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John Clark talking about another kind of writing that's important to both authors and readers-the review. I started reviewing in 2003 when Beth and I became part of the Wolf Moon Journal family. Not long after, I was accepted as a reviewer for a Canadian website that has since closed. The books I reviewed for Wolf Moon were ones I had picked to read without any consideration as to whether I'd review them. They were by authors I really liked, or books whose plots intrigued me.
(I'm including covers of some recently reviewed books)
At first, reviewing was intimidating. After, all who was I to presume whether my opinions about a work of fiction might be of interest to others. What got me over that hump were the long and animated gatherings we had with other Wolf Moon contributors, usually at Clif and Laurie Graves' home. Conversations sparkled with energy and enthusiasm and I found myself sharing thoughts about books I was reading, or had recently finished. I realized that a good review was similar to one of those conversations. Once that light went on, reviewing became much more comfortable.
When I began reviewing for the Canadian site, the process was different. The site manager would collect a batch of requests submitted by authors, add a brief description of each and send the list to her cadre of reviewers. The longer you had been part of the process, the more likely you were to get what you wanted to review. My first book to review was sent all the way from Australia. It was painful to read and even more painful to write a review. The thing that sticks with me about it, were the suddenly shifting emotions and behavior of the protagonist. Three sentences (and in the same paragraph) after crooning his love for the heroine, he would be batshit crazy, hammering the desert or the side of the tent with his fists. In short, there was no continuity. I wasn't anywhere near having a comfort level with writing a review of something so bad, but sucked it up and did my best to balance the weaknesses by noting what I could that was positive.
That was an extremely helpful experience because many of the books I reviewed for that website were self-published, or from small presses. I became a much better reviewer, focusing on balancing strengths with what needed improvement as I went along. An unexpected benefit of reviewing numerous books was getting to know and become friends with authors. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to read and review Tim Hallinan's first Poke Rafferty book, A Nail Through The Heart. I ended up reviewing three in that series and we're Facebook friends now. Bonnie Rozanski was another author who became a friend, as was Holly Schindler. In fact, I'm a regular reviewer of Holly's new stuff and look forward to each one.
Being a public librarian was a natural foundation for a book reviewer as we were responsible for buying a lot of books. Knowing authors, genres and how to interpret other people's reviews came in handy in Boothbay Harbor and at the Hartland Public Library. In fact, an important offshoot of reviewing has been the ability to remember plots/ characters and then use that knowledge to steer patrons to books they wouldn't otherwise discover. There's no more satisfying feeling than having a patron come through the door, waving a book you suggested and asking for another that's as good.
The Central Maine Library District (CMLD) has had a great opportunity in place for years. Publishers send books for readers ranging in age from toddler through young adult. Librarians can select from them at no cost. In return, they review each one and return a print copy of said review to Cheryl Ramsay at the Maine State Library, who forwards them on to the publishers. The book goes into the library collection. I've been a reviewer for that program since I worked at the Maine State Library. Beth and both of our daughters have reviewed them and I taught two volunteers at the Hartland Public Library how to do so as well. Our combined efforts have added several hundred books to the collection over the years. In retirement, Beth and I continue to review and pass them on to the Hartland Public Library.
For a period of a year or more, the CMLD had its own website where several librarians posted reviews regularly. It became a place where other librarians went to get a sense of what was worth buying. In the course of reviewing there, I was alerted to the importance (for some Maine librarians) of noting levels of profanity, violence and sexual content in books as these were deal breakers in certain instances. Sadly, that site is no longer.
These days, I'm reviewing educational DVDs and audio books on CD for School Library Journal and young adult fiction for the Buried Under Books Website. However, I try to leave at least a brief review of any book I read on both Amazon.com and Goodreads, because authors appreciate the effort and people who share my taste in books often discover unknown treasures.
What are your thoughts on reviewing?
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Did You Know The Military Has a Zombie Apocalypse Plan?
The other day I was on YouTube and came across an interesting video that was entitled 'Why You Would Probably Survive The Walking Dead."
Of course, I watched it as I wanted to see what evidence they had collected as to why little ol' me would survive the end of society thanks to the walking around of corpses.
The video is linked below if you would also like to watch it:
But the most interesting thing I took away from the video was the mention of the fact that the US military actually has a plan in place entitled "CONPLAN 8888" for if there were to be an actual zombie apocalypse and how they would handle it.
And it actually exists. The plan is set in place more as a 'training exercise' just in case but one never knows.
The military's plan for a zombie apocalypse according to Business Insider is:
"CONPLAN 8888 follows a three-step approach to ensuring these goals by 1) maintaining a defensive perimeter to protect human life; 2) conducting operations that will eradicate zombie threats, and 3) aiding civil authorities in restoring law and order"- Buisness Insider
The main point of the plan would be to help prevent humans from becoming more of the 'zombie horde' which can be easily said than done as we all have seen in video games, TV shows, and movies.
Luckily for you if you happen to live in South Dakota as youhave been voted as the second-best place to survive the zombie apocalypse.

subset: commoncrawl


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If you're particularly indecisive about your regular operating system, or just want access to all three for testing purposes, Wired's How-To Wiki has the details on getting a triple-boot system (or beyond) working with free software tools.
Photo by Foskarulla.
It's not for those who like to avoid terminal commands, and it's definitely not meant to be crammed into a half-hour lunch break. But Wired's guide is fairly thorough, assuming that burning an image to CD is base-level knowledge. You'll use the rEFIt tool to set up a multi-system boot screen, the Lifehacker favorite GParted Live CD to smooth things over once your hard drive is carved up into partitions, and a free copy of Ubuntu, while it's assumed your copy of XP (or Vista, presumably) is available and legitimate.
There are, of course, easier ways to get at multiple operating systems from one system, like using virtualization software such as VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallels, and many others. But if you're looking for the no-slowdown, full-on multi-OS experience, Wired's got it laid out for you.
Triple Boot Mac OS, XP, and Linux on a Mac [Wired How-To Wiki]


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A Suicide Squad Review from a Comics Fan
Superheroes rule the entertainment space right now, that is not a question. From the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the DCEU, from Netflix's Umbrella Academy to Amazon's Invincible and The Boys. Most people have taken a crack at it, but James Gunn has cracked the code. Gunn has helmed and is in the process of completing one of the best trilogies of the MCU in Guardians of the Galaxy. He produced a gritty, dark re-telling of Superman in an alternate universe where he goes off the deep end as a child in Brightburn. Now, he's successfully released a splendid Suicide Squad for DC Comics and he killed it. Warning: There are light spoilers regarding James Gunn's The Suicide Squad in this article. Read at your own risk. James Gunn is hands down my favorite creator when it comes to comic adaptation because he gets it, at his heart, he's a fan. He's talked several times about growing up with the Suicide Squad and watching the movie proves he was the right person for the job. With his success on Guardians of the Galaxy, it's clear to see that Gunn is an expert at telling stories centered around the group of misfit supers. There are plenty of parallels to draw to the two films, but we'll avoid for now the simplest yet meaningless question of "was it better than Guardians of the Galaxy?" The first thing that The Suicide Squad does right, it completely ignores the first movie, 2016's Suicide Squad by David Ayer. Besides a few actors reprising their roles from that one in this one, it doesn't seem to exist. Gunn wastes no time introducing us to the new members with returning favorites like Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), and Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), plus Viola Davis returns as Amanda Waller.
The Suicide Squad is quickly thrown into a battle against military forces on the island nation of Corto Maltese. Its blood and violent and the squad definitely lives up to its name. Meanwhile, a second smaller team is infiltrating the island on the other side and the missions to stop Project: Starfish begins. From here, the movie delivers on everything you'd expect, there's gruesome violence, there are quippy one-liners and funny scenes with King Shark. But where Suicide Squad really delivers and what makes this the best DC Universe movie so far, has nothing to do with superpowers or how high of a body county John Cena's Peacermaker has. The movie shines in its quieter moments when Ratcatcher2 (Daniela Melchior) talks about the relationship she had with her father or the moments of genuine human interaction between her and King Shark. It's in the scenes where a CGI rat tries to bond with the bloodthirsty killer or Harley Quinn has a moment of self-reflection on the long-term damage that toxic relationships can have.
Everyone thinks the draw of superhero movies is all about the powers and the battles, but that's just the dressing to set it apart from every other flick in the theaters. Like every other movie that draws us in and captures our heart, it's the moment of humanity, love, and acceptance that makes The Suicide Squad shine. Of course, there are amazing fight scenes and more blood, death, and gore than you've ever seen in a superhero project, yes, even The Boys. Between Peacemaker and Idris Elba's Bloodsport, you could've made John Wick 4 and 5. There is one other aspect of this movie, which you'll only get from someone as dedicated to the comic lore and as beautifully deranged as James Gunn. When Gunn sold the world on Rocket Raccoon and Groot, the flood gates were open for what he could put on the big screen from cutting deep into comic lore. The Suicide Squad took that to heart and dialed it up to 21. The fact that Polka Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) is not just in the movie, but a headlining character in one of the biggest summer blockbuster movies of the year is mind-blowing. His story is heartbreaking, his powers are off the charts and he will bring you near to tears. James Gunn also packs in a walking Weasel (Sean Gunn) and a talking Shark, aka King Shark (Sylvester Stallone).
