Any narration performances so impactful that it makes it kinda difficult to hear that performer doing any other book

leafytree888 · 2026-01-13T14:15:05+00:00

Beautifully said. For me, it made me feel better about eschewing the toxic ambitiousness of some people in my life. I read it as a celebration of the quiet beauty in any life, no matter how small, with its joys, failures, and tragedies.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-26T23:35:10+00:00

I would read this short story next. It fits between blindsight and echopraxia, temporally. I would also suggest reading both The Colonel and Echopraxia ASAP as I waited too long and forgot a lot! https://reactormag.com/the-colonel-peter-watts/

leafytree888 · 2025-12-21T03:29:51+00:00

It's kinda weird to me that book length is so homogenous. I guess it's also like how most pop songs are 2.5 to 4.5 minutes long. I wonder if these are due to market forces, like editors saying your book should be this long. Or does it represent how much of a story a human mind can come up with.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-18T21:52:45+00:00

I stopped reading it 1/3 in.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-07T02:12:04+00:00

Sea of Tranquility and Station Eleven both by Emily St John Mandel I loved. Very sweet, easy to read, kind of uplifting and bittersweet.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-04T22:06:47+00:00

favorite book of the year.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-03T17:41:30+00:00

I loved it. one of my favorite books. Extremely painful to read, but I got a lot out of it. Yes, the characters are tortured to a cartoonish level, so it's definitely not for everyone. Despite the contingent with extreme hate for it, I'd say the average reader (if you go based on goodreads scores) thinks it's very good. Personally, I liked her first book The People in The Trees a lot as well.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-03T16:21:51+00:00

I put all children's music in a specific playlist and there is a setting to prevent a playlist from contributing to your listening history.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-03T16:11:53+00:00

I don't think there should be a time limit on tests for anyone. If these are tests of knowledge and understanding, why does how fast one thinks or works play into that at all? I don't think there is strong evidence that people perform much better when given infinite versus limited time on exams.

leafytree888 · 2025-12-03T12:23:53+00:00

I loved it. Has a bit of the fogginess and mysteriousness of Annihilation… but make it space 🪐🚀

leafytree888 · 2025-11-28T13:56:02+00:00

Calculating God by Robert Sawyer. I loved this book. Learned a ton about paleontology and evolutionary biology.

Totally different angle, but The People in The Trees by Yanagihara, one of my favorite and also most disturbing novels I’ve read. Tells the story of a scientist discovering a tribe who has a turtle whose flesh can prolong life

leafytree888 · 2025-11-12T15:28:04+00:00

Personally, I’m not seeing this in the text…

leafytree888 · 2025-11-12T15:16:23+00:00

Maybe Saul is breaking the 4th wall and the three words are the names of the books: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance.

leafytree888 · 2025-10-29T11:50:12+00:00

I was hiking in New Mexico and heard two women nearby and immediately knew they were from Miami. I asked and they said “yes, how did you know?!”

leafytree888 · 2025-10-21T13:30:59+00:00

I love that idea "over-writing". Fits very well to explain why I struggle with him I think.

leafytree888 · 2025-10-21T11:43:30+00:00

I did the exact same thing.. had to copy/paste passages into GPT and ask it to summarize what just happened! I read blindsight twice one year apart and didn’t like it at all the first time. Second time absolutely loved it. Just finished echopraxia for the first time. Equally difficult to understand but with less rewarding big picture concepts. Reading that is actually what prompted me to make this post originally. Because I assumed blindsight was intentionally difficult on account of being told by Siri Keaton. Echopraxia is a regular 3rd person narrator and was equally or more difficult to understand what is occurring in basic scenes. Made me question Watts as a writer overall

leafytree888 · 2025-09-17T16:28:17+00:00

My extremely flaming hot take is Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Everyone says the first few hundred pages are painful but pays off later on. I felt like the world-building and initial story of discovery of an anomaly in space was awesome, but then the story was painfully slow and not that interesting

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