Books in December
And we close out the year with another batch of good reading!
DCS Simon Serrailler is worried about a new scheme by drug-runners to sell their product: buddy up to small children, show them kindness, give them gifts and then turn them into drug mules, carrying packages to specific destinations with no grown-up noticing. When this pattern starts appearing in Lafferton and surrounding villages, he does his best to break the threads before they get too embedded in the communities, but catching a few low-level goons is probably the best he can hope for. Meanwhile, Cat is dealing with an ancient patient who does not want to go to the hospital no matter what, an injured husband, a missing dog and an older son who seems to be at a crossroads in his young life; in other words, chaotic life as normal in Cat’s world. And now Simon, too, is considering a change in his circumstances…. This is the 11th book in the Simon Serrailler series, and a very compelling entry after several books in which this reader’s sympathy for Simon started falling far short; here, Simon is behaving in a much more human way than he has been for a while, which is a relief. While the crimes being pursued in this series are always interesting, it’s been the intertwined relationships, particularly between Simon and his twin sister Cat, that are the heart and soul of the story, so having one of those two seemingly go off the rails in earlier books was quite disconcerting; glad to see they’re back on track with this one! There are some subplots that I felt got short shrift, particularly dealing with the family dog, but overall this is a very satisfying read, and worth the wait of something like a year and a half. Recommended - but for this series, it truly is necessary to start at the very beginning (“The Various Haunts of Men”) to understand what’s really going on in the lives of these characters.
Jasmin is the mother of two small children living in Mafinga, a country where all the men have been killed by the sun and the King has decreed a socialist state where everybody is equal (though some more than others) and everybody must contribute to the whole by working in their assigned places. But Jasmin has a secret, a story machine, and if the authorities catch her with it, she might be killed; and in the meantime, the Queen has such a longing for children…. I hesitate to call this story a science fiction tale (although aliens and alien technology are involved), a fantasy (although there are many magical elements), perhaps even horror (there’s a lot of torture included); no, it’s really an invented folk tale, something that seems as old as the oldest story you’ve ever heard and at the same time is sparkling new. I raced through the book, wanting to know what happened next; but now I will need to return to it in order to read it slowly, giving myself time to savour Ms. Bacon’s absolutely poetic writing, her dazzling imagery and her way of creating characters who live and breathe and suffer without ever feeling invented; brilliant. Highly recommended. (This book will be released in March of 2022; I received an ARC from Library Thing in exchange for an honest review.)
Maisie Dobbs has come up in the world: daughter of a costermonger, she has managed to parlay a position as a maid in an aristocratic house into a scholarship to university and apprenticeship to a renowned psychologist. Before she can complete her studies, however, the Great War intervenes and she interrupts her work to serve as a nurse on the front lines in France, where her experiences shape her life as much as the war does for all the men who survive it. Back home, she works hard to make her way in the world as a private investigator while struggling with her own inner demons…. I first read “Maisie Dobbs” in about 2004 and while I liked it, I didn’t follow up beyond the second book in the series. Recently, a friend reminded me of the books and I decided to reacquaint myself with Maisie and her circle, and I’m glad that I did. There are many series now focusing on a young female detective in the 1920s, but few are as serious and deeply felt as this series, which combines a kind of psychoanalysis of both characters and circumstances with fairly clued mysteries - and all in a very well-researched setting and time period. I look forward to reading the many more books in this series now that I’ve found Maisie again - recommended!
Jules is a musician who struck it big some years ago, based on songs detailing his despairing love for Coreen, first the girlfriend and then the wife of his friend Ben; she is the only person who “gets” him, while Ben is the only person who will put up with Jules’ extremely self-involved ways. His fame far behind him now, Jules travels to Australia for a “comeback” tour, consisting of one solo gig, but when he learns that Coreen has died, the little hold on real life that he had begins to spiral out of control…. This is a novella, fast-paced and drawing on both romantic melancholy and out-and-out horror story lines, both well-evoked by Mr. Ashley-Smith. My problem with it is Jules, who is one of the most thoroughly unlikeable characters I’ve ever met: massively self-involved, careeningly alcoholic and utterly incapable of seeing the damage he’s doing to everyone around him. So, actually, what happens to him in the end is probably just what he deserves.
