The Bicycle Diaries is the travelogue of Rebecca Lowe, charting her seven-months bicycle bummel around Europe and the Middle East.
A wonderful read.
Young adult adventures
A story set in the ’30s, featuring airplanes, Japanese spies and no end of intrigue and adventure?
Of course I had to get me a copy.
I chanced upon Jamie Dodson’s Flying Boats & Spies while looking for something completely different – I found the author’s website while doing a web search on tramp freighters.
Looking for a ship, I discovered a wealth of air adventures.
As the world edges closer to war a mighty flying boat is readied for her first flight, and America’s enemies will do anything to see it fail. A plucky young pilot is given a mission that takes him to tropical islands and first love, and into the sights of murderous assassins; he, and America, will need courage to survive.
And no kidding… Continue reading
On the joys of being an avid reader
There was a time when I was a genre reader.
A single genre reader.
Which means I read mostly genre fiction, and mostly a certain genre of fiction – to wit, science fiction and fantasy (in their broader sense).
This changed, dramatically, when I was about eighteen years old.
There was no great epiphany, no great watershed moment, no single book I can nail as the one that opened the floodgates, but basically, when I was eighteen or thereabouts, I simply found out that I loved reading.
I loved stories, I loved the possibility of exploring different places, different characters, different situations.
Who cares about genre labels? Continue reading
The Peerless Peer
What with yesterday being the Wold Newton Event anniversary and all that, I spent my Sunday afternoon re-reading Philip José Farmer‘s The Peerless Peer.
And a rip-roaring read it was.
Now, in all honesty, The Peerless Peer is probably not the best of Farmer’s novels, but it is certainly a lot of fun.
In a nutshell: in 1916, the murder of a researcher in Egypt forces Mycroft Holmes to enlist the services of his brother Sherlock and of Dr Watson.
But Holmes alone can’t tackle the problem, and once in Africa, he will join forces with a notorious “eccentric” British peer. One that lives in a tree house he shares with an ape… Continue reading
The Wold Newton Event, December 13th 1795
Today is the 220th anniversary of the Wold Newton Event.
Around 3 o’clock, on the 13th of December 1795, a meteorite fell near Wold Cottage, not far from the village of Wold Newton, Yorkshire.
Here
On this Spot, Dec 13th, 1795
fell from the Atmosphere
AN EXTRAORDINARY STONE
In Breadth 28 inches
In Length 30 inches
and
Whose Weight was 56 Pounds
THIS COLUMN
In Memory of it
was erected by
EDWARD TOPHAM
1799
The site of the impact was owned by Major Edward Topham, who had a monument erected to signal the spot, and organized exhibitions of the rock in London.
The Wold Newton meteorite (an L6 ordinary chondrite) is currently on display in the Natural History Museum.
But there’s a second part to the story, of course. Continue reading
Nice Christmas list from The Snow Pavillion
Karavansara 