In Which I Chat About Cricket On The Radio,H P Lovecraft And Being Misled By An American President

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Have gone through a number of ebooks yesterday. About as varied as they could be.

So let's start with Can Anyone Hear Me? An account of BBC radio's Test Match Special Abroad by Peter Baxter a producer and commentator. I am a fan of listening to cricket commentary much more than watching it on television. It's a sport with gaps, and because of those gaps the commentators potentially talk about anything without losing track of the game. This is what makes cricket, and particularly cricket on the BBC different as, so far at least, there are no commercials.

Of course the Test Match Special team of the Seventies to the nineties has assumed such mythic status that there is a tea mug of a photo of these men. I have that mug....unfortunately packed awaiting the move. I've also read Peter Baxter's previous book with regard to their exploits in Britain and the best complement I can give this one is that it was enjoyed just as much. The closest way it can be described is as an after dinner speech done by the editor of Wisden.

Needless to say it's is an acquired taste. You would need to like cricket on the radio in the late eighties early nineties. It's like a book on wine, not just any wine but white white, and not just any white wine but from the outer limits of outer Mongolia. But if you have that taste I'd highly recommend it.

So once that was finished the next ebook turned out to be an H P Lovecraft short story Through The Gates Of The Silver Key. I'd never read him before, as I prefer my horror writing to be of the quiet chill down the spine variety. Still he has a reputation as being a master of his craft and I was curious.

Well it was rubbish. Regular readers to this blog will know that I try as much as possible to avoid giving out the details of a book as to avoid spoiling things but honestly I wouldn't know where to start describing this one. All I will say upon finishing this story was to seriously wonder whether Lovecraft was on drugs (a quick check on the internet suggested surprisingly not).

There is a twist to this tale which I could see (even if a ghost was in the way) a mile off. Truly the most horrific thing about it all was that this story actually got published in the first place.

So dear reader, if you approach an ebook with the title "A Book Lover's Holidays In The Open" what would you expect to be reading? Me I'd be expecting a man chatting about his holidays whilst buying and reading books which he'd also chat about. The sort of thing that I, a lover of reading would appreciate.

But no.Former president Theodore Roosevelt devotes just one, ONE chapter to his holiday reading and that's that for books thankyou very much. It's like creating a work called An Opera Lover's Holidays in Europe and only describing fat people expensively singing once. I tell you if I was alive when it was originally published (1916) I'd have demanded my money back under the Trade's Descriptions Act.

So what does he talk about as he wanders around the world? Well how much he's a fan of various safari parks but as far as I could gather really just to act literally as a feeder park for hunters such as him so that the stock is constant. There are chapters on hunting that just simply take your breath away by how mundane he describes the act of killing an animal.As if afterwards he's off to shops to get some milk

He's also racist. The N word is used and in a telling remark he describes native helpers in an African hunt showing more effort than "civilised" people. He didn't seem to realise that what he essentially said was that the native African people were better than the white guys. Oh the irony.

As for Native Americans? Well he is a fan of native American culture being kept and that they should have an education (including being converted to Christianity) but for the moment just to prepare them for menial labour until the day comes when they be assimilated into proper society. Let's not forget here that native Americans had to deal with not immigration but what was really an invasion from across the sea.

Let me take this further. If you are a white American how would you react if you read a sentence like this?

The White people have made long strides in advance during the last fifty years thanks to the presence of Latinas in their neighbourhood.

You'd be offended right. What if I was to tell you that in the book Theodore Roosevelt uses exactly the same sentence except for "White People" read Navajos and "Latinas" read white men (white women apparently being of no help whatsoever)?

Theodore Roosevelt reveals himself to being a racist, and possibly even worse than that a patronising racist. Unacceptable views wrapped in a civilised veneer. It possibly could be the best way to describe this book.

My Kindle it appears has a sense of humour. For the next ebook to randomly chosen to be read is Orations by John Quincy Adams who was also a President of the United States. Let's hope I like it.

Until the next time.