Visiting Kaş, Türkiye

On By Rick McIn travelLeave a comment

I ended up 4 nights in a private room in Kaş. That’s a holiday !

I love the place. Here I am in front of the ancient Greek theatre.

RICK

It’s a scenic small town on Türkiye’s Turquoise Coast, best known for its Lycian Way hiking trails, ancient ruins, and sea kayaking over the Sunken City of Kekova.

Of course I was here to hike the BEST section of the Lycian Way.

It’s low season for tourism. But November is ideal for hiking as the summer rush is over. Temperatures hover around a comfortable 21°C.

Very scenic. Here’s the vista from my balcony.

VISTA

Kaş is pronounced like CASH. So this company is called CASH MONEY. Truth in advertising. 😀

If you love cats, Türkiye is the country for you. Feral cats are everywhere, most well fed by the locals.

Sunset is my favourite time of day here.

Of course the Turkish Riviera is a destination for the rich and famous. Plenty of boats. But it’s the wrong time of year to see Tom Hanks or Rita Wilson in any of the local restaurants.

I’d return any time.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

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An impressive novel.

One of the top books of the year.

The Calamity Club (2026) is a historical fiction novel by American author Kathryn Stockett.

Set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933 during the Great Depression, the book follows two women and a girl — an orphaned girl, an unmarried bookkeeper, and a resourceful down-on-her-luck woman — whose lives converge amid the poverty, hypocrisy, and constrained freedoms of the Depression-era Deep South.

  • Birdie Calhoun. An unmarried, outspoken bookkeeper from the rural Mississippi Delta who travels to Oxford to ask her social-climbing sister for money to pay back taxes on their family home.
  • Meg Lefleur. A bright eleven-year-old girl living at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum after her mother mysteriously vanished on Christmas Eve. Deemed an unadoptable “big girl,” she endures harsh treatment from the orphanage director while holding onto hope.
  • Charlie. A gritty, resourceful woman with a complicated past and nothing left to lose. When her path crosses with Birdie, Meg, and other underestimated townswomen, they devise an audacious, high-risk scheme to survive.

Reviewers at outlets like The New York Times and Oprah Daily have praised it as an immersive, rowdy, and big-hearted saga of found family.

While some critics note a slow initial setup as the dual storylines develop, the audiobook edition—narrated by Jenna Lamia and January LaVoy—has received widespread acclaim.

Leonard Cohen – In Flander’s Fields

On By Rick McIn government, philosophy6 Comments

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

– John McCrae, 1915

Though thankfully I was never in a war, this is an important day for me. I remember.

Lest we forget – CBC

Remembrance Day (Australia, Canada, Colombia, UK and Ireland), also known as Poppy Day (South Africa and Malta), and Armistice Day (UK, New Zealand and many other Commonwealth countries; and the original name of the holiday internationally) is a day to commemorate the sacrifice of veterans and civilians in World War I and other wars. It is observed on November 11 to recall the end of World War I on that date in 1918.

Remembrance Day – wikipedia

Cause of Death by Patricia Cornwell

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Quite good. Suspend your disbelief.

Cause of Death (1996) is a crime fiction novel by Patricia Cornwell. The 7th book in the entertaining Dr. Kay Scarpetta series.

Ted Eddings is a reporter, found dead in the Elizabeth River, tethered to a compressor which pumps surface breathing air down to him. He was killed by breathing in cyanide gas through the compressor.

Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is called in to investigate.

An assistant to Kay, Danny Webster is later found dead in Kay’s car. Is his murder related?

Her sidekick, gruff, loveable Pete Marino – Police Captain in the Richmond Police Department, is the best character.

All good until the last 3rd of the book which explodes into a massive international conspiracy involving a domestic death cult, nuclear power plants, and Libyan terrorists. I could have skipped this. 😀





Without Merit by Colleen Hoover

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Not bad.

Without Merit (2017) is a contemporary young adult novel written by Colleen Hoover.

Unlike many of her viral romance hits, this book shifts its primary focus away from a central love story to explore heavy family dynamics, mental health, depression, and the burden of keeping secrets.