Then to top it all off, Gunn takes one of the most absurd villains in all of DC Comics history, and trust me, there are a lot. Starro the Conqueror is a giant, blue, interstellar, cosmic Starfish with psychic powers and the ability to control anything with a face that it puts its tiny starfishes on. That idea should've been laughed out of the writers' room at DC Comics when it was first conceived in 1960, let alone at Warner Bros, but Gunn manages to make it all work and more. But the bottom line is this if you're a fan of comic books, DC, Marvel, or anything between then you will enjoy yourself at this movie. As for the question of whether or not it's better than Guardians of the Galaxy? It's hard to tell right now, Guardians is about to finish off a trilogy, but if The Suicide Squad and the prisoners of Belle Reve get a sequel with the same characters (or the ones that survived at least) then it's going to be pretty close.
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Penland, North Carolina 2012
These photographs were made in late June and early July 2012 on a trip from Boston, where I live, to teach at Penland School of Crafts near Spruce Pine in North Carolina. I drove down there and back, photographing some along the way, but mostly photographed in the small town of Spruce Pine and near to Penland. Each morning at 6:30, often with two or three students along, we would spend a couple of hours photographing in Spruce Pine. The idea of coming back to someplace to photograph, to study it and one's results from the previous day seemed to resonate with the students and it certainly did for me. Spruce Pine is small, bifurcated into older and newer parts and reflects present day US economics and hard times. It has a railroad that goes right through it, sits in a valley alongside a river and is lush in late June with dark green foliage.
Working this way in North Carolina brought me back to days in my deeper past. There were many road trips spent photographing, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with students, pulling over in some little town, walking and shooting what I saw and what seemed worth trying to make into a picture.
Of note here to other photographers is that this is the first group of pictures I have made with a new camera, a Nikon D800E. This is always a love/hate relationship for me, getting used to how a new camera works, how it sees and imposes itself on what I want it to do. No one wants to be stumbling with buttons and controls while taking pictures and, as cameras are now very complex, it takes me a while to feel comfortable with its newness and being unfamiliar.


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How the Larry Nassar scandal has affected others
by The Associated PressA former Michigan State University gymnastics coach was convicted Friday on charges that she lied to police when she denied that two teen athletes told her of sexual abuse by sports doctor Larry Nassar in 1997. It's the latest fallout from the scandal that has rocked the school.
Kathie Klages, 65, was found guilty of a felony and a misdemeanor, making her the second person other than Nassar to be convicted on charges related to his serial molestation of young women and girls under the guise of medical treatment.
Numerous people have been charged, fired or forced out of their jobs during the investigations into the once-renowned sports doctor. He was sentenced to decades in prison after hundreds of girls and women said he molested them, including while he worked for Michigan State and Indiana-based USA Gymnastics, which trains Olympians.
A look at some of the individuals and organizations affected:
— The U.S. Education Department fined Michigan State University $4.5 million in September for failing to respond to sexual assault complaints against Nassar. The same day, MSU President Samuel Stanley Jr. announced the resignation of Provost June Youatt, saying the investigation findings showed she and former President Lou Anna Simon "failed to take appropriate action on behalf of the university to address reports of inappropriate behavior and conduct."
— Lou Anna Simon: The university president and school alumna resigned in January 2018 amid growing pressure. She denied any cover-up by the university. She since has been charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors. She is accused of lying during an interview last year when investigators were trying to determine how Nassar got away with sexual assault for so long.
The MSU governing board later hired former Michigan Gov. John Engler. He resigned amid fallout from remarks he made about some of Nassar's victims and was replaced by Satish Udpa, the school's executive vice president for administration.
In May, MSU named Dr. Samuel Stanley Jr., a medical researcher who had led Stony Brook University in New York for nearly a decade, as its next president.
MSU has settled lawsuits totaling $500 million.
— Mark Hollis: The athletic director called his departure in 2018 a retirement, but he, too, had faced pressure to leave.
— Kathie Klages: The former head gymnastics coach resigned in 2017 after she was suspended for defending Nassar over the years. Klages was charged with lying to investigators. She was convicted Friday and faces up to four years in prison.
— Brooke Lemmen: The former school doctor resigned in 2017 after learning the university was considering firing her because she didn't disclose that USA Gymnastics was investigating Nassar. A state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs investigation cleared her of any violations in 2018.
— William Strampel: The former dean of the university's College of Osteopathic Medicine was charged in March 2018 amid allegations that he failed to keep Nassar in line, groped female students and stored nude student selfies on his campus computer. Strampel, who has also been named in lawsuits, retired June 30, even as Michigan State was trying to fire him. He was found guilty June 12 of neglect of duty but acquitted on a more serious criminal sexual-conduct charge. Strampel was sentenced Aug. 7 to a year in jail.
— Bob Noto: The university in February 2018 announced the departure of its longtime vice president for legal affairs. The school called it a retirement. Noto had been Michigan State's general counsel since 1995.
— The university agreed in August to resolve a federal civil-rights investigation related to Nassar.
— Rhonda Faehn: The former senior vice president of the organization was dismissed in January 2019 by the University of Michigan after working for just a few days as a coaching consultant for its women's team. She was fired after an outcry over her hiring. USA Gymnastics parted ways with Faehn as senior vice president in May 2018 after she was criticized by Nassar's victims for not contacting authorities about potential abuse concerns.
— Valeri Liukin: The coordinator of the women's national team for USA Gymnastics announced in February 2018 that he was stepping down, less than 18 months after taking over for Martha Karolyi. Liukin said that while he wanted to help turn around the program, "the present climate causes me, and more importantly my family, far too much stress, difficulty and uncertainty."
— USA Gymnastics said in January 2018 that its entire board of directors would resign, as requested by the U.S. Olympic Committee. The USOC then took steps to decertify the gymnastics organization that picks U.S. national teams, and USA Gymnastics filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition as it attempted to reach settlements in the dozens of sex-abuse lawsuits it faces and to forestall its potential demise at the hands of the USOC.
— Steve Penny: The former president and CEO of the organization resigned under pressure in March 2017. He was replaced by Kerry Perry, who took over in December 2017. Penny has pleaded not guilty to a third-degree felony alleging he ordered the removal of documents relating to Nassar from the Karolyi Ranch in Texas.
— Less than a year after being hired as USA Gymnastics' president and CEO, Perry resigned in September 2018 after the USOC questioned her ability to lead the scandal-rocked organization.
— Former California U.S. Rep. Mary Bono was hired in October 2018 as the interim president for USA Gymnastics only to resign four day later. Bono said she felt her affiliation with the embattled organization would be a "liability" after a social media post by Bono criticizing Nike and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick drew widespread scrutiny within the gymnastics community. Six-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman also questioned Bono's association with a law firm that advised the organization on how to handle portions of the Nassar scandal.
— Ron Galimore: The longtime USA Gymnastics chief operating officer resigned in November 2018 but denied any wrongdoing in the Nassar scandal. The Indianapolis Star reported earlier that an attorney hired by USA Gymnastics directed Galimore to come up with a false excuse to explain Nassar's absence at major gymnastic events in the summer of 2015. The organization was looking into complaints against Nassar at the time.
— Li Li Leung in March became USA Gymnastics president and CEO.
— John Geddert: The owner of the Michigan club was suspended in 2018 by USA Gymnastics and announced his retirement. He was the U.S. women's coach at the 2012 Olympics. Geddert has said he had "zero knowledge" of Nassar's crimes.
— USA Gymnastics said in January 2018 that the Texas ranch where a number of gymnasts said Nassar abused them would no longer serve as the national training center. Owners Martha and Bela Karolyi have since sued the USOC and USA Gymnastics, seeking damages for a canceled sale of the property. They also have been named in lawsuits.
— Scott Blackmun: The CEO resigned in February 2018, citing difficulties with prostate cancer and the federation's need to move forward to deal with the sexual abuse scandal. There had been calls for his departure.
— Alan Ashley: The USOC fired the chief of sport performance in December 2018 in the wake of an independent report that said neither he nor Blackmun elevated concerns about the Nassar allegations when they were first reported to them.
Check out AP's complete coverage of Larry Nassar and the fallout from his years of sexually abusing girls and women.
The Associated Press


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The construction of what is to become Africa's biggest wind farm will start by June in an arid region of northern Kenya, the project's officials said on Saturday.
A total of 365 wind turbines will be erected near Lake Turkana, where winds blow predictably and regularly, averaging speeds of 11 metres per second.
After seven years of study and funding negotiations, the 585 million euro (US$775 million) project is to take off in June once risk guarantees from the Ida and Miga financial institutions — part of the World Bank Group — are finalised, Carlo Van Wageningen, head of Lake Turkana Wind Power, told AFP.
"All the contracts are in place. We're ready to start" the work once we get these guarantees, he said.
