Choosing Books

[aggienaut]

   This morning while I was huddling under the heater drinking my morning coffee I came across this fascinating three piece article: The Long Way Round: The Plane that Accidentally Circumnavigated the World and didn't even think about getting on with my day till I had finished reading through it. I think I'm going to order the book he mentions.



   And then it reminded me of another story of a crew trying to get around the world. While reading Peter FitzSimmons' "Gallipoli," he had mentioned that the German cruiser SMS Embden was lurking in the Indian Ocean threatening the ANZAC transports, and that the ship was eventually sunk and it's surviving crew marooned on an island, from which they then took a schooner on which they made it to Arabia, had many more misadventures involving bedouins and things before finally making it to Istanbul and being able to get on a train home. FitzSimmons just gave that overview but mentioned there was a book on it, and I had meant to get said book because it sounded interesting, but had forgotten until reminded this morning.

   But now I am confronted by the problem of that there are actually at least five books on the subject, all by authors I've never heard of. They all have about 4.2 of 5 stars from amazon and/or goodread and 6-7 reviews, but I'm assuming most readers/reviewers read only one of them so it's not really a good comparison. So how does one choose??

[Poll #2080976]




   In other news I'm slowly but surely composing the second episode of the podcast, my plan is to conflate all three of my Nigeria projects so I can thematically arrange all the best parts of all three. If I had more audio skills I actually have video interviews I did with local friends in Nigeria at the time which would be a fantasmical addition to the podcast (which may run more than one "episode" length if I put everything and the kitchen sink in, as I rather intend), but I'm not sure I have the audio magic to get the audio off the videos and into the audio recording.