Reviews and Comments

Ji FU

fu@millefeuilles.cloud

Joined 2 years, 2 months ago

Trying to find a better way to track books I want to read than a random spreadsheet. I had used readinglog.info which was provided by my local public library until they shut down the program. Luckily, I regularly backed it up via their CSV export. I've used Library Thing for years, but adding books for "To Read" really screwed up a lot of the other features of the website, like recommendations, etc. I really love Free Software & the Fediverse particularly. My primary social media account is on Friendica @fu@libranet.de for now everything I post here is automatically "re-tooted" there.

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Amy Hollingsworth: The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers (AudiobookFormat, 2015, Oasis Audio) 5 stars

Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood with an inside look on Mr. Rogers' …

Much better than you'd expect on a religious view of a childhood hero.

5 stars

A fantastic tale of Mister Rogers. I figured it would probably be a fluff piece about how we should be kind to each other and not preach religion. I was glad to learn I was wrong. Amy Hollingsworth is a preacher's wife, raised Catholic, but her husband is a Protestant (Pentacostal I think but I haven't been able to confirm that) pastor.

Mister Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. His parents assumed he'd go to seminary, so he did, but was called by God to children's television and not the pulpit. He tried to the get the American Presbyterian Church to ordain him a pastor without a parish and assign him to children's television, possibly producing content for the denomination's Sunday Schools, but they did not. Eventually he did finish his studies whilst working on Mister Rogers Neighborhood, but he never did pastor a congregation.

I really appreciated how Fred …

Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (Hardcover, 1981, New York, Knopf) 1 star

Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very …

A book that sounds awesome, but is not.

No rating

I wanted to read this book for a long time. It sounds awesome, a kid born right at midnight as newly partitioned India officially is declared independent of Britian, and he eventually learns he has magic abilities that include the ability to communicate telepathically with all other kids that were born in the first hour since the country's birth.

It, however, is not good. I find nothing redeeming about this story. Nothing happens in the entire first section of the book, to the point the protagonist's wife even goes about interrupting the story asking him to get to the good part. It's kind of meta, but not in the fun way. When we got to section II it kept feeling like it was just about to get good, just enough to keep my reading. Yet, nothing ever came interesting. I read some 400 pages before I gave up on it. …

Leo Calvin Rosten, Lawrence Bush: The New Joys of Yiddish (Hardcover, 2001, Crown Publishers) 2 stars

The New Joys of Yiddish brings Leo Rosten's masterful work up to date. Revised for …

I guess it's OK for a dictionary?

2 stars

I'm not really quite sure what I thought this book was going to be. The intorduction was really good and I think is closer to what I was expecting, more of a story/history about Yiddish in the U.S. He speaks of how most linguists harrumph at the use of Yiddish in the States as an accent to the primary language, and with most Jews now living in either the U.S. or Isreal (where Hebrew, not Yiddish, is the default tongue) Yiddish as a language is dying. But the author thinks the way it has worked its way into the general lexicon is actually great. After the intro it becomes, more-or-less, a dictionary of Yiddish words that are heard in American (what the author calls Ameridish or Yinglish) and what they mean, occasionally with a history of its use, either in the old world or the new, and often with a …

Michael Crichton, Michael Crichton: The Andromeda Strain (AudiobookFormat, 1994, NLS book on Tape) 4 stars

The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: …

I had to stop "reading" it. All the descriptions of blood and stuff got me queasy. I don't know why so many authors feel it's necessary to go into detail on this stuff. I kept trying to resume and I just couldn't. With a paper book I could just skim and skip over it if there isn't too much, but that's a lot more difficult in audiobook format.

Robert A. Heinlein, Lloyd James: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (AudiobookFormat, 2010, Blackstone Audio, Inc., Blackstone Audiobooks) 5 stars

Revolution is brewing on twenty-first-century Luna, a moon-based penal colony where oppressed "Loonies" are being …

Heinlein made me feel like I could start my own revolution to bring peace and liberty to my world.

5 stars

I have read dozens of Heinlein's books and have like most of them. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his most well known works and yet I'm just reading it now. I had put it off in part because the first few pages are pretty dry so when I picked it up in the library years ago, i put it right back. Secondly some of the stuff I had heard/read of it didn't sound great, sentient computers, line marriages and the like. But it was so much more than that.

The story of the luna prison planet revolution and declaring their independence certainly used much of the language and imagery from the American revolution, including choosing the 4th of July as the date of their declaration, butt there is much more wound up. There are images from the Russian and French revolutions as well and this mid …