I wouldn't say this has been the most restful month... But we've got a lot done.

The flat is sorted (or as sorted as it's ever going to be).


When we hired a car to do some flat-related running around, we also fitted in a couple of outings:



There have, of course, been lots of cafe days:



There's been Easter...

And just last week we had a great trip back to Miri. Highlights were hornbills and cake at Piasau, and a visit to the delightful little town of Marudi. But it was also nice just to chill...





The Velvet Cushion was not short of amazing books...

This month saw the centenary of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I started to re-read it almost grudgingly (so much publicity...), but found it brilliant. Of a similar vintage, but undeservedly much less well known, was Ursula Parrott's searing but sparkling Ex-Wife.

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! profiles an Iranian-American who is struggling with addiction, depression, and identity crisis. It's a much zippier listen than that description would suggest (although, for once, I would have liked a less ambivalent ending). Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos is an incredibly clever portrayal of the latter days of the Democratic Republic of Germany. And I loved Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's thoroughly entertaining, but you'd be hard-pushed to find a better dissection of racism in all its folly (definitely buy the audio-book, as Adjoa Andoh must rank as one of the best narrators ever). On a completely different plane, I also really enjoyed Sergeant Studer, a vintage crime novel by Friedrich Glauser.




Not quite hitting the spot for me were Ali Smith's Hotel World (but I'm probably in a minority there), and John Le Carre's A Most Wanted Man, which felt a little predictable and formulaic.

Under the "other things" rubric were a first foray into US "working class literature", with stories by Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (neither of whom I'd ever heard of); thoughts on Adolescence, an extraordinarily effective Netflix drama we watched with some friends the other week; and a dip into some Easter poems (I never normally turn to poetry -- unless it's Brian Bilston's... -- but it's nice to be spoonfed with it sometimes).

That last entry was part of the Book Notes series, which I resurrected after a long gap. These are a bit eclectic, but their goal is to collect together information about things I've already read. I hate the thought of losing track of these snippets, and I also like the idea of building up little files on books and authors, which cumulatively enhance and/or change your understanding of them. It seems a better idea to do it in a specific series, rather than endlessly extend existing posts with PS after PPS after PPPS. But the fact I keep rationalizing this probably means I'm not entirely convinced...




What else?

-- Well, my To Read list is now totally and utterly out of control. But nothing really new there...

-- Nottingham Forest (the team Nigel has supported -- albeit in a lukewarm kind of way -- since the 1970s) beat Manchester United...

-- This (courtesy of the Dense Discovery newsletter) was interesting. It's "a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question 'Why have a personal website?' with 'Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun'..." It was via those links that I came across this thought-provoking description by Laurel Schwulst: "My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge..."

-- I loved this piece by Manya Koetse, on Comrade Build-the-Nation, aka the Tariff Beauty... The graphics are particularly enjoyable...

-- And I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes: Stuart McDonald is going to be travelling from Bali to Leeds, mostly overland. Before covid, I had loads of surface-travel routes on the drawing-board (the best we've done so far is London to Baku), but they've all become much more difficult to realize for one reason or another, so it will be nice to have someone blazing a trail.

Which is a good note to end on...