The cover is a simple, cardstock cover with simple gold foil lettering on the cover. I picked up the Midori “Commonplace Book” ($5 and available in 2 colors) . This A6-sized, 61-numbered-page mini notebook includes a paper bookmark that is printed with lines to add your own key, a place to store your key in the book, and a 2-page spread index that is numbered to match page numbers. The Commonplace Notebook Features There is a little brochure included with the notebook that includes information…
Homer, Odyssey, tr. Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), p. 57 (from "A Note on the Translation"): Wherever possible, I have tried to avoid words whose modernity would jolt readers out of the world that is the epic’s setting. In Book 11, for instance, the ghost of Agamemnon describes how he was murdered at the feast given to celebrate his return from Troy, a passage in which he uses the word eranos, often translated as “picnic.” But “picnic” is what my late friend…
Football Book Review #1: A Season With Verona by Tim Parks Football Book Review #2: She Stood There Laughing by Stephen Foster Football Book Review #3: Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters by Daniel Gray Football Book Review #4: The Bottom Corner by Nige Tassell Football Book Review #5: Heartfelt by Aidan Smith Football Book Review #6: I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You by Greg Whitaker Football Book Review #7: The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinniss Football Book Review #8: One…
I’ve realized the importance of owning my books and movies, opting for DRM-free options and physical copies to avoid being locked into platforms.
Had to put the ebook reader in airplane mode to finish this library book. That's on me, I'm slow.Reply via email
Things The French Find Completely Bizarre – Kimberly Wheeler Not every thought needs to be announced. Not every moment needs to become content. Not every silence needs to be filled. I think the French have it right.
I started writing "How to Talk About" guides with a mindset that nobody should have to feel stupid talking about clothes. If you're reading this blog—there are no stupid questions. This guide will cover everything from "what are jeans?" to "what are sanforization and mercerization?" But I'm not going to stop there. I'm also going to focus on the things that make denim special. Why do people like raw denim? Why do people like Sashiko and Boro? What's the deal with the different types of trucker…
Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? (Rarely in the same currency) What is my writing for? I need to answer this honestly. Sometimes I tell myself it's a drum, a kettledrum pounding in my head. The act of transferring that from my mind onto the paper or screen. That answer used to satisfy me, but it doesn't anymore. For there's a cost to the body and relationships by…
Jackson, Michigan – shot on the Canon EOS M6 and EF-M 28mm f/3.5 macro.
Dear germs colleagues, I acknowledge receipt of your interminable diatribe letter. As your Supreme Plenipotentiary I am of course conscious of the anxiety that these entirely indispensable exterminations regrettable redundancies may be causing you. I and the rest of the senior management team will do everything in our power to get you to stop whining reassure you so you can get on with your day-to-day duties while you still have any. I mention once again the very supportive workshops we are…
‘Chain Letter’ invites a sign painter or lettering artist to share a piece of lettering that has influenced or inspired them, before passing the baton to someone else, in a never-ending chain.In the last one, Meghan McDermott nominated Vanessa Power. Vanessa is an Irish sign painter, muralist, and mosaic and stained glass artist.What have you selected?When I first started researching signwriting, I came across the pilllpat (agence eureka) Flickr account. She had uploaded scans from a couple of…
Roseanna Pendlebury On a planet that has no official name, a town that is likewise nameless sits abandoned as a war rages across the stars between the Earth-allied Company of Adventurers and the Martian faction. The inhabitants are a mixed bunch, both those who have a stake in the conflict and those who do not, stuck here on the edge of the galaxy to wait out hostilities, with only each other for company and survival. Above the surface floats a single remaining ship: the Philoctetes, manned by…
Glory and Ruin wrote the formula used to make fetal dragons. A dragon’s body consists of metal ore, gems and liquid rock. They are built and drowned deep inside magma where the body can seize life. Centuries must pass while they incubate. The process is slow and long. When birthing is near, the mountain erupts a dragon from caldera. The Child God foresaw that newborn dragons were too large for their temple. They could not enter nor walk underground where their People made their homes. Glory and…
The preface to Descartes's Principles of Philosophy includesI would suggest reading it all the way through, like a romance, without greatly straining one's attention, or being held up by any difficulties one encounters, so as simply to get a general idea of the subjects discussed. Afterwards, if one decides that these are worthy of them, it can be read a second time, so as to follow the sequence of my arguments; but, again, one should not let oneself be put off, if one loses the thread now and…
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. The anthology Black Summers explores Black joy experienced in Detroit’s urban spaces through a magnificent variety of forms including essays, creative nonfiction, poetry, and comics. Ibram…
“The Lost Hotels of Paris” by Jack Gilbert But it’s the having not the keeping that is the treasure. Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon and said he was giving up poetry because it told lies, that language distorts. I agreed, but asked what we have that gets it right even that much. We look up at the stars and they are not there. We see the memory of when they were, once upon a time. And that too is more than enough.
