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.

The Big Mac Novel

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well Jack O'Judgement by Edgar Wallace is finished. Let my say at the outset that I liked it a lot in a sort of don't think about it wallow in it sort of way. Rather like the Sir Walter Scott historical novel The Talisman that I chatted about recently as long as you don't take it seriously you'll be fine. This book is, to use an old expression, a rattling good yarn.

(Must admit that I'd been waiting for a while for an another writer that I could say I disliked one book but liked the next one. Did not expect it to be Edgar Wallace!)

But when it was finished it made me realised that what I was reading was what I would like to call a Big Mac novel.

The thing about a Big Mac is this. You want it, you eat it,you've enjoyed it. But soon after you've forgotten all about it. A Big Mac novel is a work where the writer has specifically set out to write a bestseller. You've read it, let's say you've enjoyed it, but soon it'll just escape your mind.

When I was a teenager/in my twenties many Jack Higgins/HarryPatterson novels were consumed in the mistaken belief that I too could be a rough tough man's man (especially when I took my glasses off). But The Eagle Has Landed aside I can barely only remember some of the plots of the books and have forgotten many more. Ditto Dick Francis. And as for Alistair Maclean could not tell you the plots of his novels other than those that were made into films (and let me say here, his books were dull the films were better).

Or perhaps Frederick Forsyth is a better example. After his first three thrillers can anyone really recall a book of his? Or for the ladies Barbara Cartland, a woman who produced so many romantic novels I'd be amazed if she could remember the plot of them all let alone the reader.

(Of course there are exceptions. One of my favourite "Big Mac" writers as I've mentioned before was Arthur Hailey, author of Airport and Hotel and whose ebook versions of his novels sell for the astonishly high price of six pounds)

You could just say that this is because I'm a man in his fifties. Something I can't deny. But there are many other books I can remember reading at that time that I can recall now as if it was yesterday. Also, can you drag from the memory the plot of all the James Patterson (plus one other) thrillers you've read?

I'm not being snobbish. There's nothing wrong with having a Big Mac medium meal. I had one last Friday.....

(A quick aside here that was a mistake. I'd finished the afternoon/evening shift at work and for reasons that I won't bother you with needed to get something outside of the house for dinner. Well after ten o'clock on a Friday evening going through the drive through in my Kia Picanto surrounded by the young dudes and dudettes in their flashy over the top shiny alloyed wheeled cars made it the longest time I've ever had to hang round there for a burger)

.....but it's just that a fuller meal is better.

The next book randomly picked, which yet again seems to show that my Kindle has a sense of humour is the first part of the three cities trilogy, Lourdes by Emile Zola. Firstly because this weekend has been all Francais due to the election of Emmanuel Macron. The new President has already pronounced that he's going to seek the transfer of jobs from the City of London to France due to Brexit. Must admit that I'm going to have absolutely no sympathy for anybody there who loses their job who in the past practically wet themselves with excitement because a company closed offices/factories for "efficiency savings" in Britain despite the human/social consequences because it sent the share price up (but note before you call me a "traitor" or a "saboteur" I'm talking about those people only).

And it's also rather funny that having never read Emile Zola before this year I have in the past few months read a book about him and a short story (The Flood - Worth reading).

Must admit it shows that I'm more ignorant of France than I thought. I never realised that Lourdes was a city. You learn something everyday. Such as never go to a Mcdonalds drive through on a Friday night.

Until the next time.

How Moving House Has Increased My Reading And Measuring Male Maturity Through Jane Austin

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

There is a twilight zone stage that me and my family are living in at the moment. Preparing for the move though it will be a number of weeks ahead so that a lot of things have been boxed, crated, charity shopped or just thrown away at the local tip. A consequence of which is that circumstances throw themselves up with unexpected results.

It's five o'clock this (Tuesday) morning. Exactly one hour before I wanted to get up. Nothing to watch on TV either recorded or live (which seem to be plastered with people trying to sell you cooking gadgets you'll rarely use, cleaning gadgets you'll rarely use or get into some rigorous training DVDs that I'm sure will lead me to a six pack and heart failure The DVD/discs are crated, as are the paper books. Nothing else to do for that hour than read on my Kindle (other e readers are available).

Before I wouldn't have considered reading at this hour, certainly not a paper book, as it's not comfortable for my eyes. But given the back light there's no problem here.

So Amazon (and the companies that sell the other e readers that are available) there's a whole new market of people to flog your wares to. Those who want to read but can't get at their paper books....you're welcome....a free gift voucher would suffice.

The book I finished this morning was H G Wells' 1899 novel When The Sleeper Awakes. The first thing to say about this is that the only way you can read it is by suspending your disbelief to such a level you'll consider when finishing taking up high wire lessons. The plot can only be described as bonkers. Starting from the fact that we have to believe that not only can a man survive two hundred years in a trance but doesn't age either!

The other thing you need to abandon when reading the book is the thought that in essence H G Wells is rehashing the plot from the earlier novel  The Time Machine (Victorian gent in the future having to deal with the society there).

It is readable....just. It's also in parts racist. The "N" word was mentioned twice. This was both unexpected and unwelcome.

Next I read Emile Zola's short story The Flood (I know, never read him before and he comes into my life twice in a week). I won't go into the plot other than what's obvious from the title. What I will say is that if you're not moved after having read this you've a heart of stone and probably a member of UKIP.

