Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

(Everything is terrible, I'm hiding from the heat and the news.)

Media I have Consumed Lately
I have been continuing my concentrated efforts to finish things I've started this month. I was away for work at the start of the month and absolutley over-estimated how many books I needed as I only finished Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn - excellent if dense in places, I suspect I need to lend it to my mum - and started The New Jim Crow - see the next paragraph! However, with our recent headwave, I've really struggled to have much energy for anything, except reading and cross-stitch. Handily that means I've finally got round to finishing Farewell to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood - very of it's time, I read it more as a fascinating time capsule than anything else - and I read the entirety of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis on the train the other day, which is another oddity, one which I'm also glad to have read but about which I have very little to say.

I've slowed down my podcast consumption rate to something more usual, so I have only three to report on. Dead Competitive about the world of dog shows, revolving around the suspicious death of a Crufts winning dog. This was tonally...odd. They'd clearly meant to make a much lighter series - think cosy murder mystery - but by their own admission discovered some much darker than expected information so while it was pretty interesting it was a fairly odd listen. Next up was Shiny Bob: The Devil's Advocate which is basically about corruption, blackmail and sex crimes in the Edinburgh legal establishment in the 80s and 90s. (If you've heard of the Magic Circle scandal this is the story behind that story, the far nastier and worse things that story was used as cover/distraction for.) It's an important and fascinating story, but very much one that leaves you feeling...slightly tarnished by proximity. And finally, I took another run at Unreal on the history of reality TV which I ended up bouncing off. The first couple of episodes were great because they covered an era of reality TV that co-incided with my being a teenager, so I'd either seen or had zeitgeist knowledge of most of the shows referenced. But it's really not as interesting to me once we stray into shows I've never seen and had no desire whatsoever to watch.

Media I am Currently Consuming
Unintentionally appropriate timing - it was Juneteenth in the US at the start of the week - has me reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which is an excellent if somewhat heavy going book on mass incarceration in the US. (It's a really well written book, the prose is engaging, it's slow going because the subject is so grim.) I knew from my 20th Century US History class at uni, that the War on Drugs was some bullshit, but I didn't realise just how much that was the case. It's particularly interesting to be reading it now, when the book is over a decade old, and the political landscape has changed so much, it's a book that feels like it's shouting to be heard when very few people are listening. As much as it's found it's audience in the intervening years, it's a potent reminder about how much has changed - for good and ill - since it was written.

My current podcast is Sports Strangest Crimes (love me some off the wall true crime), this season is about the death of Marco Pantani, but there's a whole variety of crimes in previous seasons. (High level sport is rife with financial crime in particular, but obviously doping has increasingly been a thing too, so there's lots of scope there.)

Media I Hope to Consume Next
I'm hoping to continue my 'finishing things' streak and take another run at Mexican Gothic which I was really enjoying and put down for some reason. (I think I went away for a week's filming and only had space for one book so took a new one instead of a half-read one to keep me going and then just...never picked it back up again?) Non fiction-wise I still want to read either Black and British or The Anarchy but they're both such doorstops they can really only be in the house reads.

Mini photo-post as flickr's back up! And it turns up that all the photo posts I was going to make will require sorting and uploading lots of photos...and that's not happening right now. But I have done other things ... Honest!

( There was that time I climbed a mountain )

( And visited the wallace monument )