The first step will be to improve on or build 204 kilometres (126 miles) of road in northern Kenya for the trucks that will make 12,000 trips to bring in all the materials for the project in the remote, neglected region.
"We're in the middle of nowhere. There is no infrastructure whatsoever," Van Wageningen said, adding that the wind farm site resembles "photos of the surface of the moon."
A 428-kilometre transmission line will also be built to link the wind farm to the national grid at an additional cost of 142 million euros.
The transmission line will be built by Isolux Corsan of Spain and financed by loans from the Spanish and Kenyan governments.
The wind farm is expected to start production of the first 50 MW in mid-2014 and reach full capacity in early 2015, by which time it should have an installed capacity of 300 megawatts.
Total energy generation in Kenya was 6,460 MW hours in 2008, half from hydroelectric power, one-third from oil and 16 percent from geothermal power, according to the Global Energy Network Institute.
Morocco currently boasts Africa's largest wind energy production, with a capacity of 140 megawatts from 165 turbines.
The consortium for the Kenyan project has entered into a contract to sell the power produced to utility firm Kenya Power over 20 years at a cost of 7.52 euro cents/kwh, a price, which, together with geothermal, is the lowest in Kenya.
"Here you can produce windpower at an interesting cost, without subsidies," unlike the case in Europe, Van Wageningen said.
The African Development Bank said it was "heading the financing process" to arrange for a loan that will cover 70 percent of the project cost. Others are Britain's Standard Bank and South Africa's Nedbank.
The remaining 30 percent is financed by investment funds and co-developers.
Van Wageningen said the project is the largest private investment in East Africa.


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Required Reading
- What's Your Problem with Joe Biden?
- Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia (My New Book)
- Youth for the President
- A Summary of the Conspiracy Against the United States
- Trump: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Part 3)
- Postcards from the Resistance, Vol. 8: Mother of All
- From Lance Armstrong to Trump: The Rise & Fall of the Deified Narcissist
- Reading Malcolm X in Texas
- Playing the Donald Trump Game
- President Rapist: Women Under Trump
- An Open Letter to My Fellow Liberals
- The Democrats Can't Win If They Won't Fight
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Tag Archives: Village of the Damned
My Year of Horror: Back to School
Disturbed, possessed, infected, supernaturally influenced or preternaturally gifted, the children of this month's brood are only slightly more terrifying than the roaming packs of precocious preschoolers on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Continue reading
Posted in My Year of Horror
Tagged best horror films, Children of the Corn, Gregory Peck, horror, Jodie Foster, John Carpenter, Lee Remick, Linda Hamilton, Martin Sheen, Martin Stephens, Orphan, The CHildren, The Omen, The Other, Tom Tryon, Uta Hagen, Vera Farmiga, Village of the Damned, Who Can Kill a Child?
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The Many Works of Christiana Ellis
Twitter – When do you say something? When do you not?
This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2015 at 7:23 am by Christiana and is filed under Five More Minutes, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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MRC Calls On Media To Spotlight Biden's Many Gaffes On Eve Of His Convention Speech
ALEXANDRIA, VA – For decades the liberal media have enjoyed poking fun at conservative politicians for their public gaffes, real or imagined. Dan Quayle, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin -- these are just a few of the many conservatives parodied by the press. Vice-President Joe Biden is set to address the Democratic National Convention Wednesday evening. There will be many interviews conducted with him during this time. So in the interest of fair play -- the news media are fair, aren't they? -- the Media Research Center has compiled a list of ten questions the media should pose to Joe Biden.
Questions we wish the liberal media would ask Biden
1. Last month, you made a racist comment to blacks that Republicans are going to "put y'all back in chains." Charlie Rangel said that your comment was "stupid." What does it feel like to be called "stupid" by Charlie Rangel?
2.In 2008, you turned to wheelchair-bound Missouri state Sen. Chuck Graham, and told him to "stand up, Chuck, let'em see ya." Had you ever said anything as asinine as that before?
3. In October of 2008, you said: "The number-one job facing the middle class… is a three-letter word: Jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs." Is it a challenge for you to count past 3?
4. In 2010 you turned to President Obama after Obamacare passed and on live national television said, "This is a big f-ing deal." Had you ever seen a big f-ing microphone before?
5. If the President had taken your advice to not go after Bin Laden, Bin Laden may still be alive today. What other bizarro foreign policy advice have you given that, thank God, no one took?
6. In 2010 you mistakenly told Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen that his mother had passed. When you were young, did you ever prank neighbors with dead mom jokes?
7. In June 2006, you said "You can't go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent." Did you ever try this theory in person? In your judgment, do you think folks could learn how to model their Indian accents after Abu on the Simpson's?
8. Then in January of 2007, you said "You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Since he was the first, what advice would you give to other inarticulate, dumb, dirty and ugly African Americans such as Clarence Thomas and Oprah Winfrey to help them clean up their act.
9. In October of 2011, when you said that if Republicans didn't pass your jobs bill, "Murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise." Was that fear mongering or just simply idiotic?
10. In 2008, you said: "Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of theUnited States of America." Did you ever imagine you could be so right?
To schedule an interview with MRC President Brent Bozell or another MRC spokesperson, please contact Jeremy Little - email@example.com (703)-683-5004


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LOT 31a*Rare* Lorenzen, Lantz Pottery Salt/Pepper Shakers (1.5"H)
Lorenzen, Lantz Pottery Salt/Pepper Shakers (1.5"H)
A 15% Buyer's Premium will be added to the final Sales Price. All applicable taxes will be assessed based on the sum of the sales price and buyer's premium.
Lorenzen, Lantz Pottery Salt/Pepper Shakers (1.5"H)
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Please note that by agreeing to our terms and conditions of this auction sale, you are aware of the following:
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Any items not removed within (7) days will become the property of Mariner Auctions & Liquidations Ltd. with no refunds or credits issued to the buyer.
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This article was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse
People better start waking up and paying attention to what is happening in the Middle East, because the situation is becoming quite serious. If things go badly, we could be facing a major regional war which would involve not only Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also potentially the United States and Israel. Yesterday, I quoted an article in the New York Times that warned that tensions between the Saudis and the Iranians were raising "the threat of a direct military clash between the two regional heavyweights". And now Jake Novak of CNBC is saying that a "direct conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as opposed to the proxy war they're fighting in Yemen, looks inevitable."
I put those last two words in bold so that there wouldn't be any confusion. In fact, Novak is warning that the Saudis "are marching ever closer towards a wider regional war". Novak understands the dynamics of the Middle East, and he realizes where things could be headed if cooler heads do not prevail.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have already been fighting proxy wars against one another in Syria and Iran for quite a while, but a direct military conflict between the two could literally be a nightmare scenario.
One of the primary characters in this ongoing drama is Saudi Arabia's extremely hawkish crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. He hates Iran with a passion, and he has already said that he believes that a peace dialogue with Iran is impossible.
And over the past several days, events in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon have moved talk of war to the front burner…
First, the kingdom squarely blamed Iran for a missile attack on Riyadh from Yemen that was thwarted by the U.S.-made Patriot anti-missile system. The Saudis called that attack "direct military aggression by the Iranian regime and may be considered an act of war."
Second, the Saudis accused Lebanon of — figuratively at least — declaring "war" against it because of aggression from Hezbollah. That statement spurred even Saudi ally and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to publicly urge for calm.
In an article yesterday, I discussed the "purge" that is currently taking place in Saudi Arabia. Many believe that this purge is all about removing any potential obstacles to a war with Iran. Mohammed bin Salman and his father have made dealing with Iran their number one strategic priority, and they have even enlisted the Israelis as allies in their cause…
As is already well-known, the Saudi and Israeli common cause against perceived Iranian influence and expansion in places like Syria, Lebanon and Iraq of late has led the historic bitter enemies down a pragmatic path of unspoken cooperation as both seem to have placed the break up of the so-called "Shia crescent" as their primary policy goal in the region. For Israel, Hezbollah has long been its greatest foe, which Israeli leaders see as an extension of Iran's territorial presence right up against the Jewish state's northern border.
If Saudi Arabia and Iran go to war, it is probably inevitable that Hezbollah will strike Israel at the same time, thus getting the Israelis directly involved in the conflict.
Not only that, if a major regional war does erupt in the Middle East it would almost certainly mean that the U.S. would have to get involved as well. Here is more from Jake Novak of CNBC…
But if full blown war breaks out directly between the two countries, it's hard to see the U.S. being able to sit it out without at least some form increased weapons support and other aid. Then it will be up to Iran's possible allies, like Russia and China to make the next move.
If you are thinking that this sounds like the type of scenario that could cause World War III to erupt, you would be correct.
The Iranians and the Saudis both have weapons of mass destruction, and so a direct conflict between the two would seem to be unthinkable.
But rational thinking does not always prevail in the Middle East. The conflict between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam has a long and bitter history, and the bad blood between the Saudis and the Iranians is never going to subside until one side or the other ultimately prevails.
