Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group discussion
ABOUT BOOKS AND READING
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What are you reading or what books have you read or heard about? (Part TWELVE) Ongoing general thread.
I am sorry I missed seeing the review but in any case I think congratulations are in order.
Seems I'm not interested in the current book club selection ("To Capture What We Cannot Keep"). I read one page and closed the book. Perhaps I'll try again next week. Not always the fault of the story, just me.Instead, I'm reading the January edition of the Oprah magazine which I received for Christmas. An easy read, learn a little, learn nothing, look through pages, find out about a new product. Relaxes me. Sometimes I just want something to read that's very very simple.
Thanks. It was nice to find a glowing review, but that wasn't really the point. It was knowing how authors feel, especially new ones who have really worked hard on their first novel.
Soldier Boy by Michael Shaara, an author I'd previously only known for a US Civil War book about Gettysburg, did a credible job writing short SF stories. Most are SF war, but not all. I gave it 4 stars in my review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Jim, this book is available on Kindle for 0.99cents - downloading. Looks good. Many others gave it 4 stars as well.
Can you forward to me your review of your book or post it again on goodreads as I seem to have missed it somehow and would love to read it.
Nina wrote: "Can you forward to me your review of your book or post it again on goodreads as I seem to have missed it somehow and would love to read it."The link to my review is right there in my comment, Nina, but here it is again.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Linda wrote: "Jim, this book is available on Kindle for 0.99cents - downloading. Looks good. Many others gave it 4 stars as well."That's a great price. Mine copy is a battered old paperback. I probably bought it used back in the 70s or 80s. It's still in amazingly good shape. Funny how some stick together & others fall completely apart. I still have a few paperbacks from my father in the 50s, but most are dead. Many sat in unheated storage for years & that did them in.
No reading today. Just enjoying family. My husband's birthday today - Christmas day.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
Happy Birthday to your husband and hope the day was Merry.
Happy birthday to your husband, Linda. Hope everyone had a great day.
I send my birthday wishes to your husband, too, Linda.
Thank you everyone for the good bday wishes for Fred. He had a good bday and Christmas!And, I'm still not reading anything other than my Oprah magazine!! Funny how some days you just want to read something short.
I wasn't thrilled with Antique Collector's Directory of Period Detail by Paul Davidson. He tried to cover too much territory & time which wound up confusing me. Still, I learned a few things & gave it a 3 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I'm looking forward to reading this book in 2018 "From American Cockroaches to Zebras, New Book Answers 'Does It Fart?'"https://www.livescience.com/61287-new...
When I was a little girl my favorite animal was a zebra. Sounds like a fun read.
You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David McRaney was a good, fun trip through our cognitive biases, shortcuts, & various dysfunctions. I thought it was well worth the time spent & gave it a 5 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Great review. Made such interesting points. I have a question for you Jim and you seem to have such a store of knowledge that I hope you can answer this and not think of it as racist. I am not just curious. How did the word Negro; then the word derived from it, "nigger" become associated with racism?
The LA Theater Works has a number of plays in the audio book selection in my library. Camping with Henry and Tom by Mark St. Germain is a short play that brings Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, & President Warren Harding together. Alan Alda & Charles Durning are in it. Wonderful. I gave it a 4 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Did you know Henry Ford and Thomas Edison lived next door to each other in FL?
Thanks for thinking of me, but I don't really know, Nina. A lot of words have changed meanings over the years. Some I detest. The use of the world 'decimate' to mean 'wipe out completely bothers me to no end since there are plenty of synonyms for annihilate or obliterate. The 'deci' in the name obviously means 1/10th of, so why the change? It's ridiculous, but now it's become a standard. Yuck.I expect that any word which designates a group can be good or bad & probably changes over time. IIRC, a cracker was originally a southern cowboy, possibly specific to Florida, but later evolved into a slur. Rednecks, those who wore red handkerchiefs, were once a proud symbol of the coal miners revolt in the early 1900s, but is more often associated with poor southern farmers due to having sunburned necks. It's often a synonym for cracker.
