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.

Why Do I Continue To Read D H Lawrence When I Hate Him?

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well Sea and Sardinia is finished and well to a D H Lawrence hater like me nothing, and I mean nothing has changed.

The only real pleasure it gave me was it's shortness. Otherwise it really should have given the reader a truer sense of the fate that was going to befall him/her by retitling the book Twilight In Italy2 aka you thought no one could make Italy/Italians even more boring than I did the first time.

Lawrence is a man incapable on cutting down on paragraphs. As if using so many words hides the fact that for the most part he's writing pure unadulterated twaddle. That, and his racism ( he the inglese observing these unsophisticated people living their lives as if he's in some type of experiment sets me on edge) made it for me an awful book to read.

It was one of those books that gave you a palpable sense of relief when you finished.

(A quick aside. The next book I'm reading is Can Anyone Hear Me? by Peter Baxter. It's essentially anecdotes about doing the Test Match Special BBC radio cricket broadcasts abroad. In all the housemoving stuff I'd completely forgotten that the cricket season had started and that the quiet pleasure of listening to the sport on the radio has returned. I will listen to that tomorrow, whilst continuing to box or crate our lives away. It'll be either that or cutting the grass for what I intend to be the last time before we leave......all depends on the weather)

So then a writer that in this blog has a status of regular villain. And yet I still read him and will probably continue to do so in the future. The question came into my head. "Why"?

(A question that could also be asked of my attitude towards writers that I don't hate but am neutral towards such as F Scott Fitzgerald or Jane Austen)

So then is it peer pressure? Yes and no. If you are the person who is in the minority with regard to an author then you do as a reader want to plough on and think is this next book going to be different? Well remember in all the times I've criticised Lawrence I've always stressed that it's based on the books that I've read. It's not impossible that you can dislike a work by a writer but love the next book you read from him/her. In the course of this blog I've had that experience with Michael Palin and, probably more pertinently, outside of this blog Kingsley Amis.

But that I'm willing to read further books by someone with a reputation does not mean that I will necessary change my mind. It's just that as a reader I'm willing to change my opinion to some extent if the right book comes along. Call it literary blind date. In the case of D H Lawrence though the right book hasn't come thus far so to me he just should be grateful for Lady Chatterley's Lover or else he'd be forgotten aside from people using his books as a cheaper form of Valium.

Until the next time.