Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read
I just read the first 5 instalments of Luke Jennings’s Killing Eve: Resurrection on Substack. I hadn’t read his original books📚 or watched the tv series but they don’t seem to be necessary to enjoy this. New instalments at weekly intervals, and it’s free to read.
I’ve never liked bagels …
writes John Naughton. I must say the concept of “liking bagels” caused me a certain amount of cognitive dissonance when I read that. Bagels aren’t for liking, they’re for holding the filling in.
It looks as if Bluesky might where several of the people I used to enjoy following on Twitter have ended up. People like John Self for example.
I was wondering how it was that I’d never heard of the Irish film November Afternoon 🍿 till I remembered that in 1996 I’d been living in London for 9 years, visited home only rarely and didn’t have internet access (the following year, I’d be visiting the Irish Times web site daily). That’s how.
Now Threads has come to the EU I’m reminded that I don’t want an Instagram account or anything from Meta. Maybe it’s time to try Bluesky instead. If some kind Micro.blogger has an invitation to spare, I’d be very grateful.
The new Talk about books post is about A Stranger with a Bag, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature “strangers”, people who are in some sense out of place.
My previous post, about Jane Austen, got a comment, which I greatly appreciate, from Matt Kaul.
The collection of thirteen short stories now titled A Stranger with a Bag was originally published as Swans on an Autumn River in (as far as I can tell: the information available online is confusing) 1961, then rereleased under its present title five years later. I suspect that the change of title was meant to emphasize the importance of the stranger in these stories.
It’s as if the show is saying, “Yes, yes, on the one hand the Doctor always changes, but on the other hand he is also always David Tennant and he is also always living somewhere safely with your favorite companion, unless you are a Martha fan lmao.” Tennant gets treated as though he is somehow more the Doctor than any other incarnation …
The attempt at a Marvel-style endlessly overlapping universe line is self-indulgent and sentimental in all the wrong ways.
Ben Sixsmith in The Critic on The sad reign of Ian Hislop. I remember remarking to someone in 1995 or thereabouts that HIGNFY was my favourite tv programme (I didn’t have a tv at the time) because it kept Hislop off Radio 4’s The News Quiz 😜
I get so fed up reading the phrase “show, don’t tell”. It’s not that I disagree with the principle, not at all (within reason), but surely there’s something self-contradictory about telling us that we ought to show, not tell, when you could be showing us? Silently, if possible.
People often complain about Substack for various reasons but there’s a lot of good stuff on there. (One of these days, I’m going to post a list of the feeds I follow.) And now there’s Killing Eve: Resurrection, by Luke Jennings, the author of the original novels (which I haven’t yet read).
I listened to several old episodes of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book last night, including an interview with Sarah Hall on the publication of her novel Burntcoat (2021). And today I found a copy of Burntcoat in a secondhand bookshop! Still want to reread her short story collection, Madame Zero 📖
Signal is fading, if this is right. I’ve found myself increasingly using regular SMS. I have an iPhone 12 Mini, most of my friends and family prefer Android and I refuse to instal WhatsApp, or anything Meta.
I’m not enjoying Substack Notes so I thought about deleting my Substack account entirely, to avoid the temptation to use Notes. But I have paid subscriptions to 2 Substack newsletters, and may subscribe to others in future, so I can’t just delete the account, though I read the posts in RSS 🤷🏻♂️
Mary Crawford, handsome, clever, and tolerably well provided for, has a view of the world that is peculiarly her own, partly derived from received ideas and partly from her own sharp observation. The received ideas include an unfavourable opinion of clergymen, of whom she has not met many. She thinks them indolent, selfish and hypocritical. In this, she’s not exactly wrong, though of course there are many exceptions to the general rule.
Every now and then, I find myself wanting to write a post about the unfulfilled promises of technology. Then I remember that I already wrote it, more than 3 years ago. Here it is again, still true: Tech’s unfilfilled promises
I want to go for a walk but I don’t want to go for a walk around here (boring), it’s too wet to take the bike out and the Sunday bus timetable is such that I couldn’t get anywhere worthwhile and back in daylight. So I suppose a boring walk around here is what it’ll have to be.
The iOS Weather app tells me that it’s not going to rain today until 8 pm but a look out the window tells me that it’s raining now. I wonder which I should believe?
Funny to realize that the Eblana’s existence has been forgotten and that it’s now part of “hidden Dublin”. I saw the hilarious production of Joe Orton’s Loot🎭 there in the late 70s/early 80s The story of the secret theatre buried under Dublin’s Busáras
The people I buy my coffee from keep sending me emails that look like this. I think there are supposed to be various offers between the links styled as buttons but they never show up. (I think they used to, in the dim past.) Weird, huh?
Cydney Hayes sees a “vibe shift” on Substack since the introduction of Notes: The elite capture of Substack. I must say I haven’t been finding it enjoyable or very useful particularly since the recent change to amalgamate the Notes feed and the Home page. Maybe time to delete my account?
