MrBarrington

@mrbarrington

Stockholm-based, London-born book/language nerd 🤓

813 Following399 Followers1,256 Posts

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MrBarrington@mrbarrington· 4d

Having just observed Swedish summer vacation for weeks 29-32 (inclusive), can confirm I felt exactly like this guy when I explained it all to the UK colleague who was covering my work (Insta: conajam)

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· 7d

Just a sparrowhawk out here munching a pigeon in the school playground over the road from us (Central Stockholm)

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Jul 5

Afternoon, RW: just finished my pal @angelahur.bsky.social ‘s wonderful, weird campus fantasy, The Loom Tree: a deep dive into family secrets, myths and folklore, and ultimately a love letter from parent to child (and back again?)

Cover of The Loom Tree by Angela Mi Young Hur with an illustration of a kind of ur-Yggdrasil, mythological world tree

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Jun 30

Happy publication day @angelahur.bsky.social!! #TheLoomTree landed in my audiobook library this morning…

Audiobook listing for Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree, a darkly sparkling campus-set fantasy

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· May 15

Due to an optical illusion, Trump’s “sphere of ignorance” appears to be the same size as, if not smaller than, Xi’s

Some crappy news feeder website story graphic showing Trump and Xi Jinping each overlaid with a coloured circle representing, one supposes, their respective “spheres of ignorance” referenced in the title

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Apr 20

No-one nailed the deal with adjectives n’ adverbs better than Ursula K Le Guin

From Le Guin’s Steering the Craft:

“I recommend to all storytellers a watchful attitude and a thoughtful, careful choice of adjectives and adverbs, because the bakery shop of English is rich beyond belief, and narrative prose, particularly if it's going a long distance, needs more muscle than fat.”

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Apr 19

Just William Carlos Williams, out here coveting someone else’s plums again

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Apr 16

Vibecodemaxxing

Main Bluesky Following timeline with red “! Forbidden” header and no posts visible

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Apr 12

Morning Womble – currently getting overly invested in the effect of EU postal directives on the Norwegian postal service, thanks to Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn!

Cover of the Verso Fiction edition of Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth. The cover art is a piece called The Receptionist (2013) by Anja Nieni: an odd staged photo of a desk, with a picture frame (mirror?) showing a red-haired woman in a petrol/teal outfit. Also on the desk is a telephone, with a gloved hand reaching for the handset - the sleeve of the reaching arm also in petrol/teal. It’s discombobulating, like the novel.

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Apr 5

Trialling convoluted new book delivery method: - order books with UK delivery to sister’s house - parents take books back home with them to Spain - visit parents in Spain and take books back home to Sweden

Stacks of books, spines out, slopes of spring valley in background

– Vigdis Hjorth, Long Live the Post Horn!
– Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
– Tom Cox, Notebook
– Tom Cox, Villager
– Ann Pettifor, The Gloval Casino
– Lisa Siraganian, The Problem of Personhood

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Apr 1

Good crikey but this was an incredible novel I had some designer friends/colleagues who loved working with negative space; astonishing to see it done in prose

Cover of Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber) showing an empty shell stood point down in a sandy beach, pale blue horizon behind

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Mar 6

The fact that the weather feels springlike was a straight up breaking news alert for Stockholm in the national broadcaster’s news app

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Feb 27

Typical, installed a footwarmer in the home office in the same week that temperatures jumped up to not-freezing

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Feb 26

Upgraded the home office (it’s only a loaner though)

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Feb 22

“Oh I’ve had well over one hundred cheddars”

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Feb 22

Insane flexes you see over on Reddit Don’t talk to me about cheddar, I’ve forgotten more cheddar than you’ll ever taste

Internet comment: “Oh l've had well over 100 different cheddars, there are 7 different ones in my fridge at this very moment, it's the best cheese in the world.”

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Feb 14

It’s been THIRTYFIVE YEARS since I saw this lovely man @karl01.bsky.social

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Jan 19

We can only speculate how they might have sounded

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Jan 13

What’s up with the tone policing, PostNord chatbot? Also, since when was “useless” profanity?

