What are you reading at the moment?

C. - you might find this of interest - I heard it on the World Service - but you can download via the BBC app - Apollo 13


Heavily based on interviews with the people involved - archive of the comms between the doomed lunar lander and mission control as the whole thing unfolds - the event lives on in our everyday speech - 'Houston - we've had a problem.'

This is series two - the first is about Apollo 11.


Again - an event written into our common vocabulary - 'Houston - Tranquility base here - the Eagle has landed.' Let's leave aside the whole 'one giant leap' thing - an appalling grammatical error - when 20% of the entire world population were watching - in fairness Armstrong probably had bigger concerns at the time than satisfying pedants.

Give it a listen - see what you think - it is worth noting that the smartphone next to me - or indeed the laptop I am typing on - have more computing power available to them - than any Apollo mission - makes it seem all the more remarkable.

Yours - I.

@Digimonkey Cheers Iain, I listened to 13 Minutes to the moon last year - loved it; wasn't aware of series 2 looking at the flight of Apollo 13 - one episode in and I am really enjoying it; the production seems to be more polished than series 1.

Hope all is good with you,

All the best,

Chris
 
'You have been in Afghanistan I perceive?'

If i have achieved anything in the last twelve weeks of lock-down, other than not going totally f***ing mental - I have re-read the entire Holmes canon - interspersed with other things - all four novels and the fifty six short stories. Favourites? Full length - 'A Study in Scarlet' - a close run thing with 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' - short - 'The Adventure of the Empty House.' @Missoni - you might be delighted to know - all read - via my Kindle Voyage - downloaded from Standard Ebooks. I have paper copies - but couldn't be arsed going and finding them in the cavern of books next door. I've written a few homages - I can't remember whether I have posted this before - it is in three parts - 'The Adventure of the Monsignor' - part the first - if anyone is interested - I can post the other two bits. @Scotshave @Satanfriendly

Baker Street - 1891 -

Watson is shaving - a moment of quiet contemplation - any man might reasonably expect - but - even at his ablutions - he cannot ignore - Wagner's 'Gotterdammerung' - being played manically by his companion - from the middle of the night - on an violin - of Cremona origin. He hadn't even reached the end of the first act yet.

‘Dear God - why did I move back into this madhouse?' - he asks of his reflection.

Resuming his lodging with the world's most eminent consulting detective - but six weeks after burying his beloved Mary - not being able to brook - the now empty - silent - domestic spaces they shared during a happy marriage.

Suddenly Holmes stops his demented scraping - blissful silence. The bathroom door crashes open behind the doctor -

‘Watson - Watson - ha ha - we have been summoned! The end of the dry season - I had almost lost faith in the malevolence of our fellow men - ha ha - dress quickly my friend - I shall do likewise - there is a telegram on the table - read it. We shall breakfast later.'

‘Holmes - come soonest - a foul deed on hallowed ground. Help required. Westminster Cathedral. Insp. Athelney Jones.'

No matter how grisly this might be - a welcome relief from Wagner.

A shaft of light illuminates the high altar - two uniformed officers and Jones are looking over a body between them.

‘Inspector - I received your missive - with great delight - what - who - do we have?'

A heavily corpulent man is slumped forward - face down - his richly ornamented clerical robes indicate his calling instantly - the crossed key's of St Peter - detailed in gold brocade - his rank.

‘Until this morning - he was discovered about eight thirty - Holmes - this was the Papal legate - the apostolic nuncio to the Court of St James - otherwise - Monsignor Alejandro Arroyo y Lopez.'

‘Felled my dear Athelney - in the posture of prayer - how fitting a way to meet your maker? Ha ha. May we turn him over - to see what more we can learn? Lend a hand.'

Four of them struggle to manoeuvre the dead weight - when achieved - the priest's face is picked out by the god beam - gasps from the constables. A terrible countenance - caught in a final silent scream. Lips and protruding tongue - stained purple. Almost his last act was to cry - tears of blood - now congealed on the cheeks. A sheet of fine hand-woven paper is pinned to the front of the priest's cassock - G.P.L.E.A.I.S is printed in a delicate cursive script.

‘First impression doctor?' ‘Poisoned - I would say.'

‘I concur - Inspector - I shall report to you in 36 hours - good day gentlemen. Come Watson. We have seen all we can see here.'

A horse drawn cab - returning to Baker Street -
‘Holmes - who is the murderer? You are onto something - what was his motive?'

‘Not him Watson - her.'


To be continued.
 
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'You have been in Afghanistan I perceive?'

