You should see it if you get the chance, it’s a fabulous show and Burke uses that dry British wit to make it even more fun to watch.
Started today on The Seventh Bride, T. Kingfisher’s retelling of Bluebeard. With bonus hedgehog. 
I loved the TV series. The audiobook of Connections is derived from the book you’re reading, though, not directly from the TV show. I agree with DZed about it being dated – the bit about Bell Labs being the kind of thing we create in order to create the future seems really sad when you consider that not only is Bell Labs gone, but so are a great many others, disappeared in the unsung Great Research Lab Holocaust of the 1990s – not only Bell, but GTE Labs, IBM Watson, and others that died when their companies imploded – Kodak, Polaroid, American Optical…
Burke has written other, much more recent books. If you liked Connections, try
The Day the Universe Changed – another tie-in to a PBS series
The Pinball Effect – This book has an interesting unique “hyperlink” format
Circles
American Connections
The Knowledge Web
Chances
The Axemaker’s Gift
The Axemaker’s Gift he wrote with another dude and, for me, it came off as weirdly anti technology. Maybe it was just me but the vibe was very Terminator, technology will kill us.
Woohoo! I think you will like it!
Finished King Arthur: The Making of the Legend by Nicholas J. Higham. I was a bit disappointed. Higham does take extraordinary pains to examine the available evidence in excruciating detail. His dismissal of the Sarmation and Dalmation claims for the origin of King Arthur or the Arthurian stories is by no means cavalier, but you can see his leanings in the way he describes things. What disappointed me was that I was expecting a similar examination (and probably dismissal) of the many possible “historical Arthurs” that have been proposed since 1980. I didn’t get that. Geoffrey Ashe’s contender, Riothamus, is dismissed in two pages. (Ashe, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has been writing about King Arthur and archaeological works set in his approximate time since about the time I was born) Norma Lorre Goodrich, who had proposed a different contender, is put off in a couple of paragraphs. The other possibilities and their supporters aren’t even explicitly mentioned.
Spoiler alert
Higham’s position is that Arthur never existed as a historical figure, nor did any historical figure act as the nucleus of the Arthur legend. His basic argument, which has been used many times before, is essentially that there is no mention of him in the relevant contemporary documents.
There’s more to it, of course. Higham goes into great depth about the authors of these records, their nature, why they were written, and to what purpose. He points out what we should expect to see if Arthur were real, and shows how many of the even earlier records that might show a Roman Arthur (for instance) weren’t available to the framers of the Legend. But, at its heart, it’s still the Argument from Silence.
I still would’ve liked to have seen all those Arthur Proposers to get the same nitpicking and arguments thrown against them that they devolved upon others. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get the academic bloodbath I was expecting.
Now I’m reading The Godzilla FAQ by Brian Solomon, a gift from my cousins who clearly know me. It’s a surprisingly heavy book about the Big G and his movies.
Thanks for the recommendations. I enjoy reading this type of book.
Finished Connections by James Burke, which I liked a lot.
Now I’m reading Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells.
A bit of an aside, but I find her to be a very entertaining Twitter follow.
She is pretty funny! I’m really enjoying The Seventh Bride too. I should be done by now, but can’t get more than a few reading minutes here or there.
Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado - Douglas Preston As the title says, the author and two other completely inept guys attempted to retrace on horseback, Coronado’s trip across the badlands of New Mexico and Arizona to find the mythical “seven cities of gold”. What they estimated to take a month or so turned into a much longer and much more difficult ordeal, as even today those areas are formidable for all but expert trekkers.
Finished Exit Strategy by Martha Wells, which is a Murderbot novella. Excellent writing, just like the first three.
Now I’m reading A Stone for a Pillow, by Madeleine L’Engle.
Finished A Stone for a Pillow, by Madeleine L’Engle. It was excellent. Favorite anecdote: The author was signing a contract for movie rights to* A Wrinkle in Time*. The contract, according to her, would give the studio all movie rights “throughout the universe, forever.” With a red pen, she added an asterisk and the words “except Sagittarius and the Andromeda galaxy” before signing it. The studio reps signed it too, but she heard later there was talk at the studio about the clause she’d added. What did she know they didn’t?
