Jan Hicks
@dustystacks.bsky.social
Archivist. Book reader. Persistent. I write down my thoughts about books here https://thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/
Today we remember Sylvia Pankhurst, who died on this day in 1960. Pankhurst women were each a strong flavour, and Sylvia is our favourite. Brought up by suffragist socialist activist parents, Sylvia trained as an artist (Manchester, then Royal College of Art), noting every exclusion along the way
It's taken me 3 years to get round to reading Hattie Collins's book about the origins and evolution of grime, but it was worth the wait. It's 10 years old and I'd like to read a follow up that covers what came next. #💙📚 thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/27/t...
This Is Grime
I bought This Is Grime after reading Jeffrey Boakye’s Hold Tight. I wanted to learn more about grime and its origins, and this oral history of the music genre and subculture is held up as the…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
No day trip today because Th'usband has given me his cold. Instead, a day spent in Great Harwood courtesy of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and the Rickard Sisters. I was gripped by the graphic novel adaptation of Holdsworth's This Slavery. Radical stuff! #📚💙 thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/24/e...
Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery: A Graphic Novel
This Slavery is the third graphic novel adaptation I’ve read by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard, and the second of theirs I’ve read this year. It’s an adaptation of Ethel Carnie Holds…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
Book 45 of the 60 was a bit of a struggle. It turns out that reading a dystopia is hard work when the one you're living in is worse. Salt Lick should have had more cows. #BookSky thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/24/s...
Salt Lick
Salt Lick is the second novel by contemporary fiction writer Lulu Allison. It is a warning to who we are now about what is coming next. In a near future that feels like only a few years away, the e…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
Further adventures of not being in Florence. Today, Tatton Park and the Beyond the View exhibition. Venice, Verona, Padua and Florence only 15 miles down the road. Andiamo!
A week off work. The loose plan had been to go to Florence but that didn't happen, so today we went on the tram to Heaton Park instead. Same, same.
All power to booksellers. I've been thinking recently about how I've got into lazy habits with my book buying. Book subscriptions and online shopping take less time but also shut out the serendipity of conversation and browsing. I'm not sure how time became more important than bookshop mooching.
Matthew Perren@matthewperren.bsky.social · last wk.Quick story. Back in the 80s I was bookselling in Preston, Lancs. I got sent a copy of this. I loved it so much I immediately read it again. I wrote a wee review and bought 30 copies for the shop. We sold out. I bought 30 more. Then 60. Then 100. Then repeating 100s until it was no longer available
Two recent arrivals to my book collection were perfect reading for a lazy Sunday afternoon, both by illustrator Emma Cunningham for Design For Today. Charming picture books about significant 20th century women artists. thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/20/b... #BookSky
Brick Dust & Flowers and Great Bardfield Forever
These two beautiful books by Emma Cunningham, an artist and print maker specialising in illustration, are published by Design For Today. I pre-ordered Great Barfield Forever, which is officially pu…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
Are you surreal? Psychedelic? Enjoy being shocked into laughter? Like peeking at the world through the holes in hagstones? I read this recently and it made my life a whole lot funnier. You should follow Simon @biggreenbooks.bsky.social for more fun, too.
Big Green Books@biggreenbooks.bsky.social · last wk.EXCITING BOOK NEWS. I have SIGNED copies of Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social new book "Curious Events Lately Occurring in the Neighbourhood". And what's even more exciting is that you can buy them from me! HERE. www.biggreenbookshop.com/signed-copie...
Fitting in a quick brew before my final archives tour of this year's histories festival, aided and abetted by Pinoko. Just a zine workshop to oversee this afternoon and then I'm off for a glorious week of doing nowt. #teaup
Book 44 from my chosen 60 was the beautiful, sorrowful verse novel Ædnan, about the separation of the Sámi people from their land, their culture and their identity by the Swedish state. Linnea Axelsson wrote it. Saskia Vogel translated it. thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/a... #BookSky
Ædnan: An Epic
Linea Axelsson’s prize-winning verse novel Ædnan, translated by Saskia Vogel, is an epic tale of the Sámi people of Northern Europe. Starting in 1913 and moving forward to 2016, it charts the…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
PAUL: What’s in the box? REVEREND MOTHER BUT SHE'S AN ARCHIVIST: Pain. [PAUL hesitantly puts his hand in the BOX, then FROWNS IN CONFUSION. He pulls out his hand covered in STICKY TAPE.] REVEREND MOTHER BUT SHE'S AN ARCHIVIST: Awful, right?
