I joked with Daughter before Christmas, suggesting maybe she was knitting me a present.
She was, after a fashion. She made me a photo book of our North American tour a year ago. It was a complete surprise, and between you and me, far better than a jumper.
I have ‘read’ it several times already, and will return to it any minute again. It features diners, grilled cheese, trains, some tall buildings, and much more.
The cover photo shows the two of us queening it in Queens.
The Resident IT Consultant also gave me a book, but a more conventional one, found on the Witch’s wish list.
Today I thought we would think back to that other 11th September. The one we don’t mention as much, because there was another one 28 years later. Today it’s been fifty years since the coup in Chile in 1973, killing not just President Allende, but many Chileans and others who had taken refuge in what was a democratic and just country.
I didn’t know much about Chile before Allende came to power, and then after the coup it became ‘my’ cause for protest. I was the right age, and I was learning Spanish at school, and before long that came in useful when the wave of refugees arrived.
Being of an age when it seemed important to keep up with current books I made sure to read Pablo Neruda who had been awarded the Nobel prize two years earlier, and who died soon after the coup, apparently poisoned by the junta. I may have been on the young side for his biography. I found it easier to understand the lyrics of Víctor Jara, the singer and songwriter who was murdered in the stadium. Violeta Parra who wrote and performed songs earlier still was also important. There was much music coming from Chile at the time, and luckily many af the artists were abroad on September 11th, so were able to continue sharing their music with us.
And then, after I touched on this as CultureWitch ten years ago, Chile has been brought closer to the Bookwitch family than I could ever have imagined. For astronomers it’s the place to go to for telescope time, and Daughter travelled there three times, and we learned about killer spiders, guanacos, llamas, alpacas, and vicuñas, not to mention snow during the emergency grade two in August. And there is Rosetta Girl, her Chilean astronomer friend who is now back living there. She visited once, before Covid took over the world and our movements.
But as I said, when I was seventeen I couldn’t have imagined anything like it.
I can’t make my mind up. Kindle? Or dead tree book? Which will it be? Vaseem Khan’s fourth novel about Persis Wadia is out in early August. And I need to decide.
The third one, The Lost Man of Bombay, came with me on my travels last year as a Kindle book. It saved me then, but perhaps I don’t need saving now? I loved it and it was terribly reassuring to have easily to hand. Because I had packed the wrong books. And when space and weight is an issue, the Kindle is no heavier even with the collected works of Sir Walter Scott. But you know that already. (And Scott is purely courtesy of the Resident IT Consultant, sharing his ebook selection with me. And I dare say, if things got really bad, Scott would do nicely.)
So, there I was, having picked what I thought would be a fun and romantic novel, but it turned out to be quite dire and at times like that you need a swift move onto something else. Hence my gratitude to Vaseem and his detective.
If you haven’t read his books about the first female detective in Bombay, then it is high time you did. Meanwhile, I must decide on ebook or paper. This is not made any easier by me having branched into Kindle on the iPhone for those very urgent reading emergencies that I am afraid of experiencing. And then a witch has to have a book made from paper, in case the tech fails her.
I hadn’t really understood what kind of street VI Warshawski lives in. Not until this last/latest [to me] Sara Paretsky novel, Guardian Angel. In fact, I still don’t totally get it, but around twenty books in I have more of an idea. I suppose I should really ask Sara about the street. I had imagined more of a ‘tenement’-filled street, if not with very tall buildings. More ‘outer inner’ city than sleepy suburb. But we seem to encounter single dwelling houses here, with fences and some bit of garden. Good for the dogs, and this is all about dogs.
More street issues where VI chases the bad guys, and the roads also have a say in how it all ends. Travel broadens the mind, and had I not recently been driven along US roads, I’d have been more puzzled about these ones around Chicago. Could be, of course, that without my mind having been broadened, I wouldn’t have realised I didn’t know anything.
