Colin Howells

@colinhowells.com

110 Followers 457 Following

Wishes he was a headlight on a northbound train

A copy of Stephen Markley’s novel The Deluge from 2023
American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (Adam Hochschild, 2023)
Berg (Bryan R. Simms & Charlotte Erwin, 2021, Oxford University Press)
Travesties (Tom Stoppard, 1974), the Faber and Faber paperback
Poetry of the First World War (ed. Tim Kendall, 2013, Oxford)
The Great Swindle (Pierre Lemaitre trans. Frank Wynne, 2015)
Two books: The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann trans. John E Woods, 2005) and The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Morten Høi Jensen, 2025)
'In the third and final volume of John Röhl’s immense biography of Wilhelm II, the Kaiser’s voice is the thread that holds the text together. On page after page, he cajoles, whines, demands, vociferates and babbles, bombarding his interlocutors (and the reader) with fantastical geopolitical speculations, crackpot plans, sarcastic asides and off-colour jokes. Reading Wilhelm II on every conceivable subject for more than 1200 pages (3000 if you read the three volumes in sequence) is like listening for days on end to a dog barking inside a locked car. And the effect is heightened by the fact that this volume is focused more narrowly on the monarch than its predecessors – there are fewer excursions into the worlds of the rest of the imperial elite and fewer pen-portraits of friends and associates.'
The Essential Rilke (Trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, 1999) and Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (William H. Gass, 1999)
The Children of Men (PD James, 1992)
The Living Are Few, the Dead Many: Selected Works of Hans Henny Jahnn (Hans Henny Jahnn trans. Malcolm Green, 2012)
Permutation City (Greg Egan, 1994)
Rowdy Roddy Piper dons the They Live sunglasses, in an analogy to the naked clarity all would experience if we just sent prompts to each other instead of outputs
A gamine Eliane Radigue, legendary electroacoustic composer, photographed in 1958 by Jacques Brisseaut
A broken Claude Desktop UI featuring one lonely textarea and naught else
Christopher Lambert in Luc Besson’s 1985 film Subway
Watto from the Star Wars prequels hovering in the air about to deliver some ethnically stereotyped dialogue
A book – The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (Alistair Horne, 1990)
Two books: Germinal (Émile Zola trans. Leonard Tancock, 1954), La débâcle (Émile Zola trans. Elinor Dorday, 2000)
Two books: The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Roger Price, 2005) and The Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820–1950 (ed. and trans. William Rees, 1994)
Two books – Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection 1815–1840 (Philip G. Dwyer, 2019) and The Red and the Black (Stendhal trans. Burton Raffel, 2003)
Two books: Buddenbrooks (Thomas Mann trans. John E. Woods, 1993), and Gustav Mahler (Jens Malte Fischer trans. Stewart Spencer, 2013) on a fetching mosaic coffee table
Michael Lentz’s enormous novel Schattenfroh, in its English translation by Max Lawton, edited by Matthias Friedrich, from Deep Vellum in TX
Two books: Michael Koolhaas (Heinrich von Kleist trans. Michael Hofmann, 2020) and Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War (Lyndal Roper, 2025) resting on a very fetching table
Milo Manara's Caravaggio (both volumes) and a hardcover of Dante’s Divine Comedy from Everyman’s Library lying on a fetching mosaic table
Comic character Axel Pressbutton's bio from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Pressbutton?useskin=vector#Character_biography
Screenshot detail of a Cascade PBS subscription page, marketed as 'Passport'
A paperback copy of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (Andrew Graham-Dixon, 2010) on a very attractive mosaic table
Roofed gate, featuring a plaque reading 'LIFE IS TO ENJOY' while a security camera operates in the background
Two books: Goethe – Faust Pt 1 in an English translation, and Philip K Dick – VALIS & Later Novels, a Library of America collection
Comically tiny dog peeking out from a tiny window in an enormous red fence
The Kingdom (Emmanuel Carrère trans. John Lambert, 2017)
Two books: Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell and The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins
A tulip being gently, though threateningly, squeezed in a vice
António Lobo Antunes – The Inquisitors’ Manual, trans. Richard Zenith, 2004 Philip Freeman – In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor, 2024
JavaScript code: the number 017 is non-strictly compared (double-, not triple-equals) to the string '17', and evaluates to false; 018 and '18' evals as true
Showing off being chronologically close to the mystery time and place of an online guessing game
Mapping the land between Iceland and Ireland: 'Ideland', 'Ieeland', 'Ifeland' …
Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian and M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati, translated by Anne Milano Appel (2022)
More than 200,000 mourners attend Long's funeral at the State Capitol in Baton Rouge, LA (pic courtesy of the State Library of Louisiana)
Paperback of Chevengur by Andrey Platonov, translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler, from NYRB
From Kagi (the best search engine), a description of the article 'Troubleshoot What a Favicon.ico Is and why a Browser Requests It' on Cisco's support docs: 'Modern browsers show an icon to the left of the URL. This is known as the 'favicon.ico' and is typically fetched from the favicon.io website.'
Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev, translated from the Russian by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater, from NYRB
Job ad: 'AI/ML Engineer with React JS, Java or Python, Svelte, AI/ML - 10+ years only'
Painting by Tom Waring entitled 'Gwedutch', 2023