What I read

Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.

Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.

Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....

On the go

To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.

Up next

The new (double-issue) Literary Review

Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.

London Pride has been handed down to us:

Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.

Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery

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Heritage endangered:

On an old cobbled street in a market town, residents say hundreds of years of history are disappearing before their eyes as thieves keep stealing large slabs of Yorkshire stone.

The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.

Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert

According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.

And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.

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Gender and learning:

The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???

Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)

What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.

Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.

There was no parcel.

I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).

So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.

For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.

And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.

I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.

There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.

The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.

I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.

But, really.

And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....

ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.