Let us hope that a "hot war" between Saudi Arabia and Iran does not erupt any time soon, because such a war would not be good for the United States whatsoever. Pretty much every scenario that you can imagine ends with enormous numbers of innocent people dead, and such a conflict could ultimately be the spark that sets off World War III.
Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho's First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled "Living A Life That Really Matters" is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.
Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years.Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream.
If you want to know what is coming and what you can do to prepare, read his latest book [amazon text=Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming & How You Can Survive It&asin=150522599X].


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John Brunner is a science fiction writer who should be exalted among the genre's giants, but has instead fallen out of fashion. A new biography of the British writer might not restore his reputation, but those who read it will find a new-found respect for a man who was ahead of his time. Unfortunately, those who do read it probably already know that.
I first became aware of Brunner while I was in university and was working my way through all of the Hugo-winning novels, novellas and short stories, figuring they would be wheat already separated from chaff. The one book that stood out from all the rest was the novel Stand on Zanzibar by Brunner. To this day, I count it among my favourites.
The book led me to his other groundbreaking novels, The Sheep Look Up and The Shockwave Rider, the former of which is a novel of a coming ecological disaster and the latter which is a prototype for the cyberpunk novel.
The impact of these books is fully covered in the biography John Brunner by Jad Smith. The Eastern Illinois University professor explains how Brunner carefully crafted books that stretched his own writing abilities and the limits of the science fiction novel.
While he was a contemporary of the New Wave authors in Britain, Brunner was never part of that movement, but stood apart and was frequently the target of abuse from them. As the biography describes it, it almost sounds like professional jealousy. Brunner sold his stories where he could make the most money and that was in the U.S. magazine market, not the smaller British outlets. His style was a fusion of the best of the American and British science fiction traditions. (I must confess that before reading this biography, I always thought Brunner was an American!)
Brunner had a handle on what editors wanted and was able to write stories that sold. While some of his stories might have been formulaic, he was always looking for inventive ways to tell them so he was not the sell-out that the New Wave purists might have believed. Brunner didn't think the idea of the starving artist was all that romantic and instead chose to make money from his work. Despite that, you couldn't say he got rich from doing it. He had financial problems of his own and his output, while prolific by many standards, was only ever enough to keep him solvent. His output slowed more as he matured as a writer and chose his stories and markets more carefully.
Smith's biography charts Brunner's career from start to finish with great detail. While Brunner may have had a reputation as a bit of an egotist, Smith portrays him sympathetically and you wonder if some of that bad reputation may have been the work of disinformation spread my his New Wave rivals.
There isn't much about his personal life in the book, although you learn about his marriage to Marjorie and there various ups and downs and how his own health declined after her death. He remarried later in life, but died only a few short years afterwards.
The book concludes with a Q&A with Brunner and it is effective as it reinforces a lot of what is explained previously and acts as a sort of summary of the author's life.
As a fan of both Brunner and literary biographies, I found this book entertaining and informative. I learned a lot about a writer about which I knew virtually nothing. I learned more about some brilliant books that I admired and now have a line on even more Brunner books that I have not yead read, but will do at the next opportunity.
I recommend this book to anyone who is an admirer of John Brunner or is a fan of science fiction history.
John Brunner
By Jad Smith
University of Illinois Press
Price: $21.95, paper; $80 cloth


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Are you ready to get Dirty?
Dirty is Book One in Kylie Scott's Dive Bar Series.
Order your copy of DIRTY here:
Amazon US | Amazon UK | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
The last thing Vaughan Hewson expects to find when he returns to his childhood home is a broken hearted bride in his shower, let alone the drama and chaos that comes with her.
Lydia Green doesn't know whether to burn down the church or sit and
cry in a corner. Discovering the love of your life is having an affair on your wedding day is bad enough. Finding out it's with his best man is another thing all together. She narrowly escapes tying the knot and meets Vaughan only hours later.
Vaughan is the exact opposite of the picture perfect, respected businessman she thought she'd marry. This former musician-turned-bartender is rough around the edges and unsettled. But she already tried Mr. Right and discovered he's all wrong-maybe it's time to give Mr. Right Now a chance.
After all, what's wrong with getting dirty?
"Once upon a time," he began, voice low and measured. "There was a princess. A beautiful, occasionally annoying princess."
"What was her name?"
"Ah, Notlydia."
I frowned. "Her name is Notlydia?"
"You wanted a story, I'm giving you one. Shut up."
An even heavier sigh from the man. "Anyhoo, Notlydia was all set up to marry this prince. We'll call him Prince Bag of Dicks."
"Works for me."
"But on the day of her wedding, when she was wearing this sweet dress that served her tits up like they were a fucking platter—"
"Is this an R-rated story?"
"Please," he said, sliding an arm around my bare waist. And I let him. "R is for rubbish. If you don't get to see any penetration then you're wasting your time. This is XXX."
I laughed.
"So on the day of her wedding to Prince Bag of Dicks, Notlydia kisses him and he turns into a big slimy two-headed toad with terrible breath and even worse foot odor."
"Whoa." I rested my head back against his shoulder. "Poor Notlydia."
"Hell of a plot twist, right?"
"Never saw that one coming."
"Mm." He rested his cheek against the top of my head.
"What happens next?"
"Well, she's completely freaked out, of course."
"Of course."
"And she takes off into the woods. She's running through bushes, jumping fences, climbing trees, you name it. Nothing's going to stop her from getting the hell away from that toad, Prince Bag of
Dicks." He took a sip of beer. "Unfortunately, she loses her fancy dress along the way. She's just down to some skimpy underwear and a corset and with all that jogging through the forest, it's barely holding her in. One decent breath and there's going to be nipple out there for all the world to see.
Did I happen to mention she'd been voted Best Rack in the kingdom four years running? Anyway, eventually she finds this small cottage. Now, what you don't know about Notlydia is that she has a shady past."I tried to look up at him. But with the angle, all I got was stubble and cheekbone. "That doesn't sound like Notlydia."
"Be quiet." A hand covered my mouth. "Notlydia's a dirty, dirty girl. Got a bad side like you wouldn't believe. A little breaking and entering is nothing to her. So into the house she goes. But she's all muddy from running through the woods, see? She can't let people see her like this, she's a princess, for fuck's sake."
The hand remained over my mouth. Which was fine, I had nothing to add to his pornographic fairy tale.
"Notlydia gets in the shower and starts soaping herself. There's lots of bubbles and steam, and she's a modern woman so there's a bit of self-love. She even finds time to wash her hair, shave under her pits. Things like that. But then the owner of the cottage wakes up and hears the water running. He stomps into the bathroom saying, someone's using up my hot water. Notlydia cries out, not me, not me."
He craned his neck, meeting my gaze. "See, babe, what did I tell you? That Notlydia is a filthy little liar."
I looked up to heaven. No help was forthcoming.
"Someone's using up all my soap, says the owner. Not me, not me, cries Notlydia." He put his lips next to my ear. "She should be ashamed of herself, shouldn't she? If ever a busty princess deserved a spanking."
I bit at the palm of his hand, teeth catching at the fleshy mound beneath his thumb.
"Ow." He laughed, pulling his hand free. "Then the owner said, someone's been fingering herself in my shower."
"Stop!" I put my hands over my ears, trying desperately to hold in my laughter. "This is the worst story ever. The Brothers Grimm are rolling over in their graves."
"Notlydia throws back the shower curtain and says, oh yeah, big boy, that was me. Come and get it. And they have wild sex all over the cottage." Vaughan's body jerked beneath mine as he laughed his ass off. "The end."
"No way. Notlydia is virtuous and pure. She'd never pull that sort of shit."
"Nah." He chuckled. "It all happened exactly as I said. Dirtiest princess in all the land."
"Like hell. The owner of that cottage was a pervert and a deviant. Why, he would have picked the lock on a chastity belt. She never stood a chance." Difficult to maintain my pious stance, given I'd started laughing so hard tears were pouring down my cheeks. The funny bastard. "I want to know more about this cottage owner. What's his name?"
"I don't know. Let me think . . ." He rested his chin back on top of my head. "He definitely isn't Prince Charming."
"He could be!"
"If he wanted to. Or not. Whatever," I added weakly. Crap. "Let's go back to not talking."
I was a moron.
We'd been all relaxed and laughing. Me and my idiot mouth. Way to go, Lydia. Just shout out any old impossible daydream to the dude who's made it clear there was no future "we." If someone could just direct me to the nearest brick wall, I'd knock a little sense into myself.On the other hand, it was two stupid words. Surely he could have ignored the last hundred years of Disney perpetuating slick-haired young royals gallivanting around the countryside saving hot babes in distress. For the sake of getting along. God knows, Chris never had any problems ignoring or placating me. I'd seen his thoughtless gorgeous smile aimed my way a hundred times. No, a thousand. If only I'd recognized it for what it was.
Ugh. Just the thought of it made me want to punch the douche all over again.
Maybe I needed a bit more than a week to get over that catastrophe. The money would help. Substantially. I'd never imagined that compromising my morals and taking hush money from such foul woe-begotten assholes would feel so good. Maybe I should sell out more often.
"This, ah, this Prince Charming of yours," he said haltingly.
