My latest ’excursion’ into podcasting is up - an interview with spy writer Michael Dylan about his latest book The New Spy, for @spybrary. Find it where-ever you get your etc. etc. spybrary.com/the-new-s… #booksky #authorsky

Trump: I want Iran’s oil

ATTACKS IRAN

Media: Let us ponder why Trump is attacking Iran.

I mean. Come on.

Read: There There by Tommy Orange 📚Most of the book is perceptively drawn scenes of disparate cast in the runup to a powwow in Oakland. When tragic violence explodes there, it’s both the point and beside the point that they’re all native American. #booksky #books

Read: The Fraud by Zadie Smith 📚Meaty and slightly meandering like the 19th century English novels it pastiches, with a nuanced human take on slavery’s effects rather than performative shouty self righteousness. #booksky #books

Saw #onebattleafteranother. Self indulgent self righteous simplistic mess congealed by four over privileged stars riffing cringey stoner ‘humour’ on Pynchon pretension for spurious intellectual validation and only winning #Oscars because everything else is even worse.

I use AI a lot in writing, to get over blank screen paralysis. I get it to generate a bunch of words which I know will be so infuriatingly bad I’ll be forced to rewrite them entirely till none of its version remains and I have created my first draft #writingcommunity #amwriting #writersky

Read: Everything We Do Is Music How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop by @elizabethalker.bsky.social 📚Wonderfully nerdy cross referencing of pop music with ‘serious’ avant garde, which took my listening down many weird and, it transpired, joyously unlistenable rabbitholes. #booksky

Read: Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie 📚Fergie/Andrew bio- readable etc. but most of it’s been in the media already. Brings together the astonishing extent of their ligging and fosters a sense of righteous outrage. #booksky

Down a snow-drifted alley a tipped up wheelie bin wide open like a pm’d corpse and a cheap suitcase ripped apart with cheap clothes scattered in the slush. Like a proxy for a murder victim. #writingcommunity

Read: Villager by Tom Cox 📚Portrait of a village, seen partly through the eyes of the village, circling through time, space and points of view. Rich and enrichening and humane. #booksky #books

Went for a walk on the frozen lake…

Can someone suggest a ‘comedy’ podcast that is at least 1/10th as funny as the smug friends interviewing their smug mates and/or straining to crack weak predictable topical jokes think it is? I’ve just been trying a bunch and they all, without exception, ear-meltingly awful and homicide inducing.

Read: The New Spy by Michael Dylan 📚The opposite of the Slow Horses (Galloping Thoroughbreds?) fight a bunch of terrorist threats in London. Fast read, and more action than atmosphere. Feels like a lost novelisation of BBC’s Spooks. #booksky #thrillers

Read: Reykjavik - A Crime Story by Ragnar Jónasson Katrín Jakobsdóttir 📚By the numbers, emotionally flat Icelandic noir heavy with the usual deserted islands, crusading journalist and middle aged professionals hiding a sin from their youth. #booksky #thrillers

Read: Vienna At Nightfall by Richard Wake 📚Richly atmospheric Alan Furst-ish world of pre-WW2 Austria, as completely believable ‘ordinary bloke’ is pulled into spying, with all the agonies and internal conflicts it brings, and a credibly snarky authorial voice. #booksky #thrillers

Productive happy days make for dull journalling.

Productive, happy days make for dull journalling.

I’m old enough to remember when Harlan Coben was good.

Read: The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry 📚Leans more towards agonised burnt out spook cases of Greeneland and Deighton than gripping suspense. Feels real enough that I now need to research what actually happened in Bahrain in 2012. #booksky #thrillers

I opened the scary box - here’s what I found. 1st of the actual newsletters from the 80s, getting deeper into what exactly happened in 1982 in the twisted, funny retro murder mystery based loosely on my childhood. open.substack.com/pub/fuppe…

When I was a kid, I made pirate treasure maps by drawing on paper then ‘ageing’ it by grilling and scorching the edges. Mocking up a newsletter for tomorrow’s fupperynewsletter.substack.com in Photoshop is far less fun. #crime #thriller

Next episode of the Fuppery Newsletter - a twisted, funny retro fictional serial murder mystery in the medium of 1980s village newsletters. Contains an older man dancing naked in the suburbs and a judgemental police officer. bit.ly/4sBAVNn #readingcommunity #books #crime

Conceded I not only need progressive lenses but also the reading glasses version too, where the close vision is closer and the long vision is a bit more blurred. Magnificent game changers. I can get absorbed in a book again rather than having to keep moving it to keep the text in focus.

Read: Harry’s Game by Gerald Seymour 📚 Long overdue to read this (mostly associate it with the 1970s TV series and Clannad). Pulls together action, politics, ‘world’, psychology, morality, emotions, suspense, allthethings, brilliantly. Total, total classic. #booksky #readingcommunity #thriller