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bearshortyStation Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, 332pp
This book was my father's favorite from last year so I promised him I would read it. And I did really enjoy it although I don't think it will end up my favorite for the year.
I really liked the style of the book and the focus on many characters. At first I was disappointed that we didn't get immediate post-apocalyptic scenes but skipped 20 years but the book did eventually got to that. In a lot of ways this book was about specific characters, whose lives intercept, and their whole lives that just happen to involve a catastrophic illness and apocalypse. I also enjoyed many scenes that happened before the illness. Most characters were really well drawn and none were perfect and many were not likable. But they all felt like real people. And once we get to the illness itself and scenes surrounding it, I thought it was very well done in how people would react and variety of responses and possibilities. I didn't feel the initial threat from the prophet but it was clearer by the end by there was such a fear of him.
The book was very well done and I enjoyed reading it. I'm just not sure how long it will stay with me.
12 Rules for Life: an antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson, 368pp
This book was a present from my Dad for New Year. I brought it to work to read at lunch and it took me three months to get through. He is a psychologist and uses psychology, literature and religion to come up with "rules" for a better, more fulfilled life. He is very into self reliance and being responsible for yourself.
I hated the foreword and was getting very frustrated already. That person thinks that without religion we will all just get to nihilism. Thankfully, the book itself was better and only one chapter really drove me crazy.
For most of the book I liked the rules themselves but his explanations were sometimes too much. He grounded too much in religion (he doesn't think people can be truly atheist, which is argh.). I really hated Chapter 11 because of his stance on gender. He laments that men can't be men anymore and that more women now attend college - he blames the culture for weakening of men. He really doesn't recognize his own privilege. And it's annoying because a lot of his rules actually makes sense like taking care of yourself as if you were responsible for yourself - Often we would take our pet to the vet but won't take our own medicine for example. His ideas on listening are also interesting and finding good moments in life full of suffering. And having friends who only have your best interest at heart. His book read better when he was giving personal examples and frustrating when it was too much philosophy.
At many points he was very frustrating and sometimes condescending but again, at other points, his ideas made me think.
I would never have read this book if it wasn't a present. And I would recommend only the rules themselves but not the explanations of them. I actually made notes for all the chapters I read but I don't feel like typing them out at all.
Сто Лет Тому Вперёд [One Hundred Years Ahead] by Kyr Bulychev [in Russian], 409pp (Reread)
Kyr Bulychev was one of my favorite writers when I was a child and his Alisa books were influential in my love of sci-fi. The short story about little Alisa not sleeping and her father calling the Martian embassy by mistake is still my favorite and a comfort reading. And it has a great punch line. (And now as a parent, I appreciate it on a whole other level). When I was downloading a few of my Dad's Kindle books from his Calibre into my Kindle over the New Year I downloaded Bulychev's whole Alisa collection. I didn't really plan on rereading but one night I just thought why not. (I love his other books too. And the author was also a historian in addition to being a popular sci-fi writer. I was a history major in college and grad school.)
Alisa series of books are usually novellas but "One Hundred Years Ahead" is one of the few novels. It was very popular when I was a kid, especially because there was a Russian TV mini-series based on it (Guest from the Future - and now I want to rewatch it. I think its on YouTube.) with a very popular song. So one evening I just decided to read it again as an adult and to see how it stood up to not just reading as an adult but in 2019 as opposed to 1980s.
First of all by the weird coincidence I started reading it on April 11 and the date in the future to which Kolya travels to is April 11, 2082 - so that was pretty freaky but fun. (Chronology in Alisa books is not consistent.).
The first half of the book is mostly from the perspective of Kolya, a twelve year old in 1970s Moscow, who accidentally travels to the future for a day because his neighbor, who minded the time machine for the future scientists got suddenly sick. Kolya mostly explores, runs into people and aliens, sees the differences in the future. People take him for someone in historical costume for a costume party. It was fun to see one character looking at what is pretty much an Apple watch and read a newspaper from a tablet. There are also flying car bubbles and stationary buses and of course aliens and traveling into far space. And of course kids who are super smart. By accident, Kolya ends up with a mileophone, a rare telepathic device that eleven year old Alisa borrowed from her Dad. He takes it so the space pirates don't steal it and runs back to the past with it.
