Read: Misinterpretion by Ledis Xhoga ★★★ 📚
An Albanian interpreter gets into a lot of communication difficulties. Set in New York & Albania Constantly surprising narrative as the narrator bounces from one complex situation to another.
Read: Misinterpretion by Ledis Xhoga ★★★ 📚
An Albanian interpreter gets into a lot of communication difficulties. Set in New York & Albania Constantly surprising narrative as the narrator bounces from one complex situation to another.
Read Heartwood by Amity Gaige ★★★★☆
Gripping search for a missing hiker on the Appalachian trail. Told from three points of view, the lost, the searcher and a seemingly disconnected elderly lady in a retirement complex. An enjoyable read.
Read Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside ★★★★★
Finally (and this seems less fanciful with each passing day) our inner spaces are being placed in jeopardy, as the providers of social media colonise and denature what use to be called the life of the mind for advertising revenues or political gain. Science fiction not so long ago, the enclosure of experience itself – not only of our consumer tastes, but also of our root desires, our dreams, our political leanings – has become commonplace. From habitat to place itself, from public to inner space, from freedom of speech to the chambers of our imagery?, everything is subject to enclosure, all too often by powers and principalities that we cannot even name.
and
This grief is all the more painful because it is shot through with a guilt from which no one is exempt. For, according to the accepted environmental / Climate Change narrative, we are obliged to accept that everyone is equally guilty, even though it always seems to be one small and shamelessly entitled group that profits most from the destruction.
What a wonderful book, 4 essays on morality & extinction. The Wind and the Willows, Thomas Hardy, poets & philosophers. Burnside touches upon a range of linked concerns from cave painting to covid always in depth if not at length.

Given the good weather there are quite a lot of butterflies around this week. This one looks like an old one that has been in the wars, black faded and very ragged. I wonder what tales it could tell. My butterfly by month page is building nicely.

#Flora #BloomStrolling #BloomScrolling

#SilentSunday #Bird
Today’s daily create #tdc5280 #ds106 #dailycreate #ShowYourStripes point toward the #ShowYourStripes webpage that very neatly shows
visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country, region or city over the past 100+ years
The site also links to #BiodiversityStripes
The ‘biodiversity stripes’ provide a visual representation of the change in biodiversity over time, often since 1970. The highest level of biodiversity is coloured bright green. Lower levels move through yellow to grey, depending upon the level of decline. Darker greys appear with greater declines.
This one shows the decline of UK moths from 1970 to 2018

86% decline in only part of my lifetime. Horrific. I was 12 in 1970, I remember when cleaning insects from a windshield was a thing.
In 2025, the now-annual survey conducted by Buglife in Kent found a decline of 66% in flying insects since 2021.
Kent bug splat survey shows ‘troubling’ fall in flying insects – BBC News
I am currently reading Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside, a wonderful book, which in part deals with the feelings around this terrible state of affairs.
@creating #tdc5278 #ds106 #dailycreate
Three happy moments in the last week:
My fairly new granddaughter (no images for obvious reasons)
Yesterday in the park, I saw two shadows spinning round each other on the path. Two Speckled Wood Butterflies spiral up through the sunlight. There were too fast & fascinating for a photo.
I made a rolled omelet where you separate the eggs and the yellow layer wraps round the white layer. Looked & tasted good (I didn’t even think to take a photo)
Read: Solace House by Will Maclean ★★★★ 📚
After sudden scalding exposure to the late twentieth century, and the garish monomania of the supermarket, it was joyous to return to the hospital, to the house. I found that I wanted to immerse myself in Solace House and its environs, gather it around me, cloak myself in it. I didn’t doubt, in that moment, that this was what Flayne had felt, sequestered here in his self-imposed exile.
Fun Gothic horror with magic mushrooms. A narrator who becomes more & more unreliable as the book gets weirder. I am not sure I really know what went on. Plenty of nineties details.
Read: In the Woods by Tana French ★★★ 📚
Doorstop of a police procedural. Lots of psychological twist & turns. Vivid characters. Maybe too much horror in the crime, like most thriller books and movies nowadays.