Cleopatra Fox is disappointed when, far from agreeing to take her on as a partner, private detective Harry Armitage simply offers her the cases he doesn’t want - cases where husbands (and in one case, a wife) are looking for proofs needed to divorce their wives. She takes on the jobs if only to prove to Mr. Armitage that she can complete them on her own, but when Mrs. Warrington, wife of one of these men, is murdered in her own drawing room, Mr. Armitage thinks he has the right to take the case back. Of course Cleo refuses to let him, and together they delve into the sordid nature of marriages of convenience, photographic studios that provide more than a wholesome service, and the political strife of early 1900 England, in which women are starting to agitate for the vote more and more - and may not stop at murder to achieve it…. This is the third Cleo Fox book, all set in London in 1900. The time period is very curious to modern readers, given how little females were supposed to know, how few places they could even aspire to attend and how certain men seem to be about women’s inability to act in any capacity other than those few, narrowly defined roles; Ms. Archer does a good job of invoking that time and place, although as with previous books in the series, I found a few spots where the language seemed anachronistic to me. Still, those few terms weren’t enough to jar me out of the story, and I find the mysteries to be well done. The relationship between Cleo and Harry is churning along in a believable way, and her relationships with her family and members of the hotel staff are quite entertaining too. As this is only the third in a project series (of four as far as I know), I think any reader could start here without missing too much information, although generally it’s best to start a series at the beginning. That said, recommended!
The Peculiar Crimes Unit is dead - decommissioned, pensioned off, its building to be readied for other purposes - or is it? Arthur Bryant is determined to have one last case to send the team off, although his choices are slim; he settles on the case of an old lady who slipped through the seams of the social safety net and died of starvation alone in her flat. Or did she? The more he digs, the more he uncovers a hotbed of espionage, intrigue, and the fallout from government secrets held from World War II…. This is the final Bryant and May book (excepting perhaps a kind of coda that has been rumoured about), and a fine send-off it is, too! The elderly detectives, the slovenly Arthur Bryant and his dapper companion John May, along with their team of loyal sidekicks, find themselves passing through a crash course in diplomatic history while attempting to solve a string of seemingly unrelated deaths; this being Bryant & May, of course there are many side roads and comedic moments along the way. A truly fine way to end the series - but you certainly must start at the very beginning (“Full Dark House”) to understand any bit of what’s going on! Highly recommended - the whole series, that is!
Wallace Price is not a nice person - a lawyer, he values efficiency and winning over all else, including human relationships. So when he suddenly dies of a heart attack, there are few mourners at his funeral. He is surprised when one of them, a young woman he has never seen, not only appears at the funeral but actually sees and responds to him when nobody else does; it turns out that she is Meiying, a Reaper sent to bring his soul to a waystation where a ferryman while guide him across. Hugo Freeman is unlike anybody he’s ever met, and along with Mei, Nelson the ghost of Hugo’s grandfather and Apollo the ghost-dog, Wallace begins to learn how to become a better person, despite being dead. After all, the potential for personal growth doesn’t stop with the mere end of life…. T. J. Klune is getting a lot of praise (and probably some hate too, unfortunately) for centering queer folk, people of colour and queer people of colour in his books, but what I think he does best is centering human relationships, connections and honest emotions throughout his work; I’ve only read two of his books (the other being “The House in the Cerulean Sea”), but in both cases the fantasy worlds are anchored by the characters’ humanity and care for each other. I pretty much knew what would happen in this novel from the beginning, but that didn’t detract from the story at all - indeed, it was fascinating to see how he would get his characters to that ending! Above all, this story is engaging and thoughtful, and it takes no time at all for the reader to become invested in Wallace, Hugo and the rest - they’re all people (and dog) that we would want to know in our own lives! Recommended.
Re-read. Maisie Dobbs is asked to find the errant daughter of a wealthy self-made man; Charlotte is 32 years old, but flighty and without any accomplishments, and Maisie thinks she won’t be hard to find. But when she discovers a link between Charlotte and several women of the same age, women who have recently died in confounding circumstances, Maisie soon finds that aspects of the Great War are still reverberating, even in 1930….This is the second in the Maisie Dobbs series, set in England between the wars, and at this point the Depression is well under way. I like the details of life in England at that time, ranging from soup kitchens and long lines of men trying to find non-existent jobs to the contrasting images of wealthy people shopping in great emporia and investing in possible future horse race winners; but the strongest aspect of this series is the deep dive that Maisie takes into understanding the people she encounters and how they come to do the things that they do, both good and bad. I believe there are some 17 books in this series by now, but I’ve only read the first two - so I’m looking forward to a lot more reading to come! Recommended.
