Thursday, October 21, 2010
Customers 13
An older man, white hair, neatly clipped white mustache, wearing a powder blue pullover sweater, approached the information counter.
"Do you have any books about learning how to type?", he asked with a slight British accent. "I used to know how, but it's been a while, and now I'm back to hunt and peck."
"Let me see," I said. "I don't think we have anything in the store, but let me look up and see what might be available." I check the computer and there are a few available to order. I read him the titles, and he wants to order one.
"That would be great if you could order it," he said. "I am doing some writing and I really need to relearn how to type."
"What are you writing?", I ask.
"My memoirs. I am 91, and nobody has told the story. I was there to get Queen Wilhelmina out of the Netherlands before the Nazis invaded. I was on a train on my way to leave and they pulled me off to go get the Queen. We got her out just before the Nazis invaded. No one has told this story from the point of view of someone who has been there! I was there! And if I don't tell the story...well, there's no one left!", he said with a smile.
"It sounds like quite a story," I said.
"I was born in Cardiff, Wales. Ah, and we were poor. My father was unemployed and he'd drink on the week-ends." He shook his head. "It was rough." He paused. "I'm sorry, I live alone. I know I can talk a lot."
"Well it seems as though you've been through a lot. It sounds like a good idea to get it written down."
"Yes, well, I really need to figure out how to type again. Hunting and pecking isn't working while I try to get all this down."
"Right." I get his contact information for the order. "So we'll call you when the book comes in," I said.
"Thank you, I really appreciate it," he said.
********************
A man, in about his 30's, unshaven, t-shirt, jeans, came up with two items to purchase. One was a hardcover bargain book, Paul of Dune, by Brian Herbert. The other was a magazine, Women's Health.
"I'm kind of embarrassed to even be buying this," he said, pointing to the cover of the magazine, which had a picture of a blond woman in a black bikini and the main headline was "The Hot Body Issue". "It's not for me," he said, "I swear it isn't. It's for my sister. She just had a baby."
"Would you like a bag?", I asked, figuring if he was embarrassed, perhaps a bag would be appropriate.
He thought about it for a moment, and smiled. "Nah. I guess I can just carry it out."
"You can use the book to hide it, if you want. Just an idea." I said.
"It's really for my sister. I'm just taking it to her."
"You don't have to explain to ME," I said, laughing. "Have a good day!"
You can send email to: 2of3RsATgmailDOTcom
Monday, October 18, 2010
The Wave
Susan Casey, author of The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks (which I now want to read), writes The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. It is, you guessed it, about waves - rogue waves, monster waves, tsunamis - waves that wreak havoc. The point? Waves are getting bigger. Waves are hard to predict.
Scientists haven't been studying ocean waves for all that long. It's difficult to determine, let alone monitor all the factors that go into creating waves. Scientists have been building models to try and predict huge freak waves.
Surfers also try to predict waves, though for different reasons. They want to ride them.
Casey spent time with extreme surfers and their quest for great waves as the framework for exploring waves and their immensity, power, and unpredictability. Laird Hamilton, Brett Lickle, Dave Kalama and other surfing greats feature prominently here. She also spent time with scientists who are trying to figure out how to predict waves as well as why they seem to be getting bigger. Scientists such as Penny Holliday, who travels on ships with monitoring devices to try to determine the cause of large waves. Nicholas Sloane lives in South Africa right off the Wild Coast, where ships have to deal with the Agulhas Current, some of the most treacherous water anywhere in the world.
Waves have been increasing in height and severity, causing more damage to ships and coastal areas. Scientists are trying to determine why waves are getting wilder, and how they can predict when and where they'll hit.
She shares some facts about waves that are mind-boggling and sobering...
"Tsunamis, waves caused by sudden lurchings of the earth's crust, are the ocean's speed champions. Their wavelengths can be more than one hundred miles long, and they can travel faster than jets."
"To his shock, he found that two hundred yards below the ship, gargantuan underwater waves more than six hundred feet high and ten miles long were rumbling by at the speed of four knots."
"...twenty seven vessels along with 654 people were lost during a four-month period in the winter of 1997-1998. Oil tankers slipped from the radar, leaving only black slicks to show they'd ever existed; rescuers responding to emergency calls arrived at the coordinates and found, instead of the vessel, mangled bits of debris. 'In some cases ships had simply broken apart like a snapped pencil,' an IMO report read."
"'Tsunamis are no ordinary waves,' McGuire said with understatement. 'They are walls of water that just keep coming in. If it's one hundred feet high, it's going to be one hundred feet high for five minutes.'"
