Your Humble Blogger is back on-line for a day, to catch up on book reports and take care of other such business as exists. While I’m here, I can report on a curious effect of special relativity: on long car drives, not only does (as everyone knows) distance stretch, so that the last sixty miles or so are far longer and take more time than the first 200 or so (subjective time, of course, as the minutes are also far longer than those in the first few hours), but the car actually gets smaller. I don’t know how this affects really large cars, but an ordinary passenger car holding two adults and a child, normally reasonably spacious, after the first eleven hours on the road shrinks to the size of a thimble. You can try this yourself, although I don’t recommend it.
This is probably related to the other known effect of special relativity, which is that if you swing your left arm in a circle at speeds over 90% of the speed of light, your watch stops.
Anyway, as I only read three books, there’s some chance that by the end of 2004 I will have written a book report on every single book I read (not counting picture books). Actually, I probably did miss one or two, but the point is the same: I made it a year. I think I’ll keep doing it, although coming across Eric Leuliette’s list of every book he’s read over thirty years almost made me give up the whole idea. I wonder if he ever stands in front of a library shelf and thinks “That book looks familiar ... but it’s not in my database ... did I forget to add it, or did I never actually read it?” For completeness’ sake, then, I am currently partway through both Melissa Scott’s The Kindly Ones and Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux, and the odds are good that I will not finish either until 2005.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
Is the watch phenomenon only if you wear your watch on your left wrist? Or does it work on pocketwatches as well?
Art Garfunkel also has a list online of every book he’s read in the past 30 years. It’s at http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/library.htm. I personally find the mere fact that such a list exists to be quite amusing.
Note, please, that your book reports are a different animal entirely — you may write them, in part, out of a desire for completeness, but I for one read them to see what you thought about the books. If the project makes you more likely to review lots of books of any sort (which it seems to) than as a reader I vote yea.