Eddie's Monthly

Finally a reading report that comes out on time*. My secret? I suck and I only read two books this month.

Buffalo Hunter Hunter – Stephen Graham Jones

A teacher is notified that belongings from here great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpa have been found in an excavation. It's a notebook, nay, a journal from her ancestor. In this journal, a lutheran pastor transcribes the strange confession of a blackfeet indian. His confession gets stranger and stranger as she deciphers her ancestor's pages...

This book is extremely slow going, and for a good amount of the book, you are just there for the ride, which is aimless as far as you can tell. And the writing is confusing too. But then you start to see what's going on, and it starts to get going. I loved the setting, and the expended lore on the classic monster (don't wanna spoil anything as the reveal is a good 100 pages in). It's so well done and give that monster some much needed flaws and means to escape from it. The horror elements of the book also only creeps in ¾ of the book in, and it is very welcome and surprising in its intensity. I'm staying as vague as possible as I would recommend you read this book for yourself, if you're not put-off by the sluggish start.

The Order of Time – Carlo Rovelli

Synopsis: What the fuck is time?

A very, very interesting dive on what time is and how we've come to conceptualise it. But more importantly that time is fake. I have been on a post-modern deconstruction bender in the last few year, but I gotta be honest, time as a pillar of reality had not been on my list. And this is not just about time dilation, which most everyone understand (or understands that they don't understand but know it exist — let's say: is more or less familiar with), this book goes way further. I thought it was interesting to things about if anything was truly time independent, and in what capacity, the different natures of time, how we can think of order instead of time with noncommutative properties for instance (if we measure one quality first and then the other we get a result, and a different result if we do the opposite). I would say this book is enjoyable for many audiences, and I don't think anyone would get more enjoyment out of it by having a physics background.

The book also has this very human and poetic way to look at things, which makes the book infinitely more engaging that all those hard, cold physics books, and infinitely more interesting than any vulgarisation books trying to use overt humour to keep the reader engaged, which are at the end of day, just commodifying science for easy, bingeable, mindless and thoughtless consumption to the profit of people wholly uninterested in anything but the number of zeros in their bank accounts. Got a little carried away here, but the bottom line is that this is good, and this is human. I like this human focus and human centeredness, as it is common when we talk science to delve into the unfeeling realm of numbers and the uncaring (and illusory) 'objectiveness' and 'rightness' of science. Another thing that I liked was that it was a hard cover. I have never been a hardcover guy, as they are more expensive, and being very smart I realised that since the words are the same I can just get the paperback for cheaper, but it is such a better reading experience. Being able to read one-handed (pictured below) not only frees up you other hand, but is also more comfortable and looks much cooler from the outside.

Two measly books this month? We are getting washed. At least one of them is from our list. I'm currently at 32/60 books read in the booklog, and at 10333/19773 pages — or 53% and 52% done respectively. I'll see you next month to report more of my embarrassingly slow progress.

Thank you for reading my logorrhea Eddie – Award winning author