Space hazards

I'm back to reading The Hazards of Space Travel. {Smile}

Remind me never to travel to Io. Between the volcanoes spewing all kinds of dangerously heating and poisonous substances around and the tidal forces warping the very rock 100's of feet, I can't imagine anyone wanting to go there. I might be underestimating a few daredevils, but any who do want to go are not in their right mind as far as I'm concerned! {Lopsided Smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

The World of the Dark Crystal

I recently got a coffee table book, The World of the Dark Crystal by
Brian Froud. It tells about the background of the movie The Dark
Crystal. I really enjoyed it, and not just because I have a weakness
for coffee table books. It starts with the history of how Brian Froud, the
concept artist, and Jim Henson, then head of the Muppets got together, came
up with the idea, and turned the idea into a movie. {Smile} They don't go
into a lot of detail, but they give a general idea.

I don't mind the lack of detail on that because the rest of the book
covers the history of the world the movie is set in. You get some glimpses of this history in the movie, but this book gives a clearer view. {Smile} It lets me glimpse other stories that happened earlier, and maybe what came just after. {smile} Those are fun to think about when I'm daydreaming. {SMILE}

I enjoyed the book, obviously. I finished it in a little under a week, which is doing pretty good these days. {SMILE}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Reading notes

In the Lord of the Rings, the king has gotten married, and everyone is ready to go home at last. {Smile}

I've been kind of stuck there for about a week. I got a coffee table book, The World of the Dark Crystal by Brian Froud, and immediately started to look it over. It's about the background of the movie The Dark Crystal. That is really nice, and not just because I have a weakness for coffee table books. I'll have to write that one up soon; I finished it in less than a week. Reading it while soaking my toe helped, but I read it at other times, too. {SMILE}

After that I expected to get back to The Lord of the Rings. This shows I don't always know my own mind. {Smile} Instead, I picked up The Hazards of Space Travel. This covers hazards astronauts and space tourists can reasonably expect as they travel out into our solar system. It includes historical incidents astronauts have contended with, as well as ones they're likely to encounter but haven't yet. {small smile} I just finished a chapter on air. It started with a (fictional) account of a traveler whose friend's oxygen got switched off, and how the traveler saved his friend by turning it back on. The book then explained the need for a proper amount of oxygen. It mentioned the hazards of having too much, including the Apollo 1 fire that burned so fast no one survived, even tho they were just testing the capsule on earth. They mentioned an incident where a Cosmonaut's suit got over inflated during a space walk, and he had great difficulty getting back into his space craft at the end. They also mentioned the problem of getting the bends from switching between our oxygen-nitrogen* atmosphere and the pure oxygen atmospheres in modern space suits too quickly. The book says they're currently trying to develop hard space suits that will allow an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere without risk of over-inflation. That does sound like an improvement! {SMILE}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

* Oops; carbon dioxide is a trace element in our atmosphere, so I removed it. {Smile}

A Thousand Words for Stranger

I've been trying to think how to give an overview of A Thousand Words for Stranger. It isn't easy. In fact, it's a very difficult book to give a book-talk on. {Smile}

The book begins in the rain on a street on a backwater planet named Auord. The avian alien 'Whix and his human partner are on a stakeout, watching a couple of members of the humanoid Clan, an alien race that doesn't belong to the Trade Pact like the humans, 'Whix's people, and most others they know of. While they are watching, the two Clan members - a man and a gal - are attacked by native Auordians. The attackers are killed, the man taken in for questioning... and the gal disappears in the confusion.

That's the prelude. Chapter 1 begins in a dirty back alley, where a single protagonist cannot remember a thing: not name, nor sex, nor whether the world existed five minutes before. Tho they do know they're on the planet Auord, because that pops up in odd compulsions telling this person to get off Auord and stay safe.

{pause} Describing what this character discovers later would ruin the sense of bewildered mystery at this point. I don't really want to do that, so this is as much as I can say about the story. {smile}

I can say one thing that won't spoil that feeling. I was particularly impressed with the way the aliens who turn up really feel alien. They don't feel like talking lions or Scots with funny hair; they feel like unique aliens. Yet there's more than one kind of alien like this; usually when I see aliens, they either correspond closely to not-so-alien people or creatures, or else there's only one other race. In this book we meet a few races well-enough developed, we realize they aren't something familiar pretending to be aliens. The closest to that would be 'Whix, who seems to be bird-like; yet he's not a raptor, nor a song bird, nor a chicken or a duck... he's a type of bird I've never heard of, and not just because he's as intelligent as a human. {Smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Sarah, Plain and Tall is a slim book I found in the children's section years ago. However, it's really a book for adults told in simple language that people still learning how to read English can handle. There's nothing to make you blanch if a kid does find it, but most kids will be bored by this simple, somewhat delicate tale. {Smile}

I recently reread it after recommending it to a friend of the family who's teaching "advanced beginners" English as a second language. She loves it, and so do her students. {Smile}

It is told from the view point of Anna, a girl who lives with her little brother, Caleb, and their Papa on a farm on rolling plains in inland America. (Their mother died just after Caleb was born.) However, it is really the story of Sarah, who answers a personal ad Papa put out when he decided he needed a wife. They each write to her, and she answers back. Then she comes to see what they and their home are like. She's from the coast of Maine. She finds that people talk funny, saying "yes" when they mean "ayup." Plus, there's no dunes, no sand, no shore, and no sea. Instead, there's lots of grass, and farm animals, and Anna and Caleb and their Papa. {pause} Sarah particularly misses the sea. Since the children really like her, they are afraid she will go back to Maine.

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Bees and books

The bees are back, unless they're still here. We suspect the latter. We only spotted them twice, but the second spotting involved three black bees who acted very much at home. {half-smile}

Moving to happier news, I recently finished A Thousand Words for Stranger. I liked it. That was an interesting complex of problems. Plus I liked seeing more than one alien who didn't seem like a copy of either an animal species or a human culture. {Smile} I'll have to start on the second book of the trilogy fairly soon. {Smile}

I also read Sarah Plain and Tall recently. A friend of the family was complaining about a lack of decent texts for her new class. When she said it was an English as a Second Language class, and they were "advanced beginners," I thought of Sarah immediately. It's easy reading, but it's really more interesting to adults than to children. {Smile} (No, there's nothing to make you blanch if a kid does find it. {GRIN}) Well, she said they loved it, and she clearly did, too. Then Dad decided to check it out, and he liked it. {SMILE} So of course I had to re-read it myself. {BIG SMILE}

I'll have to do proper reviews of those two books soon. Probably I'll put them up here later, as well as at the LiveJournal community Book Rec. {Smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Reading snapshots

In The Lord of the Rings, Sam and Frodo are plodding thru Mordor. The water tastes pretty awful there, but at least it wets the throat. {smile}

Meanwhile, in A Thousand Words for Stranger, Sira, Barac, and Jason are busy trying to get out of the council's building and away from the Clan. {smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Reading and Writing

Sam and Frodo are having an awful lot of trouble with a humongous, hairy spider.

{Smile} Yes, my reading is coming along. It hasn't been going quickly, but it is progressing. {Smile}

{bite lips}

I just wish I could say the same for my writing. I got both moving nicely during Lent. Since then, the reading slowed, and the writing stalled pretty completely. {small smile} I'm going to have to figure out some way to break this bout of writer's block. {pause} I just wish I knew what would work. {smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

What I'm reading

So... What am I reading? {Smile}

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Frodo, Sam, and Gollum have left Faramir and are heading towards Minas Morgul. They've stopped to hide for the day, but the day isn't getting lighter.

A Thousand Words for Stranger by Julie E. Czerneda: In this one, it's harder to describe where I am. {smile} Sira has landed on a strange planet with Jason. (They were separated from Huido because he's big enough to need his own escape pod.) Then she got separated from Jason. Worried he'll be in more danger with her than separate, she didn't want to go back. So she called Rael, who she doesn't remember thru her amnesia, but who knows her well. Rael who teleported in and fed Sira after saying the line that gave the book it's title: " Rael left again when some of Sira's news upset her.

"The Color of Plants on Other Worlds" in Scientific American April 2008: It's a non-fiction article about the various photosynthetic compounds found on earth, and how they use the energy they're getting from the sun. It also speculates how this might be different around other stars, especially how it might affect what the plants would look like. {Smile} I find it absolutely fascinating. {SMILE}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Small talk

I was thinking about what we talk about when we don't have much to talk about. I know the weather is traditional, but my parents and I rarely bring it up unless it affects what we're planning to do. {smile} Instead, we talk about what we're reading.

We'll ask each other "What are you reading?" "Where are you in the story?" or "What's happening?" and we'll listen to the answers.Even without questions, we talk about it. Dad will say "Gollum is leading Frodo and Sam thru the marshes." Or he'll say "Rammage just captured a pirate ship." Or "Piemur is at a gather, and just stole some pies." {SMILE}

We ask and talk about this even if we haven't read the book. I have read Anne McCaffrey's Pern; it and Darkover are the two series all three of us are quite interested in. However, Dad was telling me where he was in The Lord of the Rings two decades before I read it. He tells me about Rammage, and I still haven't gotten into that series. We have enough overlap in reading tastes, the stories often sound interesting. We might read it eventually... maybe we'll even read it soon. {Smile} And if not... it's still more interesting than the weather most of the time. {Chuckle, SMILE}

I think I might post this type of thing here.

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin