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565. How to Stop Time

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Matt Haig

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy

352 pages, published June 11, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Tom Hazard has a extremely rare medical condition that does not allow him to age like the rest of us.  While he looks 41 years old, he was born centuries earlier during the Elizabethan Age.  As a member of the Albatross Society, Tom has to follow their cardinal rule:  don’t fall in love.  However, after he moves back to his old home of London and starts working as a history teacher, Tom meets a , his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he becomes smitten with an enchanting French teacher.  He must then navigate the dangerous territory between his heart and his head.

Quotes 

“And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?”

 

 “Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”

 

“That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”

 

“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”

 

“I

Like

The Way

That when you

Tilt

Poems

On their side

They

Look like

Miniature

Cities

From

A long way

Away.

Skyscrapers

Made out

Of

Words.”

 

“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”

 

“To talk about memories is to live them a little.”

 

“Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”

 

“It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”

 

“As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered. No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire.  They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.”

 

“Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”

 

“Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.”

 

“She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”

 

“There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.  In those monents that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.”

 

“Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”

 

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.  Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

 

“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”

 

 “She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people anymore. I wanted her in every sense.”

 

 “That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, “I can’t do this life anymore, I need to change.’ And one thing happens which you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no control over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”

 

“This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.”

 

“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

 

“It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”

 

“I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.”

 

“Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.”

 

“I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.”

 

“That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”

 

“There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, I went in search of another book by this very creative, thought-provoking author.  After reading How to Stop Time, I was not disappointed. Like The Midnight Library, Haig takes a very interesting idea, adds in a relateable protagonist and creates a book that is a pleasure to read and to think about long after finishing.  Highly recommended.

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550. The Test

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sylvain Neuvel

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Novella

108 pages, published March 1, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Test is a short novella that takes place in the not to distant future of the UK.  Idir, an immigrant from Iran, is taking the 25 question British Citizenship Test.  If he passes, then his entire family will be allowed to stay.  If he fails, they will be sent back to the Middle East.  However, a few questions in and the test takes an unexpected and terrifying turn.

Quotes 

“When faced with a choice, humans almost invariably seek a no-action, no-change option, even when one of the presented alternatives is quantifiably and logically more advantageous.”

 

“System justification is the idea that many of our needs can be satisfied by defending and justifying the status quo. It gives stability to our political and economic systems because people are inherently inclined to defend it. It prevents people at a disadvantage from questioning the system that disadvantages them, makes people buy the inevitability of social inequity, ignore or support policies that hurt them.”

 

“Here the aversion to decision-making is reinforced by a phenomenon called reactance: when we feel that someone, or something, is threatening or eliminating our behavioural freedom, even just limiting our options, our innate reaction is to try to re-establish that freedom.”

 

“People who talk a lot about the environment are always the ones living the farthest away from nature.”

 

“The goal of the values assessment is not the selection of model human beings, but of model citizens. This means the test should favour homogeneity, not atypical attitudes, no matter how commendable they may be.”

 

My Take

An interesting book in parts with some ideas in the middle that made me think about human nature and decision making, especially when under stress.  However, a bit thin on the plot and character development.

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534. Machines Like Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

306 pages, published April 18, 2019

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Author Ian McEwan tells the story of a world where fully functional robots that closely resemble humans are introduced in an alternate reality 1980’s  Britain.  The UK has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing is alive.

In his early 30’s, Charlie finds himself unemployed and adrift when he comes into a small inheritance.  He uses the money to purchase Adam, one of the first group of synthetic humans sold to the public. With the assistance of his neighbor Miranda, whom Charlie is in love with, Charlie co-designs Adam’s personality. Adam, who is beautiful, strong and clever, develops feelings for Miranda and the three protagonists are soon emeshed in a love triangle.

Quotes 

“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.”

 

“As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.”

 

“Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.”

 

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

 

“We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.”

 

“I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.”

 

“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.”

 

“Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn’t, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”

 

 

“It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.”

 

“What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

 

“My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.”

 

“other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.”

 

“Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.”

 

“A man newly in love knows what life is.”

 

“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

 

“The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.”

 

“football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.”

 

 “property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb.”

 

“…I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.”

 

“The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”

 

My Take

Ian McEwan’s combination of an alternative history with fully realized robotic artificial intelligence make Machines Like Me a fascinating read.  The plot itself is compelling in that we want to see what robotic Adam will do next and how he will interact with the human co-creators of his personality.  However, the subtext of the book raises intriguing questions: what makes us human? Our actions or our inner selves? Could a machine understand the human heart and be capable of love?

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530. Klara and the Sun

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kazuo Ishiguro

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction

304 pages, published March 2, 2021

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Klara and the Sun is set in the near future and is told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities.  When she is purchased to serve as a friend to fourteen year old Josie who suffers from a potentially terminal illness, Klara learns that her role may be different from what she expected.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Klara and the Sun is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and it does not disappoint.  In the same vein as his earlier dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (a book I also really enjoyed), Ishiguro creates a fascinating world not too dissimilar to our current one, but different enough to make you think about the horror of the changes society has decided to accept.  Klara and the Sun explores compelling themes such as what does it mean to be a human, what is our purpose on this earth and what is love.  One of the best books that I have read in a long while.  Highly recommended.

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484. Station Eleven

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Emily St. John Mandel

Genre:    Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction

333  pages, published September 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel set in the days of civilization’s collapse after a virus kills off most of the world’s population.  Author Emily St. John Mandel examines how human beings cope when almost every aspect of the world as they knew it ceases to exist.

