Reports coming in from around the country and we have our typical deaths by landslide. This is what happens in a mountainous country such as Korea. I’m sure there was the usual share of farmers too – they go into their fields to shore up dikes and levees for irrigation and end up being swept away.
It’s been a few years since these kinds of rains here. We’ve had our storms, but not this consistent pounding for over a week. Drainage and flood management systems have improved immensely over the years, but you just can’t overcome heavy rains for such a sustained period.
On another note, the rain had me spending my Sunday with the goal of reading a book. I started The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester this morning and just finished it. I’m such a fan of Forester, and I’ve read his Hornblower series twice through (10+ books, Forester died while writing an 11th), so I’ll gladly read anything he’s done. He also wrote The African Queen, which is the book upon which the famous Bogart/Hepburn movie was base. I love that movie – it was one of those that would come on TV every so often – an event like The Wizard of Oz, back in the day when if you didn’t actually sit down and watch the movie it was gone again until next year.
In any case, I wasn’t disappointed by The Good Shepherd at all. You can’t go wrong when you’re on a destroyer in the North Atlantic escorting a convoy of 37 ships – most definitely going to be a page turner. And there are only 271 pages, so it was pretty quick and easy. The action drove the story wonderfully, and I’m already well-versed in Forester’s style as well as the naval terminology that goes with the genre so I didn’t suffer in that respect.
Even having read the book, I don’t think I’ll have any problem seeing the movie, Greyhound, written by and starring Tom Hanks and based on the book. I pretty much devour anything nautical like this (I’m working my way through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin (Master and Commander) series, and have most of those books too). As a matter of fact, Hornblower and Aubrey take up a whole shelf in my study.
To this day I wonder why I didn’t join the Navy (I actually know why, but the story is so uninteresting I’ll just leave it at that).