Found it on Kindle Blogs: Reading Clive Cussler

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UPDATE: Publishing blogs on Kindle is, alas, a thing of the past. But blogs themselves, of course, are still "a thing." That includes the blog, Reading Clive Cussler.
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This is a new feature I'm thinking about adding: reviews of blogs that you can subscribe to via Kindle. I've been subscribing to the daily Kindle feed of the National Catholic Register for almost as long as I've had my Kindle, but I hadn't really started sampling other blogs via Kindle until recently. Since I can try each one for free for 14 days, I thought I would sample some and, if I like them, cancel my Kindle subscription and just read the blogs online for free.

Clive Cussler
Clive Cussler, maritime
adventurer, prolific author
The first one I'll mention just called out to me because, as I've said before, I enjoy Clive Cussler's novels, even though they are formulaic (in fact, Cussler apparently just outlines the books, then has various "co-authors" write the actual novels). Anyway, the idea that someone wanted to annotate Cussler's books just caught my fancy. The blog is called, simply, Reading Clive Cussler, and its author (who calls herself The Thunder Child) is a woman after my own heart. Since each Cussler novel involves some legendary figure, article, or place from the distant past, and many contemporary readers are so poorly versed in history, art, and legend, the Thunder Child is probably performing a useful service in providing annotations on references to things arcane and unusual. I suspect, though, that she simply likes having an excuse to do a little quick research on such things and parsing out which references are based in fact and which are pure fiction.

Here's a sampling of the things she clears up for Cussler's readers:
  • From Spartan Gold: Balaclava train station 
  • From Pacific Vortex: the Merchant Marine 
  • From The Chase: Mesozoic Sea 
  • From Trojan Odyssey: Caltech (California Institute of Technology)
  • From Spartan Gold: Napoleon's Reserve Army
Thunder Child has been adding to this blog with some frequency for about a year, and has only touched on three or four of Cussler's many dozens of novels. At this rate, she'll be writing for the rest of her life, if she just keeps working through his bibliography. If she stays with  it, I hope she'll add an index so that readers can easily pull up all references from a particular title. On the other hand, her blogger profile lists dozens of blogs that she writes, with such varied titles as Interlock: The Jigsaw Puzzle Blog, Collecting Amelia Earhart, The Bible Reader, and The Bug Blog, so I suspect that Cussler does not have her full attention.

Anyway, Reading Clive Cussler is fun to dip into. I'm just a little jealous that someone else got the idea before I did.

©2012 Lisa A. Nicholas

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