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This book would probably have been more enjoyable if I had read the series as a kid. Despite the lack of nostalgia, it was refreshing to read a children's book series that avoids happy beginnings, middles, and endings. I also appreciated the literary propaganda that was mixed-in. I would still like to know how the story ends, so hopefully the TV series is good.
timtim finished a book

The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)
Lemony Snicket
timtim commented on timtim's update
timtim started reading...

Supercomputing for Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Architectures, and Scaling Deep Learning Workloads
Jordi Torres
timtim started reading...

Supercomputing for Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Architectures, and Scaling Deep Learning Workloads
Jordi Torres
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timtim started reading...

The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)
Lemony Snicket
Post from the When Breath Becomes Air forum
My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life. Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?
Unlike Paul, I did enjoy analytic philosophy but this quote reminded me of Searle spending an entire chapter (or article?) examining the act of getting a beer from his fridge. Not sure it was worth it.
timtim started reading...

When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
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Post from the The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1) forum
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1)
Becky Chambers
timtim finished reading and wrote a review...
A graphic novel by Alison Bechdel about exercise, philosophy, literature and personal reflection sits right at the center of my Venn diagram of hobbies and interests, so it was virtually impossible not to enjoy this book.
Bechdel uses her history of exercise as a lens to reflect on her life in general. Throughout the decades, she recounts her quest to be strong and self-sufficient, as well as reach a state of transcendence (letting go of the ego and overcoming the subject-object divide). Several struggles in her life prevent her from reaching this goal: not being in touch with her emotions, a reluctance to be dependent (or even around) others, workaholism, relying on alcohol and sleep medication, etc. Interestingly, in her sports she does attain what she fails to reach in the rest of her life. (Her description of the flow state you can experience during running and cycling, when you are just a body in the here and now, was very relatable. Also, using exercise as therapy.) As the decades pass, she incrementally gets better at the non-exercise aspects of life, and unlike the writers and poets she references, Bechdel seems to escape the self-destruction caused by their attempts at transcendence by "just" being in the world and nature with others.
Some minor gripes: I recall that the cultural and scientific references in Are You My Mother? complemented the memoir really well. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, the stories about the Romantics, Transcendentalists, and Beat Generation "rhyme" with Bechdel's personal history but overall seem more disconnected. At the same time, these cultural references enrich the reading experience, so they are still a net positive. Just as in life, there were several threads that remained loose ends, such as a satisfying conclusion to the cultural history and a reason for why exercise culture suddenly emerged.
timtim TBR'd a book

Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
timtim completed their yearly reading goal of 25 books!