As for the dogs, at least I now know where Mitch came from, and how he got his name.
It was thanks to one of Sara’s posts on social media that I woke up to the fact that I hadn’t read all the VI books, when I thought I had. And that Guardian Angel wasn’t the only one I neither owned or had read. I’m glad I was able to rectify these shortcomings, and it’s always, well, often, interesting to travel to another time; this one the early 1990s. You forget what life without mobile phones was like. And whereas VI is often a little short of money, here she badly needs new running shoes, but can’t afford them. Would obviously have helped if she hadn’t bought herself a fancy car she didn’t have the funds for, or that would prove a hindrance when chasing the bad guys.
But yes, Guardian Angel is about dogs. And crookedness in places where you don’t expect it. VI also gets together with Conrad Rawlings, which I’d only ever known about as a ‘historical’ fact. He’s quite nice, really.
Though it’s the roads I think of when I think of this book. Time for me to travel some more.
The party was for two o’clock. Despite me working hard to achieve some sort of fashionable lateness and then adding some unforeseen issue near Haymarket, I still arrived at one minute past. I rang the doorbell and told my lovely host that ‘I am Swedish and therefore unable to arrive late’.
Luckily someone else had arrived before me.
The weather was typical for a Scottish summer, sunny, humid and far too warm. But there were bifold doors. I enjoy having a June birthday and I’m glad my host felt this was a good time too, so moved hers to be four months early. Probably so she could wear a midsummery dress, the day being Midsummer’s Day for this early arriver.
There were people I knew, people I’d sort of heard of, some other familiar faces and some real strangers. A good mix. As I said, my host is lovely, which will be why one guest had spent a hot day baking Christmas biscuits for her.
We chatted books and all that sort of thing, plus some other chat. It was nearly all girls, with one token boy. But Kirkie is used to that.
Won’t go into more detail, but have to admit that before I hailed my homeward pumpkin, I inadvertently stole Alex Nye’s piece of cake. It was just there. It, too, was lovely. I really didn’t mean to. I suppose I have just not had many social occasions for some years, and I forgot.
North. South. Front and back. It’s hard to keep track.
On our recent long weekend away I suffered from a disappearing library. University library at that.
We stayed in a flat in St Andrews’ North Street. South side. Front windows looked out onto the library across the road. Back windows looked south. It was probably the Waterstones building we saw the back of.
Bedrooms faced front, i.e. north. Living room faced south.
Are you with me so far?
I was pleased to to have a view of the large library building where Daughter once collected her knowledge. Did her homework. But when I sat down in ‘my’ armchair, I was confused because the library wasn’t there. Just some roof top. Wrong windows. Something about which room faces front? Or back. Also, isn’t front always south? Apparently not.
Three days wasn’t long enough to learn where the library was. But I’m sure a library ought to be visible from a person’s armchair…
At least the flat had books. I’d have been quite happy to read some of them, had I come unprepared. There was also a selection of books for sale at Kinross Services, where we had time to kill while the car charged, which it only did because there was literally no parking (Bank Holiday weekend). At all. So I made the executive decision that since the charging spots were empty and we had a car that could ‘eat’ there, that’s what we would do.
“Coffee pods have just been delivered. As has ‘The One Who Got Away,’ who clearly didn’t!” So said the Resident IT Consultant in his WhatsApp message on Saturday.
I had, in fact, got away, which is why I wasn’t there for the coffee. But the rest of the message made no sense to me. Book title. Probably. But why, or whose? I’d not bought anything. Besides, he’d have had to have opened any package to know what got away, or didn’t.
When I got home, it was obvious. See-through packaging. Or ‘Evidence Bag’ as they call it. Front cover of the book clearly visible on the clear side of the bag. Very clever. A bit gimmicky, perhaps. But I like a good gimmick.
I have another book on the go, but how am I going to make myself wait?
