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 https://micro.blog/books/9780525436140

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 https://micro.blog/books/9780735235458

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 https://micro.blog/books/9780571370184

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 https://micro.blog/books/9798292312741

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 https://micro.blog/books/9781800181359

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: 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 https://micro.blog/books/B07L42FZZ9