5096 Wasted reading time

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Mosquitoes are dirty used needles that fly.

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I did something today that I have never done before in my life.  I quit a book.  Done.  Finis.  Threw it across the room less than half read.

I hear and read about other people who get partway through a book, and set it aside as not being worth the effort.  I never do that.  I struggle onward and (eventually) finish every book I start.  Sometimes it takes a while.  The House of the Seven Gables, for example, required literally years of coming back to it, but eventually I did finish it.  There were a few others like that.

It's not that I'm especially virtuous or anything.  I'm just pretty careful about what I pick up.  I choose books based on reviews, recommendations, or skimming in the bookstore.  Buying books online makes it a bit harder to skim, so with crap like that shades of purple thing, I sometimes get stuck.  It arrived, I skimmed, and just from a paragraph or two here and there I knew it was so poorly written it would drive me crazy, so I never even started actually reading it.  Stuff like that doesn't count.

Well, I stupidly fell for Michael Crichton's sales numbers again. 

I've read Crichton before, and every time I end up annoyed.  He can't tell a story!  It's like he immerses himself in the topic, learns all the buzzwords, loads up on details, and then writes 300 pages of everything he has learned about the topic, like he wants to show how smart he is, and half-heartedly wraps a thin story around it so he can call it a novel, rather than a textbook.

I got 141 (of 431) pages into Airframe and gave up.  I'm tired of page after page of details on airplane parts, repeated over and over, and thin characters who seem to serve just to spout that stuff.  It really is possible to give us as much as we need to understand the situation, Michael, without page after page of detail!

And then, of course, I remembered that I'd had the same thoughts reading Crichton in the past.  Phooey!  I have a very poor memory.

If you want good mystery, try Lawrence Block.  I've read two of his books recently, and enjoyed both.  

(Yeah, I know the color on the "shades of" thing is wrong, but you know what I meant, and I didn't want it to show up in searches.  Ok?)
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5046 Brush fire 5 - real estate taxes

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

"Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power."

-- Salmon Rushdie --

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I recently read the book The Martian, by Andy Weir.  They made it into a movie, which is out now.  The book is chock full of chemistry and  physics; Jay would have loved it.  I suspect the movie has a different emphasis.  I think the hard science part was all good, as far as I know, but I did find one part that doesn't ring true:  the potatoes.

 The abandoned astronaut turns the habitat into a potato farm, in order to generate enough food to last until he can be rescued.  Their food supply had included some potatoes, meant for a treat for Thanksgiving or something.  He decides he can cut them into pieces and grow them.  

Just one problem with that idea.  Potato sprouts are poisonous, so commercial potatoes sold in the US in the past few decades have been treated to inhibit sprouting.  If you cut up American "eating potatoes" and stick them in the ground, they'll just sit there and rot.  If you want to grow potatoes, you have to buy untreated "seed potatoes".   Untreated potatoes, called "sets", are available from like Agway and other garden supply stores, but they are unlikely to be included in the astronaut's food supplies because, hey, they might sprout.

Some of us are old enough to remember buying potatoes in the grocery store that had long white sprouts growing out through the ventilation holes in the bags.  Mothers would let kids put a potato eye in a saucer of water and grow a little potato plant.  You don't see that any more.  There's a reason for that.  Today's potatoes have tiny dry spots where the eyes used to be.  No sprouting allowed.

The astronaut's potatoes should not have sprouted.

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I usually get a real estate tax bill for the country house in late September, due in October.  I seem to recall getting a notice that the bills would be going out late (but of course I can't find that notice now).  Along about the end of December, I noticed that I still hadn't seen the bill.  I had also hadn't received any late notices.  So I called the town tax office, and yeah, the bills had gone out (on time, she says), and yeah, I'm in arrears.  And, no, I can't pay it now, because their office is no longer collecting taxes.  Duh?

I swear I never received the bill.

