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always my fave - looking into the kitchen with Mark E Smith on the fridge. Much changed now but still the same

#booksky #books 6184 Penguin 6849 The Plutonium Factor / Michael Bagley (1983) old-style thriller re-working of the "holding the country to ransom" trope here with a planeload of plutonium and some pretty familiar characters - not to mention the only man who could track them down if he only had time

#booksky #books 5925 Crimson Snow / Martin Edwards (British Library 2016, internet £3.07) annual festive selection of murder mystery shorts including one of the forgotten stples of the trade - the magazine serial prize competition, printed here with the solution as an appendix as is only proper

#booksky #books 2997 Death Of A Bookseller / Bernard J Farmer (British Library 2022, internet £2.70) 100th crime classic reissue written by a book-loving ex-cop about a beat Sergeant befriending a book dealer who inducts him into the mysteries of the trade before taking a terminal knife to the chest

#books 4848 Penguin Classics 154 The Vinland sagas : The Norse Discovery Of America (1978) two short Icelandic sagas as translated by Magnus Magnusson (a man I was once very rude to) telling how Eirik The Red colonized Greenland and his son Leif Eiricsson pushed on further

chimney breastt (bedroom)

into the kitchen - still disrupted by failed attempt to insert a new fridge

#booksky #books 6183 Penguin 8340 The Accidental Tourist / Anne Tyler (1986) admirable honesty in a book that includes great sadness amongst some wacky comedy and delivers both effectively with respect to a very OCD writer of travel guides having to find room in his routines for unplannable love

#booksky #books 6182 The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing / Melissa Banks (2000) hitting the jackpot with her 1st novel, one of those cheery chick-lit dating hell rompas that you can end up reading & even enjoying without respecting it or yourself (and the last paragraph sucks on a cosmic scale)

#booksky #books 6181 Penguin 8810 Steps Going Down / Joseph Hansen (1986) the brightness of Southern Californian sun glints off the phony smiles of endless hustlers and many low-lifes among the high-flyers - as here where the guy hustling his way into an old man's fortune is about to get out-hustled

#booksky #books 6180 Penguin 11911 Enchantment / Monica Dickens seemingly ordinary folk seeking escape from the grind in assuming alternative identities, some through D&D gaming and some in other, far more dangerous forms of fantasy. Eerily prescient as modern fluidity erodes the norms of reality

#booksky #books 6179 Penguin 13129 Adam Hardrow / David Fraser (1990) 2nd Liieutenant moves with his regiment to France in 1939 for 4 volumes fighting the good fight in sundry theatres of operation - the "Commando" magazine-style illustration on the cover tells the whole story : not for over-13's

Thank you for the mention Mark @markymark757.bsky.social 💙

behind the bed

#booksky #books 6178 Penguin 11999 A Helping Hand / Celia Dale (1990) seeming to offer a room and a helping hand to successive lonely and wealthy old ladies is actually a smooth business operation and the only helping hand on display is pushing them through the door marked "Exit"

#booksky #books 6177 Penguin Modern Classics Lolita / Vladimir Nabokov (2004) not just shocking but shockingly good, adding a term to his adopted language and telling uncomfortable truths about male desire and obsession and the acutely observed complications of tarnished innocence

#booksky #books 6176 Penguin 9954 Small Changes / Marge Piercy (6th post-1987) as an author you know you've made it when your name on the cover is more than twice the size of the title and given the mint condition I'd say someone bought it after "Woman On The Edge Of Time" and then never read it

#booksky #books 13021 Elidor / Alan Garner (Armada 1974) 2 years after the edition Ithat was the first book we read at senior school under the tutelage of Mr Norris who gave me a detention for calling him a troglodyte though tbf he looked more like Penfold but it was some years before "Dangermouse"

#booksky #books 13005 Penguin Modern Classics 700 Junky / William S Burroughs (3rd post-2002, charity shop £1) not a lot of fiction in this account of addiction to heroin. Also (see RFK Jr) it may be horrible but it's a damn sight easier when you're only spending the family trust fund

#booksky #books 6175 The Pope's Rhinoceros / Lawrence Norfolk ( QPD 1996) ranges and romps over the whole of Europe weaving a fiction around the true lunacy behind a 1516 Italian shipwreck of a Portuguese ship bringing the fabled beast to His Holiness inspired by Durer's woodcut of the previous year

chimney breast - currently under re-construction

this high quality gag came from someone who is also here but as he hasn’t posted it himself I assume he doesn’t want to be tagged to share in the glory

Date set : 13/03/2026 - and yes. it's a Friday

behind the telly