A little late, but the last week and a half was hectic!
I’ve finally put the summer edition of our school magazine to bed. I had to use Canva for it for the first time, having always used Adobe InDesign before, and found Canva’s AI-driven ‘I-know-better-than-you-what-you-want’ tendencies frustrating, whereas InDesign is totally under your control. I don’t want to change the text size automatically if I change the box size, ditto re cropping of photos – Canva makes you take extra steps to outwit it every time. It’s been a learning curve!
I’ve also had a haircut, got new glasses, been to a wedding staying over with my dad. And, I nearly forgot – I had a day in London for the matinee of Jesus Christ Superstar with Sam Ryder (and feat. Richard Armitage as Herod – I’d asked him about it here at a book event earlier – he said Herod was a nasty piece of work – and he played him on stage as a mad villain kitted out in gold lamé jodphurs!).
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I’m doing well with my own #20BOS26 – I’ve read 13 and reviewed 11 of them, 14th read nearly done, so I’m well on target – and plan to have a lazy August with loads of reading, so getting to 20 shouldn’t be an obstacle (best laid plans and all!). I offered a bit of creative thinking in my Midway Check-in post, and I’ve created a road trip for fun ,,,
My #20BOS26 Road Trip
Part One of my trip stays relatively close to home, around the British Isles.
- We begin in Dublin, where Louise Hegarty author of Fair Play hails from, where we’ll hop over the Irish sea – by ferry to Liverpool and on to…
- Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. This is where the bananas imported by Joseph Paxton were grown in the glasshouses – gaining their name Cavendish from the Duke of Devonshire’s family name, as described in The Future of Bananas by James Dale. From there, we’ll motor down to…
- Oxford, where Dani Heywood-Lonsdale’s protagonists in historical art thriller, The Portrait Artist are based. We shall then take a detour to the…
- Devon Coast – where we’ll go searching for lost lego with Tracey Williams, author of the lovely book Adrift: The Story of the Lego Lost at Sea.
- But the lure of the capital is strong, so it’s off back to London, stopping off at the Park Royal Business Park on the outskirts as we approach. This could be the model for Ben Pester’s Capmeadow Business Park in The Expansion Project.
- Onwards into the city, and we shall visit the National Gallery where The Portrait Artist is partly set.
- We’ll also head to the East End where we’ll go to the dogs in Hackney as in Nicola Barker’s Reversed Forecast for something completely different!
Wanderlust beckons though, so we’ll head to Heathrow for a long-haul flight from London to:
- KolKata, India. However, we’ve stayed with Nicola Barker, as that’s where her fictional biography of mystic Sri Ramakrishna, The Cauliflower, is based. After immersing ourselves into the bustle of Kolkata, we need some R’n’R – so will take flights to get us to
- California, and via San Francisco, where we’ll pick up an RV, we visit Fresno and Sacramento where cartoonist Adrian Tomine went to school, and was born respectively – he tells of his early life there in his cartoon memoir, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.
- Here we’ll pick up an RV for a drive north through Nevada to Idaho, the rural setting for Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. After sampling the rural delights of the Rockies foothills, we’ll drop off the RV and take a flight from Boise to:
- New York. Halfway through Tomine’s memoir, he meets his future wife and moves to New York where he now lives in Brooklyn.
Our globe-trotting must come to an end, so it’s back to Europe we will go for an extended stay in Paris – for at least 3 novellas worth (Duras, de Vigan and Balle), and our trip ends for now.
Where next though?
Well we’ll stay in Paris with Balle as her protagonist Tara is doomed to relive November 18th over and over again. However, we won’t get trapped in that loop, after another Solvej Balle, let’s take a trip around the Mediterranean countries with Esther Garcia Llovet to Benidorm on the trail of Ronnie Kray’s stolen cigarette lighter in Spanish Beauty, then late 1960s Morocco with Leïla Slimani in Watch Us Dance, before heading home to London for Nicola Barker’s Darkmans.
And my trip is complete? Where did your books take you so far this summer?