Re-read. I read this almost every year around the Winter Solstice; sometimes I re-read all five books in the series. Great mythic stuff!
Kurt Wagner is the head of a massive arms manufacturing company, hated by millions around the world. Susan deVeere is an award-winning filmmaker who is feted for her progressive work. How the two ended up sleeping together fuels the start of “Paperclip,” but is soon superceded by the activities of Omar, Kurt’s bodyguard and an ex-patriot from SankaraVille in Africa; Jet, Kurt’s driver who is studying magick (definitely *with* the “k”); and the newly minted International Court for Economical Crimes in SankaraVille, which is prepared to kidnap industrialists to force them to stand trial for their crimes. And that’s not even to mention Waldo, a human who has somehow become a bird…. This novella is part of Mr. Doubinsky’s “city-state cycle,” depicting a world containing many city-states in competition with one another rather than countries doing the same; otherwise, though, the world is rather like our own. He tends to write in short chapters, in this case alternating between the various voices of his main characters, and even though the chapters are often only a few paragraphs long, there is never any confusion as to who is describing what because each character is so well delineated, and this reader at least found herself rooting for each of them in turn (well, not for Kurt obviously). Not quite sure what Waldo’s there for, but other than that, I found the author’s storytelling to be very much flowing in nature, and a joy to read. Recommended!
"Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village" is an entertaining little book about, well, what the title says. Ms. Johnson wrote the words and Mr. Cooper drew the pictures (which are very Gorey-esque, although that’s at least partially due to the subject matter). The book is divided into sections detailing village landmarks, villagers themselves, the attached Manor and its buildings, and the occupants of and visitors to the Manor, along with a couple of handy quizzes to enable the reader to judge just how much s/he has taken the advice rendered to heart. A hilarious little read requiring less than an hour of your time, and also the perfect book to dip into randomly on those days when you just need to laugh out loud; recommended.
“Rock Me On the Water” takes as its main conceit the idea that one calendar year changed everything in America in terms of cultural, social and political life, and that those changes occurred largely through the lens of American popular culture which was based primarily in Los Angeles. As a unifying concept, it works quite well, although of course each new offering is situated within its temporal background; i.e., the film “Chinatown” for example gestated for years before being made, and its creators obviously didn’t spring full-grown from the head of pop culture in the year 1974; an artist such as Linda Ronstadt struggled for many years before breaking through commercially with her country-pop-folk-rock amalgam; and a breakthrough television show like “M.A.S.H.” was predicated on both earlier times (the Korean War) and earlier sit-com conventions. Mr. Brownstein, known as a senior writer at The Atlantic (to which I have subscribed for decades) doesn’t dwell merely on the surface of these matters; he spends a good deal of time discussing the political realm of the early 1970s (in particular, Watergate and the rise of Jerry Brown, once and future Governor of California) and also makes pointed note of the fact that the vast majority of people in positions of power who could influence pop culture were older white men (and even after the younger generation began to break through to those higher echelon jobs, they were almost exclusively *younger* white men). I’m not entirely sure who the intended audience is here, whether young people to whom this would all be ancient history or older folks who might want to reminisce about their youth. I myself was born in November of 1958, hence was 15 for much of the year under discussion in this book; for me, reading about that time sparked significant memories (seeing Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt in concert in Berkeley, attending rallies for Jerry Brown, and of course watching all those television shows), which was rather more bitter than sweet, really. If you’re interested in that particular moment in American culture, this is an excellent read (and fully footnoted, with an extremely impressive array of author-conducted interviews with many of the main characters), but I’m not sure how much it will resonate with younger people who no doubt will spend much time thinking, “who?” in response to these stories.
My brother was in the UK recently and he picked up “Teach Your Cat Welsh” as a joke gift for me. This small book consists of short phrases in Welsh, their meanings and how each word is pronounced on the odd pages and drawings of cats (or parts thereof) on the facing page. For instance, “it’s snowing” is “Mae’n bwrw eira,” pronounced “Mine boo-roo ey-ra,” an appropriate phrase for where I live (in Montreal), and the facing page shows a cartoon cat’s head, face looking up and mouth open to catch some snowflakes. Fun stuff, very silly. So “Diolch” (thank you), Rich, and “Blwyddyn Newydd Dda” (Happy New Year) to all!
If I counted right, I end 2021 having read some 134 books in a single year, wow! On to happy reading in 2022!
