Amazon exiles discussion
Amazon exiles
nocheese wrote: "I must be a special friend, suzy, you sent me two :)"Did I, nocheese? ... Oooooops!!! ... HA HA HA HA HA!!!
I find the Goodreads Inbox quite a challenge to work out sometimes as it will insist on grouping together or separating out Conversations and reorganising Emails in places that I have to keep on going searching through? ... I often lose the continuity of where I am up to if I am sending out several Messages at a time, like I do for Christmas and Easter ;o>
I’m glad it’s not just me Suzy. I find Messages confusing, the way it shows everything twice. I’m never sure what I’ve sent or if I’ve got it right.
It's late downunder but Easter Greetings to all here - I hope you've all managed to spoil yourselves in some way.
Nice picture of a sparrow in the act of eating a seed from your bird feeder, Gordon. How did yo manage to capture that precise moment?
... whilst sitting in a nearby Tree disguised as a giant Stick Insect?!! ;o>
Are the blue bits of the feeder plastic, Gordon? I had to change to metal ones as the bloody squirrels chewed them to bits.
It's all plastic, Lez, apart from the lid and the hook to hang it on the tree.I don't get many squirrels, actually.
I've refilled the feeder this morning, after the birds emptied it from ¾ full yesterday morning.
It’s cruel to show a picture of books to librarians when we can’t read the spines!
Lez wrote: "It’s cruel to show a picture of books to librarians when we can’t read the spines!"They aren't all mine (long story) but, left to right:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
The Circle - Dave Eggers
Adam Bede - George Eliot
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Romola - George Eliot (awarded to my grandma as a Sunday School merit award in 1923)
The Lifted Veil - George Eliot (barely visible: a 60-page 60p Penguin edition)
The Gathering - Anne Enright
Foursome - Jane Fallon
The Sound & the Fury - William Faulkner
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
The Fatal Englishman - Sebastian Faulks
Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon - F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby is on the shelf in my bedroom)
The Machine Stops & Other Stories - EM Forster
The Celestial Omnibus - EM Forster
Where Angels Fear to Tread - EM Forster
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
Freedom - Jonathan Frantzen
Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder
Pincher Martin - William Golding
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
To the Ends of the Earth - William Golding
The Diary of a Nobody - George & Weedon Grossmith
Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson
The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Moshin Hamid
Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
Victoria - Knut Hamsun
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Under the Greenwood Tree - Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Gertrude - Hermann Hesse
Demian - Hermann Hesse
Narziss & Goldmund - Hermann Hesse
The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse
Stories of Five Decades - Hermann Hesse
Pictor's Metamorphoses - Hermann Hesse
Plus, lying on their sides on top of these:
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Autobiographical Writings - Hermann Hesse
Klingsor's Last Summer - Hermann Hesse
Strange News from Another Star - Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
Blimey, that’s beyond the call of duty! Thank you. I’ve read 9 of them, including ‘Under The Greenwood Tree’ which we had to read at school. Put me off Hardy forever.
Under the Greenwood Tree isn't one of his best, but it's a fairly pleasant read. (I read it on a North Sea ferry about 25 years ago.) I love The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native and I like Hardy in general. We read Far from the Madding Crowd at school, which put me off for a while, but when I re-read it about 10 years later I realized it was actually good. It seems to be the purpose of schools to make exciting and interesting things as painfully dull as possible. I think this is even truer now than it was in the last millennium.
Have you read The Machine Stops, Lez? It's one of the stories I think should be compulsory reading for everyone living in a developed country in the early 21st century, but I've said that before about Animal Farm and I know you disagree with me about that.
I haven’t read it but I remember seeing it on TV and being impressed. Of your other authors, have you read Golding’s ‘The Inheritors’ and Fowles’ ‘The Collector’ (great film too) ? Both very good. Sorry, I seem to have hi-jacked the books thread.
Call me a philistine if you like but I haven't read any of the at all.
I find Hardy (and most of the Victorian novelists) to be utterly depressing, Tess of the D'urbervilles being the worst.
I love Hardy and have all those titles on my shelves along with The Trumpet Major, The Dynasts and Selected Short Stories. I love his poetry too. The only other title of Gordon's that graces my shelves is Diary of a Nobody. And the only other one I've read is Lord of the Flies. When I was working at Auckland Public Library in 1975/76 (a fabulous service with three huge city-block size floors above ground and two below), we had a young library assistant who was asked if there were any books on Middlesex. She went to the workroom for the 'restricted' books and came back with with books of transgender interest. She never lived it down! Mind you, I wasn't much better with decoding the Kiwi accent. When a young lad came in and asked if we had anything on careers, I overwhelmed him with books on both North and South Korea. He probably never went into a library again!
