I found this Book downstairs```

digitS'

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Nice to have one's continued presence appreciated around the homestead.

I don't have an idea for a current novel to read. I read Anthony Doerr's most recent (2014) and Pulitzer prize-winning novel, last year. He kicks out a book of short stories or a novel about every 5 years so, it looks like I will have to wait a year or two for the next one ...

:) Steve
 

flowerbug

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Much of a reason for the concern about being lost? Did you find it?

@flowerbug , I worked in the library for one semester. It was a pleasure :). So much better than the semester of museum work. Oh gosh, I was bored ... bored ... bored.

Steve
who has also agreed to disposing of one book when adding another to the shelves. it's also big reason for me to make regular use of the library ;)

i grew up in a library... Mom volunteered for the first township library that started in a closet at the township offices. eventually it was upgraded to a temporary metal trailer and then became an actual building. lo this many years later it seems to be doing ok. she also organised the church library. in both cases i read through both of those as a kid, several times, even if i didn't understand the words often the pictures were interesting. my trips to the city library in downtown Saginaw back then often had me coming home with bags of books. some i could not read well, but i tried, i may have even had them under my pillow...

as a teen i volunteered in the high school library. i wasn't always a good teen, but that was a bit of a refuge. that also gave me experience with slide and movie projectors.

i did not do much in college at the library other than study/research, but it was always a dangerous place. i'd go in for work on one thing and get distracted in the aisles by other things. hours later... at a time when i had no hours. somehow i made it back from the jungles of South America to the great white north.

the local library, i was there for almost nine years, small town library, first group i worked with was excellent. a lot of depth and diversity. regime change eventually took out all but one of the people with experience. i held on as long as i could. not much diversity now. i use it but miss what used to be...

i am not reading anything at the moment. which is why i managed to make progress on projects yesterday. i sorted and shredded old papers and filled up a six gallon bucket (well packed) and have a pile of papers sitting near the shredder to go for today. i also made progress on studying computer parts and picking a few. i hope to be ready by Monday evening to actually place an order. wish me luck.

beautiful morning, sun shining on ice/frost coated trees. i hope it warms up my car well enough to melt off the ice coating. it is a lot of work to scrape the windows free. it really would have made sense 20yrs ago to buy a cover for it. being outside all the time has taken a large toll on the paint, trim, interior. the mice are taking their toll too...

as for books/reading and science fiction i've always liked the large scale broad vision types of books. a more recent author i enjoy is Alastair Reynolds. and more recently Ann Leckie.

non-fiction, history, war, plagues, nature, etc. all work for me. as too just plain old books about dirt. i am at danger to read about anything at any time if left to my own schedule/devices. including old numbers off computer chips and box car numbers off old slides from the 70s. somewhere around here i may still have the rolling stock registry...
 

digitS'

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Read a review of Ann Leckie's recent book in Gizmodo. "No one can be civilized except the Radch, and yet there is evidence before her eyes of civilizations that are not Radch." Yep, that is a departure from Mark Twain quote from The Innocents Abroad that @Ridgerunner uses ...

Took a look Iain M. Banks. A quote from an interview: "The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't." I like that. "... in all human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots." Ha!

Steve
 

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Nice to have one's continued presence appreciated around the homestead.

I don't have an idea for a current novel to read. I read Anthony Doerr's most recent (2014) and Pulitzer prize-winning novel, last year. He kicks out a book of short stories or a novel about every 5 years so, it looks like I will have to wait a year or two for the next one ...

:) Steve
Steve have you read clan of the cavebear ? There are about 9 books in the series
 

digitS'

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No, I haven't. Altho that was set in prehistory, two of the 3 authors in the review, I have read. Just about everything that Ursula Le Guin wrote up to about 1980 and Anne McCaffery's The Ship Who Sang, plus several others of hers.

I read some Orson Scott Card in the 80's but had begun to have a serious loss of interest in science fiction by that time. To an extent, it was interest in fiction, at all. I have read at least one novel each winter, in recent years.

Those books, like The Story of Beautiful Girl and Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, were books about disabled people. I think that this is artistically a seriously neglected group. Yesterday, I was attracted to a book about a member of Hitler's Youth who contracted polio. She was asked to take pictures of her experience in the hospital and recovery. Then, these pictures were used for propaganda against disabled people. She began a resistance response against the Nazis.

That book is now out of print so I missed it. But, it wasn't just "there." Real life America example: a deaf boy was shot by Georgia volunteers during the Trail of Tears. The only child of a widowed mother, her property was confiscated and sold, as was all Indian property that couldn't be carried. The guvment got $36 for that (in 1838).

Nearly all novels about the disabled are for young people to inspire them to strive or to show tolerance. There's Nothing Wrong with That but I'm not a kid and likely to expect a little more from the literature.

Steve
 
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