DCS Simon Serrailler is worried about a new scheme by drug-runners to sell their product: buddy up to small children, show them kindness, give them gifts and then turn them into drug mules, carrying packages to specific destinations with no grown-up noticing. When this pattern starts appearing in Lafferton and surrounding villages, he does his best to break the threads before they get too embedded in the communities, but catching a few low-level goons is probably the best he can hope for. Meanwhile, Cat is dealing with an ancient patient who does not want to go to the hospital no matter what, an injured husband, a missing dog and an older son who seems to be at a crossroads in his young life; in other words, chaotic life as normal in Cat’s world. And now Simon, too, is considering a change in his circumstances…. This is the 11th book in the Simon Serrailler series, and a very compelling entry after several books in which this reader’s sympathy for Simon started falling far short; here, Simon is behaving in a much more human way than he has been for a while, which is a relief. While the crimes being pursued in this series are always interesting, it’s been the intertwined relationships, particularly between Simon and his twin sister Cat, that are the heart and soul of the story, so having one of those two seemingly go off the rails in earlier books was quite disconcerting; glad to see they’re back on track with this one! There are some subplots that I felt got short shrift, particularly dealing with the family dog, but overall this is a very satisfying read, and worth the wait of something like a year and a half. Recommended - but for this series, it truly is necessary to start at the very beginning (“The Various Haunts of Men”) to understand what’s really going on in the lives of these characters.
Jasmin is the mother of two small children living in Mafinga, a country where all the men have been killed by the sun and the King has decreed a socialist state where everybody is equal (though some more than others) and everybody must contribute to the whole by working in their assigned places. But Jasmin has a secret, a story machine, and if the authorities catch her with it, she might be killed; and in the meantime, the Queen has such a longing for children…. I hesitate to call this story a science fiction tale (although aliens and alien technology are involved), a fantasy (although there are many magical elements), perhaps even horror (there’s a lot of torture included); no, it’s really an invented folk tale, something that seems as old as the oldest story you’ve ever heard and at the same time is sparkling new. I raced through the book, wanting to know what happened next; but now I will need to return to it in order to read it slowly, giving myself time to savour Ms. Bacon’s absolutely poetic writing, her dazzling imagery and her way of creating characters who live and breathe and suffer without ever feeling invented; brilliant. Highly recommended. (This book will be released in March of 2022; I received an ARC from Library Thing in exchange for an honest review.)
Maisie Dobbs has come up in the world: daughter of a costermonger, she has managed to parlay a position as a maid in an aristocratic house into a scholarship to university and apprenticeship to a renowned psychologist. Before she can complete her studies, however, the Great War intervenes and she interrupts her work to serve as a nurse on the front lines in France, where her experiences shape her life as much as the war does for all the men who survive it. Back home, she works hard to make her way in the world as a private investigator while struggling with her own inner demons…. I first read “Maisie Dobbs” in about 2004 and while I liked it, I didn’t follow up beyond the second book in the series. Recently, a friend reminded me of the books and I decided to reacquaint myself with Maisie and her circle, and I’m glad that I did. There are many series now focusing on a young female detective in the 1920s, but few are as serious and deeply felt as this series, which combines a kind of psychoanalysis of both characters and circumstances with fairly clued mysteries - and all in a very well-researched setting and time period. I look forward to reading the many more books in this series now that I’ve found Maisie again - recommended!
Jules is a musician who struck it big some years ago, based on songs detailing his despairing love for Coreen, first the girlfriend and then the wife of his friend Ben; she is the only person who “gets” him, while Ben is the only person who will put up with Jules’ extremely self-involved ways. His fame far behind him now, Jules travels to Australia for a “comeback” tour, consisting of one solo gig, but when he learns that Coreen has died, the little hold on real life that he had begins to spiral out of control…. This is a novella, fast-paced and drawing on both romantic melancholy and out-and-out horror story lines, both well-evoked by Mr. Ashley-Smith. My problem with it is Jules, who is one of the most thoroughly unlikeable characters I’ve ever met: massively self-involved, careeningly alcoholic and utterly incapable of seeing the damage he’s doing to everyone around him. So, actually, what happens to him in the end is probably just what he deserves.
Cleopatra Fox is disappointed when, far from agreeing to take her on as a partner, private detective Harry Armitage simply offers her the cases he doesn’t want - cases where husbands (and in one case, a wife) are looking for proofs needed to divorce their wives. She takes on the jobs if only to prove to Mr. Armitage that she can complete them on her own, but when Mrs. Warrington, wife of one of these men, is murdered in her own drawing room, Mr. Armitage thinks he has the right to take the case back. Of course Cleo refuses to let him, and together they delve into the sordid nature of marriages of convenience, photographic studios that provide more than a wholesome service, and the political strife of early 1900 England, in which women are starting to agitate for the vote more and more - and may not stop at murder to achieve it…. This is the third Cleo Fox book, all set in London in 1900. The time period is very curious to modern readers, given how little females were supposed to know, how few places they could even aspire to attend and how certain men seem to be about women’s inability to act in any capacity other than those few, narrowly defined roles; Ms. Archer does a good job of invoking that time and place, although as with previous books in the series, I found a few spots where the language seemed anachronistic to me. Still, those few terms weren’t enough to jar me out of the story, and I find the mysteries to be well done. The relationship between Cleo and Harry is churning along in a believable way, and her relationships with her family and members of the hotel staff are quite entertaining too. As this is only the third in a project series (of four as far as I know), I think any reader could start here without missing too much information, although generally it’s best to start a series at the beginning. That said, recommended!
The Peculiar Crimes Unit is dead - decommissioned, pensioned off, its building to be readied for other purposes - or is it? Arthur Bryant is determined to have one last case to send the team off, although his choices are slim; he settles on the case of an old lady who slipped through the seams of the social safety net and died of starvation alone in her flat. Or did she? The more he digs, the more he uncovers a hotbed of espionage, intrigue, and the fallout from government secrets held from World War II…. This is the final Bryant and May book (excepting perhaps a kind of coda that has been rumoured about), and a fine send-off it is, too! The elderly detectives, the slovenly Arthur Bryant and his dapper companion John May, along with their team of loyal sidekicks, find themselves passing through a crash course in diplomatic history while attempting to solve a string of seemingly unrelated deaths; this being Bryant & May, of course there are many side roads and comedic moments along the way. A truly fine way to end the series - but you certainly must start at the very beginning (“Full Dark House”) to understand any bit of what’s going on! Highly recommended - the whole series, that is!
Wallace Price is not a nice person - a lawyer, he values efficiency and winning over all else, including human relationships. So when he suddenly dies of a heart attack, there are few mourners at his funeral. He is surprised when one of them, a young woman he has never seen, not only appears at the funeral but actually sees and responds to him when nobody else does; it turns out that she is Meiying, a Reaper sent to bring his soul to a waystation where a ferryman while guide him across. Hugo Freeman is unlike anybody he’s ever met, and along with Mei, Nelson the ghost of Hugo’s grandfather and Apollo the ghost-dog, Wallace begins to learn how to become a better person, despite being dead. After all, the potential for personal growth doesn’t stop with the mere end of life…. T. J. Klune is getting a lot of praise (and probably some hate too, unfortunately) for centering queer folk, people of colour and queer people of colour in his books, but what I think he does best is centering human relationships, connections and honest emotions throughout his work; I’ve only read two of his books (the other being “The House in the Cerulean Sea”), but in both cases the fantasy worlds are anchored by the characters’ humanity and care for each other. I pretty much knew what would happen in this novel from the beginning, but that didn’t detract from the story at all - indeed, it was fascinating to see how he would get his characters to that ending! Above all, this story is engaging and thoughtful, and it takes no time at all for the reader to become invested in Wallace, Hugo and the rest - they’re all people (and dog) that we would want to know in our own lives! Recommended.
Re-read. Maisie Dobbs is asked to find the errant daughter of a wealthy self-made man; Charlotte is 32 years old, but flighty and without any accomplishments, and Maisie thinks she won’t be hard to find. But when she discovers a link between Charlotte and several women of the same age, women who have recently died in confounding circumstances, Maisie soon finds that aspects of the Great War are still reverberating, even in 1930….This is the second in the Maisie Dobbs series, set in England between the wars, and at this point the Depression is well under way. I like the details of life in England at that time, ranging from soup kitchens and long lines of men trying to find non-existent jobs to the contrasting images of wealthy people shopping in great emporia and investing in possible future horse race winners; but the strongest aspect of this series is the deep dive that Maisie takes into understanding the people she encounters and how they come to do the things that they do, both good and bad. I believe there are some 17 books in this series by now, but I’ve only read the first two - so I’m looking forward to a lot more reading to come! Recommended.