Two years ago we had a serious problem with mis-delivered mail here.   I was getting mail for other people, at least one a week, sometimes two.  I always stuck it back it the mailbox with a note on it to please redirect it.  You KNOW people had to be getting my mail, right?

Well, it's started again.  I get mail for someone else about once a week, usually a close neighbor.  I usually hand deliver it if they're close, even if it's "spam" mail --- I figure it's not my place to decide what they do or do not want.  I'm wondering how other people handle it.  Do they just throw it out?  Do they open and read it?  I know there are people (really) who think that if they receive mail or packages addressed to someone else, they are allowed to keep it.  

So, what can I do about the unpaid taxes?  The clerk said that unpaid taxes are turned over to the county, then when the county sends out the bills for school taxes in the spring, the unpaid amount will be included in that bill.  That's gonna be a bunch of money, and with my investment situation in turmoil, I'm not sure I'll have it.  

Just another emotional storm.  Ho Hum.

Oh, and my back is out.
Oh, and I planned to head upriver Thursday, returning Saturday, but a major snow storm is predicted, so I guess not.

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Later update - See the comments for more on potatoes and  sprouting.
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5041 Random

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

– B. F. Skinner --

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I thought this was amusing:  from http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/ukrainian-google-translate-has-been-accidentally-trolling-russia--WJJqAWte3x Google Translate was criticised in Russia on Tuesday after it emerged that the service was translating the term “Russian Federation” to “Mordor”.  I assume that's the Ukranian Google, translating from Russian to Ukranian.


The explanation offered by Google is that humans are not involved in translations.  Instead, the service scans  hundreds of millions of documents to find the best translation. But, of course, not being human, it doesn't always "get" the context.  One has to wonder what documents were scanned, and how many led to "Mordor".

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I'm reading the new Stephen King compilation of short stories.  I'm pleased to report that I'm halfway through, and so far only half of the stories get into horror.  I prefer King when he's more psychological or philosophical than when he's freaky.

One of the stories is about a couple who are just barely making ends meet, behind on the rent, can't afford the car insurance, and so on.  He is a substitute teacher, and she is a healthcare worker caring for a wealthy old man six hours a day, six days a week.  That's thirty-six hours a week, right?  Without giving anything away, the old man offers the woman $200,000 to do something.  The couple are debating whether to go for it or not, and she says that it would take her three years to earn that much.

My head spun. 

Either Mr. King, or I, have no idea what life costs and jobs pay these days.  That means she is currently making something like $67K per year.  And plus whatever money the husband is bringing in, that's not enough to support them?  I don't understand. Many decades ago I was a substitute teacher for a year, and I remember that it amazed me that an average of two days a week netted me more than what a salaried teacher made, so the couple had to be together currently pulling in well over $100K.  I guess I really have no idea what an average salary is these days, or what it costs to run a small household.  Either I don't, or Mr. King doesn't.  I don't get it.

Another story is about a Kindle that offers the user what appear to be alternate timelines, like one where Hemingway (and a bunch of other writers) lived longer and wrote some other books.  And you could look up newspapers and read about events that happened in other possibilities, including one where the Cuban missile crisis resulted in all-out nuclear war and the end of civilization.  It blows the minds of two college literature instructors and a student who go a little bit crazy looking stuff up.

I don't get their reactions.  It's not like they are just curious.  They seem to think this stuff really happened and that it somehow has meaning to them.  If I came across something like that, I'd think "fan fiction", and just be impressed that there was so much of it.  And I know that the Cuban Missile crisis didn't kill us all, so I'd figure that was fiction, too.  And even if it WAS material from "other time lines" (which I'd have trouble believing, but even so) I'd figure what the heck, it's not mine, has nothing to do with this life, and as far as I'm concerned it's all fiction.

I'm not all the way through that story yet, but I still think that the protagonists need a slap upside their heads.

