What are we reading? 20/11/2023

[Ruby]

scarletnoir wrote: "A quick update on Ross Macdonald:

I have now finished not only The Chill but also Black Money . . . .

Thanks to you I have checked out Black Money. Hope I like Macdonald--there's lots to read. My eyes are bothering me so audiobooks and large print are best. Someone gave me a nifty light gizmo--around my neck or head with its arms batteried.

[Paul]

Ruby wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "A quick update on Ross Macdonald:

I have now finished not only The Chill but also Black Money . . . .
Thanks to you I have checked out Black Money..."


Hello Ruby! Good to see you around

[[deleted user]]

Ruby wrote: "Thanks to you I have checked out Black Money..."

Lovely to see you, Ruby.

[Ruby]

CCCubbon wrote: "Re Kennedy assassination.

My daughter was six months old, she cried and cried until she could talk and I was walking up and down with her trying to calm her down with the radio on when the news ca..."

I was at work and we all went home. On the subway I could tell who knew and who didn't.

[CCCubbon]

Ruby wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "Re Kennedy assassination.

My daughter was six months old, she cried and cried until she could talk and I was walking up and down with her trying to calm her down with the radio on..."

Hello old friend. Hope all well

[Robert]

Paul wrote: "Ruby wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "A quick update on Ross Macdonald:

I have now finished not only The Chill but also Black Money . . . .
Thanks to you I have checked out..."

Welcome back, Ruby.

[Robert]

AB76 wrote: "Nuremberg Diary has been a really fascinating read over the last three weeks

I'm about 3/4 of the way through now and every conversation that the au..."

I will look for this book. Fritsche was acquitted, actually. So were Dr. Schacht (financial expert for the first years of Hitler's reign) and von Papen (slippery fellow, not too clever).
Might be interesting to compare this to Telford Taylor's book on the trial. Taylor, an assistant prosecutor, agreed with the co-defendants' assessment of Goering; elimination of drugs and a healthier diet reduced his weight and cleared his mind. The former Number Two gave a lucid account of himself from the dock, in testimony that went on for days.

[AB76]

Robert wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Nuremberg Diary has been a really fascinating read over the last three weeks

I'm about 3/4 of the way through now and every conversatio..."

yes, Fritsche seems to be an odd man out at the trial really, i'm now in the last section of the diary. Jodl's stand in the dock is interesting, he seems to have been a military man with a spine unlike Kietel

Doenitz starts declaring the war was all the politicians fault not soldiers who were doing their duty in a chat with Gilbert and i found this an example of much German thinking between 1871 and 1945. A distrust for politicians (ie democracy, at least till 1933) and a glorifying of military duty and honour that by 1939 was totally bordering on a mutant hybrid of the same duty that led to the severe occupation of Belgiium and N France in WW1.

I see this as a cancer of thought in that era and even Thomas Mann in WW1 was of a similar viewpoint that politics and politicians(ie democracy) are a problem. Fischer in his brilliant study of Germany in WW1 also noticed this problem, which explains in many ways for me how 1933 and the Enabling Laws were not as unpopular was they should have been

[Gpfr]

Ruby wrote: "... I have checked out Black Money..."

Good to see you here, Ruby 😃

[AB76]

RIP ex england football manager Terry Venables

I mention him here as he co-wrote a few novels in the 1970s, i found one on amazon for £2 and have ordered it. I dont expect too much of his football brilliance to be transferred to the page but any polymath of sorts must be respected, its not easy to write or co -write 4-5 novels

his Hazell novels(detective novels) ended up in a tv series in 1978-79

(for our american friends, Venables was a soccer managerial legend, who crooned, wrote novels and was a very likeable figure, he died aged 80 this weekend)

[Ruby]

CCCubbon wrote: "Ruby wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "Re Kennedy assassination.

My daughter was six months old, she cried and cried until she could talk and I was walking up and down with her trying to calm her down with..."

Hi CC---could be better! I'm in week 7 of weaning off meds. Reading is hard, really hard so listening to audiobooks and watching old movies. This won't last forever.

[Ruby]

I want The Oppermanns to be my last read of the year, in remembrance of Justine. She recommended this book.

[Bill]

NYRB is offering all their books at 25% off with free domestic shipping until Noon ET on 27 Nov. I'll browse the titles, but not sure if I'll take advantage. With this kind of offer there must be something to temp me.
https://www.nyrb.com/?utm_medium=emai...

