I tried to group related notes under some headings, but this is still something of a jumble. This book took me many months to finish, but I’m glad to have read it. You get a real feel for the people involved. What you do not get with this book are basically any timelines or headers indicating the names of battles. You …
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I listened to this via Spotify. Romero was a good reader. There’s not a lot here that isn’t covered in Masters of Doom, but there is one thing I appreciated. Almost never does Romero speak a bad word about anyone in this book. If he has to relate something negative, he is quick to point out the context, e.g.: We were …
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It’s 1944, and Sherlock Holmes (never named as such) has retired to Sussex to keep bees. A boy comes walking along with a large, gray parrot on his shoulder. The boy is mute, but the parrot speaks, mostly in German, and sometimes strings of numbers.
There’s a murder, and the bird goes missing, and Holmes has to solve it. I would …
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Did not finish. This was recommended by an author I follow on Twitter. The whole book is around 100 pages, and I wanted something I could finish quickly. But I gave up on this one pretty early.
It’s snippets of the inner mental life of Billy the Kid. Some of them are quite nonsensical. For example:
(To come) …[Read More]
I was surprised this book ended when Monty Python began. Nothing in-depth about Fawlty Towers or A Fish Called Wanda, either. Very little about the other Pythons except Graham Chapman. Still, I enjoyed it. Cleese performed with the Footlights at Cambridge, was offered a job writing comedy for the BBC just as he was graduating, and went for it.
He was …
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K requested this book from the library. Somehow, my Libby app was logged in to her account, so I got the alert when it became available. I thought, hey, I must have put a hold on this and forgotten about it. So I downloaded it, started listening, and got hooked before I realized this wasn’t really my book.
This man’s …
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In Gilead, Iowa, in the 1950s, an old pastor’s heart is beginning to fail. His first wife died years earlier in childbirth, and he was resolved to live the rest of his life as a bachelor, but he met and married a much younger woman, and they have a son. The book is written by the pastor, John Ames, to his son, who is about seven years old.
I …
[Read More]Notes from various essays and things I read.
Written in 1955. Read 6/23/24. It’s in the book Tolkien and the Critics.
Lewis is reviewing The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Tolkien wrote of good and evil as unchanging absolutes, but that does not mean his characters are simplistic, always black or white (see the conflict of Boromir, of even Gollum, for example). The war writing is realistic – “the endless, unintelligible …
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Years ago, I read the first Parker book, The Hunter. I remember finishing it and thinking it was okay, but I didn’t need to keep reading the series. But recently, the character of Parker came up again in Quentin Tarantino’s book Cinema Speculation. So when I saw this book at Half Price, I picked it up.
Overall, it was entertaining. A …
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On growing up Chinese in Canada: “I rejected the Chinese culture I came from, and I rejected the Canadian culture around me and not letting me in.” “It was rare for the immigrant kids to find the same depth of community among each other, because our backgrounds and experiences were all mixed up. What we shared was our …
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