A military Sci Fi novel with an interesting twist to the casus belli between two cultures. The integration of telepathy in the story is interesting, particularly in the idea of mechanical amplification and an “internet” that exists in the “space” which makes the FTL transit possible.

There’s interesting exploration on the emotional toll of war, on perspectives of anti-military citizens, and on the corrupting influence of power which exceeds the usual in the genera. I appreciated that touch.

The heroine of the story is slowly revealed in a way that allows a slow and gradual suspension of disbelief: thinking back on the story i find myself sputtering as i realize the character who was revealed. Masterfully done.

Yet another relief from the tedium of sardine travel.

I picked this up in the RDU airport used book store. (More airports should have used book stores!) The universe in which the story is set is one where Earth, exploring the stars, have yet to find intelligent life. They proceed with an ambitious terraforming and colonization project, to discover the Quill have taken over the terraformed planets and kill humans with ease. Uncertain how to fight the threat, Earth quarantines the rest of space. Settlers and spacers are stuck on crowded space stations, as the planets are certain death.

I enjoyed how Czerneda portrayed the culture that developed on one space station and how she recognized how the difference would lead to miscommunication between the Earth scientist and and the colonists. The strata of privilege on the space station and the competition of rank on the science vessel provide more than sufficient conflict to power such a powerful story. It seemed deftly handled and worthy of reflection.

The Quill were also fascinating, but i dare not write more than that without spoiling one discovery or another. On the other hand, the romance that developed was not quite as believable.

All in all, the perfect diversion during air travel.

I’m impressed by just how old and familiar this story was while being novel and fresh. Eight year olds in China, in their first experience of democracy, behave like … like candidates for the US presidency. Witness debates with coached sound bites, voter manipulation, focus groups, and so on. The unfiltered presentation leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions. I find myself wondering about the need for civics class, indoctrination to a set of ideals where winning a race isn’t everything. I mull pursuit of power, ambition, and gendered behaviors. It is interesting, too, that for these Chinese students the opposing choice to a dictator is a manager.

I picked up this book in the store for the USS Pampinito on Mechanicrawl02008. My grandfather sailed in subs in the Pacific theater in WWII. I was interested in learning more about what his day to day life on the sub must have been like, as he was never one to tell sea tales. This memoir, enriched with the stories of other men serving on the USS Guardfish and USS Extractor gives an idea of the rhythm of difficulty and threat to which the men who served lived and worked.

From the US Naval Institute webpage for the book:

Claude Conner weaves a compelling tale of his experiences in the Pacific aboard the USS Guardfish, one of the Navy’s top-scoring World War II submarines. Tragically, the Guardfish also was the only submarine to sink another American warship in a little-known friendly-fire accident against the USS Extractor. This well-documented memoir chronicles Guardfish’s Hollywood-like war actions, including her perilous forays into Japanese-controlled harbors, daring rescue of personnel from a Japanese-held island, near catastrophic flooding of the submarine’s conning tower, depth-charge attacks, and much more.

The author includes rare firsthand accounts by a dozen Extractor survivors who describe actions leading up to their encounter with the submarine, the actual sinking of the ship, their rescue, and their subsequent treatment by Navy officials. Conner examines the chain of events that led to the regrettable sinking and offers details of the Court of Inquiry that followed and for which he testified as a witness. This book was highly recommended by World War II historian Clay Blair when first published in 1999.

For me, this seemed worthy of a skim but not much more. I took notes on some of the outlined process concepts. In brief, Roam has taken the list of the “6 Ws” - a slightly different list of “Who what where…” - and mapped those to diagram types. EG: for who or what, you are drawing a portrait; for when, a timeline. He presents five different aspects one should consider in a diagram. EG: are you showing a change or how things are at the moment?. This systematic process of reflection before one begins drawing a diagram is appears quite useful.

He notes that there are many different comfort levels on using diagrams, and so if you aren’t used to simple diagrams in you meetings and communications, he has extensive explanations on how the process will enhance communication and help address the challenge of solving problems.

I finished this ages ago. And i seem to be locked into choosing worth or not worth consuming: no “unstated.” I’ll choose “worth consuming” as a pleasant SF diversion. I find Laumer entertaining.

She’s fascinating: a magical horrific tragic beautiful person.

I don’t often read biographies, but i had read some of Isak Dinesen’s stories and felt they addressed dilemmas and problems of a totally different cultural reality. And, in fact, they might, as her childhood might be considered a romantic rebellion against her bourgeois maternal family with in preference to her father’s aristocratic line, yet smack in the middle of the early Bohemian lifestyle of fin de siecle Denmark. Her stories are seeded then, and then she goes through another lifetime between 1913 and 1931: her life in Africa. When she returns to Europe, lover and farm torn from her, syphilitic, she creates something else out of herself.

A few notes from reading:

A mention of “Orm og tyr” by Martin Alfred Hansen in the book made me want to read it - “a history of Scandinavian religious literature and the relationship between pagan and Christian cultures” - but it seems to be only available in Danish.

Another marked page was about a challenge to write for the American magazine market. An English friend of hers, Geoffrey Gorer, advised her “Write about food. Americans are obsessed with food.” Thus, “Babette’s Feast”

Finally, through a struggle she learned, as she related to Marianne Moore, “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope . . . suddenly the work will find itself.”

Beautifully shot. The characters only slowly let themselves become known to the viewer, but the plot isn’t not the film. It is the visual meditation on distance, visual and emotional.

I think this would have been better as a short story. Over half the novel is a slow reflective narrative about the main character’s childhood and involvement with several women. I was never engaged as Hajime shares this back story with a flat sense of self-recrimination and self-pity. Once the story catches up to the present and the choices he must make as an adult do i find myself caring about the struggles.

When the women come back into his life decades later, the story begins. The character Hajime revisits the backstory - his childhood, his regrets - as he reconnects with a classmate and with the woman who was his childhood best friend. In his adult context, i can care about the self recrimination and regrets.

I will likely reread Kazo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World for contrast as another reflection on regret and choices.