Reading Books

I am still sort of enjoying "Steppenwolf" , but one of te things about books is I prefer a font that I can read regardless of whether I have contact lenses in or not , ie a dark high contracts font that is not to tiny. Some fonts are very faint so unless you have a decent light they become difficult to read. This is where an e-reader scores because you can change the font and even get it to read the book for you. The print in "Steppenwolf" is excellent and I can read it with or without contact lenses in almost any light.

"Steppenwolf" itself despite hitting on suicide and murder pacts , being anti right wing jingoism in a society that is pro right wing jingoism , is very hopeful seeing Harry Haller reluctantly buying a gramophone , learning to dance despite his abhorrence of jazz and eventually realising that socialising and fun is actually enjoyable and something he wants to do. I have actually read over 150 pages in a week so that is quite fast for me and I am not sure whether I will go for another reread next or hit an unread classic.

Books are a wonderful way of exploring whatever you want to explore and it does amaze me the number of people who say they don't have time or can't read books. I am looking at some of my sets of books that I want to revisit including "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" and the F Paul Wilson "Adversary" series while I am still working through "Imajica" on my Kindle. I also feel I need to revisit some Dean Koontz although my problem with him is that he seemed to publish books quicker than I could read them, but he did publish one of the few novels "Dark Rivers of the Heart" that I read in one sitting, and I may be wrong , but I think that was around seven hundred pages. Another was Matt Haig's "Reason's To Stay Alive" which I gave away on a World Book Night , gave to my friend Paul Campbell the writer for his 50th birthday, but I also read on the train journey to London.

So we need a song to go with this., and what about one of my favourite Beatles songs "Paperback Writer". The B side is "Rain" another of my favourites and it makes up a perfect single. Macca's bass on "Rain" supposedly was so heavy that it made the needle jump the groove and while it is impressive my copy plays OK so I don't know if the bass has been calmed or what, and "Strawberry Fields" has just started playing and for the first time ever I've noticed the morse code snippet near the start.

Winter Solstice - 2020

 Today is the shortest day of the year, that is there is more darkness than light, so after today the days start to get longer.

This always reminds me of the final book in F Paul Wilson's "Adversary" series, where the days just keep getting shorter.

I have been out for a short walk to post a Christmas card to a good griend and outside it is dark and very cold. As I walking I noticed th elights on the West Road which looked almost magical , I would have loved to capture that in a photograph but the were to far away and my Google Pixel camera , good as it is, couldn't capture it. I always think back to twenty years back when we had film cameras and if you took a picture you then had to wait til you finished the film, then send it off to be developed before you knew when the photograph was OK.

Here is a write up about the Winter Solstice which is far better than what I could tell you, although any excuse for a celebration is good for me.

This is also an excuse to share the excellent "Solstice" by the incredibly talented Matt Berry who I also recently found out was one of the voices in "Disenchantment", as well as being part of teh wonderful "What We Do In The Shadows".

Enjoy this year's Winter Solstice , knowing that tomorrow there will be more light.

Not The End of The Books

I've just finished the excellent "Not The End of The World" by Christopher Brookmyre, and was very impressed , and I was right that he is in the same universe as John Niven. He also has a huge back catalogue so I have the option of buying more of his stuff.

Instead I'm revisiting "The Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker, one of my favourite authors and these revisitations means that I have an endless supply of books because I can read and reread. As I have said before my memory is not too good so while I have a vague recollection of what the book is about the words are still a joy to consume and the lead me into a different world once more.

I have other favourites too who I need to revisit , JG Ballard and F Paul Wilson to name but two, and this could keep me going til next year or longer.

Music is the same, once you have things in your collection , you have them because you want to revisit them , usually again and again. I've sort of regressed because I play music either digitally or on vinyl with a preference for the latter because it limits you to around twenty minutes of songs, so it connects you even more closely with the music.

Today I revisited "The Lodger" by David Bowie which like all Bowie albums is full of off the wall musical directions and is over far too soon, and that is me listening to it digitally while walking. Possibly tomorrow "Gouster" (unreleased excellent album around the time of "Young Americans") may get a spin. It's only available as part of a big digital box but you can buy the tracks individually to get your own copy at a reasonable price. One of the benefits of digital downloads.

6Music have been playing "Nowhere To Hide" by Ghostpoet from the album "I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep" which has definitely caught my ear, so that's what we go with tonight.

A Library ...

I've just finished "A Shadow On The Wall" by Jonathan Aycliffe which I wrote about in my last post here and like many of his books, you are just coming down from the relief of everything being resolved ... and then in the last line of the book you realise it might not be.

