Book ad

This is a first for me. I just saw an ad on TV for a BOOK! James Patterson's I Alex Cross. It's kind of a cute ad, too - you can see it on the author's website.

Interesting marketing ploy...

I don't think I've read any James Patterson. Are his books overly violent? Any advice for me?

Pedaling to Hawaii

Of all the trips into the wild that I find hard to imagine, setting out in a pedal-boat to cross an ocean has to be the at the top of the "Are you CRAZY?" list. And yet it's been done. Successfully. Both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The author of this book got the idea back in 1991 to circumnavigate the globe using only human power. He enlisted a friend, they scraped up funds and donations to have pedal boat Moksha custom-built, and left Greenwich in July of 1994. Biked to the coast, took the pedal boat across the channel, biked to Portugal, then headed out across the Atlantic. The Atlantic crossing took something like 110 days, October 1994 to February 1995. They used a hand-operated desalination device to get fresh water, and ate lots of freeze-dried food (but were lucky enough to come across a cable boat on Christmas day and have a turkey dinner).

They crossed the US separately on bikes and roller blades. After a long break for repairs, fund raising, and recovering from an accident with a car, they pedaled Moksha from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii in 54 days in the fall of 1998. After that, the author dropped out and his friend carried on alone from Hawaii to the Kiribati islands, then with other people by bike, kayak and pedal boat. The book was published in 2006, but according to the Expedition 360 website, the circumnavigation was finally completed in October 2007.

I find the whole idea just incredible. I would have said impossible, but obviously it wasn't. I can't begin to imagine what would drive a person to take on this kind of a task. It was quite an interesting read.

Book notes

I've heard a lot about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in the last 5 years. I bought a copy a few years ago, and slogged through 163 pages (out of 846) before giving up. It is rare that I do not finish a book, but I just couldn't make myself read this one. However, a couple of weeks ago I found the recorded version at the library. It is read by my favorite narrator so I thought I'd give it a try. I still find it excruciatingly slow, but I've said before that I could listen to Simon Prebble read the phone book, and so it is. I'm on CD #11 out of 26 - 32 total hours of narration.

Not that it doesn't have redeeming features. Ms. Clarke's writing has a very sly, dry wit. Today, there was actually a passage that made me laugh - Jonathan Strange has been performing magic for Lord Wellington in the Peninsular Wars. After he moved a river to a different location, Lord Wellington remarked that "there was nothing so wearying for troops and horses as constant marching about and that in future he thought it would be better to keep them all standing still, while Mr. Strange moved Spain about like a carpet beneath their feet." (If you don't find that funny, don't bother trying the book.)

I believe I would greatly enjoy the story if it were about 300 pages. But 3 times that long - most of the time there isn't enough going on to hold my attention. Still, thanks to Mr. Prebble, I believe I will finish it this time...

Big Read redux

After I posted the book list recently, it was bugging me that I couldn't find anything about it on the NEA and Big Read websites, as noted in the source. I did some more searching today. At first, I found only copies of the list on blogs with similar attributions. Finally, a comment on one of the blogs led me, not quite directly, to this article from guardian.co.uk. Apparently, the list was compiled in March, 2007 with input from "The 2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com [and] nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without." So perhaps that explains why there are some anomalies, like Chronicles of Narnia plus The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

No, Karis, reading does not make you a nerd, but perhaps the need to track down such details does. Not that being a nerd is a bad thing...

In other news, I just heard from Jason, and he is back in the US. Apparently they had a great time, and only a very short bout with intestinal difficulties (less than a day). I hope to find out more this weekend, and he says there will be pictures at some point...

The Big Read

Saw this on Deb's blog, and of course I had to do it.

“The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. Of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.” (I couldn't find the list at either of these links, but I just copied and pasted this.)

The idea is to mark in bold the ones you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - parts if it
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Most of the comedies and tragedies, some of the histories
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - the first 3 or so
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So there’s my list. I've read 53, and parts of 3 others. Some of them (like the Austen novels) I have read multiple times.