[AB76]

Ruby wrote: "I want The Oppermanns to be my last read of the year, in remembrance of Justine. She recommended this book."

hi ruby, its very good indeed, i read it about 15 years ago and its a shame that there is not more from the author in translation as German literature in english has had a golden period since around 2010

upcoming in 2024 is Kracauer's "Ginster", Kempowski 's An Ordinary Youth, pandGert Hoffmans Our Philosopher. Am looking foward to all three

[AB76]

Bill wrote: "NYRB is offering all their books at 25% off with free domestic shipping until Noon ET on 27 Nov. I'll browse the titles, but not sure if I'll take advantage. With this kind of offer there must be s..."

just seen this, thanks Bill, some great new titles ahead in 2024 i think

[AB76]

Visitants, wow what a read so far, this is the kind of novel i expected but one always starts to become wary of the gift that keeps giving and if 2023 is repeated for novels of quality in 2024, i will be a happy man

Stow is almost describing three levels of reality in this novel, one level is the post-colonial australian administration of Papua New Guinea(Stow himself served as a patrol-officer in the late 1950s), another level is the official enquiry into the suicide of a patrol officer, retold by five witnesses and the third level is, it seems, about strange "visitors" to the eastern Papuan islands, that have troubled the Papuan people.

Its not written during the colonial era but this is almost a modernist "Heart of Darkness" for the Australian rule of Papua New Guinea from 1947 to 1975. The text is littered with vernacular language usage, slang and the genuine feeling rapport that the two patrol officers Dalwood and Cawdor have for the Papuans they visit.

By using five reference points (the witnesses), a lot is hidden or mis-interpreted it seems, almost like five, possibly unreliable narrators but as yet, i am in suspense.

[AB76]

My reading of modern novels, has, as is typical, been a lot less stausfying in 2023, than classic ones. (Classic meaning written before 1980)

Books by Almada, Carafiglio and Herzog were better than the rather average rest of the 15 modern novels read in 2023

However i have just started Sojourn by Amit Chaudhari, a new novel which i picked up by chance in Waterstones. Set in a city i love (Berlin), in a season i love (autumn), i am already enjoying its spare prose

[scarletnoir]

Gpfr wrote: "In the latest issue of Slightly Foxed, there's an article on Maigret. Fans may be interested to know, if you don't already, that there are fresh translations of all 75(!) Maigret novels available a..."

Thanks for that... Simenon is all about atmosphere - I don't know of any author who does it better. The basic conceit of the Maigret books is that the inspector enters into the atmosphere of wherever the crime was committed, and by a sort of osmosis gets to the truth of what happened. It works especially well in those books set in real places (most - maybe all - of the Maigrets, but not all of the romans noirs). The earlier books are sometimes too melodramatic - perhaps Simenon thought that would be more appealing to the readers - but later depend more on suspense and intrigue. They are not police procedurals in any normal sense of the word.

Though I originally read pretty much all of the Maigrets in English - and saw the excellent BBC TV adaptations starring Rupert Davies (1960-63) which I have been re-viewing on Freeview Ch. 82 - Talking Pictures - later on, when I moved to France, I re-read many of them in French to improve my knowledge of the language. Since I was already familiar with the character and the stories, even when I didn't 'know' all the words I could often guess at the meaning, which was a great help. I reckon that I'd be able to produce a pretty good translation myself, by now!

Recently, I saw the adaptation of Félicie from that 1960s series - it was well done, but I did miss the comical scene where the inspector rides a bicycle back to Félicie's house with a lobster on the carrier (!) - they left the bike ride out.

[scarletnoir]

CCCubbon wrote: "This book is very subtle..."

You see a lot more in the book than I did, but I'm not convinced... I won't read any more Black (or Banville). It's a miserable experience.

[scarletnoir]

Robert wrote: "Guiteau remained at the scene after the shooting, asked a detective about his political affiliation, and predicted that being a presidential assassin would help him to meet women."

Thanks for your summary of what Guiteau got up to.

Odd that some people think that murdering people will "help them meet women". Even odder is that, sometimes, they are right!

[scarletnoir]

Ruby wrote: "Hope I like Macdonald--there's lots to read."

