December 11th, 2011
Linda R. Moore
My parents sent me this postcard. They did their Christmas shopping here. Drumnadrochit in Scotland is one of the gateways to Loch Ness, famous for its monster. My earliest memory of Scotland was of standing on the shores of Loch Ness, shouting “Ness-ie!”
You’re seeing a typical Highland stone village, with a garden exhibit that shows Urquhart Castle. Urquhart (pronounced, roughly, Urk-hart) is a fantastic castle that juts out into the loch.
The “ch” in Drumnadrochit is hard, a bit like the “gh” sound in “cough.”
June 2nd, 2009
Linda R. Moore
Some while ago I was on Twitter when I caught an author asking if anybody would like to host her book as part of a blog tour. As I think that blog tours are a fun idea and it later ensued that I knew Claudia already (we had met through the original Thursday Thirteen meme) I was very happy to take part. So I sent her some interview questions and without further ado: Welcome, Claudia!
Tell us a bit about your novel The Fey. What’s it about? Who is the main character?
At its most basic level, The Fey is about a young woman, Alexandra Hargreaves, who was cruising along Read more »
May 6th, 2009
Linda R. Moore
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a deceptively simple little spiritual book that starts with a man dying. And that, as the author says, is just the beginning.
Eddie has been a maintenance guy at a fairground all his life. He had aspirations, but things happened, and that’s where he grew up and eventually died. His own opinion of himself is that he never mattered, and that he didn’t deserve to be in heaven…which is where he wakes up.
Albom’s vision of heaven has nothing to do with clouds, angel wings and harps. In fact, it reminds me more of the pagan concept of the Summerland, where you rest between lifetimes and learn about your Read more »
May 5th, 2009
Linda R. Moore
Blue Diary is at times a distressing, but well-written and beautiful book. It gets its fingers into the raw stuff of human emotion in a poetic, elegant way and does not leave off until the end. There are many characters, and each one is a fully-formed person with hopes and fears (the author has a clever and unusual knack for writing a couple of sentences about each one, so we know more than they do, but without it ever falling into the trap of “telling” rather than “showing”).
Ethan Ford wanders into the local bar one day, and falls in love with Jorie. They marry, and now have a twelve year old son. Ethan is a model citizen, coaching kids in the sports teams, helping out, being a volunteer firefighter and saving lives. Thirteen years later they are still head over heels in love, but one day Ethan’s image shows up on a criminals-wanted show, he is recognized by a 12-year old girl Kat, and she calls it in. We pick up the story just as Ethan is arrested, throwing the entire community into painful disarray.
In life, the only thing one can expect is change, and sometimes that change is traumatic. It’s what you do with it that counts. Some of the characters are shaken up enough to strive for the things they wanted all their lives. Others are torn apart by what’s happened, being lied to thirteen years, and let themselves be dragged down by it. The complex emotions and thoughts of these people are beautifully shown, and their choices and actions are realistic. While the subject of the book is on the surface depressing, the end result is uplifting, positive, and real. This is a true “slice of life” novel that highlights the events of a specific period in time, and all the varied human responses to it. I will definitely be on the lookout for this author.
May 4th, 2009
Linda R. Moore
This was the first book I’ve read by Jodi Picoult and when I picked it up the BookCrosser told me that it wasn’t one of her best. She was right, but it wasn’t really awful, either. I really enjoyed the beginning — the Native American cop, Will Flying Horse, just starting a job in Los Angeles, “escaping” from the reservation, and how he discovers Cassie Barrett, a woman who’s lost her memory. That’s the story I would have liked to read. But then it swung onto the backstory of why Cassie lost her memory, and that story and setting wasn’t quite as interesting.
We have the what, and now we need the why. The majority of this book tells the story of how Cassie meets Alex Rivers, an up and coming movie actor and heartthrob du jour (think Orlando Blum), and of how they come to marry and be in a relationship together. It seems like a fairytale kind of thing, but it turns out not to be. That, of course, is how she comes to lose her memory.
As her memory returns, Cassie pieces together what is going on, she asks the policemant to help her, and he brings her back to the reservation until she can sort out her life. Thus begins an equally unlikely relationship, but at least this is seasoned with interesting snippets of life on a Lakota reservation.
I’ll probably give this author another try, because there was a glimmering of promise at the beginning and the end, and it was an early book. But I found myself irritated with the characters and plot in this one, enough that I never really sank down into the story. Oh well.
April 29th, 2009
Linda R. Moore
There’s a town in Texas, where nothing much happens other than the changing of the traffic lights. It could be any town, really, and it takes some while to figure out it’s Texas, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the time of the Korean war, life is changing across the country, and yet the only things to do are to go to the pool hall, the cafe, or the movie theatre. Or you can get laid.
On the surface, this is a novel about a place where absolutely nothing happens other than people trying to get into other people’s pants. You can leave (escape, really) if you join the military, but the horrible stasis of this life is captured in the Larry McMurtry’s classic writing. But there are undercurrents. Supposedly decent people are not decent at all. There is a hatred and fear of people that are different, or supposedly different.
Following the fortunes of several of the townsfolk and the situations they get themselves into, one gets the sense of a way of life slipping slowly away, never to return. With stasis comes innocence, a painful unwillingness to change, and yet change comes anyway. The book was described as humorous, but I didn’t find it so. There’s nothing much light about this story, and it’s actually quite depressing. Fortunately, it’s so well written and its characters so real that you can connect to them, and watch the demise of that time as surely as the old movie theater closes.
April 24th, 2009
Linda R. Moore
I didn’t really expect to understand quantum theory when I bought this book, and I was right. I don’t. But this little volume did give me a pretty good insight into the history of quantum physics which, at times, seems to be less science than a strange, philosophical guessing-game; no wonder there is such divided opinion on its usefulness.
What I find hardest to comprehend is how the physicists involved could figure it out in the first place. You cannot see quantas, gluons (lovely, lovely word) or all the other little bits and pieces that make up the dit-dit-dits of quantum theory. You can’t even measure them, because a measuring device changes the result. It’s like looking at stars; you can only see some of them if you look at them out of the corner of your eye. A direct glance makes them vanish. So to me, quantum theory is just plain weird.
Of course, I gather that to other people, it’s just plain weird, as well. So I guess that’s okay.
I bought John Polkinghome’s Quantum Theory – A Very Short Introduction to stretch my mind, and it did. Science is not my thing, period, and it took me two attempts to get through. I enjoyed the history part.I enjoyed the philosophical discussions at the end and also learned about some of the inventions that had come about because of quantum. There were certain things that I’d heard of before (Schrödinger’s cat, which was a cruel experiment) that I didn’t know were part of quantum experimentation. And I do wish I could find the quotation about a messy desk, which made me smile.
I got the basic ideas but not all the details. Fortunately, a book like this refrains from bogging down in the details. There are some mathematical forumulae tucked away at the back which the author says can be safely ignored. I safely ignored them. Other mathematical formulae pop up here and there in the book and dragged up things like matrices and vectors from my secondary education, mpfl pmpf years ago. Those were okay. I understood them at sixteen and can dust them off now. Other bits were far beyond me, and that’s okay. I stopped wanting to be an astronaut when I grew up as soon as I figured out that one had to be good at math and science. ;)
April 9th, 2009
Linda R. Moore
