The 306 Greatest Books #47 - A Doll's House

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List. 

A Doll's House is interesting because it is basically about the women's liberation movement long before there was ever a movement. The play is about a woman who has done nothing with her life except try to please two men, her father and her husband. However, it is when something tragic happens that she realizes that nothing is as perfect as it seems. The characters were written well and believable, and the story is very easy to read. Personally, I often have some issues reading plays because I feel I miss out on many of the hidden themes. Plays are often a lot denser with material because the "fluff" gets excised that you could potentially have in a novel, so anything left in the play is usually very important for the feel of the play or the plot. However, with A Doll's House I feel like I caught most of the subtle themes throughout the story and it was, like most plays, a very fast read. Definitely on my recommend list. 

The 306 Greatest Books #46 - Beowulf

I am going back and posting all of my previous book reviews so that they are listed on my site in chronological order. The reviews are dated for the time when I read the book, hence the reason many of them will be listed for times before this website existed. 

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Beowulf by an unknown author. This book can be found on the Sybervision Book List. 

I should start off my review of this story with the premise that I do not generally like stories that are written in "Old English" or something close to modern English, such as Shakespeare. They take too much for me to get invested in the story personally and I find that detracts from my enjoyment. The story of Beowulf is about a famous man who slays several monsters and eventually gets killed while taking down a dragon. The story is rather difficult upon first reading because of the illusions created by the author. Unlike The Divine Comedy though, the illusions are not related to contemporary concepts but it is more of a figurative language. For example, instead of saying "ocean" it becomes a "whale-path." So a first reading can be rather a rather arduous task but future readings present more opportunities for understanding. Overall, the story itself is very simplistic but I believe it is the rich language which is used to describe the story which caused it to be placed on the "100 Greatest Books of All Time" list. Overall, this is not a particular favorite of mine, mainly because the language is such a barrier for me.

Home Remodel - Our New Walkway

Note - This was originally published on my other site "The Geology P.A.G.E." but due to the content I have moved it here and backdated the post.

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Our New Walkway

This is our backyard before we put the walkway in. The walkway's main purpose was to stop Twix from getting so muddy when she ran around, so it is going to be rather long to cut out all the mud. You can see our outline spray painted on the ground.

Working on the path. It takes three layers to make sure everything drains and stays properly. A kind of "dry cement" layer, a sand layer, and the rocks on top. We also kept the old pathway blocks I purchased last year and put them in the middle of the path.

Veronica surveying the work done so far. This is how far we got at the end of day 1. Not to bad. Unfortunately that was one of our only days to work consistently on it.

Halfway done. Most of the time took digging up the ground, which Veronica did and laying the edging, which I did. Then both of us put down the layers and stamped them down but that did not take much time at all.

While working on this I knew we were getting a real BBQ, so I started working on a little patio for it. Veronica actually started this but I felt it needed to be perfect so I laid some sand down under it to flatten it out.

And this is it all done. The garden between the walkway and the garage took almost a week to just break up all the clumps of sod that were non-transportable.

And another look at the finished work from the back showing our new cherry tree and you can see the BBQ in the background.