Finished reading: Greek Lessons by Han Kang 📚 5 stars. Just won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Finished reading: Black Holes by Professor Brian Cox 📚three stars

World Line

Events are the atoms of experience.

• from Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

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Finished reading: The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama XIV Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho 📚

Finished reading: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir 📚

Tonight’s aurora as seen from central MA

Gideon the Ninth

In the myriadic year of our lord — the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! — Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

• excerpt from Gideon the Ninth by Tamsin Muir

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ForeverNotes

This is a fairly cool/clever framework for working with Apple Notes:

https://www.myforevernotes.com

Finished reading: Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer 📚 3 stars

Finished reading: When Jesus Came to Harvard by Harvey Cox 📚

Finished reading: Anathem by Neal Stephenson 📚

We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.

• excerpt from China Mieville. “The City and the City”

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Limitless, I came to a world where the moon lay so huge and ivory and cratered that it blotted out the sun above a mirror-twin to Earth. Except, there in that strange land everything was alive and nothing was dead, even the dead, and I could find no familiar scent to guide me through. Where the rocks spoke to me and so did the water and so did the sand and so did the plants.

There, ultimately, I found my purpose. There, I was transformed once more and truly became the blue fox. Out where all the smells run together and you cannot trust your senses.

What lived there had lost its name long ago. What lived there changed shape and form and spoke in different voices. Had been created as one thing, brought up as another. What lived there was serious and playful and lonely but not alone. It had known me before. It knew me now, read my mind, my intent, encouraged it.

It will take time. You will not survive to see the end of it. And one day, Time will bring you back here, in some form. To this place.

“How do you know this?”

But there was just laughter in reply.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

This much I know, among all the other things I know.

Excerpt From Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

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blackswangreen

The sequence of doors we passed made me think of all the rooms of my past and future. The hospital ward I was born in, classrooms, tents, churches, offices, hotels, museums, nursing homes, the room I’ll die in. (Has it been built yet?) Cars’re rooms. So are woods. Skies’re ceilings. Distances’re walls. Wombs’re rooms made of mothers. Graves’re rooms made of soil.

That music was swelling.

A Jules Verne hi-fi, all silvery knobs and dials, occupied one corner of the solarium. Madame Crommelynck sat on her cane throne, eyes shut, listening. As if the music was a warm bath. (This time I knew she wouldn’t be speaking for a while, so I just sat down on the armless sofa.) A classical L.P. was playing. Nothing like the rumpty-tump-tump stuff Mr. Kempsey plays in Music. Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to.

The piano’d vanished. Now a flute’d joined the violin.

(I can still hear it, hours later.)

• blackswangreen by david mitchell
• a reference to the Cloud Atlas Sextet by Robert Frobisher in Mitchell’s other book, Cloud Atlas

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Finished reading: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson 📚

4 stars

Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.

• excerpt from Peter Hoeg. “Smilla’s Sense of Snow”

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“A person creates the word. Gives in to the world, and becomes the word.” It sounded like a sigh. “You have no words. You have been separated.” Separated from her words. The world was built on a new language, and she would not be part of it, only an observer, a watcher. Berols’ Anna turned her head and gazed out on the chaos. “When all of this has become, you will remain; the people like you will remain, all of you, as you are, separate. But we will carry you.” She stroked Vanja’s cheek. “We will always carry you, little herald.”

From Karin Tidbeck. “Amatka.” 📚 💬

Lots of mushrooms on the trails this morning

Finished reading: The Secret Life of the Universe by Nathalie A. Cabrol 📚

4 stars