Miscellaneous

This post has some miscellaneous entries which I felt weren't that easy to discuss a lot but that I still wanted to register here.

So, I have a small book commentary, a fun test and a list to think about.

1) I've recently read two books in Portuguese by Portuguese authors which weren't that great and for that I graded both books with a four out of ten.

The first was a set of comedy conversations imagined by a humorist artist during a radio show. I like his style and he is a great writer and comedian but I felt this book was not very good simply because it was a basic transcription of what he (and his co workers at the radio) said during that show.  

I think the texts themselves were funny but without his tone of voice, without the way he meant them to be said, some of the fun is lost. 

Most of the entries were also related to some kind of specific situation on going in the country or the world or just his ideas but since the texts are from 2014, some things now don't seem to be as pertinent.

I much prefer his texts in magazines or even his TV shows because things seem to be more fluid and the clever ideas and writing do seem much better done and easier to find funny.

The second was a classic. It's the travel diary of a sailor from the 16th century while he traveled to the other side of the world during the Portuguese expansion and discoveries.

From a writing point of views, of course the text isn't that easy. Some parts of it can sometimes be read during class at school but the language is, of course, demanding since it's not modern. Although the message comes across, it can be difficult to focus on it and to bear enough to keep going.

I had the thought my adult self would be much more inclined to read it now, with a different way of appreciating things but it was still a challenge and the result not very rewarding.

Some descriptions of the scenes he lived through are supposed to let the reader have an idea of how life used to be for sailors, for foreigners, for those having a first contact with different cultures but to be honest apart from the importance of the date in which he did his travels, the descriptions don't really point out the things I'd be more curious about, there's a lot of repetition in what he does and a distinctive distance between him as the hero of his adventures and his work as storyteller.

2) I was browsing the web and found a blog with an interesting post from this year:  https://bookdout.wordpress.com/2019/03/27/how-long-will-it-take-you-to-read-your-tbr-pile/

On the website Read It Forward there's a funny tool to let us calculate how long it would take to read and finish our TBR, which for many can be a daunting task, plus when it would happen and how old one would be.

 https://www.readitforward.com/tbr-time/

I did my math based on my Want to Read shelf in Goodreads and some bunch of books I own but that I didn't add up there yet:

Here are your TBR Time Results!

Reading all 622 books will take:

3 years and 1 months

You will finish your TBR pile on:

February 4, 2023

And you will be:

37

This is fun and an easy goal to achieve, were I able to just restrain myself to it. As any book lover, any reader would agree with, the problem is that for any book read, who knows how many would be added? But it's certainly fun to try...

3) I sometimes visit the blog of website BookBub because they have lists and I like seeing them. One of those lists is from this month and in it they present 15 romances to be considered by their readers as the best of 2019. Of course everyone's opinion is relative but out of curiosity, I must say I've only read four of those - liked them all by the way -, three are on my TBR and out of the remaining eight, I might try four if I were to find the book with a deal but four of them are not something that would interest me to read.

What about you, romance readers? Interesting some titles are repeated in different sites and "best of" lists of readers. Something about them, for certain....

Happy reading!