Skip to main content

Books Read in 2016 - Area X

January 2016
Been on a good pace so far this year for fiction.  I listened to the Area X trilogy in January but finally getting around to writing this up.

Read / listened to the the excellent series of books by Jeff VanderMeer the Southern Reach Trilogy. These three books are Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance.  Very X-Files / Lost vibe to them but also original.  VanderMeer is a very good writer and his prose is very interesting.  The story unfolds very slowly like Lost and pulls you into it.  The characters develop very well and the trick of not using proper names only titles helps to let the characters define themselves through their perspective of their discipline and role.  That is a very scientific approach to character development the personal stuff comes slowly and is allowed to develop like a dish that has to stew to build its flavor.

Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy(Southern Reach #1-3)by 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Highlights from Elon Musk interview with Lex Fridman

#252 – Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI Very interesting interview of Elon Musk by Lex.  Elon's statements about supply chain and manufacturing are very insightful. Here are some of the quotes. "Physics is a law and everything else is a recommendation - lots of people can break laws but nothing can break the physics" (except for the creatures in The Expanse who can change the mass of electrons and the speed of light). First-principles analysis can be applied to any aspect of life.  Let's boil things down to the first principles then things that we are confident are true at a foundational level and that sets an axiomatic base and then you reason up from there. and then you cross-check your conclusion against the axiomatic truth. Some basics of physics you need to check if you violated could be conservation of energy or momentum... Another good physics thing is thinking about things in the limit.  If you take a particular thing an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cypress Half Marathon November 09 2025

I ran the Cypress Half Marathon on Sunday November 09 2025.  Stayed the night at Mom and Dad's house.  While training for this event I was running on October 16 and I tripped and sprained my ankle.  It was the worst sprain I can remember.  I did not run for nearly a week after this as I as nursed the ankle in an ice bucket and took ibuprofen to help with the swelling and pain.  That really impacted my training as I could not start training until after I came back from Norway on September 17th which was 7 weeks out from the date of the race. Also I had signed up to run the Sugarland half on Sunday October 12, 2025 but we had planned to visit Saagar for his birthday so we were out in SFO for that weekend.  It was probably for the best as that would have been only 4 weeks to train.  I was able to do the Marina run club with Saagar and get a 6 mile run in that weekend.  After coming back that week I was expecting to train hard straight up to the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ramesh Pateder June 1, 1941 (kind of 10/14/1942) - May 5, 2026

Ramesh "Ray" Pateder June 1, 1941 – May 5, 2026 Kunjarao, Gujarat, India • Cypress, Texas Ramesh "Ray" Pateder, 84, of Cypress, Texas, passed away peacefully at home on May 5, 2026, surrounded by his loving family. He lived a life defined by courage, curiosity, and an unshakable belief in what was possible. https://hhhcrewchief.github.io/RameshPateder/#1 Born and raised in the small village of Kunjarao, Gujarat, India, Ray came of age with dreams that reached well beyond what the world around him offered. In 1962, with a suit on his back and a garland of flowers around his neck, he boarded a plane for the United States — leaving everything familiar to begin his studies in Rolla, Missouri. The journey from rural India to the American Midwest might as well have been a journey to another planet, but he embraced every part of it. Ray's professional career began in Cleveland, Ohio, with Sherwin-Williams, where he refined the technical expertise that would define...
Post a Comment
Read more