 Bookmarque: That depends on how you feel about queueing. I’m glad I went, but the trouble might be that it’s so crowded that you can’t see it properly anyway. Also, it’s smaller than it tends to look in pictures. That staircase is just about wide enough, at its narrowest, for 2 people to pass. The phrase “victim of its success” occurs to me. I bet they make more money from the €5 entry fee than they do from actually selling books.

Incidentally, they have nice bookmarks. See what I did there?

I’ve started to read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Cathrynne M Valente. I bought the copy in the American Book Centre in Amsterdam a couple of years ago (the shop turns up on at least 1 list of beautiful bookshops), pretty much solely on account of the title. It’s a children’s book and if I were moved to be cynical I would say that it’s a bit knowing and gives the sense of being a bit too pleased with itself. But who could be nasty about an author who can write a sentence like this: “... September {who is a 12-year-old girl} read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.”?

>103 haydninvienna:. I read that way back when and remember finding delight.

I thought I had posted about what I bought in Livraria Lello, but if I did I can't find it now. I'll do it now, and sorry if you've read any of this before.

First was Goethe: Life as a Work of Art by Rüdiger Safranski. Goethe fascinates me, how he dominates German-language literature (says me, as a non-expert who can't even read German properly). Also fascinating as a major late figure of the Enlightenment. This big, fat biography came with a ton of adulatory reviews. I started reading it on the flight home (setting Ms Valente aside pro tem, although I will certainly get back to her), and so far so good.

The idea of making a work of art out of one's life is also interesting, although some of the other examples are not encouraging. The only other example I'm sure of of someone who explicitly made a work of art out of his life was Quentin Crisp. Maybe Oscar Wilde? I suspect that others who thought of their lives in this way might include Gabriele D'Annunzio though, so perhaps a little care is in order before approving the idea wholeheartedly.

Second was a little edition of The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. Ibn Battuta was a 14th-century Muslim scholar, apparently from Morocco, who travelled over most of the Muslim world of his time, and outside it, all the way from Timbuktu to Beijing, and wrote about it. He ought to be as well known as Marco Polo, but apparently his writings were unknown outside the Muslim world until the 19th century. Unlike Marco Polo, no-one seems to be questioning that Ibn Battuta really did all the things that he wrote about. I'm ashamed to say that I had never heard of Ibn Battuta till I came to Doha.

Third was another little edition of The Lusiads, in the translation by Sir Richard Burton. Seemed appropriate to buy this in a shop in Portugal.

Now finished The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. I still think it's a tiny bit too pleased with itself, but it has reason to be. A really beautiful kids' fantasy which I enjoyed very much. Ms Valente has an impressive imagination and isn't afraid to use it. I think I'm going to find the second and third books as well.

On the "life as art, art as life" idea I feel a need to add that "society as a theatre/as a stage", "society as art", were "society" could all to well be substituted with "life" was central to the original Nazi movement as well as to the Italian Fascists and to the USSR.
On a smaller scale almost all nations within the sphere of Western civilization dabbled in this, particularly before WWII. I have Swedish examples as well. Until after the war the links between Sweden and Germany were very close, in every conceivable way.

It is, as a notion, quite interesting, but the examples history provides aren't encouraging, I think. I think it sad that the book that deals with this is Swedish language only or I'd force it on a lot of people. Lucky for them, maybe ;-)
I'm also holding my thumbs - as we do in Sweden - for this not to verge too far into political territory.

Change of topic, then -

I'd love to hear what you think of the Ibn Battuta book, but maybe I'll search for it without waiting for you to read it, now that I know that it exists! His name has surfaced several times, most notably, I think, in a lecture series called The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age, from Great Courses.

I'm on some kind of eternal quest for knowledge of everything that influenced the way our Western society works, and I think it is impossible to do so without including at the very least Asia Minor and the Middle East into that.

>107 Busifer: Is holding your thumbs equivalent to biting your tongue?

>108 -pilgrim-: More like crossing your fingers.

>107 Busifer: I did say that some of the other examples weren’t encouraging, although the only specific one I could think of on the spot was D’Annunzio. I had to stop reading Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of him a while ago because he was such a loathsome individual. And he fits neatly into the history of Italian fascism. There are, thinking about it a bit more, probably plenty of other examples in the Anglosphere alone, of varying political and social views. I might even be interested in the book you referred to, except I’d need an English version.

It might be a while before I get to Ibn Battuta. The one I bought may not be the only published version. I find it rather sad, although not surprising, that he is much less known in the non-Muslim world than Marco Polo, although he travelled much further than Marco Polo.

>110 haydninvienna: I recall a discussion I had with pgmcc, I believe, in which a similar book but in English came up.
I remember it as more of an anthology, but I’ll see if I can find the name.

On Ibn Battuta at least you’ve inspired me to go look for more. It will be a while for me, too, as I’m currently stuck between a work related book and a lecture series on the history of the Ottoman Empire. I tend to do one educational non fiction piece at a time, and had hoped for the work related book to be a faster read than it turned out to be.

Edited to add: I found the book. It was Fascism and Theatre.

>106 haydninvienna: I haven’t read that one, but I was very impressed with her Orphan Tales duology, starting with In the Night Garden. It has a nested story format which I had fun with. I’ve never read Arabian Nights which I understand has a similar format, so that kind of storytelling was new to me.

I was less thrilled with Deathless. I thought it was ok, but not great.

>111 Busifer: I started on Ibn Battuta. So far it seems to be mainly what Karlstar calls STTM. Not much in the way of wonders related.

I’m in Bicester this weekend and in the British Heart Foundation shop found a book by Malcolm Pryce, of “Aberystwyth” fame: The Case of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste. You can read the description on Goodreads as well as I can, and I noticed that someone compared it to a mix of Richard Hannay and Robert Rankin. There’s only 2 reviews on LT, and a few more on Goodreads, but one which makes me a trifle uneasy talks about Pryce’s obvious love for the pre-nationalisation GWR. I hope it’s not too overburdened with steam minutiae. One for Hugh, maybe? Still, for £2 it was worth a shot.

I helped my wife take a couple of shopping bags of novels to the Heart Foundation shop for rehoming. She reads mainly thrillers (big fan of Louise Penny and Peter May) but occasionally mixes in other things, like Life of Pi and Murakami’s 1Q84. I’ve stolen those but haven’t read either one yet.

>113 haydninvienna: I helped my wife take a couple of shopping bags of novels to the Heart Foundation shop for rehoming.

That is very clever. You then had a couple of shopping bags for bringing books back from the Heart Foundation shop for rehoming. I stand in awe. Good planning.

My first Murakami was 1Q84, a Books 1 & 2 combined volume. It is probably enough to say that I went on to read Book 3 and have devoured most of his works to date. Let me know how you get on with 1Q84.

I was not so lucky with Life of Pi. It was a DNF for me, but then other people have loved it.

