The title of this blog is Ed K’s Life Safari and I have been thinking about that name, what the title means and how it relates to what I am posting. One of the definitions of a safari is:a long and arduous journey. Well guess that my life safari has luckily been fairly long – 65 years so far, and at times I think it has been fairly arduous.
So over the last three days, I have finished two books. The first bookk finished was The One Plan: A Week by Week Guide to Restoring Your Natural Health and Happiness by Yogi Cameron Alborzian The second one was The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton. They are respectively, books 36 and 37 of 2016. I am going to write about the second book The Second Live of Nick Mason in this post. I will tackle The Open Plan in a post about yoga, maybe later this afternoon.
So far this month I have finished three books. They are; Life with Pi, The Winter Fortress and most recently Dark Run. This brings my total number of books read in 2016 to 35 books. My lofty goal is 60 books. So right now I am way behind the pace I need (five books per month) to read to reach that goal. However, I am not that far off the pace needed to match last years total of 51 books.
Last week I checked out Dark Run by Mike Brooks from my library. I was not looking for a science fiction book, when I spotted the book. But after reading a couple of the quotes on the back of the book, I was intrigued. This is the one that won me over…..
The Winter Fortress recounts the tale of the 1942 sabotage of the Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway. The plant was one of the few places in the world that produced heavy water. Nazi Germany wanted all the heavy water that Norway could produce.. Heavy water was a key element for the production of an atomic bomb. I never had really heard of the mission before reading the book, but now I feel that I lived through it! Bascomb did a great job researching and writing The Winter Fortress, The book reads more like an action novel than a work of non-fiction.
I am a simple man, in more ways than one. As such when I read, I like a straight forward story. Boy meats girl, boy cuts up girl into a thousand little pieces. Then my hero comes in and needs to figure out who the killer is before he can strike again. Another story may involve an evil person or group about to wreak havoc on the world. Again my hero must save the day! But every once in a while I visit the dark side. I read a book where the message is hidden and symbolism abounds. Such is the case with Life of Pi (book 34 for 2016) by Yann Martel. I’m confused! But I for one like the story with the animals.
A week or so ago my wife and I completed watching the first five seasons of Homeland.So when I saw Mark Henshaw’s The Fall of Moscow Station among the new releases at my library I was intrigued. Looking at the book, I saw that it was the third book in Mark’s series that features CIA agents Kyra Stryker and Jonathan Burke. So rather than start with the third book in the series, I found and checked out Red Cell the first book in the series. Yesterday, Red Cell became the 32 book I have read in 2016. And now that I know Kyra and Jonathan I’m ready for their next assignment which is chronicled in Cold Shot.
So over the last several weeks I have spent more time at Ancestry.com, trying to unravel the tangled roots of my various family lines, than either reading or listening to music. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been reading or listening at all, just that my focus has been on searching for dead people. One of the most interesting finds was a great-aunt Alice Matilda Ashton.
