Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read
Still Life📖, the second book in A S Byatt’s tetralogy, and easily my favourite of the 4, is the only one I no longer have a copy of. I saw a battered copy in the Oxfam shop today and thought about buying it. But I didn’t, and I wonder why, as David Crosby said. Never going to reread the other 3.
Nine Queens (Nueve Reinas) is being rereleased 🍿. I used to have it on DVD … still do, I just found it.
Changing the cd, I meant to put on Jürgen Friedrich’s Pollock, which has one of my very favourite peformances of “Round Midnight”. That made me think of Jarrett/Haden’s Last Dance, which has the other, so I put that on instead 🤷🏻♂️ — 🎶🎹
I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn’t that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don’t think that that’s unusual as a conversion experience.
I need to replace my 4-year-old iPhone 12 mini. I don’t want another iPhone and I’d like to avoid Android because I don’t trust Google. What does that leave? Ideally, I’d like a non-smart phone that can be used as a wi-fi hotspot. Does such a phone exist? There used to be KaiOS …
The stories in Kate Atkinson’s 2002 collection, Not the End of the World, are linked or interconnected, but unusually closely.
And, of course, since ChatGPT will also steal this column, everything I’ve written ironically in these opening paragraphs will now loop back into its ravenous maw as verified truth.
If they’re OK with him running a crypto scam, allowing disease and starvation to spread through the poorer parts of the world, defying the Constitution and deliberately increasing economic uncertainty, why would they object to a rude word?
I love Sète. The best concert I ever heard/saw was the Brad Mehldau trio in the Théâtre de la Mer there in 2008.
Following from my previous post on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, in which I discussed Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra, here’s what I have to say about Coriolanus.
All these years later, still having to use the Terminal to unmount my lone remaining Sony Walkman:
sudo umount /Volumes/WALKMAN
I almost missed the fact that a new album Close to Mars by the trio John Taylor (p), Palle Danielsson (b) and Martin France (d) — all of whom are now sadly deceased — came out earlier this year. I’d been planning to go to see JT at Marciac the summer he died — a decade ago already 🎹 🎶
English is in precipitous decline. Still one of the most popular A-levels when I left school in 2011, it no longer even makes the top ten, having been displaced by various Stem subjects and those vulgar parvenus, sociology and psychology.
James Marriott. But 2011 is still recent, and it’s possible that the tide will turn against computer science and sociology.
After some hesitation, I accepted the 3-month free trial of Apple Music that came with my MacBook Air, and I’ve just listened to 6 Enrico Pieranunzi albums in a row: 3 with Jasper Somsen, 2 with Thomas Fonnesbaek and 1 with Marc Johnson. I feel I’ve done something that shouldn’t be allowed!
A look at Chris Power’s short story collection from 2018, Mothers.
I noticed a few weeks ago that Google hadn’t been indexing my Micro.blog site at talkaboutbooks.net including my newsletter posts. That’s now being rectified, I’m glad to say (even if I had to sign up to Search Console).
I read Lisa Lutz’s The Accomplice 📖 last week. Not quite as good as her extraordinary The Passenger but still highly enjoyable. I’m already looking forward to rereading it.
Brian Klaas’s nonfiction book, Fluke, revived my dormant interest in determinism, free will, chaos theory and more, and integrated them into a stimulating argument.
I replaced my 5-year-old Intel MacBook Air with an M4 and got 3 free months of Apple tv thrown in. So, I binge-watched Liaison 📺 with Vincent Cassel and Eva Green. Meh. Good cast (très sympa), risible story, a combination I find particularly frustrating.
Astonished to learn that Stiff Little Fingers still exist, with two original members. Who knew? 🎶
The Moonstone, we are told, is “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” But perhaps that’s not where its main interest lies.
“My Back Pages” is the only song from Somewhere Before that I ever listen to now (though I have the album on CD). I hadn’t realized till I read Ethan Iverson’s Shades of Jazz today that the Byrds recorded a version that Jarrett’s performance resembles more closely than it does Dylan’s 🎶 🎹