So I went looking for another book to read and decided on a Daniel Easterman and then noticed "Not The End of The World" by Christopher Brookmyre , which looks interesting and one that I had got from Barter Books in the old Railway Station in Alnwick. The book looks good and I can't remember reading it, again this is possibly my magpie mentality kicking in , buy or acquire and then forget about it.

A sad incident was when my mum gave two sets of impressive Encyclopedias which our family had had for years , to my younger (disowned by me) brother , saying she didn't want any books in the house because she didn't like them. My girls would have loved and used those books, but  sometimes things don't happen as you would want them to. I used them for schoolwork and research although now we generally have the internet which is brilliant if used properly.

I was then thinking , that because of my imperfect memory, I probably don't have to buy another book ever, there are some which I had forgotten about and many that I  remember which I want to revisit, I'm thinking "The Adversary" series by F Paul Wilson , six books starting with "The Keep" and finishing with "Nightworld" , plus various William Hope Hodgson , and these are all books I have.

Although there are bookcases round the house , effectively this is a small personal library, and the do look good but book are there to be read or referred to , but I often see people's books and big libraries and think "Have these books been read, or are they just there for show?" , and I know not all of mine have been read and I have slightly shifted my perspective to discover what I already know that I have.

I think everywhere should have physical books although I now put the bigger tomes on my Kindle as it's easier to read them that way , essentially five hundred pages or less , physical book , over that Kindle. There is a complete HP Lovecraft collection on Kindle for 75p here although for some reason individual books are more expensive.

Going off on a tangent I'm going to share a live take of the beautiful "Book of Love" by Stephen Merritt , but here's the Magnetic Fields take and a Peter Gabriel take from "Scratch My Back" which is stunning.

Grey Christmas

Weatherwise this must be one of the greyest Christmases I have ever seen. Christmas has been fine but the weather has not been too cold and seriously is just plain grey. The good news is that since the Winter Solstice we are getting more daylight, as I noticed leaving a desolate workplace at around four of the clock today.

That always makes me think of F Paul Wilson's "Nightworld" the finale of The Adversary series which kicked off with "The Keep". The shortening of the days doesn't stop when it should and hence the title of the book. Check it out, well check out the whole series, there are six excellent book and "The Keep" was turned in to a half decent film by Michael Mann.

I've been listening to a lot of Jethro Tull recently and decided to put a couple of albums on my phone, but managed to just load up the "Aqualung" out takes, but I have since rectified that. Basically the out takes didn't include "Locomotive Breath" which I included in a recent post when it was used as an opener to "Fargo". So a few Tull albums and my complete Janelle Monae and Jordan Reyne collection have been installed for my listening pleasure.

So who do I choose to share with you, maybe Jordan Reyne who's new album "Bardo" is just out but I will choose the piece that stunned me when I first saw her many moons ago at Think Tank, the hypnotically beautiful and disturbing "Shadow Line".

My Artificial Head

Apparently, yesterday was the Summer Solstice, the longest day, and the days get shorter from now on until the Winter Solstice. F Paul Wilson's "Nightworld" has a premise where the days keep getting shorter in the culmination of his "Adversary" series which started with "The Keep" which was made into a film directed by Michael Mann and featuring Sir Ian McKellen which is worth a watch although not a classic.

It turns out that TangerinDream did the soundtrack and my last post was German rock orientated, and caused me to load a lot of German rock on to my phone to listen on my walk to work. One of these albums was Edgar Froese's "Aqua" his first solo album outside of Tangerine Dream and at the time it used an "artificial head" recording process developed by, among others, Gunther Brunschen, more of which you can read about here.

It was supposed to give a more realistic aural experience but was more of a marketing point, but you had to listen to this recording and in the end it was just a decent electronic record.

I am tempted by the Froese solo box set though I actually have a copy of "Aqua" and I will be listening to it on the way to work today.

The sun is shining the sky is blue so should be a good walk in.

I am always surprised how so many different things can be related, but again that's part of the rich tapestry of life. Have a brilliant Friday every one.

Running Out - Power and Signals

 Was just thinking habout how reliant we are becoming on mobile devices and how companies are pushing us to become more reliant on mobile devices. We can use them to pay for things, watch things , communicate in a number of ways but they are reliant on two things, power and a decent signal. So you may have your phone phone and think you can use it as your bus ticket, pay for your overpriced coffee or whatever but if the battery runs out then that's you stuck. Similarly of the signal drops then you may be stuck again although some apps provide on device data.

I use my Sony Xperia XA for recording my walking and yesterday went out without it. Incidentally the Pacer software since I installed it has only possibly failed to record properly one, and that may have been my fault, so I am well impressed by it's reliability.  This was one of the few times I have returned to get hold of my phone , mainly because I wasn't sure if I'd left it in the house or actually lost it. I piced it up and the power was on 12% . By the time I got to my destination it was still going on 2% power but must have switched off soon after. I didn't have a back up power pack and although I have one power cable which I could have used to recharge it on the bus, it was in another jacket.