Now I’m reading The Postman, by David Brin.
My first completed book of the year is *Bring Me Back * by B.A. Paris, which was a pleasant surprise. I absolutely loved B.A. Paris’s debut novel, Behind Closed Doors. Then I read her sophomore novel, The Breakdown, and it was just plain not good. Bring Me Back was her third novel, so when it came out, I waited a little while to see how other people rated and reviewed it. And it wasn’t well-received. In fact, people rated it a good deal worse than her second novel (the bad one)! So I figured the author was a one-hit wonder, and decided to try her third book just in case it was good, fully expecting it not to be. But it was.
The premise is that the main character’s g/f had disappeared 12 years ago, and now she seems to have returned. “Seems to” because she doesn’t actually walk in and introduce herself; instead, she starts leaving him little clues and menacing emails. The book was split into three parts, and the first part of the book was every bit as strong as her debut novel. The other two parts weren’t quite as good, but still good enough to keep me wide-eyed and slack-jawed, furiously turning the pages because I’m invested in the story and curious about how it’s all going to resolve. B.A. Paris writes thrillers, and while I think Gillian Flynn is the gold standard for thrillers, Paris is one of the better thriller-writers that I’ve come across. So glad to see she hasn’t lost her touch!
Today I read Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma, a story about a family moving back to their ancestral farm, where (as legend has it) a dragon sleeps. I was underwhelmed.
Finished Crooked Kingdom, the sequel to Six of Crows. It’s a worthy sequel to Six of Crows, building on what works in that novel. There’s a misstep near the end, an event handled in a more cursory and emotionally unaffecting manner than I’d like; but other than that, it was thoroughly satisfying. If “young adult fantasy heist” has any appeal whatsoever to you, I definitely recommend this one!
I’m taking a break from my audiobook of Van Gogh: The Life about a fifth of the way through, and have started a novel, Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept, about the CIA effort to secretly distribute Dr. Zhivago within the USSR in the Fifties. I like it so far. I’m also starting to re-read Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation Trilogy, and am digging it, too. Haven’t read it in decades.
Same here. I read it in the early '70s and loved it. I’m always interested too, nowadays, in things like, say, pre-Internet sci-fi that goes forward into an Internet-less universe.
Finished The Postman, by David Brin. Meh. Too predictable.
Now I’m reading Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, by Peg Kehret.
Yes. Other than Hari Seldon’s pocket calculator, I don’t think there’s been a reference to computers yet, despite references to nuclear power plants, vast modern libraries and starships.
In the book I’m reading, Genghis Khan’s soldiers defeat an army many times their size, and the only survivor is a general who flees. The general is captured, but before he’s executed, he declares the tragedy of an eagle like him being killed by ants.
This so incenses Genghis that he allows the general to compete in single combat against Genghis’s best friend, the best archer of the Mongols. The general points out he’s defenseless, so Genghis orders a soldier to give the general a bow and arrows.
“Just the bow, please,” the general responds. He snatches the Mongol archer’s arrows out of the air and fires them back. The archer shoots the general’s arrows to deflect them, twisting the arrowheads together; the general shoots straight through a returning arrow.
Finally, as the Mongol archer twists to avoid a shot, the general fires a second arrow straight into his back. But he’s removed the arrowhead! “I could’ve killed you, you know.” Instead of taking the granted mercy, he begs mercy for a child captured by the Mongols; and the fight is back on.
Arrows fly from the Mongols bow like a chain, and one of them catches the general in the chest–but the Mongol also removed the arrowhead!
The general accepts defeat graciously. Genghis Khan invites the general to join his army. The general begins to sing a poem of praise for the Mongols.
The book is A Hero Born, and I don’t quite know what to think of it, but it’s pretty enjoyable. Apparently it’s huge in China. I’d never heard of it before.