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I've been reading a lot of tributes to David Bowie.  Three things impress me - 1.) that everyone pretty much says  the same things about him, 2.) that everyone mentions Space Oddity, and 3.) that almost everyone who mentioned listening to his music over the past few days made a point of mentioning that said music was pirated, as if they thought he would approve of that.

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The Wizard of Oz as never seen before:  https://vimeo.com/150423718 

This one is called "Of Oz the Wizard".  Some guy (sorry, I didn't make a note of his name, but I'm sure it's Googleable) went through the entire movie, chopping it into pieces by individual words, and putting it back together in alphabetical order, but still in chronological order by word.  It's an hour and forty-one minutes long.  I went to it just out of curiosity, thinking it would be immensely boring, but it's not boring.  It's great!

Some sections are better than others.  I especially enjoyed "hhh", starting about 38 minutes in (skip ahead).  I've been watching in bits and pieces of down time, and am now at one hour in, at the word "now".

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I still want to write up the "brush fires", but I just haven't had time.  This stuff required no thought....
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4083 Dorian and the Dipshit

Monday, August 3, 2015

The first testicular guard, the "cup", was used in Hockey in 1874
and the first helmet was used in 1974.
That means it only took 100 years for men to realize that their brain is also important.

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Every once in a while I decide I have to read a classic I'd been avoiding.  I don't know why, I guess maybe I think it would be some kind of shame if I die without having read The House of the Seven Gables or something.  (I mention that particular book because I've started it at least five times, and I simply cannot get past the first two dozen pages.  It's mental anesthesia to me.  Brain death.)

So, a few days ago I came across a reference to Dorian Gray.  No one ever references "...Seven Gables", but people often mention Dorian's picture, and it happened to be one of those free downloads to my Kindle, and it's not so very long, so,....

I'd gotten only about 1/3 the way in when I realized I passionately hate Lord Henry.  I didn't want to read another observation from him.  He is the most supercilious asshole I've ever "met".  He judges everything and everyone, finds everything wanting even though he claims not to judge, purposely says exactly the opposite of what he thinks people expect him to say for no other reason than to disconcert people, claims to live only for beauty, but then sets out to destroy beauty wherever he finds it.  He is fascinated by the beauty and visible innocence of the young Dorian, so he sets out to debauch him, while claiming to adore him and teach him to live life fully.  I hate hate hate everything about Lord Henry.

Yeah, I know, this is supposed to be a philosophical novel, and ok, I could understand the philosophical aspects were they not espoused by one as odious as Lord Henry.  Wikipedia describes Lord Henry as an aesthete, a hedonist.  You know, he could have been a hedonistic aesthete without being an odious ... asshole.  Sorry, but that's the best I can do.  It fits.

So then Dorian develops an interest in precious and semi-precious stones, and we are treated to a bazillion pages of descriptions of stones.  Why?  In the pre-internet stone age, is Wilde trying to impress the reader with his knowledge?  That's the only reason I can think of for that.  If we were supposed to apply that to Dorian's state of mind, it could have been done much more directly and more interestingly.  We finally slog through all that, and Dorian discovers textiles and embroidery, and we get a bazillion pages of ....

I'm now no long reading, but just scanning pages.  I'm 65% of the way through and I'm determined to finish,

... although I don't have the faintest idea why.
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4067 Books, leggings, stuff....

Friday, July 10, 2015

Before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.

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Yesterday I wore a caftan I've had for ages.  It's made like a rectangle with two smaller rectangles on either side for long full sleeves.  It used to be floor-length, but I shortened it to mid-calf thinking I might wear it more often if it didn't look so eveningish.  It's a lightweight black silky fabric with vertical alternating stripes of sheer and not-so-sheer, and thin silver threads.  I wore it with a black nylon tank top and black leggings I had bought in Morocco (the only leggings I own), and a heavy silver Turkoman necklace.  I really liked the outfit, and it was incredibly cool in the heat and humidity. 

