Eva
Decent collection of essays covering different perspectives on the sublime in science and art. From historical overviews, to the ‘prettiness' of Hubble's images needed to grab the general public, to arguments why the notion of the sublime should be retired, to David Bohm's quantum romanticism, and parallels between the sublime and the uncanny in automatons. Not all of them are read-worthy, but some of them i might go back to in the future.
Odd, intriguing and charming. A early 20th century tale of two people - a physicist at a Cambridge college and an out-of-luck nurse apprentice from London - whose fortunes entwine because of a road accident. It's a witty and subtle portrait of a time and a people, hinting at changes to come, in physics, the world, and women's liberation. And then it even turns into a ghost story somehow. I am left baffled and enchanted, not quite sure what to make of it.
Impressive collection of scifi short stories, exploring how different world-views can affect our lives. They feel like mathematical puzzles, yet they are brought to live with the characters that inhabit them.
What a well told story. It feels simple and quiet, despite the tragedies at its heart. A tale of families and siblings, of mentors and a fascination for nature, of dreams handed down from generation to generation, and of responsibilities, guilt and broken expectations. And how those can eat away at you for years on end. Mary Lawson expertly took me along for this emotional journey and had me sobbing quietly through the last pages.
Little Bo!
Kafka runs away from the curse his father put on him: that he will kill his father, and sleep with his mother and sister. Escaping Tokyo he ends up living in a private library, where he finds a strange mother-connection with the library's owner, whom he falls in love with. Somewhere between dream and reality he fulfils his fathers curse. Nakata is an old man, who lost part of himself due to an strange accident in his childhood. He is on a journey to open the entrance, where the characters will find their lost halves.
Im zweiten Weltkrieg: Lawrence Waterhouse ist Kryptoanalytiker. Bobby Shaftoe ist ein amerikanischer Kriegsheld. Goto Dengo ist ein japanischer Kriegsheld. Enoch Root gehört zu einem Geheimbund. Rudolf von Hacklheber ist ein deutscher Mathematiker. Gemeinsam gründen sie eine Verschwörung die eine Menge Gold in einer Höhle nahe Manila betrifft. In der Gegenwart machen sich die Enkeln Randy Waterhouse und Amy Shaftoe daran diese Verschwörung aufzudecken.
Quite a book - depicting in scenes of realism mixed with subtle irony - the slow downfall of the family Buddenbrook. The story is placed between 1830-1880 in the north of Germany. Mann wrote it while aged 22-25, and the book seems to grow with him. None of the characters are your typical hero, they all have their faults, are proud, vain, self-opinionated. But Mann's description places you very close to them, you get to feel all their pains (and there are many painful episodes, ranging from tooth pain, the last stages of death to the pain of school quizzes) and moments of clarity (standing out is Thomas Buddenbrook's discovery of Schopenhauer). Mann paints his characters by repetitively reminding us of their visual trademarks, their “huebschen Oberlippe, weichen braunen Locken, blau umschatteten Augen”, and those descriptions will probably stay alive in my memory for a little while.
So, Women are more emphatic and men are better at systematising? Turns out what we think of as gender differences can all be blamed on neuroplasticity. Our culture nurtures our minds into different genders, and our minds reinforce our culture with its gender differences. It's a chicken and egg problem, that must have started somewhere. And by now it's everywhere, in children books, movies, books, baby clothes, all our conscious and subconscious behavior, ...
With a dry humor, but also a mix of bitterness and glee, Fine picks apart a century of gender studies and gender experiments, debunks misconceptions that first clearly are based on sexism (women's smaller brains explain their cognitive inferiority) then later based on faults and inaccuracy in the testing setup (priming, p, focus on differences over similarities, .. )
For example: The simple fact of ticking a [ ] male or [ ] female checkbox on the top of a test results in significant performances differences for females and males. When women are reminded of their apparent “inferiority” in all “male” subjects (math, science, ...) their results drop.
We're clearly on an upwards curve to actual gender equality, but it might take a few generations to fully reinvent our cultural norms.
What if you grow up in a tiny universe, a tiny room and that's all you know? What if you're trapped in a tiny room and you raise a child in there? How would you build your child's world? How would you describe it?
Plot and writing were just ok. Still, it was at times very heartfelt and touching. And I did have an aha moment later on, that I appreciated.
A world with different “zones of thought”, where the local laws of physics influence the speed of computation. Where A.I.s that reach a technological singularity become “powers”. And we meet the medieval culture of the “Tines” who live as packs that form group minds. Exploring that concept - the advantages the disadvantages of groups minds - was especially fascinating. Around it all is a space opera. I could have done without the occasional action sequence, as they felt a bit B-movie like. But, all in all a fun read.
A husband leaves a family, and the wife - a mother of two - spirals downwards into despair, and it is raw and real, and dark and painful. Hadn't I read the Neapolitan novels first, I'd probably be more smitten with it, but now I just accept that I like Ferrante a lot.
Damn, Kim Stanley Robinson writes long books. But even though they are always meticulously researched stories of scifi nature, they mostly seem to be grounded in the human experiment. The struggles and politics of human progress, the passions and grand visions, the many ways we strive and fail, collaborate and disagree, in the constant cycle of creation and destruction.
At one point in the Martian adventure, scientists come up with a gene therapy that extends human life. If you're potentially living longer, do you have different opinions on environmental decisions with long-term effects? How many generations are you planing ahead for? We could use some of that right now.
Frank's bitterness and constant anger at everyone's stupidity .. I felt that in my bones.
Amazed once again by Kim Stanley Robinson. The books in this trilogy are so long, I catch myself drifting in and out of focus while listening. But that even seems okay as the plot shifts in intensity, giving you a tapestry of the ecological and governmental developments over a next half century.
Yet again, this is deliciously equal parts science and sociology, the creation and controlled management of systems of atmospheres and people. While Mars undergoes a potential phase change so does its population as they argue, organise and revolutionise their way towards a Martian independence from Earth. Yet what independence to choose?
The allure and romance of two young hippies, wannabe artists, starving, struggling, united in their adoration of all things mystical, falling in love, forging a bond to help each other develop their creative voices, to support each other through artistic explorations, money struggles, sexual awakenings, their demons. All enveloped by the desire to become famous while staying true to their art and themselves.
Set in the wild days of rock'n'roll at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies. The setting is New York and the infamous Chelsea Hotel. The cast are Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, Bob Neuwirth, Jim Carroll, Candy Darling, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg...
Their partnership, sexual and platonic, was definitely made for the books. I excessively googled images of them while reading this.
This is the story of Bjartur of Summerhouses and the story of Icelandic farmers and their politics during the early-mid 20th century. Bjartur is the most stubborn of sheep farmers, valuing his independence and economic freedom above all other things. His life and the life of his family is harsh, there's death and sickness and not much kindness. Every man fights for himself, and that also applies to all members of his family. But he's also a poet and there's much poetry in his stubbornness and his dedication to his sheep and his land.
It took a while to get into Laxness' writing style, as he sometimes seamlessly morphs narration into dialogue into poesy. There's equal parts harsh-life reality and equal parts dreams and hopes in the story, and the writing manages to pass that on beautifully, giving you occasional segments that fill your heart with love for the cruel and tender relationship between man and nature and beast.
Une vingtaine de pages dans le livre, je vais l'abandonner, parce qu'il me manque un intrigue captivante et j'ai besoin de cela pour ma lecture francaise. De plus, il me manque cette connaissance specifique de l'histoire et de la culture francaises qui semble rendre cela plus gratifiant.
I've laughed so much and then I cried so much as never before, reading this book. I mean it. An epic tale of two aged cowboys, one stoic and emotionless, the other loud and living life to the fullest. The lure of adventure, the melancholy and peacefulness of the wide open country, the cruelness of the wild west and at the core this deep bond between these two stubborn, battered, faulty yet loyal and uncompromising men. Augustus McCrae and Captain Call forever.
The Austrian empire is holding on but it's past its expiration date. Alongside the long life of emperor Franz-Josef I. run the life of three generation of Trotta men. It's a time where fathers are respected, and in control of their sons occupations. The first Trotta saves the emperor's life and is granted the status of a national hero, the second Trotta resembles the emperor in his strive for tradition and strict protocol, while the third Trotta is demoralized by his military career in an army that's listless, purposeless and waiting for the looming downfall.
