Raven's Range

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: Alexander McCall-Smith

April 7th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

It’s hard not to keep on bumping into this famous book, but I never got a chance to read it until now. A friend gave it to me as I passed through Silicon Valley, and it was just the light-hearted reading I needed.

This is the story of Precious Ramotswe, a thirty-something lady who opens up the first women-owned personal detective agency in Botswana. She doesn’t have any qualifications, she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but she studies the manual from London carefully and uses her intiutition and common sense, which is plentiful.

Equipped with a typewriter and a lady secretary, she embarks on a series of adventures that reflect Botswana culture, preoccupations and history. Wrapped around all of this is a quest to find and rescue a young boy who’s been kidnapped by a witch doctor, astute observations on the nature of life and, especially, men, and a sweet, low-key romance that’s a refreshing antidote to the western world’s bodice rippers.

There are some wonderful pearls of wisdom in this story, and it’s a truly gentle and pleasant read. I will be seeking out the sequels when I can. :)

Reading is hot

March 31st, 2009

Linda R. Moore

We went downtown and ran errands, including laundry. This time, nobody tried to steal my bike. Maybe it was the way I got the table right in front of the laundromat, or the two bikes guarding one another. When I got home, it was such a lovely day that all I wanted to do was sit out and read a really good book, which is exactly what I did until the sun dropped below the mountain.

Don, of course, was on the roof. Can you tell?

Fame at last

March 27th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

Fame at last

See that magazine? It’s the Women on Wheels magazine. WOW is a women’s motorcycling club that I used to be in. It holds a glowing review of A Little Twist of Texas.

I celebrated with a coffee at Starbucks, looking out over the view of my bike on a gorgeous spring day.

I know how to fix the post office.

March 26th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

Apparently, the United States Postal Service is having a little trouble.

I know how to fix that problem.

Everyone in the United States should join PostCrossing.

As of July 2008, our estimated population was 303,824,640 people. Let’s pretend that 200,000,000 of them are potentially able to join. This is a completely arbitrary number based on no factual evidence at all.

You start off able to send five postcards. You can send one to the USA, and four overseas. That comes to 27c for the US stamp and 94c each for the overseas (Canada and Mexico are a bit cheaper, but let’s just work with simple stuff for now.) That costs $4.03.

Assume one set of five cards per month. (Actually, an avid PCer will send more cards, but five is simple.)

That’s $48.36 a year. Let’s round it up to $50.00.

So, those 200 million Post Crossers pay $10,000,000,000 (ten billion) dollars more in stamps.

That should do it? Right?

Okay, let’s give Post Crossing some stimulus money, quick.

This strategy can be repeated around the world. And while doing so you get to find out about all sorts of interesting people and places too. (My favorite to date? Receiving a card from a place so far north in Russia that the temperature was -48 degrees celsius. )

Serious thoughtful responses to this post will be completely ignored.

Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein — Molly Dwyer

March 12th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

What a strange, fascinating book.

I admit to being daunted when I first saw this book; at nearly 600 pages, it’s not the type of light reading I’m used to when I pick up a novel! But when I started, I found it very difficult to put the book down. The story worked for me on a number of levels.

On the one hand there’s the posse of poets and writers including Mary Shelley, her husband/lover Percy Bysshe Shelly, and of course Lord Byron.Their bohemian lifestyle and long discussions about literature struck a chord, reminding me of fun times spent in kitchens over coffee or wine. On the other hand there’s a modern woman, a scholar, coming to England to present a paper on Shelley and feminism; she’s running away from a tragedy and a divorce, but finds herself haunted and caught up in the dreams of Mary Shelley herself. In other words, they’re dreaming of each other in a landscape where time is irrelevant…

While many of the conclusions drawn by modern-day Anna and her two male companions (a bit like Shelley and Byron in their roles, it turns out) sound a bit like the kids in Scooby Doo talking out the plot, I’m interested in spirituality and spiritualism and found the ideas poking at some parts of my own life that I’d let slide a bit–enough to do some further research and reading, at least.

I loved the coincidences, and the little clues left lying around for the reader to connect the dots, though it was definitely very hard to follow when the two main ladies started having dreams within dreams. I did, however, especially appreciate the descriptions of England and Scotland, and the wonderful little plot twist right at the end where the author, in a way, writes herself into the book.

There were even a couple of historical markers! :: grin ::

I can’t imagine how much research went into this book, but I really enjoyed it almost despite myself, and it resonated for me because of the somewhat neglected interests from my twenties. I don’t know if others would enjoy it, but it got my creative juices flowing a little, and I’m starting to have some ideas about what I might do for NaNoWriMo in November, should I decide to partake in that insanity for the fourth time. ;)

Logic: A Very Short Introduction

March 7th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

This was one of the better VSIs I’ve read, if only because the author had a sense of humor and an easy, chatty style that made it less dry. He also lost me around chapter two, but at least I had fun until then and read on to discover that he was a biker, too. (One logic problem is that if one replaces everything on a bike, and keeps all the original parts, are the two bikes the same, and if so, what is their identity?)

