Tag: admin1 reading

Book read by Admin1

Passion Flower

Our first passion flower photo of the year. Admire its extraordinary superstructure, concentric frills and clawed petals. Our Friedhats Sudan Rume coffee is supposed to taste of passion fruits as well as eucalyptus, candied raspberries and mint chop chip ice cream but it actually tastes, exquisitely, of sun-warmed peaches.
A1 is reading Never Flinch by Stephen King. A2 is reading The Red Shaw by William Shore (actually vice versa).

Critter of the Day: Unidentified Small Hoverfly

Dilly-dallying on the dill.
The weather station was out of action for the cold wet start of the month, so according to our records June 2025 was the second driest and second warmest June of all time, with the temperature reaching 31.9°C yesterday. It was the fourth sunniest June ever according to the solar panels.
A1 is reading The Red Shore by William Shaw (thanks A2!). A2 is reading Guilt by Jussi Adler-Olsen.

Yet Another Celebration

A family dinner to round off a week of festivities. A1 received a Shipping Forecast T-shirt and we both got coffee beans and beer. Toad-in-the-hole (veggie and carnivore versions) and the remains of the delicious cherry cake were served and we scored 12 on the GSQ, bringing our average back above 10 at long last.

<<<< And here’s Dad Dancing!

A1 is rereading Sympathy for the Devil by William Shaw.A2 is rereading Redemption by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Cherries

Some of this year’s excellent crop of cherries. Although the tree is over 10 years old it’s never fruited very well until now, not helped by the depredations of squirrels and pigeons.

A1 is rereading Body Breaker by MW Craven, which brings to an end his MWC reread. Just waiting now for the next Washington Poe book, due soon. In other news MWC has been commissioned to write some juvenile James Bond tie-ins, which doesn’t bode well for his proper books 😐
A2 is rereading Black Widow by Chris Brookmyre.

National Beer Day

It is also Father’s Day, so we had a delicious chicken, leek and mushroom pie for the dads to enjoy with their beer, followed by Fried Alaska (with raspberry Swiss roll and minty chocolate ice cream), and scored a creditable 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is rereading Born in a Burial Gown by MW Craven. A2 is reading The Man Made of Smoke* by Alex North. Many years ago, various people ignored an unhappy child in a service station, and now they are being bumped off one by one.

The One That Got Away

The cat made its annual attempt at catching a baby starling but A2 managed to usher it out of the house before it became a fluffy cat snack. Here it is catching its breath in the bushes before it flew away.
Sad news: our weather station has stopped working. We were expecting it to rain in the near future but now we’ll never know. Unless we look out of the window.
A1 is reading Hollow Grave* by Kate Webb. A2 is reading Buying Time* by EM Brown.

Strawberry Cheesecake

Another family meal, another creamy pudding. Since the Co-op shop was hacked there have been shortages on many shelves but a vast oversupply of sell-by-date cream. A1 served up a delicious beef stew and A2 concocted a creamy courgette gratin for the vegetarians. We enjoyed it all and scored our usual substandard 9 on the GSQ.
A1 started The Girl in the Woods* and The Cuckoo*, both by Camilla Lackberg, but couldn’t get into either of them.
A2 is reading The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison; a miserable book about horrible people with a specially ghastly protagonist.

Dejeuner en Famille

Dinner with the family in their lovely new house: salmon, salad and cherry cake for afters. What a treat!
Faye was our quizmistress and kindly gave us a score of 9.
A1 is reading The Vinyl Detective: Underscore by Andrew Cartmel. No proper recipes this time, but more on Vinyl Detective Macaroni Cheese, which is now credited to Sam Wong’s article How to Hack Your Macaroni Cheese in the 23 Nov 2022 issue of New Scientist (behind a paywall, but free to Leeds libraries members).
A2 is reading The Girl in the Woods* by Camilla Lackberg; child killers and child-killers, with 17th century witch trials added in.

Raindrops on Tulips

A flower, a fly and a few drops of rain the day after our solar panels recorded nearly 11 kWh.
A1 is reading Buying Time* by EM Brown, the impenetrable pseudonym of sf writer Eric Brown. This is another approach to the relive-your-life subgenre (cf North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Atkinson’s Life after Life etc), in which a rather irritating Writer goes back to various events in his past and tries to learn from them.
A2 is reading The Alaska Sanders Affair* by Joel Dicker, in which the hero, who is special because he’s a Writer and has apparently written all Joel Dicker’s books (Joel should sue) solves a cold case with the help of the police and all their resources. Irritating.

Speckled Wood

New life on a dead tree.
A1 is reading A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering* by Andrew Hunter Murray — an enjoyable light read (if a bit overlong), and highly reminiscent of Andrew Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective books in style and characterisation. So much so that A1 wondered if a pseudonym was in effect here … it turns out not (AHM is a Private Eye contributor, among much else). But in the course of this wondering A1 discovered that, on that very day, a new Vinyl Detective book was published! Spooky or what? Anyway, duly ordered.
A2 is reading The Friends of Harry Perkins* by Chris Mullin.

Florence and the (Xbox) Machine

A1 has been reading the recently published Perspectives by Laurent Binet, an epistolary murder mystery set in 16th-century Florence. And was rather struck by this passage:

As I descended from the ramparts, I heard some guards climbing the stairs. Since I had no business being up there, I would have had no excuse to justify my presence if they had seen me. So I hurried back to the roof. But you know the palace better than I, so you know that there are no hiding places up there. I ran to the wall; a leap from that height could be fatal, even to me. But God rewards the brave: at the foot of the wall was a cart loaded with hay, left there by some groom. It all happened in a flash: the decision, then the execution. I climbed onto the parapet, arms outspread like Christ on the cross, I closed my eyes and I dived. During my fall I heard the cry of an eagle. My landing was as soft as on a feather bed, and in a second I was up on my feet again, completely unscathed.

That’s from page 140. So here’s a sequence from 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II, which is set in … 16th-century Florence. Which is where we are here:

This really does stretch coincidence too far. All that’s missing is the eagle — but as any fule kno, nearly all Assassin’s Creed games have an eagle perched on the viewpoints you can jump from (he must have flown off before I got there this time). And there is always a convenient hay cart below (well, unless there’s a lake).

I think it’s pretty certain that M. Binet is a fan 🙂