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Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

April 29, 2022 by blauracke 2 Comments

I’ve owned this book for 20 years probably, and I think this was my third read through. It is a collection of short stories and some of King’ s earliest work, and the stories are of widely varying quality. Some made me roll my eyes, some left me indifferent, and some were gripping, but there is one I dislike immensely, and two that I kind of love. The one I dislike is the well-known and apparently popular “The Mist”, which takes up about 150 pages […]

“When these people say you belong to me, I own you, it is like the passing of the rain, or the setting of the sun at the end of the day.”

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

April 29, 2022 by blauracke Leave a Comment

In the late 19th century, in pre-colonial coastal East Africa, 12-year-old Yusuf is taken by a merchant to pay off his father’s debts. After working as a store clerk for some years, his master takes him on a trading expedition into the rural interior of the region that lasts several months. Yusuf is a strange and passive character that is hard to relate to. From the outset, things happen to him, while he doesn’t make anything happen; he is swept along for the ride, and […]

“Everything complicated is only complicated because someone is bad at explaining it.”

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer

February 1, 2022 by blauracke 2 Comments

One of my favourite YouTube channels is “Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell”. They make short videos on science, technology, politics, philosophy, and more. The topics range from terraforming Venus to loneliness or the deep sea, and they are all explained with, as they call it, “optimistic nihilism”. During the short runtime of about 10 minutes, the videos manage to be educational, funny, profound, and cute all at once. When I learned that the creator had written a book, I just had to buy it. I […]

“The world is my country, science my religion.”

Dutch Light: Christiaan Huygens and the Making of Science in Europe by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

January 29, 2022 by blauracke 1 Comment

Who was the greatest scientist alive during the period between Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton? It was Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens who made huge contributions to astronomy, optics, and mechanics. His improvement of lenses for telescopes and invention of pendulum clocks, discovery of the first satellite and the ring around Saturn, and his wave theory of light are just a few of his accomplishments. After his death, however, his greatness was unjustly eclipsed by Newton. Although this is mainly a biography of Huygens, it tries […]

“Stranger than fiction – certainly more outsized, surreal and outrageous than anything you’d expect to encounter”

Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

January 18, 2022 by blauracke Leave a Comment

A woman working in a government call center is stalked by an ex-boyfriend, a man lives in a strange woman’s apartment until he is confronted by one of her friends, and a farmer endeavours to build an airplane. A group of people have to live on a subway platform for months because the authorities won’t let them leave, and the lives of twins diverge when one of them begins to agitate against the government. There are a few overarching themes in this collection of stories […]

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren

December 9, 2021 by blauracke 2 Comments

If you spoke 20 languages, you could speak to half of the world’s population in their mother tongue and at least communicate with an additional 25%. In this book, the linguist Gaston Dorren dedicates one chapter to each of these 20 languages, and explores some of their characteristics and oddities. The book starts with the language with the fewest speakers, which is Vietnamese, and progresses to the one with the most, English. Dorren always provides some general information on each language first, only to then […]

esmemoria on What Else Would You Look With?I wonder if the audio brings out the best in the novel. The last part of the book was pretty great, but I had so...
narfna on What Else Would You Look With?Sad you didn't really like this one. I absolutely loved it. Not sure when I will be able to wrap my head around reviewing it....
narfna on And now, jump back hundreds and hundreds of years…#BlameMalin on this one for me, too, because she literally sent me a copy.
narfna on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”That's gotta be the new headcanon.
drmllz on “And that very same evening—that very same evening—Lord Edgware dies. Good title that, by the way. Lord Edgware Dies. Look well on a book stall.”I like to think the wife packs Hastings off to England to hang out with Poirot and enjoys having a whole ranch to herself...

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