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I’m in. 30 books. No booklord.
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Jan 9, 2024 23:29
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 03:02 |
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Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge: 3/30 Wrinkle In Time It was fine? Some kids books don't really hold up, and since I didn't read this when I was younger, I don't have any nostalgia here. I can see myself having liked it if I read it when I was younger. On the other hand my ten year old nephew read it recently and was "meh" on it, but then has read a ton* and probably has better taste than I did at his age. * - Metaphorically. I did some weighing and some math, and a ton of books, mixed hardcore and softcover, would be about 2500 books. East of Eden This book wanders. It's not as tight as Steinbeck's other books, large portions of it is just describing a family that I guess are Steinbeck's ancestors. But I like a book that takes slow detours to get to its point. I also fell in love with Cathy Ames immediately. Every time I put this book down book I was thinking about her. Troilus and Cressida I haven't read a lot of Shakespeare, the fact that I needed autocorrect just now to get his name right is evidence of that, but this one was different. It's not great, but it is a lot of fun. It only makes sense if you already know the Iliad and the major characters. It's a comedy, practically slapstick. I enjoyed imagining how I would stage this, and in my imagination it looks like a series of Marx Brothers skits.
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Feb 8, 2024 17:32
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UltraShame posted:Name: UltraShame 15. Read the coolest loving book: E
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Mar 8, 2024 14:44
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Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge: 7/30 Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb Ah, you all know this book. I basically liked it, but not enough to get on the never-ending sequel-train. The Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen I know almost nothing about psychology, so this was difficult to read, because it didn't feel like it was quite correct but I don't have enough knowledge to say why. It posits that empathy is a degree, and an evil person is someone whose empathy level is at zero. Autistic people also have their empathy set to zero, but are able to manage it through being organized. There is measurable brain activity to back up some of this. Among other problems I have in this book, it covers psychopathy but not sociopathy, and glosses over the whole banality of evil thing. How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen I haven't read a lot of books on child rearing, but this is amazing, mostly because it has stories of parents being fed up with the kids and trying to manage those feelings. I empathize. But as I type this my wife is napping and my 3 yo is having a complete meltdown over being told to not hit his little sister, so maybe I need to review. Alpha and Omega by Harry Turtledove My father in law had a shelf full of dad books. After he passed away I took a couple, including this nice hardcover Turtledove, thinking that it'd be relaxing to read the master of alternate history. My mistake! This is not an alternate history book, possibly his only book that isn't. It takes place in the now and features biblical eschatology. To his credit, Turtledove has an okay handle on the politics of middle east, where everyone distrusts their enemies almost as much as they distrust their friends, for both religious and political reasons. There's a great throw-away piece of dialog where a reform Jew is concerned that all signs are pointing to a very angry, old testament god being the true god, the kind that would let the Shoah happen. There's also a lot that's not well written, including just the nuts-and-bolts of descriptions and characters with unique voices. It's tempting to not criticize too deeply, and just call this a Beach Read, but that's not fair to better writers of better Beach Reads.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:36
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Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge: 12/30 Beowulf - Seamus Heaney translation I read this slowly over a couple months as part of an online reading group (Catherine Project), and it was an amazing way to experience this poem. Reading only pieces at a time forced us to talk about all the stuff inbetween the exciting action bits, and those discussions really honed my understanding of this poem. Like what treasure actually means, what the digressions meant, what the culture meant, what monsters were, what is civilization and what is chaos. It was great. Readings on Beowulf Turns out this is a selection of pieces of larger works, intended for high school students. Most of it was review, but one essay did have a really good point on the stolen goblet. The Other Side Of The Mountain by Michael Bernanos and The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria A couple books that came up in a list of weird horror. In a strange way they remind me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, in that they're using things that come loaded with religious symbolism, but they're not using that symbolism, they're taking iconic things and using them in their own ways. Like, Beranos has people being calcified in ways that seems like the pillars of salt in Sodom and Gomorrah, but I don't think reading it biblically is helpful to understanding the book. Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher I picked this up randomly because I was bored a library while watching my kids play, and libraries always have parenting books in the kids play area. I flipped through it, and thought I'd just read the chapter on fatherhood, but I suddenly found myself sucked in. My daughter is a toddler, so it'll be a long time till any of this is useful, but there are ideas that'll stick with me for a while, and ideas that have already changed the way I read books.
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Apr 17, 2024 17:57
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 03:02 |
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Set a goal for number of books or another personal challenge: 16/30 When We Cease to Understand the World by Labatut, Benjamín This book is unique. It's novelistic, but non-fiction. Mostly. You can't read this and say "science makes us crazy", and you can't read this and say, "the smartest scientists are crazy." You can say that some science in the 20th century has led to horrors, and some scientists barely survived their own discoveries, and this book is about some (just some) of them. I was kind of surprised Godel didn't make an appearance, because when I think of "not understanding the world," his incompleteness theories are something I return once every few years to remind myself how it works. On Gravity: A Brief Tour of a Weighty Subject by Zee, Anthony After I finished the "When We Cease to Understand the World" I saw this lying on a stack of books, and it seemed an appropriate next book, so I let the universe guide me and picked it up and read it in a day. It's conversational. It hints at further depths. It's about symmetries and the action. It's an intermediate work that's best after you've refreshed yourself the rules you forgotten from that one physics class in college. It'll make you wish you took more classes. The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Mikhail, translated by Mirra Ginsburg I had a lot of trouble with this one, and I don't know if it's because of the translation I chose. Really this book should have been up my alley, with magic realism and religion. I might try this again later in my life with a different translater. The Passion According to G.H. by Lispector, Clarice I've been reading more spiritual books lately, and this one reads as somewhere between The Ascent of Mount Carmel and an encounter with an involuntary memory that never happened. No... let me start over. A woman squishes a cockroach by accident, and as it dies she starts to have involuntary spiritual revelations regarding everything, one at a time, once chapter at a time.
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May 3, 2024 16:34
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