The second half of the book takes place in the 'present' of 1970s. Alisa doesn't know what Kolya looks like, only his name and his school and class, since Kolya carved that on a bench. So she follows him into the past, accidentally leading space pirates with her, but gets hit by a bus and ends up in a hospital next to a girl Julia who just happens to go to the same class as Kolya. (Which is actually not a stretch since both school and hospital are local ones). The problem is that in Julia's class there are 3 boys named Kolya, so it takes a while to figure out who is the one that took the gizzmo. The space pirates are looking for both Kolya and Alisa. A lot of part 2 is Alisa showing extraordinary abilities like multiple languages, athletic ability and chess since she is from the future and is more evolved.
The book really stands up on the reread. I enjoyed it as an adult too and it wasn't really dated much either. I liked Kolya's part more and the way he is trying to accept and explore the future. I feel the second half is weaker especially during the parts where Alisa's talents are on display. I get that she doesn't want to explicitly lie but c'mon, don't answer during lessons perhaps. Once the whole class rallies together to look for the gizmo and to battle space pirates the book picks up again. and many parts are quite funny. I want to slowly reread other Alisa books.
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, 192pp
Doctorow talk about copyright and authors/creator's use of internet and how to obtain success. And what won't give you success as an artist. He talks about how artists can get paid in the internet age and who benefits and who actually gets paid from creative content. I really thought the first two chapters are really informative and the third chapter dragged a little. His language is very clear and he makes his content very easy to understand and I feel I learned a lot about the middlemen especially and a little behind the scenes stuff like how record companies work and make money. And how basically most artists are screwed no matter what they do.
Doctorow lists three laws for the internet age.
1. Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, they're not doing it for your benefit. - this is about DMR and how terrible it is for creators. It doesn't help to stop copying of any kind.
2. It's hard to monetize fame but it's impossible to monetize obscurity i.e. fame won't guarantee fortune, but no one has ever gotten rich by being obscure.
3. making it easy to censor and spy on everyone to protect copyright is a bad idea and bad practice i.e. information doesn't want to be free, people do.
Ржавый Фельдмаршал [The Rusty Field Marshal] by Kyr Bulychev [in Russian], 111pp, (Reread)
This is an early Alisa novella. It's the start of school holiday and Alisa ends up going with a friend of her father to Crimea to the beach. I think she is 11 here too. Her father's friend is filming a movie. She ends up getting kidnapped by old school military robots and she has to escape. She also needs to recover the gizmo (telepathic device). This book is full of robots from the house servant who takes care of Alisa to the old man robot make for the movie. The military robots don't have the program not to hurt humans and this really boggles Alisa's mind who is not used to it. There is also a meeting with Sveta, the scientist, who ended up in the wrong location with her shrinking suitcase device and a humorous interlude about how oblivious she is about her male colleague/assistant who is in love with her. There is a real danger present with the military robots and it got suspenseful by the end. It is not the strongest book but still good. I was surprised by how much I actually remembered as I reread. I was puzzled on why Alisa's Dad just let his friend take Alisa on the overnight trip to the sea with the whole movie crew but that seemed normal to everyone.
No Time to Spare: thinking about what matters by Ursula K. Le Guin, 215pp,
It was lovely and sad to read these very random essays knowing that Le Guin died. She did live a full life though and this collection shows that. And it is a lovely collection although I liked Words are my Matter more.
I really liked the first section where she talks about what's it is like to be 80. It is probably the most honest description of ageing I have read.
My favorite essay was actually about an egg and how she partakes a soft-boiled egg every morning. It is such a mundane topic but the picture she paints is so vivid. I feel like I really got to know her as a person. I do tend to prefer her non-fiction to her fiction.