If i have achieved anything in the last twelve weeks of lock-down, other than not going totally f***ing mental - I have re-read the entire Holmes canon - interspersed with other things - all four novels and the fifty six short stories. Favourites? Full length - 'A Study in Scarlet' - a close run thing with 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' - short - 'The Adventure of the Empty House.' @Missoni - you might be delighted to know - all read - via my Kindle Voyage - downloaded from Standard Ebooks. I have paper copies - but couldn't be arsed going and finding them in the cavern of books next door. I've written a few homages - I can't remember whether I have posted this before - it is in three parts - 'The Adventure of the Monsignor' - part the first - if anyone is interested - I can post the other two bits. @Scotshave @Satanfriendly

Baker Street - 1891 -

Watson is shaving - a moment of quiet contemplation - any man might reasonably expect - but - even at his ablutions - he cannot ignore - Wagner's 'Gotterdammerung' - being played manically by his companion - from the middle of the night - on an violin - of Cremona origin. He hadn't even reached the end of the first act yet.

‘Dear God - why did I move back into this madhouse?' - he asks of his reflection.

Resuming his lodging with the world's most eminent consulting detective - but six weeks after burying his beloved Mary - not being able to brook - the now empty - silent - domestic spaces they shared during a happy marriage.

Suddenly Holmes stops his demented scraping - blissful silence. The bathroom door crashes open behind the doctor -

‘Watson - Watson - ha ha - we have been summoned! The end of the dry season - I had almost lost faith in the malevolence of our fellow men - ha ha - dress quickly my friend - I shall do likewise - there is a telegram on the table - read it. We shall breakfast later.'

‘Holmes - come soonest - a foul deed on hallowed ground. Help required. Westminster Cathedral. Insp. Athelney Jones.'

No matter how grisly this might be - a welcome relief from Wagner.

A shaft of light illuminates the high altar - two uniformed officers and Jones are looking over a body between them.

‘Inspector - I received your missive - with great delight - what - who - do we have?'

A heavily corpulent man is slumped forward - face down - his richly ornamented clerical robes indicate his calling instantly - the crossed key's of St Peter - detailed in gold brocade - his rank.

‘Until this morning - he was discovered about eight thirty - Holmes - this was the Papal legate - the apostolic nuncio to the Court of St James - otherwise - Monsignor Alejandro Arroyo y Lopez.'

‘Felled my dear Athelney - in the posture of prayer - how fitting a way to meet your maker? Ha ha. May we turn him over - to see what more we can learn? Lend a hand.'

Four of them struggle to manoeuvre the dead weight - when achieved - the priest's face is picked out by the god beam - gasps from the constables. A terrible countenance - caught in a final silent scream. Lips and protruding tongue - stained purple. Almost his last act was to cry - tears of blood - now congealed on the cheeks. A sheet of fine hand-woven paper is pinned to the front of the priest's cassock - G.P.L.E.A.I.S is printed in a delicate cursive script.

‘First impression doctor?' ‘Poisoned - I would say.'

‘I concur - Inspector - I shall report to you in 36 hours - good day gentlemen. Come Watson. We have seen all we can see here.'

A horse drawn cab - returning to Baker Street -
‘Holmes - who is the murderer? You are onto something - what was his motive?'

‘Not him Watson - her.'


To be continued.

Delighted the Voyage has proved a useful tool. I still find it difficult to pick-up a book at the moment but I am aware that this will change. That said, I have been reading, albeit, at a glacial pace, Moby Dick, to my son, on and off. Whilst I do not find it a page turner, I am in awe at his mastery of language and how much meaning he can pack into one sentence. I often find myself having to re-read a paragraph several times to appreciate the depth and richness of the pictures he is painting with words. At the moment I am locked into a punishing routine of domestic boredom and staring mindlessly at a screen. And remembering whimsically how, what seems like too many years ago now, skipping meals for a day or two, and not bothering one iota as it afforded me more time to do what I wanted, which was not eating out of habit.

I need a book for pure escapism, one that transports me, suspends time and place for me and imbue's me with a feeling of awe, wonder and "mono no aware". I have Aldiss' "Moment of Eclipse" and a couple of books by Ted Chiang, Sc-Fi of course, which I hope will do the trick. Holmes and Watson does not resonate at the moment but it may do, another timer or place. I will now contemplate over the next few hours or will that be, days, weeks or months, picking Aldis or Chiang up to read.
 