Vaughan shifted beneath me, pushing out a heavy breath. "I mean, it doesn't make sense, does it? Why would he be in a cottage instead of a castle?"
"Well . . . his parents, the king and queen of the neighboring kingdom, died in a terrible accident."
I stayed perfectly still, waiting to see how he'd react.
"I see."
"And it hurt him so bad he just, he didn't want to be a prince anymore."
Nothing from him.
"Bad things happen in fairy tales sometimes."
A grunt.
"It's not fair, but it happens," I said, feeling my way with more caution than skill. "The prince loved his parents and the castle had too many memories."
"So he ran away into the woods too."
"Doesn't sound like much of a prince if he can't handle his shit," he said.
"Princes are just men too, human beings. I don't think a crown or a penis gives you magical invulnerability to loss and pain." I stared at the wall, thinking the problem through. "Life is hard.
Terrible things happen. We all have feelings. We're all just flesh and blood, trying to do our best."
"Running away from problems isn't doing your best." His voice echoed around the small room, the same as around in my head.
What with holding the Coeur d'Alene title for runaway bride of the year, I had no answer. None at all. So much for my half-assed wisdom.
Twist (Book Two) in the Dive Bar Series by Kylie Scott releases on November 22nd!
Pre-order your copy of TWIST here:
Amazon US | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
About the Author:
Kylie is a long time fan of erotic love stories and B-grade horror films. She demands a happy ending and if blood and carnage occur along the way then all the better. Based in Queensland, Australia with her two children and one delightful husband, she reads, writes and never dithers around on the internet.
Kylie is represented by Amy Tannenbaum at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, New York.
Stalk Kylie Scott:
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads


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For more information, call 503-912-4122 or visit the Gresham Saturday Market website.


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text: cannabisnews.com: Medical Marijuana Gains Traction in the Deep South function share_this(num) { tit=encodeURIComponent('Medical Marijuana Gains Traction in the Deep South'); url=encodeURIComponent('http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/27/thread27876.shtml'); site = new Array(5); site[0]='http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='+url+'&title='+tit; site[1]='http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit.php?url='+url+'&title='+tit; site[2]='http://digg.com/submit?topic=political_opinion&media=video&url='+url+'&title='+tit; site[3]='http://reddit.com/submit?url='+url+'&title='+tit; site[4]='http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url='+url+'&title='+tit; window.open(site[num],'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,width=620,height=500'); return false; } Medical Marijuana Gains Traction in the Deep South Posted by CN Staff on February 09, 2014 at 08:17:39 PT By Christina A. Cassidy, The Associated Press Source: Associated Press Atlanta -- Medical marijuana has been a non-starter in recent years in the Deep South, where many Republican lawmakers feared it could lead to widespread drug use and social ills. That now appears to be changing, with proposals to allow a form of medical marijuana gaining momentum in a handful of Southern states.Twenty states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana, and this year powerful GOP lawmakers in Georgia and Alabama are putting their weight behind bills that would allow for the limited use of cannabis oil by those with specific medical conditions. Other Southern states are also weighing the issue with varying levels of support. The key to swaying the hearts of conservative lawmakers has been the stories of children suffering up to 100 seizures a day whose parents say they could benefit from access to cannabidiol, which would be administered orally in a liquid form. And proponents argue the cannabis oil is low in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana that makes users feel high."I'm an unlikely champion for this cause," said Georgia Rep. Allen Peake, a businessman from Macon who attended the evangelical Dallas Theological Seminary. "Once people realize it's not a 6-year-old smoking a joint, most folks realize this is the compassionate thing to do."Peake's bill has already earned the backing of more than 80 state lawmakers, including several members of the House Republican leadership, who signed on as co-sponsors and the state's largest professional association of doctors. The bill would revive a long-dormant research program allowing academic institutions to distribute the medical cannabis and would be "limited in scope, tightly restricted, well regulated and managed by doctors," Peake said.Alabama Rep. Mike Ball, a retired hostage negotiator for the State Patrol, is behind a bill that would allow people to possess the cannabis oil if they have certain medical conditions. It passed a key committee vote on Wednesday."The public is starting to understand what this is," said Ball, who chairs a powerful House committee and is a prominent voice on law enforcement issues. "The political fear is shifting from what will happen if we pass it, to might what happen if we don't," Ball said.The bills in Georgia and Alabama still have more vetting, and their ultimate prospects are not certain. But what is happening offers a strong signal of what's to come in other states.In Louisiana, although a bill has yet to be introduced, a recent committee hearing at the Capitol on legalizing medical marijuana drew a standing-room-only crowd, and Gov. Bobby Jindal made comments last month indicating he was willing to consider it."When it comes to medical marijuana ... if there is a legitimate medical need, I'd certainly be open to making it available under very strict supervision for patients that would benefit from that," Jindal said, according to a report in The Advocate.Technically, both Georgia and Louisiana have laws on the books from the 1980s and 1990s that allow for the use of medical marijuana, but those programs essentially ended before they could start. Georgia's law established the academic research program for those diagnosed with glaucoma and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, but the program stalled when the federal government stopped delivery of legal cannabis.Louisiana's law allowed for glaucoma and cancer patients and those suffering from spastic quadriplegia to receive marijuana for therapeutic use but regulations to govern the program were never developed.In Mississippi, Republican state Sen. Josh Harkins of Brandon is sponsoring a cannabis oil bill similar to the ones in Alabama and Georgia. Harkins said one of his constituents has a 20-month-old daughter with Dravet syndrome, a form of pediatric epilepsy, and the oil can help reduce the number of seizures.Elsewhere, both Kentucky and Tennessee have medical marijuana bills under consideration although they have yet to gain traction. Kentucky Senate President Rover Stivers, R-Manchester, has said he's not convinced marijuana has legitimate medical purposes and called it an area ripe for abuse.In Florida, it's likely to become a campaign issue in the fall given that Gov. Rick Scott is up for re-election and a proposed constitutional amendment will be on the ballot that would allow for the medical use of marijuana as determined by a licensed physician. Former Republican Gov. Charlie Christ, now a Democrat seeking to challenge Scott, has called it "an issue of compassion, trusting doctors and trusting the people of Florida."Meanwhile, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has signaled a willingness to discuss medicine that might be derived from marijuana with appropriate federal regulation."If someone wants to use the medicine that is in marijuana, go through the same testing that you have to go through when you do that through the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), you go through all of that, do the testing, the drug testing, that's fine," Bentley said last month. "I have no problem with that. I am not just for prescribing marijuana."Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has declined to take a position, but noted the "strong case being presented by some of the families with very serious situations involving their children."Dustin Chandler, a police officer in Pelham, Ala., has been a major part of the effort there. His daughter, 2-year-old Carly, has three to five seizures each day from a severe neurological condition she has had since infancy. Chandler believes cannabidiol could help control his daughter's seizures and improve her cognitive functioning based on anecdotal evidence seen elsewhere."We've been battling the stigma from the m-word," Chandler said. "I'd love to hear my daughter talk. I'd love to hear her say one word. You know that is something most parents take for granted."Overall, public opinion in support of legalization has shifted in less than a decade, according to William Galston and E.J. Dionne, who co-wrote a paper last year on the topic for The Brookings Institution. The authors noted proponents were shrewd in focusing the earliest campaigns on efforts to allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes, citing a 2013 Pew Research Center survey that three-quarters of Americans, including 72 percent of Republicans, believe marijuana has legitimate medical uses.Among critics' biggest concerns is that allowing medical marijuana even under a narrow list of circumstance would eventually open the door to widespread use. Peake, the Georgia lawmaker, has been adamant that will not be the case."I am concerned as anyone that we would get to a slippery slope of a broader scope of marijuana use in the state," Peake said. "I promise you I will fight that with every bit of energy in me."Georgia Rep. Terry England, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and a deacon at his Baptist church in Auburn, is a prime example of a state lawmaker who never thought of legalizing medical marijuana but is now open to it, even signing on as a co-sponsor to Peake's bill."I've not made a complete 180-degree turn, but I'm probably at 178 degrees," England said.Associated Press writers Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Ala., Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Miss., Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky., Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Fla., Ray Henry in Atlanta and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., contributed to this report.Source: Associated Press (Wire) Author: Christina A. Cassidy, The Associated PressPublished: February 9, 2014Copyright: 2014 The Associated PressCannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtml Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Post Comment


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W. H. Auden's engagement with the poetry of Byron is perhaps not the most significant of his various literary relationships; probably not as important as that with W.B. Yeats or with T.S. Eliot; and we notice that in New Year's Letter, when he lists the poetic mentors he sees as sitting in perpetual judicial session over his works, Byron is not mentioned; Dante, William Blake, and Arthur Rimbaud are the three principal judges, while John Dryden, Catullus, Lord Tennyson, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Hardy, and Rainer Maria Rilke hover in the background, adding ghostly dignity to the court proceedings. Nevertheless, I want to argue that Byron was important to Auden—and the key-work that he dedicated to him, Letter to Lord Byron, came at a crucial moment in his career and marked a turning point.
