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April 12, 2020
Sunday Morning Book Thread 04-12-2020
From the horse's mouth: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect [named after physicist Murray Gell-Mann] is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. The entire piece is worth a read.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
I've been on a John Grisham kick lately. Reread The Testament, which I wish they'd make into a movie or mini-series, followed it up with The King of Torts, and have just started The Brethren. What can I say? Grisham's books are like popcorn. I have acquired a book I mentioned a few months ago Mr Finchley Discovers His England by Victor Canning, a popular best-seller in England when if was first published in the 1930s. I liked the $1.99 price. While I was buying that book, Amazon showed me Sink the Bismarck! By C.S. Forester for 99 cents, so I bought that, too, what the heck. Also saw a spy novel, Agent Zero, on sale for free, and I like free, so now that's on the stack, too. I'm reading The Emigrants by Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg, mentioned a couple of weeks back, that tells the story of a group of rural Swedes who decide to emigrate to North America. They all have different reasons for doing so, and when they left their village for the last time, I can't imagine what it must have been like for them to give up pretty much everything they have ever known, and then have to tell all of their friends and family that they weren't coming back and they would most likely never see them again.
This sale has been going on all week. Today is the last day to pick up this dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction at the reduced price. Heck, you can get all 4 for $3.96. ___________ Moron author Oldsailors Poet has just come out with a new Amy Lynn novel, Amy Lynn Rock Star: An out of control teenage rock star… The Kindle edition of Amy Lynn Rock Star is $4.99. ___________
652 Good morning, horde! I was thinking this is a book that Mrs. Muse might enjoy reading, but she would have the same struggles with the choices made by characters who do not share her values. Movies, too. I try to encourage her to let the author (or the director) tell the story the way they want to tell it, rather than trying to impose our own values on it Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart... The Dearly Beloved is on Kindle for $12.99. This novel reminds me of another one I read and discussed on the book thread some months ago, The Book of Strange New Things. This is a book about Christians, but it isn't really a Christian book. And even though most of the events in the book take place on another planet, it isn't really a science fiction book, either. Peter, a missionary, is invited aboard one of the first interstellar ships to minister to a civilization of people they've found living on a habitable planet who are eager to hear the gospel. This journey takes him away from his wife who is strugggling with her faith, and he can't help her because he's light years away and trying to minister to a growing flock of believers. It is a very well-written novel and the planet they had to go and the people who lived there to was truly alien - not just humans with blue hair and different ridges on their forehead, like on Star Trek.
64 I'm reading "Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton" by Edward Rice. A gripping story about the 19th century British explorer, linguist, author, and a bunch of other occupations including general badassery. The Amazon blurb is quite insufficient compared to what Jake has written here, so I'll just leave it at that. Burton was quite a man. Bit of a perv, too, if his wiki entry is at all accurate. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West appears to be OOP. But you can, for example, pick up a used hardcover edition at Thriftbooks for less than $5. No e-book editions are available. And while we're on the subject, 'freakdd' mentioned Alan Moorehead's books The White Nile, Relive all the thrills and adventure of Alan Moorehead's classic bestseller The White Nile -- the daring exploration of the Nile River in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was at that time the most mysterious and impenetrable region on earth. Capturing in breathtaking prose the larger-than-life personalities of such notable figures as Stanley, Livingstone, Burton and many others, The White Nile remains a seminal work in tales of discovery and escapade, filled with incredible historical detail and compelling stories of heroism and drama. and its sequel, The Blue Nile In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small handful of Westerners had ventured into the regions watered by the Nile River on its long journey from Lake Tana in Abyssinia to the Mediterranean-lands that had been forgotten since Roman times, or had never been known at all. In The Blue Nile, Alan Moorehead continues the classic, thrilling narration of adventure he began in The White Nile, depicting this exotic place through the lives of four explorers so daring they can be considered among the world's original adventurers -- each acting and reacting in separate expeditions against a bewildering background of slavery and massacre, political upheaval and all-out war. Also OOP, so used. You can even get a hardcover boxed set edition. ___________ To console myself, I'm spending time with one of my favorite authors, Giovanni Guareschi, and his literary creation, Don Camillo. ( Hint: a lot of the Don Camillo stories are FREE here https://tinyurl.com/r4mu6qb ) I downloaded The Little World Of Don Camillo for free. It's a small book, about 100 pages and Guareschi is an amusing writer. The general time of the book appears to be just after WW II and it sounds as if the priest (Camillo) and the commie mayor (Peppone) fought in the war together. Up next will be Comrade Don Camillo, also for free. ___________ And speaking of books on religious topics, here are a couple of recommendations by MP4: You might like a couple of old books concerning religious life: Everybody Calls Me Father, by "Father X," which is a memoir of a young priest's first assignment to a parish. No date is given, but it seems to have been sometime in the mid 1930s. Actually, Everybody Calls Me Father was published in 1951. The Amazon blurb tells you nothing, but I googled around and found this interesting review by a someone who was actually acquainted with the author. Of course the book has been OOP for years. And "A Right To Be Merry," by Mother Mary Francis, who helped found the first Poor Clare convent in Roswell, NM in the 1940s - it's her recollections of becoming a nun and what it's like living the contemplative life. A Right To Be Merry is also out of print, but fortunately, a Kindle version is available. There was a British TV series, Bless Me, Father that ran 21 episodes from 1978 to 1981, which followed the misadventures of an Irish priest, Father Duddleswell, and his inexperienced curate, Fr. Boyd as they served in an English parish just after WWII. The series is hilarious. It is based on a series of books written by Neil Boyd. I'm not sure how many of them there are, but you can purchase a set of five on Kindle for only $3.99. Nearly 1200 pages. That's a lot of bang for your buck. ___________
What have you all been reading this week? Hopefully something good, because, as you all know, life is too short to be reading lousy books. | Recent Comments
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