Not me, but the Resident IT Consultant. Ever since I read Joan Lennon’s Silver Skin eight years ago, I’ve been at him about going to Orkney. That book was enough to make even me want to go. Although there is the difficulty of picking your poison; boat or plane and feeling queasy whatever you do.
I might prefer time travel, which is what you find in Joan’s book.
(It’s possible he has wanted to go there for a lot longer. The Resident IT Consultant likes his history. But when he’d ascertained that I was happy for him to go, and didn’t want to come along, he asked to read ‘that book’. So I got it out for him.)
Although, there were stumbling stones. After much thinking, he decided to get the ferry from Aberdeen, which calls at Kirkwall on its way to Shetland. And then the day before, the ferry company wasn’t sure they would call after all, on account of a forecast of stormy weather. So we did some quick brainstorming (that kind of storm is all right) and decided that not only would he go for the short ferry route, but if he set out almost immediately, he could be sure to get his connection, up there in the far North.
Almost as though he was Paddington Bear, I made him a marmalade sandwich. Plus a sardine salad. A Resident IT Consultant needs to eat when less resident.
He caught his ferry and he sent a photo of the Old Man of Hoy as proof.
He’s now walked, and ridden buses, all over the place for a few days, and I have only occasionally stalked him using tech. It’s handy stuff. No need to phone and say you arrived. Because one can see that. Or at least, I could see that his phone arrived.
If you too want to learn more about Skara Brae – which was a very long time ago, much longer than you can imagine – I recommend Silver Skin.
And there had better not be an uneaten marmalade sandwich in that bag!
What to do when there isn’t enough water? It’s not always the case that you want to get places as fast as possible. There could be prawn sandwiches you need to eat.
Admittedly, a committed Swede should be able to chew fast and see off that sandwich during a single journey across the Öresund. At its narrowest, between Helsingborg and Helsingør, it takes around twenty minutes. The crew know this and are capable of serving food and drink really fast. (Not to mention the duty-free back in the day. But let’s not mention that.)
So what you do is you go back and forth until you have finished eating. Most likely you end up where you started, because you didn’t actually want to get to the other side. This is eminently civilised. The prawn sandwich rules.
What I didn’t know until this week is that locally there is a word for this – tura – a verb that means roughly ‘to tour’. It’s fascinating. So what someone has then done is to coin the word LitteraTura. In other words, LiteraTour. Well, ish. Yesterday evening you would have been able to book a ticket to hear author Kristina Ohlsson talk about her writing – children’s and crime – in the time it takes to eat three open sandwiches accompanied by wine/beer/water, coffee and cake, book lottery and some book selling.
It goes without saying I’d have loved to be there.
Despite some minor technical issues over photographs, Candy Gourlay’s second launch of Wild Song, online with Nikki Gamble last night, was probably the best ‘zoomy’ event I’ve attended. So, well done! A good event for a good book.
And those photos. Well, they helped. I’m never a great fan of too many pictures like that, but these really opened my eyes to what went on around the last turn of the century, and how they inspired the birth of Wild Song. I’m glad they did. And it seems many of us in the audience were relieved that Candy’s relatively slow writing process – over 15 years – moved the book from being about the birth of hot dogs, to introducing us to an intelligent young Igorot heroine in the Philippines, and her subsequent trip to St Louis.
Sometimes you just want to take things more seriously.
I learned a lot about growing up in the Philippines, both at the time Luki did, and also how it was for Candy.
The fairly large audience chatted in the chat box, and enjoyed finding out more about this book, which I guess many had not had an opportunity to read yet, as it was only published on Thursday. But the thing is, after this chat Candy had with Nikki, everyone wanted to read it.
Having been somewhat sorry not to be able to go to the physical launch in London earlier in the week, it was good to see a short video from that event. It confirmed my long ago impression that Filipino people sing as much as us Swedes. As Candy said, considering what her book was about, it was only right to fill the London launch with local Igorot people, singing and dancing.
The Occasional Bookwitch 