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Another top science fiction audiobook from my local library.

And now there's micro black holes and space travel? What a book! A little jarring. Fairly profound.

It's gotten weird. Telepathic pigs and hinting at aliens. But the stories are still very human. I'm intrigued, and looking forward to finding out what happens.

Randomly borrowed this from my Libby app as one of the top Science Fiction audiobooks. Shades of "Cloud Cuckoo Land" and "Station Eleven" so far.

Bleak. Despair. Currently reminding me of the mood from "Grave of the Fireflies". Haunting and powerful.

Here on my 42nd birthday, I'm learning what I can about Life, the Universe, and Everything!

I can hardly put this down!

Every once in a while, I have an idea for a story, and I look it up to see if it already exists. I thought of a world where people re-live their lives over and over again, and there was a hidden society of these people that secretly run the world. Indeed, this time, this story was already written practically exactly as I imagined it! Really enjoyable so far, too!

I'm suspicious that I'll learn anything groundbreaking, but this comes highly recommended so giving it a try.

Big thoughts and emotions. Not actually very long. Audiobook is only a little over 4 hours. Will take almost as much time afterwards to think on and digest.

One hour in. Powerful so far.

I set this down for a few weeks. Much denser than I'm used to these days! Still a strong, prescient work for 1979 given the current revolutions going on in "AI"!

This book was perfect for my 20-year-old self, and this reread makes me fondly remember that.

Denser and more disjointed than I remember, but possibly I'm just out of practice reading heavy math books!

It's becoming very interesting for me to consume stories heavily featuring AI but written before ChatGPT broke onto the stage. In this book, they're 500 years into the future and having a hard time to get an AI to tell a story lol!

Still, I'm interested to hear the end.

Fond memories

Started the audiobook this morning. Looking forward to it!

I have this in my head as one of my all-time faves. However, I haven't read it in over 20 years. Let's see if it still holds up (I have high hopes).

What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

"The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes."

I borrowed the ebook version from the library months ago, but I couldn't finish it before the due date. Luckily, my wife had a paperback copy at home, so I picked it up again a couple of weeks ago. It's quite dense and slow-paced, but I'm really enjoying it, even if I'm probably missing a lot of the subtext and metaphor.