Tag: admin1 reading

Book read by Admin1

Ear We Go

The rotting logs blocking vehicular access to Scott Hall Playing Fields have been replaced with big stones but a few of the logs have just rolled a short distance away and this one is embellished with a fine crop of wood ear mushrooms. A2 passed it en route for her jabs which nowadays are done in chemist shops so no jabberwock or Salvation Army shop on offer.
A1 is reading Archangel by Robert Harris.

Friday Food

Our family dinners have been creeping back from Sunday to Saturday Night, then Saturday lunch and now Friday night, when we ate toad-in-the-hole with mash, multicoloured carrots, broccoli and caramelised onion gravy, followed by apple strudel made in the traditional way with filo pastry. So we couldn’t do the Guardian Saturday quiz and were reduced to asking Faye questions about syzygy, palolo worms, nerve cells and recent elections and discussing cloning techniques with Bob.
A1 is reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves. A2 is rereading Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguru.

Saturday Lunch

Happy Independence/United Nations Day everyone!
Storm Austen is coming at us from the south and Storm Boelo from the north so we had our family lunch of baked potatoes, eggs and salads followed by plum cobbler before the roaring winds and pouring rain arrived in both directions. Hatches are staying battened down for the foreseeable but meanwhile we scored 9 on the GSQ, reducing our average to exactly 10.
A1 is reading Precipice by Robert Harris, about the relationship between socialite Venetia Stanley and PM Herbert Asquith in the run-up to WW1. Contains many letters from HA to VS, all of which are, astonishingly, genuine. Fun fact: the author is married to the sister of Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and others.
A2 is appropriately reading The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves.

Hell of a Sky

The sky lights up as the sun goes down.
A1 is reading Eden Falls by Vaseem Khan, who joins Abir Mukherjee and Ajay Chowdhury as South Asian UK-based crime writers turning their hand to (mostly US-based) thrillers. With mediocre results, it must be said. This one veers into technothriller/science fictional territory with a mysterious alien object crash-landing in the desert, and the efforts of a pair of ill-matched women to hunt it down, while being chased by the FBI, an Elon Musk figure and an Indian intelligence agent.
A2 is reading Land by Maggie O’Farrell; a historical Irish family saga with plenty of misery, starting slowly but galloping to a reasonably happy end.

Feed Me!

Here’s Ganny, crying for his supper.
A1 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which took ages for the plot to get going but the journey was highly amusing and entertaining. It’s about the somewhat farcical setting up of 1951’s Festival of Britain, part of which was a funfair in Battersea Park. This evoked childhood memories, as I was taken there in the mid 1960s and had three rides on the Rotor (mentioned in the book) until I was sick.
A2 is reading Agrippa by Robert Harris; ancient Roman war and politics, carried on in most brutal terms, so not unlike today.

Take a Bow

A nice double bow, captured by the webcam.
A1 is reading The Killing Stones by Ann Cleeves. A2 is reading Our Noble Selves by Kate Atkinson, which is what Graham Greene would have called an “entertainment” and was indeed very entertaining with its irresistible-to-women protagonist and its mixture of nostalgia and espionage; it was rather too much like the William Boyd trilogy in those respects so I regret reading it immediately afterwards.

Clouds in Raindrops and a Super Supernova

The clouds have now blown away and the Dwarf Mini is out observing a supernova in a distant galaxy.
Later: And the results are in! I first photographed this galaxy (C 30, known as the “Deer Lick group”, bizarrely) a couple of weeks back on 21 August. In early September there came news of a supernova, so on the first clearish night for ages I had another go. Clouds moved in so there there were fewer exposures this time (hence some of the fainter stars don’t appear), but the supernova — designated SN 2026aaiv — is clearly visible. A supernova is an extremely energetic explosion that happens when a star reaches the end of its life, and can briefly outshine a whole galaxy of billions of stars. Luckily this one is about 45 million light years away.
In preparation for reading Cold Sunset by William Boyd, A2 is rereading the rest of the trilogy (so far), starting with Gabriel’s Moon. A1 is reading The Lost Women by Tim Weaver.

Happy Birthday

A2 blows out the candles on her exquisite cherry almond cake after a succulent roast chicken dinner and before we scored 9 (8 would be more accurate but hey it’s a special day) on the GSQ.
The cat wanted to join in too.
It is also (and is on this day every year) National Read a Book Day. A1 is reading The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davies. A2 has 6 exciting new books to choose from (thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you A1) and is beginning with The End of Everything by M John Harrison, a post-apocalyptic alien invasion story which was like a weird dream but good all the same. First book I’ve read where the colophon warns AI not to scrape.

Critter of the Day: Harvestperson

Oh no I can’t think of anything to say about this leggy creature of autumn, except that its diet of squashed slugs, bird droppings and jam seems more healthy than that of its lookalike the pholcus which just eats other spiders, the bastard.
A1 is reading Body of Lies* by Jo Callaghan, the conclusion of JC’s trilogy of crime novels about an AI detective. Somewhat melodramatic and polemical, and unfortunately the plot was in service of the polemic, rather than the other way round.
A2 is reading The Clues in the Fjord* by Satu Ramo.

Chicken Pasta Bake

Today we had a chicken, courgette, cheese and pasta bake with a veggie version for Bob, followed by air-fried peaches and ice cream and the GSQ on which we scored 10, or possibly 11.
Blimey, is it really more than a week since we had new books? Well, Slow Gods and The Bone Clocks are both big books which require close attention. A1 is now reading The Silent Bones* by Val McDermid (something of a return to form) and A2 is reading Body of Lies* by Jo Callaghan.

Crescent Sun

The weather stayed clear for the eclipse yesterday. Here’s the traditional colander shot, awkwardly taken because it was difficult to hold a camera and a colander at the same time and there was only a tiny bit of unshadowed wall to project on:

And here’s a montage of images from the Dwarf Mini and a first stab at a video, 2 hours in 20 seconds:

Later we watched a small selection of Perseid meteors. A great day!
And today is our warmest day of the year: 34.1°C
A1 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee, which had lots of horrible people being horrible to each other and swearing a lot. Disappointing — like his mate Vaseem Khan he should stick to historical crime novels.
A2’s toilet tome is Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Delete your Facebook account NOW!

Dinner with the Family

Our family meal today was at Gez and Dave’s house and featured cod loins wrapped in parma ham with green beans and potato gratin with sausage rolls for the fish refusers. Present at the gathering were Dave with a broken foot in a velcro boot, Bob and Lena all the way from Sweden and Ivy visiting Faye.
A2 contributed a Dubai-style chocolate, pistachio and shredded wheat cheesecake but unfortunately dropped it and had to scrape it back together and apply another layer so it did not look as good as the before photo here but it tasted pretty acceptable. And we scored an astonishing 14 on the GSQ, bringing us back above 10 at long last.
A1 is reading The Killer’s Mark by MW Craven. A2 is reading Pinball 1973* by Haruki Murakami.

Ghost of a Pigeon

An unlucky bird must have flown full tilt into our window today. There was no corpse on the ground below so it must have flapped away with an aching head leaving a print of itself on the rain-soaked glass and a feather where its beak should be. Here’s a brief video:

Later: a pile of feathers at the bottom of the garden provides a clue. Most likely the pigeon rammed the window when fleeing in terror from a sparrowhawk but the bird of prey caught up with it and now it is probably a ghost indeed. How sad.A1 is reading The Burning Tide by William Shaw. A2 is reading The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee.