I ventured out into the rain to take pictures and found this fellow slithering off to some appointment. [Read more…] about Roman de la slug…
I've been thinking
Filling my empty mind…
Lately I’ve been feeling mentally empty, as if someone washed all my thoughts, dried them, put them away and then pulled the plug and drained the sink. I decided that instead of complaining to myself I’d read something. I have dozens of novels and reference books waiting to be read and at least a dozen I keep forgetting to finish. I went downstairs to look over my bookshelves and the first one to caught my eye was a paperback on the bottom shelf, a book of essays by H L Mencken called ‘Prejudices: A Selection’. I randomly opened the book and started reading, ‘Roosevelt: An Autopsy’. I hadn’t been reading long when I started thinking that all I knew about Theodore Roosevelt was that he was a President of the USA and supposedly that the Teddy Bear was named after him…and that’s about it. My curiosity aroused I put the book aside and looked him up on Wikipedia. Reading quickly through the boring early life I was soon at the important part…the section titled First Marriage. You didn’t think I was going to sit here and ruminate on politics and philosophy did you? I’m a romance writer. I want to read about love! [Read more…] about Filling my empty mind…
On a sizzling summer day…
Last night some time after turning off the lights (as I tried to fall asleep with a large fan blowing in my face) snatches of a song popped into my head; a song I haven’t heard in decades. At first I only had one line…’You take my breath away”…it was an eternal minute or two until my brain dredged up…”on a summer’s day”…and then I thought, Oh yes, THAT song! I should write that down. I might forget it in the morning and I’ll want to listen to it for a laugh. It was too hot. I was too tired to bother…so I didn’t. Waking up, sure enough, I could remember there was a song I wanted to remember but all the words to the song had vanished from my brain. Irritated by my malfunctioning memory, I trolled the internet for help. Sure enough some obsessive soul had listed every hit song from 1979. Over half way down the list, there it was! You Take My Breath Away by Rex Smith. These are the lyrics… [Read more…] about On a sizzling summer day…
Book Review: Maybe Next Time…
Last week I finally spent part of my Christmas Amazon gift certificate. After a month of changing my basket every few days (failing to decide what I most wanted) I impulsively bought a modern romance, something I haven’t done in years. I’d read an interview with the author, Jennifer Crusie, about her latest novel ‘Maybe Next Time’ and went off to Amazon to see if I’d like it. In the first few free pages she’d made me laugh and empathize so I bought it before I changed my basket-mind again. [Read more…] about Book Review: Maybe Next Time…
Book review: Gateway…Cari’s reading sci-fi?
If I hadn’t had a headache, I would have been working on Dancing the Maypole not lounging around with my snotty nose pressed into a 1970’s Science Fiction book. But I was ill, so yesterday I ignored my computer and got lost in the future. Gateway by Frederik Pohl is a story told backwards. It starts out with the hero (the term hero is a stretch), Robinette Broadhead, who is having a therapy session with his robotic shrink he calls Sigfried. Robinette, or Bob as he’s usually known, has some deep emotional problems, some of which stem back to his childhood and his non-demonstrative mother. We don’t know what’s happened to bring him to the sofa, but we know he’s super rich. Somehow he’s gone from subsisting as a food miner to being someone who can afford Full Medical (as in he can get any limb or organ (other than his head) replaced with no further cost and unless he dies in an accident he’s guaranteed to live an extra long life). [Read more…] about Book review: Gateway…Cari’s reading sci-fi?
Have question need answer…
One of the blogs I follow is Literary Soundtrack. It’s written by two sisters who are voracious readers (as well as talented writers). If readers were dinosaurs I’d be a brontosaurus, the big herbivore that probably needed half a dozen stomachs to digest the odd mouthful of wood pulp. They’d be a pair of raptors. Even the T-Rex would know not to enter a reading competition with these two. He wouldn’t have a chance! They love finding music that musically fits favorite books as well as interviewing writers about how music inspires their writing. I love how they mention things that make me think about things I’ve never thought of before. Yesterday they posed a question that set my brain whirling. “Why do you read the genre that you do?” The surface answer would be; because I like it. But that’s not really an answer. Why are we drawn to specific genres? Why don’t I love reading Westerns? Why do I have no desire to read… This is where I fell off the cliff of sanity. How can I know why I read the genres I do unless I know all the genres I don’t? How many genres are there? How many of them have I not read? If I’ve never read a certain genre, how do I know I don’t want to read it? I ogled my computer like a starving piranha and forced myself to go to bed. This morning after seeing the Goblin off I was going to get some more sleep. It’s long gone midnight and my pillow is still waiting. I went onto Wikipedia and found under ‘list of literary genres’ what I was craving. Answers! [Read more…] about Have question need answer…