#books

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It's my birthday week, but the gift is for you!
If you've ever wanted to check out my writing, from now until the end of the day on 12/30 my sci-fi novella, Silence of the Song Trees, is free on Amazon. If you don't have a Kindle, no worries. There are free Kindle apps for phones and tablets that you can access by searching on Amazon. Enjoy!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HY9VHYX

Three five star review quotes: “A luminescent tale of connection and fighting for what you love...beautiful, heart-wrenching, and tear jerking” “Touching, poignant, a tale of love and perseverance that will stay with me.” “The writing is clean, evocative and full of surprise.” SILENCE OF THE SONG TREES When everyone he loved died, he became the Ghost to save his planet.

American writer and conservationist Louis Bromfield was born in 1896. He reinvented himself as a farmer in the late 1930s and became one of the earliest proponents of sustainable and organic agriculture in the United States. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927 for Early Autumn, founded the experimental Malabar Farm near Mansfield, Ohio, and played an important role in the early environmental movement.

Books by Louis Bromfield at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72406

Cover page of Early autumn by Louis Bromfield
Photograph of Louis Bromfield by Carl Van Vechten

American novelist, short story writer, and playwright Zona Gale died in 1938. In 1903 Gale became a freelance writer and sold her first story to Success magazine. Her first novel, Romance Island, appeared in 1906, followed by several novels and story collections in the same setting. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921

Books by Zona Gale at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3531

Cover page of Neighborhood Stories by Zona Gale
The portrait of American author Zona Gale

English polymath Charles Babbage was born in 1791. Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's Analytical Engine, programmed using a principle openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom. 1/ via @wikipedia

Books by Charles Babbage at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/556

Daguerreotype of Charles Babbage c. 1851. By Antoine Claudet - National Portrait Gallery
Portion of Babbage's difference engine Benjamin Herschel Babbage, printed in Harper's new monthly magazine, Volume 30, Issue 175, p.34.

@internetarchive is fighting a legal battle with publishers who struggle to understand the concept of libraries or wish they wouldn't exist. https://torrentfreak.com/authors-and-copyright-scholars-back-internet-archive-in-landmark-legal-battle-231222/

I just made a donation to the Archive and encourage those who can and care to do the same: all donations until Dec 31st are matched by a generous anonymous donator, so now is the best time to help. It is tax-deductible in the US: https://archive.org/donate

Juan Ramón Jiménez Spanish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956 was born in 1881.

Among his better known works are Sonetos espirituales 1914–1916, Piedra y cielo, Poesía en verso, 1917–1923, Poesía en prosa y verso, Voces de mi copla, and Animal de fondo. He also collaborated with his wife in the translation of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1920). via @wikipedia

Books by Juan Ramón Jiménez at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/3230

Cover of Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez. Unknown author - Fotografía tomada de la revista "LA NACIÓN, Un siglo en sus columnas". editada por el diario La Nación con motivo de cumplirse 100 años de su fundación. Buenos Aires 4 de enero de 1970.

Scottish naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist John Muir died in 1914. As part of the campaign to make Yosemite a national park, Muir published two landmark articles on wilderness preservation in The Century Magazine, "The Treasures of the Yosemite" and "Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park"; this helped support the push for US Congress to pass a bill in 1890 establishing Yosemite National Park.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/180

Cover of My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
John Muir, full-length portrait, facing right, seated on rock with lake and trees in background. unattributed - Library of Congress

"Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do."

The novel Emma by Jane Austen is first published OTD in 1815. Emma was submitted to the London publisher John Murray II. He offered Austen £450 for this plus the copyrights of Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility, which she refused. Austen published two thousand copies of the novel at her own expense, retaining the copyright and paying a 10% commission to Murray.

Emma is available at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/158

Title page from Jane Austen's first edition of Emma via Lilly Library, Indiana University

Bertha von Suttner was a pioneering peace activist. She was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in fact, she's credited with inspiring it) and became the second female Nobel Prize laureate after Marie Skłodowska Curie.

In 1889, Suttner became a leading figure in the peace movement with the publication of her pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), which made her one of the leading figures of the Austrian peace movement. via @wikipedia

Bertha von Suttner, Nobel Peace Prize 1905

reviewed Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life (2020)

When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting …

An appetizer for the world of fungi, not a beginners mycology textbook

Fungi are incredibly interesting and this book does them justice. It does an excellent job of describing their importance and the hidden connections between Fungi and plants, but also Fungi and humans. And it's written in a way that you feel close to the author, as he takes us on this journey.

I just wished there was more. More about different kinds of Fungi, more about recent science, about the importance of Fungi in different cultures etc. But I assume this is just no the scope and also not the ambition of this book, it's not meant to be an intro into mycology.

If I could I would give it 4.5 stars. It was very interesting and it made me want to dig more fungi related books, but it was not perfect. E.g. I felt a bit less invested than when reading "Never Home Alone" by Rob …

Constance Clara Garnett English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature died in 1946. She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English.

Constance Garnett at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2858

Constance Garnett and her son David, known as Bunny, mid-1890s.

"Does he paint? he fain would write a poem—
Does he write? he fain would paint a picture."
One Word More

Robert Browning English poet of the Victorian age was born in 1889. His most popular poems include Porphyria's Lover, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, the diptych Meeting at Night, the patriotic Home Thoughts from Abroad, and the children's poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. via @wikipedia

Books by Robert Browning@ PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/146

Cover of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Other Poems by Robert Browning
Portrait by Herbert Rose Barraud, c. 1888
The Pied Piper leads the children out of Hamelin. Illustration by Kate Greenaway to the Robert Browning version of the tale.