This book was my father's favorite from last year so I promised him I would read it. And I did really enjoy it although I don't think it will end up my favorite for the year.
I really liked the style of the book and the focus on many characters. At first I was disappointed that we didn't get immediate post-apocalyptic scenes but skipped 20 years but the book did eventually got to that. In a lot of ways this book was about specific characters, whose lives intercept, and their whole lives that just happen to involve a catastrophic illness and apocalypse. I also enjoyed many scenes that happened before the illness. Most characters were really well drawn and none were perfect and many were not likable. But they all felt like real people. And once we get to the illness itself and scenes surrounding it, I thought it was very well done in how people would react and variety of responses and possibilities. I didn't feel the initial threat from the prophet but it was clearer by the end by there was such a fear of him.
The book was very well done and I enjoyed reading it. I'm just not sure how long it will stay with me.
12 Rules for Life: an antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson, 368pp
This book was a present from my Dad for New Year. I brought it to work to read at lunch and it took me three months to get through. He is a psychologist and uses psychology, literature and religion to come up with "rules" for a better, more fulfilled life. He is very into self reliance and being responsible for yourself.
I hated the foreword and was getting very frustrated already. That person thinks that without religion we will all just get to nihilism. Thankfully, the book itself was better and only one chapter really drove me crazy.
For most of the book I liked the rules themselves but his explanations were sometimes too much. He grounded too much in religion (he doesn't think people can be truly atheist, which is argh.). I really hated Chapter 11 because of his stance on gender. He laments that men can't be men anymore and that more women now attend college - he blames the culture for weakening of men. He really doesn't recognize his own privilege. And it's annoying because a lot of his rules actually makes sense like taking care of yourself as if you were responsible for yourself - Often we would take our pet to the vet but won't take our own medicine for example. His ideas on listening are also interesting and finding good moments in life full of suffering. And having friends who only have your best interest at heart. His book read better when he was giving personal examples and frustrating when it was too much philosophy.
At many points he was very frustrating and sometimes condescending but again, at other points, his ideas made me think.
I would never have read this book if it wasn't a present. And I would recommend only the rules themselves but not the explanations of them. I actually made notes for all the chapters I read but I don't feel like typing them out at all.
Сто Лет Тому Вперёд [One Hundred Years Ahead] by Kyr Bulychev [in Russian], 409pp (Reread)
Kyr Bulychev was one of my favorite writers when I was a child and his Alisa books were influential in my love of sci-fi. The short story about little Alisa not sleeping and her father calling the Martian embassy by mistake is still my favorite and a comfort reading. And it has a great punch line. (And now as a parent, I appreciate it on a whole other level). When I was downloading a few of my Dad's Kindle books from his Calibre into my Kindle over the New Year I downloaded Bulychev's whole Alisa collection. I didn't really plan on rereading but one night I just thought why not. (I love his other books too. And the author was also a historian in addition to being a popular sci-fi writer. I was a history major in college and grad school.)
Alisa series of books are usually novellas but "One Hundred Years Ahead" is one of the few novels. It was very popular when I was a kid, especially because there was a Russian TV mini-series based on it (Guest from the Future - and now I want to rewatch it. I think its on YouTube.) with a very popular song. So one evening I just decided to read it again as an adult and to see how it stood up to not just reading as an adult but in 2019 as opposed to 1980s.
First of all by the weird coincidence I started reading it on April 11 and the date in the future to which Kolya travels to is April 11, 2082 - so that was pretty freaky but fun. (Chronology in Alisa books is not consistent.).
The first half of the book is mostly from the perspective of Kolya, a twelve year old in 1970s Moscow, who accidentally travels to the future for a day because his neighbor, who minded the time machine for the future scientists got suddenly sick. Kolya mostly explores, runs into people and aliens, sees the differences in the future. People take him for someone in historical costume for a costume party. It was fun to see one character looking at what is pretty much an Apple watch and read a newspaper from a tablet. There are also flying car bubbles and stationary buses and of course aliens and traveling into far space. And of course kids who are super smart. By accident, Kolya ends up with a mileophone, a rare telepathic device that eleven year old Alisa borrowed from her Dad. He takes it so the space pirates don't steal it and runs back to the past with it.