Exciting news (well we think so)! We are looking for new people to regularly contribute to our archive! We accept applications from anyone based in the UK who has an interest in sending us their thoughts and opinions about life in the UK. #Skystorians massobs.org.uk/write-for-th...
Write for the archive - Mass Observation Archive
Writing for Mass Observation You can apply to write for the archive here. Current Observers If you are one of our current Observers you may find our handbook for new Observers helpful. This has all th...
massobs.org.uk
somewhere, bono is on the phone to ed sheeran right now, comforting him and telling him he will always be irish
Another short story collection for #ShortStorySeptember and a bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed the later Gothic pieces a lot, and the moralising stories about the working class weren't too saccharine. thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/13/t...
The Grey Woman and Other Tales
A long time ago, in another job, I looked after a small collection of Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters to Lady Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, whose family owned the Gawthorpe estate in Padiham, Lancashir…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
A tawny port in a snazzy shot glass that makes me think of the circus. It's also the same size as the Baptist communion glasses we used to neck what might have been Vimto from when I believed in that stuff, so it makes me want to say, "The blood of Christ." It has been a week.
Over on Instagram, I'm nonplussed by how many accounts with photos of scantily clad women this photograph is attracting. Cream teas are pure filth, I guess.
Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood is playful, uncanny, joyously silly, and demands that we run full pelt at life and rub ourselves against its shins. @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social @breakthroughbook.bsky.social #ShortStorySeptember thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/08/c...
Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood
The second collection of short stories from Tom Cox, Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood, is an eclectic mix of flash fiction and longer form pieces of writing that share no genre…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
This is one of my favourites of all @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social's short stories. Its English absurdist bent is spot on, as is the ending: potential mild horror for some, the natural order of things for others. I'm just over halfway through the book which is transporting me away from mundanity.
Tom Cox@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 3w agoI've made this short story free to read, as a representative sample from my new book. If you like books, bookshops, eccentric old people and mystery, you might enjoy it. And if you like it you'll almost certainly enjoy the book. www.tom-cox.com/old-litkinov...
What have PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Bob Monkhouse and Nigel Farage got in common? They all went to this fancy school, Dulwich College. On this day in 1913, the school was subject to an outrageous arson attack 🔥…
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi is a moving and entertaining act of rebellion against the strictures imposed by religion in some communities and the general idiocy of people. thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/09/05/h... #BookSky #ShortStorySeptember
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories is a collection from a writer I haven’t read before. Banu Mushtaq has worked as a lawyer and a journalist, and as an author was a member of the Bandaya Sahitya mo…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
The pain of spending an afternoon scheduling social media when I could have been, oh, I don't know, doing something I've specialised in, like managing archive collections, has driven me to drink. It's alright, this Red Willow Feckless. Caramelly. Fuck social media (she said, using social media).
@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social's new short story collection arrived just in time and through a wormhole (it's not actually out yet). I'm just about to finish Banu Mushtaq's short story collection Heart Lamp. Since it's #ShortStorySeptember, it would be rude not to jump straight in.
I've rounded out this year's #20BOS26 with SJ Kim's This Part Is Silent, a raw and lyrical book about navigating the world as a woman and an immigrant and facing down racism and female erasure in British academia thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2026/08/31/t... #BookSky
This Part Is Silent: A Life Between Cultures
This Part is Silent is SJ Kim’s first book and collects together her experiences of different silences she has encountered in the world. On its cover, it bears the Korean Hangul character jeo…
thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com
Lots of excellent pubs in the replies to this. Why limit yourself to five, eh?
The Mill@manchestermill.bsky.social · last mo.Top five Greater Manchester pubs? Let's have yours.... (we're thinking the Crown Inn pictured below might be on a few lists)
thought i was bored but i was actually just completely dissatisfied and overwhelmed with the material circumstances of my life
A scientific experiment to resolve what everyone is calling the meow/miaow controversy. Please avail yourself of the alt text for elucidation of the results.
Tom Cox@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · last mo.The British spelling is DEFINITELY "meow".