I decided a while back to reread all Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe books – partly because I’m trying to reduce the number of books in the house, so have to make decisions. Keep or give to Oxfam? The end result is always (boringly) – keep some, ditch others. Giving away isn’t always a mark of displeasure in a book, as there is also the question of whether I will ever want to read them again. I have already posted on the book that is one of my great favourites by Reginald Hill, the 1994…
Some months ago, I reviewed a short story from Edward D. Hoch's Captain Leopold series, "The Rainy-Day Bandit" (1970), which Alessandro favorably compared in the comments to the subject of today's review, "The Jersey Devil" – originally published in the October, 1971, issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Famously collected in Leopold's Way (1985)."The Jersey Devil" begins when Captain Leopold gives Lieutenant Fletcher a lift home following a long shift working on a barroom knifing when…
Editor’s note: Our Mind Upon Mind series is a nod to a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column (also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years”), in which Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement. To that end, we’ve asked you what else you have thought of, tried out and improved upon after building projects from our books. Send us your own ideas! Email kara@lostartpress.com. You can read more about the…
♫ More Than This by Roxy MusicThinking back on yesterday and what was, football aside, a beautiful yet unexpected day. A reminder to embrace uncertainty in life and accept the wonderful things it can sometimes bestow. Maybe there’s nothing more than this.
[SPOILERS for Concrete: The Human Dilemma and Concrete: Stars over Sand #1…and Insane #2, I suppose.] So over the last few weeks, inspired by the recent release of Concrete: Stars over Sand #1, Paul Chadwick’s newest Concrete thing is many a year, I’ve been rereadeding old Concrete comics. Read all the Dark Horse Presents shorts, several of the mini-series, stuff like that. I mentioned my doing this on Bluesky, getting a reply from a pal there of “okay, smart guy, what about this?” And that…
The Boxcar Children #12 Houseboat Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1967. Mr. Alden takes his grandchildren on a houseboat trip. It’s a peaceful trip at first, but they keep having encounters with someone driving a black car recklessly. It seems like the car turns up every place they go. Then, Mr. Alden takes the children to an auction because Violet and Benny have never seen an auction before. They think it’s really interesting, but the auction is cut short because a valuable vase has been…
BookThe Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke SynopsisArthur Fletch has become one of the most successful living authors, after several world-wide bestselling mystery thrillers. Now, as readers are anxiously awaiting the final entry in his most successful series, a group of struggling or aspiring authors are invited to an exclusive salon on Fletch’s private island in Scotland. Soon after they arrive, they learn they’ll all be locked in competition to write their own conclusion to that final…
It is through book group that I have returned to the work of Elizabeth Gill. I have previously read her first mystery, The Crime Coast (1931). She only wrote three crime novels. The second was What Dread Hand? (1932) and today’s read was her last. The author died a year later, aged 32.
I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tardiness by reading him closely and often. In 1937 he tramped around the Hebrides, like Johnson and Boswell, with the intention of writing a travel book. The result, I Crossed the Minch, is loosely organized and a little disappointing. There’s something forced about the narrative, as though MacNeice sensed he couldn't rival the brilliance of his poetry and,…
Earl and his truck1But I'm still thinking about beauty, how it is incidental and cannot be contrived. Perhaps this is why I've suddenly become obsessed by the loose strangeness of Leonardo Da Vinci's Adoration of Magi, which I recently re-encountered in a Ken Burns documentaryLa pittura è mentale, Da Vinci said. Painting is a mental phenomenon. A few roughly sketched lines can evoke an entire world behind the viewer's eyes, but Da Vinci was more interested in the interior worlds of the faces on…
In addition to the two - quite sensible - rack toys, and the loose figures I used for the first narrative post, there were also some more assorted or generic spacemen and astronauts among the plunder of the first weekend in July, and which are the subject of this second space post. Martin let me have these, pretty-much at cost, and a maker's name has come out since we last looked at them;&
There was quite a bit of wind but not a lot of juice for lightning on this latest round of monsoon activity. I always enjoy being out in the wind, but I got only one shot of lightning this evening. I have a new camera arriving on Friday. I am really looking forward to putting it through its paces this weekend.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE “Out of the Sun.” First published in If, February 1958. Collected in The Other Side of the Sky (Harcourt, Brace & Co., hardcover, 1958). Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, edited by Mike Ashley (among several other anthologies). This is the lead story in the latter book, and it’s a good one (both the story and the anthology). It’s told by a research scientist studying the sun from the ideal vantage point of the planet Mercury. Although he is not the only person on…
