I also have the Library of America collection of Robert Frost, and that is one of the best books I own.
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel Just started the chapter on teleportation wooooo
I'm reading Tim Willocks 'Twelve children of Paris'. Mattias Tannhauser is a beast. One of the best books ever written. In my opinion
Unfortunately Michio Kaku is past his prime. Heard him speak on this book at the Town Hall in Seattle and both my son and I were very disappointed in that it was little more than recycled ideas.
Hardly surprising. I met Terry Eagleton this year, and discovered to my horror that he gave the same speech (word for word) that he was giving in the early 90s, and can even be found on YouTube from the mid 00s.
My friend let me borrow "The Oath" by Frank Peretti. I'm really liking it. It's very interesting and it's very good.
Just picked up a 1921 edition of Joseph Conrad's Victory at a used book store. Going to re-read that. When I first saw it I hoped for a moment it was a 1915 edition, but no such luck.
Read Nostromo. Great book. F. Scott Fitzgerald said he'd rather have written Nostromo than any other novel.
I've just discovered the Newfoundland author Michael Crummey. He was at the Ullapool book festival, this year, and gave an excellent reading and discussion. Lovely man, with a great, understated sense of humour, who knows what it's like to live life on the edge of the settled world. I finished his novel Galore, and am presently reading another of his novels, also set in Newfoundland, called Sweetland. A really unique and worthwhile author.
Hoping to finish Ray Bradbury's "The October Country" soon. I've enjoyed all the short stories so far. It's much more enjoyable than a previous compilation I read.
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Published 2014, won the 2015 Pulitzer. And as I turned each page, I understand why more and more.
I'm re-reading Breakfast of Champions with my husband who's never read it, and plan to pick up S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst after that! Has anyone started that one? I've heard it's fantastic.
I collect copies of The Great Gatsby! One of my many weird quirks. Love F. Scott, but I did try reading Franny and Zooey many, many years ago and didn't love it. I never finished it though, so I need to take a look with fresh eyes, probably!
Just finished reading Sandman volume 2, because a friend of mine is tired of hearing me bitch and moan about how much I despise comic books, and has made me the deal that for every entry of Sandman (a series he thinks I might like) he'll read a canto of Dante. Fine, deal, whatever. I'm also reading The Major Themes of Robert Frost by Radcliffe Squires, and reading the second half of the Robert Frost biography by Jay Parini. A student's work is never done. :3
I recently tried getting back into getting through TDC, but I find it heavily allusive to the classical world, something of which my knowledge lacks. Do you know which parts might have a clearer pertinence to the human condition or spiritual matters? My interest flagged around Canto VII. ETA: Wikipedia's synopsis makes the Bolgias look more agreeable to myself.
As you go on, you'll find it less allusive to the classics, and more concerned with theology. Especially the theology of Thomas Aquinas, which I find very difficult to wrap my head around to be honest. The whole thing is really about the human condition in one sense of one interpretation. Dante does start in the dark, earthly wood of sin, remember.
oBeen reading Green by Jay Lake. It's an early-2000s fantasy novel about a generic slave revolt, and while the character development is a bit lackluster the scenery description seem to be pretty solid. The narrative flow is, how to describe it... It's written in the format of the main character looking back to when she was a child and how her life went to hell. A few things that bothers me with this kind of narrative. + At the beginning she literally tells me (the reader) to be patient so she can explain how she got to the point where she's a jaded/bitter woman (ok, rightfully so) who forgot her identity, her culture, and her language. I'm not really used to this kind of narrative where the main character tells you flat out that he/she must first explain everything that had happened in the past before getting to the present. I mean, sure I now understand how she lost it all (re: her slave masters would beat her if she did anything remotely associated with her lost culture), but wouldn't it have been better to stick to the present (when she's a woman) and have that information be revealed to us through time? + When she meets her slave master, get ready for this... She spoils the slave master's fate! She helpfully informs me/the reader that years later, she would be walking away from the old croon's corpse with her head held tightly in the MC's fist. So any worry about how she'll get out of this mess is gone because I know that eventually she'll go stab-happy on the witch. + Everyone in that setting is evil! I mean, I know she's a slave and all, but Christ, is there no one in the setting that's anti-slavery? Granted they likely come a bit later but good Lord! + Why is she the only slave in the big creepy manor she works in? The blurb mentions she rallies the other slaves to a revolt but I'm, again, 51 pages in and she's the only slave in the bok. Just a random question, was there a noticeable downgrade of quality in the fantasy genre in the early-2000s? I've been reading a lot of fantasy books published in that time-frame lately and I've noticed they're all kind of stale, repetitive and problematic. Has the fantasy genre improved over the years?
The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Clayton M. Christensen As someone who most would consider a leftie after a discussion on how society should be constructed, I am eating the entire thing and spitting out the bones. I think the first few pages had more wtf than you could fit in a 50m pool, but the examples -- goodness I need examples -- are insightful and helpful in grasping the concepts espoused. There is are a plethora of examples of a sentence pattern that irks me no end, but I might make a new thread for that.
