One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
This is a grim reminder of how grateful I am not to be in communist Russia.
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3,653 days!
yesterday I saw on twitter a lady saying she was about to start reading Blood Meridian and if people had advice or comments. now half my feed is people talking about McCarthy.
Finished Jane Eyre despite it not really being my thing. 19th century christian morality and romance are maybe just lost on me. I can see the appeal though.
I started listening to A Brief History of Time. Iām already lost at chapter 2 when he started talking about the curvature of spacetime. I donāt always focus as deeply on audiobooks as I listen to them while cleaning, folding laundry or walking the neighborhood. Probably need the physical copy of this one.
One of the āmost boughtā but āleast finishedā books ever. I bought it when it first came out but did not find it very entertaining. My science background is weak
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In my his dark materials, the boy is reading that right now.
I actually took general relativity in college, and it was at least a thousand miles above my head. Turns out being good at math is not the same thing as being Einstein.
It was mostly math. And the math was mostly manipulating tensors, which are like if you took a matrix but instead of 2d grid, itās an n-d grid of equations that obey some rules like linearity. And the spacetime metric, which is sort of like a 4d object in 5d space but without assuming a 5th dimension exists. Anyway, itās really really really dense.
I get the same feeling when I look up quantum mechanics. Some parts make a lot of sense, but at some point you are just nodding along, vaguely following the calculus, some of which you can do, but you couldnāt get there by yourself, nor could you tie the simple answer back to far-reaching conclusions about the nature of reality.
I think it might have been possible, if I were a little smarter, and took 10 more math classes, and really didnāt care about anything but math. Iād love to go back and try again, but thereās no way Iām as smart as I was back then.
Anyway, itās not much like normal science, I think. (Except maybe fluid dynamics?) The math is so hard, and most of the weird conclusions just come directly from the math. Sometimes actudonks joke about how hard real analysis is, and this was like real analysis except way realer.
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Third book is really good imo. Agree the dark forest bogged down a bunch. Deaths End has tons of fun ideas all happening at once and it really comes together well iirc.
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Iām reading a book called The Rings of Saturn which describes a mediative walking tour in England. Itās basically a series of tangents as he walks through old seaside towns. Iām having trouble focusing as there isnāt really a plot.
Also started One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (audiobook) per a review from someone (or multiple people) on here.
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Great book, as were his two earlier ones.
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I have ready many fantasy novels by Murakami and Ishiguro so wanted to try another Japanese author. Just finished Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon by Mizuki Tsujimura. Great read! Highly recommend it to fans of this genre.
The book is a short novel in five parts. The first four chapters are first-person accounts from four different characters seeking an opportunity, and having, one last conversation with someone theyād lost. The fifth chapter retells these first four stories from the perspective of the young go-between who arranges the meetings with the deceaseds.
The reasons for the encounters are very different and fascinating. The fifth chapter nicely closes the loop on the stories from a different vantage point.
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Just finished Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Ace Atkins. Set in Atlanta mostly, around the time of the Reagan/Gorbachev Switzerland summit on SDI/Star Wars. The young protagonist thinks his motherās boyfriend is a Russian spy. The story is a pretty light read, but there is a bunch of murder and mayhem as well. Very few re what they seem. Would make an excellent movie. Only complaint is that in order to make it feel like 1980ās Atlanta, the author drops one or two references to stores, streets, people, etc., about every paragraph that isnāt dialogue. Got real old very fast. Might be very fun if you live/lived in Atlanta.
Just finished the 6 books in Red Rising. Wow. We all hold onto the youth favorites as never being able to be surpassed just like we all tend to like the music of our generation. I enjoyed this as much as Star Wars movies and LOTR books. The world is incredible. The characters are mostly all flawed and all heroic, but not equally. I am feeling a letdown now that I am done and need to wait on the finale. After 6 books I donāt know how this ends. In LOTR you know they will make it. In Star Wars you knew good would triumph. In Red Rising, most sides have shown good (couple exceptions) and all have shown evil, or at least evil capability. In some cases, the choice to do evil for the better good is even questionable. The way the story was told, in the first person for 3 books and then chapters from POV of key characters was really cool. I wasnāt sure I liked it at first when there were a bunch of chapters without Darrow, but then I got why. The history lessons, mythology, and astronomy were great. I was looking things up in middles of chapters (what would Sun look like for, Mercury? What about a Jupiter moon? What does Jupiter look like from Io?ā¦). Also had to search fan art for characters
Canāt recommend enough.
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Interestingā¦.I read the first and didnāt love it. Maybe Iāll have to give the series another shot.
Red Rising sets a nice foundation but, for me, the hook is the next book. After that I couldnāt stop. I was finding time to read 4-5 pages at a time mid day.
Starting Leviathan series now.
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Have been in a bit of a reading slump so revisiting one of my favorites, Kafka on the Shore.
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I grabbed a handful of books from my Grandmaās collection after she recently passed away. Just started The Good Earth.
The one by Pearl Buck?
Yes. I actually hadnāt heard of it.
working through
A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism (Truth to Power) by Daniel Sjursen.
i just got to andrew jackson