Pun based title, when I think of one

Or, The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation . Trail of Tears describes the historical event known by that name, the removal of the Cherokee people in 1838 from their homeland in the South East of America, to what was then known as Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, West of the Mississippi. John Ehle's book was published in 1988, so in some ways it really isn't that old; but I must have bought it not long after. At any rate, it's been sitting on my bookshelf for a very long time. Browsed through a few times, that's all. I have a number of books about the Cherokee and their history - as a people they're rather better documented than most other indigenous American nations - and with a renewed interest in the topic I thought this volume would be a good place to start. So, why have I been putting off reading the book properly? I think it's partly because I may have felt I knew the basics of the story already, and partly because I understood it as a story of genocide...

by Don Grooms and John Oocumma is at barely over 100 pages a basic down to earth introduction to speaking Cherokee in everyday situations. Superficially it seems to be a typical phrasebook as you might find for any language. Except that Cherokee isn't any language. Linguists would have to say it's in decline , mostly spoken by the older generation. Numerically the Cherokee would appear to be doing well, compared with other indigenous peoples, especially if you include all those who say they're part Cherokee. But they live entirely within the USA, they're extensively mixed with the general population, and few are inclined to hold on to their ancestral language. They exist as distinct communities in only two places: on the Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee reservation in the Smoky Mountains at the Western end of North Carolina; and around a couple of towns in the Eastern part of Oklahoma.  The plain fact is that any Cherokee you met would be a fluent speaker of US Englis...

Consider Phlebas is the first book in Iain M. Banks's Culture series. It's a fairly loose series; the stories are apparently self contained. 'Apparently'? That, because it's the first Culture book I've read. However, I have read one other of his science fiction books, The Algebraist , also a work of space opera. In some ways it could almost be a Culture book except it wouldn't quite fit. It impressed me as regards his writing and world creation, and since I had another Iain M. Banks Culture book lying around which I'd never read, Look to Windward , I went for that and then saw that it stands quite late on in the collection. I decided to read the first - this one, Consider Phlebas - even if not strictly necessary, figuring that any writer creating an ambitious 'universe' will do a lot of introducing of the features of that universe in the first volume, even if the story itself is fully resolved by the end. A side note here is that I've neve...

2020!!*!%&!! 😬 This year... I've read a lot of books. I may even manage a 34th by midnight! That's a lot for me. However, there's a lot I haven't done. Like see a film. A big regret is that I failed to visit the cinema before my trip to Finland in early March. In other words, the last time there was no issue about going to a cinema. There's all the difference in the world as far as I'm concerned between idly watching a film on the telly, probably with lights on, probably with adverts, lavatory breaks and so on, and actually going to the cinema. HOME includes Manchester's arthouse cinema, and I miss that place, right down to its sweet potato chips and boutique beers. Even if it is a bit of a trek from the station to get to it. I want to see a film with someone, take a trip, have a meal etc. quite apart from enjoying the full experience of great sound, widescreen and everything.  That's seeing a film properly . Worse, at this end of the year, I don...

Courrier Sud was St-Exupéry's first novel. It's known in English as Southern Mail , and sometimes published together with his next book Vol de Nuit / Night Flight , both books being quite short. A few years ago it received a translation into Finnish, as  Postilento etelään . The story tells of a French mailplane pilot who on a return visit to Paris, meets up with a childhood friend he has always loved, just as her marriage falls apart when her child dies. He tries to take her away from an urban world and a husband now inimical to her, but away to his own world, which is even more alien; before they ever get there she falls ill and the dream is seen for what it is, an impossible one. The central narrative is topped and tailed by the circumstantial scenes of resting and flying in the harsh environment of the Sahara . Short though the book is, I've been saving it up since finding, with great surprise and delight at the time, this Finnish translation . Who would have t...

You should be just about able to pick out the bird in this poor mobile phone picture - sorry - and identify it. The  oystercatcher  has no close relatives, so while it may have a muddy outline here and - sorry again - in the other pic, its characteristic features stand out well enough. See the bright orange beak (and legs, visible in someone else's superior photo image), and black and white plumage. Finland boasts 4,000 pairs, seen mostly on the coasts. As in Britain, or so I thought, until I saw these on the River Lune, though to be fair this wasn't so far from the coast. Anyway, to return to my self-apponted task of telling you what a bird is in Finnish, I can tell you as per the title of this post, that they call it the meriharakka . I found this quite interesting, because I knew that ' meri -' meant ' sea -' something-or-other. So what is a harakka ? The answer is that it's a magpie , so they're calling the oystercatcher a 'sea magpie', ...

... "with" William Fotheringham ! There, that, is a tiny part of how this book seeds tiny bits of mistrust throughout. (And beyond, as we will see.) Yes, there is a ghost writer at work; to be fair, it's not often that the presence of one is so upfront. It still nudges one into suspecting some image massaging. Overall my reading has been quite eclectic, but I must admit I've very rarely ventured into the sports genre. These books are almost always the work of journalists, which doesn't mean they're poorly written, not at all, but stylistically they tend to fall into a narrow range. William Fotheringham is a good writer, by the way, I've read some of his pieces in the Daily Telegraph if I remember correctly. As for other sports books, I certainly liked Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy , all about clubs and fans in odd places around the world; but the biographies, usually published to cash in on recent achievements, have been a bit lik...