I also learned that fuzzy logic isn’t just an insult — it actually has a real definition in the field of logic. ;)

So, what is logic, anyway? It is a philosophical discipline that seems to have been overrun with mathematical formulae. If the author had spent less time on the formulae I might have stopped going quite so cross-eyed, but after the first six or seven chapters I was hopelessly lost and my eyes would glaze over when faced with another series of funky symbols.

While a very helpful glossary was provided, I didn’t have the mathematical vocabulary to know what these symbols were called and sat there reading “backwards E” and “squiggle” to myself. I would have like to learn a name for them so that I could promptly forget them or look them up again. Not having a vocabulary for the symbols cramped my ability to understand.

I picked this book because I thought it might be interesting from the point of view of a web developer. Logic isn’t my strong point and the worst bugs I create usually have something to do with the “if/then/either/or” functions. I have to turn on a different part of my brain to debug these problems and it doesn’t come naturally. Neither did the ideas in this book, though what I could understand was interesting. I find it amusing to see that logicians try to prove and disprove the existence of a higher power by assigning arbitrary values to their arguments, and then think about the philosopher in a HitchHiker book who proved that black was white and got killed at the next pedestrian crossing. ;)

I found the historical snippets the most interesting. These included learning that the first logicians were the ancient Greeks. Why am I not surprised? They had nothing better to do than drink wine, build fantastic structures, invent theater and then lie around exhausted in barrels. ;)

Overall, I found myself not really caring about the subject matter, while still caring for the book’s style and presentation. I don’t find the topic fascinating enough to pursue further and it didn’t help me with my programming, either. Even so, I’m glad the author had fun with his subject and continues to do so. If not, well, at least he can ride his motorcycle. ;)

Found one!

February 10th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

Found one! It was nice to be in an area with well-stocked bookshops again, though the traffic in the Bay Area still sucks. This is Becky Cochrane’s new book, and it was even faced out at Barnes & Noble in San Jose. You should buy this book, along with its predecessor, A Coventry Christmas. The first one was great fun and I’m looking forward to reading the new one.

Blue Plaques of Leeds

January 22nd, 2009

Linda R. Moore

I bought this book several years ago so that I could add the Leeds Civic Trust‘s blue plaques to Markeroni’s database. It was one of the few books I kept when I moved from Sunnyvale to Lodi, and last Fall I picked it up from the storage shed and brought it home.

I already have someone in mind for this book, since she’s doing a challenge that includes finding blue plaques in Leeds. ;) But I thought I’d read it before I sent it along, and I’m really glad that I did. (If you want to read it, let me know: She’s not in a hurry, and I could loan it out first, if you’re prompt.)

There are currently around 120 blue plaques in Leeds, Read more »

Friendsreunited.co.uk by Andrew Collins

January 15th, 2009

Linda R. Moore

Well, I finally finished a book — one I’ve been hanging onto for two years. I first got this book at the George and Dragon in Oxfordshire, the last time I was in the UK — October 2006! It is a BookCrossing book, one of the few I kept when I gave away almost of all of books in 2007, and since I realized how many books I’d accumulated in our RV I figured it was time to start finding them homes again. That required reading.

This, as the name implies, is the book of UK website Friends Reunited (similar to classmates.com). It is a collection of anecdotes taken directly from the words of people whose stories are told: tales of romance, World War II, amazing coincidences and some actually rather hum-drum nothingness.

It was okay, I guess, but I think that it could have used an editor or a narrator rather than just the anecdotes. And the contents of forums really don’t translate well to text–those direct quotes could have been spun into a more interesting essay-type format.

So saying, it was an easy book to just dip into, with absolutely no requirement for thought at all. I think that mostly I liked it because it was about British people and I found the story of Friends Reunited both inspiring and reassuring. I’ve found a few old friends on the site and visited the pages of others that I would never care to speak to again. ;)

If anyone is intrigued by this let me know, otherwise I’ll just leave it in the wild or find it a new home.

Judaism: A Very Short Introduction by Norman Soloman

November 18th, 2008

Linda R. Moore

I bought this book because I have several friends who are Jewish while knowing next to nothing about their religion. I figured that a read through would give me a sense of what they believed in, and what their various festivals were about and for, and that’s exactly what I got.

And more.

With the kind of very dry humor that I’ve come to expect from these guides, I was introduced to the underlying principles of Judaism and some of the important characters from its history. Particularly interesting to me was that around the time of Jesus’ birth there was no distinction between “Jews” and “Christians”–while one set thought they’d found the Messiah and the other was still waiting, they were still all Jews. Read more »