Pete's Log: Recent Readings and Listenings
Entry #2490, (Books, Writing, n such)(posted when I was 45 years old.)
In the past few weeks I have read two books and listened to one more:
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Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
I enjoy Mary Roach's sense of humor and sense of curiosity, and the feeling I got from the cover of this book was that this would a funny book about silly humans trying to impose laws on animals. It turned out to be a much more thoughtful book about human-animal conflict. But still quite entertaining.
When I read Packing for Mars, I noted that "[t]he most impressive thing to me about this book is the people and facilities that Mary Roach is able to get access to." And I think that applies to this book as well. But in this book she lifts the veil a little. She describes herself as a human pest that keeps asking and asking until she gets access to somewhere. And also repeatedly mentions people and institutions that did not respond to her multiple inquiries. -
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
The true story of the HMS Wager, which shipwrecked after rounding Cape Horn. The book seems well researched and is compellingly written. It slowed down a bit for me once the main (surviving) characters made it back to England and fought the public opinion battle. Still an interesting glimpse into 18th century naval life, and how miserably it can go wrong. -
The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, narrated by Andy Serkis
So I was curious to see if The Two Towers audio book dragged as much as I previously thought the book did. And the answer is "kind of." I think I've misremembered the entirety of The Two Towers being slow, when really it's just parts of the second half. Since there's only so much of Sam feeling mistrustful of Gollum that I can take. So in audio book format, the first half was excellent and the second half was good but took me a while to get through since I wasn't always in the mood to listen to more of Sam's complaining about Gollum.
Other notes on the audio book version: I enjoyed Andy Serkis' narration. As expected his Gollum/Sméagol was excellent. I also quite enjoyed his voice for Treebeard and was also amused by his impression of Merry imitating the voices of Gandalf and Treebeard. There's something special about being able to capture how one character would imitate the voices of another character.
Other notes on the differences to the film: Poor Faramir sure was done dirty. I'm undecided if I'm more upset about his movie treatment or the movie treatment of Merry and Pippin. I've read that he succumbs to the influence of the ring in the movie because that more properly shows the power of the ring. But I find it very convincing in the book how he is very different from his brother Boromir and it doesn't feel at all like it lessens the power of the ring when Faramir is able to resist it.
A couple other things I noted down while listening:- Gandalf is a clown
- Aragorn talking about his sword has some serious "Sir, This Is A Wendy's" vibes