IIRC, Negro comes from Spanish which means black. Sometime in the 18th century, 'nigger' became the a common term in the US. Given the status of blacks at the time, I'd guess it always was derogatory. Jim seemed fine with the appellation in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), but Twain & most of his readers were white. Besides, it was set in the rural south where it would have been common usage.
It was commonly used in rural Maryland when I was a kid living on the Eastern Shore, but it was bad then. I remember asking a friend's mother whether the term 'black' or 'colored' was polite since she was black & I was confused by the news at the time. She gravely told me that 'colored' was just fine with her. It was the mid 60s, I was about 7, & Mom didn't know.
We were clueless since there were few blacks where we grew up on Long Island. Most of us were 2d or 3d generation off the boat. A lot of the first generation had lived in Brooklyn & our parents had made good, so they moved out on the Island into neighborhoods that were a real mix of ethnicity, but Greeks or Italians were the darkest skinned in any quantity that I recall. I remember a lot of ethnic jokes, but they were told in good humor. We ran all around & through everyone else's houses & got yelled at in a lot of languages, although the hand signals (spanks) were all the same.
I remember the food the most & I'm no gourmet. It was just that good. Wherever we were playing, we were fattened up. Mrs. Muchimichi made the best spaghetti & Artie always had bushels of clams & oysters. George's mother was Greek (Papa-something) & made some sort of honey cake to die for. Grandma Meyer made spaetzle & sauerbraten. Kowalski's mom made wonderful perogies. Miss Muriel (Irish) was the queen of pies & her husband (Mr. Perkins) owned a restaurant with Australian cuisine. (Their son Jonathan was the red-headed Campbell's soup kid of the 60s & now owns his own restaurant in partnership with my aunt.) The Lins had Chinese place, but I don't think they were exactly. Their sweet & sour spoiled everyone else's for me. The Goldmans had a deli. Arnie still had it last time I was there a decade or so ago. Hot pastrami dripping with grease on rye. Yum! Those were just a few. (I just gained 10 lbs thinking about it.)
It was completely different on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Most had been there forever, both black & white, but had been completely segregated until recently. It was very rural & conservative, to put it politely. My black friend, Jonathan, was never comfortable eating at our house & I only remember eating lunch at his a couple of times. There was always a wall there which I didn't understand for a long time.
He hurt me one time when we were playing. (I think he hit a baseball that bloodied my nose or something.) His mother was terrified & took me home begging my mother for forgiveness. My mother was completely mystified, as was I. It was no big deal to either of us, but I'll never forget how scared that poor lady was. It was scary. Mom told me not to ever tell anyone about the incident. I never did, but I don't recall playing with Jonathan after that, either. Sad.
Nina wrote: "Did you know Henry Ford and Thomas Edison lived next door to each other in FL?"I didn't. Neat. They were somewhat friendly in the play.
I finished up my review of 2017 on Goodreads. 5 stars, of course. Details are here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Jim, it was so entertaining after not being on Goodreads for a spell to come across your reviews. Thanks for taking the time to do that. I do have one comment about the Huckleberry Finn comment; that book setting was supposedly in Hannibal MO where Mark Twain had grown up and I don't consider it as the rural south; although MO did have southern leanings as it was a border state but not strickly southern. But, perhaps you perceived it as such.
Glad you enjoyed them, Nina. Consider it short hand. The time/area was more rural southern & much of their trip was deeper into the south, but you have a point. The area is a bit like KY & MD being on the border. In MD, there are distinct areas with the Eastern Shore being much like rural south while the central area is more like the north.
I hope your New Yorkers are not in blizzard conditions. It is very cold here single digits and sometimes zero at night. Supposed to finally warm up toward the end of next week. We have had no moisture since October. But, troubles on the home front. It seems we don't have a dishwasher leaking problem; worse.Our sewer is clogged up and rather than coming back up into the sink it is going down through a pipe leakage into our basement finished bedroom wall. We might be facing major construction if the wall has to be taken down.
Also, my daughter's horse has something bad in it's leg and might have to be put down if the medical treatment doesn't work.They aren't hopeful and also she has been boarding another horse for a friend and has greatly improved that horse's condition since boarding him and now that owner says if Megan puts her horse she will put that one down also. Megan feels terrible about this but can't do anything about it. Enough bad news for tonight.
