dovegreyreader scribbles

Barking mad

It's the weekend, time for a ten minute rest from the Booker-thon.
Touch of cramp, you can't see me but I'm actually doing a Paula and sitting by the side of the road looking up that next hill in Athens, not even halfway.
Rural living + four gun dogs means that somewhere in your garden you have a kennel and an enclosed run.
So do all our neighbour's dogs within a radius of several miles.It's not cruel, they need lots of affection and praise (the dogs not the neighbours) but they are not pets and treating them as such unravels all the obedience training required when they are working.That aside they get very muddy and very wet and they reek of, well er, wet muddy dog.
Warm,heavy summer nights with perhaps the merest hint of a breeze have meant that the tempting aroma of the ladies (dogs not neighbours) travels afar and our four boys (dogs not sons, we only have two of those, plenty) and everyone else's have been getting a little fraught.The hills have been alive with the sound of barking and howling giving way to the most pitiful lonely goatherd yodelling echoing all around the valley.
All told make that far more noise than anyone who lives in the country for the peace and tranquillity of it all can tolerate for long.
We've tried everything, running them into the ground (perhaps they've got kennel fever?) more food (perhaps they're hungry?) but mostly going out and shouting at them.Pointless.
Stand up wind from their aroma (or should that be down wind?) and Will, Barney, Ben and Sticks (the baby pictured here and the most obedient) are adorable but not at 3am when the bookhound is out there trying to persuade them to please be quiet and the gamekeeper seems to be cleverly sleeping right through it.

Then we hit on a very bright idea, it's TOO quiet, what did we do with small, recalcitrant children when we put them to bed? They all had radios, these dogs need the sound of music.
Radio Kennel (Radio 2) has worked like a miracle cure. They love Wake Up to Wogan which is understandable so do I. Wossy kept them bemused and pondewous but silent and they have enjoyed Parkinson and a waltz through the musicals (especially Cats) with Elaine Page and not a single solitary woof. Paws for Thought is their absolute favourite though...sorry!
As Mark from Mostly Books reminded me recently, Billy Collins has a poem for every occasion and here's  Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House . We do actually.

Happy Birthday Joseph

The Bloomsbury Day in Literary History drops into my inbox each day and today look who has a birthday...

Joseph Roth born 1894 in Brody, Galicia
With Granta’s on-going reissue of his novels, Joseph Roth, the Central European writer, is beginning to receive the attention that his work so richly deserves. Dying in his early forties, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the abiding interest of Roth’s fiction lies in his account of the old order of European society as the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to fall apart. In The String of Pearls, the Shah of Persia causes a diplomatic incident when he demands to sleep with the beautiful noblewoman he sees while visiting the Viennese court. Although under normal circumstances his wishes would be obeyed, the woman is married to a wealthy and important man and so, to avoid trouble, a cavalry officer replaces her with a prostitute who strongly resembles the woman. Roth’s other novels include The Radetzky March and Confession of a Murderer.

Warming to Woolf

I love September,it's our family month for birthdays and anniversaries and the time I always start thinking ahead about my winter reading projects.
This year I plan to weave in a few authors I have struggled to warm to.They don't really move me, they don't warm the cockles of my heart but others adore them.Why do they?
First on the list is Virginia Woolf and if I'm honest I don't think I've given her a fair crack of the whip over the years, mostly she gets up my nose.
But this is based, I fear, on only a partial reading of her writing and far too much delving into the background of her life.Hoisted by my own petard as I slay someone on Amazon for giving a book a bad review based on reading only a fraction of it.
This won't be study or deep analysis this will be reading for pure pleasure and I have several other authors who will joining the ranks over the next few weeks.
If you're a Woolf-ian here's your chance to be in on the conversion.I'm approaching this with a completely open mind, the slate is wiped clean.What am I missing? What do you see that I don't? I'm open to any new ideas,different approaches, persuasive plaudits and entirely prepared to emerge blinking into a new dawn next Spring.
All comments welcome.
Susan Hill has come to the rescue and offered to be class tutor and suggests over on her blog I make a start with A Writer's Diary which I will in a few weeks time (heavens, tough first assignment, how many times have I browsed through that one...but this is for pleasure and I'm going to read it all, it might feel different)
If you share my misgivings and want to give it a go please join the class, no exams, no essays, no studying, no desks; just plump sofas, pots of tea and pure pleasure in reading and sharing thoughts and discovering whether you, like me, may have missed something.If you're a die-hard Woolfian join in too and help people like me who have been trying to catch this bug for years and never quite managed it.
If you want to copy the logo from here to use on your blog if you decide to keep me company in this virtual sitting room, then please help yourself.

I still love librarything

I joined librarything in its infancy a year ago and quickly and addictively was needing a daily fix of cataloguing every book in the house.
Why? Don't know but it got ridiculous. Find me more books went out the cry and in would trot someone with a stack of Observer books, yes. they'll do...78 more and I've overtaken bopeep, that'll show her (him?) 233 more and I'm in the top 50 libraries...of course it matters, what about those nursery rhyme books, how many? Only 6? Find me more more more.Go up in the loft NOW. It's why the random books from my shelves to the lower left on the blog are often quite an eclectic and crazy mix and every so often I think the RAC Handbook pops up as a reminder of the madness that was.
We took the task seriously chez dovegreyreader.
I had some great and very funny e mails from librarything founder Tim Spalding who looked after his obsessive little chicklets in the early days, dealt with problems, gave us free lifetime memberships when it had a bout of hiccups in the software development stages and we all lost a shelf or two and as a result has developed a fantastic site and a loyal fan base of users.
Tim's dream was to get a mention on the BBC somewhere and I tried my hardest for him, Miles Mendoza why didn't you listen to me? I told you this would be huge.Offspringette, preferring to keep her job with Auntie, also declined my suggestion of putting a scrolling ad across the screen in the middle of Newsnight.
The whole thing is now actually ENORMOUS without my help. Almost 75,000 users and over five million books catalogued and a wonderful link called "zeitgeist" which gives all the stats.I made it to 24 in the Top 50 Libraries but am now, even with a book habit that could do with some therapy, slipping down and out of the rankings with so many members.
I can safely predict that this man will usurp my place ere long but he does have a very unfair advantage over someone whose life's work has been about spreading joy and happiness for an organisation where the only free books ever to land on the desk were the Nurse Prescribers' Formulary and Health for All Children (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions, I've been doing the job far too long) Not forgetting The Illustrated Guide to Dermatological Conditions, that was free and not recommended reading over lunch even given my cast iron digestion.
Incidentally I note that no one else out of 76,000 librarything users has these.Too busy being proper nurses to catalogue all their books, quite right.
I can't resist widgets in case you hadn't noticed and librarything have plenty.I've landed in some unholy messes trying to install my blog gadgetry.The Moonphase thingy was a lengthy affair to get it waxing, waning and doing gibbous things in sequence with what I could see out of my window here in Devon, ticking the GMT box proved surprisingly crucial, and the Hessary Tor weather station another big headache. Some things seem to give the whole baby a massive dose of colic and the results are not pretty.However I think I have perfected the librarything search box which you will find if you take a scrollstroll down the left hand side of the blog.
Type in any author to the librarything search box and the theory is it takes you to their very own shelf in my library.In reality it takes you to anyone with their first or second name or both.Just teething troubles.
Why might you be even the least bit interested in doing this? I haven't a clue but it's there anyway.