Top Ten Places in Books I'd Want to Visit

This week Top Ten Tuesday is asking us to share places from books we'd like to visit.  Allllllllllllllll aboard!


1. Hogwart's

2. Al's Diner with a Portal to 1958, a la 11/22/1968

Obviously this one is immediately on my mind because of watching the Hulu series  based on 11/22/1963,     but one of the reasons I was drawn to that book so much was because of the setting.  I grew up listening largely to music from the 1950s and 60s -- it was the only non-church music  my parents would listen to in the car  or in our home --   and watching series like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or The Wonder Years.   Granted, I wouldn't want to live in 1958 (insert the usual reasons, from pervasive smoking to race relations), but  how I'd love to visit it...again and again,  using the diner for historical tourism. Penn Station? The Hotel Albert?   It'd all be there waiting for me.


3.  Amsterdam, from The City of Bikes

 

Granted, this one isn't impossible. Once I pay off my student loans (OCTOBER OCTOBER OCTOBER),   I'll be able to travel more, and I could theoretically handle even a jaunt across the Atlantic.  I suspect, however, Amsterdam is more meaningful to me as an ideal rather than a reality, and if I got there I'd be overwhelmed by the crowds and the noise. 

4. The Flat of One Bertie Wooster (P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves-and-Wooster stories)

Honestly, I'd pop in to let Jeeves serve me some English drink I've never heard of ("A lemon squash,  Jeeves, thank you") and then listen to Bertie talk, because he's a riot.   Perhaps I could even witness him being shanghaied by one of his aunts.

5. The Oasis, Ready Player One

I realize that the real world Wade and company live in is definitely a craptastic wasteland, but I am only visiting after all, and if I'm visiting  you really can't get more value for money than the friggin' Oasis. 

6. Narnia, The Chronicles thereof

 The best bits of the medieval era -- castles, swords,   quests -- without the constant smell of manure, urine, and death.

7. The Shire, LOTR

 A quiet life surrounded by friends, food, drink, and gardens? Count me in, and if Gandalf shows up I'm not at home. And if those dwarves show up I'm most definitely not home.


8. Tara

 

 I've been in my share of grand antebellum estates and savored their smell and sights, but I've never been to a country plantation home, one that would have commanded the surrounding countryside like its kingdom in miniature.  Those who have read Gone with the Wind know that Tara -- for Scarlett -- means stability and home more than anything else, and the movie delivers that feeling well:

 ASHLEY: Tara, the red earth of Tara.

Mr. O'HARA: That land's the only thing that matters, it's the only thing that lasts.
ASHLEY: Something you love better than me, though you may not know it... Tara.
Mr. O'HARA: ...From which you get your strength...
ASHLEY: ... the red earth of Tara.
Mr. O'HARA: Lands the only thing that matters...
ASHLEY: something you love better than me...

ASHLEY: ...the red earth of

Tara...Tara!... Tara!... Tara!
SCARLETT: Tara! Home.

 9. The Nautilus, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

I can still remember being fascinated by the idea of the submarine having a Star Trek-like viewing window as a kid. 

10. The Abbey, Redwall

 

EULALIAAAAAAAAA!

C'mon...it's a medieval-like castle-monastery thing filled with woodland creatures who wear robes and pack swords and bows. I'd want to be one of the animals, of course (little awkward otherwise).  

Top Ten Tuesday: Best Books of 2018, So Far

This week's Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by the Artsy Reader Girl, is the best books we've read in 2018.

In order of my reading them...

1. Star Trek the Fall: Ceremony of Losses, David Mack
2. Poetry Night at the Ballpark, Bill Kauffman
3. Fares, Please! A Popular History of Trolleys, Horsecars, Streetcars,Buses, Elevateds, and Subways, John Anderson Miller
4. Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, Scott Horton
5. Verbal Judo: The Art of Persuasion, George Thompson
6. A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, Ian Mortimer
7. How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, Russ Roberts
8. Exploding the Phone: The Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, Phil Lapsley
9. Ready Player One, Ernest Cline
10. Little Brother,  Corey Doctorow

About the books:

Star Trek: Ceremony of Losses  is only part of a series, but features compelling moral drama about a doctor who does the right thing when his government  is being manipulative.

Poetry Night at the Ballpark is a collection of miscellany by a favorite author. I likened it to encountering him at a bar and then having a long, fascinating conversation about a variety of things.

Fares, Please! really speaks for itself. It's a fun history of public transportation.

