Buggers

Well folks, a bit cooler today and for some like my cousin , very grateful for. He found it stifling the other day. I really do not mind the heat but then it's horses for courses.

I am doing my twice a week stint at Avanta in Sittingbourne, and as each week goes by I can ascertain the interest in helping jobseekers trail off. They have blocked my LiveJournal access but so far do not know about my other blog site. Tee hee. (Just for reference they also block Twitter and Facebook). So this is a bit of a covert post.

Beforehand, decided i needed a pint of foaming ale and went into The Summoner, a Wetherspoons pub, and quaffed a delicious Ringwood Old Thumper (5.6 % ABV).

Think I better go before the thought police get me.

Hythed Off

After my morning in Sittingbourne I took the bus to Canterbury for another visit and then a charity shop in Hythe.

In Hythe I picked up three books and one CD, which I gave to my cousin as he is a Manic Street Preachers fan.

The books are -

Ian McEwen “Atonement” (Vintage)
David Pearce “The Damned United” (Faber)
Tim Butcher “Blood River” (Vintage)
Bernhard Schlink “The Reader” (Phoenix)





The "Damned Utd" book is the second copy i have picked up recently but this one is a cleaner one and thus I have a spare to re-donate.Of these four  i think I shall start with "The Reader".

Book 38 - Daphne Du Maurier "The Doll: Short Stories "

Daphne Du Maurier "The Doll: Short Stories" (Virago)





I’d only read one of du Maurier’s stories (“The Birds,” which I loved) before reading this collection, which I’ve seen some readers classify as lesser du Maurier. If these are her less successful stories, I’m excited to dig into her best ones!

Best known for "Rebecca" and "Jamaica Inn", most of the 13 stories in this collection were published either in the 1920s and 1930s in various magazines and anthologies or in the 1955 collection Early Stories. All were written before du Maurier was 23 years old, and her potential as a storyteller is present in each and every story.

All of these stories have some sort of dark element at their core. Sometimes the darkness is in the form of a nasty twist at the end, as in the opening story “The East Wind” in which a temporary madness overtakes a seaside village. At other times, the main character is shown to be unaware of the potential disasters around them ("Tame Cat"). And then there are the characters who aren’t what they seem ("And Now to God the Father"). Sometimes the darkness has a comic twist ("Frustration").

Perhaps the oddest story in the collection is the title story. The revelation on which this story turns is excessively strange, but what interested me about it is what the secret he discovers represents. The horror here is not in what he learned, perhaps, but in two ideas: (1) That a woman can be utterly self-sufficient, not needing a man and (2) That a woman can have a strong sex drive. Which of these facts sent the narrator over the edge?

Although there were aspects of every story that I liked, a couple of them stand out as less successful. “The Happy Valley” is underdeveloped. “The Limpet” is sometimes wickedly funny, but it goes on too long.