Lovely Photo anyway, Gordon, with the sun slanting over the bookshelf. I lay claim to having read 28 of the titles.Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is marvellous.
Tender is the Night & The Last TycoonLord of the Flies
Dead Souls
Siddhartha
that's it
WoW?!! - I've read 14 of them and am now feeling rather impressed by myself! ;o>
Jamaica InThe Prisoner of Covid.
Five Stay at Home Together
I've got more but... ;o)
Ohhh?!! - I love these! ;o>... MORE! ... MORE! ...
Biggles Doesn't Fly NorthBiggles Doesn't Fly South
Biggles Doesn't Fly West
Biggles Doesn't Fly East
……..and numerous other titles…….
Zen and the Art of Getting a Supermarket Delivery Slot
I've been getting in a lot of practice on the last one, Derek - LOL!
suzysunshine7 wrote: "I've been getting in a lot of practice on the last one, Derek - LOL!"I've given up, so despite being officially 'at risk' now I've reached the advanced age of seventy I've just been going out shopping when I need to.
Mind you, the Forest of Dean isn't exactly a Covid-19 hot spot.
Love in the Time of Corona(Not) on the Beach
The Insider
The Man in the Covid Mask
Around the World in Eighty Days, the Diary of a Pandemic
The Man in the Surgical MaskThe Loneliness of the Long-Distance Zoom-conferencer
Don't Stand By Me
Fifty Shades of Toilet Paper
The Ballad of the Closed Café
No Company for Old Men
The Shopping News
Yeah, I gave up on them all weeks ago now, Derek, but I still like to keep a daily/nightly Eye on them all the same - and it finally paid off as I suddenly got offered a Home Delivery Slot at just after 3am on Saturday Morning and I got almost a half of everything that I ordered delivered to us today and nearly all of it was the stuff that we really wanted and needed the most ;o>
Gordon wrote: "... Fifty Shades of Toilet Paper ..."EEEEEEEUUUUUUUWWWWWWW!!! ;oO
Very lovely fresh spring colours Gordon.
Another cartoon from Mr. Wrong Hands re: literature/virus-life has tickled my fancy:-
https://wronghands1.files.wordpress.c...
Hmmm? - I definitely am not into wearing Boned Corsets, using Potties instead of Loos and being surrounded by folk with very poor personal Hygiene though! ;oO
suzysunshine7 wrote: "Hmmm? - I definitely am not into wearing Boned Corsets, using Potties instead of Loos and being surrounded by folk with very poor personal Hygiene though! ;oO"It's an interesting thought... When I was growing up in the sixties & seventies we would go to stay with my grandparents a couple of times a year (it was a long way to travel, as Dominic Cummings can testify). The toilet at their house was outdoors and had no light, so at night you had to use a chamber pot that was kept under the bed. And then somebody had to empty it in the morning. That was a long, long time after the regency.
They lived in a colliery house (my grandad was a miner). All the front doors & window frames were painted the same colour (National Coal Board green) and all the houses were extended in the same way at the same time. By the time I was visiting they had kitchens built on to the back: previously, all cooking was done on the coal range in the living room. They also had bathrooms added upstairs with room for a bath and a wash basin, but not a toilet. Up to the nineteen-fifties baths were taken in a zinc tub in front of the fire. Of course, the miners had baths or showers at the pit head so facilities at home were more for the benefit of their families. It would have been unusual for anyone to have a bath at home more than once a week.
Gordon wrote: "suzysunshine7 wrote: "Hmmm? - I definitely am not into wearing Boned Corsets, using Potties instead of Loos and being surrounded by folk with very poor personal Hygiene though! ;oO"It's an intere..."
Been there, done that Gordon. My grandad was a Northumbrian miner and every year my brother and I were put on the Flying Scotsman First day of the summer school holidays to stay with them. Two communal water taps, one at each end the row. The co-op butcher, grocer, etc coming round weekly by horse and cart. Toilet down the garden, basically a large bucket with a seat in a shed that was emptied weekly and removed, again by horse and cart.
Gas lighting, radio driven by lead acid batteries, replaced weekly.
We had a great time. Basically we ran wild for the whole of the holiday. Mum and dad joined us for the last two weeks then we all drove back to London in the Morris 12 we had at the time. It took about ten hours to get back I think.
