Another book that i used for typing practice over at TypeLit.
It’s rather an enjoyable way to read a book, while at the same time being incredibly useful in improving ones typing.
As to the typing experience, it’s a quagmire of punctuation and capitalisation due to most of the book being in dialogue, which are obviously very useful skills to practice. So i present it to you, totally recommended, as both a great read and also great typing practice: what’s not to like?
This is a book that i used for typing practice over at TypeLit.
It’s rather an enjoyable way to read a book, while at the same time being incredibly useful in improving ones typing.
This book is quite a good find. The mysterious Arsene Lupin is the ultimate rascal as he goes about relieving the rich and famous of France of their valuables: a joy to read about.
As to the typing experience, it’s a rather difficult book to type as it is full of French words and names, but a fun challenge and great typing practice. So i present it to you totally recommended, both as a great read and also great typing practice: what’s not to like?
A delightful, long poem telling the full story of the Pied Piper. Great for reading out loud to children. And much, much better than the Brothers Grimm version.
Best of all, it’s free. So why not download and give it a read today.
When i read this last time i never wrote a review for it: possibly because i’d only just written a review for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and didn’t really see the need to say much the same for this book.
So what brings me to reading this book again and writing a review now, you may ask. Well, it’s because i just finished reading Heartless by Marissa Meyer and i so wanted to see how well it would flow into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland if it was read as a prequel.
Now i’m certainly not saying that this book needs a prequel, but if it were to have one then Heartless has my full blessings to occupy that honoured place.
Yes, one can argue that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a plenty wonderful book and stands perfectly alone without any need for a prequel, but, having just read Heartless beforehand as a prequel, i can fully attest that it makes for a much better reading experience if you do.
Here be some more “Alice and Wonderland” books.
My school house master, Peter Forest, who was also my maths teacher, one day stated in front of the whole class that i’d either grow up to be the next Einstein or a tramp, and that he feared it would most probably be the latter. Suffice it to say, i never did get around to doing that degree in theoretical physics. 
So when i found this book on Amazon it reminded me of Peter Forest and his condemnation of my future and was certainly instrumental in my purchase. I wasn’t disappointed, so thanks Peter.
The strange thing was the timing, as i let the “Infinite Improbability Drive” always select my next book from “The Pile” and it’s only been a couple of books since i finished Into The Wild, about Chris McCandless, AKA, Alexander Supertramp. This book certainly flows nicely on from that. It makes me wonder if Chris had actually read this amongst all the other books mentioned in his story.
William covers his adventures as a tramp during the late 1800’s, where he ventures far and wide. The funniest thing for me was that he was a trustifarian. I had no idea that these creatures existed back in the 1800, but it’s certainly true in William’s case, and he even admits it in the book.
When his grandmother died, instead of willing him her property, which she knew he would squander rather quickly, she instead put it into trust from which he was given an allowance. So off he goes to America, tramping around, living on hand outs and goodwill, while all the time his weekly allowance from his trust fund is being saved up for his return. And he can return at any time, by working cattle ships from Baltimore, and even getting paid while doing so.
Even later on when he gets back the England, he continues to drop out into his tramping lifestyle while his trust fund rebuilds his bank account in order to fund his next adventure. I wonder if William was the original trustifarian, were there others before him?
Without a doubt, a very good inside look into the mind and lifestyle of the typical trustifarian. But, on top of that, it’s a very revealing look into this odd sub-culture of the underclass of the age and the lifestyles they lead and how they managed to support themselves. Although, one can’t really get away from realising that most of these people were simply down where they were due to alcoholism, with every opportunity of spending any penny they managed to accrue on getting drunk always eagerly taken — no, nothing much changes.
Anyways, an enlightening piece of history of the Victorian age seen from a very different view point to the normal history books and biographies.
I decided i’d read this just to get my mermaid thing going before reading The Mermaid by Christina Henry.
I have to say, i’m very disappointed.
Silly little girl falls in love with handsome prince who she can’t have because she’s just not good enough and he loves another, blah, blah, blah. So she has to die, like dead forever, because mermaids don’t have immortal souls like human beings do because they’re obviously just animals and Anderson obviously believes that animals don’t have souls and probably agrees with Descartes that you can even nail them to doors and dissect them without anaesthetic because they’re just soulless things unworthy of our consideration.
But wait, Hans gives this disgusting, soulless animal a chance, she can have legs to go on land and woo the handsome prince but she has to lose her voice by having her tongue cut out and suffer the pain of walking on knives for her whole life to do so. So desperate is this soulless creature that she agrees to this obscene torture. If she gets the prince to own her through marriage thus becoming a responsible pet owner for this soulless animal then god will bestow a soul upon this creature and it can live happily ever after as the sex slave of the prince. Otherwise she’s just going to be a bit of nothing floating on the wind for all eternity.