Chatbot chat log:
- Chatbot, why are you so useless?
- Please don’t use profanity. We ask you to maintain a respectful tone and avoid using profanity or foul language.

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 26

#booklog 40. Having and Being Had – Eula Biss Loved this. Vignettes about Biss’s life, her family, home, art – and consumer habits – that deliver a clear-eyed analysis of the traps of capitalism. No solutions, but contradictions and Catch-22s are laid bare without judgement, without pulling punches

Cover of Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had, featuring a painting of some extravagant feast

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 25

#booklog 39. The Waste Land & Four Quartets – T.S. Eliot My achilles bugbear: acclaimed contemporary UK actors reciting poetry. Great actors! I’d gladly watch them in Hamlet or on HBO doing a regional US accent. But I always feel the energy is “look at me! Serving the text with killer acting chops”

BBC Radio Collection audiobook cover of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land & Four Quartets, read by Paul Schofield

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 24

#booklog 38. The Odyssey – Homer (Fitzgerald translation) The more one revisits the Odyssey, the more one is struck by what a duplicitous a**hole Odysseus is What a friggin’ tool

Cover of the Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey, with an odd painting reminiscent of a tree man creature, or some bullshit, sea behind.

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 24

Every time I open this dishwasher with its weird blue light I feel like I should be ordering two vodka Red Bulls and three bottles of water. Turnmills vibes?

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 22

37. The Devil – Leo Tolstoy Still attempting to appreciate Tolstoy. Chipping away at short stories, & the unfinished (barely started) novel, The Decembrists Turned to this in a moment of high work bullshit when I couldn’t face anything remotely modern, “my eyes seemed to say” (Not there yet, obv)

Cover of Tolstoy’s Short Fiction from Standard Ebooks, with a painting of some sort of tsarist Russian dreadfulness, a serf whipping a lame child as soldiers and assorted poor muzhiks look on

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 22

#booklog 36. Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Evocative, immersive, lusty, humorous, and quite brutal. Some parts feel underdone, some didactic dialogue, if that’s not overly quibbling. But full of powerful images; the mother of the girl with braided hair is particularly haunting

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 21

#booklog 35. Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality – Venki Ramakrishnan Fascinating study of the aging process, what it means for life in general & humans in particular. Chortled when he finally put the boot in to the current raft of tech billionaires out to cure death

Cover of Venki Ramakrishnan’s “Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality”, plain white cover with a sort of part-vial of blood, part-hourglass thing, one half with purple-red blood, the other half bleeding further into the rainbow with orange-yellow-green…

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 19

#booklog 34. How to Write One Song – Jeff Tweedy Had to put this down halfway through as I was dangerously close to writing one song, and my family doesn’t need that “oh shit he picked up the acoustic guitar again” energy Recommended

Audiobook cover of Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song. The word song is multicoloured. Jeff’s cowboy-hatted head pops up from the bottom of the frame, only as far as the nose

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 19

#booklog 33. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – Susannah Clarke Piranesi inspired #reread. Vexed me twenty years ago, when I thought it lost its way & fizzled out. Nonsense! Though still think, stylistic pastiche or no, it could be 100 pages shorter. Regardless, much better second time around

Cover of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, silhouette of a raven against plain white cover, text in faded lettertype

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 18

#booklog 32. The City We Became – N.K. Jemisin The anger at Trump’s America is palpable. Took me a foolishly long time to realise this city-themed fantasy obviously also had gentrification in its sights. But it didn’t pack the emotional punch that I got from each volume in the Broken Earth series

Cover of N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, with 3D-style overlaid colour images of a New York skyline shot from underneath a bridge

MrBarrington@mrbarrington· Dec 16

#booklog 31. Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives – Sam Parker Good reviews, well blurbed. But not particularly convinced, tbh. Have to be sceptical of arguments based on shonky shibboleths like, say, the Stanford Prison Experiment