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listenin' to LIFE by 'Keef' Richards
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The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom. Few plot weaknesses but overall enjoyed it. Curiously, it shares some common ground and part of the ending from a couple of my (as yet unpublished) short stories I wrote back in 2009 - 2011. great minds think alike?
Bought and read it last week, whilst having a break from reading an old 1960s paperback by Gardner Fox (who created a number of DC Comics characters) called Escape Across The Cosmos. It's pretty dire but now back reading it! Glad to have read Mitch's book as an antidote to Gardner's.
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Having been on my bookshelf for many years, I finally got around to reading my forty-seven year old paperback edition of James Blish's short story collection 'Galactic Cluster' (though as I am 45, of course I haven't had it since publication!). Curently reading 'A Work of Art', in which scientists in the far flung future, place composer Richard Strauss' mind in a 'volunteer's' body, he sets to composing again and one line by a character is interesting, to wit:-
'They were great back in the old days - men like Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin' and other non film composers mentioned.
It's interesting how he describes the way music is composed in the future - way off I feel but some interesting synonyms with the rise today of 'non composers'. Blish describes musical terms in the classical sense, through the story before mentioning these film composers. So I presume he was both a classical music buff and a film music one also.
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I have had this book sitting on a shelf for a couple of months. I'll begin 'Julian' by Gore Vidal sometime this weekend.
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Posted: |
Nov 16, 2012 - 2:29 PM
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By: |
Joe E.
(Member)
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Well researched and fascinating book by Randall Larson...and this is only volume one of four.
I am also reading this book.
Somehow I suspect a great many people frequenting this board would be interested in this book, and the three subsequent volumes. Crazy, I know...
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It's been months since I last posted in this thread. While I shamefully haven't read nearly as much lately as I'd like or as I probably should, I have read a fair bit more since the second Barsoom book back in April. I've been concentrating on nonfiction:
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, by Jane Goodall, with Phillip Berman. When I was an anthropology undergrad at UF in Gainesville I attended a talk she gave in Jacksonville in early 2000, I think it was, and bought this book of hers at the event, but never got around to reading it until this year.
In it, Goodall discusses her life, work and beliefs, with some bigger musings on good and evil, what's wrong with the world, what's right, and why she's optimistic things can and will be made better. A great deal of it is very spiritual / religious in nature, something not generally associated with most scientists and something to which I personally have some difficulty relating. However, her advocacy of things like basic decency, working to effect positive change, etc. is something I treasure, and really I'll read anything of hers just for the stories spanning her decades of working with chimpanzees.
Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, by Don Johanson, with Kate Wong. A couple years ago I attended a talk by Don Johanson as part of FSU's Origins series, and as with the Jane Goodall appearance years before I enjoyed his talk and bought his book (getting it autographed this time), but didn't get around to reading it until this year.
This one is more focused on just the author's work and his field of expertise than the previous book, with less in the way of advocacy for social change. It's still a solid, compelling read, albeit one not offering me anything beyond what I'd expected. It interleaves sections on various hominids with sections on developments over the decades in the field of human evolution, and is structured as a pair of intertwined chronologies. Like Goodall's book, it has a lot of autobiographical material, but also looks at the work of several other paleoanthropologists. I enjoyed this one a bit more than Reason For Hope, though I'd recommend either. The next book I read, however, is considerably better than either...
Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, by Carl Sagan. Unlike the previous two books, I got this one without attending a talk by the author (alas, if only - he died just before it was published, and he's the only one of these three I never got to see / meet in person), and also unlike them, I read it when it came out rather than letting it wait around on my bookshelves until this year before I picked it up. I wanted to revisit it, though.
This one is really a series of essays on all the things Sagan liked to write about, and had frequently written about before, but he continued to find new and insightful things to say about them, as always; the subject matter ranges from the creation of the universe to the possibility of life on Mars, with many tangents reaching into numerous realms of nature and fields of human endeavor. Many of the essays were previously published in Parade and the like, though they are revised here. The epilogue, written by Ann Druyan after his death, is personal and touching.
Sagan was a much better writer than most, and this book was easily the most pleasurable of the three I've listed here so far, speaking purely from an appreciation of his ability to wield the language; I suspect this would hold true even for those readers who might disagree with some of his conclusions, or the causes for which he advocated.
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Posted: |
Nov 23, 2012 - 12:14 PM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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Just finished Child of the Light by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge, the first volume of The Madagascar Manifesto trilogy, a sort of magical realist historical story based on the Madagascar Plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan). I found it far more engaging than I expected to and am looking forward to completing the trilogy. Currently working through Off the Sand Road, the first of two volumes collecting the supernatural fiction of Russell Kirk (yes, that Russell Kirk). Hmm. Just about halfway through my organic chemistry textbook, and, unusually for a textbook, I think I've read just about every word of it so far! It's been too long since I last posted to list everything I've read since, but a few recent highlights include the collection Jagannath by Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, Town of Shadows by Lindsay Stern and Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. I'm looking forward to winter vacation so I have the energy to dig into some nonfiction again.
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