So What Are you Reading?: Generations
- Thread starter captcalhoun
- Start date
Exodus. And I'm not talking Leon Uris, Julie Bertagna, White and Meier, Lyacos, Irvine, Collier, or Iyer.
The February/March issue of Reader's Digest.
Because it came up in Stranger Things, I re-read A Wrinkle in Time, which my across-the-street best friend's mother liked to read to him/us when I was 10-11. It's been a long time since I read it or saw an adaptation (I don't think I saw the Disney version, but there was an earlier TV miniseries I saw), so it was a mix of things I remembered and things I didn't. Fairly interesting, but it ended surprisingly abruptly, and it had more of a religious element than I remembered. It felt like it was probably an inspiration for Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. Still, I was lukewarm on it and don't feel particularly motivated to seek out the sequels.
Same. I wasn't motivated to read more.
However, it did improve my viewing of the last season of Stranger Things.
L'Engle's works do have that. She was, after all, a devout Episcopalian, and she wore that on her sleeve in her books, to the same extent that ordained Presbyterian cleric Fred Rogers went out of his way to avoid wearing that on his sleeve with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Many Waters is a retelling of chapters 6-9 of Genesis.
But she could also push the boundaries of what is generally regarded as appropriate in children's literature, particularly for the time in which the books were written (I'm thinking of 1984's A House Like a Lotus, with its very frank exploration of sexuality).
Be that as it may, I'm now reading Numbers, which is definitely not a treatise on mathematics, and I'm only barely on top of yesterday's quota.
The other thing that surprised me about Wrinkle is that it had much less discussion of tesseracts than I remembered -- mentioning the concept, but then just reducing it to a brief mention of folding space (which isn't actually the same thing at all) and then just using "tessering" as a plot device without bothering to explain how Mr. Murry can do it with, apparently, just an effort of will.
Been a long, long time since I've seen any of those. My Gran used to get them.
Currently doing a re-read of An Oblique Approach by David Drake/Eric Flint.
They canceled the Canadian edition, so now our library system gets the American one. Now they're down to 6 issues a year. Eventually, they'll probably move to quarterly, twice, and ultimately a single issue, a la the almanac.
Lots of magazines have done that. Smithsonian has been less-than-monthly for a few years now. Popular Science went to online-only (and my subscription, which I'd held since I was 9 years old, has gone bye-bye) years ago. On the other hand, Model Railroader and NMRA (formerly NMRA Magazine, formerly Scale Rails, formerly the NMRA Bulletin) both remain steadfastly monthly, even after Kalmbach (the founding publisher of MR) was bought by Firecrown.
And while I definitely see your point, Mr. Bennett, about "tessering" (I ended up looking up "tesseract" on Wikipedia, myself), I find myself thinking about the Great Bird once saying something to the general effect of "Does Sgt. Friday explain that his revolver is a Smith & Wesson .38 snubnose?".
And while I definitely see your point, Mr. Bennett, about "tessering" (I ended up looking up "tesseract" on Wikipedia, myself), I find myself thinking about the Great Bird once saying something to the general effect of "Does Sgt. Friday explain that his revolver is a Smith & Wesson .38 snubnose?".
Last edited:
Looking it up, they stopped totally in 2024 here in the UK.
Got some of their book collections, but not the magazines
I finished rereading Star Trek: Requiem by Michael Jan Friedman and Kevin Ryan. It works fine as an adventure of the month story. Everybody acts in character, and it's a nice companion to "Arena" for those who like that episode. It really doesn't go as far as it could with any of its story ideas, though. If it had come out five or more years later, then the authors probably would have had more freedom and page space to expand the concept.
I also finished The West End Horror by Nicholas Meyer. It's a good book overall but definitely tinged with tragedy and remorse in its ending.
I also finished The West End Horror by Nicholas Meyer. It's a good book overall but definitely tinged with tragedy and remorse in its ending.
I wasn't judging, just saying that there was less tesseract content in the book than I remembered. I must have been conflating it in my memory with other things I read about tesseracts in my youth, in science books and such. (I think Sagan's Cosmos had a section about them.)
Anyway, "tesseract" is from Greek for "four rays," with tessera being "four," so I guess "tesser" does work after all as a term for travel through the fourth dimension. Although IIRC, the characters in Wrinkle said tessering was actually travel through the fifth dimension, which as we all know, is correctly referred to as The Twilight Zone.
Really? I thought it was a vocal group from the late 1960s and early 1970s, known for "Up, Up, and Away."
For some reason, all this talk of tesseracts has me thinking of a Klein bottle filled with Möbius strips.
Yes, I think it must have been an influence on Duane-- the Darkness in L'Engle is very similar to what Duane says in the first Young Wizards book about the threat of the Lone Power. I reread the Meg books a few years ago (and read the ones about her daughter Polly for the first time), and found Wrinkle my least favorite of the three as an adult. Wind in the Door was my favorite.
Hmm... After reading your posts on the books and Mari Ness's on the first three Meg novels, I think I may have read A Wind in the Door long ago, since the stuff about mitochondria sounds familiar. I might be curious enough to reread that one, but Ness's description of A Swiftly Tilting Planet put me off of it, and none of the rest sound like they'd be my cup of tea.
Avenger.
Ah, that might be the one I was thinking of.
My mom used to subscribe to Reader's Digest, but I thought they had stopped publishing it ages ago.
Entertainment Weekly also changed to just a website a few years ago.
Last edited:
Similar threads
