I love audio books, and I think my favorite narrator is RC Bray. Right now I’m listening to him narrate The Martian by Andy Weir, which was adapted into a fantastic film with Matt Damon. This is a good example where you’re good to go whether reading the book first or watching the movie. They elide or change just a few things, and the book expands on tons of stuff the movie just couldn’t include. I thought the movie made a good decision giving Watney his Iron Man moment, whereas the book mentions it but then says lol that’s too dangerous so no.
I’m a big fan of stories where someone wakes up in a terrible situation and has to survive one agonizing step at a time, eg All is Lost with Robert Redford, or even the TV show Lost. A guy being stranded on Mars in sorta modern day era is like catnip for me, especially learning the lengths Weir went to in order to make everything scientifically accurate.
What I didnt like in the film was using the commander for rescuing Damon. Just seemed selfish for me. I would have liked it more if they used Beck to catch him.
What was your favorite vs least favorite Dark Tower book?
I think my favorite is still The Drawing of the Three (book 2). My favorite sequence though is the opening of Wizard and Glass (book 4) battling against Blaine with a war of riddles.
My least favorite is Wolves of the Calla (book 5).
Ita hard to put into words. I get why people don’t like Wolves but there is a lot of action and a pretty good mystery story there, not to mention the reintroduction of Fathe Callahan.
But book 6 takes such an odd detour (not like the one in WAG) and I really really dislike the Jake/Callahan teamup and am indifferent to not super jazzed about the King inclusion.
I think its pretty noticeable that King was likely in the worst of his pain during the writing of book 6.
Just finished Shelly Kagan’s Normative Ethics. As the title suggests, it’s a survey of ethical theories. Unlike other textbooks, though, it doesn’t focus on who said what and when. In fact, it doesn’t mention any philosophers by name except in the end notes and references. Instead, it tries to focus on the general components that make up any theory of ethics and to give an idea of the breadth of the conceptual possibilities. It’s probably not a great first book on ethics, but I found it quite wide ranging and insightful. By focusing on the nuts and bolts of ethical theories, it seems like this book prepares readers to do their own moral philosophy instead of merely understanding someone else’s position.
I’m also halfway through Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, which I picked up on a whim at a used bookstore. This is a foundational work of feminist ethics written by a Harvard psychologist. The thesis is that then current moral psychology (as conducted by Kohlberg and others) placed too much emphasis on male moral reasoning and as a result labeled any differences that females had as deficiencies. Gilligan argues that females have distinct but equal valid modes of moral reasoning, which can be understood as an “ethic of care.”
You read more ethics than anyone who isn’t a grad student or professor. Isn’t there a big 19th century work on ethics from an English guy? You should read that, and the Theory of Moral Sentiments (if you haven’t). I kind of disagree about reading an “overview” if you are generally familiar with the field, in that you are invariably getting a filtered version of the best thinkers/writers.
I rarely read anything twice, but I’m going through a second listen of Fukuyama’s Origin’s of Political Order. It’s a pretty impressive work, basically a history of political systems around the world (focus on China, India, and the Ottomans) from chimpanzees to the French Revolution. (Part 2 is after the French Revolution.) It’s also great to fall asleep to–wide in scope but not overly dense and reasonably entertaining.
Also reading a book called Exercised by a Harvard biology prof that discusses what is known about human activity (anthropologically), energetics, and exercise.
Sidgwick’s Method of Ethics? I have that, but it’s really long, and the Victorian styling doesn’t make the going any easier. I’ve read the first of the four “books,” which is mainly stage setting. Hope to pick it back up at some point.
Holy Fuck! Written in 1937. A guy goes for a walk onto a hill and his consciousness leaves his body and goes into orbit. This is like page 1. The whole book is his consciousness travelling the universe witnessing countless civilizations in the galaxy by inhabiting the minds of essentially aliens and describing their rise and fall. Civilizations going way beyond human capabilities and eventually he witnesses the entire age of the cosmos and different cosmos coming to existence and eventually ending. It’s incredible, but it’s a bit of a slog to read at times. It doesn’t really read as science fiction. It’s more like speculative philosophy of the entire universe and cosmos. It’s almost like a religious book. Humans are viewed as a very early basic civilization facing the struggle to advance that all alien societies face where they either destroy themselves or move forward.
Jason Sanford runs my favorite genre grapevine of all things in the sf/f genres. He’s been out of commission from COVID for a while. Glad to see him back.
