siphoning off a few thoughts

I just finished Agatha Christie’s sixth published Hercule Poirot book.  My thoughts:

not the best, certainly not the worst, but duly entertaining

I’ve been working my way through the Hercule Poirot books (in publication order), and one element that I appreciate is that Christie avoids a formulaic set-up. Sometimes Poirot is accompanied by his friend Hastings (Mysterious Affair at Styles), sometimes by a local person (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), sometimes he solves the case from his armchair (one of the stories in Poirot Investigates), and sometimes he acts like 007 (the not-very-good The Big Four).

In this novel, Poirot doesn’t appear until the second third of the book. The first third lays out a variety of distinctive storylines that only come together on the titular Blue Train. Something bad happens. Poirot brings his A game. Red herrings abound. A great travel read. (I read it on a trip to Brazil: it got me through five days.)

Note on potentially offensive content: Murder as entertainment and vanity.

Ida Odinga, wife of Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga, has joined a Lysistrata-like nationwide sex boycott aimed at forcing the countries leaders to overcome a political impasse.

Kenyan women’s groups started the boycott in an effort to end the feud between the factions led by Mr. Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki that has paralyzed Kenya’s government for weeks. Kenya’s Federation of Women Lawyers has urged the wives of both leaders to withold sex from their husbands until the feud is resolved. … The group has also said it’s willing to pay prostitutes in order to make the ban more effective.

from Foreign Policy.  Hat tip to Blattman.

I’m taking a little blog break. 

But I am heading to Peru on Sunday for a week, then back for a while and then off to Brazil for part of February.  So you can see there is a shift in my work focus.  I am not leaving my Africa work behind, but there will be a move toward Latin America.  So now I’m reading Paulo Coelho’s «Veronika decide morrer» (first book ever in Portuguese!) and listening to Rosas Negas, by Ana Garcia Bergua.

Congratulations to all who completed or began the Africa Reading Challenge.  I was exposed to so much interesting literature both by African writers and about the continent. 

I haven’t taken time to update all the listing, but if you look at the links at the bottom of the ARC page, you will see a few more fascinating reviews.

Thank you all!

Parents! Your child refusing to fall for the idea that Santa does everything he’s supposed to by “magic”? We thought we’d help out and provide some scifi explanations for Ol’ Saint Nick, just in case.

Let’s look beyond the whole “Living in the North Pole and having an army of elves to do his bidding” thing – After all, that part will always be cool, no matter what. The problem that today’s media-savvy younglings have with Father Christmas isn’t his product placement deal with Coke, but his modus operandi. You can prove, thanks to NORAD and the internet that Santa Claus exists and does all his deliveries in one night, but how can you explain his speedy deliveries? We’ve come up with five possibilities to try out on uninformed brains.

from http://io9.com/5114387/five-sci+fi-rebirths-for-santa-claus

Teleportation
In a world where we’re told that small Japanese men can teleport across time and space just by blinking hard, why would it be so unusual to suggest that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer isn’t a magical flying reindeer, but instead a superpowered teleporting one? It even sounds, uh, convincing-esque: “With one blink of his glowing nose, he can bend space on itself and take Santa to wherever he needs to be.” Suddenly, Santa’s reindeer become an animal version of the X-Men, allowing you to explain that Prancer and Dancer and Donner and Blitzen aren’t any stupider names than Dazzler or Gambit (After all, there are already superheroes called Donner and Blitzen).

Cloning
What if there was more than one Santa? That would easily explain how gifts can appear all across the world in one night, but if each man in this generous army happened to be the same man, then the mystique of Santa Claus is preserved – and, as an additional bonus, your child will be given another example of why scientific research into genetics (and specifically, cloning) is a good thing. An example that doesn’t happen to be a prematurely-dead sheep.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nature demanded both hubris and humility, both an unrelenting commitment to understand and an acceptance of our inability to achieve understanding – an immersion in “the magnitude and surpassing splendour of the realities” and a dependenc eon “all the wild legends of fairy magnificence” that our “imagination” and “fancy” can conjure.

I get it all but the hubris.

from Sachs’s The Humboldt Current: 19th Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p138.  Quotes from Reynolds, “Leaves from an unpublished journal.”

I’m taking a week off the blog.

Last night on the NPR Books podcast I heard Neil Gaiman talk about his latest book, The Graveyard Book.  A boy’s family gets killed, he is adopted by the residents of a graveyard and learned to live like…dead people. 

In the course of his book tour, Gaiman read the entire book aloud, and it is posted free on his website.

If you don’t know Gaiman, he wrote the book that the movie Stardust was based on.  I personally loved his book Good Omens and would recommend it.