An informational book that describes and advocates for the note taking system of the German …
Review of 'How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A short and easy read, easy recognizable insight, and inspires action.
This book is written in an easy going language. It makes a convincing case for changing one's a approach to learning, then proceeds to break that change of approach up into manageable bites, and inspires the reader to get right down to it.
This early work of Ursula Le Guin sees her in her period of writing more classical, "hard" science fiction; yet her personal fingerprint is fortunately still all over this story. This is not a ground breaking piece of literature, it's a nice little well-rounded, bite-size, easily digestible and entertaining story, yet it still manages to discretely subvert many of the genre tropes and stereotypes and raise some interesting questions. And as always, no matter how great and imaginative world building and science fiction technology Le Guin creates, it is always the people who take front and center.
Stylistically, Le Guin hadn't quite found her stride yet when writing this book, it is not as well written as her later works. But it is still immensely enjoyable, and a snapshot of a one-woman literary revolution in its beginnings. And also just plain old entertaining and captivating.
When Diggory and Polly try to return the wicked witch Jadis to her own world, …
Review of "The Magician's Nephew" on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I loved this book as a kid, I found it better written, more mysterious and meaningful than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. So I was really looking forward to share it with my 8-year-old for our goodnight story.
Well... We had to put it down halfway through because he hated it so much. He liked the first parts of it well enough, was caught by the mystery of the terrible uncle, the magic rings, the Wood Between The Worlds, and the ruin world of Charn. But he could not abide the smugness of Aslan, the revering and worshiping descriptions of him (this is too cringe, dad!), and he found the one-dimensional description of the witch as irrationally evil to be so insulting to his intelligence that between that and Aslans smugness, he found himself siding with her. He was not taken by the creation myth of Narnia, found …
I loved this book as a kid, I found it better written, more mysterious and meaningful than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. So I was really looking forward to share it with my 8-year-old for our goodnight story.
Well... We had to put it down halfway through because he hated it so much. He liked the first parts of it well enough, was caught by the mystery of the terrible uncle, the magic rings, the Wood Between The Worlds, and the ruin world of Charn. But he could not abide the smugness of Aslan, the revering and worshiping descriptions of him (this is too cringe, dad!), and he found the one-dimensional description of the witch as irrationally evil to be so insulting to his intelligence that between that and Aslans smugness, he found himself siding with her. He was not taken by the creation myth of Narnia, found it "cringe" in its (my interpretation) postulated rather than demonstrated wonder. And believe me when I say this is not a kid who has lost the sense of wonder, let alone the ability to think about morality. Quite the opposite, he found the characters and their morals insultingly simplistic and lacking in empathy. Harsh truths from an 8-year-old.
It was a bit of a blow to me but I am also immensely proud of Junior, because I totally can see his points, my childish sense of wonder had just lingered with me since my own childhood and led me to never question these things. I still think there is a lot of good storytelling in this book, as in the rest of the series, but... Just got to realize, I guess, that it isn't aging as well as I'd have liked it to.
Review of 'Star Maker by William Olaf Stapledon' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I found this book very hard to finish. I read it having heard it was a classic in early Science Fiction, bringing some philosophy and literary ambition into a genre otherwise dominated by Flash Gordon type pulp zine stories. And, well, the ambition is certainly there. I guess some of the thoughts and ideas in it may also have been novel for its time, but they are heavily dated for today's reader and have mainly historical interest.
The writing style is rambling, overwrought, as full of adjectives as H. P. Lovecraft, although not quite as terrible. On the other hand, Lovecraft knows to keep it short, which is not exactly the case for Stapledon.
One thing that speaks in Stapledons favor is that he has clearly been careful about being up to date with the scientific state of the art of his time. Which is hopelessly outdated today, of course, …
I found this book very hard to finish. I read it having heard it was a classic in early Science Fiction, bringing some philosophy and literary ambition into a genre otherwise dominated by Flash Gordon type pulp zine stories. And, well, the ambition is certainly there. I guess some of the thoughts and ideas in it may also have been novel for its time, but they are heavily dated for today's reader and have mainly historical interest.
The writing style is rambling, overwrought, as full of adjectives as H. P. Lovecraft, although not quite as terrible. On the other hand, Lovecraft knows to keep it short, which is not exactly the case for Stapledon.
One thing that speaks in Stapledons favor is that he has clearly been careful about being up to date with the scientific state of the art of his time. Which is hopelessly outdated today, of course, but it is pretty interesting to get some insight into what they got right and wrong at the time. He also has a remarkable imagination when it comes to conjuring up alien life forms - there are passages that are genuinely interesting to read for that.
That doesn't change that the book could have been cut down to 25 or 30% of it current length and only gained in quality by it. The format of the story doesn't make it better: the detached journey through countless worlds in the Universe means that just as one world begins to get a little interesting and engaging, it is left behind. Also, Stapledon doesn't use the world to tell a story, but to prove a philosophical point, meaning that he treats his protagonists with a careless detachment that quickly wears off on the reader. No matter which great imagination he displays, ultimately the whole (very considerable) length of the book is basically just an incredibly elaborate wrapping for a surprisingly boring and unoriginal vision of (what he carefully doesn't name as but which is, as plainly as Aslan) God.
So yeah, there's good stuff in this book, even glimpses of greatness in the descriptions of the various worlds and alien species, but they are depressingly thinly scattered in a never ending desert of pompous, unstructured rambling.
