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Disappointingly lightweight tale of living the early phases of the Covid pandemic in a small town in Italy, with a bookshop. After, say, "The Hired Man" which is superficially similar, this feels inconsequential; reading lists and tourists and no real payoff. I didn't realise at first it is non-fiction although it may well have been 'streamlined.'

Hopeful in the light of our being told that nature has all but vanished; it clearly hasn't in some places. This book is a year's almanac of animals wild and domesticated, of life and death. Quotes my old favourite John Stewart-Collis and also Edward Thomas. Some mornings I can hear all the birds of Gloucestershire as well.

We all have a Cafe Conde in our past somewhere - the eternally perfect place because it maybe only existed for a moment, was solid in time and place as well as in the people around us. The grass was greener, the light was brighter, by friends surrounded. Maybe life was better twenty or however many years ago, or maybe it's that you were twenty and carefree and now you are neither. Whatever characters there are in this novella, they are overshadowed by the echoing rain-soaked or sunlit streets of a mythical Paris that probably never existed, maybe not when Andre Breton was trying to make it dance like a circus bear to the tune of Surrealism and not in the desperate years after the 1940-45 War, but possibly in the 1950s when Queneau (who mentored Modiano's early career) was writing about Zazie in the Metro, and Boris Vian played riffs on jazz and engineering (bars, cafes, streets tiled with wet grey cobbles after a night of rain, fruit and vegetable stalls chanced upon early in the morning after a night spent blowing that ol’ trumpet in a smoky cellar somewhere ... way on down South ... ). It's that 1950s Paris this novel evokes.

In the morning we all wake up and the place we lived when we were young is gone, and that, despite the alluring and fleeting presence of Louki, the Trickster (I don't believe for a millennium that it's coincidence) is the point of this book. Louki is undoubtedly a person, and one who's been dealt a sort-of bad hand in life (daughter of a single-mother and probable sex worker, still, you're getting to live in Paris in the prosperous post-war years), and whether her ending makes sense is another matter. I like the notion of the 'neutral zones,' like Burroughs' Interzones, places where all is in flux. I've known times and places like that, some of them recent and nearby. Extracted from time, the whole novel is like that, but more, like a painting is more than a photograph.

 Gabe Henry's book can be repetitive as after all a lot of people tried to do basically the same thing, but it also underlines that there is a strong link between comedy and spelling reform - Gabe is a comedian himself so there may be a bias, but the link is there e.g. the Phunny Phellows, who included Mark Twain, and who Gabe suggests were the first ever stand-up comics. 

Why spelling reformers would want to abolish j I don't know. J is almost a counter-example to the 'no fixed sound for a letter' rule - it has basically one sound (with a few, usually loan-word, exceptions) throughout its uses.

I'm intrigued by SoundSpel which is maybe the best one I've seen. It was championed by "Uncle" Ed Rondthaler (1904-2009 and yes that is correct.) and is fairly close to my proposed new spelling (PNS) of a while back. It lacks a few things e.g. both voiced and unvoiced th are written [th], and both c and k represent /k/. Q for /kw/ is a nice touch and more real-world than PNS, where qu becomes cw as in [cween] and q is the /x/ sound in loch. PNS doesn't have k except in loanwords like kilometre. Its vowel pairs are consistent, not IPA-strict. SoundSpel does use doubled vowels (aa, ee etc) which PNS does also.

'plow' may be American but to me it also looks more rural (despite a local pub - in the heart of the nearby village - being called The Plough).
SoundSpel is described as 'American Spelling,' being an example of one subset of modified spelling, that is, the wish to move away from a British-dominated language. The US is independent, they say, and should have its own language, or at least its own spelling. Webster made a start, but a small one. 
One of its proponents was Dewey, creator of the decimal system of that name. He failed to radicalise orthography but he does seem to have, as a by-product, invented winter sports as an American pastime (previously it had just been in Europe; he put Lake Placid on the map). 

Starts in the Middle Ages when spelling wasn't really a thing and ends in the near-present with txtspk. For some reason mentions that CS Lewis was born in Ireland but evades that George Bernard Shaw was actually Irish and didn't think much of the English's ability to speak their own language (I once argued, unfortunately, that minority languages didn't matter, based on Irish English having become a major literary tongue). Nicely mentions Slade and their apparently 17 consecutive hits with 'humorous' misspelings (Cum on Feel the Noize, Gudbuy t'Jane, Mama we're all krazy now etc.). 
Not as long as you think because a lot of it is notes and references.

Brief stories about several of the artists who have improved our way of seeing the world via perceptual shifts and breakthroughs. A good book for dipping into and reading one or two at a time. Holds the interest very well.