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Christmas Book Flood | Recommending reading

12 January

Book of the day

watchmeWatch Me
(Social Media Murders: book 2)
Angela Clarke
(UK: Avon, 2017)

The body of a 15-year-old is found hours after she sends a desperate message to her friends. It looks like suicide, until a second girl disappears.

This time, the message is sent directly to the Metropolitan Police – and an officer’s younger sister is missing.

DS Nasreen Cudmore and journalist Freddie Venton will stop at nothing to find her. But whoever’s behind the notes is playing a deadly game of hide and seek – and the clock is ticking.

Available in the UK via ‘My Local Bookshop‘ search engine, or via Amazon (Watch Me)

bokati%e2%88%82indi-1-coverFacts of the day

12 January

1967 Dr James Bedford becomes the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation.

New Year

According to a 2002 US research study, each January about one in three Americans resolve to better themselves in some way. A much smaller percentage of people actually make good on those resolutions. Whilst about 75% of people stick to their goals for at least a week, less than half (46%) are still on target six months later.

Book

Zadie Smith claims that she finds the first few pages of novels difficult to write. It took her two years to write the opening chapter to her novel, On Beauty. She says: “the whole nature of the thing changes by the choice of a few words,” which is why she needed to be really careful. The rest of the novel was finished in just five months.

Writers birthdays

1628 Charles Perrault (France)
1729 Edmund Burke (Ireland)
1783 Erik Gustaf Geijer (Sweden)
1861 James Mark Baldwin (USA)
1875 Marika Stiernstedt (Sweden)
1876 Jack London (USA)
1878 Ferenc Molnár (Hungary)
1882 Jakob Jud (Switzerland)
1922 Tadeusz Żychiewicz (Poland)
1929 Alasdair MacIntyre (UK)
1930 Jennifer Johnston (Ireland)
1932 Alain Teister (Netherlands)
1939 Helmut Eisendle (Austria)
1939 Jacques Hamelink (Netherlands)
1948 William Nicholson (UK)
1949 Haruki Murakami (Japan)
1952 Charles Faulkner (USA)
1952 Walter Mosley (USA)
1959 Lasana M Sekou (Aruba)
1962 Joe Quesada (USA)

Jokes of the day

A diet is a strange behaviour where, instead of watching what we eat, we watch what other people eat.

Cartoon: Various, Cartoons on diet regimes, CartoonStock

Quote of the day

Björk Guðmundsdóttir: ‘I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don’t have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.’