And so to the current book I'm reading. Emma by Jane Austen. It's the first Austen book I've ever read (though some paper books are in the great crated unread.

It's funny how my attitude to Austen has changed even though I've never read her work before. As a child soon to be a teenager I rejected her because she was "just for girls". As a teenager/twenties I wouldn't read her because she seemed to be the thinking woman's Mills and Boon.

(As an aside I wouldn't condemn my past self for that view. I've written before how I believe that some female writers would have a far greater male readership if the covers didn't give men the wrong impression about their work. Marian Keyes is a recent example, though at the time Georgette Heyer and Norah Lofts were rejected by me exactly because their covers reminded me of Mills and Boon)

In my thirties and forties I had acknowledged that she was worth reading but life and other books always seemed to come before her. Now, in the age of fifty three, being I suspect the only man outside of publishing who has read a Georgette Heyer novel first Jane Austen has arrived in my life.

Hope I like it.

Until the next time.

The Importance Of Being Ernest Alfred Viztelly

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I've finished reading With Zola in England by Ernest Alfred Viztelly. An account of Zola's exile in England when he was being arrested in France for the Dreyfus affair which was published in 1899.

The book is an amalgam of articles Viztelly, a journalist, wrote about how he helped Zola in this time in the London Evening News.

It was an interesting read in many ways. It's Victorian Britain yet there are still issues of media attention as well as the fear of Zola being apprehended against his will and taken back home to France.

But what makes this book really important is when you compare the attitudes of turn of the century Britain to the present day. Whilst obviously Zola is a "celebrity", did not have a physically (though obviously emotionally) traumatic journey to England, had rich friends to help him and was living in relative comfort it is still the case that this was a Britain that took in asylum seekers.

If Zola had lived today the jackboot media would have questioned why he was in Britain, mocked any friends that dared to assist this drain on Britain's resources, would have made anywhere he resided appear like Buckingham Palace, condemned his lack of English and would have only welcomed him if he attacked the European union from the highest mountain.

What this would have done is that less people would have helped him settle in a foreign land and the jackboot journalism rabble rousing would have also made him venerable to abuse and possible attack from the feral amongst us.

For obviously accepting that security checks on asylum seekers need to made the attitude of Britain now to asylum seekers is cold and cruel. It will also damage Britain in the long term in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Britain was the country that let in Karl Marx. It will be given no marks for what it's doing now.

So Ernest Alfred Viztelly, a man who was proud of Britain's then attitude to asylum seekers and who helped a friend in need.He is the type of Great Briton that we should follow.

The next book on the great ebook unread is Keeper Of The Peace by Edgar Wallace. It's not clear what the plot's about and I must admit that it's a long time since I've read an Edgar Wallace book (such a long time ago I can't remember what I thought of it) so am curious to read one now.

Until the next time.

Hooked On Classics (2) and The Great EBook Buying Game (2)

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well I've finished reading The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield and to be honest I was stunned.

These stories are very clever. Nothing much happens, no literary eqvilant of melodramatic music will enter your heads as you read them. The characters appear to live comfortable lives. And yet slowly she reveals people who are walking around in a state of quiet sadness.

You the reader are embroiled in the lives of these people for a brief while, but are affected by it.

It was quite simply the best collection of short stories that I've ever read.

The next ebook . Got for reasons of cheapness (it was free) is With Zola in England by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. It was Viztelly's (who was apparently a journalist in the old London Evening News) account of the time in exile of Emile Zola in England (in a time when Britain accepted people who fled their country of origin for political reasons) having left France to avoid imprisonment for his actions on the "Dreyfus Affair". So far so good.

As all my paper books are now boxed, crated etc in preparation for the move you may remember that I created what I'm now calling The Great Ebook Buying Game (given now the fashion is to title everything "great". From baking shows to Acts of Parilament that will turn Britain into some right wing wet dream).

Given that I'm not buying anymore paper books until we permantly move house. This temporary monthly game is simply seeing how many ebooks I can buy on Amazon for £5. I'm doing this as I'm writing this post now. So let's see what happens.

I go to the Amazon "Daily Deals" One of them looks Chick Lit stuff, one of them is George Orwell's Animal Farm (have read that) and the remaining one is The Humans by Matt Haig. It seems interesting enough. So it's bought at 99p.

Looked at "Recommended reads" for me by Amazon. Nothing grabs my attention. Then time for the 250 books they're offering for 99p. I stop at Absolute Friends by John Le Carre. You know I haven't read Le Carre in years. Bought.

Amazon then offer more "Recommended Reads" suggested by my purchase of the Le Carre. I stop at a biography of the Italian fascist poet Gabriele D'Annuzio. by Lucy Hughes-Hallett. I think about this one long and hard. Eventually I decide to buy it. There is a rise of the extreme right in Britain, I'm curious to know what turns people that way. Bought for 99p.

Looking further at the Recommended reads following my purchase of the biography leads me for some reason to the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. It's just 75p. Bought. This leads me to yet another Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt at just 49p. Bought.I have 79p left. So I go for another Sinclair Lewis book Free Air at 75p. Today then has become Sinclair Lewis day.

Until the next time.