Yep! - no Electricity, Water brought in by the Bucket-load from the nearby Spring, and hanging on all night to avoid having to go to the freezing cold Privy in the dark! - LOL!!! ;o>
Before we finally got mains water laid on to the house (in the early 70s) we used to have to take a container up to the end of the drive (half a mile) and fill it up from a stand-pipe which was where the supply to the hamlet terminated! 🤪
My parents were lucky but for a sad reason. My mum's (adoptive) dad died a few weeks before her wedding and left her adoptive mum enough money for the £50 deposit for a house. Liverpool council employees (my dad) got a small percentage off a mortgage which also helped. My mum only had to pay a small amount off the interest while my dad was away during the war.I left to get married in 1972, my sis went travelling then settled in Harrogate where my parents finally moved to as well.
I've put a pic on my profile, taken in 2007, only the windows had changed.
£50 deposit for a house sounds so comical now, though it would have been a lot of money in its day.
The price of the house was £500 - a lot in 1938!A similar house in the same road now is around £215,000.
Trying hard not to invoke the famous Python sketch, but I too can relate. Late 1950s in Rhodesia, I spent my school holidays in the small town of Banket. There was a row of shops (all under one roof and owned by the lovely Selous Dardagan) with residences for the store managers behind. I stayed with Hamish and Marie MacDonald, a young Scots couple who ran Mr Dardagan's butcher's shop. The residences, under the same roof as the shops, were all conjoined and shared a long, open veranda. Cooking was done over an open range and the one shared toilet was down a very long, dark path. The dark was scary enough for me, never mind snakes. I always had to get one of the grown-ups to accompany me.In 1971/72 I was living in Edinburgh, in the heart of the Old Town, near the University. My Uncle and Auntie and two cousins lived in a Corporation flat in the Royal Mile, just next to John Knox's House, so we're talking prime real estate by today's standards. They had a single toilet on every second landing shared by the occupants of six flats. I was not impressed!
In the mid-80s another Uncle and Aunt were employed as school caretakers at a small primary school in the Borders. It came with a small cottage but no running water. They had to go out in all weathers to cart water by the bucket load from the nearby burn.
Aren't we all soft these days!
Re "my story" above, I was googling Selous Dardagan as I thought he had died in an aircraft shot down by a missile, but that was one of his family, not Selous himself. However, I did find a wonderful description by Doris Lessing from her book "African Journeys" (which I have now ordered from ABE) that took me right back to all those school holidays when I was evacuated to Banket (my parents both worked and they had no family to look after me). I've pasted the quote in my photos - hope none of you are vegans, the fly-covered carcass is not very appealing, but, hey, I lived to tell the tale! Life was pretty basic in the 1950s.
WoW?!! - you certainly have travelled wide and far, Val!!! ;o>One of my Cousins sent Mum these Links last year asking if they reminded us of anyone or anything? ... and they immediately took me right back to my most treasured memories of my early years in Ireland living with my beloved Nan ;o> ...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-norther...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRL9i...
Our old Family House passed on through so many generations was near Tipperary ;o>
Wow, she is a really strong woman - totally confident with the hand life dealt her in the first place and her own choices since. As I said above, how soft are we?
I know ... my Nan made everything look and seem to be so easy too. Washing Days in particular would take all day long to see through and I still vividly remember like it was yesterday just how incredibly tired and mind-numbingly bored I got whenever I was put on Mangle Duty - LOL!!!And I have two tiny scars to always remind me never to play with Irons in the Fire ;o>
Some good news in these strange times re: something I posted on this thread ages & ages ago about a petition to stop the mass culling of mountain hares...Just yesterday MSPs voted to ban the unlicensed culling of mountain hares and make them a protected species under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Hurrah!
Also yesterday, MSPs voted to ban Scottish salmon farmers from shooting seals. Hurrah!
YAYYY!!! ;o> ...
Helen The Melon wrote: "Some good news in these strange times re: something I posted on this thread ages & ages ago about a petition to stop the mass culling of mountain hares...Just yesterday MSPs voted to ban the unli..."
Brilliant! The sooner we accept that we actually share the planet and we're not entitled to treat it like an "all you can consume" buffet, the better.
Amazon exiles
Books mentioned in this topic
A Boy's Own Story (other topics)A Boy's Own Story (other topics)
How Amazon fucks over its publishers (other topics)
In Dubious Battle (other topics)
If they have ever sent me a Message in the past then I can still use that, click on 'Reply', and send them a new one - I just can't use the 'Compose' function at the moment as I've already reached my (rather limited) Goodreads limit on using that - LOL!!! ;o>
I dunno ... it feels all the more important to be able to still reach out and connect with folk today - just to make sure that everyone that we know and care about is still managing to stay well and is still doing okay right now ... x