I have several loose thigh-length caftan-like semisheer tunics that I rarely wear because over regular pants they look too "heavy".  So I got all enthusiastic and went to eBay, and bought some more leggings in black, brown, and white.  They'll arrive early next week.  I used the measurement guides on the listings and ended up ordering size "L" instead of the "M" I would ordinarily order, because I didn't want them to be too tight at the waist, and that's what my 39" hips demanded.

Last night when I took the Moroccan leggings off, I looked at the size inside.  They are S/M.  Ouch.  Maybe I should have looked at that label before I ordered new ones.

Oh well.  They were like $7 each, so no big loss if they don't fit.

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The new neighbor across the street seems nice.  BUT this morning at 6:30 am I was awakened by a power saw, and pounding of a mallet, and general mayhem.  He was replacing the posts for his gate.  At 6:30 am.  Sheesh!  I gave up trying to sleep and got up at 7:30.  I'd been reading into the wee hours, so I'm not too happy.

Reading:
I've been reading mostly nonfiction the past few months.   

I read a book about Eliot Spitzer, his rise to power and his sudden fall from grace.  I really liked him as NY attorney general, he wasn't afraid to go after the people who thought they were powerful enough to get away with anything.  When he was elected governor I was ecstatic.  I figured he could fix Albany, probably the most corrupt state government in the country.  I really expected big things from him.  He lasted 14 months.  Sigh.

I read a book written by a British Muslim female physician who accepted a two-year stint in a hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  She, having spent the previous several years in the US, was unprepared for the restrictions on her person and her freedom there.  It was interesting, but, unfortunately, in her view, everything was just hunky-dory.  I would have liked to see a little indignation....

I read the book written by Jaycee Dugard, the woman who had been kidnapped at age 11, and spent 18 years held captive by her rapist.  Her story isn't quite what one would expect from the tabloid versions, but it's harrowing enough.  It's easy to see why she had not attempted to escape, when seen through her eyes.

I read the story of Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom came the HeLa cell line used by labs the world over.  HeLa was the first cells that didn't eventually die in culture.  Her cells are pretty much immortal.  They are responsible for many research breakthroughs and cures, and have made many people rich.  But until recently, she got no credit.  Her children didn't benefit - in fact, they can't afford the very cures her cells created.  An interesting story, but the writer got too close, I think.  It dragged sometimes.

There were a few other books in there, but I forget.  The current book is a novel about ... it's hard to explain ... you know how you make a decision that takes your life a particular direction, and years later you wonder what your life would be like if you'd gone the other direction?  This is about a guy who "splits" at a key decision point, and one copy goes one way in one complete version of the world, and another copy goes the other way.  Some 13 or 15 (I forget) years later, both men are very unhappy with their lives.  Both realize they hadn't necessarily made the right decision.  And then there's like a rift in the fabric between the two worlds, and the two meet, and decide to exchange lives.  I'm having trouble with this.  I have difficulty suspending disbelief, and I really can't accept that both would simply give up and go to a world where they know nothing, nobody, dropping into a life with no context, and one that they probably won't be able to get back from.  Like, guys, hey, you already KNOW you don't make the best decisions.  What makes you think your doppelganger knows any better.  Frying pan, fire, you know?

Well, I'm only 1/3 or so into the book.  What do I know.

If you want the title and author of any of the above, ask in a comment and I'll dig it out for you.
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3978 I don't get it

Sunday, September 21, 2014

GUILT is about what you have done or not done. You did something wrong.
SHAME is about you as a person. You are something wrong.

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I am reading Harriette Simpson Arnow's Hunter's Horn.  It's about a hardscrabble mountain farm family in the early 1940s Kentucky.  There's lots of small things I don't understand, but one is driving me crazy.  The family is going into their second winter without meat.  This winter, at least, they do have plenty of corn, beans, and so on after having nearly starved the winter before, but due to various problems they will likely still have no meat until the next autumn.  The mother and horde of children miss it terribly.

They define meat as pork, mutton, beef, and chicken.  And that's pretty much it.

