Quite Interesting....

I'm reading a couple of cool books.

1.  DROOD

This is a book that Dan Simmons released last year, and which just came out in paperback last month.  I picked it up when I saw it, because the hardcover was too big, and also because I've really enjoyed Dan Simmons's books in the past.  

This novel seems to be in a similar style to his previous novel The Terror, which is fiction, but is based on the facts of the true story of the Franklin Expedition.  In Drood, we are given a fiction based on the facts of Charles Dickens's final five years alive.  In 1865 Charles Dickens survived a horrible train crash while returning to London from France.  After the crash, Dickens got pretty weird, apparently, becoming obsessed with corpses and traveling around to dark and dangerous places in London in the middle of the night.  In the novel, he is obsessed with finding a man named Drood, who Dickens meets under mysterious circumstances in the aftermath of the train crash.

I'm not terribly far into the novel at this point.  I'm just shy of 200 pages in, and it is a near 800 page novel...but I'm finding it very addictive so far.  It is written from the perspective of Wilkie Collins, a contemporary of Dickens's.  

I have a feeling after finishing this novel, I'll want to read a lot of Dickens.  I've never read anything by him before, but I've bought my mother a few of his novels in the past, so I will read those.

Dickens's final novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  He never finished it.  Is there anything more fascinating than a mystery left unsolved?

2.  THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE

The Book of General Ignorance comes from the people who are behind the wonderful British Panel Show: Q.I.

Q.I. is hosted by Stephen Fry, and basically it is a quiz show where comedians on a panel are asked to provide answers to little known trivia.  The comedians are given points not so much for giving the correct answer, but for giving the most interesting answer.  The person with the most points at the end of the show wins.  What do they win?  They win the show.

You are penalized points if you give an answer to a question that "everyone knows is right", but is in fact WRONG.  The show does a great job of dispelling common myths, like that baseball was invented in Cooperstown, USA (WRONG!  It was invented by the English in the 1700s).  Or that glass is not actually a solid, but a very slow moving liquid (WRONG!  Glass is a SOLID.  To be specific, an AMORPHOUS SOLID.)  

The book contains all sorts of interesting bits of knowledge along these lines.  For instance: America was NOT named after the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, which is what everyone KNOWS is the right answer...

In fact, America is named after Richard Ameryk, a Welshman, and wealthy merchant of Bristol.  He was John Cabot's chief financier for his second transatlantic expedition in 1497 and 1498.

In way of evidence, the book states the following:

Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland.  As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him.  There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year [1497]: '...on St John the Baptist's day [24 June], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristow called the Mathew [Cabot's ship]', that clearly suggests this is what happened.

Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents.  This is the first use of the term 'America' to refer to the new continent.

The book then goes on to explain that the misconception that America was named after Amerigo Vespucci came from a French cartographer in 1507, who had seen the name America to describe the new continent on other maps, but who was not certain as to the name's origin.  He had assumed it was a latinized version of Amerigo Vespucci's first name, who had discovered and mapped South America from 1500 to 1502.

But Vespucci never used the term "America" to describe his discoveries.  This is because it was unfounded for anyone to name a discovery after their FIRST name.  It was always the LAST name that was used.  If America had been named after Vespucci, it would have been something like "Vespucciland."

The book has a whole host of other interesting facts...like that the largest living organism in the world is a honey fungus mushroom patch in Oregon, whose root system covers 2,200 acres, and is approximately between 2,000 and 8,000 years old.  It is all one connected root system.

The book also says the the colour of the universe is Beige.

I also just read that the capital of Thailand is not called Bangkok, but is actually called "Grung Tape".  Bangkok is a name that apparently only ignorant foreigners use.  The Thai haven't called the city by that name in over 200 years.  Bangkok was the name of the fishing village that existed in that location before the king Rama I moved the capital there and renamed the city in 1782.

Grung Tape is actually just the first part of the city's name.  The actual name is 152 thai characters long, consisting of 64 syllables.

The full name translates in English to:

Great City of Angels, the supreme repository of divine jewels, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of the reincarnated spirits.

This book is indeed Quite Interesting

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This blog entry has taken a while to do, which has distracted me from my task for this afternoon, which is to do some preliminary research into the Crusades.  It's for a movie idea I had a long while back, but something just clicked into place in my head yesterday about it, so I want to start doing some research and planning to see if the idea starts growing in my head even more.

So until next time!!!