I hope you enjoy them, too - in fact, I have only ben able to track down 8 Archer ebooks and one out of print book at an affordable price - some others are absurdly expensive signed copies or first editions. It amused me that the ONLY print copy I could afford came from a village some 50 miles away and cost less than £4 including postage!

You may have more luck with audiobooks - perhaps there are more available in that format. I wish someone would make the rest of the Archers available as ebooks or reprints.

[scarletnoir]

AB76 wrote: "...a glorifying of military duty and honour..."

This mindset is very clearly represented both in the brilliant book All Quiet on the Western Front and in the film adaptation by Lewis Milestone - most likely you are familiar with both.

[MK]

scarletnoir wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "This book is very subtle..."

You see a lot more in the book than I did, but I'm not convinced... I won't read any more Black (or Banville). It's a miserable experience."

scarletnoir wrote: "Robert wrote: "Guiteau remained at the scene after the shooting, asked a detective about his political affiliation, and predicted that being a presidential assassin would help him to meet women."

..."

I'm with you Scarlet. I think it was Snow and the treatment of women in it that put him on my DNR (Do Not Read) list.

[scarletnoir]

I can read French (oh, yes I can)... and reading, for example, a police procedural in French probably only takes me an extra 25% of time over reading such a book in English.

But.

But there is François-Henri Désérable.

Now, reading a 5-page chapter of Évariste can take me - easily - two hours or more, because...

Because... vocabulary
Because... idioms
Because... references
Because... background

It's the sort of thing, which if written in some sort of po-faced clever dick way would drive me nuts. But Désérable isn't like that... his joy in writing, the fun he has doing it, the fun he transmits to the reader - it's just fantastic. (I have to say - this is the author with whom I feel most "on the same wavelength". It just works, for me. For others? No idea - but madame loves his books as well.)

No time today for any lengthy extracts or commentary, but thought I'd share a couple of idioms which I liked:

(of Évariste's father, the mayor): on murmure, dans le village, que le maire 'travaille du chapeau'...

which means: "there is a rumour in the village that the mayor is going a bit crazy". (It seems to me that the idiom must be linked to the English "he is talking through his hat", but the meaning is not quite the same.)

Even better, following a digression (Désérable is prone to digression, as am I):

revenons plutôt à nos moutons, c'est à dire à Évariste qui peut-être les comptait pour s'endormir...

This is an untranslatable joke: "revenir à nos moutons" means literally "get back to our sheep" but idiomatically means "get back to the point"... so to say then that "Évariste perhaps counted them to go to sleep" makes sense in French, but not in English.

It made me laugh out loud when I read it - but who'd be a translator of texts as rich as this? (Those are trivial examples...)

[AB76]

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...a glorifying of military duty and honour..."

This mindset is very clearly represented both in the brilliant book All Quiet on the Western Front and in the film adapta..."

yes and its also present in a more subtle earlier way in the 1880s and 1890 novels of Theodor Fontane. He cleverly observes the rituals that have emerged from the victory over France in 1870-71 and the new "glory" of a united Imperial Germany. When i first read Effi Briest, about 20 years ago, the sections dedicated to the cult of the military and its celebration days showed me the roots of the duty and honour cult that by the 1930s had been twisted and warped into something turbo charged and merciless. (though in 1914, the occupation of Belgium was also violent, cruel evidence of this)

For a great novel of occupied France in WW1, read Maxeence Van Der Mensch's Invasion14 written in 1937. I found it via a canadian unversity imprint

[Ruby]

scarletnoir wrote: "Ruby wrote: "Hope I like Macdonald--there's lots to read."

I quit the Money book almost right away--reading is too hard right now and the print is smallish. Trying to recall what I was reading 60 years ago. I knew there were mystery writers such as Tey, Millar, Allingham, others. Never got into them. I read odd books such as those written by Sholom Asch, and the Yiddish/Jewish canon. Carson McC, Flannery O'C, and what I loved was those early novels from the likes of Adam Hall, Len Deighton.

Apropos of nothing, I remember when Philip Roth announced at age 75 of so that he was done with fiction. I feel sort of the same unless it is re-reading great novels and classics.

[[deleted user]]

AB76 wrote: "...For a great novel of occupied France in WW1, read Maxeence Van Der Mensch's Invasion14 written in 1937...."

I had to look him up. Given how much I appreciated Au Bon Beurre on the Occupation in WWII, this looks a good one for me to try.

