I purchased Story of Your Life and Others after I saw Arrival in theaters, which rocked me to my core, and I wanted to see just how it translated from the page to the screen. The answer? Very differently. For one, Chiang is a lot more technical in his descriptions, and I really appreciate the sparse-ness of his language. He does not use wordy descriptions to manipulate emotions out of his readers; he simply lets the readers draw the parallels between the science-y concepts he talking about […]
There’s a human being behind that brain, people
When Henry Molaison was 7 or 8 years old he collided with a bicycle and hit his head, an incident that many scientists believe was the cause of his subsequent epileptic seizures. By the time he turned 27, Henry and his parents were desperate for relief from what had become a debilitating condition, so much so that they agreed to let Dr. William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital, perform a lobotomy. This would be a new type of lobotomy that would specifically target the medial temporal lobes. While […]
Sleeping Beauty, Environmental Warrior
Beauty is a complicated fantasy novel about fairy tales, feminism, environmentalism and the end of the world. It involves fairies, angels, humans, and time travel, and places a heavy emphasis on darkness vs. light, on creativity and destruction. There is a whole helluva lot going on, sometimes maybe more than the author can handle, but author Tepper, who died last year (because of course she did, it was 2016), certainly demonstrates great passion for her subject matter. The novel begins in 14th century Westfaire with […]
The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.
4.5 stars Aristotle “Ari” is a conflicted teenager growing up in El Paso in the late 1980s. He’s sixteen and a loner, but doesn’t really mind his lack of friends. He’s very close to his mother, whose a high school teacher (not at Ari’s school), but wishes he could talk to his dad, a Vietnam vet about, well, anything really. The youngest of his family, Ari’s twin sisters are much older than him and his brother is in prison, never spoken about by anyone in […]