Time for Easy Reading

This morning I finished reading the next book for our reading group. If you remember, we decided to go into hiatus two months ago. Well, several of us have been meeting virtually each Tuesday for cocktails and just general comradery. We talk about things, and books do come up, just not like in our meetings. Anyhow, we decided to resume in June, but again virtually. So I resumed my reading of "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin", by David Quammen. The book overall was very interesting, basically being a life of Darwin after his return from his 5-year voyage on the HMS Beagle. The only real difficulty I had was when I got to the last three chapters; that was where all the science lay in wait. It took a while, but I got through it. It should be a very interesting discussion in June.

The other book I just finished this last Saturday - 2 days ago - was another science/history book. This was on the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920.

I had read John Barry's bestseller over 15 years ago. Laura Spinney's "Pale Rider" is not strictly chronological, yet covered many various aspects of the pandemic. It was interesting to note that people were told in 1918 that to keep the spread of the flu was 1) avoid large gatherings, and 2) wear a mask! 

But reading these two heavily ladened science books was too much for me. My next NF book was to be a science/nature book about crows. I just couldn't bring myself to read it right now. So I am switching to some easy reads. 

My fiction is about a 16th Century Dutch painter as he travels and paints his way through Antwerp and Brussels, and then to Rome. The book has several of his paintings in B&W. My nonfiction selections are about fly fishing adventures, lives of five 19th Century Victorian couples, and a book of essays by a favorite author. More about them as I read them. 

For now, I'm going to relax my brain. See you later.

   

Fooling Around with Fonts

I'm writing in the evening just for some fun. If things look a little different it's because I just began typing with the default font that is set for the blog. Since there is no checkmark near the names of the various fonts I can't tell. I'll just have to experiment. Here's the list typed in the font in normal size:
(What do you think? Does this look the same as the first paragraph? I'm going to copy it and put it in alongside the first paragraph.)

Ariel
Courier
Georgia
Helvetica
Times
Trebuchet
Verdana

What do you think? Does this look the same as the first paragraph? I'm going to copy it and put it in alongside the first paragraph. Yes, it is Times Normal.

Why am I doing this you might ask? If you really want to know, go back and read some of the earliest posts - before July 2018- when I lived in Lexington and I was posting every day. I was doing a lot of experimenting. I don't know why I settled on Ariel Normal, which I have been using until now, but lately, I feel crowded when I am typing. So I am going to experiment again if you don't mind.

This is Verdana Normal. I like this. It feels more open and airy. And slower. What does that mean? When I was using Ariel it felt as if I was speeding along. Not so with this font.

This is Helvetica Normal. Slightly smaller, but still open.
This is Aria Normal. Pretty close to Helvetica. More jammed up.
This is Trebuchet Normal. Too small.
This is Courier Normal. Too light; almost like I'm running out of ink. It's spread out, but small.
The last one is Georgia Normal. It's probably the darkest one, but still too crowded.

I'm going to out Georgia and Verdana against each other. First Georgia, then Verdana:

Yesterday we had a Zoom virtual meeting for our book club. We had 8 persons online.
Yesterday we had a Zoom virtual meeting for our book club. We had 8 persons online.

I think I'm going to go with Verdana Normal for a few posts.

A Lost Summer

On this morning's news, a segment was about the reporter was calling this coming summer as "The Lost Summer". I heard that term in a movie I watched the other evening. It was called "The Big Chill", about several college friends who get together for a funeral of a mutual classmate. I may have also read it, but not sure. It doesn't matter. It was enough to get me thinking about what we are going through with COVID-19 and probably will when summer does show up. It's making me remember things of past summers, both recent and long ago.

Growing up in Western Pennsylvania, grade school summers were full of playing outside with my younger brother and our collie dog, Bambi. When we weren't playing two-person baseball, we were often going down into the backwoods making camps and generally exploring.

High school summers were filled with summer jobs and band practices for fall football games. I remember a few vacations where we would visit relatives in Maryland near Washington D.C., stopping at the Gettysburg battlefield along the way. I remember a vacation through Virginia (actually near here) to see the Endless Caverns. My first jobs were cutting grass and driving for a blind lady.

Summers during my college years was consumed with making money for college and living. I was staying at home so I saved a little. My jobs were varied: motel desk clerk, driving for that same blind lady, and finally janitor for the district Bell Telephone headquarters building one-half block from the college. I got that job during my freshman year and kept it straight through graduation, working during the school year as well.

After graduation, I went into the Army and summers disappeared. That is to say, the seasons ran together except for holidays. I took time off or vacations when my duties allowed.

I don't foresee an early end to this seclusion. There won't be any traveling to see daughters or grandchildren. No vacations with my wife. I have a couple of books by Bill Bryson that I think I will read. One, a re-read, is "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" and "One Summer: America 1927". The first is about the author growing up in the 1950s in Iowa in a town very similar to mine and doing things very much like I did. We're about nine years different in age so it was a fun read. The other is self-explanatory.

Maybe this is a good time to get serious about writing that novel.

Book Review: The Mirror & the Light

Well, I finally finished it. 754 pages. Over 7 weeks. What a slog of a read. But it was well worth it. Hilary Mantell's third novel in the trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII is the best of the three. It's been several years since I read the second, "Bringing Up the Bodies" and before that, "Wolf Hall", the first. All three were terribly long in pages, and all three took a while to read, though this last one took the longest.

The main reason it took me so long, besides being a slow reader in the first place, is the way the author writes. Not only does she use language that is similar, but not exactly the same, as that was used in dialogue in the 1500s in Tudor England, but she also has a distinctive way of writing dialogue. Whenever she was writing dialogue that involved Cromwell, his name was not used. In fact, his name was often omitted in the prose. She used the pronoun "he". I had to pay attention or I would find myself going back over sentences to see who was talking to whom. But after about 400 pages, I began to get the hang of it. 

Another thing that made it slow going was that most of the characters in the story had more than one name that would be used. Charles Brandon was the Duke of Suffolk, while Thomas Howard was the Duke of Norfolk. And many of the women were referred to similarly, but then also as the wife or daughter of some dual-named male. Fortunately, there was a six and a half page "cast of characters" at the beginning of the book that I found myself using repeatedly until about page 700.

The best part of the story was the last 50-60 pages when Cromwell was taken to the Tower of London and interrogated before he was beheaded in July 1540. The dialogue between Cromwell and his interrogators for the king was the best writing of the novel. Sometimes serious and threatening, sometimes sarcastic and even a little humorous, I found the give and take spell-binding.

I also took the time to look up some of my notes and read about a little more background about some of the characters and certain subjects and topics as well as some words I didn't know. 

 As you can see I didn't do too bad; just 3 sides of two 3x5 cards. Sometimes I use three or four cards for much smaller books. One thing I noted and went off to read more was after about two-thirds of the way through, I began to notice a similarity between Henry VIII and our current President. I was wondering if I was the only one to notice that. So I Googled it and found that...well, let's just say you might want to Google it yourself.

A final note: You don't have to read the first two to enjoy this third volume, but it is well worth it to read them if you have the time ( and who doesn't these days!).  

And You Thought a Drum Was Just For Keeping the Beat...

This morning I had my weekly Skype chat with my younger brother (by 3 years), Jerry, who lives in Colorado Springs. We bring each other up to date on things of the past week, as well as talk about things we remember from our past. One of the things we have in common is drumming. I don't drum anymore. I learned in 8th grade and played through high school. I was a pretty good drummer and finally went to State Band my senior year. I didn't play after that.

But my biggest accomplishment to my mind was to teach Jerry to play the drums. I taught him in his 8th grade and by the time he was in high school he was better than me. He went on the garner many honors with his skill and went to college to study music. When he finished his master's degree he volunteered for the Army so he could play in the NORAD Band in Colorado. This was during the Vietnam era. When he got out of the service, he and his wife, also a music major (flute), remained in the state. He began teaching in middle school for some years, retired from that and worked himself up to managing a bicycle shop, a hobby that proved useful. 

