Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s Comments (group member since Sep 20, 2013)

Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)’s comments from the Net Work Book Club group.

Thorry, thir, you're right.

It's a 60s (or older) African Americanism. "Jive" is the old name for AA street slang in general, and came to mean fake, pseud, poseur, naff. And a "turkey" is an ignorant or annoying person. So a "jive turkey" is an ignorant, annoying pseud.

I loved the scene in "Airplane" where this very proper Englishwoman (Maggie Smith?) says to the confused stewardess who's trying to understand two black passengers, "Excuse me, miss--I speak jive." and then holds a conversation with them--with subtitles, if memory serves.

I'm in full tympany with you, Groovy.

Badump-bump! Chssss!

well, cello there, funny man! LOL That joke is pretty bass, don't you think?

Nevermind...you woodwind too, if it happened to you.

I see a lot of books from Gutenberg etc here, that were published before the ISBN system. I'd like to add a few that were published in the 1920s etc but have no magic numbers. How do we do that?

Link told me that I had already submitted feedback on the review so I can't see it again. I hadn't.
Nobody's going to be able to see your preview unless you fix this.

"Can you get behind it?" "For sure, reaaaally."

On one level yes, but a lot more. It's from

I still dig things, Groovy. Heck, I still grokk! Though often I don't grokk this new world.

I remember seeing a documentary back in the sixties featuring an African American woman who was about 102 yrs old and called herself Sojourner Truth, but I don't think it could have been the original one, could it? She was alive then, and talked to the interviewers with a very raspy voice. I remember her saying she liked the funny papers, "And I do like my vanilla ice-cream--yes sir, I do like my vanilla ice-cream!"

Groovy wrote: "Good news, they're replacing Andrew Jackson with a woman on the $10 bill. Just thought you'd like to know."

Do you know who it is?

If Adam and Eve had been Chinese, we'd all still be in Paradise. They would have eaten the snake and left the apple alone.

She did! It took her a second, but then she got the giggles.

Groovy wrote: "What does a Chinese chicken say?

Wok, wok, wok, wok!"

Tee-hee!! I am going to the Asian supermarket today and if my Spanish friend is on the till I may tell her that joke.

Two civil servants meet in the corridors of power. One says to the other: "What's the matter? Can't you sleep, either?"

Michael wrote: "The main character should be understandable, more than anything else. Likability isn't always necessary, but if the audience gets where the character's coming from, they can find the character rela..."

I think that's what attracts some people to the series that starts with The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. Thomas is certainly "unlikeable", he's embittered and angry from the git-go but then you see why, and see his struggles to come to terms with a totally bizarre situation...shame about the turgid prose, though that's nothing to do with the character himself.

Re: unpleasant characters you can enjoy disliking, Carl Hiaasen has some good ones. The "Skink" series is full of oddballs. I can't remember in which book he did a wonderful send-up of Geraldo Rivera; his unpleasant characters usually get their comeuppance in a splendid, satisfying way.

Oh, huge. Authors used to worry a lot more about plot, which required stronger and more believable characters than the formula fiction does--and even Dan Brown and John Grisham are guilty of it. OK, so there was genre fiction then too, but less of this "same plot, same characters, just tweak the details" series stuff. First rule of good writing: You have to get the reader's attention and then hold it. Don't get lost in soapboxing, or too much description of what they ate and what they wore (though we do need to know basically what the person looks like if we want to visualise them doing the stuff!). It's the person that will hold the reader's interest, not their house or their car or whatever. They have to be believable within the context of the book, but also someone that either we can love to hate, or relate to. Otherwise the reader will just be bored stiff or annoyed--and who needs that?

There's nothing wrong with series of novels with the same main characters, but please--write them so that a reader doesn't have to have read them all, in order, to make sense of the story. A stand-alone that makes sense on its own can form part of a series!! I know that cosy mysteries can be pretty awful, but I will never forget picking up Number Two of the "Yellow Rose" series and the author ruined Volume One for anyone who hadn't read it by recapping the whole thing-- plot twist, conclusion and all. Not everyone has access to whole series, but why ruin your chances of getting a new reader interested enough to hang on and find more?

I read a lot because I don't sleep well. Sometimes I get so tired that I actually don't want to read any more, but since I also have tinnitus, audio books are out. (Walkman generation--how do you think I got it in the first place!)

That's a good point. How often have I bailed on a book lately because I just couldn't care about the character(s)!Life's too short to read about people that make you want to slap them.