AC Fick 📚

A pile of books to be read before the end of April 2026.

View from the northern balcony into the Nonfiction Room of the Late Imperial Library.

View of the pool and garden through a rain spattered window.

View to the north of the trees beyond the ha-ha, and the lift towers of the building downslope on a rainy Sunday in Johannesburg's old north.

Must make a dent in this pile before the world ends.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📑🗝🚪🌳🌍⛈️

A room lined with books, with a table and sofa in the centre, and in the foreground the Calendario Romano open to March, showing an altar boy about to receive communion.

A room lined with books, with a table in the middle, and in the foreground the Calendario Romano open to March, showing an altar boy about to receive communion.

A room lined with books alphabetised by author surname.

A small shelf with books alphabetised by playwright surname from Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Albee, and Aristophanes through Harold Pinter, Dennis Potter, and William Shakespeare, clocks, boxes, keys, and a framed photograph of a group of writers on a beach at the southern end of Africa.

Earthquakes mean March
[…]
The sun of this month cures all.
Therefore, old women say:
Let the sun of March shine on my daughter,
but let the sun of February shine on my daughter-in-law.
▫️Anne Sexton, 1975

A new, apocalyptic month in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi.

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Neville Morley's CLASSICS WHY IT MATTERS; Alasdair Roberts's CAN GOVERNMENT DO ANYTHING RIGHT?; Göran Therborn's THE KILLING FIELDS OF INEQUALITY; and Alexandra Fuller's FI: A MEMOIR OF MY SON.

Four hot cross buns.

Prunes

Four pouches of parsley.

Books and buns, parsley and prunes: one dared to go forth to market just before the afternoon wind-storm began in #NorthJozi.

🫅🏾🛒📚🥖🥬🫐🌬🌍☁️

Pumpkin, tomatoes, gooseberries, lemon, green pepper, yellow granadillas, purple granadillas, beans, chillis, and tamarillos.

Today's mini-harvest from the volunteer food garden in #NorthJozi.

Laura Jean McKay's THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY, and Karl Ove Knausgaard's THE THIRD REALM.

Friday inductees into the #LateImperialLibrary: time to shut one's imperious personage in for the week's end.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📑🗝🚪🌳🌍🌔

Four purple granadillas freshly harvested off the vine at the office garden.

A yellow granadilla harvested off the vine at the office.

Granadilla flower.

Granadilla flower.

Today's harvest from the two vines and two new flowers in #NorthJozi.

E-waste chemicals found in the brains of dolphins and porpoises A new study has warned that liquid crystal monomers from electronic devices are accumulating in the organs of endangered marine species.

"How chemicals from our laptops and TVs have ended up in the brains of dolphins and porpoises"
www.euronews.com/2026/02/25/h...

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a person is pushing a stack of books on a table and one of the books has the letter t on it Alt: Cartoon GIF of a person putting a stack of books on a table.

Every few weeks there is a Fourways bookshop selling stock on tables in the Killarney shopping centre.

Copies of Roberto Bolaño's A LITTLE LUMPEN NOVELITA, Ursula K. Le Guin's LAVINIA, Alan Hollinghurst's THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR, and Miguel de Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE. The Hollinghurst is a masochistic moment given how appalled one is by elements in his work (the same exasperation one has with Edmund White's oeuvre), but, pace Katherine Mansfield, one must go everywhere, see everything.

Thursday inductees into the #LateImperialLibrary; one went forth to get poppadoms and ended up ensnared in a table-top book trader's trap. Still, one can never have too many copies of Cervantes or Le Guin, and the Bolaño was a good find.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📑🗝🚪🌳🌍🌔

Watch 'I leave for France. Be not tongue-tied. You're a dream of what you were. A breath, a Queen...' | Richard III Clip Watch the clip 'I leave for France. Be not tongue-tied. You're a dream of what you were. A breath, a Queen...' from the movie Richard III on Clip.Cafe. Duchess of York: I leave for France. Be not tong...

Mood.

clip.cafe/share/i-leav...

