Summary: In a nutshell, this book is a collection of snarky definitions interspersed with some poetry relevant to those words.
Comments: A number of the definitions are incredibly amusing, some aren't, and some probably made more sense a hundred years ago before some of the context was lost to the mists of time. I marked some of my favorites so that in the future I can skim the book looking for the amusing parts as opposed to read it cover to cover as I did over the last couple months. I'm not sure what the hit to miss ratio is for how many of the definitions I actually found amusing, but I think it was worth getting for the good ones.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Night Signals, by Cynthia Wall
Summary: After Marc falls and breaks his leg while hiking in the mountains, his chances of survival are grim unless Kim and the search and rescue operation manage to find him.
Comments: This is very much an emotional rollercoaster of a story, particularly the heartache of the people trying to find Marc. A few more things that it shares with Hostage in the Woods, besides the multiple viewpoints, are the author's love of adjectives, and the fact that rescue comes at basically the last possible second - any later, and it would have been more of a cleanup mission. I rather enjoyed reading this book again, but damn does it mess with my head.
The technology changes over the last 20-some years are less noticeable than in Hostage in the Woods, since cell phones and so forth probably wouldn't have helped much - I would guess that the area where Marc was doesn't have very good cell coverage even now, so it wouldn't have helped him any. And I can't really picture him saying much about the hike on twitter or facebook, so it's hard to say if the search and rescue operation would have had any additional clues as to where to start looking.
Comments: This is very much an emotional rollercoaster of a story, particularly the heartache of the people trying to find Marc. A few more things that it shares with Hostage in the Woods, besides the multiple viewpoints, are the author's love of adjectives, and the fact that rescue comes at basically the last possible second - any later, and it would have been more of a cleanup mission. I rather enjoyed reading this book again, but damn does it mess with my head.
The technology changes over the last 20-some years are less noticeable than in Hostage in the Woods, since cell phones and so forth probably wouldn't have helped much - I would guess that the area where Marc was doesn't have very good cell coverage even now, so it wouldn't have helped him any. And I can't really picture him saying much about the hike on twitter or facebook, so it's hard to say if the search and rescue operation would have had any additional clues as to where to start looking.
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