Fool's Errand is a critical history of the Afghanistan war that stirs the water and asks why the hell Americans aren't more pissed off at the constant bloodshed and waste of this war.  Ooh, did Queen Elizabeth just tweet something passive aggressive about her new daughter in law?  War? What war?

Verbal Judo is a pocket guide to nonviolent communication  and conflict deescalation.  Useful stuff if you work with the public.

A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval History was a fun social history of medieval England.

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Mind  interprets Adam Smith's poorly-known Theory of Moral Sentiments,  to explore the meaning of life in being loved and being lovely.

Exploding the Phone reviews the phone-hacking scene of the fifties to the eighties, when computers made it more difficult and became objects of hacking interest themselves.

Ready Player One is...awesome.

Little Brother  takes the surveillance state, a kid, and a user's guide to cybersecurity and mixes them together for a YA techno thriller that not only argues for privacy, but gives readers the tools to achieve it against the government's designs.  That's my kind of self-government. 

Teaser Tuesday: Murder on the Moor?

Teaser Tuesday bids participants to share a two-sentence excerpt from their current read.  It's hosted by Books and a Beat.

I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea straggled towards Leet, and asked, "Was it here indeed that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my life?

p. 9, In the Days of the Comet. H.G. Wells

Teaser Tuesday

"They believed in the righteousness of their cause, the inevitability of their victory, and the immortality of their young souls. And as they wheeled around to the east and pulled out their Michelin maps of Tunisia, they believed they had actually been to war."

From An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942- 1943. Rick Atkinson.

Teaser Tuesday: The Empty Throne

It's been ages since I did a Teaser Tuesday, but it's Tuesday and here I sit with a Bernard Cornwell quotation worth sharing.

At night, in the hall, when the hearth smoke thickens about the beams and the ale-horns are filled and the harpist plucks his strings, the songs of battle are sung. They are the songs of our family, of our people, and that is how we remember the past. We call a poet a scop, and a scop means someone who shapes things and a poet shapes the past, so we remember the glories of our ancestors and how they brought us land and women and cattle and glory. There would be no Norse song of Haki, I thought, because this would be a Saxon song about a Saxon victory.

p. 10-11, The Empty Throne. Bernard Cornwell

Teaser Tuesday (20 May)

     "Sometimes all a reader can do is sit back and watch the words go by:

The same arrested relay of emulative métis underlies Oydessean architectural theory. For in the female invention 'of making threats adhere to one another' is also the beginning of architecture. The Vitruvian myth of aboriginal architects 'imitating' the weaving and daubing of birds' nests continues a widespread aetiology. (A.L.T. Bergen, 'The (Re)Marriage of Penelope and Odysseus: Architecture Gender Philosophy, A Homeric Dialogue' in The Ages of Homer, J.B. Carter and S.P. Morris, eds. [Austin, 1995], p. 210)

     It is hard to know whether we are reading about Homer or poring over the Time-Life series on home remodeling."

p. 138, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath

Teaser Tuesday (4 Feb)

"We asked for help," said the other priest, "to ensure that the light of the gospel isn't extinguished from Britain, so that the pagans defeated utterly, and so the love of Christ will fill this land."
"What he means," Pyrlig explained, "is that he knew you were in the shit, and so he came to me and asked for help, and I had nothing better to do."

p. 275, The Pagan Lord, Bernard Cornwell


Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which people share teasers from their currents, hosted by Should be Reading.

Teaser Tuesday 19 Nov: Martin Eden

"Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for -- ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in the world."

p. 8, Martin Eden; Jack London

Share your own 'teases' at Should Be Reading!

Teaser Tuesday (20 August)

It's easy to be foolish, he thought. It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy. It's better to be stoic -- to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it?

p. 87, Trains and Lovers,  Alexander Maccoll Smith

Teaser Tuesday (28 May): Sugar, Sugar

First, the food companies themselves are hooked on salt, sugar, and fat. Their relentless drive to achieve the greatest allure for the lowest possible cost has drawn them, inexorably, to these three ingredients time and time again. Sugar not only sweetens, it replaces more costly ingredients -- like tomatoes in ketchup -- to add bulk and texture. For little added expense a variety of fats can be slipped into food formulas to stimulate overeating and improve mouthfeel. And salt, barely more expensive than water, has miraculous powers to boost the appeal of processed food.

P. xxviii - xxix, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.


I just started this today, and upon seeing these words in the introduction they seemed worth sharing. I've become something of a pure-foods guy in recent years, though I do have a weakness for peanut butter and graham crackers. So far this book is making a decision to abandon processed foods completely look more and more attractive.

Teaser Tuesday (26 March)

One man from Nebraska even wrote us a couple of times, filling his envelopes with books and brochures. He apologized for always filling my mailbox and ended one of his letters with, "I'm just so excited that you'll be coming through our state!" It seemed that not too many people were interested in pedaling across Nebraska.

p. 26, Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? Five Kids Meet their Country, John Boettner

In 2010, the highly conservative International Energy Agency announced that output of conventional oil would peak within ten years if demand continued to grow on a business-as-usual basis.
"Even if oil demand were to remain flat," Fatih Birol, the agency's chief economist, conceded in 2011, "the world would need to find more than forty million barrels per day of gross new capacity -- equal to four new Saudi Arabias -- just to offset this decline."

p. 10-11, Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, Taras Grescoe

Teaser Tuesday (29 January)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which particpants share excerpts from their current reads. Play along at Should Be Reading!

Now we aim -- after some work -- to connect in the reader's mind, with a single thread, elements seemingly far apart, such as Cato the Elder, Nietzsche, Thales of Milteus, the potency of the system of city-states, the sustainability of artisans  the process of discovery, the onesidedness of opacity, financial derivatives  antibiotic resistance, bottoms-up systems, Socrates' invitation to overrationalize, how to lecture birds, obsessive love, Darwinian evolution, the mathematical concept of Jensen's inequality, optionality and option theory, the idea of ancestral heuristics, the works of Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke, Wittgenstein's anti-rationalism, the fraudulent theories of the economics establishment  tinkering and bricolage, terrorism exacerbated by death of its members, an apologia for artisan societies, the ethical flaws of the middle class, Paleo-style workouts (and nutrition), the idea of medical iatrogenics, the glorious notion of the magnificent (megalopsychon), my obsession with the idea of convexity (and my phobia of concavity), the late-2000s banking and economic crises, the misunderstanding of redundancy, the difference between tourist and flaneur, etc. All in one single -- and, I am certain, simple, -- thread.
How?

p. 20, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Teaser Tuesday (20 November)

"I...no others. I....all..." He shook his head, and spoke again. The Companion switched to its female voice, speaking for itself. "I do not have the vocabulary  to translate what Ponter is saying."
Mary nodded slowly. "The word you're looking for," she said gently, "is 'alone'". 

p. 196, Hominids, Robert Sawyer

"When his slaves began sneaking away to nearby Yankee camps, a Vicksburg planter asked the 'patriarch' of his slaves, Silas, if the elderly man and his wife were planning their escape as well. Oh, no, 'Uncle Si' reassured his owner, they were too old for that and they were going to stay right where they were. That night all the remaining slaves on the plantation slipped away, including the aged couple. When the planter rode out after them the next day, he found Uncle Si in the woods, bending over the lifeless body of his wife. The planter asked, not unsympathetically, why the old man would subject her to such a strenuous journey, one she clearly was not strong enough to endure. Silas replied simply that it couldn't be helped, adding pensively, 'But then, you see, she died free.' "

p. 166, A South Divided: Portraits of Dissent in the Confederacy. David Downing.

Teaser Tuesday (13 November)

"I have studied the rules of sparring for an adequate time," said Lobsang, standing up. "Two millionths of a second, to be precise. Sorry, did that sound smug?"
Joshua sighed. "Actually, it sounded like exaggeration for humorous effect."
"Good" said Lobsang. "That's exactly what I intended."
"That sounds smug."

p. 138, The Long Earth. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

"You might find her sunbathing among the dinosaurs."
"Dinosaurs! Her! Sunbathing!"
"You'll have to see for yourself. But be careful, Joshua. The dinosaurs look amiable enough. Well, some of them. But she might bite..."

p. 208, The Long Earth. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.


Suppose there were an infinite succession of Earths, and you could move between them with a single step? Such is the premise of The Long Earth which I started a few days ago and have found to be  most intriguing.

Teaser Tuesday (23 October)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish event in which bloggers share excerpts from their current reads, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

"Remember , don't look up!" one of the sewer workers, affectionately known as the "flusher" within the industry, called to me. The rungs were now dripping with sewer water -- millions of pestilent microbes yearning to enter our bodies. They'd told us countless times not to look up and I'd just watched Rebecca carefully avoid doing so, no matter how many times I called to her, trying to trick her into it. Only an idiot would look up.
"What?" I said, looking up. A droplet burst apart on my right cheek, splashing within a millimeter of my eye.

p. 112. Flushed! How the Plumber Saved Civilization, W. Hodding Carter

Common folk reserved their most intense scorn for those who brought on the war yet refused to serve in it or grow enough food to support it. 'The crime is with the planters", wrote an angry Georgian to the Savannah Morning News. "As a class, they have yielded their patriotism  if they ever had any, to covetousness...for the sake of the money, they are pursuing a course to destroy or demoralize our army -- to starve out the other class dependent on them for provisions." Another asked: "What class has the most interest in the war and has made the most money by it, and sacrificed the least to maintain it? It is the class known as the planters."

p. 85, Bitterly Divided: the South's Inner Civil War, David Williams

Teaser Tuesday (16 October)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish game hosted by Should Be Reading wherein participants share excerpts from their current reads. This week I started Bernard Cornwell's King Arthur trilogy, which has proven captivating so far.

