So what's your summer reading?

[ritchie]

I'll never go on a holiday without access to news again.

Ted, that's one of the joys of a holiday. Mind you, at our idylic caravan site in the 'heart of rural Northumberland, we can't get mobile telephone reception ....peaceful, you bet your sweet bippy it is, just the place to go to try and get my blood pressure down. Well, that's the idea anyway. The weekend before last they hired the adj field out for a rave! Boom,Boom,Boom till four in the morning ....still it's a one off...is n't it? and this weekend the silence was broken with the sound of police cars and an ambulance. Apparently there had been a 'domestic' and some sweet young thing had stabbed her beau in the neck ....alledgedly ...he said he had done it himself....how gallant.

On the way home we stopped to buy the local Sunday paper only to see splashed across the front page, 'news' about a car crash involving one of my son's friends who had four passengers in with him at the time. It was 'big' news because his friend is a footballer. Thankfully no one was injured.

When we eventually managed to get mobile reception to ring him, he explained that everything was alright and he was n't one of them in the car ...... oh and by the way "I've just ordered a pizza, can you pick it up for me on the way home!"

No news is good news......roll on next weekend.

[howard male]

Ted wrote -

Finally read it. Its great. All 800 odd pages of it. you want a better review ask a proper reviewer.

By coincidence just five minutes ago I was lifting this hefty tomb into a cardboard box (just about managed to squeeze some other books in there too) as I've already started the daunting task of packing, ready for our moving flat at the end of the month.

But, yeah, great book - I really cared about what had become of that baseball!

[ritchie]

howard wrote

But, yeah, great book - I really cared about what had become of that baseball!

thank goodness it was n't a 'who done it'

"yeah great book, but what a suprise to find that it was the manheim steamroller driver what did it"

[Dayna]

It's Mannheim Steamroller. I thought it was my spelling that stinks!

[Tom McPhillips]

Ah, (and I should know) - Ritchie's not wrong

I live in MANHEIM, PA, and we have steamrollers rolling by all the time - our road's been in the state of being resurfaced all summer...

So Ritchie's obviously talking about me and not the band - glad to be able to clear up the confusion!

So Dayna, if Jamie were to draw you. what would your cartoon look like?

[Dayna]

Gee, They still use Steamrollers in PA? Here in Ohio they use gas powered ones. LOL!

( Just kidding. That's a Browns/ Steeler's type of joke. )
But then with the luck we have in this area, our team might just get wiped out in Pre season games.
I don't know if I'd like anyone to draw me. But he sure made 2D & Noodle cute!

I likes reading the stories in the Readers Digest Condensed Books. There are two based on Western stories, that were based in actual history.

I loves the one story about how these explorers traveled out West. I think they were British, or at least one was. They did all kinds of work in the Rocky Mountains where they were living. They hunted,trapped, & gathered up all kinds of things they'd need to survive the winter. One was an older guy teaching the younger one. Something happened & they got raided by some Blackfoot Indians. They took all their things & tied the two men outside in their long underwear, in the snow. The one older guy said, "Well, at least we still got our har! And where there's har, there's hope!" What a line...! But Hollywood, don't you dare steel this!
Dayna

[Con Murphy]

I actually included two music-related books in my summer reading. I finally got round to reading Garth Cartwright's book Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians cover to cover rather than just dipping into various parts and/or using the references to investigate certain artists*. I'm sure most regulars here have read it already, but in case you haven't, it is to be recommended. I've only been to the Balkans once, but I found the book very evocative and as fRoots readers already know Garth has that great ability to make you want to check out every artist he enthuses about.

I also finally got round to reading Alan Lomax's Mr Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz. Long overdue props to Norman for pointing me in the direction of http://www.abebooks.co.uk/ where you can pick up so many great second-hand books for next to nothing. I got my 50-year-old copy for about three quid incl p&p, and would have happily paid double just for the authentic musty book-store smell and well-thumbed yellowed pages. It adds to the attraction of a superbly written biography. In fact, it's part bio-, part auto- (and never, it has to be said, does it ever border on hagio-). It seems to have been written in a style preserved in aspic, it could almost have been written any time over the last 60 years or so. Jelly Roll himself and all the people involved in his life that Lomax managed to interview just leap out of the page at you, and you are transported back to those hugely creative and controversial times in New Orleans in the early part of the last century. A great book, and I wonder why it took me so long to get round to reading it.



* Just as an aside, in his book Garth recommends using Passion Discs http://www.passiondiscs.co.uk/ which I was astonished to discover is not run from some vibrantly East European part of exotic London but from a house down a tiny country lane in a sleepy Hampshire village 5 minutes down the road from where I live. Bizarre.