Mark Cocker, Crow Country, Elizabeth Bowen, The Death Of The Heart, EP Thompson, Whigs And Hunters, Samantha Harvey, The West Wind, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, John Rees, The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 16405-1650

Crow Country was a reread, and a book that sparked my somewhat sporadic interest in corvids. I must have read half a dozen books on crows, but as Helen points out I still struggle to tell a jackdaw from a rook. William is rather in to collecting fings at the moment, 'fings' mostly consisting of rocks and 'fevvas'. There's a flock of canada geese that have taken up residence in the car park at work, so I can nip out every now and then and get feathers for William's collection. Currently his rather unhygienic collection is on display in a jam jar on the kitchen table alongside the 'unicorn twigs' Libby cajoled me into buying from Morrison's. 'The Death of the Heart' was form the 100 essential novels and fitted into the mid-century upper-class woman with no real problems trying to keep up appearances rather than the late 20th century east coast academic with no real problems dealing with is own neuroses category. Far better was Things Fall Apart, the last paragraph of which cause me to swear with shock. Following a tale of a powerful man brought low in tribal Nigeria, it finishes with a new colonial governor arriving and treating all the events of the book as a minor footnote in his own vanity publication on the subject of subduing natives in the Upper Niger valley.