Lots of fun, exciting ideas in the first half. Bacigalupi sets up 4 captivating plots, all ready to collide. Unfortunately, the resolution of each of these plot devices is not as compelling as the ideas behind them.

A good companion read to River of Gods, which takes place in near-future India.

After watching Cosmos, this is especially rewarding. Incredible how Sagan and Druyan were such capable storytellers.

After reading the novel, I feel the movie does stands up pretty well.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -- the glory -- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting in his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem eveil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time is seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions: What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction,and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system build on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

The first half is transcendental. The second half is of-quality, but once the plot focuses on the Trask clan, it just isn't as riveting. I wonder if the first half is so good because Steinbeck was documenting his childhood, rather than writing fiction.

My first go at Dickens. The books introduction basically read "This Dicken's shortest novel and perhaps least favorite among readers." At which point I should have just put it down, and waited for a good time to get into David Copperfield. But I forced myself to get through it. True to the introduction's summary, the first two thirds are eventless, while the final third makes things interesting. Not recommended.

Oft cited source of inspiration for Jonathan Blow's Braid.

This isn't a book so much as an existentialist thought experiment. I found myself skipping the city chapters and reading only the Polo / Khan interludes.

Re-read as an adult. Back as a kid, I couldn't follow all the quantum-leaping time-shifts. Thoughout the Time Quintet, Charles Wallaces gets billed as a the super-child, the most talented of all the Murrys. So now that he gets his own novel, it's a bit odd that Charles barely gets a chance in the spot light, as the majority of the narrative occurs as Charles inhabits the spirits of others.

But I was impressed by this read. L'Engles existential notions are more coherent in this book. It's enjoyable to find how all the threads are connected across time and space.

Re-read again as an adult. I love the small world that Many Waters takes place in. Old Testament, pre-history, angelic mythos, mythical creatures. There are hardly any thrills or a building climax. But there's something magical with this book that I still connect with, the same way I did when I was Sandy & Dennys' age.

Re-reading this again as an adult. This contains some nice ideas - about the connectiveness of all matter in the universe, from the nanoscopic fictional farandolae to the size of galaxies. But it feels like L'Engle threw this one together after getting a couple neat ideas but as a whole it's not that compelling of a story. The plot is forced

Pretty good SF. Ensemble narrative, plot driven by 8 intertwined stories.

"The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this." Oshima brings his two hands together tightly.

"In Murasaki Shikibu's time living spirits were both a grotesque phenomenon and a natural condition of the human heart that was right there with them. People of that period probably couldn't conceive of these two types of darkness as separate from each other. But today's things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us."

Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They're a lost cause, and I don't want anyone like that coming in here.

The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry's computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn't working were not as interesting to him.

But things like the ability of some student's dead car to spawn repeating pattern of thimble-sized vortices a hundred yards downwind would seem to argue in favor of a more cautious view of the word, an openness to the full and true weirdness of the Universe, an admission of our limited human faculties. And if you've gotten to this point, then you can argue that growing up in a family devoid of gigantic and obvious primal psychological forces, and living a life touched by many subtle and even forgotten influences rather than one or two biggies (e.g., active participation in the Church of Stan) can lead, far downwind, to consequences that are not entirely devoid of interest.