Tangled Mind

Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

Standage explores the histories of six 'period-defining' drinks, from beer in the Neolithic to cola (Coca-Cola vs Pepsi) in the modern era, and explains how each beverage has shaped history.

The drinks in question are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Cola: there's an epilogue focussing on water, contrasting the lack of safe drinking water in parts of the developing world to the modern Western fad for bottled water -- often pretty much the same stuff as comes out of the tap.

I keep looking around the dark corridor for secret drinkers, then understand that the beeriness is the fermenting combination of all the midsummer scents, and it is old and original. A Neanderthal standing on the bank of the river, spear in hand, would have known it. [p.108]

Subtitled 'Walking Britain's Wild Landscapes After Dark', this is a short collection of pieces about Lewis-Stempel's thoughts and experiences of walking at night -- on the Welsh coast, in the Lake District, and on the Thames Path at Hammersmith (adjacent to the London Wetland Centre). He's a farmer, and in some of the essays there is a lovely sense of comfortable familiarity with his land. I realise that I miss having 'my' land, the places I'd walk every day, the places so familiar that I notice any change and every seasonal recurrence.

Lots of fascinating facts and observations here: I learnt that birds flying in a V formation can fly almost twice as far as one bird flying alone; that the word 'delirium' is rooted in the notion of going off track when ploughing; that brent geese are named for their dark colour, 'brent' being a corruption of the old Norse 'brantr', burnt.

I appreciated his unease when in London ('I'm fritted by the city at night') but could not help thinking that I would not be keen on walking alone, at night, along the darkest part of the Thames Path. (Men's fears are different from women's.) Overall, though, I really appreciated his observations and his sheer joy in existing as part of the natural world.

Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
[loc. 2810]

Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)

Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen beneath the official enquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it'll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice. [loc. 1069]

Third in the trilogy that began with The Searcher and continued with The Hunter. Cal Hooper's life in the small village of Ardnakelty seems settled: he's more or less engaged to Lena, and Trey is finding friends and possibly even romance. Then a young woman -- Rachel, fiancee of local big-shot Tommy Moynihan's son Eugene -- is found dead in the river. ( Read more... )

Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet ...is the communications medium we will use to organise to save our species and planet from their imminent eradication. We can’t win these fights without a free, fair and open internet. [introduction]

Audiobook, read (with vigour and enthusiasm) by the author. Doctorow's foundational argument is something most internet users will agree with: that big internet sites, such as Facebook, Amazon, and the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, have become much less usable and user-friendly over recent years. (I would add Del.icio.us, Vinted, Goodreads, LiveJournal...)

The guest, the bessa, and vengeance are like the machinery of classical tragedy, and once you are caught up in the mechanism, you must face the possibility of tragedy. [Chapter 3]

A tragedy set in Albania. Gjorg Berisha is compelled by the Kanun, the ancient laws of the mountain country, to kill the man who killed his brother. The murder cements his own fate: he'll be killed in turn by one of the men of the Kryeqyqe family, in thirty days' time. ( Read more... )

“Not every mystery is a crime,” said the Commander. “But every crime starts as a mystery." [p. 76]

Gamache has come out of retirement to take the role of Commander at the Sûreté Academy, which has lately been turning out new police officers who are aggressive, brutal and not up to Gamache's standards. He has to root out the source of the corruption, which -- in typical Gamache style -- he does by keeping on some known troublemakers on the staff, and recruiting his old friend-turned-nemesis Michel Brébeuf as another teacher. Of course everything goes swimmingly, ( Read more... )

I started to recognise an intrinsic feeling of accentuation when it came to Essex, between sparseness and density, bucolic abandonment and oncoming modernity, realism and poetry, country and city, rich and poor – buzzing dichotomies that meant that, as hard as I tried to pin Essex’s story down, it always somehow slipped away. [loc. 1151]

Burrows was born in Essex^*, and moved back there from London when he and his wife started a family. He has real affection for the county, but a solid grasp of its socioeconomics, and of the TOWIE-fuelled perception of Essex as 'a land of crass consumerism, populated by perma-tanned chancers and loose women with more front than Clacton-on-Sea'. 

Dear Mr Hammerstein,
It may come as a surprise that I am writing to you, as it appears that the theater industry believes I am dead and can now make up whatever they wish about me... [opening line]

I read this for the prompt 'based on the top-grossing movie in the year of your birth'. Set in 1959, it's a novel about Maria von Trapp and her response to the forthcomming stage musical of 'The Sound of Music': her letter informs Hammerstein that she has 'several ideas about how the script can be fixed'. Hammerstein -- already ill with the stomach cancer that would kill him within a year -- is too busy (and possibly too nervous) to talk to her, so instead his secretary Fran has a series of conversations with Maria.

I was born in a nation at war. I grew up in the shadow of war. And, like everyone else my own age, I had been waiting all my life for "the future war". [Firebird]

Two short novels written for less-confident readers, featuring young female pilots in the Second World War: I listened to the audiobook, read clearly and evocatively by Rachael Beresford.