I have been a fan of Oliver Sacks and his writing for decades. When that first beautiful NYT article came out in early 2015 and revealed he was dying from cancer, I essentially hid my head in the sand and refused to read anything else from him for a long time. He was warm and kind and insightful and passionate and I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye. The day of Anthony Bourdain’s death, I walked into my library and On the Move was sitting […]
So close!
I really loved Andy Weir’s The Martian – it was fast paced, it was funny, the science was compelling, and the diary format really worked in terms of telling the story and highlighting Mark’s isolation. I was very excited to receive this book from my Secret Book Santa; Artemis should have been a sure fire hit for me. But it wasn’t, this time. This is a caper story, in essence, set on a city called Artemis that is located on the moon. The city is […]
My favourite book of 2018
I know it is a terrible cliche, but every chapter inevitably had me thinking “this sounds familiar, I feel like we read this every day, the more things change…” While I did not grow up watching the television series, I was a voracious reader as a child, and repeatedly read The Little House of the Prairie series. I am also very interested in biographies of writers I enjoy, particularly when my perception of them isn’t particularly well matched by the reality (see also L. M. […]
I feel a little lost here, but I still like it
Living in a pretty small, remote town, we make certain to take the kids (yeah…the kids) to a comic book store whenever we are in a bigger city. I walked in to one this winter, and all packaged up just like they knew I was coming, there were the six issues in the limited run World of Wakanda comic series. It hit all the right buttons: Black Panther, so hot right now! Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey, interesting feminist thinker and poet, first two black […]
Another book that felt super 80s to me
On a recent work trip, I was reading Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, and it was heavy. There’s a lot going on in my life, and that book was too much for me to handle in a hotel room on my own, so ducked into a library to find something a bit frothy. I immediately came across Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. I am absolutely excited to see the forthcoming movie (mostly because of that amazing cast and because let’s see something different), but […]
Tesseracts freak me out, guys
It’s strange, but true. I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid and loved it, but trying to figure out tesseracts made me a bit stressed out. Dava Sobel’s The Planets, with it’s good explanations of a mind boggling solar system, did the same thing. And then we come to Crouch’s Dark Matter, which also talks about the creation of a multiverse. It’s too much for my simple brain – it’s all basically infinity and I just can’t comprehend and it actually makes […]