Of course, there are turning points and turning points; it is generally considered that the major one came in 1939, and divided him neatly into English Auden and American Auden; the division was even given official status with the publication of a major collection of his early works under the title, The English Auden. I certainly don't want to deny the importance of this move in both biographical and literary terms. His arrival in New York coincided with the death of W.B. Yeats, an event commemorated by Auden in both a prose article and a famous poem—his first written in America. Indeed, the poem has come to be seen almost as the inauguration of his career as American Auden. His own revisions to the poem only heightened that sense of a new start—and of a break with the past.
It may not be an exaggeration to say that the elegy is Auden's most famous poem. In an essay titled "Disenchantment with Yeats" (in Harold Bloom's Modern Critical Views), Edward Callan says those attending the memorial service held for Auden in Westminster Abbey might have got the idea that he was a one-poem poet, rather like Thomas Gray or W. E. Henley—one, that is, who is widely known for only one poem.[1] (Philip Larkin was another poet who saw this as a likely fate for himself, and said in a rueful letter to a friend, "They fuck you up will be my Innisfree . . . ")
The poem is a magnificent elegy but we know that it also marked a certain stage in Auden's difficult relationship with Yeats; to use a rather hackneyed expression, he was "coming to terms" with Yeats. Auden's disenchantment with the senior poet is well-known. He reported, for example, how he, Auden, had introduced C. Day Lewis to the poetry of Frost and Hardy, while Day Lewis had introduced him to the later poems of Yeats; whereas Hardy had a good influence on Day Lewis, Auden declared "I wish I could say the same about Yeats's influence on me. Alas, I think it was a bad influence, for which, most unjustly, I find it difficult to forgive him."
As Edward Callan puts it in his essay,
Auden developed an almost obsessive fear of the danger of Yeats's kind of outlook [ . . . ] The stages of his growing disenchantment with Yeats marks the hardening of his conviction that the greatest threat to individual freedom in the modern world—the Utopias of both left and right—were a direct legacy of the Romantic outlook on which Yeats prided himself.
To a certain extent Auden's distancing himself from Yeats was a definite rejection of the notion of the poet as Bard, as inspired singer of irrefutable truths. Yeats wasn't the only figure that Auden came to reject in this sense; Shelley was another name often mentioned, and particularly his famous definition of the poet as "unacknowledged legislator of the world"—a concept, Auden said, that reminded him of the secret police. But Shelley had never actually exerted any strong influence over Auden, so did not constitute in any way a direct threat.
Clearly there would have been no need for a rejection if there hadn't been points of contact. In his reassessment of Yeats, Auden was rejecting what in fact had been, and possibly still were, strong temptations for him. There was the alluring notion of being the inspired leader of a generation, a role that had almost been thrust upon him from undergraduate days; and there was the temptation of being a public figure, imparting wisdom on public affairs, political and social.
He never entirely shook off this role, and certainly one of his earliest poems in America, "September 1 1939," was to become one of the great public poems of the century—despite the poet's own attempts to suppress it, excluding it from his Collected Poems. Even fairly recently this great New York poem took on a new lease of life, as people turned to its lines in another tragic September.
Auden rejected this poem—and his earlier poem on Spain—because, as he saw it, they were not honest. According to Anthony Hecht, the only possible way of understanding his rejection of "Spain" is by accepting that "Auden came to misunderstand his own poem because he had changed his views about history, and was, moreover, unaware of this." This may or may not be the case; the one thing that is clear is that a major shift in his attitudes and thinking had come about.
However, it is worth emphasizing that such changes did not come about all of a sudden, with one ocean-crossing and the death of a major poet. Auden's dissatisfactions with the role that had been thrust upon him had begun earlier; the move abroad naturally makes a convenient break, for publishers, critics and biographers, but nothing was ever as simple as that with Auden.
Before his move to America he had published an important anthology (just one of many that he was to edit in his lifetime), The Oxford Book of Light Verse, a volume still in print. In the introduction to this volume he gave a broad definition of light verse:
When the things in which a poet is interested, the things which he sees about him, are much the same as those of his audience, and that audience is a fairly general one, he will not be conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language will be straightforward and close to ordinary speech
Until the Elizabethans, he tells us, "all poetry was light in this sense. [ . . . ] In the 17th century, poetry, like religion, had its eccentric sports. Milton, with the possible exception of Spenser, is the first eccentric English poet, the first to make a myth out of his personal experience . . . ." The division of the poet from the society for which he writes was accentuated in the Romantic age: "As the old social community broke up, artists were driven to the examination of their own feelings and to the company of other artists. They became introspective, obscure, and highbrow."
This, of course, had been a frequent complaint about Auden's own early poetry. And strange as it may seem to a reader of his first poems, complaints of obscurity in fact troubled him. Auden never took the Eliot line that in a difficult age a poet had to be difficult. The poet should not be cut off from his society; he should not be maudit—should not, it seems, be moderne.
Defining Milton as "eccentric," he did not use the word in any indulgent or approving way. Although Auden himself may have seemed to cultivate a certain eccentricity of manner—bedroom-slippers out of doors, obsessively rigid bedtime hours—he was not in any way attempting to create a picturesque poetic persona for himself; indeed, with his strict adoption of regular writing hours, he seemed determined to make poetry-writing seem as humdrum a job as that of "the unimportant clerk" who "writes i do not like my work / On a pink official form." We may be reminded of another poet he greatly admired, Robert Frost, who wrote in "The Constant Symbol": "We must be preserved from becoming egregious . . . "
Considering the potted history of English poetry that Auden provides in the introduction to the anthology, one might see certain parallels with Eliot's own strictures on post-17th-century poetry; but the dissociation that Auden is talking about here is not one of sensibility—or not primarily; it is rather a dissociation with the audience, with the wider community. And he saw Modernism, whether in the highly intellectual version of Eliot or the aristocratic version of Yeats, as being guilty of perpetuating—or, rather, of exacerbating—this dissociation. For all Eliot's refutation of romanticism, Auden saw both movements as sharing the same fault of "Bardism"; the poet, as he puts it in the introduction to the Light Verse anthology, puts on his "singing robes"; whether these robes are the flowing mantles of the Romantics or the patchwork cloaks of the Modernists, the point is that they set the poet off from the wider community.[2]
Auden is therefore clearly turning his back on this tradition—the tradition in which he had grown up and written his first important works and become, paradoxically perhaps, famous. And in this act of self-rejection he felt a sense of identity with another poet, who, as he saw it, had rejected an earlier falsified version of himself, one that had made him extremely famous, in favor of a less charismatic but more authentic role.
Now we may feel that Auden rather simplifies Byron's poetic development. He had a great fondness for clear binary divisions—his essays are full of such categorical distinctions, as between the art of Prospero and that of Ariel, between Edens and New Jerusalems, between Dingley Dell and the Fleet—and he makes a sharp division between what we might call Byronic Byron and Ironic Byron.
In his earliest prose piece on the poet, written in 1938 for an anthology entitled Fifteen Poets, he wrote:
No egoist can become a mature writer until he has learnt to recognise and to accept, a little ruefully perhaps, his egoism. When Byron had ceased to identify his moral sense with himself and had discovered how to extract the Byronic Satanism from his lonely hero and to turn it into the Byronic Irony which illuminated the whole setting, when he realized that he was a little ridiculous, but also not as odd as he had imagined, he became a great poet. For Byron was not really odd like Wordsworth; his experiences were those of the ordinary man.
This passage throws a different light on that famous line on Yeats: "He was silly like us." If only, Auden seems to suggest, Yeats had had the savvy to turn his silliness into a joke—to extract some knockabout fun from the Gyres and the Golden Dawn, to crack a joke or two while standing in God's holy fire . . .
However, the important point here, clearly, is the acceptance of the poet's ordinariness: "his experiences were those of the ordinary man . . . " Byron and Auden learned to make poetry from these experiences, rather than—to quote from a later poet writing in what is clearly the same tradition—from any propensity "to swagger the nut-strewn roads."
The circumstances in which Auden wrote his famous Letter to Lord Byron were, of course, not exactly ordinary. It was 1936 and the poet was on a trip to Iceland. It was a chance for him and for his travelling companion, Louis MacNeice, to take stock, to reconsider their careers—and, as Auden frankly admits, to have a holiday. Auden had in fact initially set out on his own and was only joined by MacNeice later. So it was quite definitely a trip into the wild, into as empty and unknown a land as Europe could offer.
All of which makes his choice of reading matter—and his reasons for the choice—somewhat surprising:
In certain quarters I had heard a rumour
(For all I know the rumour's only silly)
That Icelanders have little sense of humour.
I knew the country was extremely hilly,
The climate unreliable and chilly;
So looking round for something light and easy
I pounced on you as warm and civilisé.
The anglicized pronunciation of the last word, as demanded by the rhyme, reminds us inevitably of the anglicized pronunciation of the name Don Juan in Byron's poem. In both cases, one could say that there is a comic contrast between the poem's joyful acceptance of exotic material and the narrator's stolidly British refusal to alter his vowel-sounds and habits of accentuation.
