Cell: A Book Review

According to the intro material in Stephen King's bestselling Cell, there are over 193,000,000 cell phones in America. After you read Cell, you may wish to toss yours.

At 3:03 PM EST a mysterious pulse occurs and wipes the minds of all people with a cell phone. Clay, the main character, does not have a cell phone and is spared. His journey from Boston back to Maine is the heart of the book. I enjoyed King's comments on the behavior of cell phone users, their rudeness and self-absorption. This book is a subtle screed against the pervasiveness of this ubiquitous communication tool.

I'd have liked more explanation of The Pulse, but none is given which some may argue makes for a more unnerving experience. I was unclear if you had to be on your cell phone or just had to have one hanging from your person. I wonder if the pulse worked on cell phones that were turned off.

Read the book for a fun horror experience, and visit King's interesting site.

Meanwhile kudos to NLS for getting this book out so quickly. I noticed at the end of the book a note that it had been finished in October 2005 and I noticed that at the end of the taping, the narrator said it had been narrated in February 2006. And I'm reading it in April 2006. Often you get the book when the paper back comes out 8-12 months after the original release date.

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Addendum: Here's a longer version of the review--along with my bio--at the Necropsy site.

Braille display

The ITACTI project is one of at least two attempts to produce lower-cost and more useful braille displays. Read about their recent effort. (Taken from Top Tech Tidbits.)

-Text by David Faucheux

An interesting fund-raising opportunity

Did you know that Barnes & Noble allows not-for-profit organizations to put on what is known as a bookfair?

Click the audio link to learn how it works.

Anyone wishing to help Acadiana Area Council of the Blind during its bookfair occurring May 6 and 7 thru purchasing a book or CD should read the following taken from an email I received yesterday via a bookstore manager.

Ordering from the website will not count towards the fundraiser; but if anyone orders directly from the store and says that it is for the AACB bookfair, I can give you credit for those transactions. The number to call is 337.989.4142

Make sure that the person ordering lets the CSR know that the purchase is for the bookfair.

Happy reading.

Another vocab game

Last year, I did a piece on words. Here is another about words and even about a man who read the Encyclopedia Britanica. NPR's Weekend Edition program did a series of pieces with A.J. Jacobs. You can listen to them here.

Sudoku puzzle for blind gamers

Here (spotted by David Faucheux).

Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World's Most Seductive Spice: Book review

Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World's Most Seductive Spice, RC 58625, spins a tale of intrigue and fascination. Saffron, still the world's most costly spice, lends its vivid yellow-orange color and fragrance to noted dishes in several of the world's great cuisines including that of Iran aka Persia and India. Learn about the long history and lore of this magical spice and how the nymph Smilax, growing bored with the attentions of the mortal Crocus, turned him into a purple flower. It's not nice to bother Greek gods and goddesses and even nymphs as their puerile tendencies can be disastrous to defenseless mortals of either gender.

I have tried several times to visit www.saffroninfo.com to learn more about saffron, but the site seems to be down.

Visit the following web sites if you like books and want to locate interesting reads:

http://www.complete-review.com/
http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com

Choice Magazine Listening: Part II

Choice Magazine Listening: Part I

I conducted an interview with an editor at Choice Magazine Listening. I learned that their magazine began production in 1962 and that they have everything they ever recorded archived on reel-to-real tape, flexible disk, and later slow-playing 4-track cassettes. Fascinating!

Visit Choice Magazine Listening to sign up.

Octavia Butler

During the summer just after my sophomore year, I--as was my habbit even then--read about 25 books including The Nighttime Guy, The River and the Stone, Brain, XPD, Headlong, King of Kings, Vision Quest, Social Studies, Dollar Princesses, and Shike: Book 1: Time of the Dragons; but it was Kindred that stayed with me. On Friday March 3, I caught a portion of a rebroadcast of an interview with Octavia Butler. She had died on February 24 at age 58. She is noted for her Patternist series about telepaths and xenogenesis trilogy. In 1985, Butler began this trilogy, about the Oankali, extraterrestrials who come to Earth to repopulate the planet with human/alien hybrids after a devastating war. Butler's aliens are notable for having a plausible third gender, known as ooloi.

In 1979, she published Kindred, a novel about an African-American woman who is repeatedly thrown from 1976 to the ante-bellum South, where she is forced to deal with life in a culture based on slavery. Butler herself categorized it not as science fiction but rather as a "grim fantasy." Kindred became the most popular of all her books, with a quarter of a million copies currently in print. "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you," she said of the book. (Extracted from Wikipedia.)

I found the interplay of races intriguing in Kindred. There was the protagonist and Rufus, the plantation owner's son. But this was not the only important relationship she had with a European-American male for her husband, Kevin Franklin, was a leading supporting character in the novel. Robert Crossley in an introduction to the edition recorded by RFB&D mentions how Kevin and Rufus become more alike as the novel continues. I didn't see that as he had.

I found the cookhouse scene between Sarah and the protagonist where Sarah tells her that "White-trash Margaret had my babies sold so she could buy furniture and china" to be quite illustrative of slavery and how tenuous any slave's position really was.

Not the romantic South of Gone with the Wind, this book is a definite read for the high school class or college class discussing diversity and how any form of slavery is as poisonous to slave masters as it is to the slaves themselves!

Butler's last novel, 2005's Fledgling, deals with vampirism. Click here to read the excellent review, noted horror critic, June M. Pulliam, has written for Nicropsy.

Apologies if the audio of the interview and the books was not as clear as could be. The original NLS recording, RC 16072, is over 25 years old. My radio experienced some static during my recording of that mini-sample of the Butler interview.