What's driving me nuts is why do they never think about rabbit, possum, or squirrel?  Plenty of them around, and they can trap them, they don't need to use up bullets.  What about fish?  And if they can afford a few bullets, how about deer?

They train hounds to chase fox, and sneer at dogs who go after rabbits.  I dunno - if I were starving for meat I'd pure-D appreciate a dog who brought home a rabbit every few days.

When I was in high school in the mountains, many of my classmates ran trap lines every morning before school, and I have eaten rabbit, squirrel, possum, and raccoon (raccoon was not very good) when I visited classmates' homes.

I don't get it.  Every time some character in the book complains about no meat, I want to yell at them.
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3662 The hurricane reading list

Thursday, November 15, 2012

"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence."

-- Henrik Tikkanen --

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The 11 days without electricity were almost like a vacation to me.  A camping vacation, maybe,  but a time without distraction.  There were lots of things I could do, but I was too cold to do much of anything beyond huddle with a candle and a book.  You know, those people in the city who rioted after 5 days without electricity - I'll bet none of them were readers.

I had a few books I'd recently purchased but had not yet read.  When I'd got through those, I started on the "good" books - the leather-bound gold-trimmed volumes, classics and signed modern classics that had been sitting in the bookcases for so many years unread but looking good.

Click on the title for a synopsis and reviews from other readers.

Where the West Ends: Stories from the middle east, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus, Michael J. Totten.
Interesting, sometimes funny.   Michael is a journalist.  This is the tale of some highly unusual travels through the listed areas.  Recommended if you are interested in history, cultures, and in understanding how history affects culture.

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, Jimmy Carter.
I don't care what anyone thinks of Jimmy Carter as a president, no one can deny that he's a truly good man.  I adore him.  I wish more Americans were like him.  In this book he warns that fundamentalists, both religious and political, are deliberately blurring the lines between politics and religion, and warns that the result is an intolerance leading to an erosion of our nation's basic human values.  It was published in 2005, and it's frightening that what he saw then is even more true today.  Highly recommended.

A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, Reza Kahlili.
This book was absolutely and utterly engrossing.  Amazing.  Also the most frightening thing I've ever read, and I'm not exaggerating.  Kahlili (not his real name, and of course that's not his photo on the cover) was born and grew up in Iran.  He became disillusioned when, after the revolution, the mullahs did not live up to their promises.  He saw "his" Iran destroyed, and decided to do something about it.  The real story of what goes on in Iran is frightening enough, but the really scary part is what the real intention of the mullahs is and how they're going about it.  It's not what you expect.  Very very highly recommended.  Read the info at the link.

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke.
I saw the movie when it first came out, at a drive-in theater (long ago replaced by a mall) in Kingston, NY.  The visuals in the movie were amazing for a time before computer-generated animation, and still look good on a TV screen.  Now imagine it at a drive-in, where the screen dissolved into a black and star-spangled night sky at a time and place with little interference from ground light.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  However, no one understood it.  At all.  (And those who claimed they understood, we considered supercilious a-holes.)
I recently heard that the book was much better.  Not as pretty, but it explained everything.  So I finally read the book.  Hey!  It really does!  It's a good read.  Absolutely nothing is confusing.  So if you were confused by the movie, read the book.  It's well worth the time.

The Litigators, John Grisham.
I don't like some Grisham books.  Yeah, they're well written, but I sometimes find the characters annoying and the situations and attitudes infuriating, the more so because they are too real, too much the way it really works.  This one is a bit different.  The three main characters manage to find themselves in a situation that's WAY over their heads.  Sometimes incompetence is endearing.  (Well, when it's not real life, anyway.)  It was a good read.

At this point, I ran out of newish books that were not ponderous political tomes.  So I browsed the shelves of leather-bound pretties.