I do think it's strange that they list "complete works of Shakespeare" and also "Hamlet", and "Chronicles of Narnia" and also "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". I have never heard of some of these books, and don't want to read some of the others, but I've added quite a few books to my "to-read" list. Just what I needed - as if it wasn't already a really long list!

Eva

I am reading a very intriguing book called Eva, by Peter Dickinson. I found it via a booklist that is posted on Robin McKinley's blog. (Peter Dickinson is Robin McKinley's husband.) Robin and her blog readers have all posted to this booklist. WARNING: if you like fantasy, you are liable to find hundreds of books to interest you on this list. You may never dig yourself out of the pile of books-to-be-read...

Anyway, back to the book, which was written in 1988. It is set in the future, when the world is grossly overpopulated, and there are very few animals left. Eva is very badly injured in an automobile accident, and to save her, they implant her consciousness into the body of a chimpanzee.

I haven't gotten very far in the book, but there are a wide variety of themes here: the definition of "self"; ethics of medical experimentation, especially on animals; corporate sponsorship and exploitation (yep, that's how they paid for her treatment); etc. I'm looking forward to finding out how these themes develop.

Car, Connections, Quizzes

Well, good news - sort of - about my car. The A/C blower was working again today. I took it in to the shop and they thought it might need a new ignition module, but had a fairly simple way to test to see if that is a problem in case it happens again. So they just kept it for the day and did routine maintenance. And ordered a part for the back-seat problem.

I just got distracted for a minute there. On Deb's blog, I found in her library a book by Patricia Wrede that I had never seen before. That led me to Amazon, and their list of "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought". I scrolled through some, and found this book by Robin McKinley - and then I found Robin McKinley's blog. She blogs about horses and bell-ringing and other interesting stuff - though her footnotes are very hard to follow.

I really like the books I've read by these two authors, and look forward to some new ones. Yea for rambling connections that lead to other connections...

Here's a quiz I stole from Deb. Sometime, maybe I should steal from other people...

The Road Trip of Your Life

You see companionship and loyalty as what's most important in life. You live life at a fairly leisurely pace. You take time to enjoy the sweeter parts of life, even when you're busy. You're willing to take a few risks in life. You may not take the road no one travels, but you're happy to take the road less traveled. You are able to find a fairly healthy balance between work and play. You work when you need to, but you never let yourself burn out. You could have owned an indie bookstore or boutique in another life.

The Road Trip Test

Tanya Huff

I've started reading Summon the Keeper by Tanya Huff. I've read some of her short story collections (Relative Magic and Stealing Magic) and really enjoyed her writing. She is very good at characterizations, and her plots and humor really draw me in.

If you enjoy fantasy, I highly recommend her writing. My family will tell you that there must be something special about an author who can get me to enjoy stories about assassins and vampires.

This book is the first in a series about Keepers, whose job it is to plug holes in the fabric of the universe. The heroine and her cat arrive at a B&B and get stuck there monitoring the gateway to Hell in the furnace room. No assassins or vampires in this one. Yet.

If that isn't enough to get you interested, here are my favorite quotes so far:

"I've said it before and I'll say it again, evil has no imagination. Probably why so much of it ends up in municipal politics."

"Your father's likely to be worried about you being in such proximity to the hole in the furnace room."
"There's really no need to tell him about Hell, Mom."
"He's teaching in the public school system, Claire. He knows about Hell."

"So Many Enemies, So Little Time"

Subtitled "An American Woman in All the Wrong Places", this book was written by a journalist and former history professor who began a year teaching journalism as a Fulbright professor in Kyrgyzstan just before 9/11. During that year, she visited several of the "Stan" countries that used to be part of the USSR as well as Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. She returned home through Russia, Mongolia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.

It's a fascinating description of encounters with "ordinary citizens" of countries that are supposed to hate us, and the predominance of slanted and incomplete information on both sides. It is full of contradictions: those who wonder why Americans interfere in other countries, but want the US to solve their problems and help restore their economy. The Americans who go to other countries determined to "respect indigenous traditions", but are horrified at some of the specifics of those traditions. The Muslims who can't believe their American visitor would refuse to join them in drinking vodka.

I can't imagine taking some of the excursions that Elinor Burkett took, but I'm very grateful that she wrote about them.