>113 haydninvienna: Not surprising, since he did travel a lot. I'm more curious if it is possible to learn something about the times and lands through which he travelled, so I'll stay tuned for your final verdict!

Happy very belated Thingaversary, haydninvienna!
(Turns out I missed my own as well.)

>116 clamairy:
(Turns out I missed my own as well.)

Hmmmm! Where did I put that penalty calculation equation?

>117 pgmcc: Thanks Clam. Happy belated Thingaversary to you too.

I finished The Case of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste on the flight back from London. My goodness. One for hfglen in that there is indeed an awful lot about the pre-nationalization GWR, including a cameo by Dr Beeching; but I don’t know how Hugh feels about alternate-history noir. It’s darker than Pryce’s Aberystwith books, involving a startling level of duplicity in the great and good of the United Kingdom. Not that some of them wouldn't have been capable of it.

Having said which, Pryce tells a decent although somewhat implausible story (but it’s alternate history, so that’s sort of OK) to explain a historical mystery. Why did the royal family of the United Kingdom become the House of Windsor in 1917, having been a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until then? The ending felt rushed though, as if Pryce had run out of word count or hit a deadline, and resorted to a deus ex machina to get it all over with. Still worth the £2 I paid for it.

There are appendices, one of which is not fiction: the list of 2000-odd railway stations closed under Dr Beeching’s Axe.

>118 haydninvienna: It's a good thing you live so far away! Otherwise I'd keep on kidnapping the books you keep noting against my name, in order to enrich Railwaysoc's library! ;-)

>119 hfglen: Hugh: Pryce actually writes quite lyrically about the jobs of fireman and driver, without hiding that they were hard and dirty work, and passes on a bit of extremely recondite knowledge which I have so far been unable to verify: that until nationalisation, a GWR driver on a mainline train could celebrate a marriage. Now I suppose you will say "Well, of course! Everybody knows that!" However, given that it's in an ever-so-slightly alternate universe, maybe not. Pryce's universe is close enough to ours that I wouldn't be surprised to discover that all the trains he mentions really existed, and ran at the times he says. I looked at his website but there seems to be nothing on it suggesting that he is a train nerd of any kind, let alone a specifically GWR nerd.

Ramadan short hours have their benefits. Yesterday afternoon I read A Game of Battleships, the fourth in the series that began with Space Captain Smith. I found out about these books a year or so ago by finding the cover of the first one while browsing Good Show Sir. Toby Frost had showed up in the comments, and took some good-natured ribbing so gracefully that I sought out the first book, and then decided to help him buy his yacht by buying all the others. Great literature they are certainly not, but "silly steampunk fun", as LT member munchkinstein says. Or, as Good Show Sir user, GSS ex-noob says, "Sounds like Flashman In Spaaace, and what could be better?" That isn't quite right, actually. Isambard Smith is definitely not a rogue--he is almost painfully honourable. The books must be doing something right because all 6 are still in print and available in bricks-and-mortar stores, or at least in Waterstones Birmingham. The only problem I find with them is that Isambard Smith and his originally inept crew are becoming decidedly too ept, so to speak, and that dilutes the silliness.

I think that to appreciate the books properly though you need to have grown up with Dan Dare, and those little Second World War comics with heroes called something like Battler Britton. I did.

I'm now on to the 5th one, End of Empires.

>121 haydninvienna: Your review, and the comments in the link have sold me on this one. I never read comics much, but I did grow up with Capt. Joan Worralson, WAAF; is my upper lip stiffened to the requisite degree, do you think?

>122 -pilgrim-: I forgot to mention Biggles (never read the Worrals stories, but must have read virtually all of the Biggles and Gimlet books). Give it a go as long as you don't mind the whole mind-set being mocked. Affectionately mocked, but still mocked.

>121 haydninvienna:, >123 haydninvienna: I just took a look at your "Battler Britton" link; what struck me was the age of the eponymous hero. In a story which I assume to be aimed firmly at pre-teen boys, the hero seems to be in his mid-thirties!

IIRC, Worrals and Frecks were in their early twenties.

I wonder when the idea that stories FOR children had to be ABOUT children (or at least young adults) came in?

>120 haydninvienna: I can't help with any of that information either. The local train nerds know NGR and SAR, not GWR. Presumably a British railway library would have a copy of a Bradshaw of an appropriate vintage (to give you times of trains), but myself I've never seen one of these famous guides. Also no clue about train drivers celebrating marriages.

>124 -pilgrim-: I read a lot of worthy British boys' stories as a child. (Still amazes me how Anglocentric my upbringing was, in a former colony 10,000 miles away from the land that some of my mother's contemporaries still called Home.) In those the heroes tended to be plucky British teenage boys. Apart from Biggles, where the heroes were all adults, I remember one by Percy F Westerman called Sea Scouts at Dunkirk--7 copies on LT, to my surprise--which is exactly what it says on the tin: a leaky old tub crewed mainly by Sea Scouts taking part in the Dunkirk evacuation. The Westermans, father and son, wrote enormous numbers of these ripping yarns: Wikipedia lists 178 titles for Percy (father), but only "at least 30" for John F C (son). John seems to have had a career in the British Army, which probably interfered with his output somewhat.

And of course there's The Coral Island, in which the heroes are three teenage boys. I actually read this too. Its successor, The Gorilla Hunters, had the same three heroes. The latter was actually broadcast as a serial on ABC radio sometime in the fifties.

Having written all that, I'm not sure it answers your point. Most of those stories would probably be classified as YA now, so arguably not for children, but I'm not sure what the "target demographic" would have been in 1930.

And I have now read all 6 of the space adventures of Isambard Smith:
Space Captain Smith
God Emperor of Didcot
The Wrath of the Lemming Men
A Game of Battleships
End of Empires
The Pincers of Death.

As I said above, to appreciate them properly you really need to have grown up on Biggles and Dan Dare and the Westermans. And hands up everybody who understands the reference near the end of the last book to a modern piano piece “... called Fairy Bells—a medley of folk songs by some oaf called Peter Peason”?

Don’t let any of that stop you reading them though. They’re fun. Steampunk that doesn’t take itself seriously.

>126 haydninvienna: I didn't intend the implication that children's books never used to have child protagonists - Jim Hawkins being a early example (if Treasure Island was, indeed aimed at children!)

Only that I can't imagine a children's author nowadays getting published with a thirtysomething protagonist.

>127 haydninvienna: And no, I don't get the reference :-/

>128 -pilgrim-: According to Wikipedia, R M Ballantyne (author of The Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters and many others) was a significant influence on Treasure Island. ETA: As to your second sentence, I can't either and I'm not going looking for a counterexample.

The reference was to Nigel Molesworth's grate frend Peason and his famous piece fairy bells. If that doesn't help, look for a copy of The Compleet Molesworth. (It has been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, which might possibly be extending the definition of "classic" a trifle too far.) This was a much earlier subversion of the school story. When the first of the 4 Molesworth books, Down With Skool, was written, "Frank Richards" (Charles Hamilton) was still publishing new Billy Bunter stories. Molesworth and St Custards are Harry Wharton et al and Greyfriars turned on its head.

