📷 A neighbour took a photo of my son and I looking up in wonder at the Northern Lights last night.

📷 Quite a show over our street this evening. Never seen this before.

📚 Finished reading Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns. An excellent, comprehensive guide to privacy aimed at web developers but useful to anyone working with technology, particularly those that create websites and other digital products for the North American and European markets. The author is an advocate for a principles and ethics based approach no matter what the law says in a particular country. A very useful reference that I’m glad to have in my library.

🎶 It’s Album Club #158. I’ve never heard a Janis Joplin album before. This is a treat.

📚 Finished reading  Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck by William Souder. I’d been saving this until I had almost completed my read-through of all of Steinbeck’s works. Over 20 years ago I read Jackson J Benson’s biography of Steinbeck which comes in at around three times the length. Both are great books. I enjoyed Souder’s writing and appreciated his use of more recent sources to build a picture of the man, although the end felt rushed. I also remember Benson going into a lot more detail about Steinbeck’s practice of writing. If you don’t have the time or interest to tackle over 1,100 pages, this is a good place to start.

📚 Finished reading Toxic Positivity by Whitney Goodman. A rallying cry against the culture of ’positive vibes only’ and self-help dogma such as The Law of Attraction. More of a self-help book than I was looking for. There are lots of useful conversational tips in the book, but mainly aimed at avoiding emanating toxic positivity yourself as opposed to dealing with it in others. The section on how we use complaints as a form of social bonding is fascinating.

📚 Finished reading Vinyl London: A Guide to Independent Record Shops by Tom Greig. An excellent old-school paper guide book to the record shops of London, filled with photos, history and facts on the products they sell. I’m very familiar with the cluster around Soho (with my favourite being Sounds of the Universe) but had no idea there was an epic-looking shop much closer to me, in the form of Bushey’s Second Scene Records. I can’t wait to visit.

📚 Finished reading Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt. Years ago, my brother bought me Rufus Wainwright’s cover version of the entire album which got me hooked. I still love that record, but Garland’s original is even better. Both artists have a voice that takes a bit of time to get used to, but once you’re on their wavelength the music is so rewarding.

‘”There’s something about my voice that makes them see all the sadness and humor they’ve experienced,” she said a few years later about those crowds that clamored for such musical self-flagellation. “It makes them know they aren’t too different; they aren’t apart. That’s the only reason I can give for people’s liking to hear me sing because I’m not that fine a singer.”’ (Manuel Betancourt, Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall)

I disagree with Garland’s self assessment. Her singing has an authenticity about it and she nails all of the songs — from upbeat show tunes to beautiful ballads.

These 33 1/3 books, each one about a specific album, are consistently excellent. I’m looking forward to reading more of them.

📚 Finished reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. A collection of tiny vignettes depicting various relationships. A couple of stories were shocking, notably Tell The Women We’re Going and Popular Mechanics, leading me to search the web for more information on how the stories were interpreted. It was quite enjoyable to read a book where you can pretty much finish a short story in every sitting, no matter how little time you have.

📚 Finished reading Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint by Russell Davies. A book of two halves, the first being a well-argued love letter to PowerPoint (and tools like it), and the second filled with tons of practical tips for presenting. Davies rejects the “death by PowerPoint” naysayers, argues how it is a tool to help many of us become good presenters and explains that those people most dismissive of PowerPoint are sometimes those that are in positions of such power that they themselves don’t need it. Thoroughly recommended.

📚 Finished re-reading Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe. I was given this copy in 2009 by someone I met on Twitter, swapping it for The Vodi by John Braine. The novel is a slice of working-class life in 1950s Nottingham, filled with heavy drinking, fighting and affairs with married women. The opening scene sees the lead character fall down some stairs in a pub before vomiting all over two other customers, setting the tone for what’s to come. Although it’s of its time and is an enjoyable book, it’s still shocking to me when casual racism gets dropped into the narrative.

📚 Finished reading  Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone, 125 Years of Pop Music by Peter Doggett. An epic work that felt paradoxically too long and yet not detailed enough. It’s incredible to read a book like this in 2024 when I have access to almost all of the songs that are referenced, being able to hear for myself at the press of a button what the author described. (I can’t believe how many artists I’m familiar with only through their stories in books and music magazines that I read as a teenager.) Electric Shock is quite a dry read, slow going in places, but I’m glad I kept with it. I’d completely forgotten about the 16rpm vinyl format which I could use on my childhood record player to make songs sound otherworldly. Towards the end of the book it also got me thinking about how physical music sales to the mass market probably were a temporary blip, with live performance being the dominant medium for artists to earn an income both before and after.

🎶 I’m completely obsessed by Flowers Were Better from Alicia Clara’s incredible record from 2021. All of her work gets better with every play. ‘Female Canadian dream-pop’ seems to hit the sweet spot for me, and this record is particularly great.

🎶 Best Patreon gift ever turned up in the post today. What a treat. Thank you Smoke Fairies.

Our garden seems to have turned into a veritable Winterwatch-style safari over the past few days.

For an incompetent chef (that would be me), these Lazy Vegan frozen meals are fantastic. Add some oil to a frying pan, empty the contents of the bag into the pan and then stir for 10 minutes or so. I know it’s not proper cooking, but I love that it’s a healthy, quick meal.