Roth's writing is quite exquisite, full of details, mixed with a very fine humor.
The Islamic revolution in Iran through the eyes of a female Literature professor. When oppressive totalitarian regimes take away your freedom, your right to move in public, your right to feel the sun and wind on your skin, they usually also come to take away your art. Movie theatres close, foreign music is forbidden, and books like The Great Gatsby are put on trial for propagating questionable morals. Reading Lolita in Tehran shows us the cruel fate of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where one generation of women could walk and marry freely, while the next generation receives prison sentences for wearing nail-polish. Nafisi and the girls in her private class compare themselves to the heroins and victims in famous novels. Literature becomes a way for them to make sense of and to rebel against the Muslim customs and regime.
A fascinating and eye-opening read. Yet I found it a bit too long and unstructured for my taste. Sometimes I got lost in time. And some segments had a clearer connection between the discussed novel and the societal dynamics in Iran (Lolita), while others felt more random.
Not as bewitching as [b:When We Cease to Understand the World 62069739 When We Cease to Understand the World Benjamín Labatut https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661332705l/62069739.SX50.jpg 84341168], especially not if you've read [b:Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 12625589 Turing's Cathedral The Origins of the Digital Universe George Dyson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1322700777l/12625589.SX50.jpg 17677574] and watched the AlphaGo documentary. But the writing is still great, and Labatut gives his unique haunting touch to von Neumann's life and legacy.
13 stories with overlapping characters, and shuffled in time, that circle around characters that are in or adjacent to the music scene. At the beginning I was quite engaged, as the writing is good, but with every chapter/story it started to feel more like a short-story collection and my interest in the characters started to dwindle. The same structure worked well for me in [b:Homegoing 27071490 Homegoing Yaa Gyasi https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448108591s/27071490.jpg 47113792]. Which must have been the exception to the/my rule.
Mon troisième Vonarburg et je l'aime moins que les deux autres. Probablement parce que cela semble parfois être plus fantastique que scifi.
Cela commence comme un thriller paranoïaque, dans un Montréal froid, dans un environnement politique croissant. Et petit a petit, cela se transforme en un mystere psycholgique. Cela m'a beaucoup intrigue. Mais le developpement s'est deroule aun rythme tres modere.
Le mystere des illusions et des hallucinations pose des questions intrigantes sur la manipulation des croyances et le developpement des mouvements religieux. Et le liens eternels entre les croyances religieuses et politiques.
Etait-il vraiment necessaire que nos protagonistes assistent a un bal costume? C'est l'une de choses qui m'a fait lever les yeux au ciel.
Mais dans l'ensemble, j'aime toujours beaucoup l'auteur.
A stream of Kerouac-like impressions of drugs, booze, sex, swimmingpools, airplanes, told by a travelling drugs-salesman in a not-to-far slightly dystopian future, who dips too deep into his own medicine which causes memory-loss. The whirlwind of anecdotes and short story snippets is entertaining and the language poetic, but quickly grows boring, as no real story-development happens. But then, about half way in, our hero overdoes his drugs and lands in a clinic, where he undergoes treatment for his complete memory-loss. The change in the storyline got me invested again, as it even included a first-person account of a Penfield stimulation experiment.
Notre narratrice sans nom est la seule enfante dans un groupe de quarante femmes. Elles sont captes dans un prison souterraine. Elles dorment, elles mangent, elles excretent, suivi par les gardes. C'est une vie sans une sphere privee et sans les attouchements. C'est la seule vie notre narratrice connait parce qu'elle etait trop jeune quand l'evenment mysterieux s'est passe. Toutes leurs compagnons de cellule ne veulent pas et ne saient pas parler de ce qu'est s'est passait. Mais notre narratrice veul comprendre, et c'est la ou la livre commence ...
Ma memoire commence avec ma colere.
.. l'unique plaisir que je pusse obtenir etait celui, si rare, de la curiosite satisfaite.