• Great idea for a book forum, Roderick. The act of snuffing is similar to the forms of tobacco smoking that seem to work best in relaxed and reflective states. The pipe smoker and snuffer are perhaps particularly similar in this respect. As we enjoy our tobacco we gaze outward or inwards, or downwards to the page. And there is a sort of reflexivity between the aesthetic sensation and the thoughtful contemplation – one almost feeds the other.

• I hope the book forum catches on. As an avid reader, I have a particular interest. Should I be retiring at four in the morning, I still need a page or two to settle me down. A final pinch, a few minutes of page-turning enjoyment, then lights out …  – Och shure ye know the drill. 🙂

• Unfortunately, for people like me, who go through a good few books every year, we become more demanding. We expect high standards, become less accepting of poor writing, find it more and more difficult to find new genres or authors to explore. We can of course watch or listen to book programmes, check out things like broadsheet book reviews (the ‘New York Review of Books’, Guardian newspaper ‘Books + Reviews’ etc), check the annual book prizes (the Booker,  the Crime Writers’Association [CWA] Gold Dagger awards, etc.) and so forth. But chats with friends (including my family – wife and daughters, a brother, one of my nephews) who are also ardent readers is a great help to me. Yet, surprisingly perhaps – the majority of my ‘social’ contacts seldom read anything outside their mobiles.  There is now not even a bookshop remaining in my home town.  In most of my contacts homes there’s not a book to be found! And that’s where this forum may be so helpful: sharing, helping, informing.

• And on that note …  my current read is the novel ‘We Begin at The End’ by Chris Whitaker.  For want of a label, it can be described as being in the genre of ‘crime novel’. But this is no police procedural, no crime noir, no pulp fiction razzmatazz. There’s no older tortured imploding male or younger aggressive female ‘SIO’ named ‘Guv’ here. There’s no team of henchmen/women speaking in the foreign language of abbreviations, variously identified as DCI this, DS that, or DC the other.  But the book does have its crimes and their placing in plot and story within time/s, place/s and being/s –  It was, after all the CWA 2020 ‘Golden Dagger’ winner! But it’s almost a literary crime novel, if that’s not a ‘put off’. The story emerges from the pages in astounding elegance. Much is set in the little Californian backwater of Cape Bay. The central character is Duchess Day Radley, a 13 year old girl of amazing courage and moral strength (think ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and Scout Atacus, or ‘True Grit’ and Matty Ross). Her lifelong support is the ageing and neurological disease-threatened Police Chief Walker, known as ‘Walk’ (whose police department includes him and a lone female dispatcher/multitasker). While the State Police zero in on one culprit in one, two, then three murders for a quick indictment and death sentence, Duchess and Walk have a different target in their sight. And Duchess, the descendant of an Old West outlaw, does not believe in taking prisoners. The book is deep and layered in characters, places and plot. And already taken up by I think Disney+. Anyone read it?  Anyone read other Whitaker novels, or anything similar?