And then we’re told that if children are good then the little mermaid may still get a soul and go to heaven but if children are bad then she won’t. So if you you’re ever a naughty child, even for a moment, then you’re obviously a fucking evil little shit who hates mermaids. WTF!!! But mermaids are soulless animals who don’t get to go to heaven so its a bit confused as to whether a child should be worried about being good when its not actually the child’s fault in the first place that mermaids are soulless animals who god obviously hates and doesn’t want in heaven anyway.
Children should not have a sense of right and wrong built upon fairy tales, imaginary beings and/or other such nonsense. Because what do you think is going to happen when the child finds out that everything it believed you told it was true is a complete lie that you conjured up in order to hoodwink and con the child into behaving to your unreasonable demands?
I seriously would not read this to any child i had in my care. It’s disgusting, backward, patriarchal, god-grovelling drivel. Some books really should be burned and/or deleted.
A wonderful collection. You never know when you might feel the need to read a fairy tale.
The book that inspired the film: Apocalypse Now.
I read this book many, many years ago and i especially wanted to read it again before re-reading The Little Paris Bookshop. From my long ago memory of Heart of Darkness it struck me that there was something similar going on in the two books so i wanted to re-read both. More on the similarities in the next review, for this review i’m just sticking with Heart of Darkness.
So what did i think? It has the usual politically incorrect Victorian wording and attitude to non-Europeans, which tends towards appalling, even more so than usual as this book is mostly telling a story of the Belgian Congo when the Belgians were exploiting it and its peoples.
There’s a lot been said about this book, both good and bad, and you can read more on the wiki page if you want to know more.
For me, i’d like to see the glass half full with this one. Yes i understand the other side of the debate, and i most certainly do not condone any colonialism, i absolutely condemn it all, however; this book was written in the Victorian age and i do feel that if you are going to read Victorian literature then you have to lay aside your modern prejudices, morals, ethics, etc., and understand that the people writing it were victims and hostages of their own age as we are of ours. It’s not so much politically incorrect as it’s far more politically ignorant. And for me that is what a lot of this book is about: the political ignorance of the age.
Yes, Conrad uses words that are considered repugnant now, but they were not considered so when he wrote this. And its the words, i feel, that create the problem for a lot of people, allowing those to cloud their judgement of Conrad’s attitude and opinion. If you can take that step back and accept the words to be used as they were used in his age by white Europeans, only then can you see what Conrad was really saying when he wrote this book. You really cannot read this book as though it were written by someone in the 21st century for people in the 21st century. It’s a piece of history written a long time ago, read it as such.
So, if one considers the above, it is, i think, very clear that Conrad is very appalled with the worse of white Europeans descending upon the peoples of Africa appearing almost deity like — and exploiting that appearance to the maximum — simply due to their modern technology, their equipment, their immaculate white clothes in a hostile environment of sweat and mud. What chance would any person who has lived a natural life in a completely natural world have of remaining unaffected by the power and influence over the natural world that white Europeans had at their disposal?
Conrad makes clear that he alone, amongst the white Europeans on the boat, can see the humanity in the people’s of the Congo, while others would just consider them wild animals. How the sounds of the Congalese connected to a part of him, as only a human could connect to another human.
The only white person in the whole of Africa that Conrad wishes to speak to is Kurtz, the rest he seems to dismiss as arrogant fools and idiots who should never have been there.
One also has to remember that Conrad actually did go on this journey on a steam boat up the Congo to one of the inner stations, he witnessed what the Belgians were actually doing there, and he knew very well what Europe was being told about the people that lived there. The most telling part of this book is simply Kurtz’s last four words: “The horror, the horror!”
When Marlow, the protagonist, finally arrives home and meets Kurtz’s fiancé and she asks him what his final words were he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth because he feels it would crush her to know what he did in her name, as Kurtz only went there to win his fortune in order to be considered worthy to be her husband. One can quite clearly see the metaphor here, that Conrad himself, when he came back from the Congo, didn’t have anyone to speak to of the horror that he had witnessed being done in the name of the progress of European nations at the expense of those they dehumanise, oppress and treat no better than animals. There seems to me that if we place Conrad in Marlow’s place, we get to realise that when Conrad was in the Congo, he had no one to understand his feelings of horror, that he only wished to find one person amongst it all that he could talk to. And when he came home to Europe how was he to explain to the people of Europe the horror that was being done in their name by the worse of them that they would send to Africa on their behalf — and would they even want to listen?
So for me, this is what this book is, Conrad’s description of what he’d experienced in Africa that he felt no one would, or could, listen to; that he felt no one he knew would understand.
If only he could have found just one person at the end of his own journey to talk to who understood.
As i mentioned at the beginning, i was reading this before re-reading The Little Paris Bookshop, so please consider reading that straight after this. Some may think it’s a strange juxtaposition to make, but i think it works rather well.
I’m quite looking forward to having a real big Oz binge someday in the future. 
