An Amazonian Mystery And Sects In The City

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

One of the things you have to accept, and I do, is that when you buy a Kindle Amazon are going to send you emails enticing you to buy further ebooks. Most of these are either based on their various offers for that particular month, or on books you've recently purchased which is perfectly fine.

However recently I received an email from them which stated that as I've shown an interest in The Panda Trap by Pascal Garnier here are some other works of his as well as similar writers for your consideration.

Now regular readers to this blog will remember that I read this book a few weeks back and did recommend it (Buy it soon. The way Britain is going reading a work by a French author, even in English, will be considered an act of treachery). Thing is though I actually downloaded it in January 2013.

I think that email was the first of its kind Amazon sent to me. So the question is how did they know I had after four and a bit years got round to reading it?

There are three explanations. Firstly it was just coincidence and I was just being paranoid. Well that's possible. After all I feel this in a queue of Tesco Express ("Express"? Choose the wrong moment and its more like a Tesco Donkey Cart for the time you have to wait).

Secondly that someone from Amazon is reading this blog. Oh I hope so. Fame at last and all that. Mind you the email address I use in this blog is different to the one I use for the Amazon Kindle.

The final possibility is that if you have the wifi on whilst you're reading an ebook Amazon can somehow know this. I think that, from now on, when I'm reading an ebook I'll be certain that it's on aeroplane mode.

No matter how well read you think you are every reader knows that there are gaps their knowledge. Well known writers that they have merely glanced at, are aware of but haven't actually taken the plunge into. This is mainly due to the other distractions of life as well as the fact that there are so many books but so little time.

Until this year I'd obviously heard of Emile Zola but hadn't read anything by him. However now I've read a book about his exile in London, a short story and now a novel Lourdes, the first part of a "Three Cities" trilogy written in 1984.

It is a good read, I did feel I was reading the French Dickens (I'm sure there's a French blogger describing Dickens now as the "English Zola") as there are various stories with one particular one that carries it through.

For commercial reasons or not Zola does not appear to give a view as to whether he believes in the healing power that the Lourdes legend has to give. It's fair to say though that he does not approve of the Catholic church as an institution.

What he conveys well is how people fuelled with a mixture of religious fervour and illnesses come to the city as a pilgrimage, almost like a Christian Mecca in that regard .Lourdes that emerges as the central character.

I'm looking forward to reading the remainder of the trilogy. For now though the next book is The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson 1834-1872. Volume One. Well it was free.

Until the next time.