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How Long Before You Give Up on a Book?
I’ll be brutally honest: if I’m not enjoying a book, I pull the rip cord and parachute to the next book. This includes the books in my SF book club. The other guys used to push forward, slogging through the mire of a bad book. Not me. Life’s too short to read bad books. Before I started Project Hail Mary, the latest novel by Andy Weir, one of my friends made an observation: “I think Andy knows how to write one book.” Uh-oh, I thought. Having not even started Project Hail Mary, my hand was already primed to pull the rip cord. Then again, Weir’s first book was pretty good.…
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Drowning by T.J. Newman is the Best Movie You’ll Read This Summer
From the opening, harrowing moments of the first three chapters to the last 30 minutes of the audiobook, this book did not let up. A few weeks ago, I finished T. J. Newman’s debut, FALLING and eagerly jumped into her brand-new book, DROWNING. In the book, a plane suffers mechanical failure two minutes after takeoff from Honolulu and crashes into the ocean. Unlike those famous airplane disaster movies from the 1970s that takes a quarter of the movie to introduce the characters and get the plane in the air, Newman puts you on the plane just after takeoff from the first sentence. By Chapter 3, the plane is down. And…
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How Do You Keep Track of What You Read (and Watch)?
On New Year’s Day 2023, I decided to try something new. I have long kept scattered notes about the things I consume. This includes books, movies, TV shows, music, and various other things. But these lists and such remain, well, scattered. Over the past couple of years, the writer Ryan Holiday landed on my radar. He is the bookstore owner who writes about the Stoics and their philosophy and how it is still relevant in the 21st Century. In my reading about how Holiday researches and studies his subjects, I learned he keeps an extensive notecard system. His research assistant, Billy Oppenheimer, also keeps an extensive set of notecards. He…
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Is Time the Most Valuable Resource a Kid Has That an Adult Doesn’t?
I’ve been thinking about this off and on for a few weeks now. It stemmed from multiple sources, but a comment from one of my fellow book club members really sparked the idea. We were talking about The Mandalorian—which, on 7 March when we had our meeting, had only aired one episode of the current season, its third—when my friend made the following paraphrased comment: In order to keep up with all the Star Wars content coming at us via movies, live-action TV, animated TV, comics, and video games, you’d almost have to be a teenager with no life in order to have the time to consume all this stuff.…
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Reading Into The Dark
At least nine times a year, I start a book with zero knowledge about it. And it’s wonderful We’re all readers here, right? How do you usually pick that next book to read? If we’re in a brick-and-mortar store, we look at the cover, we note the author, read that all-so-important description, and then maybe a few pages of chapter one. If we’re online, all of that is still present, but we get the added bonus of that preview. We can actually read the entire preview before we make that purchase decision. Oh, and then there are the reviews—from professionals as well as amateurs. In every step of this process,…
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Intentional Reading
Do you ever feel left out of a conversation? It’s only mid-January and while the year is still brand-new, the old year still has a few remnants lingering. The biggest me for is the various Best Of lists still readily available. I read many of them—books, TV, movies, music—and made an interesting observation about the book ones: I read few of them and could not contribute to the conversation. I’m an avid reader I have anywhere from 2-5 books going on all at once. Well, let me clarify: I’m re-reading Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic in 2023 so I’m only reading a page a day, but it’s still active. I’m…