Jay

I just want to express how fucking inspirational and magnetic Raymond Carver's prose is. This compilation specifically got me through high school in a way that I've been impressed with how stoic, yet powerful this guy manages to make from certain mundane situations. Tonally concise, heavily suburban, it's so difficult to replicate his writing style without coming off as a knock-off or a discount. Just simply gorgeous to read and imagine.

What I find fascinating about “Flow” is that it covers a lot of ground for a book that is psychological and self-help in nature. While it doesn't dig too deep into the psychological aspects, the heavy references to examples and statistics, coupled with very astute remarks that show a clear understanding of an author who understands the texts that he is reading, indicate a book written to be far better than many other self-help books that exist out there.

At times it is matter-of-fact, but the tone of Hiroshima crescendoes in its last act: the aftermath of each of its subject matters. It is not the bombing itself that feels the most devastating about Hiroshima as much as it is about the events that follow.

In doing so, Hersey collates a series of accounts that underlie just how implicitly political, interwoven, and shared the impact of the atomic bomb truly is. It is not a precursor to luck, nor misfortune; divide, nor unity; merely an acknowledgement of the vultures and the sunshine that come to respond to the destruction of Hiroshima.

...I met a man one time... who said, “I experienced the atomic bomb”–and from then on the conversation changed. We both understood each other's feelings. Nothing had to be said.

Reading “The Plague” at the post-pandemic period feels... so resonant. One cannot understate how much of a punch the book feels especially at its tail end: when the story mellows out and provides itself with very surprising one-liners or musings that linger even after the book's conclusion.

My first time reading Arthur Clarke impresses me in the way he intertwines the nature of the world, the human progress, and ambition. This book hits hard in the way that he creates a story about the resistant and ambitious nature of our species, complemented by a future that builds a world so beautifully and wonderfully argues the incomprehensible but celebratory nature of human ambition.

It's so beautiful sifting through the text. Each short chapter progresses the story and it triumphantly closes the story of the space elevator with grace.