Also want to mention that there's music references scattered through the Space Captain Smith books, although most of the ones I remember are in the first book. For example, when Isambard Smith first meets Rhianna Mitchell, the hippie lady who ends up as part of his crew, she is running a hippie-ish shop on a space colony called the Free State of New Francisco. "Over the shop speakers, a confused-sounding man was mumbling a patchily coherent song about a tambourine, backed by tinkly sounds not unlike someone urinating on a glockenspiel." Then when Isambard and Rhianna are in a deep spot of bother, having been captured by the enemy Edenites, Smith's homicidal alien friend Suruk and the pilot Polly Carveth are suiting up to go in after them. Suruk decides to sing the war song of his people. Polly decides that the song is rubbish and selects something from the ship's sound library:

Something came over the interior PA system, a low, flat twang, a sound from far away and deep down. Suruk shuddered and adjusted his hat.
A slow, rattling drum crackled through the hold. From the bottom of a well there crept a woman's voice, a lost, hungry ghost. Suruk ran one of his thumbs along the razor edge of Gan Uteki, the sacred spear. Hunting music indeed.
Carveth stepped through the door, the Maxim cannon levelled and ready to shoot.

The first one should be obvious. Got the second one yet? It's "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane.

Just so you know: This is stuff I grew up with. "Mr Tambourine Man" and Jefferson Airplane are parts of the sound track of my teens. And of course Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize for literature a couple of years ago, so it's still literature, kind of.

>129 haydninvienna: That will show me, showing off from memory. The oik who played Fairy Bells at St Custard’s was Molesworth 2, not Peason. Maybe Toby F had the same brain-fart that I did.

I ended up reading Absolutely on Music, bought in Maastricht, on the flight home. It proved to be really, really interesting. I knew Murakami was into jazz, but he proves to be a dedicated and serious listener of classical music as well. The book is essentially a series of conversations between him and Seiji Ozawa, with some commentary. They are friends IRL. so the conversations are pretty informal but also pretty searching, in all sorts of ways (at one point there is a parenthetic note that some of the stories Ozawa passed on could not be committed to print). Lots of stuff about what makes the difference between a good performance and a great one, and why orchestras sound different over time or which different conductors, and so on. The best bit was a chapter discussing Mahler's First Symphony, and why Mahler is so different from Brahms even though they were only 27 years apart in age and lived in the same town. Prompted by that I switched my headphone listening from the Brahms 4th to the Mahler 5th (the only one of Mahler's symphonies I have on my phone, something I will have to fix) and of course Murakami and Ozawa are right. I'd just never thought of it before.

I hope no one is bothered by the apparent inconsistency between this comment and post #130. Murakami somewhere quotes Duke Ellington's comment that there's really only 2 kinds of music, good music and the other kind. My elder son, who helped me move the stuff in Oz, used to be a dedicated heavy metal listener. I find that what he now has on the car radio is ABC Classic FM (the Oz equivalent of BBC3). Rich Capparella, who is one of the presenters on KUSC in Los Angeles (my favourite classical radio at the moment) apparently spends some of his spare time playing bass in a Beatles tribute band. Incidentally, Hugh: Rich C says the best thing about living in LA is bird of paradise plants--I think he means strelitzia.

>132 haydninvienna: In all probability yes. LA tourist publicity would almost have one believe they invented the things. Mind you, the same could be said for Las Palmas and the Canaries in general (as if they didn't have enough strange and wonderful flora of their own). In fact, the LA bird-of-paradise flower comes from a particularly dense and aggressively thorny piece of vegetation in the Eastern Cape.

>133 hfglen: Looking at the Wikipedia article, S. reginae is the one my mum used to grow, and they are said to be commonly grown in LA also.

It occurred to me also that another take-away from the Murakami book might be that there's only 2 kinds of books too.

>134 haydninvienna: That's the one! The tree-size one I showed you in Kloof is S. nicolai, which is a bit of a "garden thug" here, coming up all over the place where it isn't wanted.

Okay, so I'm way behind here, but I am intrigued by the steampunk series you talk about up there in 127 because the marketing blurb on Amazon references a psychopathic alien headhunter. I can't decide if it's too flakey to be tolerated or if I would find it charming. Can you talk a bit about the headhunter?

Also I appreciated up there in #81 and #85 the discussion of books by John Carey. I enjoyed his memoir, The Unexpected Professor.

>137 jillmwo: Hi Jill, nice to see you back again.

I liked The Unexpected Professor too. He seems to be a decent bloke, and writes well. If you haven't read What Good Are the Arts? and The Intellectuals and the Masses, try those as well.

Now, as to Space Captain Smith--this is kind of difficult because, as I said above, the series is basically a take-off of the likes of Biggles and Battler Britton (don't feel left out if you've never heard of the latter). It seems to be aimed mainly at British men of a certain age. You being none of those things, you may not get the point. However, I'll describe the set-up, and tell you about Suruk the Slayer along the way.

It's sometime in the 22nd century and the British Empire has expanded into space. Many alien races are among its members. It is the embodiment of all the virtues that the old British Empire liked to pretend that it had--free, democratic and equal. There is a Queen--heaven help me, Queen Kylie. But trouble is brewing--alien races are threatening the Empire.

There are 2 main alien enemies and a human ally. The alien races are the Ghast, which are like giant ants (the fallen creature on the cover of the first book is a Ghast), and the Lemming-Men (basically ewoks grown up to three times the size and turned into homicidal maniacs). The human ally is the Edenites, who are religious nutters whose interest is to wipe out the godless unbelievers of the Empire. At the start of the first book a Ghast attack on the Empire is imminent.

Our heroes are four in number (coincidentally, or not, the same number as Biggles' company). Smith is captain. He is brave, honourable and really not terribly bright, but is fiercely loyal to the others and they to him. There are 2 women--Rhianna, who is a sort of hippy dippy lady who turns out to have awesome psychic powers and eventually becomes a serious couple with Smith; and Polly the pilot, who is a simulant (a completely humanlike android) created originally as a sex toy for the unusual tastes of an immensely wealthy man, who escapes and fakes credentials as a pilot. She is shortish, chubby, cute, and fond of biscuits, alcohol and other recreational substances. And ponies. Fortunately, with her android mental powers, she becomes an excellent pilot.

