Read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett ★★★★★ 📚
Probably the cutest terrorists in fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of emotion, love, fear and boredom. Gives a good account of the joy of opera too.
Format: Status
Walking down from Ben Reoch, l notice a ginger bundle off to the right, not quite bracken. Looking at it through my camera’s zoom and it is a fox, head buried in the grass. After a moment or two its head comes up and stares intently into the grass. After a couple of moments, and photos, the fox turns and looks at me. A few more moments while we look at each other then it turns and runs off. As I move down the slope I can see over the ridge the fox went over. A few sheep stand around, moving off when they see me. They don’t look to have been worried about the fox.
Likes Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable by .
Thankfully, Flickr, the website from which I took the image, has a handy feature that allows you to see the license history of an image
I didn’t know about the flickr license history. Neat!
Read: Winter Ali Smith ★★★★★ 📚
Amazing book, floats between time and characters, dreams & hallucinations. Funny too.
Her sister Iris is making nothing of her life. Sophia thinks of their mother, when Iris worked at the filling station, telling anyone who asked how her daughters were doing that Iris had a good position in an oil company.
Getting to be a bit of a butterfly blog. Walked the RSPB site at Ardmore last Tuesday. Highish tide & a strong breeze. The path was often protected by windward bushes. Lots of small tortoiseshells & some painted ladies basking. Devils-bit scabious flowering. Some whites too, mainly green-veined.
The Distance Between Us by Maggie O’Farrell ★★★ 📚
I enjoyed the telling very much, clever switching between characters, time & location. The whole story didn’t really move or gel with me much though.
Read: Bringing the House Down by Charlotte Runcie ★★★★ 📚
Great fun. Critic makes a right mess of mixing review & life in the most selfish way. The criticised act tears him apart. Online cancelling follows.
Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves ★★★ 📚
Convoluted telling of a convoluted mystery. I enjoyed the twists and turns without any idea of the solution. An unstable narrator who recalls fragments of her past at different times.
Read: The High Places by Fiona McFarlane ★★★★ 📚
A quite varied and strange set of short stories. My favourite involved a colossal squid and the ghost of Darwin. There was an eternal mechanical budgie in another!
Lots of butterflies on the walk to Greenside today. Small tortoiseshells, Painted Ladies, Red Admirals and Green veined whites.
