09:23 – It’s been chilly around here, but nothing compared to the forecast for Sunday night. The low is to be 4F (-15C) with winds of 20 MPH. That puts the wind chill, at a first approximation, around absolute zero (−459F/−273C), where atoms stop vibrating and even Colin will want to stay indoors.
I tagged this post as recommended books/videos, but in fact the books I’m about to list are distinctly NOT recommended. The first is Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a dystopian/PA novel. It has 2,759 Amazon reviews averaging 4.1 stars. It’s a New York Times Bestseller and a 2014 National Book Award Finalist. That last should have told me to run screaming from it. The good news is that Mandel can write competent English sentences and paragraphs. The bad news is that it’s a literary novel (hawk, spit), which means it’s all about beautiful language. A would-be poet writing prose. No plot, no story. Nothing ever happens. Boring. If you’re even considering wasting $10 on a Kindle copy of this book, I recommend you first read the 1-star reviews on Amazon, which provide a fair evaluation of the book. It’s simply terrible.
Then there’s James Hunt. He has a bunch of his books listed on Kindle Unlimited, which means I can read them for free with my KU account. I grabbed several of them yesterday, with high hopes. Unfortunately, the best I can say about Hunt’s books is that they’re not literary novels. I wasted half an hour or so reading the first book and part of the second in his Exiled series. All I can say is, stop him before he writes again. The plot, such as it is, is ludicrous. The Colorado River has run completely dry, leaving California and the Southwest without water. Literally, without a drop to drink. So an evil congressman passes a law to expel (Exile, presumably) these states from the US, leaving 40 million people to die. And the ludicrous plot is the least of it. This guy can’t write his way out of a paper bag. Horrible dialog, horrible everything. Don’t waste any time on these. Even at $0.00 each, these books aren’t worth the price.
More work on science kit stuff today.