vivdunstan

Just blogged about physical descriptions of my Dublin great granny and her close family, including both her parents. Fortunately for me all recorded in Irish prison registers. The family was extremely poor, and in and out of prison a lot for petty crimes.

Second of three appointments completed for my new root canal + new crown. Huge thanks to my lovely NHS dentist. I know I'm really lucky to have him. In awe at his skill which makes scariest things trouble free - I can even fall asleep during them! Also always good craic (he's from Northern Ireland). He trained at Dundee University, taught by among others my previous dentist, who's from the same West Yorkshire town as my dad. Small world.

I now have a temporary crown in place, and can eat fairly normally, but will be extra careful on that side for the next fortnight. After the dental appointment we treated ourselves to breakfast in a local coffee shop, including a soft breakfast roll of scrambled eggs and sausages for me. Felt really indulgent. And fun.

Pleased this afternoon to manage a couple of things on my to do list for the week. I blogged my way through them. Both family history hunts. First finding my granddad and his siblings in Catholic baptism registers for Leeds, Yorkshire. And secondly, using communion rolls to narrow down when my maternal ancestors moved to Melrose, Scotland. Happy with that burst of genealogical productivity.

Just had another look for granddad's baptism in the Leeds Catholic registers on FindMyPast. He is there! Right names for him, dad and mum, also correct birthdate. Recorded under Moor not Moore, which is why I missed him initially. So chuffed with this! I will tell my auntie (his daughter), and also cousins in Ireland (descendants of his Dublin aunts). So that's him in there, as well as all his full siblings.

Before my book club read for August I'm squeezing in another novel. This is alongside Wheel of Time book 7 and spread out Little Dorrit reading. Plus loads of non fiction.

The Stranger Times by C.K. McDonnell has the following publisher blurb:

There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . .

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.

At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got problems of her own.

When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they'd previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.

And for my book club in August The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean has the following blurb:

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

Here are the covers of the two books: