Tag: Massachusetts

Books

Book 805: The Prophets – Robert Jones, Jr.

Geoff W

Book cover of "The Prophets" with Amazon Affiliate linkThis was a stunning debut novel. Jones (re)created a world that draws you in and takes you on an emotional journey. There were so many side/back stories that I wanted to know so much more about! It’s amazing he got as much into the story as he did, I can’t fathom trying to cut back or reign in the story.

The real problem is my digital copy was due back before I finished typing up my response so I can’t actually use characters names for those side stories/back stories so I’m just going to have to gloss over them—booo.

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ARC, Books

Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard

Geoff W

Book cover of "The Mosquito" with Amazon Affiliate linkWell if I wasn’t already so jaded from having lived through the last nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d be terrified mosquitos were coming to exterminate all of us!

I accepted this galley back in April when the pandemic was just really kicking off.* And then I promptly forgot about it for a few months, followed by avoiding it for even longer because it just didn’t feel right to read it with the way the world was going. I finally decided I needed to clear my galley backlog and this was the oldest so here we are. This particular quote caught me with all the rumors flying about where COVID-19 came from:

Zoonosis rates have tripled in the last ten years, and account for 75% of all human diseases. The goal of health researchers is to identify potential ‘spillover’ germs before they make a zoonotic jump to humans. (Ch. 18)

After reading this book, I feel like wherever coranavirus came from it was like “hey Mosquito, hold my beer,” and then it seriously underwhelmed when you look at the stats in this book!

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Updates

October Recap 2020

Geoff W

Sunrise over Carson Beach in south bostonOctober was a blur, work continues from home and the only thing to change things up was a long weekend out in the Berkshires (western Massachusetts) for Indigenous People’s day. The weather has been changing rapidly here, my morning walks have been completely in the dark and this past Friday (October 30) it SNOWED (end of post picture).

We visited Hancock Shaker Village which was really neat (two photos below) and drove through a lot of the small towns and just enjoyed spending some time in Lenox and Stockbridge that we’ve visited in the past but only fleetingly as we’ve avoided the crowds in the past.

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Updates

September Recap 2020

Geoff W

Rows of apple trees with a super tall sunflower plant with multiple flowers on itIt’s been a super quiet month on the reading front. The class I’m taking has sucked up most of my reading time and what time I’m not reading I’m spending knitting.

It feels like ages ago that we were in New Hampshire for a week, but it was only a month ago as this posts but yeah 2020 is still flying. Other signs fall arrives: work is picking up, we went apple picking and leaf peeping, and all the knitting 😀 We’re heading out to western Massachusetts for the long weekend and that’ll be nice.

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Book 742: Crime Dot Com – Geoff White

Geoff W

Book cover of I honestly don’t know how people exist without being paranoid ALL THE TIME. When I first said yes to this after the publicist reached out, it was like 95% because the author’s first name was Geoff and 5% because the subject was interesting. And then I found myself completely absorbed with this book.*

Now I’m not saying we’re totally screwed, but I mean we’re not really that far from being totally screwed and White does a really good job of explaining all of it. He takes an in depth look at the start of cybercrime with the quaint “Love Bug” virus (Wikipedia) to the state sponsored hacking/cyber assault that nudged us into the rotting cesspool of Trumpism that is the US right now.
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