Finished reading: The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander 📚

An instant of sharp pain before the numbness. The world was floods above and fire below. If there was such a thing as a soul, the soul had gambled on a sort of baptism, and had it won?

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

A ring of expectant faces before the light dims; they move in the shadows like ghouls …

… and the creatures of makeshift lives, the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused: the Lion, the Scarecrow, the maimed Tin Woodman. Up from the shadows for an instant, up into the light; then back.

The Goddess of Gifts the last, reaching in among flames and water, cradling her, crooning something, but the words remain unclear.

• excerpt from Gregory Maguire. “Wicked”

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First fire of the season in the wood stove!

Finished reading: The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami 📚 3.5 stars. A good book, but not amongst his best, largely due to Murakami not effectively “managing“ his plot threads and characters.

Finished reading: The White Mountains by John Christopher 📚

I live as if in someone else’s house A house that comes in dreams And in which I have died perhaps Where there is something strange In the weariness of evening Something the mirrors save for themselves—

—from “Dull Knife,” Anna Akhmatova, trans. D. M. Thomas”

(excerpted From Rose/House by Arkady Martine)

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Finished reading: Rose/House by Arkady Martine 📚

Three stars

Finished reading: Grendel by John Gardner 📚 4 stars. Re-read for the first time since college.

A few months ago, I came across Circling Home by John Lane. The book described a personal project of his to learn everything about the home, neighborhood, and town that he had made a conscious decision to settle in. He drew a circle with a one mile radius around his home on a map and used that as the boundary for his investigations. This research would eventually become the book.

I really the idea. It resonates with me on two levels:

First, every few years, I pick a research topic to “go deep” in and learn everything I can about. I typically collect all of that information, analysis, and data and build an extensive set of notes, articles, and diagrams. Over the past three decades, topics have included: comparative religion, neuroscience, post-Soviet international relations, the American revolution, geology, astrophotography, AI and data science, climate change, lunar science.

Second, I love the town that I live in: the small town of Harvard, MA. I’ve already been accumulating articles and web links and local histories of my immediate environs. I’ve already been capturing photos of the plants and trees and insects in my area. I’ve been downloading topographic maps and geology articles of the area.

And so I’ve already started my next research project. I will learn all that I can about my neighborhood – the Shaker Village Historic District.

I’ll document my findings and notes and discoveries here. After hand wringing over a few different titles, I’ve decided to call this site “Where I live.”

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

― exerpt from H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

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Finished reading: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells 📚 4 stars. Always a pleasure to re-read.

Finished reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚

3 stars. 4 stars if Vandermeer had taken a different approach to the Lowry section.

Finished reading: Want by 📚 3 stars

Finished reading: A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle 📚 3 stars

tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate of Virconium, the Pastel City, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman, stood at early morning on the sand dunes that lay between his tall home and the grey line of the surf.

Excerpt from “The Pastel City” by M. John Harrison 📚 💬

Finished reading: Breath by James Nestor 📚 4 stars

He took the clay from the hand of the angel, and made Adam according to Our image and likeness, and He left him lying for forty days and forty nights without putting breath into him. And He heaved sighs over him daily, saying, ‘If I put breath into this [man], he must suffer many pains.’

And I said unto My Father, ‘Put breath into him; I will be an advocate for him.’

And My Father said unto Me, ‘If I put breath into him, My beloved Son, Thou wilt be obliged to go down into the world, and to suffer many pains for him before Thou shalt have redeemed him, and made him to come back to his primal state.’

And I said unto My Father, ‘Put breath into him; I will be his advocate, and I will go down into the world, and will fulfil Thy command.’

• from “Discourse on Abbatôn” by Timothy, Archbishop of Alexandria

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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