Re-read. I read this almost every year around the Winter Solstice; sometimes I re-read all five books in the series. Great mythic stuff!
Kurt Wagner is the head of a massive arms manufacturing company, hated by millions around the world. Susan deVeere is an award-winning filmmaker who is feted for her progressive work. How the two ended up sleeping together fuels the start of “Paperclip,” but is soon superceded by the activities of Omar, Kurt’s bodyguard and an ex-patriot from SankaraVille in Africa; Jet, Kurt’s driver who is studying magick (definitely *with* the “k”); and the newly minted International Court for Economical Crimes in SankaraVille, which is prepared to kidnap industrialists to force them to stand trial for their crimes. And that’s not even to mention Waldo, a human who has somehow become a bird…. This novella is part of Mr. Doubinsky’s “city-state cycle,” depicting a world containing many city-states in competition with one another rather than countries doing the same; otherwise, though, the world is rather like our own. He tends to write in short chapters, in this case alternating between the various voices of his main characters, and even though the chapters are often only a few paragraphs long, there is never any confusion as to who is describing what because each character is so well delineated, and this reader at least found herself rooting for each of them in turn (well, not for Kurt obviously). Not quite sure what Waldo’s there for, but other than that, I found the author’s storytelling to be very much flowing in nature, and a joy to read. Recommended!
"Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village" is an entertaining little book about, well, what the title says. Ms. Johnson wrote the words and Mr. Cooper drew the pictures (which are very Gorey-esque, although that’s at least partially due to the subject matter). The book is divided into sections detailing village landmarks, villagers themselves, the attached Manor and its buildings, and the occupants of and visitors to the Manor, along with a couple of handy quizzes to enable the reader to judge just how much s/he has taken the advice rendered to heart. A hilarious little read requiring less than an hour of your time, and also the perfect book to dip into randomly on those days when you just need to laugh out loud; recommended.
“Rock Me On the Water” takes as its main conceit the idea that one calendar year changed everything in America in terms of cultural, social and political life, and that those changes occurred largely through the lens of American popular culture which was based primarily in Los Angeles. As a unifying concept, it works quite well, although of course each new offering is situated within its temporal background; i.e., the film “Chinatown” for example gestated for years before being made, and its creators obviously didn’t spring full-grown from the head of pop culture in the year 1974; an artist such as Linda Ronstadt struggled for many years before breaking through commercially with her country-pop-folk-rock amalgam; and a breakthrough television show like “M.A.S.H.” was predicated on both earlier times (the Korean War) and earlier sit-com conventions. Mr. Brownstein, known as a senior writer at The Atlantic (to which I have subscribed for decades) doesn’t dwell merely on the surface of these matters; he spends a good deal of time discussing the political realm of the early 1970s (in particular, Watergate and the rise of Jerry Brown, once and future Governor of California) and also makes pointed note of the fact that the vast majority of people in positions of power who could influence pop culture were older white men (and even after the younger generation began to break through to those higher echelon jobs, they were almost exclusively *younger* white men). I’m not entirely sure who the intended audience is here, whether young people to whom this would all be ancient history or older folks who might want to reminisce about their youth. I myself was born in November of 1958, hence was 15 for much of the year under discussion in this book; for me, reading about that time sparked significant memories (seeing Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt in concert in Berkeley, attending rallies for Jerry Brown, and of course watching all those television shows), which was rather more bitter than sweet, really. If you’re interested in that particular moment in American culture, this is an excellent read (and fully footnoted, with an extremely impressive array of author-conducted interviews with many of the main characters), but I’m not sure how much it will resonate with younger people who no doubt will spend much time thinking, “who?” in response to these stories.
My brother was in the UK recently and he picked up “Teach Your Cat Welsh” as a joke gift for me. This small book consists of short phrases in Welsh, their meanings and how each word is pronounced on the odd pages and drawings of cats (or parts thereof) on the facing page. For instance, “it’s snowing” is “Mae’n bwrw eira,” pronounced “Mine boo-roo ey-ra,” an appropriate phrase for where I live (in Montreal), and the facing page shows a cartoon cat’s head, face looking up and mouth open to catch some snowflakes. Fun stuff, very silly. So “Diolch” (thank you), Rich, and “Blwyddyn Newydd Dda” (Happy New Year) to all!
If I counted right, I end 2021 having read some 134 books in a single year, wow! On to happy reading in 2022!