Fun Stuff > ENJOY
What are you currently reading?
Barmymoo:
I've just zipped through I am Malala, and am now on Clare Balding's Walking Home - I've seen both of them speak this week, and am enjoying reading the books in the context of having met them in person! Malala's book is an incredibly good introductory history of Pakistan (probably in no small measure thanks to Christina Lamb, who helped her write it) and Clare is even funnier than I had realised.
ev4n:
I've had I am Malala sitting on my dresser forever, but I can't seem to pick it up.
Akima:
I just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. I made a mental note to buy this book once it came out for the Kindle on the basis of the huge tick given to it by Howard Taylor in his blog, and frankly I was very disappointed. Fundamentally the problem is that the author completely failed to make me care about his protagonist.
(click to show/hide)The technical challenges are well done, but the author conveys no sense of doubt that they will be overcome, or fear that the carboard-cutout plucky hero will not come through in the end. One of the other characters in the book sums up the protagonist as "a problem solver", and quite frankly he is presented as nothing else. There is a rather jarring change from the first-person point-of-view of the hero to third-person views of mission-control, NASA personel, Chinese rocket-scientists etc. This is done to show off more neat problem-solving stuff (and it was nice to see Chinese people both actively involved in the plot (Joss Whedon and Peter Hyams please note) and not simply as yellow-peril villains (Tom Clancy and any number of other Western writers in pretty much every genre ever)), but it blows any sense of the hero's isolation out of the airlock.
I was really looking forward to this book, because I'm so tired of lazy science-fiction that might as well have Harry Potter waving his wand in the engine-room, but the author's complete failure to engage me emotionally relegates it to second-rate in my opinion.
ev4n:
That's too bad. I agree with your upsides, but found the narrator's propensity for sense of humour and for making really stupid mistakes engaging.
That said, I gamed with Andy Weir years ago, read his online comic religiously back in the day, so I may have been biased in favour of the book.
KOK:
Saint-Exupéry: Terre des Homme (in Danish translation). He tells about his experience during the early days of mail flight, when motors were fragile and emergency landings were something you must always keep in mind.
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