The Cats’ House

Now this is what I call a cat-friendly environment.

Not sure if I myself would want to live there, but I can think of a few people I know, who would move right in. Personally, I am more a fan of real, bark-covered tree-limbs or some such and this stuff looks a bit too colorful for my taste. But it sure seems like fun for the cats.

(found via freshome)

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I am normally not a big fan of audiobooks. I often find that my mind tends to drift off and I lose the thread of the story, if I don’t concentrate very hard. The only audiobook I have enjoyed so far has been “Three Men in a Boat”, read by Hugh Laurie. And that was easy, because not only is it a hilariously funny story, but Hugh Laurie is the perfect narrator for it. How could I ever drift off while listening to Hugh? Exactly.

Now, my new found enthusiasm for audiobooks incidentally was sparked by Hugh Laurie as well, if only indirectly. You see, it was on his recommendation, so to speak, that I started to read my first P.G. Wodehouse novels recently. And, not surprisingly for anybody familiar with said novels, I enjoyed them just as much as Hugh’s foreword had led me to believe I would. (I will in time write a review about them, too.)

So, since I am a newly converted Wodehouse addict, obviously I started to look for more of his books. And that was how I happened to stumble upon LibriVox.

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain, read mostly by volunteers. They have oodles of books there, as far as I can tell.

For myself, of course, I was only interested in the Wodehouse stories, of which there are 19 finished ones recorded and a couple others in the works. As of today, I have downloaded most of them, but only listened to “Psmith in the city” (only partway through). And even though the fact that the single chapters are read by different people takes some getting used to, I quite enjoyed it so far. I might have enjoyed it still more if I had read it myself, but at least I got to hear the story at all, whereas I just don’t have the money to buy all the books right now. Plus, audiobooks do really have their merits on long distance drives - can’t read very well while driving the car, after all.

So if you’re a fan of audiobooks, it might be worth to check out LibriVox. Oh, did I mention that you can also volunteer to read for them? That sounds like fun. Of course, with my dreadful german accent I will abstain from doing so.

Whenever I manage for five minutes to not be utterly disgusted at the state of humankind, I run into things like this post about dog fights to disabuse me of the notion that there is any good in human beings.

I couldn’t even read the whole post, because the pictures alone were enough to make me cry. How can these people be sick enough to do that to innocent animals? If they are disturbed enough to get off on blood and fights, can they not just kill each other for fun and games? Seeing something like this makes me so fucking angry that I would gladly help them.

Those bloody bastards all deserve to die a slow and painful death. Where is Dexter when I need him?

If anybody tells me ever again that human beings are “the pride of creation” I promise I will smash his face in.

I can’t remember anymore what prompted me long ago to put that book on my Amazon wishlist (it probably had something to do with the beautiful cover again), but when I recently found it on Bookmooch I decided to give it a go.

This is what Publishers Weekly had to say about the story:

The author of the bestselling Bee Season returns with an accomplished but peculiarly tensionless historical novel that follows the shifting fortunes of a young Irish-American woman. Raised in tough turn-of-the-century South Boston, Lydia Kilkenny works as a shopgirl at a fancy downtown department store, where she meets shy, hypochondriacal medical student Henry Wickett. After a brief courtship, the two marry (Henry down, Lydia decidedly up) in 1914. Henry quits school to promote his eponymous remedy, whose putative healing powers have less to do with the tasty brew that Lydia concocts than with the personal letters that Henry pens to each buyer. After failing to pass the army physical as the U.S. enters WWI, Henry quickly, dramatically dies of influenza, and Lydia returns to Southie, where she watches friends, neighbors and her beloved brother die in the 1918 epidemic. A flu study that employs human subjects is being conducted on Boston Harbor’s Gallups Island; lonely Lydia signs on as a nurse’s assistant, and there finds a smidgen of hope and a chance at a happier future. A pastiche of other voices deepens her story: chapters close with snippets from contemporary newspapers, conversations among soldiers and documents revealing the surprising fate of Wickett’s Remedy. And the dead offer margin commentary—by turns wistful, tender and corrective (and occasionally annoying).

This turned out to be a very quick read and I enjoyed especially the comments of the dead people in the margins (they literally are in the margins beside the main text and were a bit of a pain in the ass to read, because switching over to them meant a break in the flow of the story). It seems strange that they sounded so very much like the living, but on the other hand that was what made them so funny to me.

The story itself is strangely undramatic. Considering that there was a war going on and then additionally a worldwide flu epidemic with people dropping dead left, right and center, I think one could be excused to expect a bit more drama or at least action. But Lydia seems to go through life mostly as a spectator, having things happen to her, but not actually making them happen herself. That makes her a quite realistic character in my eyes, but sadly not a very engaging one.

Still, it was an quite enjoyable light read, nothing to write home about, but a good way to spend a lazy afternoon or two. But I don’t think I will go out of my way to read Myla Goldberg’s other book(s).

Another book I have had on my shelves for more than a year. At 750 pages it seemed a bit daunting. Add to that the fact that it is a historical novel, based on facts, which can turn out pretty boring if not handled right. So it’s no wonder I passed it over again and again, I’m more surprised that I did finally get around to tackle it. And it “only” took me almost 2 weeks to read it…

Then again, the fact that I didn’t give up on it, but kept picking it up again and again, tells you that it can not be all that boring in the end.

The first thing about this book that caught my eye in the bookstore was the beautiful cover (as usual), the second one was the back blurb:

1828

Brilliant young naval officer Robert FitzRoy is given the captaincy of the HMS Beagle, surveying the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, aged just twenty-three. He takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tore it apart, leading one to triumph and the other to disaster…

To be honest, they had me at the mention of Charles Darwin. Having studied biology, it is probably not a big surprise that Darwin is something of a hero to me. His books and his theories about natural selection and the origin of species have done more to enlighten the world than any other person’s achievements ever. So, to read a gripping novel about the man can only be interesting, right?

Well, yes and no. Firstly, I was a bit dismayed to realize that this book is not so much about Darwin (he is mentioned for the first time around page 220 or so) as about Captain FitzRoy. Secondly, the Darwin in the book turned out to be a very much different person from the one I thought to know from reading his own books. Frankly, the Charles Darwin in this book is not very likeable and, especially in the beginning, comes across as a bit of a tosser, who just got lucky.

But the story in this book revolves mainly around the person of Captain Robert FitzRoy, who, I have to admit, seems to have been quite a remarkable man himself. It is unfair that he is totally forgotten today, whereas every child knows Darwin’s name. But such are the vagaries of history. Personally, I would have gotten along better with Darwin, since FitzRoy’s staunch belief in God and the Bible would have driven me up the wall - as they did Darwin, which is the reason for the end of their friendship and their later hostility towards each other. But nevertheless I can’t help but being impressed with FitzRoy’s contributions to science either: Besides inventing the weather forecast, his navigational charts of Patagonia, Chile, the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego were so exhaustingly precise that they continued to be in use until recently. His inventions saved hundreds, if not thousands of sailors’ lives. Sadly, he died utterly bankrupt and ridiculed and his writings were soon all but forgotten.

One thing I love very much about historical novels is the author’s notes at the end of the book, because I am always curious as to how much of the narrative is actually supported by recorded facts. In the case of this book these notes were quite detailed and just as interesting as the novel itself.

I still think the book could have been a good 200 pages shorter. There were many scenes that didn’t really add to the narrative and could have just mentioned briefly in passing (the whole New Zealand episode being one of them). But on the whole this turned out to be an entertaining read. I loved the fact that it gave me a new perspective on a man I thought I knew and that it taught me about another one, who is unfairly forgotten. What more can you expect from a book?

There was a bit of confusion about them, so I thought I’d better post a little explanation about this new feature here:

Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 I have enabled gravatars in the comments, which means that beside every comment you write here, your designated gravatar picture will appear.

If, that is, you have an account on Gravatar.com and have specified a picture there.

Gravatar stands for globally recognized avatar. It is simply an avatar image (much like in forums) that can follow you from weblog to weblog, if the site has gravatar support enabled. And since that option is now included in the standard WordPress software for version 2.5 and up, I think we will see these little images pop up on more and more blogs in the future.

You can even set up a different gravatar for different email addresses you use, so that you can have different pictures showing up beside your comments in different blogs. For myself I am currently using a picture of River Tam from the movie Serenity: (So, no, this is not what I look like, unfortunately.)

If you don’t have an account on gravatar.com yet (why not?), my server can obviously not show a specific picture for your comments. Which is a pity, I know. Instead, it would usually show a default picture, namely this one:

I think we all agree that this looks pretty boring. Well, even if you don’t agree, I still think it’s boring, which is why I changed it to this one:

This, just in case you live in a cave or something, is a picture of Wentworth Miller from Prison Break. There’s no special reason behind me using this particular icon, besides the fact that I think he looks cute and I liked the thought of having his picture appear on my blog almost every day.

But if, for whatever reason, you don’t like your comments to be associated with his picture (or any other one I might choose for that purpose in the future) there is an easy way out: you can just sign up on gravatar.com and specify your own picture there. It’s free, it’s easy, it doesn’t take more than 2 minutes and I think it’s fun.

And, no, this is not a sponsored post.

I usually don’t join such internet-wide things anymore, but I thought for this one I could make an exception. So, happy RSS Awareness Day everybody!

And if you have no idea what RSS is, follow the link or watch this cool video: