3585 Reading

Monday, July 30, 2012

Most people can work with any insanity, as long as it is consistent and predictable insanity.

--  Silk  --

-------------------------------------------------------------

In the past few months I have read (not listed in order):

1. The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Alborn
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales of the Jazz Age - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. What Your Childhood Memories Say About You ... and What You Can Do About It - Kevin Leman
4. How To Raise Emotionally Healthy Children:  Meeting the Five Critical Needs of Children - Gerald Newmark
5. Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert
6. Monday Mornings: A Novel - Sanjay Gupta
7. Sisters - Kathleen Thompson Norris
8. Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know - ?
9. A few other books I started and not only didn't finish, they were so bad I deleted them from the Kindle.

I am now reading God is an Englishman, R. Delderfield.

All were either free or $.99 to $1.99 for the Kindle.

I have accepted that as a warning for the future.  Sometimes a deal too good to pass up should be passed up.

An advantage of paper books is that you can leaf through and scan here and there to get some idea as to whether it's worth reading.  Can't really do that with an electronic book.  Well, you can, but it's a pain and you have to commit to acquiring it first.

#1 was good as a story of a man and his life.  I don't understand what all the fuss was about when it first came out, though.  I see no real lesson to be learned, as some people had described it.  I can't believe some people, after reading it, went about trying to identify the five they'd be likely to encounter.  I mean, if there was any lesson at all, it was exactly that you CAN'T anticipate that.

#2 leaves me wondering why Fitzgerald was so celebrated.  What a pile of dross.

#3 and #4 are typical of those books that could have said everything they had to say in 20 paragraphs, but proceed to take 200 pages to say it.  I didn't get more than halfway through either before I tired of the repetition.

#5 was not at all what I expected, but would have been a fairly good read *IF* I had not started out with much higher expectations.  Frankly, it looks to me like it was written as a romance novel for the women of the time specifically to teach a lesson - that women must avoid romantic fantasies and accept their lot in life, or suffer the consequences.  Hmmm.

#6 was more like an outline.  The author may have had some good tales to tell, but character development and situations were skimpy.  It seems like it was actually just an idea for a television series, which might have been a pretty good show, and this was a demo piece.

#7 was depressing.  I wanted to wade into the novel and slap them all upside the head.

#8 a waste.  Not the stories I knew...

Again, I had high hopes for God Is an Englishman.  It starts out rip-snorting, but about 1/4 of the way through it's starting to bog down.  I find myself frowning a lot.

Yeah, gentlewomen of the time were sheltered, and not all that well educated, but not so much that they didn't see animals "doing it", and weren't so stupid that they couldn't figure it out.  Being taught that sex is unladylike and to be "endured" is not the same as being totally ignorant of what is involved.

And after his trip through the countryside, Adam knows he wants to run his carting business in those spaces not served by the railroads, I think it was the unsullied northeastern part of the isles (don't remember, didn't pay attention, and with the Kindle it's not all that easy to leaf through and find that part - one more way that paper is better than bytes) where he would cart materials from the producers to the nearest railroad - so why on earth has he set his headquarters in London, environs already fully served by rails?  Waggons (yeah, two "g"s), horses, and drivers all stabled in London, when their territory would be many many miles away?  Seems like he should have his stables in the centers of the territories he wants to serve, in multiple locations. But, maybe I'm getting ahead of him.

This book is making me look up a lot of stuff on the internet, like mentions of Chat Moss.  It turns out Chat Moss is a huge peat bog that presented a challenge to the railroad, ingeniously solved by "floating" the rail bed across it.  I also had to look up the movers and shakers of the time, Cleveland bay horses, skewbald, the well at Cawnpore, the Crimean war, various bits of military attire and accoutrements and a bunch of other things.  Leaves me wondering how much I used to miss or gloss over when reading books before the internet.

I'll probably finish "God Is...", but I doubt that I'll want to read the following two parts of the trilogy.

I have high hopes for several other books on the Kindle, and recently I have purchased on paper the latest Stephen King, and a non-fiction book by journalist Michael J. Totten, and a novel by Leonard Pitts that I'm sure will be good, and a few others.

Sheesh.  I've got to stop buying books.
.