[AB76]

Russell wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...For a great novel of occupied France in WW1, read Maxeence Van Der Mensch's Invasion14 written in 1937...."

I had to look him up. Given how much I appreciated Au Bon Beurre on the ..."

i think you will enjoy it Russell, the occupation of the Nord region of France and Belgium in WW1 is quite well documented now but this novel covers so much of why the Germans made life so difficult in that small portion of mainland France, that was under occupation for most of the Great War. I havent read it yet but apparently the novel Schlump by Hans Grimm(1928) covers the German side of occupied France(the Nord region again), though i think it is lighter hearted than Invasion14

[FrancesBurgundy]

scarletnoir wrote: ""Évariste perhaps counted them to go to sleep" makes sense in French, but not in English.

.."

Mais si, Scarlet - in my much younger days I was told to count sheep to go to sleep, en anglais. Apparently you had to watch them jumping over a fence and count, and unbelievably I tried that very recently when transcribing hymns into shorthand, reciting Robert Frost poems, finding birds, flowers, items of clothing going through the alphabet all failed. And the sheep failed too.

[Robert]

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: ""Évariste perhaps counted them to go to sleep" makes sense in French, but not in English.

.."

Mais si, Scarlet - in my much younger days I was told to count sheep to go to sle..."

Lewis Carroll, an insomnia sufferer, wrote a little book designed for the dead of night-- mathematical puzzles are one thing I remember.

[AB76]

i see the elgin marbles are creating a new culture war for this listing, hapless Tory government

i understand as they are owned by the British Museum, they cant be fully returned but the British govt is becoming a laughing stock since Brexit. Its like this faded island is trying to believe its 1823 or even 1923, not 2023...we do not rule the waves anymore!

[FrancesBurgundy]

Robert wrote: "Lewis Carroll, an insomnia sufferer, wrote a little book designed for the dead of night-- mathematical puzzles are one thing I remember..."

I can't find any copies of that but I see a new edition is being published next March - looks great. MrB is a mathematician and is very excited about a paper he is working on, so I get lots of sleep-inducing explanations of how far he's got and where it might be going. I'm not sure if he knows I understand virtually nothing about it - I think he thinks I'm taking it all in whereas I'm actually in another world!

[Gpfr]

Robert wrote: "Lewis Carroll ... mathematical puzzles ..."

Years ago I was teaching a very high-up director in Gaz de France and he loved maths and loved Lewis Carroll, because of mathematics.
He was pleased to see I had a complete works which includes A Tangled Tale, which

originally appeared as a serial ... in 1880. The writer's intention was to embody in each Knot (like the medecine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood) one or more mathematical questions ... for the amusement, and possible edification, of the fair readers of that magazine.
L.C. December 1885

[MK]

It's almost the end of the month, so why not use up a gift link or two?

Who would have thought that the NYT would single out California for a 10 best books piece? The cougar's tale sounds especially good as does the one on police reform. (Seattle has been under a Justice Department Consent Decree for a long time now.)

Link here - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/28/us...

[MK]

A huge shout-out for Franklin Foer's . I got my copy from the library which is my place to go for hardbacks. I don't know if the public libraries of any here are close to having it available or 'on order'. But if you want an excellent book of the first two years of the Biden Administration and both its accomplishments (bills passed) and failures (especially the Afghan departure), this is the book for you.

I'm not sure how subtle Foer is, but his analysis of Biden leaves this reader to draw their conclusions and makes me want to take another look at The Atlantic which is his usual beat. Here are a few tidbits (hopefully no spoilers) -

Biden is an ingrained person. Once his mind is made up, it seems to be difficult for him to move. Overturning Roe is a case in point. It was not until that 10-year-old had to travel across state lines that he left his waffles behind. And then there is Bibi - who I would like to be history once and for all and back on trial as he should be. How long he lasts after this conflict is over will be interesting, as is how long Biden will take to change in this instance.

Along the way there are the protracted 'what's in the bill, what's out' - mostly with Manchin being the stumbling block.

That's all I'll say, other than if you come by a copy within your budget - grab it. It is one of the best non-fiction books I've read this year.

And an end note, if you don't know what 'carried interest' is, please google it. Then you can throw brickbats at Kyrsten Sinema for her closeness to hedge fund managers and the fact that they should be ponying up and not hiding behind carried interest.

