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I'm pretty sure that in "A Year In The Maine Woods" Bernd Heinrich says that trees which produce seeds will all all do so on the same year, and only about every five years. I guess that when they produce a lot of seeds there is a bump in rodent population because of the food supply being so excellent, so the next few years those trees won't produce as many seeds because if they did there'd be no point, the rodents would eat them all. They have to wait a few years for the rodents to die off a bit. This seems to be the pattern this year, because we had little trees popping up all over the place this spring. My neighbor even had some in her dog run. And this year there's so many squirrels being hit on the road that it's almost causing a road hazard.
42) "Tom O'Bedlam" by Robert Silverberg
It escaped my notice, when I said in my last post that there was a very 70s feel to this book, that in fact it came out in the mid 80s. I don't know if he did the 70s feel on purpose or if he was just old enough that it came out that way. Probably the latter, because there seemed to be a certain... cultural / racial insensitivity? I think it won't be too spoilery to say that a lot of people die, but that it felt to me as though most of them were not considered important because they're non-white people. The main female character does hook up with a light-skinned black guy near the end of the book, and there were a few very specifically ethnic background characters, but this felt like a clunky effort. "Here, let me go out of my way to give you some non-whites." And the 'saintly' guy mentions having lived in an area with a lot of 'immigrants' and having moved on because he didn't like their company. It felt so... non-saintly, to my sensibilities.
And I can't get started on the whole business of 'bitch' being equated with 'slut'. For one thing because it just gets too long and complicated and I have to tell half the story to make it make sense. The story would have been better off without that character.
. . .
This whole writing thing is really not working, today. Every time I've tried to write I've gotten so sleepy it's ridic. I should really get to bed, I want to be up fairly early to go help with the Historical Society Pie Bake tomorrow. (It's the yearly fund raiser.)
It escaped my notice, when I said in my last post that there was a very 70s feel to this book, that in fact it came out in the mid 80s. I don't know if he did the 70s feel on purpose or if he was just old enough that it came out that way. Probably the latter, because there seemed to be a certain... cultural / racial insensitivity? I think it won't be too spoilery to say that a lot of people die, but that it felt to me as though most of them were not considered important because they're non-white people. The main female character does hook up with a light-skinned black guy near the end of the book, and there were a few very specifically ethnic background characters, but this felt like a clunky effort. "Here, let me go out of my way to give you some non-whites." And the 'saintly' guy mentions having lived in an area with a lot of 'immigrants' and having moved on because he didn't like their company. It felt so... non-saintly, to my sensibilities.
And I can't get started on the whole business of 'bitch' being equated with 'slut'. For one thing because it just gets too long and complicated and I have to tell half the story to make it make sense. The story would have been better off without that character.
. . .
This whole writing thing is really not working, today. Every time I've tried to write I've gotten so sleepy it's ridic. I should really get to bed, I want to be up fairly early to go help with the Historical Society Pie Bake tomorrow. (It's the yearly fund raiser.)
.