FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON

"Now when an American has an idea he looks for another American to share it.  If there are three of them they elect a president and two vice-presidents.  If there are four they appoint a secretary and their staff is ready to function.  If there are five they convene in a general assembly and their club is formed"--From the Earth to the Moon

"And yet they were planning only to send a projectile to the moon.  This is a rather brusque way of establishing relations, even with a satellite, but it is in very common use by civilized nations"--ibid.

Yesterday I finished The Innocents Abroad.  There's still the foreword and the afterword, but they won't take long.  I'm also close to finishing that book about fifty architectural ideas.

So now I'm starting a new book.  I chose Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon because I read the Classics Illustrated comic book version when I was a kid.  It's about a group of Americans being shot to the moon from a giant cannon, with lots of scientific information about the moon, though with nineteenth-century limits.  Verne knew how to write adventure stories with a little-boy appeal along with the science and technology stuff.  I read over forty pages just today.

From reading to writing:  I've started some new blogs. (If blogger.com has a limit on how many blogs one address can open, I don't think I've reached it.) I now have a total of five, including this one and memoirslam.blogspot.ca .  They're "Poems" at jjmatthewspoems.blogspot.ca ; "Translations" at jjmatthewstranslations.blogspot.ca ; and "Fairy Tales Retold" at jjmatthewsfairytales.blogspot ca . I've posted my first Dumbass adventure ("The Golden Goose") at the fairy tale blog, and my translation from Greek of a few parts of Sophocles' Prometheus Bound at the translation blog.  But I'll have to write some poems before I can post them at the poetry blog. (I've started work on a Cinderella poem.)

And now I've included two quotes from the book, breaking my usual limit of one per post. (Rules are made to be broken.)