Reviews of the books I've read

I started reading this book because Caltech had a new alumni book club starting up, and this was the first book to be discussed. My timing in the reading, however, wasn't so great. I was all SQUEEEEEEEE about reading this book, and placed a hold on the book from the library. The book club started on February 22nd, my loan was due on February 24th. Which is to say, I read the book on the 23rd. As I do.

This book is about the math women at what would become, and is, Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. The people who computed. The computers.

Of this story, of their tales, I have mixed feelings.

The strongest feeling I have is of anger that smart, well-educated, ambitious women can't be engineers because, and only because, they are women. "Let me do all these amazing calculations, but I'm not allowed to design these things, or if I can contribute, my contributions aren't even a footnote in history." Every part of the book about this, about the history of this, is rage-inducing.

A close second to this feeling is appreciation. That I would go to college was never a question, of course I would. The question was always, "Which one?" That I was able to go to Caltech is to me these days, somewhat stunning. At the time, my thought was "of course," but that's the arrogance of youth and my ignorance of the world. Probably a good thing on the latter, not so much on the former, because it leads to the third feeling.

Sadness. Sadness that this rich history was there, that these women had blazed the path I so obliviously walked. I wish this book had existed when I was at Tech. I might have appreciated where I was an the opportunities in front of me more.

Or maybe not. Arrogance of youth and all.

I enjoyed this book a lot. The girlie parts, however, were REALLY CONFUSING TO ME. So much so, I had to write notes down about them as I read. My first note was about all the fashion stuff. It bugged me. Is this a book about the girls or the rockets or what? I wanted the history of the rockets. And THIS, ladies and gentleman, is a defining feature of Kitt. And one of the reasons I ended up at Tech, and not, say, Pomona.

I found much of the random details strange. The fireworks fire was weird. At one point, we hear about the chocolate shake and croissant one of the "girls" had for lunch. Because you remember that detail for a specific day? Did the woman keep a food journal, and have it tucked away in case she was interviewed 40 years later about that day and could tell the author exactly what she had for lunch that day of that one event? Those details pulled me out of the narration a bit.

That said, this was a fun read. I am glad this book exists. I am glad these women were able to use their intelligence, interests, and education; that they were able to walk the path, even if they couldn't soar in the skies. This book is worth reading.

It seemed incredible that in the midst of her crumbling existence, the world kept spinning and people went on with their daily lives.
Location 669

I understand this. The hardest part about death is that life keeps going.

JPL was used to hard-won success born from repeated failure.
Location 755

It didn’t feel like a job; it was more like being part of a secret society.
Location 820

One of the features of the teams I like to build and be on is this element, that you are part of a high-functioning team working towards a common goal, without ego.

Careers were rarely a topic of discussion among the women. Their importance was seen as marginal in comparison to their social lives.
Location 901

See? Rage-inducing.

They couldn’t help but feel that if they were using their own rocket, they would have better luck with it, or would at least be in control of their failures.
Location 2045

Employers argued that too many women vanished after taking a leave. Instead, she would use her saved vacation time and sick leave to be home with the baby. When those ran out, she’d come back to the lab.
Location 2071

F'ing short-sided asshats. If you'd provide child-care and flexible hours, HEY, they would stay. See above, secret society.

The engineers viewed the IBMs with suspicion, while the women embraced the new technology, largely because of their hands-on experience in using the machines. The world of programming kept drawing them in, expanding in both complexity and scope.
Location 2147

Yep. Why did we ever relinguish control over this amazing technology?

Janet Davis was about to leave too. Fulfilling Dr. Gates’s prophecy, she was eight months pregnant and knew she would have to quit soon. She hid the pregnancy as best she could, wanting to work right up to the end.
Location 2233

When a person enjoys what she does, she'll endure a lot to keep doing it.

As Carl Sagan said, “Observation: I can’t see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.”
Location 2238

When the news anchor announced that Kennedy was dead, they held one another, in shock and sobbing. They knew that neither the country nor the fledgling space program they belonged to would ever be the same.
Location 2336

Debugging a program at JPL in the 1960s simply meant talking through the problems. Margie would sit with Barbara, and they would run through the programs one command at a time.