The story follows 17-year-old Merit Voss, who considers herself the invisible outcast of her incredibly bizarre family. The Voss family lives in a repurposed church affectionately dubbed “Dollar Voss”.

The living situation is highly dysfunctional: Merit’s father lives upstairs with his new wife (who was formerly his ex-wife’s nurse), while Merit’s biological mother lives downstairs in the basement recovering from severe anxiety and agoraphobia.

It sounds depressing. But Merit is an interesting and funny character.

She collects unearned trophies. 😀

Hang in there. The book concludes on a hopeful note centered around reconciliation, mental health treatment, and open communication.

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

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How to Stop Time (2017) is a historical fantasy by English writer Matt Haig.

A thought provoking read. Haig is an excellent writer 

Tom Hazard has just moved back to London to take a job as a high school history teacher. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but due to a rare condition, he has been alive for centuries.

He was born in 1581 in France and has lived history alongside famous historical characters such as Shakespeare, Captain Cook, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Tom is constantly under the supervision of the Albatross Society, a secretive group which claims to protect people like him, and its leader, Hendrich.

As the story unfolds, Tom has to decide whether to remain safely in the past, or to risk living in the present.


Cumberbatch is working on a TV adaptation.

The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian

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Well … A very interesting premise.

The Guest Room is a 2016 psychological thriller novel by Chris Bohjalian. 

  • The Party: Richard Chapman agrees to host a bachelor party for his younger brother at his upscale Westchester home while his wife, Kristin, and daughter are away. 
  • The Incident: The party turns violent when two young women, who were brought there by force as sex slaves, kill their Russian bodyguards and flee into the night.
  • The Fallout: Richard’s home becomes a crime scene, he is placed on indefinite leave from his investment banking firm, and his marriage falls apart because of a brief, intimate encounter he shared with one of the women in his guest room. 
  • The Escape: The story shifts between Richard trying to salvage his life and Alexandra (Anahit), a 19-year-old Armenian woman running from both the police and the deadly Russian mob. 

The book provides a look at the violence and degradation associated with modern global sex slavery.

I found the ending a surprise. And shocking.


Favourite LONG Book Series

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I’ve read all of these book series. Looked forward to every new release.

My favourite favourites are closer to the top.

Jeffrey Archer wrote a number of my favourite series:

  • Kane and Abel series
  • Clifton Chronicles
  • William Warwick series

YES ➙ I do see that zero female authors are featured. For the past 20 years I’ve made an effort to read as many or more female authors, yet none of their series have yet made my list.

I’m young. 😀 There’s still time for me to ADD more to this list.

Leave a comment if I’ve obviously missed one of the best.

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan

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ASSuME this is a novel mocking the current far-right tradwife political push. Part of Trump’s Project 2025, for example.

You’d be wrong as I was.

About half way through, I realized it was something like a Stephen King horror.

Trad Wife (2026) follows Jenny Kaplan, a disgraced journalist desperate to resurrect her career.

She travels to the isolated, 300-acre Black Swan Farm in Pennsylvania to write a scathing, undercover exposé on Mia Wright—the internet’s reigning “trad wife” queen who flaunts a flawless, curated life of pastoral bliss, from-scratch meals, and seven perfect children.

What starts as a standard journalistic takedown quickly descends into a surreal, modern gothic nightmare.

Jenny realizes there is a genuinely sinister, suffocating supernatural presence inside the farmhouse.

As the days blur together, Jenny begins suffering from severe memory lapses, unexplained hair loss, and terrifying nightmares of something slithering into her room …

Personally, I support a woman’s right to being a stay-at-home wife or a stay-at-home mother — if her finances and support system allow it. Increasingly difficult in 2026.

Many stay-at-home women are not white nor politically right wing, of course.

Painter Frank Bowling

On By Rick McIn Art and beautyLeave a comment

I’d never heard of Frank Bowling —but ended up at an exhibition in Istanbul:

Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction

With Interruptions by Francis Bacon and Victor Willing

As I liked abstract painting, I liked his work.

Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana.

He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract “Map” paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction.

In his earliest works, Bowling was influenced by the work of Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh and Francis Bacon.

6 Key Works from Frank Bowling’s Remarkable Career