Quotes 

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

 

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

 

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

 

“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

 

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”

 

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

 

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

 

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think – this will maybe sound weird – it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

 

 “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

 

“I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

 

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

 

 “An incomplete list:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

 

“He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

 

My Take

After reading and loving The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, I was intererested to see if she had written any other books.  I discovered that Station Eleven was her breakthrough novel, so added the audio version to my library queue.  While I prefer The Glass Hotel, I did enjoy Station Eleven, especially her fascinating descriptions of how life changes after a pandemic wipes out most of civilization.

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480. The Dispatcher

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   John Scalzi

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Novella

130 pages, published October 4, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the not too distant future, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone.  99.9% of people intentionally killed come back to life.  We don’t know how it happens, but it impacts the human race in unexpected and interesting ways.  Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher, a licensed professional whose job is to humanely dispatch those whose circumstances put them in death’s crosshairs, so they can have a second chance to avoid death, who races the clock to save a fellow who has been kidnapped.

Quotes 

“I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

 

“It’s because I remind them they’re not God,” I said. “And that if there is one, I’m closer to Him than they are.”

 

My Take

“I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

 

“It’s because I remind them they’re not God,” I said. “And that if there is one, I’m closer to Him than they are.”

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465. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Suzanne Collins

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance

517 pages, published May 19, 2020

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel to the wildly popular Hunger Games Trilogy.  The book opens with the reaping in advance of the tenth annual Hunger Games.  In the Capitol, 18 year old Coriolanus Snow, whose prominent family has fallen on hard times after the death of his military hero father, is preparing to serve as a mentor in the Games and hope that the experience will provide him the redemption he desperately seeks.  Snow is assigned to tribute Lucy Gray Baird, a 16 year old singer/songwriter from District 12.  As the games proceed, Snow develops feelings for Lucy and starts to question the life he has led.

Quotes 

“You’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. No right to take away their life and freedom. Those are things everyone is born with, and they’re not yours for the taking. Winning a war doesn’t give you that right. Having more weapons doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does.”

 

“Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.”

 

“That is the thing with giving your heart. You never wait for someone to ask. You hold it out and hope they want it.”

 

“You can blame it on the circumstances, the environment, but you made the choices you made, no one else. It’s a lot to take in all at once, but it’s essential that you make an effort to answer that question. Who are human beings? Because who we are determines the type of governing we need. Later on, I hope you can reflect and be honest with yourself about that you learned tonight.”

 

“And try not to look down on people who had to choose between death and disgrace.”

 

“We control it,” he said quietly. “If the war’s impossible to end, then we have to control it indefinitely. Just as we do now. With the Peacekeepers occupying the districts, with strict laws, and with reminders of who’s in charge, like the Hunger Games. In any scenario, it’s preferable to have the upper hand, to be the victor rather than the defeated.”

 

“I’m planning to,” said Sejanus. “I’m planning to build a whole new beautiful life here. One where, in my own small way, I can make the world a better place.”

 

My Take

While not quite as good as The Hunger Games trilogy, I enjoyed The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes which provided insight into how Coriolanus Snow became a heartless tyrant in later life.  I especially liked the characters of Sejanus and Lucy who preserved their humanity in spite of horrific conditions.

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445. Recursion

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Blake Crouch

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Thriller

336 pages, published June 11, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

New York City cop Barry Sutton is perplexed as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.  Helena Smith has dedicated her life to research that will let us re-experience our most precious memories.  When Helena invents a technology that lets us re-set time and start over, she intersects with Barry and they team up to save the world from destroying itself.

Quotes 

“Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human – the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

 

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”

“He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD”

 

“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?”

 

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

 

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

 

“He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”

 

“He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.”

 

“He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”

 

“This low point isn’t the book of your life. It’s just a chapter.”

 

“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

 

“In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion-a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’etre.

What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationship and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.”

 

“Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

 

“Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

 

“Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?”

 

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984”

 

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”

 

“But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”

 

“The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone.

She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means — not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.”

 

“Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions – our idea of reality – are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.”

 

“She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.”

 

My Take

I found Recursion to be a highly engaging and fascinating read.  While it stands on its own as a SciFi thriller, author Blake Crouch also has a lot of interesting things to say about time and memory and the role they play in making us who we are.  Recommended.

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441. Childhood’s End

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Arthur C. Clarke

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

234 pages, published August 1953

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Written in 1952, Childhood’s End describes a world in which a group of beings from outer space appear in spaceships over every city on earth.  Called the Overlords, the extraterrestrial beings are intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind and exert their benevolent will to unify the planet, eliminate poverty, end war and improve life. With only a few pockets of resistance, humankind agreed and a golden age began.  However, it was not to last.

Quotes 

“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”

 

“Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.”

 

“Science is the only religion of mankind.”

 

“Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.”

 

“In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. […] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.”

 

“man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.”

 

“Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.”

 

“The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!”

 

“Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.”

 

My Take

Prior to Childhood’s End, I had never read anything by Arthur C. Clarke.  My favorite science fiction writer has always been Isaac Asimov.  It turned out to be a real treat to read this fascinating tale by one of the genre’s master storytellers.  Although written in 1952, Childhood’s End holds up well.  I had a hard time putting it down and recommend you check it out.

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414. This Is How You Lose the Time War

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Amal El-Mohtar

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

209 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This Is How You Lose the Time War is written from by two authors, Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and is told from the perspectives of Red and Blue, two time-traveling agents from warring futures who are working their way through the past.  Red and Blue begin to exchange letters which leads them to fall in love.

Quotes 

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.  I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”

 

“Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”

 

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”

 

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.  I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

 

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”

 

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.”

 

“It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You’re different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”

 

“Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”

 

My Take

While there are some beautiful and poetic parts of This Is How You Lose the Time War, I just couldn’t get into this book.  The plot (what there was of one) was difficult to follow and I often didn’t know what was going on.  However, it may just be me.  There are many others who really like this book.

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