Some Things Are Meant to Be Shared

And a bad pun is one of them.

The Last Tribe

by Brad Manuel, narrated by Scott Brick

I just finished reading The Last Tribe. I enjoyed the story but I found all the Biblical parallels trite. They were so blatant. The disease that killed the world was called "The Rapture." The pandemic paralleled Noah's flood story and in the end the survivors and their bull, cows, goats, pigs and chickens boarded an airplane and flew off to paradise to start repopulating the earth. At least the story was not preachy.The trite stuff aside, I did enjoy the story. It was not depressing. It was not a question of how many survivors can we kill off with as much gory detail as possible. This is not saying that there was no gore at all but that it was, shall we say, tastefully done. This not saying that there were no bad guys either because there were a few who got what they deserved, as should all bad guys who aren't willing to change their ways. 

 It was good people doing what they had to do when they had to do it and doing it without whining and complaining. I actually enjoyed the details of what they did to survive and to get themselves to the rendezvous point. The book was  thought-provoking. What would you do were you in a similar situation? Would you have the skills to survive? Could you find the inner-strength to carry on?  

Three stars for telling a readable post-apocalyptic story that was a bit more believable than zombies, aliens and rampaging hordes. Four and a half stars to narrator Scott Brick, who was nominated for a Audie award for this book.

Join Me For a Don Quixote Readathon

It is time for another reading of  El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. I just acquired an audio edition of the Edith Grossman translation (read by George Guidall, one of my favorite audiobooks readers) and it is finally time to dust it off and listen. Yes, I am reading in English. I have never had the patience to read dense prose in Spanish. But I will have a Spanish edition nearby, just in case. 

 

I have jumped on the Don Quixote bandwagon. It is one of the best books I have ever read. In its day, it was boundary breaker. Nobody had every written like this, especially not in Spain, where one had to be so careful of what one was saying lest one be hauled before the Inquisition. So much of what we take for granted today, was new ground for readers. Ostensibly, the book was written to discredit books of chivalry, the Harlequin Romance novels of the 15th and 16th centuries. In truth, discrediting books of chivalry was just the jumping off point for critiquing so much more; speaking through the mind and mouth of a crazy person was just a way of getting passed the censor. Yes, the censors. Every book that was published in Spain had to be approved by the Inquisition before it could be published.

 

If you are reading along with me or when you finally decide that you are going to read it, please do yourself a favor: forget Man of La Mancha; forget what you think you know about the story; forget what you may have seen on TV or in the movies. Go into the reading of it with a blank slate. What you are reading was a new kind of storytelling. The artifices of plot and story arc, setting, character development are new ideas still being defined. The borderlines between fact and fiction are fluid; in fact, in Spanish the word for "story" and the word for "history" are one and the same, historia. This is what the novel looked like in its infancy; it was still learning. 

Villa in Italy

By Elizabeth Edmondson (Nicolette McKenzie)

(c) 2006

Delightful! A 'country house' mystery with no bodies and a happy ending. Just what I needed.

In the end, this turned out to be a solid 3 and half star read -- right where it should have landed.  I am sure that I will be back for more books by Ms Edmondson. 

Don Quixote: A Warning for Readers

As I will talk about in another post, I have started re-reading El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha.

This one is for all my bookish buddies: 

My Well Annotated Editions

...he spent whole days and nights over his books; and thus with little sleeping and much reading, his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason."  (Walter Starkie)

...he spent his nights reading from disk till dawn and his day reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind. (Edith Grossman)

...que se le pasaban las noches leyendo de claro en claro, y los días de turbio en turbio: y así, del poco dormir y del mucho leer se le secó el celebro, de manera que vino a perder el juicio. (Cervantes)

So, my book - loving friends, it seems we are warned: our brains are going to dry up and we are going to lose either our minds or our reason -- or both.

And yes, two translations of the same work, because we are lovers of words and attuned in our own reading to the authors choice of words. The same goes for the art of translating. There is no such thing as an exact translation; there are always choices to be made. Does he lose his mind or his reason; do both words have the same meaning? I suppose that is why I have so many different translations in my house. 