Oh, that's a lot of bad news, Nina. Hope things improve!
Sorry to hear you are going through that, Nina.
Thanks, I'll keep you informed. Probably next step is that my husband will cut a section of the wall out and see what develops from there. We aren't sure at this point if our INS will cover any of this.
I got behind on my reviews for some reason. Short Science Fiction Collection vol. 008 is devoted to Alan E. Nourse. Usually these Librivox collections have as many different authors as stories, so this was a nice change of pace. Nourse had quite the imagination, too. I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen is a fantasy set in a post apocalyptic SF world, a nice blend & a precursor to his 'Swords' series. I haven't read it for years & thought it aged very well. I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Death of a Gossip is the first of the Hamish MacBeth cozy mysteries by M.C. Beaton. It was short & fun. I gave it a 3 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Nina wrote: "Thanks, I'll keep you informed. Probably next step is that my husband will cut a section of the wall out and see what develops from there. We aren't sure at this point if our INS will cover any of ..."A lot going on for you and your husband. Keeping my fingers crossed that if needed - home insurance will cover and prayers for Megan's horse.
Jim, thanks for the reviews. "Death of a Gossip" has been added to my want to read list. Believe you've mentioned M.C. Beaton previously. Still have to look this author up and try out some of the books. I too get disappointed when not giving all the information to be able to solve the mystery. Sometimes I just shrug and move on. Other times, I find myself saying why couldn't such and such be mentioned then end up saying "oh well."
Like - "cozy mysteries."
I believe this is the first book I've read by Beaton. Look at my review again & read the comments. You might get some other ideas, too. A couple of friends of mine are real fans of hers.
I read one by him but forgot the title; an Agatha Raisin.
Having problems with my email so this is an experiment.
Nina wrote: "Having problems with my email so this is an experiment."I see your post, Nina.
Thanks, Joy for answering as we updated my email and everything is changed and I needed to see if I could even get the messages.
Good something works. Still battling the water drainage problem. Can't use the kitchen sink. If we put any water down the drain it goes directly to our basement bedroom and soaks the carpet. We call the INS company tomorrow. Wish us luck.
Nina, I hope the problem can be solved soon!
I'll keep you informed. Perhaps will know tomorrow what happens next.
I gave How Great Science Fiction Works a 4 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I really enjoyed the first 10 lectures or so, but I think SF grew beyond the constraints after that. For instance, his discussion of sex, gender, & feminism was incomplete & muddled since they're squished into one 30 minute lecture. Each could have easily filled their own. Still, it was quite a trip. Highly recommended.
Jim wrote: "I believe this is the first book I've read by Beaton. Look at my review again & read the comments. You might get some other ideas, too. A couple of friends of mine are real fans of hers."Will do.
Marvelous review of the S.F lectures, even if I don't read much of that genre nice to know what it's about. Anyone who is interested in having a laugh a page do read, "The All-Girls Filling Station Reunion," bu Fannie Flag. It is the perfect anecdote for my on going not Happy New year so far. Starting with no phone or Internet as I mentioned and ongoing kitchen disaster and watch stopped working and daughter's horse having to be put down and a very important picture Christmas card from granddaughter so far is lost in mail. Yes, I do need this book. Writing is so good; she is a genius at comic lines. One more plumber just rand the doorbell. We'll see what's next?
I gave Sanibel Flats by Randy Wayne White a 4 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I look forward to reading more of the series.
Science Fiction: The Literature Of The Technological Imagination by Eric S. Rabkin was pretty good. It's shorter than Wolfe's How Great Science Fiction Works. The roots of & early SF is traced even better, but once he gets into the 1950s, he doesn't do the subject justice at all. Leaves out far too much, although he covers film better than books.I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I read a couple of good books lately. Beyond the City by Arthur Conan Doyle was surprisingly good. It's kind of a soap opera by the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Not really what I expected. I gave it a 4 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Med Ship Man is by Murray Leinster back when he was still writing good stuff for the pulps rather than novelizations for awful SF TV shows. I gave it 4 stars here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
You do give great reviews, Jim. So does Joy.
Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group
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A nice Christmas present indeed.