BOOK: Bring Down the Stars (2018)

by benmweilertNo Comments
Bring Down the Stars Year: 2018 Author: Emma Scott Length: 285 pages I'm not sure where I picked up this book on Kindle, but it finally took me two years to finish it (I'm excruciatingly slow at reading eBooks). To expand my horizons, I thought reading a romance novel would be good for me. Bring Down the Stars feels like a classic partly due to its heavy resemblance to Cyrano de Bergerac. Its tropes feel solidly planted in the genre, even to the point of being almost timeless. Still, the characters are a little frustrating. When I finally sat down to focus on reading this book, it hooked me pretty well. The writing is beautifully poetic—which is most often seen from the male point of view (POV). The female POV was a good counterpoint to give the reader both sides of the story while also making the miscommunication between these star-crossed lovers a buildup to either passionate love or a complete destruction of the friendship....
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BOOK: Einstein’s Dreams (1993)

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Einstein's DreamsYear: 1993Author: Alan LightmanLength: 140 pages I can appreciate poetic works that try to string each idea together into a connected narrative. I've seen few that have done this as well as Einstein's Dreams has. Of course, the problem with trying to make all these disparate poems work together is that they are still just brief glimpses into stories that could easily stand on their own. Perhaps that's the curse of well-written poetry—it leaves you wanting more. I'd almost consider these stories as writing prompts for anyone looking to make an entire book out of the dreams of the world's best physicist. Many of the stories in this collection/novel play upon the ideas of general relativity. The way the physics is described and how the people in these worlds live feel legitimately realistic. Of course, sometimes the physics "gimmick" isn't revealed until the end of a story, thus leaving me in the dark as to what was actually happening as I...
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BOOK: Housekeeping (1980)

by benmweilert1 Comment
HousekeepingYear: 1980Author: Marilynne RobinsonLength: 332 minutes / 5.53 hours As I'm working my way through Pulitzer winners and finalists, I approached Housekeeping with skepticism. I knew nothing about this book other than its inclusion on these lists for "high literature." Having now read it, this book completely underwhelmed me. I'm going to include this with other books of literature like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Ulysses, both of which I found extremely boring and lacking of any kind of plot that I could latch onto. At least this was short and had some occasionally flowery prose. Even now, thinking back on what I read, I can't pick out anything significant that happened in this book. That I'm having trouble remembering what it was about should indicate how little impact it had on me. I vaguely remember there being something about an aunt who was a drifter and the bigger metaphor of "home is where the heart is." And, of course, extrapolating...
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