[Bill]

MK wrote: "And then there is Bibi - who I would like to be history once and for all and back on trial as he should be."

It seems like every commentary on the present situation I've read from the Israeli side includes the assurance that Netanyahu is toast and that he has close to zero support among Israelis. Yet, the longer he remains in charge (which I think he is despite the "unity" government) the more these assurances sound like the 2016 "Trump can't win" take in the US.

[AB76]

Bill wrote: "MK wrote: "And then there is Bibi - who I would like to be history once and for all and back on trial as he should be."

It seems like every commentary on the present situation I've read from the I..."

i fear that the slimy oaf will survive this crisis, posing as a war leader and making every move a calculation based on how it guarantees his survival. The lasting damage he has done is working with Smotrich and Ben Givr, who seem to embody a right wing approach that will be suicide for Israel in the long term.

[AB76]

Finished the stupendous Visitants, one in a long line of great Australian novels, as ice and chill settled over the shires, my head was in late 1950s Papua New Guinea and its people and places

I'm out on a limb with my next novel, it was an Oxfam find last year, a 1960 novel by James Barlow called The Patriots. The web can be appalling for literature and very little is available about author or novel but i feel like a dose of post-war english thriller like reading. it may become the first true turd of 2023, i hope not

[Robert]

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Robert wrote: "Lewis Carroll, an insomnia sufferer, wrote a little book designed for the dead of night-- mathematical puzzles are one thing I remember..."

I can't find any copies of that but I see..."

Carroll is a state of mind....

[AB76]

Robert wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Robert wrote: "Lewis Carroll, an insomnia sufferer, wrote a little book designed for the dead of night-- mathematical puzzles are one thing I remember..."

I can't find any ..."

i remember on the Oxford canal in 2018, we passed along the Isis where he first composed in his head the ideas of "Alice", to entertain his young niece. on a balmy october day with the Port Meadow and its cattle on one side, it was lovely to think of that magical world being created as they rowed along

[CCCubbon]

Regarding Lewis Carroll.

I thought that you might find this extract from Once upon a Prime by Sarah Hart interesting;

There’s one specific number that Lewis Carroll seems to have been a little obsessed with: 42. It crops up all over the place in his writing. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which happens to have forty-two illustrations), the King of Hearts, infuriated by the rapidly enlarging Alice’s disruption of court proceedings, reads out from his notebook, “Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.” When Alice follows the White Rabbit into his hole, she tumbles down a very deep well, and keeps falling down and down. She wonders if she will fall right through the earth. It’s a curious mathematical fact that falling through a tunnel leading between any two points on the earth’s surface takes a constant amount of time (being a pure mathematician, I ignore prosaic things like friction and air resistance). Guess how long it would take Alice to fall all the way through the earth to the other side? You got it: forty-two minutes.

There are other possible 42s hidden in Through the Looking-Glass. While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is full of playing cards, in Through the Looking-Glass the theme is chess. The entire book has the structure of a chess game, white versus red, with Alice moving through a board laid out over the fields. Alice meets several of the pieces during the course of her adventure, which it’s possible, says Lewis Carroll, to play as a real game of chess with Alice as a pawn who crosses the board to become a queen. During one conversation, Alice tells the White Queen she is 7 and a half years old exactly, or 7 years, 6 months; 7 times 6 is, of course, 42. The Queen’s age is much greater: 101 years, 5 months, and a day. How many days is that? The answer depends on where your leap years go, but the highest attainable total is 37,044. Is this a randomly chosen number? Perhaps. But the Red Queen and the White Queen, being from the same chess set, are presumably the same age. So their combined age is 74,088 days. What of that? Well, it’s exactly 42 × 42 × 42. I struggle to believe that this is a coincidence.

[Gpfr]

CCCubbon wrote: "Regarding Lewis Carroll.

I thought that you might find this extract from Once upon a Prime by Sarah Hart interesting ..."

♟👩‍🎓😉

[scarletnoir]

AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "When i first read Effi Briest, about 20 years ago, the sections dedicated to the cult of the military and its celebration days showed me the roots of the duty and honour cult that by the 1930s had been twisted and warped into something turbo charged and merciless."

