People who have known me for a long time are aware that I love reading. But they don’t read this blog )) So for my esteemed readers, let me state: I love reading very much. It kind of started in childhood — I was taught early, and I took a liking to it. On top of that, I read fairly quickly, so the amount of literature I’ve “devoured” across various genres is quite substantial. My university years put something of a damper on my hobby, so I had to stop reading everything in sight and focus on what I really wanted. What I wanted was mostly science fiction and fantasy. Those were the years of Perumov, Lukyanenko, Asprin (and a little bit of Bjarne Stroustrup :) University ended, but no great piles of free time to lounge on the sofa with a book appeared either. On top of books costing an unreasonable (in my view) amount of money, work and daily life take up a significant chunk of our time — and there are also the news to read and movies to watch. Fortunately, humanity invented (and the internet gave us access to) the wonderful format of audiobooks. Given that the commute to work in a modern medium-sized city takes about an hour, and I ride a minibus — no need to drive, so I can let my mind wander — this is a perfect option for me. In my previous post I wrote about podcasts. I don’t think I need to explain what those are. But all the shows I listen to only last for the first two days — an hour each way every day equals 4 hours over 2 days. So plenty of time remains for literature. And now, standing before a treasure chest from which I can pick almost anything I want, the hard part is choosing. Besides fiction, there is a huge number of psychology, self-help, and other books that are very often also worth reading.
And that is precisely why, to make the choice easier, I started writing this post. I want to ask you — my few but very esteemed readers — to recommend - perhaps more than once, a book or books that made an impression on you. Or ones you’d like to read, or that someone recommended to you. In turn, I’m going to (even without any recommendations) publish my impressions of books I’ve read or listened to from time to time.
And I’ll start with a positive review (though I originally planned to write about a different book).
Fans of science fiction don’t need to be told who Robert Heinlein is. A very interesting and at times witty writer. I recently listened to his “Orphans of the Sky” published by “Audiokniga Svoimi Rukami” (“Audiobook DIY”).
First, about the quality of the recording. If this was truly made by non-professionals, they deserve enormous respect. A quite pleasant narrator’s voice, reading with very few mistakes and appropriate intonations. And the musical accompaniment is simply excellent — the background music doesn’t distract, the transitions between chapters are also musical, lasting 1–2 minutes, and very apt. I mention this because the quality of a narration can ruin even a great book, but this time I was more than satisfied. Moreover, the guys give away the fruits of their labour for free — a kind of open-source movement for audio literature. Now about the plot itself. This is the first science fiction book I very, very much wanted to hand to my beloved wife. Because the book is not so much about space and sci-fi as it is about psychology and religion. A very brief spoiler: a deep-space ship on a very long journey to a new planet has been flying for so long that everyone who remembered the beginning of the voyage has died (like in the animated film “WALL·E”). And now the ship’s large population treats the ship’s operating instructions as religious dogma, the physics, mathematics, and astronomy textbooks as secret encoded messages from saints of the distant past, and the very fact of the voyage — figuratively — not believing that they are flying anywhere or have a destination. Effectively the Middle Ages aboard a giant starship. And the events described thereafter are, as they should be, pivotal in the lives of the people. The book is very interesting, primarily for the thoughts it provokes — how human consciousness can distort facts, breed speculation, and invent things out of thin air. Deeply religious people may find it disrespectful, while agnostics like me should enjoy it. Believers absolutely should read it — it offers a chance to look at religion from an additional (second? third? eighth?) angle.
I hope I haven’t scared you off with an atypical number of words — I’ll be waiting for your literary recommendations.