There have been many more beautiful women, and thousands who were better, but since the world was weaned I doubt there have been many so unforgettable as Guinevere, eldest daughter of Leodegan, the exiled King of Henis Wyren.  And it would have been better, Merlin always said, had she been drowned at birth.

p. 172, The Winter King: a Novel of Arthur. Bernard Cornwell

'Get the mines working, rebuild the bridges, pave the fords, dig out the sluices and find a way of persuading the Sais to go back home. That's enough work for one man's life, don't you think?"
'Yes, Lord', I said nervously, and wondered by a warlord would busy himself repairing water conduits.

p. 109, The Winter King

'Dear sweet God!' Sansum bellowed. 'Thy servant comes, slaughtered by wicked men and their foul witch! All I did was obey Your word. Receive me, Lord! Receive Thy humble servant!' This was followed by a scream as he anticipated his death, but it was only Issa lifting him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his robe and carrying him gently away from the stone pile to the pond where he dropped Sansum into the shallow, muddy water. 'I'm drowning, Lord!' Sansum shouted. 'Cast into mighty waters like Jonah into the ocean! A martyr for Christ! As Paul and Peter were martyred, Lord, so now I come!' He blew some urgent bubbles, but no one besides his God was taking any notice and so he slowly dragged himself out of the muddy duckweed to spit curses at my men who were eagerly dragging the stones aside.

p. 311, The Winter King

Teaser Tuesday (25 September)

The conversation cut off by another person's telephone ringing. The voice that trails away as eyes and brain tunnel into a screen. It's annoying when you're the victim, but then, don't you do the same thing yourself? You're in a real place with someone who means a great deal to you, say having lunch with a close friend or colleague or reading a book to a child. To all appearances, you're present and fully engaged. But your attention is provisional, awaiting the next summons from beyond. A faint vibration or beep is all it takes and off you go.

p. 52, Hamlet's Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which participants share excerpts from their current reads; it is hosted by MizB of ShouldBeReading.


The above is why I keep my cellphone turned off and only check it in the evenings. To everything its place and time..

Teaser Tuesday (2 July)

It's the first Tuesday of July, and that means...time for a teaser. Tuesday Teaser is an event hosted by Should be Reading in which participants share excerpts from their current reads.

[Simon] describes reading the newspaper in a café as an almost transcendent experience. One night at a neighborhood restaurant, he swoons when the waiter sets down a cheese plate in front of him."This is why I live in Paris!" he declares. 

p. 13,  Bringing Up Bébé: One Woman Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting; Pamela Druckerman

Even Simon, who's merely British, is perplexed by my self-doubt and my frequent need to discuss our relationship.
"What are you thinking about?" I ask him periodially, usually when he's reading the newspaper.
"Dutch football," he invariably says.

p. 14,  Bringing Up Bébé

The colors were lifted, the glorious Stars and Stripes, and beside them the white silk colors of Masachusetts with the arms of the Commonwealth embroidered on one flank and the motto Fide et Constantia stitched bright on the other. The silk streamed in the sunlight as the men cheered, broke cover, and charged.
To die. 

p. 38, Copperhead. Bernard Cornwell

(Mood whiplash, anyone?)

Teaser Tuesday (12 June)

Teaser Tuesday once again!

How wide the gates of hell gaped, how searing the flames would be, how agonizing the lake of fire, and how long would all eternity stretch if he did not stand now, fetch his sword, and walk out from this den of iniquity into the cleansing rain. Dear God, he prayed, but this is a terrible thing, and if you will just save me now then I will never sin again, not ever.  He looked into Sally's eyes, her lovely eyes.
"Of course I'll kill him for you," he heard himself saying.

p. 227, Rebel. Bernard Cornwell. 

Teaser Tuesday (5 June)

There is a Chinese proverb that says, "When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills." What will we do? 

p. 24, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Revolution. Thomas Friedman.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly book event in which participants share excerpts from their current reads. Play along at Should Be Reading.