Suruk, the fourth member, is Smith's best friend. He is a M'Lak, a race that was at one time at war with the empire but is now allied to it. He is about 7 feet tall and kind of frog-like. See the cover of End of Empires, the fifth book. The M'Lak live for fighting, and collect skulls of defeated enemies (Gurkhas, anyone?). I don't know if that qualifies him as psychopathic--after all, by his race's standards Suruk is completely normal. The M'Lak are useful people to have on your side if you need to do a spot of fighting. He and Polly don't get on at first, but after an incident when a Lemming-men force sets out to wipe out the inhabitants of a planet populated by sentient blue ponies, and Polly goes rogue and takes out the entire Lemming-Men base on her own , Suruk grants her his grudging respect. Incidentally, there is no sign of racism in the Empire. Other races in the Empire might be seen as odd, but never as inferior. Even the enemy races are seen as inferior only in that they are homicidal maniacs, or run about shouting all the time, or whatever. The only instances of overt racism that I can remember come from the Edenites, and Smith has to have it explained to him what the Edenites' problem is with a bi-racial human couple who also happen not to be married.

The books don't have any serious world-building. The steam-punk element is not emphasised, except that the Empire drinks vast quantities of tea--the second book, God Emperor of Didcot, is about an attempt to cripple the Empire by wiping out its supplies of tea. There is space, and there are planets. Things happen. Most of those things involve fighting.

Heaven help me, I love these books. It's probably a sign of basic immaturity in me. But I get the jokes. You may not.

having written all of that, I wonder if I'm trying to justify my own affection for what I said further up (#121) was certainly not great literature. As I said, I get the jokes.

>138 haydninvienna: Revisiting your boyhood perhaps - minus the attitudes that now make one cringe in books from that period?

That said, I cannot think of any actual examples of racism in W.E. Johns himself - although I have not actually read any of his Biggles books (I inherited the Worrals ones from my mum) - and in his attitudes to women he was far ahead of his time. He was actively campaigning for female pilots to be given a greater role.

ETA: the title of the 2nd book implies that Toby Frost has read Frank Herbert; is this also a pastiche of Dune in any way, or were those books so ubiquitous at the time of writing that the referencing was automatic?

>139 -pilgrim-: I hadn’t actually noticed the resemblance of the titles but you’re right. I can see no way in which the series is a pastiche of Dune though. What struck me about that title is the reference to Didcot—the planet it is set on is called that. Naming it after an Oxfordshire town noted in rail travel, and as having a great big power station (now demolished), seems odd, but I don’t pretend to know what went on in Toby Frost’s mind.

Yes, by the standards of the time Johns seems to have been pretty free of racism and sexism and other unpleasant attitudes. Of course, it’s a long time since I read his books and I have no intention of starting again.

Johns also seems to have been something of an environmentalist. I remember a late book of his called Where the Golden Eagle Soars, about the Scottish Highlands, which gave me my first lesson in thinking about the environment.

>139 -pilgrim-: prompted by your comment, I picked up God Emperor of Didcot and almost immediately discovered that one of the minor characters had the same unusual last name as one of Biggles’ companions—Hebblethwaite.

>138 haydninvienna: Even if not necessarily charmed by the books themselves, I am charmed by your affection for them.

>142 jillmwo: Bless you, you made me laugh.

>140 haydninvienna: The towers of Didcot power station used to be a notable landmark when travelling by rail between London and Bristol. Other than that, it is one of the blandest places I know! Maybe the blandness was its appeal?

What is the planet Didcot like?

>144 -pilgrim-: I first encountered Didcot not long after my arrival in England. I wasn’t impressed.

The planet of which there is briefly a God Emperor is basically a vast tea plantation and is very like the image I have of the tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka. As I said above, the books are not strong on world-building. I’m reminded of C S Lewis’s comment that he disliked the Three Musketeers because there was no sense of place—the countryside was just somewhere inns could be and fights and such could happen. Didcot the planet has an unusual life form called a sun dragon, but there is no attempt to fit them into an ecology. That’s not a problem for me, but might be for some readers.

Now as I read I’m looking out for hat-tips to Biggles and other bits of pop culture, and finding quite a few.

In Greece doing nothing but read. Specifically reading Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which I bought in Birmingham Airport. Amazing, but I need to do a fair bit of digesting of it.

>146 haydninvienna: No sightseeing? Or have you seen it all already? 😁

>147 clamairy: Never been to Rhodes before. I’m not really into sightseeing unless books or music are involved and Herself isn’t physically up to it. But we might go for a day tour while we’re here.
At the moment I’m reading Le Grand Meaulnes, in English unfortunately.

>146 haydninvienna: I went through a Murakami phase a while back and that was one of my favs. Nothing beats Wind-Up Bird Chronicle tho, IMHO.

>149 littlegeek: Haven’t read that one. As I mentioned, I’ve read several of Murakami’s non-fictions, but I think the only novel of his that I’ve read is A Wild Sheep Chase.

Finished Le Grand Meaulnes. There’s a certain dreamlike quality about this one too. I’d like to be able to read it in French, but my French is nowhere near good enough.

What next? I have The Night Circus, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Imprimatur and Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man with me.

Sounds nice to just laze around, in good company, while reading.
Enjoy yourself!

Might I cast a vote for the Becky Chambers'?

>152 clamairy: You might, and I did. I just now finished it. I’ll give it 4 stars, easily, but I have no idea what to compare it to!

>153 haydninvienna: It reminded me (and other reviewers as well) strongly of the dynamics of the Firefly series cast. Of course the similarities between Kizzy (Wayfarer) and Kaylee (Serenity) are pretty obvious.

>154 2wonderY: Never seen Firefly, I’m afraid. My knowledge of TV after about 1970 is close to non-existent.

Also finished Just One Damned Thing After Another, which I bought as a result of one of Maddz’s posts (https://www.librarything.com/topic/293559#6833893). Not bad, but I don’t feel any great urge to continue the series. And I still think she pinched a few ideas from Connie Willis.

>146 haydninvienna: & >149 littlegeek:

I share littlegeek’s views on those Murakami books. 1Q84 is the book that got me hooked on Murakami.

>150 haydninvienna:
I view The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet as SF for non-nerd SF readers. It is a good, fun read and has elements from so many series and films that it is almost a medley of SF ideas.

I tried to read the next Chambers book but felt there was too much explaining SF tropes to the non-SF reader. Obviously, though I would have hoped otherwise, my DNA has a big chunk of SF-nerd coding.

>157 pgmcc: You could probably say that Space Captain Smith and its sequels, which I was frothing about a while ago, are SF for non-nerds as well. I don’t want to start on what makes a story SF—that way madness lies. In a way the 2 novels make an interesting pair—both have a strong subtext about friendship. Smith is quite violent in a cartoonish way; Long Way has almost no violence even though there is a looming war in the background. I liked both. Come to think of it, the really interesting pairing is of Connie Willis’s Historian stories with Jodie Taylor’s. Taylor takes the same tropes as Willis and runs them into the ground, to the point where I haven’t much interest in reading the sequels because in terms of interest (for me at least) she has nowhere left to go.

This is obviously Dreams Week. I’ve just finished The Night Circus, which I actually started some time back. I loved it despite some annoyance with a couple of Ms Morgenstern’s stylistic oddities (such as omitting the comma at the end of a line of dialogue, and occasional verbless sentences beginning with “Though ...”). Now I suppose I’ll have to read The Green Man next, just to keep up the theme.

