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Aug. 14th, 2011 03:10 pmDowntown Abbey should come with a warning that you better have seven free hours when you start, because you're not going to be able to turn it off until you finish it. Seriously.
Aug. 14th, 2011
Book review: Moby-Duck
Aug. 14th, 2011 04:06 pmI'm going to steal ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jethrien's format...
Title: Moby-Duck
Author: Donovan Hohn
Genre: Non-fiction
Synopsis: In 1992, a container full of plastic bathtub toys was lost at sea. Years later, the plastic ducks, beavers, turtles, and frogs wash up on shores from Alaska to Seattle. One journalist makes it his epic quest to understand everything there is to know about this event.
Thoughts: ( stuff )
Somewhat tangentially related to this, as I was reading his account of traveling on an ice breaker in the Arctic, I started looking up Arctic cruises. And you know the Northwest Passage? That countless people died trying to find? That the first people to transverse it did so by ramming their ship into the ice and waiting three years for the current to take them around the Arctic and spit them back out again? (That would be the Fram, and thy actually did the Northeast Passage, but still, first to transverse the Arctic.) You can take a cruise through that now.
Oh god I want to go. I think this just got added to my bucket list. When I have a month or two and a few thousand dollars to spare. I so want to go on an Arctic cruise! Even if it's not a complete transverse--even just to go to Baffin Bay and see where the icebergs live. And I say this as someone who gets terribly seasick and to whom Caribbean cruises have never appealed. Now that I've been to the Arctic, I really do want to go back. (You can take autumn cruises of the fjords in Greenland and see the Northern Lights! I want to gooooo! While there's still ice up there!)
jethrien's format...Title: Moby-Duck
Author: Donovan Hohn
Genre: Non-fiction
Synopsis: In 1992, a container full of plastic bathtub toys was lost at sea. Years later, the plastic ducks, beavers, turtles, and frogs wash up on shores from Alaska to Seattle. One journalist makes it his epic quest to understand everything there is to know about this event.
Thoughts: ( stuff )
Somewhat tangentially related to this, as I was reading his account of traveling on an ice breaker in the Arctic, I started looking up Arctic cruises. And you know the Northwest Passage? That countless people died trying to find? That the first people to transverse it did so by ramming their ship into the ice and waiting three years for the current to take them around the Arctic and spit them back out again? (That would be the Fram, and thy actually did the Northeast Passage, but still, first to transverse the Arctic.) You can take a cruise through that now.
Oh god I want to go. I think this just got added to my bucket list. When I have a month or two and a few thousand dollars to spare. I so want to go on an Arctic cruise! Even if it's not a complete transverse--even just to go to Baffin Bay and see where the icebergs live. And I say this as someone who gets terribly seasick and to whom Caribbean cruises have never appealed. Now that I've been to the Arctic, I really do want to go back. (You can take autumn cruises of the fjords in Greenland and see the Northern Lights! I want to gooooo! While there's still ice up there!)
Book review: Call of the Wild
Aug. 14th, 2011 04:22 pmI did a bunch of reading over my vacation, so bear with me.
Title: Call of the Wild
Author: Jack London
Genre: Fiction--animal-centric pseudo nature documentary? How do you define the genre of someone who invented one?
Synopsis: Buck, a tough but noble mutt of a dog, is stolen from his owner in San Francisco to be sold as a sled dog in an Alaska in the midst of a gold rush. He learns the harshness and brutality of life in the far north, and becomes brutal himself in order to survive.
Thoughts: ( stuff )
After finishing Call of the Wild (which is awfully short), I started White Fang. The first thirty pages of that are very similar to his short story "To Light a Fire," and can really stand alone. After that, it's kind of nature documentary, but without a deep grounding in actual observation. After a while, I realized it was pretty much Call of the Wild, slightly expanded, and stopped reading. Maybe I'll get back to it eventually, but I think I need a break from London's depressing, brutal view of the world.
Title: Call of the Wild
Author: Jack London
Genre: Fiction--animal-centric pseudo nature documentary? How do you define the genre of someone who invented one?
Synopsis: Buck, a tough but noble mutt of a dog, is stolen from his owner in San Francisco to be sold as a sled dog in an Alaska in the midst of a gold rush. He learns the harshness and brutality of life in the far north, and becomes brutal himself in order to survive.
Thoughts: ( stuff )
After finishing Call of the Wild (which is awfully short), I started White Fang. The first thirty pages of that are very similar to his short story "To Light a Fire," and can really stand alone. After that, it's kind of nature documentary, but without a deep grounding in actual observation. After a while, I realized it was pretty much Call of the Wild, slightly expanded, and stopped reading. Maybe I'll get back to it eventually, but I think I need a break from London's depressing, brutal view of the world.