Auden, as narrator, obtains comedy from the equally amusing contrast between the landscape and his reading-matter:
I can't read Jefferies on the Wiltshire Downs,
Nor browse on limericks in a smoking room;
Who would try Trollope in cathedral towns,
Or Marie Stopes inside his mother's womb?
However, there is more to it than that. One could say that Auden is here rejecting all possible temptation to play the role of prophet in the wilderness. He is, indeed, rejecting the entire wilderness tradition (although he was to write brilliantly on it in later life). In the poem he expresses his specific distaste for mountain-poetry, in his famous (or notorious?) lines on Wordsworth and his followers:
The mountain-snob is a Wordsworthian fruit,
He tears his clothes and doesn't shave his chin,
He wears a very pretty little boot,
He chooses the least comfortable inn . . .
[I..] think it time to take repressive measures
When someone says, adopting the 'I know' line,
The Good Life is confined above the snow-line.
He declares his uneasiness with an "interest in waterfalls and daisies, / Excessive love for the non-human faces," stating his fear that "It won't be long before we find there is / A Society of Everybody's Aunts / For the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants." And he here makes the uncompromising declaration:
I dread this like the dentist, rather more so:
To me Art's subject is the human clay,
And landscape but a background to a torso."
Three times in the poem he uses the feminine rhyme of "scenery" and "machinery"; on the second occasion he says: "To use a rhyme of yours, there's handsome scenery / But little agricultural machinery . . . " Byron's use of the rhyme is to be found in the "Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill":
Men are more easily made than machinery—
Stockings fetch better prices than lives—
Gibbets on Sherwood will heighten the scenery,
Showing how Commerce on Liberty thrives!
Auden includes this poem in The Selected Poetry and Prose of Byron published in 1966. The rhyme in Auden's hands reminds us of his fondness for industrial landscapes; as he says, with clearly anti-Wordsworthian intent: "Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton."
The poem gives Auden the chance to make a more general consideration of Romanticism. He offers us in the third section a brief history lesson; this, of course, was to become one of Auden's specialities; in later works, like the "Sonnets from China," he provides brilliant synecdochic overviews of the whole of human history, and in more fabulistic works like "The Fall of Rome" he throws light on great historical trends, using suggestive anachronistic vignettes. In the Letter to Lord Byron we have an early example of this gift for sweeping survey, with the poet applying the viewpoint of the hawk or the helmeted airman to a broad swathe of history rather than just to "our time"; in this case he confines his vision to a period from the Augustan Age onwards.
The argument anticipates the one he was to develop in the introduction to the anthology of Light Verse. As his example of the two arts in the Augustan age, he takes the figures of Isaac Watts and Alexander Pope:
We find two arts in the Augustan age:
One quick and graceful, and by no means holy,
Relying his lordship's patronage;
The other pious, sober, moving slowly,
Appealing mainly to the poor and lowly.
Each artist knew and shared the concerns of his audience:
The important point to notice, though, is this:
Each poet knew for whom he had to write,
Because their life was still the same as his.
As long as art remains a parasite,
On any class of persons it's alright;
The only thing it must be is attendant,
The only thing it mustn't, independent.
It is hard not to notice the overturning of Marxist language and concepts here. Things began to change with the Industrial Revolution, when the engineers of this revolution "A new class of creative artist set up, / On whom the pressure of demand was let up: / He sang and painted and drew dividends, / But lost responsibilities and friends."
Those artists with "originality of vision", he tells us, "Jumped at the chance of a secure position / With freedom from the bad old hack tradition, / Leave to be sole judges of the artist's brandy, / Be Shelley, or Childe Harold, or the Dandy." And he concludes with a desolate look at the effects of what he calls the Poet's Party (punning on the double meaning of this word) on the present day:
To-day, alas, that happy crowded floor
Looks very different: many are in tears:
Some have retired to bed and locked the door;
And some swing madly from the chandeliers;
Some have passed out entirely in the rears;
Some have been sick in corners; the sobering few
Are trying hard to think of something new.
The theme, then, of Letter to Lord Byron, is not at all what one might expect from the circumstances and situation of the poet; the bleak emptiness of Iceland has curiously enough inspired in Auden a witty but at heart serious meditation on the relationship between an artist and his audience. It is clearly a theme that Auden felt to be important at this point in his life, and equally clearly Byron was crucial for his argument—even, one might say, for his repositioning of his own self.
What emerges in the poem is that, for Auden, the greatness of Byron's best poetry depended entirely on a question of tone—or of voice. The word voice recurs many times, of course, in Auden's poetry; most famously perhaps in the lines from "September 1st, 1939":
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of authority
Whose buildings grope the sky . . .
The kind of voice Auden is referring to in the Letter is one that is clearly speaking to other people, on level and equal terms, and not addressing them from a pulpit or a pedestal:
I like your muse because she's gay and witty,
Because she's neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European city,
And country houses long before the slump;
I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.
In his biography of Auden, Humphrey Carpenter quotes a passage Auden wrote for a symposium in 1948:
"The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolmasters, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means that, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets."
Actually, Carpenter goes on to comment, he wrote largely for his friends, whether or not they were poets. The word "friends" recurs in the Letter, particularly in these famous lines:
Art, if it doesn't start there, at least ends,
Whether aesthetics like the thought or not,
In an attempt to entertain our friends . . .
Some have, indeed, said that some of the faults of obscurity in his early poetry can be attributed to the fact that the poems were addressed too specifically to a close group of friends, excluding anyone not "in the know." However, at this point in his career Auden was concerned to extend the circle—or rather to find a way to connect the private and the public. One is reminded of his famous squib, "Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places"; Auden now seems determined to convert this sentiment into a method and style of poetry.
Carpenter also quotes a piece of advice that Auden gave to another poet in a letter:
Try to think of each poem as a letter written to an intimate friend, not always the same friend. But the letter is going to be opened by the postal authorities, and if they do not understand anything, or find it difficult to wade through, then the poem fails.
The strategy adopted in Letters from Iceland—that is to say, the writing of letters to friends—allowed both Auden and MacNeice to talk on public matters while adopting the tone of a private conversation. And this communicative skill was, as Auden saw it, Byron's great achievement in his best poetry.
Apart from the brief prose piece I've already mentioned, Auden wrote extensively on Byron in two major essays; one was the essay on Don Juan collected in The Dyer's Hand and the other was the introduction to The Selected Poetry and Prose of Byron, published by Signet Classics in 1966. There is a certain amount of overlapping, as Auden felt at liberty to include long passages from the earlier essay in the introduction. In any case, the two essays both contain valuable criticism and offer us great insight into Auden's own thoughts on poetry.
He draws, as already mentioned, a clear division between the poetry that made Byron famous in his own times and the poetry we value him for today, connecting the latter with his prose. In the introduction, he says, "It does not matter where one opens the prose; from the earliest years till the end, the tone of voice rings true and utterly unlike anybody else's." In the essay on Don Juan he declares:
From the beginning, his letters seem authentic but, before Beppo, very little of his poetry; and the more closely his poetic persona comes to resemble the epistolary persona of his letters to his male friends—his love letters are another matter—the more authentic his poetry seems.
He quotes a typical passage from a letter to Byron's friend Hobhouse and goes on to say, "while the letters and Don Juan have been written by someone-in-particular, Manfred must have been written, as it were, by a committee."
One of the key-words here, clearly, is "authentic," and he links that word very specifically with the notion of the writer as friend; indeed, in the essay on Don Juan, he includes a long philosophical passage on the notion of friendship, which is interesting but not directly to our purposes here. The essential concept is, in any case, clear; until Byron discovered a way to adopt in poetry the same friendly tone that he used in prose, his poetry remained false or inauthentic.
The discovery, in Byron's case, turned out to be a purely technical one. Many people have talked about Byron's realization of the possibilities of ottava rima and his handling of it, but I think no-one has analyzed its technical qualities more acutely than Auden. Perhaps he may seem to go too far in his appraisal of its importance:
Take away the poems he wrote in this style and meter, Beppo, the Vision of Judgment, Don Juan, and what is left of lasting value? A few lyrics, though none of them is as good as the best of Moore's, two adequate satires though inferior to Dryden or Pope, "Darkness", a fine piece of blank verse marred by some false sentiments, a few charming occasional pieces, half a dozen stanzas from Childe Harold, half a dozen lines from Cain, and that is all.
The selections he made in his own edition of Byron's poetry reflect this assessment. Whatever one may think of this sweeping assertion, Auden's appraisal of Byron's use of ottava rima is masterly. Paradoxically he sees the potentiality of the form to lie precisely in its tight restrictions. Noting that Yeats is one of the few poets to have made successful use of ottava rima in serious poetry, he points out that Yeats relies on frequent use of half-rhyme or para-rhyme. In Byron's time this was not considered legitimate:
Because of the paucity of rhymes in English, it is almost impossible to write a poem of any length in this stanza without using banal rhymes or padding the line in order to get a rhyme. [ . . . ] The very qualities of English ottava-rima which force a serious poet to resort to banal rhymes and padding are a stimulus to the comic imagination, leading to the discovery of comic rhymes and providing opportunities for the interpolated comment and conversational aside.