ETA Peter, I have 1Q84 on the shelf in Bicester, so it will probably be my next Murakami.

>159 haydninvienna: I have The Night Circus coming up in my reading plans fairly soon, probably late this month. The Kindle edition was on sale recently and I grabbed it because I had been wanting to read it. I’m glad to learn you enjoyed it!

>160 YouKneeK: it fell into my all-too-common pattern of starting a book, reading the first 20 pages or so, and then bookmarking it and not going back to it. I’d actually carried it in the backpack on trips a couple of times without opening it. I’m not sure that I regret that now, because I finished it in 2 sittings, last night and this morning.

You might need to be warned that I adore the style of fiction exemplified by italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. I don’t do action adventure much and as I said in my intro I’m a complete wuss about violence and cruelty.

Incidentally, a bit more proud dad stuff. One of my work colleagues is in Canberra at the moment and with his wife and a friend visited the restaurant where Son Who Cooks works. I’m pleased and proud to say that they thought it was superb, and told Son (and me) so. I think Son is walking a few inches off the ground.

>162 haydninvienna:
That is great.

>162 haydninvienna: Yay to Son Who Cooks!

I decided that I didn’t like Amis’s alcoholic, lecherous protagonist well enough to continue with The Green Man, and now I’m 150 or so pages into Imprimatur.

>165 haydninvienna:
How are you enjoying Imprimatur?

>166 pgmcc: Doing OK so far. Because I often read a book backwards I gather that there’s some stuff that I haven’t got to yet, about a piece of music by François Couperin, Les Baricades Mistérieuses. I have Angela Hewitt’s piano version and I know there are guitar performances around.

Edited to put in an acute accent!

Made it to Cărturești Carusel in Bucharest. It really is beautiful, and has a decent selection of books in English. (It also has a lot of stationery and souvenirs, which looked like good stuff, although I didn’t buy any of it.) God knows what the building was like as a bank, which apparently was what it was built for.

Anyway, I bought:
Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford
Good Omens by you know who
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun by J R R Tolkien (huh? Never even heard of this!)
Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher, for the obligatory Romanian author, and
Literary Places by Sarah Baxter.

I’m now at breakfast, and the radio is playing a cover by some woman of “Walking in Memphis”. Can’t go upstairs for a few minutes yet ...

I like the bits of Bucharest that I’ve seen, which admittedly isn’t much. But it’s another tick on my list of Countries in the European Union That I’ve Been to. I count a country if I’ve slept in it, basically. I think I have 11 to go.

>166 pgmcc: I finished Imprimatur on the flight home. Wow, what a ride. But it mostly seems plausible. The bit I found least plausible, oddly, was the idea that the music of Les Barricades Mystérieuses (the apparent misspelling in my previous post was the way it's spelt on the CD I have--apparently all four possible variant spellings have appeared) encoded a defence against the plague. I'm well aware that there are musical ciphers, but Monaldi and Sorti seem to me to exaggerate the mystery.

However, I find the idea that Pope Innocent XI financed the Glorious Revolution of 1689 entirely plausible. The papacy and the kings of France had been at loggerheads for at least a couple of hundred years by 1683. I seem to remember a certain dissension between the King of England and the Pope, beginning around 1530 or so. Still must have been a shock, the idea that the Papacy could finance the overthrow of a Catholic sovereign by a heretic. And that is all I have to say about plausibility, because a serious breach of Pub rules is looming otherwise. I'll just say that I enjoyed the book.

ETA: There's a lot of recordings of Les Barricades Mystérieuses on iTunes. Including one on the, er, ukulele. Oddly enough, it actually sounds like music. In fact, it probably sounds rather like what Robert Devizé (Robert de Visée, who was a real virtuoso of the time) played on his 17th century guitar, which would have been smaller and less powerful than a modern "classical" guitar.

As I said in the Bookstore Tourism group, I'm visiting Toronto on 28 June with my younger daughter, who doesn’t read (but who turns 21 on 1 July, and whose name is Laura—how cool is that?) so can’t be too big on bookstores. Does anyone have a must-visit shop in Toronto within easy public transport reach of Union Station?

>170 haydninvienna: Pretty sure Bakka Phoenix Books fits the bill. I don't know Toronto well enough to suggest others.

>153 haydninvienna: Yes, I found it very hard to categorize. Though I wonder if it's a new branch on the SciFi tree, as I would put Martha Wells Murderbot series in there, too.

>159 haydninvienna: I enjoyed that one, too. It had some annoying quirks, but I found it a very pleasing journey.

>171 tardis: Thanks tardis. It would seem to fit the bill. I intend to buy at least 1 Flavia though, and Bakka-Phoenix doesn't seem to list them, so I'll have to find an Indigo as well. That shouldn't be hard. There's one in Eaton Centre, and we will surely be going there.

I’m in Bicester again this weekend and the dearly beloved has presented me with a copy of The Language of Bees by Laurie R King. I’ve read a couple of these already and quite enjoyed them. Also, I finished reading Good Omens this afternoon. I can see why the chorus of praise for this book. There’s actually a good deal to think about in it. And unlike some people I don’t find it self-consciously clever.

I agree; Good Omens would be a great vehicle for starting a few philosophical discussions. Preferably over a bottle of wine.

Back in Bicester on Friday morning.

Spent Friday doing odd jobs around the house and then lunch with my wife at a local antique and bric-à-brac place called The Old Flight House, which is directly opposite the RAF station at Weston on the Green. ("RAF station" makes it sound grander than it is: no screaming jet fighters, just parachutists and gliding.) the The shop is the old officers' and sergeants' messes. It has a decent café and among the furniture and whatever (they sell all kinds of stuff) are some books. They don’t really organize it like a bookshop though. You can certainly find bookcases with books, and the books are for sale, but the bookcase might be mostly inaccessible behind an immovably large chair, or have fragile-looking and unstable glassware on top of it. I noticed a nice Folio Boethius, but it was £30 and I don’t want The Consolations of Philosophy quite that much. In the evening, dinner with my wife at the Turkish restaurant in Bicester and on getting back home finally passed out, not having had much sleep the night before.

I travelled back to Heathrow by train, necessarily passing through central London. Since I had some time in hand, I grabbed the opportunity of an unplanned visit to Hatchards, in Piccadilly, said to be the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, founded in 1797 and at the same address in Piccadilly since 1801. The interior is rather like a high class Waterstones, which is what it is. The Hatchards group (there are 4 Hatchards shops in London), like Hodges Figgis in Dublin, is owned by Waterstones, and the Waterstones mothership is a bit further down Piccadilly. I didn’t have much time so I got my wishlist up on the phone and went looking purposefully rather than just browsing. I found and bought
Ice by Anna Kavan
and
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

Both of these were BBs, the first from lilisin here and the second from japaul here.

