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Showing posts from January 25, 2015

Are You an Audiobook Person?

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There are things we hear discussed among readers today, and one of them is electronic versus print books for reading. People say things like, "I want a book in my hand," or "E-books are so much more convenient." I'm okay with both. I like reading on my iPad when I travel, my Kindle at bedtime, and a "real" book anytime, anywhere. The other question is "Do you listen to books?" To that one I have to say no, or at least, not yet. I'm a fast reader, and I doubt I'd be happy with the slow pace of someone reading to me. I'm also a wool-gatherer, so I'd probably zone out when something interesting caught my eye. So I haven't done the audio thing yet. However-- I have to listen to my own books in order to okay them for release on Audible.com, Amazon's audio book company. It's been an enjoyable experience, and it gave me a different perspective on the book, the story, and the protagonist. Most recent was the firs

Take Two Frog Stones & Call Me in the Morning

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Being a student of history, I find myself wondering about what advice was like back in the day. We live in a world where everyone wants to tell us how to eat so we can live to be 100, what to wear so we appear cool and confident, and how to survive the next attack, the next storm, or the next epidemic. Advice from our parents' day now seems quaint and often wrong. The ads that told us real men smoke Marlboros. The Singer instruction manual that advised women to put on a clean dress and makeup and style their hair so they'd be "prepared" for sewing. The general view that a woman should not work once she became pregnant and should stay in bed for two weeks after the birth. Really? So I wonder, did the Tudors get advice from their doctors about how to live to be forty? Of course they did; people have always hoped some "wise" someone could tell them how to achieve good health and avoid early death. The "frog stones" in the title were ground up a