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Got Some Book Tokens? -- by Susan Price

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'The Silver Pigs' - Davis (Long blog warning. Sorry, couldn't curb my enthusiasm.) Got any book tokens left over from Christmas? Just in case, I’ll pass on this advice, which was given to me, at regular intervals, by my good friend, Karen Bush. “Read the Falco books.” Karen, excellent editor and avid reader, put me onto many great reads: most notably the ‘Song of Fire and Ice’ sequence by George R. R. Martin, and the wonderful ‘Six Duchies’ books of Robin Hobb. Also, Hobb’s lesser-known, but excellent ‘Soldier Son’ trilogy. Karen and I often exchanged notes about what we were reading (both of us were always reading something ) and then she’d demand, “Have you read the Falco books yet?  No?— Well, read them .” Karen had regularly proved that she  knew a good book when she met it, but still, I never got around to Falco. I think I'd got it into my head that they were an Ancient Roman version of the Brother Cadfael series: that is, 'murder-mysteries' set i

This one wild and precious life... reviewed by Katherine Roberts

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You know that feeling of finding some coins down the back of the sofa? I was clearing out a drawer recently and came across an unused £10 National Book Token from ages ago... so long ago, in fact, that it had expired. "Ah well," I thought, "it was obviously a gift at the time, so easy come easy go..." and then I discovered that you can actually renew one of these tokens if it has expired. So I sent the details online to National Book Tokens, along with a photo of my expired card, and they emailed me a replacement. I could probably have spent this online too, but decided to enter into the spirit of olde-worlde book shopping and buy my gift-book from a local independent bookseller. I also decided it should be non-fiction, and so I chose the wonderful Arcturus Books in Totnes. Turned out I pretty much wanted to buy everything in the shop, but my token (being rather devalued over the 15 years or so it spent in my drawer) would only buy one book. In the end, I allowed th

The Doom of Zoom by Sandra Horn

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  That’s it! I’m done with Zoom. A murrain on it! Bad cess to it! I’ve always had an edgy relationship with it, beginning in lockdown when our choir went online. We had to mute everybody because the time-lag turned the singing into an unpleasing sound-swill, so each of us could only sing at our machines alone. Not a choir by any measure. I gave up on it after one or two sessions because it made me so sad – all those dear faces in some other place I couldn’t reach. It felt like a bereavement.   Worse was to come, with workshops about poetry. Group chats in which I was largely ignored. Looking hard at the image of myself on camera, I began to see why anyone who didn’t know me might have been expecting Nurse, hovering just out of sight, ready to wheel me off to the third bathchair on the right. I know from the mad-looking picture on my City smartcard, taken by a woman sitting down while I was standing up, that the up-the-nose shot really wouldn’t fill anyone with confidence in the m