Okay! I Get It!: How to Hide and Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr (read by Luis Moreno)

Maybe I am just cranky but I don't think I can read this through to the end. I get the point, I just don't need the supporting evidence and the gory details. I agree that:

• there is more to US history than can fit into a couple of years of high school American History classes
• there is more in our history to be ashamed about than there is to be proud of
• we have to stop sweeping our mistakes under the rug and own up to the idea that we are not the goody-goody, holier than thou nation that we have been brought up to believe we are
• we have a long history of treating non-white peoples and cultures -- Black, Asian, Native American -- as not worthy of citizenship in our country
• we are imperialist, whether we accept the idea or not
• it is time to talk more openly about the mistakes of our past and start understanding how they have shaped the nation that we are today
• we aren't any better than any other imperialistic national on this planet --and in some ways we are even worse
   

I am not saying that this is a bad book; I am just saying that I am not up to the read. Based on what I have read, 3 stars. I give the guy credit for talking in no uncertain terms about the very dark side of history.

DNF after about 4 hours.

Book Haul: Audible 2 for 1 Sale

Usually the Audible 2 for 1 sales run for a couple of weeks. The current sale started in May and will end in a week; the choices changed every few weeks. There were some good choices in the pile, but I already owned them. I bought these instead. Some I chose to get some variety into my reading and to try something a out of my normal range of reading. 

The Clockmaker's Daughter was meh. Murder at Melrose Court was such a hoot that I've read the second already and have the third in my Wish List. The rest are TBR.

 Over the course of the sale, I picked up...

 

 

 

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

 

Okay, I have credits to burn, so bring on the next sale.

 

Life Without Puns...

Is no life at all.

Not for Me: The Clockmaker's Daughter

I found this one in the Audible 2 for 1 sale pile and decided to give it a try. I don't remember why I chose it. Maybe one of my bookish friends had been talking about it. Maybe it had been mentioned in one of the two weekly news magazine we subscribe to. 

 It really did not take me long to decide that I was not enthralled.  I found it hard to follow with all the jumping from one point of view to another, from one time period and set of characters to another. The whole thing just seemed to drag. I don't mind long descriptive books when taking the time to get there is one of the joys of the book but I just wanted this one to get there already. Maybe I went into the enterprise with doubt and then reaped what I had sown. Whatever the reason, this book was not for me.  Solidly in the middle at 3 stars.

The BL-pocalypse Is Here

 

Image compliments of Mike Finn

With much regret, I have logged into Booklikes for the last time and managed to delete my account. I feel that it is no longer a safe site. It has never been a secure site, no https, but now it isn't even safe. As far as I am concerned, the owners have sounded the death knell in a deliberate move -- or else, they have been sold a bill of goods -- but the bottom-line is still the same: I no longer feel safe and I feel my privacy is in jeopardy.

 

So, what brings me to this conclusion? I had noticed over the past few days a new addition to the urls that flash across the navigation bar and/or the bottom of the window as a BL page works its way through refreshing a page or moving from Blog to Dashboard, etc. This morning, it got hung up on that step and I was able to capture the link and use the information contained in it to do some investigating. I am enraged by what have learned. 

   

The link is four lines long, so I've included only the start of the of the url: https://mandrillapp.com/track/click/3... The alarming words in this link are "track" and "click." My hackles are now raised and more information is needed. What is MandrillApp and is it reliable? I personally feel that most apps are just fancy dressing for illicit information gathering or worse, so just seeing the word 'app' makes me suspicious. This is what I learned on Google when searching for "MandrillApp":

 

Is Mandrillapp com safe?

mandrillapp.com. A Safer Browsing Experience. Everywhere, Anytime. This site is a source of spam and links using their service should be avoided.

Source: Is mandrillapp.com Safe? Community Reviews | WoT (Web of Trust)

 

For me, the magic words are: This site is a source of spam and links using their service should be avoided. If Booklikes is now in bed with a known spammer, I'm done. Booklikes is already a home for spammers; that is part of the reason that so many legitimate members have fled. But now it has gone a step too far and I don't feel safe using the website. 

In the end, this is the BL-pocalypse. Not the website losing its domain. Not the website ceasing to exist. Not the failures to connect or even the very, very slow connection we have been all facing. BUT alliance with a known purveyor of spam and a betrayal of trust.

Albrecht Durer

 

2020 Reading List

YTD:  119 Books and 1179 Hours  

Goal for the year: 100 books and 1500 hours

July, 2020

1. Charity Girl -- Re-read
2. Blood Sport -- Re-read
3. Bolt -- Re-read
4. Murder at the Vicarage -- NEW39
5. Devil's Cub -- Re-read
6. The Chequer Board -- Re-read
7. A Civil Contract -- Re-read
8. Come to Grief -- Re-read
9. The Convenient Marriage -- Re-read
10. Doing Time -- NEW40
11. The Pun Also Rises -- Re-read
12. Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 -- Re-read
13. A Divided Loyalty -- NEW41

MTD: Count 13 and Hours 142

Best of the Month

20 for '20