Ever read this poem? A Crabby Old Woman! - by Margaret Kollmer
caflowerluver
8 years ago
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April is here! What are you reading?
Comments (101)I picked up a book from "New Arrivals" shelf titled Palace Circle by Rebecca Dean (I confess because I liked the cover and the setting --pre WWI) and it is rather awful. One-dimensional characters and plots that seem inspired by daytime soaps. I stopped reading around half-way. On a happier note I discovered a new (to me) historical author: Jude Morgan. Very impressed with her writing and comand of the period. Just read Indiscretion and An Accomplished Woman which are both obviously Austen-inspired, and I'm starting on Passion, which seems like a "heavier" book, the main characters being the women in Byron, Shelley, & Keats' lives....See MoreJune and Hours of Happy Reading
Comments (68)It has been a long time since I've posted here but I have been reading. Sometimes I have so much to say there isn't time and sometimes I have nothing! In the last week I finished three very enjoyable books and wanted to give them a mention. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker is about 650 pages long and I finished it in less than a week because I couldn't put it down. It is a thriller about a writer who develops writer's block after having written a very successful book. He visits his college professor, Harry Quebert, also a writer who had one very successful book. The story jumps around in time and would have been impossible in audio book format. This book has the most mixed reviews on Amazon that I have ever seen, about evenly mixed between those who loved it and those who hated it. I loved it. The Big Tiny by Dee Williams is about a woman who discovers she has a heart problem in her early 40s and decides to simplify her life by leaving her home that she had done so much work on and building instead a tiny house that measures 84 square feet and is on wheels. She built the house herself and has lived in it for 10 years, I believe. While I could never live in a house nearly that small, it does make me think about having so much stuff (especially books) and why can't I live without a lot of this stuff. Fantastic book! The third book is another wonderful thriller, Suspicion by Joseph Finder. I like all of his books and saved this one for a few weeks because there will be a long wait for another book by him. It has a few gruesome spots but I was able to skim through them without too much problem. This one makes you wonder who you can trust....See MoreJuly: What are you reading?
Comments (104)A BURNT-OUT CASE SBS TV showed the docudrama Lamumba two nights ago, on the evening of 30 July 2010. I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti. Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. In late October 1959, just days after I joined the BahaÂi Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada. The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first Prime Minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted two months until he was driven from office in September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country, and together they attempted to prevent the Congo succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seizing power in a CIA sponsored coup.-Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, "Lamumba," 30 July 2010. All of this got me back into Graham Greene who went to the Belgian Congo in January 1959, just before the Congo crisis broke out, with a new novel already beginning to form in his head by way of a situation involving a stranger who turned up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. While Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case in 1959 in the months leading up to and after I became a member of the BahaÂi Faith. This novel is one of those in the running for the most depressing narratives ever written. The reader only has to endure for a short time the company of the burnt-out character whose name in the novel was Querry. Greene had to live with him and in him--in his head--for eighteen months. Greene wrote that: "Success as a novelist is often more dangerous than failure; the ripples often break over a wider coast line. The Heart of the Matter(1948) was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers, perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired. This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years......See MoreHow Many of These Have You Read
Comments (54)Vee and Annpan, American writers of children's books are just as apt as English ones to anthropomorphize and dress their animal characters in human clothes. Besides Disney, there's Dr Seuss and his weird critters, Joel Chandler Harris's no-longer-PC "Uncle Remus" tales, the Sesame Street characters, and probably a lot of others. Some Americans are very fond of the English books, too. The difference I see, though, between these writers' stories and those of English writers: American readers, unlike English readers, seldom continue to favor them long past childhood. Oh, they often remember them affectionately, are likely to read them to their own children or reread them for themselves, etc., but the majority of American adults aren't going to admit that children's books are still their favorite books. Maybe it's a fear of being labeled 'childish'. I don't know. It's an interesting sociological/cultural phenomenon -- to me, that is. :-) My own personal problem with the English books: they are so unbearably pretty and precious. I hated Beatrix Potter's books! Especially Peter Rabbit. Vee, my sons loved Babar, so I gritted my teeth and read those books more than I ever wanted to. In fact I probably read more kids' books as an adult than I did as a child. The breakover age for me was about nine....See Moremawheel
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