It was high time I reread this classic. I found the story much more engaging that The Iliad — crafty Odysseus and his wily ways. There are so many stories in this epic that are embedded in our literary subconscious — Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, the Cyclops, revenge against the suitors, etc. Because of its legacy, I can’t rate this any lower than a five. And yet, I didn’t find myself rooting for Odysseus after all his hubris and, in particular, thinking of all the grieving fathers who lost sons during his exploits. And what for?
I’m not sure what to make of this Stephen King book. Mr. King narrated the audiobook, and he did a fine job. The premise was interesting: the main protagonist mysteriously began to lose touch with Earth’s gravity. Besides this supernatural twist, the book dealt with the poor treatment of a LGBTQ couple in a small Maine town. There were some fine moments of paradigm-shifting moments among the characters in the novel as they embraced inclusion. I can’t quite figure out the meaning of the main character’s elevation in the end.
This book stressed me out! I swear my blood pressure would creep up as rabid Cujo set about to do his evil. I even woke up in the night with images of the huge dog staring at me through the car window, waiting to tear me to shreds.
I finished this 500+ page book in four days. In stark contrast, it took me at least a month to slog through the same number of pages of a Wallace Stegner novel. Stephen King books have a way of flying by.
An entire book dedicated to the premise that our devices and social media are harmful to our concentration. Two hundred pages of studies, yet hardly any advice on how to mitigate the effects. The final chapter dealt in platitudes. This was a waste of time.
A breezy space opera with interesting science (space flow systems that enable long distance FLT travel) and fun characters. Lady Kiva is the space version of Beth from Yellowstone. First of a series and I will probably read them all.
A bleak, bleak story that could have been written about my upbringing. I am giving this book a five-star rating because of the writing and how perfectly Stegner captured the angst of living in the perpetual get-rich-quick ambition that plagues some people.
It took me more than twenty years to read this first volume of the epic Story of Civilization by Will Durant. Now, I hope the read the remaining ten volumes over the course of the next year. My history education is underway!
This collection of essays makes a rational and persuasive argument for a material universe, and by implication means that our lives are meaningless blinks in an eternity of unthinking time and space. You get the feeling that Lightman wishes it were otherwise (like us all), but wants to lay it out as he sees it.
A highly readable account (as always) from John McPhee of a difficult subject. In this case, Geology. I read this to acquaint myself with the unusual mountain and desert terrain that we’ve encountered here in Arizona. I have learned a lot about geology in general from this short book. It’s also given me a whole new perspective on Time and the universe. A million years is nothing in geology, but uncomprehending to the human mind.
Highlights
Deffeyes is a big man with a tenured waistline. His hair flies behind him like Ludwig van Beethoven’s. He lectures in sneakers. His voice is syllabic, elocutionary, operatic. He has been described by a colleague as “an intellectual roving shortstop, with more ideas per square metre than anyone else in the department-they just tumble out.”
The inclination of a slope on which boulders would stay put was the angle of repose.
On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information.
Since the late Miocene, the earth’s magnetic field had reversed itself twenty times—from north to south, from south back to north—and the dates of those reversals had by now become well established.