Interesting comment... I haven't read the book, though a very long time ago I saw Fassbinder's film adaptation which (from memory) focused far more on the woman's reaction to the situation in which she found herself - with the (military/moral) background shaping people's opinions, I suppose... I'd guess (no more than that) that the film was a sort of feminist piece, but memory is fickle...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071458/...
From Wikipedia, it seems as if the author based the novel on real life, but significantly altered some details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effi_Br...

[scarletnoir]

Ruby wrote: "I quit the Money book almost right away--reading is too hard right now and the print is smallish.

If I understand you correctly, eyesight is a problem. My mother drove her car until the age of 95, then suffered from progressively worse macular degeneration and is now 'severely visually impaired', which for the purposes of social services and the tax authorities is the same as 'blind' (though she isn't, completely). Anyway, at some point in this period we moved from books through ereaders with ever larger font sizes to audiobooks. Mam can cope with telling her 'Alexa' to read such and such ebook, and maybe it's the way to go for anyone whose sight is failing. She still derives a great deal of pleasure from these books, now aged 101.

Apropos of nothing, I remember when Philip Roth announced at age 75 of so that he was done with fiction. I feel sort of the same unless it is re-reading great novels and classics.

I'm 75 but have not reached that stage yet... I still enjoy finding new authors, such as, in my case, François-Henri Désérable, Juan Marsé, Antonio Tabucchi among the 'literary' writers, and many others who write what might be termed 'crossover' novels - both of commendable literary skills but also using genre frameworks such as crime or historical bases.

As for re-reading the classics - we all have our own ideas about which novels deserve that designation (mine excludes a number of books which others would no doubt put in their list) - and I also feel a little nervous about revisiting works which helped to shape me, and which I might on a revisit find less impressive than I did 50+ years ago... So, I'm not there yet, and may never be.

[scarletnoir]

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: ""Évariste perhaps counted them to go to sleep" makes sense in French, but not in English.

.."

Mais si, Scarlet - in my much younger days I was told to count sheep to go to sle..."

It's a silly idea. Of course. the 'counting sheep' notion exists in English and in French, but the joke based on the French idiom of 'revenons à nos moutons' isn't translatable.

The great joy of Désérable as an author is that he's incredibly cultured (so, very many references) but also superbly talented and does not take himself too seriously. Great fun!

[scarletnoir]

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Robert wrote: "Lewis Carroll, an insomnia sufferer, wrote a little book designed for the dead of night-- mathematical puzzles are one thing I remember..."

I can't find any copies of that but I see..."

I didn't even know about this work, but it seems as if there are versions widely available. About the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tangl...

and available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=lewis+ca...

[scarletnoir]

Bill wrote: "Yet, the longer he remains in charge (which I think he is despite the "unity" government) the more these assurances sound like the 2016 "Trump can't win" take in the US."

Indeed. These are worrying times...

[scarletnoir]

CCCubbon wrote: "Regarding Lewis Carroll...She wonders if she will fall right through the earth. It’s a curious mathematical fact that falling through a tunnel leading between any two points on the earth’s surface takes a constant amount of time."

I'm struggling to understand this, as a physicist... the force on something starting at the earth's surface is directed towards the earth's centre (of gravity), so the tunnel would necessarily have to pass through that point - otherwise anything traversing such a tunnel along a 'chord' would be dragged along the inner surface of such a tunnel.

Besides, anything passing any distance below the surface would be melted or maybe even vapourised by the temperature!

(As you know, I am a very literal-minded creature...)

[AB76]

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "When i first read Effi Briest, about 20 years ago, the sections dedicated to the cult of the military and its celebration days showed me the roots of the duty and h..."

it should be up there with best french and english novels of that era, i feel it is still overlooked. Germany doesnt have a galaxy of writers in translation from the 1870-1900 period(aka The Imperial or Wilhelmine years) but Fontane is out there with 4 great novels in english translation, including the brilliant Der Stechlin

Of his contemparies Theodor Storm is superb but tends to write local novels of the North Sea coastal area he lived in with less political focus, though there is some subtle references in his short stories

[CCCubbon]

scarletnoir wrote: "CCCubbon wrote: "Regarding Lewis Carroll...She wonders if she will fall right through the earth. It’s a curious mathematical fact that falling through a tunnel leading between any two points on the..."

I think you might like this explanation..

https://www.abc.net.au/science/articl....


Seems for shorter distances the 42 minutes still holds but longer distances would be around 38+ minutes .