This, from The Independent, is something we already know about but it does no harm to keep reinforcing the message:
The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.
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I tried to read Michael Dibdin’s The Tryst, a novel he first published in 1989, but it was heavy going and I slowly got bogged down, so much so that I couldn’t carry on as there was no pleasure associated with the endeavour. I read 40 pages and knew by then. Usually they say you should give a book at least 50 pages before you can be certain that it’s not working for you. But I can tell a long time before that. Often I can tell after the first sentence.
I’ll read Dibdin again if I get the chance. I haven’t read his Zen series, as I find the Venetian detective too unsympathetic for my taste, but some of his stand-alone novels have been excellent.
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This is from Fernham:
It seems that Colette’s father “passed his retirement in his study writing his memoirs and binding the volumes himself. While her father was alive, neither Colette nor any other member of the family was ever tempted to open one of the books, because of their unprepossessing titles: My Campaigns, the Lessons of ‘70, Marshal Mahon Seen by a Fellow-Soldier, and so forth. After her father died, however the library was converted into a bedroom and Colette’s elder brother made a discovery:….Except for a dedication, the books contained all blank pages.”
(Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, Columbia UP, 2005, 91.)
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The Australian novelist, Patrick White, left behind a box full of papers which have been stored in the Australian National Library.
Out of the boxes came extraordinary treasures: photographs of the young swell at Cambridge in the 1930s; precious letters saved from the thousands he’d received in a long lifetime; the old man’s beret and [...]
One of the current Amnesty campaigns is concerned with protecting trafficked women.
These women are imported from carefully chosen supplier countries including Moldova, Romania, Albania, Thailand, Nigeria and Sierra Lione. Moldovans are now particularly available, with an estimated 25% of the Moldovan population having been exported since the country became independent.
Specific import techniques may vary from [...]
Crimeficreader has done tagged me again. My first impulse was to run, and I did, round and round and ended up in the same position, but panting. I’m not going to tag anyone else.
Thanks for a continuing parade of new things to read, and especially for Charlote Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wall-Paper.
Thanks for improving [...]
We want to have 20,000 books within the next five years, said Army Lt. John Brown, referring to the library facility for prisoners illegally detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Much as I love books, it would be nice to think that the whole complex in Guantanamo Bay will have been dismantled before the projected time-period has [...]
That book meme…
Thanks to Crimeficreader I have been well and truly tagged. So here are my answers:
1. One book that changed your life?
I suppose it was Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. A book has to be very special to change someone’s life. Most books don’t change anything at all. As a child I read [...]
In an article in The Independent an example of the British Government’s draconian stance on political protest was aired. Thirty-six year old Steven Jago, a management accountant, was charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.
Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: In a time of universal deceit, [...]
The video of Pink singing Dear Mr President live in New York City is on YouTube, and you can access it via this link.
It’s only a mildly interesting video, but worth a watch so you know what all the fuss is about. It’s certainly better than the official video release, which is naîve in the [...]
During my talk in Lincoln last night I read an extract from one of the novels in the Sam Turner series.
I published Shooting in the Dark some years ago. It is a novel centred around a death-threat to a blind woman and her sister. It is about sight and seeing and how easy it is [...]
Pierrepoint is an interesting film, Directed by Adrian Shergold, who cut his teeth with the British television industry and was responsible for The Second Coming, the 2003 production with Christopher Eccleston.
Interesting, also, that Albert Pierrepoint was not the last hangman in the UK, as he retired in the mid-fifties, although the last executions were carried [...]