I also looked for, but didn’t find, 2 more BBs:
A Corner of White
and
Together: Our Community Cookbook.

I went into the Waterstones mothership looking for those 2 and didn’t find either one—even actually asked for the second one, but it was out of stock not only at that Waterstones but at all the nearby branches.

By then it was time to scarper out to Heathrow. On the flight I started reading Foucault’s Pendulum, which was a kind of delayed-action retrospective BB from pgmcc—retrospective because I bought the copy many years ago (the price on it is in euros, which indicates that I bought it in Dublin) and it was in the TBR until Peter mentioned it in post #91. So far I’m enjoying it—I seem to recall somebody saying that it was “Dan Brown done right”— and of course it fits pretty well with Imprimatur. Peter, the chapter on vanity publishing that you were thinking of is probably chapter 39.

Something happened on the flight that’s never happened to me before: the Qatar Airways flight attendant saw me reading Foucault’s Pendulum and asked me about it. I really couldn’t describe it otherwise than by comparing it to Dan Brown. But she said she’d read The Name of the Rose and enjoyed it so there’s hope for her.

>175 2wonderY: I was going to say that almost any worthwhile book could start a few philosophical discussions over a bottle of wine, but I realised that some might take a bit more work than others. You might have to struggle a bit with P G Wodehouse or Georgette Heyer, say.

>171 tardis: Well, I knew what I was letting myself in for. We finally got to Bakka-Phoenix this morning.

• A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
• The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There and The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon In Two both by Catherynne M Valente
• Soulless by Gail Carriger.

I told the guy behind the desk about LibraryThing.

>178 haydninvienna: I look forward to hearing what you think of Soulless. I haven't read it, but I have read its YA prequel in the Parasol 'universe' - Etiquette and Espionage.

>177 haydninvienna: I am confident that a fruitful philosophical conversation can be extracted from the whole concept of the drones, and their resemblance or otherwise to their apid kin!

>121 haydninvienna: et al. I have discovered that, in fact, I already own a copy of Space Captain Smith. Now if only I could regain access to it...

>179 -pilgrim-: So far, I’m not entirely sure re Soulless. I’m about 50 pages in and I suspect that by the time I finish the book I’m going to be finding Ms Tarrabotti annoying. The writing has a few quirks, and so far I haven’t seen much sign of the rapier wit that got compared to P G Wodehouse. However, I’m suspending judgement for the time being.

I probably should be posting about the rest of our adventures in Canada in this thread since the weekend is well and truly over. Yesterday afternoon, almost by accident we visited the Toronto Railway Museum (at the old roundhouse near CN Tower) because we had just been through the Ripley’s Aquarium, which would have been good if it had been less crowded, and I wanted a beer. There was a beer garden shown at the Roundhouse but it was closed until 5 pm. I took a few pictures of the roundhouse itself and a CN engine, which I’ll post if I can figure out a better way to do it.

Now we are on the train to Ottawa.

>179 -pilgrim-: Was that Drones, noting the reference to PGW, or just drones, noting the reference to The Language of Bees in #174?

Reading on the train: Ice by Anna Kavan, mentioned in #176, which also contains a link to lilisin’s comments, which I basically agree with. A strange book indeed. I think Brian Aldiss’s comment on the back gets it best: “De Quincey’s heir and Kafka’s sister”. It’s not really a story, more a series of connected visions, and it’s never clear which are visions or hallucinations and which are reality (for some undefined value of “reality”).
I could think of it as being at the other end of some sort of surreal continuum from The Hearing Trumpet: both are bonkers, but The Hearing Trumpet is sometimes funny. Whatever else Ice is, it’s definitely not funny.

>182 haydninvienna: I was attempting to refute your contention that a philosophical debate would be hard to start from PGW. The option to compare with The Language of Bees is simply icing on the cake!

>180 haydninvienna: Rapier wit?! I must make allowances for my book being aimed at a different demographic, but I never found Etiquette and Espionage more than mildly amusing.

The question is whether the language is dumbed down for the YA audience, or whether the YA tag is simply code for "all sex scenes PG-rated."..

>180 haydninvienna: I enjoyed Soulless enough to put the rest of the series on my wishlist, but not enough to pay full price for it or save it on my shelves. I found the lead character a bit forced at times, as well as the romance. It was good fun though, as I remember, though not in the category of P. G. Wodehouse, imo.

>185 -pilgrim-: >186 MrsLee: I’ve just found Prudence in a Chapters shop in Ottawa for $3, and bought it. I wouldn’t have paid full price for it, I don’t think.

>179 -pilgrim-: >186 MrsLee: I’ve got a bit further with Soulless—stopped for dinner at the point where Lord Maccon was about to have his wicked will of Alexia, apparently with her enthusiastic cooperation, and I still haven’t read much rapier-like wit. In fact, I’d say I’d seen better piffle in the Pub. But the book could still be fun.

So the kid and I are spending the night in jail. Seriously. And I am paying for the privilege. The old jail in Nicholas Street Ottawa is now a hostel. I’ve been here before, in 1996 (it was already a hostel then). It’s not exactly cheap unless you go into one of the dorm rooms, but it still makes a stark contrast to the Chateau Laurier, which we stayed at last night.
Today the National Gallery of Canada (which I found more interesting than the Ontario gallery in Toronto), including Louise Bourgeois’s rather horrifying “Maman” outside.

>189 haydninvienna: NorthernStar and I stayed in the Nicholas Street Hostel in 1978 or thereabouts. Gosh that was a long time ago. I barely remember it.

>189 haydninvienna: I was remembering that stay with tardis as I read your post. I have pictures somewhere.

>189 haydninvienna: >190 tardis: >191 NorthernStar:

Wow! You three certainly have your story straight:

“It was already a hostel then.”

Sure it was.

Birds of a feather, if you get my drift.

So the big trip is over, and the kid is back home (and getting some sleep, I hope). Never mind, we had fun.

I had a few hours between flights in London, so nipped into town on the Tube to visit Daunt Books. This got 2 items off the wish list:

• Dreyer’s Guide: An Utterly Correct Guide to Grammar and Style; and

• Together: Our Community Cookbook.

The first was a BB, but I don’t remember who fired it. I also saw a very favourable Economist review. (I flirted with the idea of buying a few extra copies and sending them to certain authors. Guess which.) I sometimes buy books like this one out of an impulse to stylistic hygiene, as you might say, but only if the book is a good one.

The second was a charity publication after the terrible fire at the Grenfell Tower in London. For that reason I wanted to pay full price in a proper bookshop rather than have Amazon take a cut off the top. The foundation, which is under the patronage of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, hopes to sell 50,000 copies of the book, and if that is achieved the foundation will benefit by £250,000 (it says here).

Just to sum it all up, we had a fine time in Canada, and the kid had a fine birthday. Laura is a good travelling companion: tolerant of her father's idiosyncrasies, and prepared to walk a lot (and my, can she walk—I'm not as much of a pedestrian as I used to be).