Byron's gift was not for concentration or concision, which was what the Heroic Couplet required: "in heroic couplets he becomes self-conscious and stiff . . . " He was naturally expansive, and paradoxically the constraints of ottava rima allowed him to become so—allowed him, that is, to talk as freely and naturally as he did in his letters to friends. It was an entirely new verse style, and Auden describes it brilliantly in his Letter to the poet:
I think a serious critic ought to mention
That one verse style was really your invention,
A style whose meaning does not need a spanner,
You are the master of the airy manner.
Of course, the finest homage Auden can pay is by writing himself in a form that is closely allied to ottava rima, Rhyme Royal. He gives a modest explanation for not adopting the stricter form of ottava rima:
Ottava Rima would, I know, be proper,
The proper instrument on which to pay
My compliments, but I should come a cropper . . . ,
But of course it is only mock-modesty; he shows himself fully skilled and adroit in handling the stanza. The occasional groping for a rhyme (as when he parenthetically notes, after a double rhyme of "point" and "joint": "There is no other rhyme except anoint") is all part of the fun and entirely in the Byron tradition. Part of the fun of this kind of poetry, Byron suggests in Beppo, lies in the fact that the poet is not in full control:
But I am but a nameless sort of person
(A broken Dandy lately on my travels)
And take for Rhyme, to hook my rambling verse on,
The first that Walker's Lexicon unravels . . .
A few stanzas later we find Byron addressing the goddess Fortune—"And as for Fortune—but I dare not d-n her, / Because, were I to ponder to Infinity, / The more I would believe in her divinity." As Peter Cochran suggests in a note to his on-line edition of the poem, "though the tone here is light, the meaning is profoundly authentic." Presenting himself as almost helplessly in thrall to the form of his poem, Byron is able to give comic expression to what was an almost fatalistic belief in the role of fortune: "This Story slips forever through my fingers, / Because, just as the Stanza likes to make it, / It needs must be, and so it rather lingers . . . ."
Auden allows himself similar moments of apparent helplessness. He begins one stanza by invoking Yeats, quoting the title of his sonnet "The fascination of what's difficult"—and ends the same stanza with the couplet:
Et cetera et cetera. O curse!
That is the flattest line in English verse.
There is a clear echo here of Byron's famous "Hail Muse etc.", and of many other moments when Byron achieves high comedy by apparently flailing around, like a clown on a tight rope.
However, Auden is serious in his notion that an artist is given new potential by imposed restrictions. It was a notion he referred[?] to frequently, especially when advising fellow poets. For example, in the early 1930s he told John Cornford, still a schoolboy, "You might do more with stricter verse forms . . . as the very nature of the form forces the mind to think rather than to recollect . . . ." And in one of his late epigrammatic squibs he declared:
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses,
force us to have second thoughts free from the fetters of self.
The Letter was also part of a general campaign on Auden's part to broaden the field of poetry—in particular, to find a place in it for the non-earnest. As he says in the Letter, "Light verse, poor girl, is under a sad weather; / Except by Milne and persons of that kind / She's treated as démodé altogether."
Of course, he got the chance to create his own anthology of Light Verse in 1938 but his real aim was to break down such distinctions altogether. In 1965, in a wonderful anthology of Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets, he was to write: "When [ . . . ] I read The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, what really surprises me is not that Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should have admired a number of poems that I dislike—in sixty years readers may be saying the same thing about me—but his unconscious assumption that comic or light verse is not quite poetry: 'real' poetry is 'earnest' statement." Auden attributes the responsibility for this prejudice to Matthew Arnold and pays homage to Walter de la Mare, who printed "folk songs and nursery rhymes side by side with poems by the 'Greats'."
Although he felt the need to keep up the campaign as late as the 1960s, I think it fair to say that he had already won the major battle back in 1936, when he published the Letter to Lord Byron. It gave him a new direction for his poetry, opening the way for the more discursive poems of his later career, and it also prepared the way for a good many other long works by later poets who used strict form with a similar lightness of touch: poems by Kenneth Koch, A. D. Hope, Andrew Waterman, Clive James, Vikram Seth, John Fuller—just to give a sprinkling of names. I don't know enough about the history of Byron criticism to say whether Auden contributed to a revival of Byron studies in his time, but I do think it fair to say that it is greatly thanks to him that the spirit of Byron lives on in so much good contemporary poetry.
[1] Auden's memorial stone in the Abbey is engraved with the words, "In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise."
[2] In one of the most amusing stanzas in the Letter to Lord Byron Auden lists the various singing-robes of the great poets of English literature, concluding that he saw Byron "like Sherlock, in a dressing-gown.


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image source: here. edited by me. |
I know this isn't the right time to do this tag because it's not exactly mid-year right now. More like 3/4 of the year through. This post has been sitting in my draft for quite some time now because I don't really have the time to make it (I don't even have time to catch up on my book reviews). So when I finally got some time on my hands, I decided to finish this long overdue post. Basically, I will answers several questions that will conclude my reading in the first half of 2015—including some of the best books I've read so far this year. Without further delay, let's jump right into it :)
1. Best Book You've Read So Far in 2015?
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
I would've been able to choose more than one, but I tried my best to only choose one book to answer most of these questions. And I finally decided to pick Wonder, because it's literally a wonderful book to read. Even though it's a middle-grade book, I find myself immersed in the story and was able to relate with the characters on an emotional level. So, so good.
2. Best Sequel You've Read So Far in 2015?
A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
Not only this book is the best sequel I've read so far this year, I might consider A Clash of Kings as the best sequel of all time. I find myself enjoying this book a lot more than the first one; most probably because I'm already used to the world building as well as the abundant characters. The story becomes so much more complex and twisted in this sequel, and I love it <3
3. New Release You Haven't Read Yet, But Want To?
Finding Audrey by Sophie Kinsella
I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera
4. Most Anticipated Release For Second Half of 2015?
Another Day by David Levithan
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson
Dumplin' by Julie Murphy
5. Biggest Disappointment?
I Was Here by Gayle Forman
Since I've read Gayle Forman's books several times, I have some kind of expectation each time I picked up her newest book. Same thing goes with this one; even though I've heard mixed reviews about it. Unfortunately, I find myself disappointed with this book. Despite my disappointment, I still adore Gayle Forman's beautiful writing and will look forward to her next work :)
6. Biggest Surprise?
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
I seriously didn't expect to love this book when I started it—because I read this for a book club. This book literally made me smile and giggle throughout all its' adorable moments. And I think this is the first time I've ever read a book with LGBT as its' main theme. So good!
7. Favourite New Author?
R.J. Palacio—even though I've only read one book by her, I think she deserves to be my favourite now :)
8. Newest Fictional Crush?
Peter Kavinsky (To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han)
Out of all the characters that I've met throughout this year so far, I think Peter has officially become my newest fictional crush. He's totally swoon-worthy ♥♥
9. Newest Favourite Character?
Mark Watney (The Martian by Andy Weir)
OMG, if you've read my review for The Martian, you'll know how much I love this guy. He's just an amazing character and has officially become one of my most favourite characters this year! Mark Watney is funny, sarcastic, and he's really smart too. I love his personality and his cheerful demeanor.
10. Book That Made You Cry?
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
I read several books this year that made me teared up, but Wonder made me cry the hardest. And I wasn't crying because the story is sad; I cried happy tears at the end of this book because it was just so heartwarming and tears naturally streamed down my face :'))
11. Book That Made You Happy?
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
The Martian by Andy Weir
I might be mentioning these books too much, but what can I do, these books made me happy! Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda successfully made me giggle a lot while reading and The Martian made me laugh out loud at Mark Watney's crazy antics and jokes.
12. Favourite Book To Movie Adaptation You Saw This Year?
The Longest Ride (Book review for The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks)
This is probably one of the best Nicholas Sparks' movie adaptation I've ever seen (besides A Walk to Remember which is still my all-time favourite). Although I'm not sure if I'm a bit biased because of Scott Eastwood :p ♥
13. Favourite Review You've Written This Year?
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
I don't really have much reason why I love writing this review, but I thought this book deserves to at least be in this tag—because it's one of my favourite reads this year as well. If there's one thing that I love from writing this review, is that I get to look back at all of my favourite passages from the book. Some of those passages I read over and over just to absorb the whole meaning of it.
14. Most Beautiful Book You Bought So Far This Year?
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
I don't think this one needs further explanation. It's just so beautiful. Need to read this one soon.
15. What Books Do You Need To Read By The End of The Year?
Sharp Objects / Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness
Obviously, I have a ton of books I need to read soon. But right now these are the ones at the top of my head.
And that's it for this Mid-Year Book Freak Out Tag! Hopefully that was quite interesting to read :)
I won't tag anyone in this post, but if you're reading this and you want to do it, consider yourself tagged! And if you decided to do this tag, don't forget to mention a link to your post in the comments below so I can check it out :)) Okay, bye now!


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