Book Addiction

Now that I’ve figured out how to download books from the library onto my Kindle, I’m completely addicted.

I just finished The Martian by Andy Weir. It was, all in all, a ripping, edge of the seat yarn.

The protagonist, Mark Watney, had a fab sense of humor but the story was a bit too technical for me. A lot of it went clean over my head.

Also, realistically, it’s obscenely unlikely Mark would’ve survived his very first brush with death let alone the seemingly infinite series of ones to follow. Granted this is sci/fi NOT reality. Still, he’s thrown endless death defying situations and survives them all just barely. It’s a bit draining. Mind you, I want him to come out on top but couldn’t the author cut the guy a break—give Watney fewer hoops to jump through?

My last complaint? After one of his unending calamities, Mark makes a self deprecating remark that, once he made it through, he ‘‘cried like a little girl.’ Why is this still an accepted slam? I get that he’s using this phrase as self-mocking humor BUT what? Little boys don’t cry? They’re tough, manly, unfeeling, emotionally constipated men at the age of eight? There’s something wrong with tears when you’re hurt?

Now I’m reading Matt Haig’s The Humans. It’s about a superior race of aliens who send one of theirs to Earth to kill off a not nice but wildly intelligent math professor who’s found a way to significantly advance the human race. Why? Humans are too violent and assholic. Sure but don’t we have any good qualities to make up for that? Maybe but it’s not clear at this point.

Some awesome snippets:

One of the aliens wrote a book about us. It’s called,

The Fighting Idiots:
 My Time with the Humans of Water Planet 7,081.

Apt. Totally fucking apt. 

The superior book reading of aliens versus humans.

A human can’t just just swallow every book going, can’t chew different tomes simultaneously, or gulp down near-infinite knowledge in a matter of seconds. They can’t pop a word capsule in their mouth like we can. Imagine!
~~~~~
By the time they have read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead.

One comment on the books we humans read:

…is it one of those books they read to feel clever, or one of those they will pretend they never read in order to stay looking clever?

He then goes through a list of the various types of books people are drawn to, ending with:

Of course, there is the ultimate, all-important question: does it have a dog in it?

This book DOES have a dog in it which, naturally, makes the book exceptional—by human standards at any rate.

So far I’m totally loving my new addiction.