Minster Readers Book reviews

We read two books a month, and someone takes notes and writes them up. Here are my notes from the July meeting:

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle written 1901

Final comment – If we came across another Holmes on the shelf, we would read it. We thought that we wouldn't actively seek it out.

We were surprised by how undated it seemed. Change a few physical things like the hansom cabs and it could be valid today. It had a great set of characters. Especially noted were Cartright and the lawyer that spent his own money arguing any case, and even both sides of a case.

Conan Doyle has a deceptively simple sort of writing that carries you along. It is spare, with nothing extraneous. It was a nice easy read. A first Conan Doyle experience for one of us, and a flash back to our youths for many of us.

It was noted that Phrenology had also come up in The Siege of Krishnapur last month. Conan Doyle had a number of strange interests.

It was commented that the Sister/brother relationship was contrived, but Liz pointed out that there were a lot of cases like that in the Bible.

Mark was 7, with +/- 1 variation.

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Flight Behaviour - Barbara Kingsolver 2012

A good Book Club choice – everybody read it and the marks varied widely.

Comments were on the lines of:

• Struggled to read it due to expectations of Kingsolver. She writes better than this. It didn't flow
• Depressing picture of Society – unfulfilled lives

• Didn't like the book hitting us over the head with ecology

We expected the Mexican characters to feature more, as they came from the home of the butterflies.

Liked some of the comic bits – Preston getting his encyclopaedia, Dovie videoing the TV interview.

Concern about the children and poverty,

the husband was a simple soul, without ambition; she had an unstretched brain. It was nice to see her develop an enquiring mind as she got involved with the science.

Ros thoroughly enjoyed it, thought she did a good job trying to explain global warming in simple terms, and we all learnt a lot about the life cycle of butterflies. Others hated the way we were beaten up again and again about climate change. Called it heavy propagandising.

Dellarobia was proving a point to her Mother-in-law by staying put, but once she learnt more about Hester she didn't have to, so took the other turning.

We could see where Dellarobia was coming from, how she married because she had to, made a wrong decision and everything that followed was a result of that. But, she fought and found a way out. It started with a sort of suicide, She was desperate to get out of her life. Working with the scientists and developing her self knowledge gave her the confidence in her abilities.

It was pointed out that the headings of the chapters were sociological and economics terms that grew around the story.

Generally people thought that 'Prodigal Summer' was better.

Another comment was that the book was too long, but once she reached page xxx the author shut it down quickly It was a flawed book, and that make it easy to analyse.

Mark 6.5 varying from 4 to 9

Dropbox shortcomings

I have recently learned something about dropbox that I thought I would pass on. Yesterday while AJ was uploading wedding photos to the wedding folder, my system told me that I had used 3.5 GB of my 3.5GB allowance. I only have a few small folders, but I am shared on a lot.

I grabbed a folder called dropbox-Annabelle, and moved it rapidly to somewhere else on my disk. It is now in my Temp directory, but still has the Dropbox icon on it. BUT, it is no longer in Dropbox. I immediately dropped down to 2.7GB used.  It is not on my other computer any more either.

What this means is that when a folder is shared, it counts against the space of each person that it is shared with. I had always assumed before that it only counted against the owners allocation.

This means to me that dropbox has ceased to be such a valuable facility for storing and backing up files, and is of more use as a temporary transfer facility.

I have a folder called 'New photos for grandma' which has never been emptied. Do you think that she still looks at it, or can I clean it up? Similarly the dropbox-Annabelle and dropbox-Jack folders, I am going to archive elsewhere all pictures more than about 6 months old. But I don't own them, so if I delete the owners pictures, are they going to be upset? We need to agree a protocol for how we manage all these photos because it has become so obvious that we cannot just use dropbox as a dumping ground.

Does my Brain work slower?

I have noticed recently that when I do a task, I think that I have done it quickly and efficiently, but I am surprised by how long it has taken by the clock. I have sadly come to the conclusion that internally my brain synapses are not as fast, and that an internal second is longer than an outside world second. So what I think has just taken me a second has actually taken me two seconds, or something like that. What it means is that the days are going much faster. I have to allow longer to do things.

This is not a sudden revelation. In my adulthood I noticed how much shorter days seemed to be than when I was a young man. In those days we had millenia of time to accomplish stuff.

I have recently done a test as suggested by Dr. Mosley at www.cognitivefun.net/test/2 in the Fast Diet book and noticed how much slower my reactions were compared to other anonymous users. But, in doing the test I noticed that my eyes seemed to recognise the colour very fast, but I could see that it took me a significant time for my fingers to get to the correct key to press.

So is it my brain that isn't working so fast, or my muscles not reacting as fast? Actually on this day it is very cold and I am wrapped up in a thick sweater, and I wonder if that has an effect.