"'Wave heights around the U.K. have increase by about a third in the last few decades' - McGuire emphasized that climate change has additional wave-generating effects that few people are aware of.' If you start to see meter-scale (3.3 foot) rises in sea level, then that load starts to bend the [earth's] crust, and that would promote magma reaching the surface. That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It'll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot.' As bizarre as this sounds, history - and other scientists - back up his theory."
The book has some stunning photographs, some of surfers riding ridiculously high waves, some of huge waves crashing over ships, some of devastation waves have caused. I found myself going back to them repeatedly as I read.
I really liked the science she presented about waves. Chapters like the one on the devastation caused in Lituya Bay in Alaska, where extreme waves have scoured the shoreline. Or the one on Penny Holliday and her research trip on the ship Discovery, which had to be cut short - because of severe weather battering the ship. Perhaps if I were a surfer, perhaps I would have had more appreciation for the chapters about surfers surfing.
I came away from this book with an enormous appreciation of the waves themselves, their ferocity, their unpredictability, their strength, and their beauty.
"...I stared at Jaws (the name given to a surfing site and the waves it produces in Hawaii). At about forty feet, this wasn't the biggest day on record, but somehow that diminished nothing. The wave was breathtaking. As it rose, its face opened up to the cliffs and its lip curled over a full-bellied barrel. Except for luminous glints of turquoise at its peak, the wave was sapphire blue, gin clear, and flecked with white. If heaven were a color, it would be tinted like this. You could fall into this water and happily never come out and you could see it forever and never get tired of looking. Jaws did not permit its spectators to dream about being someplace else, to feel bored or irritated or jaded. Watching it was an instant antidote to petty problems. There could be no confusion about who called the shots out here, at this gorgeous, haunted, heavy, lush, primordial place, with all its unnameable blues and its abillity to nourish you and kill you at the same time. There was unspeakable power at Jaws, but it was the beauty that got me."
You can email me, Bibliophile, at 2of3Rs@gmailDOTcom.
Scientists haven't been studying ocean waves for all that long. It's difficult to determine, let alone monitor all the factors that go into creating waves. Scientists have been building models to try and predict huge freak waves.
Surfers also try to predict waves, though for different reasons. They want to ride them.
Casey spent time with extreme surfers and their quest for great waves as the framework for exploring waves and their immensity, power, and unpredictability. Laird Hamilton, Brett Lickle, Dave Kalama and other surfing greats feature prominently here. She also spent time with scientists who are trying to figure out how to predict waves as well as why they seem to be getting bigger. Scientists such as Penny Holliday, who travels on ships with monitoring devices to try to determine the cause of large waves. Nicholas Sloane lives in South Africa right off the Wild Coast, where ships have to deal with the Agulhas Current, some of the most treacherous water anywhere in the world.
Waves have been increasing in height and severity, causing more damage to ships and coastal areas. Scientists are trying to determine why waves are getting wilder, and how they can predict when and where they'll hit.
She shares some facts about waves that are mind-boggling and sobering...
"Tsunamis, waves caused by sudden lurchings of the earth's crust, are the ocean's speed champions. Their wavelengths can be more than one hundred miles long, and they can travel faster than jets."
"To his shock, he found that two hundred yards below the ship, gargantuan underwater waves more than six hundred feet high and ten miles long were rumbling by at the speed of four knots."
"...twenty seven vessels along with 654 people were lost during a four-month period in the winter of 1997-1998. Oil tankers slipped from the radar, leaving only black slicks to show they'd ever existed; rescuers responding to emergency calls arrived at the coordinates and found, instead of the vessel, mangled bits of debris. 'In some cases ships had simply broken apart like a snapped pencil,' an IMO report read."
"'Tsunamis are no ordinary waves,' McGuire said with understatement. 'They are walls of water that just keep coming in. If it's one hundred feet high, it's going to be one hundred feet high for five minutes.'"
"'Wave heights around the U.K. have increase by about a third in the last few decades' - McGuire emphasized that climate change has additional wave-generating effects that few people are aware of.' If you start to see meter-scale (3.3 foot) rises in sea level, then that load starts to bend the [earth's] crust, and that would promote magma reaching the surface. That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It'll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot.' As bizarre as this sounds, history - and other scientists - back up his theory."
The book has some stunning photographs, some of surfers riding ridiculously high waves, some of huge waves crashing over ships, some of devastation waves have caused. I found myself going back to them repeatedly as I read.