The book-buying, apart from the 2 mentioned in #193, was as follows:

at Indigo In Eaton Centre:
• The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
• A Red Herring Without Mustard and Speaking from Among the Bones both by Alan Bradley
from BMV Cafe on Queen St West:
• At the Existentialist Cafe (etc) by Sarah Bakewell
• Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (with the glow-in-the-dark cover, to replace the one I left in the cab), by Robin Sloan
from Bakka-Phoenix:
• A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
• The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There and The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon In Two both by Catherynne M Valente
• Soulless by Gail Carriger
from Chapters in Rideau Centre, Ottawa:
• Prudence by Gail Carriger
• Too Dumb for Democracy (etc) by David Moscrop.

I have another Adventure starting on the 24th. Not much book-buying is likely to be involved though, since I'm mainly going to places where books are not sold.

>194 haydninvienna: "places where books are not sold." **shocked face**

>195 2wonderY: Well, one of the places I’m going is Helsinki, where books are most definitely sold. Academic Books is one of my favourite bookstores. But I’m also going to Broome, which is a small town on the beach in the north-west of Australia. Nice place if you like tropical paradises (I do, in small doses), but a few bookshops short of a library. And to Port Macquarie, on the other side of the continent, where my stepdaughter lives. Same comments.

Actually I might be selling Broome a little short. It actually has 2 bookshops, one of which calls itself “an indigenous publisher”. Might be interesting. I’ll also be passing through Sydney, Perth and Hong Kong, but just passing through. And stopping in Brisbane for a couple of days, but I think my sister in law would probably like me to talk to her.

Explanation: my wife’s birthday is on 22 July, and for the last few years we’ve been going to the Savonlinna opera festival in eastern Finland. (Opera in a genuine mediaeval castle! Great fun. Seats are a bit hard though.) After the Opera we travel to Broome for a few days and then on to Sydney and then up the coast to a tiny town called Nabiac, which has the world’s least luxurious motel, fortunately attached to a fine pub, and across the street a cafe that does a fine breakfast. The point of this is to allow my wife to visit the grave of Danza, one of her horses, the dam of Olivia who has appeared on LT from time to time. Danza died at an advanced age about 3 or 4 years ago. Nabiac is about 90 kilometres from Port Macquarie, where the previously mentioned stepdaughter lives. Then I’m getting off the chain in Brisbane for a couple of days to visit one of my relatives by my previous marriage. (My second wife died of cancer 17 years ago.).

Not a book, but a piece of reading, that shows why the first page of the Economist that I read, always, is the one at the back, the obituary. In the issue for 29 June to 5 July, which I received only a few minutes ago, the obituary is of David Esterly, a self-taught woodcarver whom I had, I admit, never heard of. Anne Wroe, who writes the obituaries, must be one of the best living writers of English. I rather vaguely knew about Grinling Gibbons, from long-ago reading of my father's Woodworker magazines. Now I'm interested to read what Esterly had to say about him. There are a few copies of Esterly's books on LT.

>196 haydninvienna: I've never been to the opera festival in Savonlinna but have visited the Olavinlinna castle. It's a nice example of period typical architecture. We don't have much of that in Sweden - all of the ones built by Swede's are no longer on Swedish territory ;-)

>198 Busifer: Like Suomenlinna (Sveaborg)—one of my very favourite places.

>198 Busifer: Just so, though I've never visited Suomenlinna. Maybe it's time to visit Finland again, and not only Torneå.

A book that I bought from Cărturești Carusel in Bucharest—Literary Places by Sarah Baxter. I'm not sure whether to treat this one as a DNF or to say that I'm dipping into it. I read the section on James Joyce's Dublin, as portrayed in Ulysses, and it didn't tell me anything I didn't know already nor inspire me to go there (not that I need inspiring to go to Dublin—I'd go back there in a heartbeat). Much the same with Dickens' London or Thomas Mann's Davos. I'll probably continue to dip into it, but it's really not the kind of book to read straight through.

>200 Busifer: I've been to Helsinki 4 or 5 times now and have been to Suomenlinna every time. I've even been there in December, when it was clammy and foggy, but still beautiful. I'm going to the city again in a couple of weeks, and will try very hard to get out to Suomenlinna again.

Explanation for anyone else: Suomenlinna is a fortification on a group of islands in Helsinki Harbour. It was originally built by the Swedish empire when what is now Finland was part of that empire, as a defence against the Russians. By the time the Russian attack came in 1808, the Swedish empire was basically bankrupt and the commander surrendered without a battle, to save the inevitable loss of life. The Russians then took it over and it was bombarded by the British and French navies during the Crimean War. When the Finns became independent after WW1 it became a Finnish military establishment but was obsolete by the 1960s and ultimately was converted into a museum. Some few hundred fortunate people live there as well.

https://www.suomenlinna.fi/en/

Pic from Wikipedia:

Another book bought recently: Dreyer’s English (etc). Cheery, full of good advice, and I found nothing to disagree with. Perhaps not a book I’m going to keep at my elbow as I write, but there are a few authors around who could usefully do so, I think. Little touches that I liked, such as his parenthetical comment that he has rather gone off the verb “to trump”. There is also a list of websites he finds useful.

Recommended.

ETA: although, who am I recommending it for? Dragoneers are by definition perfect. Must be those authors I mentioned.

>194 haydninvienna: That's a very respectable haul! Especially for an overseas excursion!

I've kind of anticipated the book-buying drought by ordering 2 books from Booktopia, the Australian online bookseller, for delivery to my sister in law's place. (Booktopia ships only to Australia and New Zealand.) The 2 books are by Australian authors and I haven't succeeded in finding either one in bricks&mortar stores. They are

A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty and
The Mine of Eternal Spring by Alan B Pierce.

The first was a BB from, I think, mabith. The author of the second one is a former Attorney-General's Department colleague of mine, possibly the world's only retired legislative counsel with 3 published novels to his name. I have the first one, Cheung Chau Dog Fanciers Society, but have to admit that I haven't read it. It's one of my "only you" books. But The Mine of Eternal Spring apparently got decent reviews. Alan's a good bloke but I don't really expect great literature, although I saw someone describe Cheung Chau Dog Fanciers Society as the only Hong Kong novel that was any good.

ETA looks like The Mine ... will be another "only you". No copies on LT so far. Here is the description from Booktopia:

Roland Scott unexpectedly inherits, at the age of twenty-three, a debt-laden country law practice and a share in a failing gold mine. Roland decides to work at the mine, leaving his late father’s practice and his girlfriend Linden, the daughter of a wealthy doctor, behind.

The time is the 1970s, but the challenges of operating a small gold mine in the Australian bush have changed little since the late 19th century. Roland must gain the trust of a band of offbeat and unforgettable characters working at the mine. He must also choose between the temptations of Megan, the mine manager’s wife, and his love for the absent Linden. For Roland it is a quest to find his true self.

The Mine of Eternal Spring is an absorbing, action-packed tale of gold, lust, love, loyalty and betrayal in a remote and beautiful valley in Eastern Victoria, told with verve, style and deliciously subtle humour.

>202 haydninvienna: I've passed it a couple of times when arriving in Helsinki by ferry, but I've been on my way to visit friends, inland, so have only stayed in Helsinki for a day or so. And the last time was probably 19 years ago.

>206 Busifer: I might be in Helsinki next June for a few days. Secret mission for work. Shshshshsh!

>207 pgmcc: *tip-toes backward*
Ohh, these covert missions. I promise not to tell!
I only hope Finland will still stand, after?

In all seriousness, I’m unlikely to get to Helsinki anytime soon. So many places to go! And son just discovered The Tank Museum, which is his idea of heaven, and so we kind of promised him to try to get there, so that’s one more on the list.

Just ordered another book on line in Oz. This time it's one by an author whose work I have read, but not this particular book: The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. I read A Mine of Serpents many years ago and remember enjoying it (the touchstone goes to The Orchid Trilogy, of which A Mine of Serpents is part). I've been looking for a copy since I bought The Orchid Trilogy in Dublin in February, but although it was published as a King Penguin only a few years ago, it seems to be very hard to find now except as a POD. The Image ... sounds like a really strange book: read the reviews by @benwaugh and petroglyph.

>207 pgmcc: Peter, if you're going to Helsinki, I encourage you to go to Suomenlinna if you don't know it already. And of course you will be going to Academic Books for, er, research for your mission.

ETA Go to Suomenlinna even if you do know it already. Like I said, one of my very favourite places.

>210 haydninvienna:
I have never been to Finland and the mission I will be on fills three days from 06:00 to 23:00 so I will have to take a day or two as leave to see the place properly. Your recommendation is taken on advisement.

>208 Busifer: Did you mean the one at Bovingdon in England? If you go there, try to find time to visit Monkey World which is nearby. They have or had a TV show which my wife used to be a big fan of, and she finally persuaded me to go to the place itself. It proved to be unexpectedly interesting, but will appall you at some of the things that people do to chimpanzees.

This is a test. I've been dissatisfied with the quality of photos that I posted ever since Africa, and I've finally got around to trying a new way.



I took these in the National Gallery in Ottawa. Hugh, do they look familiar?

And the roundhouse:

I also have a fine shot of Louise Bourgeois' "Maman" outside the National Gallery, but in deference to the feelings of any arachnophobes in the Pub I won't post it.

None of them are visible to me.

Nope. No can see.

>213 haydninvienna: >214 haydninvienna: I can see the pictures using Firefox 68.0.

Maybe check that you are using the secure (https) URL? If I manually change this thread's URL to plain 'http', it breaks the pics for me too.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board. Not the “https” issue, BTW. The images are on Google Photos. Maybe it doesn’t allow permanent linking?
>218 ScoLgo: I posted them from a Mac using Firefox also. Weird.

I might try again tonight using Safari on the Mac.

EATA: Works in Chrome on an iPad.

>219 haydninvienna: Sorry I wasn't clear, Richard. I intended the 'http vs. https' comment for those having difficulties seeing your pics. However, after messing with the URL, the photos are now gone for me too so I'm pretty sure I was on the wrong track there anyway.

Have you tried the 'junk drawer' feature in your profile for linking photos?

I can see the photos on my iPhone.

>220 ScoLgo: I've used the junk drawer quite a bit, but it always seems to reproduce the image at a significantly lower resolution. Look at the images in this post and you'll see what I mean.

This is the third picture above linked from the junk drawer:


Not only is it lower resolution but it's oriented wrongly.

Just to kill the "https" issue off, all the links are "https" anyway.

I have now tried opening this page on my work computer (PC running Win10, with Internet Explorer and Edge installed, and Firefox running from a USB stick): neither Explorer nor Edge shows the images (and Explorer warns me that "only secure content is displayed"); Firefox shows the images properly. I'm posting this from the work PC using Firefox.

Like I said, back to the drawing board. If I want higher resolution than the junk drawer allows, is there an image host that works and doesn't require a steep payment? I understand that Photobucket would work, but it apparently now requires a $400 annual payment to allow external linking.

>222 haydninvienna: I’ve been using imgur.com for a couple years without issues. I haven't explored image hosting sites much so I don't know if there are better ones, but it’s free and I find it very easy to use. You upload a photo, then click on the photo and copy and paste the “Direct Link” it gives you into your IMG html.

I’m not sure about the image qualities as most of what I post isn’t high quality to begin with, but I haven’t noticed lower resolutions like in your example from the junk drawer.

>213 haydninvienna: Not a sausage. I'm using Win10 and Firefox from my laptop.

I could see the pictures yesterday but today there are only white placeholders, except for >222 haydninvienna:. Using FF 68.0.

Trying again ....



ETA it's one of 3 pen and ink drawings of strelitzias by Charmian Johnson, in the National gallery of Canada.

I post a lot of photos to this site so maybe I can help. The other day when you first did the test, I could see the images in your test posts. Today they're little gray circles. The image just above I can see.

I have noticed secure v non-secure site issues when I grab an image URL from one type of site and load it to the other. It usually happens when I'm posting my reading wrap ups and include LT cover images from my catalog. Otherwise when I grab an image URL from another website it works fine (smugmug and flickr are my two hosting sites). Chrome browser...don't know version.

loaded both secure and non secure versions and there are still gray minus circles in place of photos. maybe it's an html problem. did you forget a " or a > ?

>227 Bookmarque: Thanks for trying but I don't think it's just a syntax error. For me, as I said in #222, I could see the photos on my work PC in Firefox but not in Internet Explorer or Edge. Right now I'm using my own Mac with Firefox, and everything from last night is still there just as I posted it, although this page has been reloaded several times. And as I said in #219, I can see them on the iPad in Chrome but not in Safari.

I've just tried opening this page in Safari on the Mac, and Safari doesn't show the images I posted last night but does show the ones in #222 and #226. The common element in the ones that aren't shown is that they were posted from Google Photos. The one in #222 came from the junk drawer, and the one in #226 came from my shiny new Imgur account.

In the pious hope, here are the other 2 strelitzia drawings. Hugh, If you can see them, my first thought when I saw them in the Gallery was "Oh my, I bet Hugh would be interested in them."

>226 haydninvienna: >229 haydninvienna: Receiving you loud and clear. They're beautiful drawings; she's clearly a gifted artist.

I see 226 and229 images. They are lovely. Still don't see problem images.

>230 hfglen: >231 MrsLee: sign of relief. Since it’s Friday and I have a DNBR weekend, I will see about getting some more pics up.

Now I'm trying to see if I can put an image inside spoiler tags.

Nope. The image shows even if text between the tags doesn't.

If anyone wants to know what I was trying to hide, see here. Not recommended for arachnophobes.