I finally got around to reading some of the Father Brown short stories.
53 were published between 1910 and 1936 by English novelist G. K. Chesterton.
Father Brown solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and keen understanding of human nature. …
In the most popular adaptation, Mark Williams plays Father Brown. That’s Arthur Weasley, to you. 😀
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Shakespeare: The World As Stage is a biography of William Shakespeare by author Bill Bryson.
… The focus of the book is to state what little is known conclusively about Shakespeare, and how this information is known, with some discussion of disproved theories, myths, and that which is believed by the public but not provable.
It also explores the political, social, cultural and economic background to Shakespeare’s work. …
I read it while in London. Quite dry for Bryson, I thought. I would have liked more humorous anecdotes — whether or not they were true. 😀
The best section is Bryson debunking all the conspiracy theories that other authors actually penned his great plays.
Existing today are only 6 Shakespeare signatures, spelled differently. He took a lot of licence with spelling since it was the spoken word that mattered.
And only 3 images of Bill exist.
We tend to go with the Chandos portrait, which was the 1st work donated to the National Portrait Gallery, London. I went to try to see it summer of 2022 — but the Gallery was closed for renovation.
It’s most likely Shakespeare, but nearly nothing can be factually verified about the great playwright.
I also took the tour of Shakespeare’s Globe — a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre … as best can be guessed.
While on the tour a production was rehearsing. A new play based on Joan of Arc, but using the technology of the original theatre.
Shakespeare lived 1564 – 1616, a terrible time in London. Plague years.
It’s astonishing we think we know as much as we do about one of the most influential writers all-time. Plays at the time were not intended to be published. Happily, much of his work was saved.
This 2001 Spanish book is one of the biggest selling novels of all time.
Stephen King wrote, “If you thought the true gothic novel died with the 19th century, this will change your mind. Shadow is the real deal.”
I did get through it — but overall found it too long. A great premise that — ultimately — is not a story well told.
I won’t read either of the other 2 books in the series.
The novel opens in the 1940’s with the protagonist, Daniel, a boy whose father owns a bookshop in Barcelona.
One day, his father takes him to the Cemetery of Forgotten books – a secret labyrinthine library that houses rare and banned books.
Daniel is drawn to one called “The Shadow of the Wind” by Julian Carax and takes it home with him.
Daniel quickly reads and falls in love with the story. He soon discovers that the book’s mysterious author, Carax, has gone missing along with every other copy of “The Shadow of the Wind” and most of his other works.
Daniel then sets out to find out what happened to the author and his books. …
Wikipedia
I visited Oxford in 2018. Really enjoyed it.
So in 2022 I planned a trip to rival Cambridge. Home town of Pink Floyd. 😀
The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209. And even today the highlight of the small city are the Colleges.
Click PLAY or watch Rick Steves on YouTube.
As the Church ran education in the early centuries, there are plenty of Churches.
One place I really did enjoy was The Orchard Tea Garden outside of town.
On advice from a local, I had the FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST mess at Cafe 24. I ASSuME this is where Sir Isaac Newton broke fast. 😀
I do think it would be super inspiring to be a student here.
The libraries and bookstores are fantastic.
Cycling town I happened to come upon AstraZeneca. The British-Swedish multinational company has its Head Office here. Moderna has headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts so there’s a bit of symmetry.
Click PLAY or watch the tourist pitch on YouTube.
Described as one of the “most beautiful cities in the world” by Forbes in 2010, I personally found it frustrating to explore on foot and by bike. MUCH is locked down. Bicycles prohibited. Views limited.
Oxford is better for the tourist.
Excellent.
The Giver is a 1993 American young adult dystopian novel written by Lois Lowry.
… The novel follows a 12-year-old boy named Jonas. The society has taken away pain and strife by converting to “Sameness”, a plan that has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives. Jonas is selected to inherit the position of Receiver of Memory, the person who stores all the past memories of the time before Sameness …
The Giver won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide as of 2018.
It has been the subject of a large body of scholarly analysis with academics considering themes of memory, religion, color and eugenics within the novel.
In Australia, Canada, and the United States, it is on many middle school reading lists.
A 2012 survey based in the U.S. designated it the fourth-best children’s novel of all time.
The author had originally intended not to write more about Jonas and the baby — but finally published Son in 2012.
… it follows Claire, the birth mother of Gabriel, the baby seen in The Giver, the first book in the series. Claire is obsessed with finding her son. …
Themes in Son include those of love, obligation, sacrifice, and loss. …
For me, the sequel was good — but not great.
Neal Stephenson is the darling author of tech geeks.
His breakthrough came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk novel.
Termination Shock, published in November 2021, is a climate fiction novel about solar geoengineering.
A Texas oil-industry billionaire builds a launcher on the Texas-Mexico border to fire sulfur into the air, a form of stratospheric aerosol injection intended to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight into space.
This technique replicates the effects of volcanic eruptions that inject sulfates into the atmosphere and produce global cooling, such as the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption.
Schmidt’s plan has uneven effects, helping low-lying areas such as the Netherlands, Venice, and the Maldives, but threatening the Punjab with drought. …
Eventually India sends a hit team with drones to take out the project.
The book did keep me interested. Some of the characters entertaining: the Queen of the Netherlands, and granddaughter of Queen Beatrix; Rufus Grant, a part-Comanche exterminator of feral hogs. And others.
In the end, I was wondering if this technology MIGHT be part of the solution in future.
I first heard about a jungle covered ancient city in Honduras on Kraig Becker’s Adventure Blog.
In 2017, Douglas Preston wrote the book about a project headed by documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins that used lidar to search for archaeological sites in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve of the Gracias a Dios Department in the Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras.
After a privately funded lidar survey revealed complex archaeological sites under the rainforest cover, Preston accompanied a joint Honduran-American expedition to do ground truthing of the lidar results.
They were able to confirm the presence of large abandoned prehispanic settlements and to document plazas, terracing, canals, roads, earthen structures including a pyramid, and concentrations of artifacts, among them decorated cylindrical stone vessels and metates, confirming the existence of an ancient city.
The official name of the principal archaeological site that was mapped has been changed to the City of the Jaguar. …
The book is very well written. A fascinating story.
My main takeaway — however — was that nearly every person in their exploration party was exposed to leishmaniasis, a disease caused by parasites that are transmitted by the bite of sandflies.
What a horrible disease.
Between 4 – 12 million people are currently infected in some 98 countries.
DO NOT GET BITTEN BY SANDFLIES.
There’s no vaccine for humans.
I liked The A.B.C. Murders because it departed from the usual Christie assembly of likely killers all in one room. In some ways.
AND it gave Hercule Poirot more trouble than usual.
By the end of the book I was disappointed in the A.B.C. killer. Surprised he lasted as long as he did.
Quite an amazing plot. Based on a true story. A mammoth missile launcher, hidden in the woods and aimed at the US.
Hardly a day goes by when nine-year-old Laurent Lepage doesn’t cry wolf. His boundless sense of adventure and vivid imagination mean he has a tendency to concoct stories so extraordinary and so far-fetched that no one can possibly believe him.
But when Laurent disappears, former Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true.
So begins a frantic search for the boy and the truth. And what Gamache uncovers deep in the forest leads back to crimes of the past, betrayal and murder, with more sinister consequences than anyone could have possibly imagined . . .
Google Books
I’d never heard of this popular murder mystery series set in rural France.
This 1st novel in a long series was first published 2008.
Martin Walker is a journalist, having worked for The Guardian for 28 years. A Brit, he now lives in the Périgord/Dordogne in Southern France.
Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges, a passionate cook and former soldier who was wounded on a peacekeeping mission in the Balkans, who never carries his official gun and who has “long since lost the key to his handcuffs” is the village policeman in sleepy St. Denis.
Like Three Pines in Quebec, astonishing things keep happening in this tiny rural village.
The book is an easy read. Bruno an entertaining and enjoyable character.
I’ll try more in the series.