I really liked the science she presented about waves. Chapters like the one on the devastation caused in Lituya Bay in Alaska, where extreme waves have scoured the shoreline. Or the one on Penny Holliday and her research trip on the ship Discovery, which had to be cut short - because of severe weather battering the ship. Perhaps if I were a surfer, perhaps I would have had more appreciation for the chapters about surfers surfing.
I came away from this book with an enormous appreciation of the waves themselves, their ferocity, their unpredictability, their strength, and their beauty.
"...I stared at Jaws (the name given to a surfing site and the waves it produces in Hawaii). At about forty feet, this wasn't the biggest day on record, but somehow that diminished nothing. The wave was breathtaking. As it rose, its face opened up to the cliffs and its lip curled over a full-bellied barrel. Except for luminous glints of turquoise at its peak, the wave was sapphire blue, gin clear, and flecked with white. If heaven were a color, it would be tinted like this. You could fall into this water and happily never come out and you could see it forever and never get tired of looking. Jaws did not permit its spectators to dream about being someplace else, to feel bored or irritated or jaded. Watching it was an instant antidote to petty problems. There could be no confusion about who called the shots out here, at this gorgeous, haunted, heavy, lush, primordial place, with all its unnameable blues and its abillity to nourish you and kill you at the same time. There was unspeakable power at Jaws, but it was the beauty that got me."
You can email me, Bibliophile, at 2of3Rs@gmailDOTcom.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
The Right Book for Right Now
I have quite a few books in my To Be Read pile. They are books I really do want to read, books I've been meaning to read for...well, let's just say quite a while. Quite often when I'm finishing with one book, I'll choose a book for my next read from the TBR pile.
Sometimes, though, when I come to the end of what I'm currently reading, as I mentally go over my TBR (To Be Read) pile in my mind, none of the book in the pile appeal to me at that particular time. I want to read them, I just don't want to read them right NOW. It may be a mood thing, or a length thing, or a subject of interest thing.
If I'm lucky, I'll find a book to read that I hadn't been looking at before, and it is the right book for right now. It's a book that suits my mood, my energy level, my interest at that moment in time.
That is what happened with Room.
I picked this up as an unknown. I didn't know of Emma Donoghue, hadn't read Slammerkin (one of her previous books), hadn't heard anything about this book, I hadn't even read the back cover or inside flap of this book (unusual for me).
I just started reading it. Jack narrates. Jack, who is five years old and lives in Room with his mother. He sleeps in Bed, plays on and under Table, lies on Rug. Why are all these things proper names? Is it just a quirky five year old's view of the world? Well, perhaps.
Jack shares his world in his five year old voice, sharing his day to day life, and slowly, we learn why he and his mother live in Room, how they got there, why his mother wants to get out, and what happens when they do.
Jack is completely believable and engaging, sharing his observations...
"Lunch is bean salad, my second worst favorite. After nap we do Scream every day but not Saturdays or Sundays. We clear our throats and climb up on Table to be nearer to Skylight, holding hands not to fall. We say, 'On your mark, get set, go,' then we open wide our teeth and shout holler howl yowl shriek screech scream the loudest possible. Today I'm the most loudest ever because my lungs are stretched from being five."
Jack describes his world, his world in Room, with Ma, is all he's ever known and he describes it like a child does, telling it like it IS, not how it should be, or might be, because living in Room is all he's ever experienced.
Like Curious Incident of Dog in the Nighttime, or The Art of Racing in the Rain, Jack as narrator has a unique voice and take on the world. Brilliantly done, Donoghue captures the tenor of just being five years old. More than that, through Jack's observations and musings, she reveals Jack and Ma's completely out of the ordinary life.
I don't want to share more of the plot, in case you, like me, haven't heard much about Room. I'm glad I got to read it as an unknown. It was a delightful surprise. Highly recommended.
You can send email to: 2of3RsATgmailDOTcom.
Sometimes, though, when I come to the end of what I'm currently reading, as I mentally go over my TBR (To Be Read) pile in my mind, none of the book in the pile appeal to me at that particular time. I want to read them, I just don't want to read them right NOW. It may be a mood thing, or a length thing, or a subject of interest thing.
If I'm lucky, I'll find a book to read that I hadn't been looking at before, and it is the right book for right now. It's a book that suits my mood, my energy level, my interest at that moment in time.
That is what happened with Room.
I picked this up as an unknown. I didn't know of Emma Donoghue, hadn't read Slammerkin (one of her previous books), hadn't heard anything about this book, I hadn't even read the back cover or inside flap of this book (unusual for me).
I just started reading it. Jack narrates. Jack, who is five years old and lives in Room with his mother. He sleeps in Bed, plays on and under Table, lies on Rug. Why are all these things proper names? Is it just a quirky five year old's view of the world? Well, perhaps.
Jack shares his world in his five year old voice, sharing his day to day life, and slowly, we learn why he and his mother live in Room, how they got there, why his mother wants to get out, and what happens when they do.
Jack is completely believable and engaging, sharing his observations...
"Lunch is bean salad, my second worst favorite. After nap we do Scream every day but not Saturdays or Sundays. We clear our throats and climb up on Table to be nearer to Skylight, holding hands not to fall. We say, 'On your mark, get set, go,' then we open wide our teeth and shout holler howl yowl shriek screech scream the loudest possible. Today I'm the most loudest ever because my lungs are stretched from being five."
Jack describes his world, his world in Room, with Ma, is all he's ever known and he describes it like a child does, telling it like it IS, not how it should be, or might be, because living in Room is all he's ever experienced.
Like Curious Incident of Dog in the Nighttime, or The Art of Racing in the Rain, Jack as narrator has a unique voice and take on the world. Brilliantly done, Donoghue captures the tenor of just being five years old. More than that, through Jack's observations and musings, she reveals Jack and Ma's completely out of the ordinary life.
I don't want to share more of the plot, in case you, like me, haven't heard much about Room. I'm glad I got to read it as an unknown. It was a delightful surprise. Highly recommended.
You can send email to: 2of3RsATgmailDOTcom.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Comics and Alzheimers
A slender woman, short brown hair, maybe in her 50's, came up to me and asked where the books like Gary Larson's Far Side books are. I showed her a few Gary Larson books we have in the bargain (i.e. cheaper) section, and then showed her the section in Humor with all the rest of the comics are, Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, etc. She sort of stood there for a moment, thinking.
"Let me tell you what I'm looking for, maybe you can help me," she said. "My dad has early Alzheimer's, and he really likes comic strips in the paper, but he gets easily distracted, so..."
"Ah. In a lot of these books the comics are jammed in there, the pages are pretty crowded. It sounds as though he needs some that have maybe one comic on a page, or just a few. The Far Side is good for that, here are some of his that just have a few on a page. We also have a few with comics from The New Yorker, those have just one on a page. Calvin and Hobbes, Zits, a lot of them are really busy, so much crammed on each page." I showed her The New Yorker cartoon book.
"He's been having my mom make larger copies of comics from the paper and put them on the wall. I thought a book might be good, they are larger and that way he can look at as many as he wants and then be done with them. He gets overwhelmed easily," she said.
"My mom had Alzheimer's and she if something overwhelmed her, she'd just be done with it, she would be too frustrated and she'd just give up. Having lots of white space on a page is a good idea. My mom also had a stroke, and after the stroke, she found some things funny that she never would have found funny before. It's as though some of her sense of humor changed after the stroke. But hey, she was laughing, laughing is good."
"Absolutely," she said. "I want to give my dad what he likes while he can still enjoy it. Thanks for all your help, I'll keep looking here."
"You're welcome," I said. "Good luck with everything."
You can email me, Bibliophile, at 2of3Rs@gmailDOTcom.
"Let me tell you what I'm looking for, maybe you can help me," she said. "My dad has early Alzheimer's, and he really likes comic strips in the paper, but he gets easily distracted, so..."
"Ah. In a lot of these books the comics are jammed in there, the pages are pretty crowded. It sounds as though he needs some that have maybe one comic on a page, or just a few. The Far Side is good for that, here are some of his that just have a few on a page. We also have a few with comics from The New Yorker, those have just one on a page. Calvin and Hobbes, Zits, a lot of them are really busy, so much crammed on each page." I showed her The New Yorker cartoon book.
"He's been having my mom make larger copies of comics from the paper and put them on the wall. I thought a book might be good, they are larger and that way he can look at as many as he wants and then be done with them. He gets overwhelmed easily," she said.
"My mom had Alzheimer's and she if something overwhelmed her, she'd just be done with it, she would be too frustrated and she'd just give up. Having lots of white space on a page is a good idea. My mom also had a stroke, and after the stroke, she found some things funny that she never would have found funny before. It's as though some of her sense of humor changed after the stroke. But hey, she was laughing, laughing is good."
"Absolutely," she said. "I want to give my dad what he likes while he can still enjoy it. Thanks for all your help, I'll keep looking here."
"You're welcome," I said. "Good luck with everything."
You can email me, Bibliophile, at 2of3Rs@gmailDOTcom.
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