very very samey unvarying drone/hum - any 3-second stretch sounds the same as any other - that unassumingness appeals to me occasionally
..........................................
I'm reading Middlemarch - for a bookclub - I'm about two-thirds in and after a poor start I think I can see why people like it. I've never been embarrassed about the fact that I love lists. I've not done one in years. Here's a list of some of the books I've read so far this year - yes I do keep a note of them. I've been and am and was and wasn't a member of 6 bookclubs this year and I don't go to all of them all the time - but bookclubs are what spurred me to read about a third of the books on this list - that is my excuse.
The number after each title is my score out of ten - for me, 5 means quite a good book, one that was worth reading - less than 5 means that I would never read it again, more than five means that I would if my life was infinite, and when I'm in the region of 8 and 9 and 10 (yes I have over the years given books ten out of ten) then those are the books I live for. I do read quite a lot, but I don't have a TV and I don't look at a smartphone - but I do go to the cinema more than most people, when I drink I drink too much and too long and don't do anything else, despite my overprolific output of music I don't spend much time doing that, because I am very lazy and work very very quickly/impatiently - e.g it will take me longer to type this thing than it took to make this "album".
I entertain hardly ever, but in spite of being quite moody and grumpy and misanthropic and finding most chat boring I do socialise more than most, I can spend a whole day walking, but apart from that I never travel, apart from to London, and that week-ish in Newcastle. So I do devote quite a lot of time to reading and when I'm on my deathbed, thinking about 2023, this is what I'll mainly be remembering -
John Cooper Clarke - i wanna be yours (5)
Ferdinand Mount - the clique (3)
Hugh Thomson - the green road into the trees (5)
Anna Lembke - doperminenation (5)
Robin Wall Kimmerer - gathering moss (2)
David Thomson - in camden town (8)
Julian Vignoles - a delicate wildness, the life and loves of david thomson (9)
Angelica Garnett - deceived with kindness (7)
PG Wodehouse - psmith in the city (7)
Caroline Maclean - circles and squares (6)
Tove Ditlevsen - childhood, youth, dependency (8)
Callum MacDonald - assassination of reinhard heydrich (6)
Clifton Gachagua - madman at kilifi (3)
Andrea Lawlor - paul takes the form of a mortal girl (5)
Gary Shteyngart - super sad true love story (6)
Kazuo Ishiguro - klara and the sun (6)
Cormac McCarthy - blood meridian (5)
John Steinbeck - grapes of wrath (7)
Elizabeth Barton Phillips - mum can you lend me £20 (6)
Lisa Jewell - the night she disappeared (4)
Tina Brown - the palace papers (7)
Wendy Lowther - hitlers furies (4)
Jung Chang & Jon Halliday - mao (6)
Jeffrey Deaver - hunting time (4)
Mark Sullivan - beneath a scarlet sky (6)
Magnus Fridh - the art of still (4)
Patrick Suskind - the pigeon (5)
David Essex - faded glory (5)
EH Young - miss mole (3)
Mitch Albom - the time keeper (4)
David Holloway - stalin and the bomb (5)
Ling Ma - bliss montage (5)
Gerald Kersh - night and the city (7)
Ewan Morrison - nina x (2)
Robert Orledge (ed) - satie remembered (6)
Chidera Eggerue - what a time to be alone (3)
Lilian Pizzichini - the blue hour, portrait of jean rhys (8)
Charles Dickens - great expectations (8)
Hermione Lee - penelope fitzgerald, a life (8)
Niviag Kornellinssen - crimson (6)
Chris Packham - fingers in the sparkle jar (1)
Penelope Fitzgerald - the beginning of spring (5)
Hilary Mantel - giving up the ghost (5)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - americanah (7)
Tove Jansson - art in nature (6)
Barbara Kingsolver - demon copperhead (3)
Even though I've wasted less time drinking than in any other adult year of my life, and even though as I get older it does get harder to fill the days and I often don't try at all and just lie on a sofa and read all day, I seem to be on course to have read fewer books this year than normal. And the proportion of really brilliant ones has seemed lower than usual. My god, we can all remember our late teens and early (and maybe beyond) 20s when almost every book we read was a life-changer, when almost every new album made us change our whole direction forevermore.
No more. I couldn't even do a list of my favourite new albums of the year - I haven't had the time or inclination to hear any, even though I must've downloaded about 20,000 - not much of an exaggeration - and this is why no muso nowadays should be upset that everyone ignores us all, cos we're ignoring everyone else too. So - no life-changing books this year for me - there was a good patch quite recently when I read the biogs of Jean Rhys and Penelope Fitzgerald and they sandwiched a bookclub book, Great Expectations, which I'd read several times already.
And according to my list my favourite book of the year is the biography of David Thomson - one of those quiet people whose name will vanish from public awareness (probably already has vanished) very soon. Apart from Great Expectations, my favourite novel was Americanah - not what I expected at all - I thought it was going to bludgeon me over the head for a million pages telling me I'm horrible, but actually it's very gentle and quietly riveting, just the lives of two quiet young people drifting into and out of each other's orbits. No question, the most unbearable book I tried to year all year was Chris Packham's autobiography. Oooh good, Bart Davenport's "Fuck Fame" has just come on my random-play VLC player and when that happens I get so high I can do anything in the world and even though it's raining I think I'll go out into it and take a chance.
she says this is the last album she'll make like this before she goes off and makes stuff with Lana Del Rey - so just for this moment we have Kathy to ourselves - (yes I love Lana's music too) Simon Aulman
The new EP from Scottish songwriter Alec Bowman_Clarke goes deep, setting vulnerable lyrics to gentle melodies & stripped-back arrangements. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 30, 2021
Soft and soothing acoustic compositions from this Italian guitarist with melodies that flutter like leaves on a breeze. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 1, 2021