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This is actually an anti-review - I very seldom do not finish books I have started - whether I particularly am enjoying them or not - I get to the end - sometimes only through bloody-mindedness - but to completion - none the less. This I will not - I'm not going to waste any more of my life on it - according to the Kindle - I am 19% of the way through - enough to know it is not going to get any more engaging. It was recommended to me by a friend whose opinions I take seriously concerning books - the strap line on most copies reads 'what we should know about people we don't know,' - fair enough - interesting premise - it is almost entirely derived from the theories of a psychologist called Timothy Levine - who asserts that in our interaction with people we don't know - we 'default to truth' - humans tend to believe the better of our fellow men until we have overwhelming evidence that the contrary is true - fair enough - engaging as an idea - it might be easy to understand that there would be good evolutionay reasons why this might be the case - but thus far not one of the examples provided by the author to support this deals with a stranger - he might get around around to it later in the book - but I'm not going to find out. If I am wrong - and you have read it to the conclusion - I am happy to have this pointed out to me. Given the fact that Gladwell is a staffer at the 'New Yorker' - I was astonished how crap his writing style is - each to their own - you may want to see what you think yourself - the book won awards apparently. Deeply disappointing for me - having heard great things about it. At least on the Kindle I only wasted five quid - compared to the price of a paper copy. Since we are on the subject - books I refused to finish - classics - 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville - one of the greatest opening lines ever - 'Call me Ishmael,' - then it descends into the inky depths it so tediously describes thereafter - if only it happened quicker - if the Pequod had gone down like the Titanic - in chapter two - fair enough - it need not have taken nearly six hundred pages of stupefyingly dull and over written text - I am aware that I am swimming against the tide with this book - generally considered a masterpiece of 19th century American literature - the honour of the very, very worst book I never finished - 'American Psycho' by Bret Easton Ellis - if it is a pastiche and satire of the astonishingly vacous times the author describes - he did well. Each to their own - I.

@Missoni @Scotshave
 
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This is actually an anti-review - I very seldom do not finish books I have started - whether I particularly am enjoying them or not - I get to the end - sometimes only through bloody-mindedness - but to completion - none the less. This I will not - I'm not going to waste any more of my life on it - according to the Kindle - I am 19% of the way through - enough to know it is not going to get any more engaging. It was recommended to me by a friend whose opinions I take seriously concerning books - the strap line on most copies reads 'what we should know about people we don't know,' - fair enough - interesting premise - it is almost entirely derived from the theories of a psychologist called Timothy Levine - who asserts that in our interaction with people we don't know - we 'default to truth' - humans tend to believe the better of our fellow men until we have overwhelming evidence that the contrary is true - fair enough - engaging as an idea - it might be easy to understand that there would be good evolutionay reasons why this might be the case - but thus far not one of the examples provided by the author to support this deals with a stranger - he might get around around to it later in the book - but I'm not going to find out. If I am wrong - and you have read it to the conclusion - I am happy to have this pointed out to me. Given the fact that Gladwell is a staffer at the 'New Yorker' - I was astonished how crap his writing style is - each to their own - you may want to see what you think yourself - the book won awards apparently. Deeply disappointing for me - having heard great things about it. At least on the Kindle I only wasted five quid - compared to the price of a paper copy. Since we are on the subject - books I refused to finish - classics - 'Moby Dick' by Herman Melville - one of the greatest opening lines ever - 'Call me Ishmael,' - then it descends into the inky depths it so tediously describes thereafter - if only it happened quicker - if the Pequod had gone down like the Titanic - in chapter two - fair enough - it need not have taken nearly six hundred pages of stupefyingly dull and over written text - I am aware that I am swimming against the tide with this book - generally considered a masterpiece of 19th century American literature - the honour of the very, very worst book I never finished - 'American Psycho' by Bret Easton Ellis - if it is a pastiche and satire of the astonishingly vacous times the author describes - he did well. Each to their own - I.

@Missoni @Scotshave

I am currently reading Moby Dick at a glacial pace and have to agree that it is hard work; I do admire his use of language but there is no sense of pace. I am determined to finish the book though but at the rate I am reading probably another year or so to go. Anna Karenina is also another book that has little pace for me, except for the horse racing chapter which is just an incredible piece of writing but the rest of the book...er no...
 
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'Solipsism' - noun -

'The view that the self is the only reality.'

'Absorption with oneself without consideration for the needs and desires of others'

To extend -

'Epistemological solipsism is the variety of idealism according to which only the directly accessible mental contents of a solipsistic philosopher (?) can be known. The existence of an external world is regarded as an unsolvable question rather than actually false. Further, one cannot also be certain as to what extent the external world exists independently of one's mind. For instance, it may be that a God-like being controls the sensations received by one's brain, making it appear as if there is an external world when most of it (excluding the God-like being and oneself) is false. However, the point remains that epistemological solipsists consider this an "unsolvable" question.'


Fake news - except it is not - unfortunately - I.

@Missoni @Scotshave @Blademonkey
 
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Doesn't look like this thread has been active for a while but I thought I'd see what people are loading onto their Kindles for their summer jollies (or summer stay-cations, as the case may be).

Personally, I downloaded East of Eden by John Steinbeck last night and have already finished the sample which was absolutely fantastic. I remember reading Of Mice and Men at school but haven't read any others of his since. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in!
 
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