Sometimes a pen and paper is actually better, and although I have the Kindle app on my phone and an actual Kindle Fire they are still dependent on power and signals.

I'm not sure what the answers are to these first world problems, unless someone makes distributed power a reality. Imageine how cool it would be if power was as distributable as a radio , tv or mobile signal. We would truly be a wireless society then although even more vulnerable to losing the source of keeping us up and running.

This could possibly be even extended to replacement body parts, imagine a heart running on distributed power. but I am really flying off  into the outer reaches of science fiction here and I am no Brian Aldiss, and I was introduced to the concept of distributed power by another of my favourite authors F Paul Wilson. I think it was Legacies. one of the excellent Repairman Jack series.

Anyway it's Sunday and I need to relax , so it has to be "The Power" by Snap. Have a good day everybody.

Mid Day At The Lost And Found

Today is grey and rainy. This is the sort of day when a five mile walk is not exactly inviting, but it was fine again, although I didn't exactly surpass my target by much , a mere 300 steps at the moment, but that may increase by the time midnight comes around.

Today I found a series of books by F. Paul Wilson , the whole of the "Adversary Cycle" series which were in a bag under the stairs , but missing  "The Touch" which I seem to remember I borrowed from a friend of mine to read, but I'm not so sure if I bought it. Then I thought I'd look for it and I seem to have mislaid quite a few of my Clive Barker novels, including my favourite ever book, "Imajica", plus the excellent L.Ron Hubbard biography "Bare Faced Messiah". I have read these books, and can probably buy new copies if I really want them, but it's strange how finding one thing can spur you into looking for something else.

This is one of the problems with our magpie attitude to stuff, we always want to have although we do not need. My music collection is huge though nowhere near as big as some, and my book collection is also quite extensive.


As I write this I'm listening to some alternate recordings of early Pink Floyd songs, "Matilda Mother" has completely different lyrics but is still good, and "Jugband Blues" is still a prime late sixties music hall psychedelia hybrid. That's a small part of my 5 thousand CD or half a terabyte of MP3 music collection (100K songs , though probably a lot of duplicates).

Anyway this Easter Sunday I have had an Easter Egg, done 10K steps, and found the books above. The weather is rubbish, but you can't have everything, although it would be nice to have. So it's time to see if I can track down those books and if I can't find them , reorder them online.

I've include two excellent videos of "Matilda Mother" from "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" and the alternate version so you can hear what I've been listening to.

So I need now to see if those books are still around, and make my tea (a couple of bacon sandwiches methinks). So enjoy your Easter Sunday my friends, and if you're lucky like me you'll be able to have a lie in tomorrow too.

The Twenty Three Hour Day

No there's a title for a science fiction story. It makes me thing of F Paul Wilson's "Nightworld" the final book in The Adversary Cycle where the days start getting shorter than they should be or "The Eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss where during the workday timepieces are slowed down by the controllers then at nights and weekends timepieces are speeded up. Sound familiar to anyone.

So today we just have twenty three hours to cater for daylight saving or whatever you want to call it. We do get it back later in the year , so that hour is but in a temporal savings account (but we don't get paid interest, much like a bank).

Yesterday was weird, I have things to do , and want to do things but just couldn't actually bring myself to get anything done, or rather that's how it felt. It was like a feeling of nothingness and emptiness inside, like my get up and go had got up and gone , leaving me bereft and empty. I always try and think of positives but yesterday was not feeling positive at all.

The think is, I had had a brilliant night on Friday seeing lots of friends I hadn't seen for ages as well as The Coyotemen and King Salami and The Cumberland Three , although I was feeling extra tired so didn't last the whole night.

This has been fairly full and intense but we've been rewarded with some excellent weather for the weekend.

ON the positive side I put in train some stuff that needs doing round the house, did some shopping for fruit and kept up my ten thousand steps a day. Last Sunday I had to do fourteen thousand steps but hit nineteen thousand. I don't expect to do that today but I do intend to hit ten thousand steps.

I also managed a couple of films on catch up TV and now I've managed to write this and it's only just turned eight of the clock (new time.

One other chore this has caused is that I have eight analogue watches , add to that the cooker, light programmer, heating control and three analogue clocks and that's a few timepiece adjustments I've had to do. As I said last night I could do with today being 72 hours to give me time to do things at leisure, but there's only sixteen of the twenty three hours left, the first seven hours used up by sleeping and writing this.

Anyway the weather is gorgeous again,I need to shower, get up , get papers, walk five miles and have a wonderful day. I found an excellent live version of Haircut 100 doing Fantastic Day for you to enjoy.

You have a fantastic day too my friends.