What's a line delivery you'll never forget?

clip.cafe/share/oh-hea...

Mood. 🥋

Indeed. One of the many reasons elites don't want unencumbered access to the information or the internet . . .

Who else wants Northern European crown princess level chutzpah, such that you can apologise for consorting with a monster by saying, "Some of the content of the messages between Epstein and me does not represent the person I want to be". Levels, Jerry! Levels!

A shelf of fiction with the volumes alphabetised by author surname from Harry Mulisch and Herta Müller through Charles Mungoshi and Alice Munro.

A shelf of fiction with the volumes alphabetised by author surname from R. K. Narayan and Ibrahim Nasrallah and Taslima Nasrin through Gloria Naylor and Njabulo Ndebele and Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu and Irène Némirovsky.

A shelf of fiction with the volumes alphabetised by author surname from Maggie Resha and Yasmina Reza through Jean Rhys and João Ubaldo Riberio and Samuel Richardson.

A shelf of fiction with volumes by Salman Rushdie from GRIMUS and MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREn through EAST, WEST and FURY.

Must one go forth from the #LateImperialLibrary to snip ribbons and smile at the naive watercolours of miseducated bureaucrats? Alas, noblesse oblige in #NorthJozi in 18 ⁰C . . .

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This guy gets it.

Is The World Going Sober? $830 Million Wiped Of Liquor Stocks, As Jim Beam Halts Output As Jim Beam, Kentucky's bourbon icon, halts some production in 2026, almost $830 million has been erased from spirits market value. As wellness rises, drinking is not.

This is an amazing figure. Because Gen Z doesn’t drink much alcohol, the industry has lost $830 billion over 4 years

www.forbes.com/sites/dougme...

Film still from NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1984), Michael Radford's adaptation of George Orwell's 1949 novel, showing John Hurt as Winston Smith writing in his diary in his enclave in the totalitarian state of Oceania.

Mood.

a man in a suit and tie looks surprised with his mouth open Alt: GIF from THE GOOD FIGHT (2017-2021) showing Delroy Lindo as Adrian Boseman in a suit and tie looking shocked with his mouth open.

I have a (mis?)memory of going to see jobs and posts about careers and of seeing where students went after graduation when I first joined. I rarely checked it, but now get email notifications for connection requests. But the main feed is 50-year olds acting like 13-year olds emotional incontinence.

What in Hades is going on on LinkedIn? It seems to have been turned into a space for bathetic performance of dating site level pseudo-intellectual non-argument, and a platform for semi-literate, misinformed and disinforming '80s-style self-help posturing. Ragnarök for building professional networks.

Confessions of bibliophiles Amassing a hoard of literary treasures is essential for some but so is sharing the love

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mg.co.za/article/2019...

Philip Roth books of fiction arranged by date of publication: GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (2 paperbacks); LETTING GO (2 paperbacks); WHEN SHE WAS GOOD (2 hardbacks and 1 paperback); PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT (2 hardbacks and 5 paperbacks); OUR GANG (2 hardbacks and 1 paperback); THE BREAST (2 paperbacks); and, THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL (2 hardbacks and 1 of 2 paperbacks).

Philip Roth books of fiction arranged by date of publication: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL (1 of 2 paperbacks); MY LIFE AS A MAN (1 hardback and 2 paperbacks); THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE (3 hardbacks and 1 paperback); THE GHOST WRITER (3 hardbacks and 2 paperbacks); ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND (3 hardbacks and 1 paperback); THE ANATOMY LESSON (2 hardbacks); THE PRAGUE ORGY (1 hardback and 1 paperback); THE COUNTERLIFE (1 hardback and 1 paperback); THE FACTS (1 paperback); and, DECEPTION (1 of 2 hardbacks).

Philip Roth books of fiction arranged by date of publication: DECEPTION (1 of 2 hardbacks and 2 paperbacks); PATRIMONY (1 hardback and 1 paperback); NOVELS AND OTHER NARRATIVES 1986-1991 (2 hardbacks); OPERATION SHYLOCK (2 hardbacks and 2 paperbacks); SABBATH'S THEATRE (1 hardback and 1 paperback); AMERICAN PASTORAL (1 hardback and 3 paperbacks); and, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST (2 hardbacks and 1 paperback).

