Books

Finished Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie Macdonald Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante Babel, R.F. Kuang Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Started The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy 2666, Roberto Bolaño Mythos, Stephen Fry Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Sean O’hagan Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves David Copperfield, Charles Dickens Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell A Heart So White, Javier Marias The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis Ongoing / Non-narrative The Complete Poems & Plays, T....

Frank Martin uncrosses his arms and takes a puff on the cigar. He lets the smoke carry out of his mouth. Then he raises his chin toward the hills and says, “Jack London used to have a big place on the other side of this valley. Right over there, behind that green hill you’re looking at. But alchohol killed him. Let that be a lesson. He was a better man than any of us....

Why did Gaspery-Jacques get sent to Ohio where he happened to run into Mirella? It wasn’t his decision, was it? Why would the Time Institute want to do that? Was it an accident? It seems too unlikely to be an accident… I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world....

Finished Recursion, Blake Crouch ⭐⭐⭐ Story of our life, Ted Chiang ⭐⭐⭐ Five Little Indians, Michelle Good ⭐⭐ Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Exit West, Mohsin Hamid ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Anomaly, Herve Le Tellier ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ American Gods, Neil Gaiman ⭐⭐⭐ Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy The Odyssey, Homer Unfinished >50% complete The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King ⭐⭐⭐ Shutdown, Adam Tooze ⭐⭐ <50% complete Crashed, Adam Tooze Neuromancer, William Gibson Split Tooth, Tanya Tagaq Beloved, Toni Morrison Sutree, Cormac McCarthy Check out The following are from this Hacker News thread:...

A quote highlighted by Colleen: By the time he entered university, Saeed’s parents prayed more often than they had when he was younger, maybe because they had lost a great many loved ones by that age, or maybe because the transient natures of their own lives were gradually becoming less hidden from them, or maybe because they worried for their son in a country that seemed to worship money above all, no matter how much other forms of worship were given lip service, or maybe simply because their personal relationships with prayer had deepened and become more meaningful over the years....

This book really pits two of my beliefs against one another. On the one hand, I believe the value of specific, physical places and our relationships with them is vastly underrated. It provides meaning, connects us to the past and encourages a deep respect for people and places that is a necessary counterweight to the obvious trends of the ephemeral, impersonal nature of our modern digitized lives. It is the place from which all efforts at conservation should begin....

7% : The winds of the world known by the patient. It’s a lovely passage. The Wikipedia page on the winds of the world is not nearly as beautiful, but also very cool. 30% : The sapper. The man who defused the landmines left behind by the retreating German military. Kip. 42% : Their distance gives them a private energy. Was this the inspiration for the Helado Negro album?

Contains spoilers This was a great novella. A slow burner, it drops its core themes quickly and densely about three quarters of the way through. Language, time, free-will, purpose, parenting are all front and center in this very human human-alien encounter. I love stories that focus on that slippery line between what we have the ability to change and what we don’t and how we make sense of this partial self-determination....

Essays by George Orwell So much of his worldview seems to be about his experience of violence and the political context in which he experienced it. The scale and scope of violence that was part of European life in the first half of the 20th century is so hard to fathom. Reading Orwell really drives home the idea that this experience was such a formative part of not just political, financial and public life, but the way in which people forged their beliefs and their sense of self - who they were in the world and the ways in which they understood themselves and their role in society....

Works in Progress The Public Domain Review Gapminder (Dollarstreet) Our World in Data Cochrane Library - summaries of state of knowledge based on RCTs