Pun based title, when I think of one

Moominsummer Madness and Vaarallinen juhannus ( 'Perilous Midsummer' - my translation!) are the same book, the first being the English translation, the other the Finnish. I've just read them together, in an exercise rather like that of a while ago when I read St Exupéry's Courrier Sud in French, English and Finnish. Note that while Tove Jansson was Finnish, she wrote in Swedish, and these two volumes are both translations of the original. Some day I'd like to chat to some one who's familiar with the original Swedish, because just like with Courrier Sud , I'm fascinated by how much translators can render the style, the tone, the nuance etc of their texts. I would like to know if the rich vocabulary of the Finnish translation in particular accurately reflects Tove Jansson's in Swedish. I fully expect a yes to that, by the way. I have no doubt of her genius. These may be 'children's books', but they tick all the boxes you want for literary...

This is a laulurastas or song thrush , commonplace both here in the UK and in Finland, where there are around 900,000 pairs according to my lintuopas/Finnish bird book. It looks like but is a smaller bird than the mistle thrush ( kulorastas ). And their song differs, even to my ignorant ears. This is quite a bit after the fact: I took this picture back in May, on a visit to East coast Scotland. Sadly, I don't normally see or hear song thrushes around my house (nor blackbirds or anything like that), but I'm sure they're around, not too far away. But it's almost the only usable photo I've ever taken of a small bird - they tend to fly away, and if you only sport a compact camera, your career as a bird photographer is unpromising. I think it helped being out in the wilds, hence the birds not being quite so touchy about humans. The pictures I've provided in these 'bird reports' have been pretty rubbish up till now, so I didn't want to let this go unrem...

Provenance is a standalone novel which appeared a little while after Ann Leckie had made a considerable impact in science fiction with what came to be known as the Imperial Radch trilogy . No, I don't know how to pronounce that. Perhaps a bit of Googling might turn up a fan's report of how Leckie pronounced it herself at a book signing. But it's not a bad bit of nomenclature. If it's meant to sound a bit like 'Reich', that suits the story well enough. Provenance is set in the same universe, but outside the Radch realm, and a Radch character only appears briefly. I'll say right out, that Provenance is a weaker book than any of those in the Trilogy; it's slighter, smaller in scale, and even seems somewhat uncertain in its intentions at times. But I'm glad I read it , because I'll be one of the many readers who found the setting intriguing and wanted to see more of it. Also, I wanted to read it before I read  Translation State , set in this univ...

I'm stunned by Use of Weapons  by Iain M. Banks . Looking around, this is not an uncommon reaction for readers, to a shock of an ending. I'll say straight off, if there's any chance you'll read the book - if you read SF, if you've heard of it - minimise any time you spend reading reviews. Too bad, that I've already mentioned a shock ending, but... I gather Banks's first try with this story, written I think before his first success with more mainstream fiction, employed a very complicated narrative structure. This later take only appeared as the 3rd in his ' Culture ' series. It still does make demands on the reader, with two interleaved strands, one going forwards recounting the story of mercenary Cheradenine Zakalwe's latest mission for the Culture, the other going backwards to the darkest events of his past. And before even starting you'll notice in the contents the oddity of a book which tails off with an epilogue, some verse, and then a ...

Writing one of these again? A sort of end of year review ? More a sign of nothing better to do I might think. I don't think I bothered last year. But I am pleased with one or two cultural glimmers from the last 12 months, and I never wrote about some of them, so here's a series of barely connected reports about films and books and; not much else actually. Films - off the top of my head, I saw barely three films. But at least I have been getting to the cinema. The thing is, for reasons of circumstance, the cinema means Manchester, which entails an unfun car journey, or what used to be a train journey I was quite happy with, once. But the train services have been getting poorer in the North West in recent years. It's all a matter of slow deterioration, but the little losses make a difference. In my case, the loss of a particular afternoon train from the timetable meant that for most films of typical blockbuster length, I could no longer get home off peak. For the first film...

Watching Napoleon has left me feeling a little sad. It's also left me feeling violently shaken, but more about that later. As it says on the poster, this is a Ridley Scott film. I can't claim to have seen all of his films, but I have seen many of them, in the cinema, and the fact that he was the director was usually the main reason I went and parted with cash, to see a film on the big screen. I'm certainly drawn to science fiction, so Alien and Blade Runner are the films of his which figure most prominently in my mind. But I've enjoyed his work in many other genres as well, Thelma and Louise and Gladiator and so many more. I'd barely heard about Scott before I saw his first film, The Duellists (who are Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel), which made a big impression with its spectacle and its rendering of its almost Shakespearean theme. Interestingly, it also has the Napoleonic Wars as its background. I got to wondering how many times I'd seen Napoleon Bon...