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“Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” is a novella by Sarah Ladipo Manyika. Of all the books nominated for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize, this looked like the most interesting to my eyes. I’ve enjoyed previous Goldsmiths nominated novels including Acts of the Assassins and Satin Island.

Perhaps in today’s modern age of streaming and such, The Coral would be a bigger band and may have survived their eventual burnout. Their work ethic was evident from the start, as rumours swirled in the NME about a fantastic new band from Liverpool who were going to blow everybody’s socks off. I went to see them live in Bristol after they’d released three EPs and they were incredible. Their sound, a bit like the movie “Holy Mountain” set to pop music, imagined a Merseybeat channelled from an alternative universe in which Lennon and McCartney took their acid in the Mojave desert rather than in the English suburbs. Yes, it was derivative but somehow it also managed to be utterly new and compelling.

After a day on foot in Reykjavík, and with some trepidation, we returned to the car for our drive through Iceland’s countryside. We started by heading out on route 1, which is like Iceland’s M25 except that it encircles an entire country and about thirty times fewer people. We went to house of Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness, only to be turned away because it was being renovated and wouldn’t open for another month. Undeterred, we pressed on toward Þingvellir, stopping off on the way to take pictures at a viewpoint. It was just crazy, a flat expanse of undisturbed snow. Just as with the drive from the airport, the territory should have been relentlessly bleak but instead we got a winter wonderland.

We went to see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern last year. At the time, I didn’t know much about her, other than the fact she was famous for painting flowers. And that people get a bit hot under the collar about what those paintings might represent. Was the art world of the 1920s and 1930s so repressed that it managed to get into a lather about some paintings of flowers? And more importantly, are they any good?

Alistair Reynolds’ 2000 novel “Revelation Space” has long been in orbit of my science fiction “to read” list, but it wasn’t until one sleepless night (post “Command and Control”) that I came across it in Ingrid’s audiobooks. I was instantly drawn in as I listened to the opening scene about an archaeological dig facing evacuation ahead of an imminent ‘razor storm’.

I love making plots in R with ggplot. However, there are always a few niggles that I forget about between plots. I wrote this post so that I have somewhere to look the next time I need to tweak a few things in my plots. I intend to come back and add updates in the future as I learn more things. If I keep coming back, I might also remember a few of these too.

We arrived in Reykjavík a few days after a monumental snowstorm. As such the city was still under at least six inches of snow. We collected the hire car from the airport and drove out of Keflavik. The scenery normally looks like a moonscape, but for us it was a frosty white wonderland.

I had low expectations for “Hello America”, the next in the series of Ballard novels that I started reading over seven years ago. However, it turned out to be a hoot. A couple of years ago, this novel would have been a wig-out bit of standard Ballard weirdness (a bit like “The Drowned World” or “The Crystal World”) but given recent events “Hello America” is starting to take on an eerie prescience.

Ingrid and I got married a month ago. It was a lovely day. We had a simple ceremony with two witnesses, our friends Sue and Andrew. We kept it quiet and small, as we just wanted to be married without too much fuss. A month on, we’re happy to report that we are glad we did it.

Note: Recent months have been very busy, so this album digest combines a review of the new album by The National with a couple of reviews left over from earlier in the year.

I’ve written a few more album reviews in the past months but I’m so far behind (February and March have already been published on a considerable lag) that I’m just going to pepper forthcoming digests with additional reviews of older albums.

“Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser is about the history of nuclear weapons and their safety. This might not seem like a thrilling subject, but it’s absorbing from start to finish. I started it three years ago but only finished it more recently as the subject of nuclear weapons has become more pertinent to current affairs. Suffice to say that when I bought the book over three years ago, I would not have believed that it would be so much more relevant by the time I had finished it. There are many people who would stand to gain a great deal from reading this book. The name at the top of the list rhymes with Dump.

We bought a cheap package holiday in the British Airways Black Friday sale. The weekend spanned Ingrid’s birthday, so it was ideal. £99 each for flights and a hotel, and we bagged a hire car quite cheaply too.