I was laughing out loud every 2nd page. It’s been compared with Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.
I downloaded because I was in Scotland, en route to St. Andrews.
Tom Coyne is the editor of quarterly, The Golfer’s Journal.
In 2010 he published A Course Called Ireland, where he WALKED around the perimeter of the Republic and Northern Ireland, without the use of any transportation, playing the courses en route: 36 courses, 648 holes, over 2,000,000 yards.
Reluctantly — urged by his drunken best friend — he wroteA Course Called Scotland, 111 courses in the home of golf.
Tom chose mostly LINKS courses, hoping to learn the secret of golf in Scotland.
Courses in Scotland were originally set-up on the worst coastal land — no good for farming. Golfers shared the space with sheep and rabbits that kept the foliage down.
He did include some links courses in England and Wales, as well.
The 4th book in the Gideon series is best yet. In fact, each seems better than the last.
This thriller reminded me of the film Alien. It could be categorized science fiction.
Gideon’s Sword
Gideon’s Corpse
The Lost Island
Beyond the Ice Limit
The Pharaoh Key
[Warning: BEYOND THE ICE LIMIT is the sequel to THE ICE LIMIT.
While BEYOND is a stand-alone novel, we want to warn potential readers that the copy below contains serious spoilers for THE ICE LIMIT, for those who wish to read that book first.]
That thing is growing again. We must destroy it. The time to act is now …
With these words begins Gideon Crew’s latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on earth.
Five years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, led a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite–the largest ever discovered–from a remote island off the coast of South America.
The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic Sea and broke apart, sinking—along with its unique cargo—to the ocean floor. One hundred and eight crew members perished, and Eli Glinn was left paralyzed.
But this was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space.
Now, that organism has implanted itself in the sea bed two miles below the surface—and it is growing. If it is not destroyed, the planet will be doomed.
There is only one hope: for Glinn and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon’s expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the “meteorite” has a mind of its own—and it has no intention of going quietly…
The Women (2024) by Kristin Hannah is one of the most popular books of 2024.
Intense.
I’d forgotten just how IDIOTIC was the Vietnam War.
The tragedy that befalls Frankie is multilayered, though all of it can be traced back to the moment she impulsively volunteers to be an Army nurse in Vietnam.
Before she knows what’s happened, she’s 2nd Lt. Frances McGrath, arriving at a 400-bed hospital 60 miles from Saigon.
… Frankie has no understanding of what horrors await her.
Her first full day in-country, after helicopters swoop in carrying dozens of gravely injured men, a medic hands her a boot and, when Frankie realizes a foot is still inside, she vomits and then tells anyone who will listen that she’s made a huge mistake.
Author Kyla Stone specializes in apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.
I’d call this series Young Adult — though there are some painful scenes. I fast forwarded some.
It’s a bit cheesy and predictable, too.
The author seems too enamoured of firearms and gun fights.
The story starts with a shocker.
In the dead of winter in Michigan, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack destroys the U.S. power grid. No electricity. No cars or phones. The country is plunged into instant chaos.
But for Hannah Sheridan, it’s the best day of her life. For the last five years, she’s been the captive of a sadistic psychopath–until the EMP releases the lock of her prison.
Battered but not broken, she emerges from her underground cell into a hostile winter wilderness with nothing but the clothes on her back and her determination to survive.
Book 1 does have one of the better trailers I’ve seen so far.
Canada has some of the worst mobile phone service / costs in the world.
And I hate mobile phones at any price.
SOMEHOW I ended up paying Bell Canada $80 / month.
I’d only gone with Bell because they supposedly had the best coverage on one part of Vancouver Island. (It seemed just as crappy as the rest.). AND for their 30 day holiday add-on plans.
Bell dropped the 30 day plans in 2023, alongside the other major carriers.
WhistleOut recommended Public and Freedom Mobile as the best options for Canadians who want combined Canada + USA coverage. My bill went to $36.70 /month. Pay as I go. Cancel anytime.
No surprise ➙ once I switched I got a phone call from Bell offering me something for $40 / month. No USA coverage.
Babel is set in an alternative-reality 1830s England in which Britain’s global economic and colonial supremacy are fuelled by the use of magical silver bars.
Their power comes from capturing what is “lost in translation” between words in different languages that have similar, but not identical, meanings.
Silver bars inscribed with such ‘match-pairs’ can increase industrial and agricultural production, improve the accuracy of bullets, heal injuries, and more.
To harness this power, Oxford University created the Royal Institute of Translation, nicknamed “Babel“, where scholars work to find match-pairs.
… focused on four new students at the institute, their growing awareness that their academic efforts maintain Britain’s imperialist supremacy, their debate over how to prevent the Opium War, and the use of violence.
Class obsessed England needs diversity in Babel to optimize Silver production. 😀
Friends in this book thrown together as outsiders: Robin from China, Ramy from Calcutta, Victoire from Haiti, and Letty, a white British admiral’s daughter. (In our reality, women were not invited to be students at Oxford until 1879.)
The administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards, held at Chengdu Worldcon (in China), ruled Babel not eligible for nomination without further explanation.
A later report based on emails shared from the awards’ administrative panel revealed that the book was likely ruled ineligible in an attempt to avoid running afoul of Chinese censorship laws
The 3rd — and best so far — book in the Gideon series.
Gideon’s Sword
Gideon’s Corpse
The Lost Island
Beyond the Ice Limit
The Pharaoh Key
Still absurd and impossible. But more entertaining.
Gideon Crew–brilliant scientist, master thief–is living on borrowed time.
When his mysterious employer, Eli Glinn, gives him an eyebrow-raising mission, he has no reason to refuse.
Gideon’s task: steal a page from the priceless Book of Kells, now on display in New York City and protected by unbreakable security.
Accomplishing the impossible, Gideon steals the parchment–only to learn that hidden beneath the gorgeously illuminated image is a treasure map dating back to the time of the ancient Greeks.
As they ponder the strange map, they realize that the treasure it leads to is no ordinary fortune. It is something far more precious: an amazing discovery that could perhaps even save Gideon’s life.
Together with his new partner, Amy, Gideon follows a trail of cryptic clues to an unknown island in a remote corner of the Caribbean Sea. There, off the hostile and desolate Mosquito Coast, the pair realize the extraordinary treasure they are hunting conceals an even greater shock-a revelation so profound that it may benefit the entire human race . . . if Gideon and Amy can survive.
Rick McCharles 