The second half of the book takes place in the 'present' of 1970s. Alisa doesn't know what Kolya looks like, only his name and his school and class, since Kolya carved that on a bench. So she follows him into the past, accidentally leading space pirates with her, but gets hit by a bus and ends up in a hospital next to a girl Julia who just happens to go to the same class as Kolya. (Which is actually not a stretch since both school and hospital are local ones). The problem is that in Julia's class there are 3 boys named Kolya, so it takes a while to figure out who is the one that took the gizzmo. The space pirates are looking for both Kolya and Alisa. A lot of part 2 is Alisa showing extraordinary abilities like multiple languages, athletic ability and chess since she is from the future and is more evolved.
The book really stands up on the reread. I enjoyed it as an adult too and it wasn't really dated much either. I liked Kolya's part more and the way he is trying to accept and explore the future. I feel the second half is weaker especially during the parts where Alisa's talents are on display. I get that she doesn't want to explicitly lie but c'mon, don't answer during lessons perhaps. Once the whole class rallies together to look for the gizmo and to battle space pirates the book picks up again. and many parts are quite funny. I want to slowly reread other Alisa books.
Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, 192pp
Doctorow talk about copyright and authors/creator's use of internet and how to obtain success. And what won't give you success as an artist. He talks about how artists can get paid in the internet age and who benefits and who actually gets paid from creative content. I really thought the first two chapters are really informative and the third chapter dragged a little. His language is very clear and he makes his content very easy to understand and I feel I learned a lot about the middlemen especially and a little behind the scenes stuff like how record companies work and make money. And how basically most artists are screwed no matter what they do.
Doctorow lists three laws for the internet age.
1. Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, they're not doing it for your benefit. - this is about DMR and how terrible it is for creators. It doesn't help to stop copying of any kind.
2. It's hard to monetize fame but it's impossible to monetize obscurity i.e. fame won't guarantee fortune, but no one has ever gotten rich by being obscure.
3. making it easy to censor and spy on everyone to protect copyright is a bad idea and bad practice i.e. information doesn't want to be free, people do.
Ржавый Фельдмаршал [The Rusty Field Marshal] by Kyr Bulychev [in Russian], 111pp, (Reread)
This is an early Alisa novella. It's the start of school holiday and Alisa ends up going with a friend of her father to Crimea to the beach. I think she is 11 here too. Her father's friend is filming a movie. She ends up getting kidnapped by old school military robots and she has to escape. She also needs to recover the gizmo (telepathic device). This book is full of robots from the house servant who takes care of Alisa to the old man robot make for the movie. The military robots don't have the program not to hurt humans and this really boggles Alisa's mind who is not used to it. There is also a meeting with Sveta, the scientist, who ended up in the wrong location with her shrinking suitcase device and a humorous interlude about how oblivious she is about her male colleague/assistant who is in love with her. There is a real danger present with the military robots and it got suspenseful by the end. It is not the strongest book but still good. I was surprised by how much I actually remembered as I reread. I was puzzled on why Alisa's Dad just let his friend take Alisa on the overnight trip to the sea with the whole movie crew but that seemed normal to everyone.
No Time to Spare: thinking about what matters by Ursula K. Le Guin, 215pp,
It was lovely and sad to read these very random essays knowing that Le Guin died. She did live a full life though and this collection shows that. And it is a lovely collection although I liked Words are my Matter more.
I really liked the first section where she talks about what's it is like to be 80. It is probably the most honest description of ageing I have read.
My favorite essay was actually about an egg and how she partakes a soft-boiled egg every morning. It is such a mundane topic but the picture she paints is so vivid. I feel like I really got to know her as a person. I do tend to prefer her non-fiction to her fiction.