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone.
I first read this back in 1968/69.  I don't know whether it was because I was young, or because I was dating a Yale-educated electrical engineer from Naples who spoke five languages so I was fascinated by Italy, whatever, anyway, I thought it was great then, so I decided to reread it.  I didn't make it far before I gave up.  Mr. Stone seems to think it's important to describe in excruciating detail every wall, every building, every doorway, every cobblestone young Michelangelo passes on his morning walk to the shop where he is apprenticed, and worse, he seems to take a different route every time.  Aaaaagh!  Basta!  Enough already!
Maybe I should skip a few hundred pages in and see if I land on some meatier stuff.  Just ... not this year....

God's Little Acre, Erskine Caldwell.
When this book was first published in 1933 it was a scandal.  Terrible.  Banned in more places than Boston.  Caldwell says it's just a story, no "lesson" in it, but I was fascinated by the contradictions in Ty Ty.  He wants scientific methods, then captures an albino to "conjure" for him.  (Everyone knows albinos can find gold, so that's "scientific".)  He wants peace in his family, then says and does things that cause calamity.  Everything is a contradiction.  A good character study.  It's worth reading, but not worth rereading, so get it from the library.

Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories, Philip Roth.
(The title on my book is slightly different from the title on the Amazon.com offerings, but it's the same book, same stories.)  Pretty good light reading.

And then the power came back on.
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3613 King of root beer

Monday, September 10, 2012

The admirable qualities so often sought among human beings

actually reside almost exclusively in dogs.

-- Evan Morris --

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Women who extend their eye makeup way past the outer edges of their eyes in an effort, I suppose, to make their eyes look larger, actually end up looking cross-eyed.  Do they really not realize this?

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Stephen King's 11/22/63 has been sitting on the shelf for a few months, so this week I started reading it.  In the first few pages his character rhapsodizes about 1958 root beer.

Yes!  Yes!  Oh my God yes!  I had almost forgotten.  Root beer used to be full and round and dark and smooth and strong and thick and full of body!  It was only lightly carbonated, but formed a head when poured.  It was a meal!  You rolled it around in your mouth for a while before swallowing it.  You could add 8 ounces of vanilla ice cream to 8 ounces of root beer, and the flavor was still strong.  You could smell a glass of root beer three tables away.  In the '50s and '60s root beer was just about my favorite thing in the whole wide world!

Somewhere along the early '70s it changed.  It got thin and blah.  Fizzly.  Watery.  Add ice cream and the taste almost disappears.  Fizzly water that a root beer barrel candy got dissolved in.  Artificially flavored?  Blah.  I stopped drinking it because it was such a disappointment.  That's not root beer.  I haven't had a good root beer in 40 years.

What happened?

(Up in the mountains you could get REAL root beer, locally brewed and mildly alcoholic.  The real stuff.  I wonder if that still exists?  Probably not - them damn revenooers!  Regulate the flavor right out.) 

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"Root beer used to be full and round and dark and smooth and strong and thick and full of body!"  Hmmm.  I notice a pattern here.  That's what I like about The Man.  The old root beer had a good head, too.
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3585 Reading

Monday, July 30, 2012

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

--  Silk  --

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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.
.

3208 ...and into the fray.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first,
the passion fades
and there had better be something else to take its place.

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I just started reading Michael C. Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon. It's 675 6x9" small-type pages, not including the introduction and the preface. I've so far read the introduction and the preface and the first seven pages of Chapter 1, and I'm already fascinated.

This could be a problem. I may have difficulty getting anything else done.
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1231 Books

Friday, May 4, 2007

Got this off Roba's blog, who got it from Forsoothsayer’s blog, who got it from CairoGal.

Instructions: Look at the list of books below.
*Bold the ones you’ve read
*Italicize the ones you want to read
*Leave the ones that you aren’t interested in alone.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible (well, most of it)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With A Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Helen Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)


Hey! You left out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance!

Just because a book is in bold doesn't mean I remember anything about it. It does mean there's probably a copy of the book in the house somewhere.
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