24 Festive Tasks: Guy Fawkes Night

 

Square Two

Book: Read a book set in the UK, a political thriller, a book involving any monarchy or revolution, a book about arson or related to fires and burning, or a book that is self-published.

Decider by Dick Francis (set in UK, plot involves arson)  

When Keith wants to get rid of something, he burns it. 

 

 

Task 1: Start a (publishing) revolution! What would you change / reform / get rid of in the book world?

Change is good. Change is needed. But not all changes in and of themselves are good. For me, it is audiobooks other than plays that are produced with background music, sound effects and multiple narrators -- and they are proliferating.  That kind of crap is intrusive. If I wanted a movie, I would turn on the television and watch.  For me, these over-produced recordings are part and parcel of BT's gripe: hype over quality.  Most of the time, they are just a case of lipstick on a pig or the emperor's new clothes -- the pig is still ugly and the king still has been hoodwinked. A talented single (or maybe two if there two distinct narrative voices) narrator is all that is needed to produce a quality audiobook that lets the words speak for themselves.

Task 2: Many of us would probably like to burn the whole year of 2020 in effigy. If that’s true for you, now is your chance! Tell the world (or us, anyway) what you hated about this year and why it should be blasted off the calendar forever.

Taking this entirely on a personal level, there is no doubt that 2020 will go down as one of the strangest years in my memory but oddly for me, I can't lay the blame entirely on the pandemic.  Yes, like everyone else,  life around us cancelled and closed  and we went into isolation and donned our masks.  Etc. etc.  But, when my favorite art instructor retired and when my favorite bookish website collapse, it had nothing to do with the pandemic -- and for some reason, these things hit harder because once the virus is under control and life gets back to some semblance of normal, Bill will still be retired and BL will still be mismanaged, a safety hazard and left to the spammers.