All along, he taught privately as well as played in local orchestras and bands. Today, he still teaches, though it's by Skype right now - and is a member of a local concert band which has suspended its playing for now.

All of this is leading up to my chat with him today. It began by him telling me that he had his first Skype lesson for about five of his current students. It was about replacing a drumhead on a snare drum. Then our conversation went from there to drumheads in general, then snares, then the drums, how to hold the sticks, and then back to drums, and the next thing we knew we were approaching noon (my time - we set a one-hour time limit generally) when both of us have other things to do; him more than me usually.

Anyway, I so enjoyed discussing some of the things I learned about drums I wanted to mention them here, but I am going to some mental organizing first and then post again. So actually, I never got to the title of today's blog. I will.

But it truly was a very interesting Skype call today. \

Stay home and Stay Safe! 

Staying Home

It's been 14 days since I have been out. Fourteen days since my last physical contact with a person other than my wife. It's been 14 days since I last worked at my volunteering at the Stonewall Jackson House. It's been two weeks since I have driven a car - the Saturn to be specific. I've been out of the house five times - twice each of the past two Wednesdays to take the trash can to the curb in the morning and recover it in the evening. Each of those "trips" take about 45 seconds. The sixth time was longer - I took a 25-minute walk last Friday around the neighborhood. That's it - 28 minutes of outside exposure!

Now I can't blame the coronavirus on this completely. I could go out and walk more. I could drive around the neighborhood or go get a drive-thru coffee down the road. I could even drive to Subway or MacDonald's or some other fast-food place to get lunch instead of eating my homemade sandwich. I could. Yes, I could. It's just that I don't want to. I've lost my motivation to go outside. But that is not the worst of it.

I'm beginning to lose my motivation to read and write. I'm currently reading six books more or less. I say that because I haven't reached that spot in any of them that I normally do in my reading that one grabs me and I rush to finish it. Then I will continue to read the other five until another gets to that "rush to the end" spot. I'll keep on doing this until I have two left and then I replenish the reading pile back to 5 or 6 books again. As I said, I've not reached that point and don't feel like reading many times at all.

As far as writing is concerned, you easily see when I last posted. There were many times I said to myself, "Self, you need to write about _______ . But I didn't. I am hoping that by writing this post that it break up the log jam, or brain freeze, or whatever it is that is preventing me from doing what I normally love to do.

Well, what do I do all day if I don't what I normally love to do? I watch a lot of CNN about the coronavirus. I sleep a lot during the day because I don't sleep well at night. I play games on my phone -usually Sudoku and a crossword daily. I visit the social apps I belong to like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Probably too much sleeping and social apping. The Sudoku and crosswords keep my brain sharp.

Well, I've done it as my granddaughter likes to say. I wrote today. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Anthony Price

You may not have ever heard of Anthony Price. I had not heard of him until one day in the late 80's - he was still writing then I later found out - when I happened to come across a couple of his books in the Mysterious Book Store when it was in the west side of midtown NYC.

I picked up his first one, "The Labyrinth Makers", and his fifth, "Other Paths to Glory". I was instantly hooked. The series, eventually 19 in all, was about a British spy organization much like the real MI5. It featured an agent, David Audley, with a deep knowledge of history as well as being a very good spy. Audley was in each book, but oftentimes he was secondary to others. But he always played a significant part in the climax or conclusion. At least in the 11 books I was able to collect.

  I still look for his books whenever I go to a used bookstore, but to date have not been able to find any of the remaining eight books. He wrote like the spy genre of the day, but one peculiarity I found when I read him was that he wrote less about describing the scenes around the characters; only the minimum to get a picture for the reader. He spent most of his writing efforts on what the characters were thinking and what they thought the other characters were thinking. At first, I had trouble following the storylines but soon was able to understand where the story was going.

Price got his start in writing for a local newspaper and once was given the chance to interview a man who had written a book but was not having any success getting it reviewed. Price did the interview; the man gave him the book to read; Price read it and gave it a very good writ-up. The man let him read the drafts of his second and third books of the series as well. It was a very lucky day for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anthony Price was born in 1928 and died in 2019. I missed his obituary.