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Friday, April 05, 2013

Books and Words

I was lucky enough to get a Net Galley ARC of John Lescroart's latest book, which I can't review yet, but as usual I loved catching up with Dismas and Abe.  The Ophelia Cut also references an event that took place six years earlier in Lescroart's The First Law.  The long-kept secret of that event becomes a threat when an article in the news brings attention to it once more.  Have to note that the cover featured on the Amazon site is the worst Lescroart cover--ever.  Someone needs to rethink that concept.

Right now, I'm reading The Fat Chef by Fredrik Nath (mystery set in Paris during WWII) and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral:  A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (I love Kingsolver's writing, don't know why I delayed so long on getting this one).

Still reading my gardening books, and on occasion, I dip back into the Elizabethan world of spy-craft and read about Walsingham's vendetta against Catholics in The Queen's Agent by John Cooper.  I will finish this one, and I do find it interesting, but since there is so little information available about Walsingham, the book is more about his crusade against Catholicism.   I would not have wanted to be a Catholic priest in England during Elizabeth's reign and within Walsingham's purview.  No.
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My husband heard about this study on NPR:  Mining Books to Map Emotions.  Knowing that I'd be interested, he told me to check it out online.  Which, of course, I did.  You might be interested in the way this study panned out, too.  Can you chart the historic mood of a country by checking on the emotional words that appear...or don't appear.


I had already saved a draft of this post when I saw another reference to it over at Read in a Single Sitting.  Her link was to this article in the Telegraph.

6 comments:

  1. Jenny,
    I loved Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--it's one of my favorite books. It's probably time to reread it now that summer is fast approaching! The mystery set in WW II Paris sounds like something I might like as well.

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  2. What an information and recommendation pack post. You will probably keep me happy for the rest of the day. I just read Kingsolver's Flight Behavior which is wonderful.

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  3. Jenny, just read the article about mapping emotions words in books through the years. Fascinating, but doesn't really surprise me. Did you see the study where someone mapped unhappy or angry words in TWITTER and Louisiana came out very high on the unhappy word usage scale?

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  4. Teresa - She is so good! I'm already loving it! The Fat Chef has a great premise, but the writing is pretty simplistic. Maybe the writing will improve; anyway, it is a great idea for a story.

    Commonweeder - Oh, another Kingsolver fan! She always engages me, and I regret neglecting her lately. Haven't read Flight Behavior but will certainly look for it now.

    Teresa - No, especially the use of fear words in the last 25-30 years. Haven't seen the Twitter study, but will look for it. Why can't we ever be close to the top on a positive study?

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  5. I loved Animal, Vegetable, Miracle!!!

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  6. Bybee - I' m already loving it. Now I realize how she made Prodigal Summer's setting so real!

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