From Gems Press
by Gem Groom
Download the free ebook (epub).
Paperback.
Gem’s Fascinating Leisure Reader: Volume Two shares the best of our recent discoveries from deserving but long-neglected texts. This volume includes three dozen of our new favorite anecdotes and passages, ones we think you’ll really enjoy and find interesting, gathered into book form. Gem’s Readers are basically bathroom readers for smart people.
We aim to delight and amaze you with gems that we have unearthed that you would never find otherwise. The idea is to give you a collection of appealing and unexpected true tales and musings that you can immerse yourself in any time you have leisure to transport yourself.
Some of the excerpts are funny; some are rather odd or alarming (although they should not give you nightmares); but they are all, in their way, fascinating. Some are poignant, some are wise, some bits may even be enlightening or may — uh-oh — give you ideas, but the unifying thread is that we found them all well worth reading. So we rescued them from oblivion and present them here for your delectation.
Even the direst adventures in this book are often recounted in great good humor, letting us laugh at others’ misfortunes. For instance, in the excerpt from Seven Wives and Seven Prisons, we get to see how things got off to a bad start for the fellow, and why things were likely to continue in that way, and we must admit we find it funny. Also funny were Mozart’s letters to his father, explaining in the first one that of course he was not going to get married, what kind of idiot would wreck his life and career that way, and explaining in the second letter, a few months later, that Constanze is a nice girl and he needs a housekeeper, so, uh….
With this book, you’ll have close at hand some rather random — let’s say eclectic — nonfiction bits to take you away from your everyday world to some very different times and places. It’s a time-traveling vacation. Where else can you so easily immerse yourself in experiences you didn’t even know you wanted: making an amateur movie in 1921 or calculating the financial cost of being imprisoned in the Tower of London for 22 months? We’re not saying all the information in this book is useful, or correct (whales don’t pretend to be islands and let you hang out on them until you light the campfire), but we do think you’ll consider time spent with Gem’s Fascinating Leisure Reader: Volume Two time well spent.
You may want to also check out Volume One.