Philip Roth books of fiction arranged by date of publication: THE HUMAN STAIN (2 harsbacks and 1 paperback); THE DYING ANIMAL (2 hardbacks); THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA (2 hardbacks and 3 paperbacks); EVERYMAN (3 hardbacks and 1 paperback); EXIT GHOST (2 hardbacks and 2 paperbacks); INDIGNATION (1 hardback and 1 paperback); THE HUMBLING (1 hardback); and NEMESIS (2 hardbacks and 1 paperback). Stacked on top of these: READING MYSELF AND OTHERS (2 paperbacks); and, SHOP TALK: A WRITER AND HIS COLLEAGUES AND THEIR WORK (2 paperbacks).

Art is life, too, you know. Solitude is life, meditation is life, pretending is life, supposition is life, contemplation is life, language is life.
▫️Philip Roth, 1981

#BookSky 📚💙 📚🖋

a man is sitting at a table with the words freedom is a noble thing eh Alt: GIF from MIDDLEMARCH (1994) showing Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw, seated, saying, "Freedom is a noble thing, eh?", and his interlocutor replying, "Indeed, sir, and in short supply".

Twenty years ago, in a small Eastern Cape town of grotesques—"[a] town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe" (Eliot, 1871-2)—one had it trucked in from a store in a seaside city 130km away.

Cream-coloured sofa in front of bookcases of fiction on which volumes are alphabetised by author surname from Michael Cunningham and Rachel Cusk through Joseph Heller and Lillian Hellman. A table covered with an orange cloth bears a laptop, tablets, DVDs, books, a wooden bowl of Namibian soapstone hearts, two small maroon biscuit tins, and some plastic building blocks. Extract in main post from THE UTOPIA OF RULES: ON TECHNOLOGY, STUPIDITY, AND THE SECRET JOYS OF BUREAUCRACY by David Graeber (2015).

Swimming pool surrounded by trees in a garden lit by the sun of late summer, early autumn.

Leaves turning colour in late summer, early autumn, in Johannesburg.

Bright sunshine in a blue sky dotted with wispy clouds over Johannesburg.

As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than systems of arbitrary extraction, everyone duly scurries about trying to curry favor by pretending they actually believe this is to be true.
▫️David Graeber, 2015

📚💙 #LateImperialLibrary #NorthJozi

Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Peter Horn, E. W. Hornung, and Michel Houllebecq to Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Han Kang, and J. C. Kannemeyer.

Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Ismail Kadare, Franz Kafka, and Jaroslav Kalfar through Mandla Langa, Margaret Laurence, and Phyllida Law.

Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Hamid Ismailov, Noni Jabavu, and Harriet Jacobs through Elfriede Jelinek, Jack Kerouac, and Barbara Kingsolver.

Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Doris Lessing, Andrea Levy, and Javier Marías through Gabriel García Márquez, Valerie Martin, and Emma Mashinini.

Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.
▫️Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915

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Quotation from Arundhati Roy interview with David Barsamian (from 2022, published in “The Architecture of Empire” in 2023): “[P]oetry, literature, the way you build a story, the way you tell a story, the way you construct a sentence, these are all more indestructible than almost anything else. So to insist on beauty. To insist on the fact that you are going to spend a lot of time trying to create something that presents the world as different from the way people want you to see it. That you notice things that people don't want you to notice. These are acts of resistance for me.”

5 other writers of whom I've read 5 + books: 💙📚

#BookSky

Angela Carter
Italo Calvino
Ursula K. Le Guin
Alice Munro
Naguib Mahfouz

Well, one saves almost nothing but celebrity pictures in one's twilight years, all one's idols too dead to be tarnished by revelations, and no comfort in the apocalyptic times but the undisappointing dead.

🥂

Cassette tape case style presentation of Bruce Springsteen's "57 Channels (And Nothin' On): The Remixes" (1992).

Indeed.