Reading

I enjoyed Dune Messiah. It wasn’t as good as the first book, but very few books are. Frank Herbert carried on Paul’s story to it’s conclusion — an act that we knew must play out as well as Paul did. Frank Herbert wrote about prescience, about a protagonist with oracular vision without it being boring. Near infinite vision isn’t a gift, it’s a curse. The alternative would have been to spell out the ending for us, but instead Herbert lets us experience Paul’s turmoil. ...

Spoilers ahead I enjoy reading anything by Haruki Murakami. The last book of his that I finished before this was A Wild Sheep Chase, and before that, 1Q84. What struck me about this novel was the down to earth nature of the story. Set around Tokyo in the late 1960’s, this book follows Toru Watanabe and his various relationships. This book is a love story at it’s core, without any of the mysticism that Haruki Murakami normally brings to his stories. ...

Dave Baldwin tells the story of his life and the relationships he has formed. I’m not a big fan of biographies. I prefer books that take an idea and run with them. I also didn’t expect to like this book very much because I never really got along with Dave, who was my aviation doctor. The way he slings a phrase doesn’t do much for me and I struggled to gel with him. ...