A smorgasbord of stuff for your delectation to celebrate my birthday. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. Only one more part after this one…

23. Lightening Book Review #3: The Vinyl Detective – Noise Floor by Andrew Cartmel. This is the the 7th Vinyl Detective book and possibly the weakest so far. Set in the world of 1980s electronic music it’s not about finding a rare vinyl record this time, but rather finding an aging electronic musician. There’s the usual hipster/foodie/audiophile vibes but the plot is air thin, you will immediately know whodunnit in the whodunnit, and there’s a desperate attempt to give this Scooby-Do style adventure an “edginess” using aging threesomes and references to John Fowler’s The Magus. There is the usual boring insistence on describing every turn in every journey the protagonists take, and the characters are even more cartoony than usual. The only truly enjoyable scene is the village fête in the end, and even that is highly unbelievable. Feel free to skip this one, unless you’re looking for a cozy, featherlight read between other books and there’s nothing better lined up.

24. Lightening Book Review #4:The Vinyl Detective – Underscore, by Andrew Cartmel. This is why I still read this series – a cozy and highly imaginative adventure with a likeable cast, in a charming and vivid setting. The crime is stylized, the new characters are vivacious and it reminds me of my favourite book in the series, Victory Disc (book #3). Take a trip back to London in the 60s, with a dash of family drama, a hint of Italian passion thrown in, and of course a sprinkling of good music.

25. Lightening Book Review #5:The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman. While we’re on the topic of cozy mysteries, this one was a treat. Unexpected plot full of twists and turns, a memorable and original cast of characters, a unique setting, humour and heartache, and a it dared to touch on actual issues with substance (aging, sickness and death, religious oppression, capitalism and corruption, and the limitations of the law and its enforcers). A very enjoyable read and not just because Elizabeth is now one of my favourite fictional characters.

26. My Apple Watch Ultra 2 has been acting up lately – it’s almost 2 years old and it’s been losing battery power and struggling to keep track of my laps in the pool. So far a full charge and a restart before every swim have helped, but it’s annoying. A watch at this price level should be able to last for 3 years at least, and yet we’ve somehow been trained to expect to upgrade our watches every year or two at the most, if only because they lose their ability to keep a charge after the first year or so. Originally my watch lasted almost 3 days between charges (and I’m a very active person). Now I have to charge it once a day. I’ve been contemplating moving to a Garmin for my workouts and switching back to an analog watch, but I use some of the Apple Watch capabilities to keep track of my health post treatments, so we’ll see.

27. I have ordered the Moleskine Limited Edition Peanuts notebooks (the yellow lined large hardcover and two sets of the extra large cahier notebooks). There’s something about this collection that I find irresistible, and so they will be part of my birthday gifts this year.

28. There’s something tragic about an unfilled and unfulfilled notebook and I have too many of those lying around. I’m considering what to do with them, especially with those that I’ve started using and have abandoned after a few pages. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas.

29. Tomorrow I start reading Ulysses having just finished The Obstacle is the Way, the last book that I planned to read in May.

30. Lightening Book Review #6: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. I read the 10th anniversary edition of this book, which has a new introduction and a few additions to it. This is a very digestible intro to stoicism, competently written and researched by a man with a marketing background, but it had the same affect on me that Seth Godin’s books have: it glanced on my brain and left no mark. It was hard to concentrate on this book not because it was challenging but because it was not: it was like eating easily digestible, flavourless popcorn with sprinklings of anecdotal salt at the beginning of each tiny chapter. You are left hungry and unsatisfied at the end, not sure what exactly you consumed.
Philosophy should make you sit up and pay attention, think, stretch your mind and sweat a bit. It was divorced from its gravitas, substance and challenge in this book, and that’s a pity.

31. There’s no greater joy than crumpling yesterday’s to do list and tossing it out.