well what books do you like
um a broad spectrum my tastes seem to change over the years um
i like uh uh mysteries adventure some science fiction
i like uh Sagan i read i read just about everything that he puts out
uh-huh
um Robert Ludlum
great
and i've just started uh i got a whole set
of books on uh Sherlock Holmes
uh-huh
so i'm just getting into that uh that's kind of uh interesting it's unique
yeah
how about yourself
yeah those are great uh i've been a Sherlock Holmes fan for years and i think i've read most of his stuff multiple numbers of times
oh you have
uh i just find it very relaxing and very enjoyable and i always hope for my memory to to fail me so after a couple of years i can pick up a story and read it again
uh
oh okay uh i got a whole set i got a set for Christmas
that's great
so i've just started into some in to him i haven't uh i've uh i think uh they had uh uh
Sherlock Holmes uh miniseries on uh on educational TV
uh-huh
uh channel two up here i'm not sure what it is down there and they had uh uh some of his i i started watching that and i got interested in it so that's why i got the gift
yeah yeah
so you've been doing it for a long time
yeah i started reading them years and years ago and i it's and i i'm not really much of a mystery
reader although i've always liked Sherlock Holmes and then somebody turned me on to a guy named Dick Frances
um and he's uh a former jockey and he writes mystery stories and they always involve horse racing in one form or another he's very very good if uh you've never read him
that would be a great opportunity
no i mean is Dick Frances
his name is Dick Frances and any book store owner will know who Dick Frances is
um yeah
and you can pick up any of his stuff and you can just sort of try it and if you like his style well he's written i'd say twenty or twenty five
oh okay yeah um
novels you know he's quite quite clever
my taste runs runs to uh Ludlum
you know that type of
uh the adventure stuff
yeah adventure yeah uh some of that gets i don't know i think they've got ghost writers now on a lot of them and uh they just put their name to it because years ago either that or my tastes are changing um
yeah
they just don't have the same depth that they seem to have before
huh yeah you know i always suspected uh uh
uh Michener of doing that you know i read some of his early stuff and then it seemed like his later stuff they would be these long long long passages that were just of inferior quality it
it was yeah it was uh just to fill a page
yeah i mean i just got the feeling that he sort of has a coterie of of students and he says okay go write three chapters on this and he and he kind of he might write some stuff i don't think he writes all his stuff every word i may be wrong
yeah you're probably right um
uh
i'm trying to think of that uh
Stephen King
yeah
have you read any of his
i've read a couple of his things i i just wasn't that crazy about him
which really puts me in the i know in the vast minority
no no no no i've i've read a couple of them that weren't too bad um
my oldest boy is into him so he's oh you've got to read this dad you've got to read that dad but i'm not that's not really not my uh cup of tea
yeah
except the
the latest one he's got out uh it's uh
fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred page he had he had published it about ten years ago
huh
and he's got it out now with the with the the full text no cuts and no
he he explains that when he did it the first time because of publishing costs they asked they asked him to cut it back a third
yeah
so that's what he did now he's got it out and
i can't even think of the name of it
but it's starting out pretty good um it's something that's not
huh
like his present style
yeah yeah
um
but other than that um
i've read Dune i don't know if you've read Dune
i read Dune years ago and i again you you i uh i just did not care for Dune i read through it all it was laborious i i
uh
felt i had to get through it and when i put it down i never wanted to read another thing by that guy again
to read it again yeah i've read uh i like the original
Dune and then they had
he's had two others after that which i didn't care for at all so i kind of fell off
yeah yeah
yeah
um
but again i realize i mean i all my friends were saying how great Dune was and i just could not
could not get into it i read the whole thing but i didn't enjoy didn't enjoy it that much
have you read any science fiction at all
i really read a lot of science fiction and Asimov is one of my favorite authors
yeah
i think his stuff is is great just going back to his very early works and almost anything he writes i try to read
uh
even i haven't read any of his recent but i've read some of his old uh uh things and in yeah i i like him he's he's not too bad some of it's
uh not him but some of the other science fiction i mean it's just so uh uh
like uh Tolkien
yeah
i never could get into him
interesting and i was just crazy about Tolkien i read his stuff and i reread it and i read the whole twelve hundred pages aloud to my son when he was uh a young boy when he was about eight or nine
we would just read ten pages every night and i just did that you know for a half a year until i'd read the whole thing out loud
huh that's interesting
and uh
yeah my
um both my boys are into him but i don't know it's just something i
i don't know if i had the time or put myself in the frame of mind for it
yeah yeah
what do you do what do you do for um
educational
anything
well uh uh being a college professor there's just a certain amount of academic reading i do as a matter of course
oh so you have to you're forced into it no matter what
well well well yeah forced is probably not too strong a word but
yeah yeah
to keep up in your field you usually have to do some uh some technical reading but uh i actually like um
for technical reading i like to read what i call uh soft core science like uh Discovery Magazine
that's i get that
which i like very much and uh
and then uh National Science Foundation puts out an excellent publication called Mosaic
with uh the and they get some of the best scholars scholars and scientists in the country to write articles that can be understood
they're not highly technical but they're not probably not as simplified as in Discovery
huh
but they're very good except i couldn't i just got on their list somehow because at one time i did some research for them and i'm not really sure how one would go about getting this but it's it's excellent
uh
for finding out what's going on in fields other than your own
yeah have have you ever heard of the Source Book Project
i don't believe so
Source Book Project
uh it deals with anomalies um
whether it's uh animal vegetable or mineral or or geologic anomalies
oh no no
you know like uh uh rain fish
you know that type of thing
oh that would be fascinating
or the uh
the uh is it the Mima mounds in
um Kentucky i think
or Tennessee
i don't know
what what about them
well it's just the Source Book Project um
it gives you a short
uh synopsis of of whatever they're talking about and then it gives you all the sources
that you can look up
uh-huh
if you're interested in it
i see okay that would be a very interesting thing
and they they tried to uh
uh throw out the uh sensationalism you know like flying saucers and all that kind of stuff
right
the things that they that they publish are documented sightings you know and an or
digs or whatever
uh-huh
um i'm kind of in to that i'm uh uh i belong to the Narragansett Archeology Society so i like going back and you know
digging up things it gives me you know uh it's kind of a a thrill to see something that nobody's looked at for two or three thousand years
yeah do you have any interest in Stonehenge or did you ever have any
uh
as far as being uh yes that type of thing yeah that's what these Mima mounds were supposedly like early Stonehenge in America
um
yeah i'm fascinated with that kind of stuff in fact just recently uh a few days ago
they discovered a cave
