Doctor Zhivago

 Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak - One Star ☆ 

Yeah, yeah, I know... won the Nobel Prize and the Soviet Union would not let Pasternak leave the country to accept his award. But I didn't find it an interesting enough read to finish. One Star.

It's just another windswept Russian steppe story withering in the summer heat, freezing in the winter cold with a war to supply some action. Isn't that a Russian genre? Tolstoy did that. Solzhenitsyn did that.

I'm not saying it isn't a good read. I am saying I didn't finish it.

Oh, and the movie is too long also.

George W. Parker

Books vs ebooks

I can't begin to estimate the tonnage of paper I have moved from house to house in my lifetime. So I have finally broken down and accepted ebooks as my standard reading method. Lying on the couch or sitting at the kitchen table my phone is just easier to use. From John Norman to Norman Mailer, H.R. McMaster to Edward Snowden the books are out there.

But, like many old LPs when you are trying to find them on CD, you may not find some books out there. That is why I still have two bookcases of "real" books waiting to be boxed up for my next move.

George W. Parker

A New Effort

Once again I am taking a stab at "Socializing" and "Connecting." (I wonder what the over and under is on the number of days this will last?)

I have updated my website - https://www.georgewparker.com

and consolidated my blogs into one so it is the same on:

Blogger - https://georgewparkertalking.blogspot.com/

Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4784146.George_W_Parker/blog

Website - https://www.georgewparker.com/blog

From 2021 - KISS

If you write, you probably want to be read. This is not Tolstoy's Russia, all snowed in with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. People have so many other options (distractions) today: TV, Movies, Video consoles, Pokemon Go, and if nothing else they can solitaire on their phones. I think when you write it's important to follow the KISS method (Keep It Simple Stupid.) Make your story accessible. Keep it moving. Make it about something. Be entertaining!

George W. Parker

From 2021 - Work

Writing is work. Thinking is a chargeable operation. Aside from actually stringing works together there's research, plotting out the story, character development, editing, making time to write, and a thousand other things to do before you even get to the selling your product stage; which I find is the hardest of all work. 

Writing has been the one constant in my life for over fifty years. I have set it on a shelf for extended periods while I tried to make a living and raise a family. But it was up there on the shelf staring down at me at all times. I always knew it was waiting.

It's work. It's fun and exciting. It's humbling and frustrating. It is what I do.

George W. Parker

From 2021 - New Year Media Clean-up

 I have spent the last three days updating my customer-facing author internet points. I have bounced around from Amazon to Google to Apple to Barnes and Noble to Smashwords to Facebook to Instagram to YouTube to Goodreads and to a bunch of other web places. Thirty-eight specific spots where I verified access, checked links, and standardized my written content, fonts, images, and color schemes. And I haven't even started checking my gaggle of email addresses!

I still need to link this blog to my Amazon Author page, my personal website, (Which looks good in a browser and good on a phone; but I ported it over to my Facebook business page and the covers are all over the place. Give me a break! And I'm not sure it's a viable presence hidden below four other tabs anyway.) edited my favicon and who knows what else. 

I don't think I am doing anything special having all these access points. I think we all do everything we can to sell a book. There seems to be a new platform popping up every day. That can lead to a haphazard look and approach. Like me, keep refining that "Look." If you had a "Look" before you ever uploaded a file to Kindle, maybe you are a Marketer.

George W. Parker

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

translated by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley

By my personal star rating system a five star book represents a book I will read again. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ by that measurement.

I won’t try to sell you on reading this book, you should already be sold. But I will explain why I enjoy it. I have read this book at least five times since the late sixties. And as you see by my rating, I will read it again. The first time, I read it over night. Like ninety minute movies, two hundred page novels are few and far between these days. There should be more of them so you can enjoy them more often. You can’t read Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on a lark.

Solzhenitsyn shows us the best of human nature. Denisovich retains the ability to be a man in the worst of situations. He was not a brick layer. But he has learned and mastered that trade during his years in prison. He takes satisfaction in applying that art and in the fact the others in his work gang appreciate his abilities. He has retained his individuality.

In the work gang’s return to their barracks Solzhenitsyn presents the vagaries of life. The definitions of friend or foe, right or wrong are simply cast by changing circumstances.

Could you ask for more from another three hundred pages?

George W. Parker