Each equation, each string of text, was thought through logically. As Margie described the program aloud step-by-step she would usually come across the error herself. Even if she didn’t catch it, her friend Barbara was there listening and would be sure to spot it. But while
Location 2563

So, rubber ducky debugging? This process still exists, btw.

Meanwhile, a manufacturing flaw meant that structural panels began to fall off the lunar module adapter.
Location 2575

Highlight(yellow

Sylvia had always loved to travel. Even as a child she felt the lure of leaving familiar places.
Location 2588

Returning to JPL and her friends, she was thankful to have no feelings of guilt at leaving her children. Her psychologist had told her this was a medical necessity, and it also helped that so many of her colleagues were working mothers.
Location 2646

When Margie struggled with some parts of the program, she did what she had always done—asked the other women. She loved having her friends to rely on.
Location 2741

O. M. G. What is this craziness? An environment where YOU CAN ASK FOR HELP? Where you aren't shamed because you're human? What the f, people, can we have one of these f'ing everywhere please?

Helen enjoyed being a mentor to the women in her group and wanted more for them, so she came up with a simple plan. She would find intelligent women and get them in the door by hiring them as programmers. Then she would encourage them to get advanced degrees in engineering. While they went to night school, she’d teach them to succeed within the framework of JPL.
Location 2753

And this is how you keep women in STEM.

Between their aptitude and her guidance, a generation of female engineers would emerge in the lab.
Location 2755

Muller was a complainer. He whined that the women monopolized Cora, the IBM 1620.
Location 2788

Asshattery knows no gender, btw.

Unfortunately for Muller, the women had priority on Cora since they were responsible for 90 percent of the lab’s computer programming. The men were just beginning to dip their toes into the technology, and they lagged behind their female colleagues.
Location 2790

Writing the program was so much fun that Sylvia could hardly call it work. She came into the lab each morning excited to get started.
Location 2823

Sylvia’s programming made sure the ship swung in line with the movement of the planets it passed, so that instead of using fuel, it would simply be thrown from one planet’s gravitational field to the next. Each step of the elegant dance was carefully choreographed.
Location 2828

When Macie hired new women she had often told them, “In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog.” In some ways, her advice still rang true.
Location 3090

"In some ways" I eyerolled here. In pretty much all ways, unfortunately.

While it was a mild day in Pasadena, in Florida the weather was unusually cold. However, after six delays, everyone was eager for the launch to go forward.
Location 3141

This whole incident is rage inducing, too, by the way.

After the craft had spent five years in storage, no one had thought to check the lubrication and coating on the antenna’s rib apparatus.
Location 3253

No one had thought...

“They’re always focused on the control room at JPL. The people really doing the work don’t get on TV,” she remarks.
Location 3476

In 2008, the fiftieth anniversary of her starting at the lab, JPL changed the rules and dictated that all engineers were required to hold advanced degrees. Because Sue never finished college, they took away her salaried position and switched her to an hourly rate. However, once administrators saw how much overtime she was getting, they made an exception and switched her back.
Location 3479

Dying laughing here.

Finally, a book I know exactly from where I have a recommendation, even if I can't find the exact moment Patrick recommended it. I placed a hold on the book from the library, and had three days to read it before I needed to return it, as the other books I was reading needed finishing first.

And so, from start to finish, less than 24 hours. That in and of itself is an indication that it is an engaging book.

The book has the quirk of the Observer character, the mentioning of which is a non-spoiler about the book, as it shows up in the first ten pages or so. I guess in the perspective of things (first person, third person, third person omniscient, and such), the explicit Observer isn't unusual, but being called out and personified is puzzling. I wanted something to happen with the Observer, some explanation beyond a vehicle for explaining different location and context switching.

I was also weirded out by the father's constant male references to his female family, "dude," "man," and the like. Don't call a woman "Dude."

It was a fun, fast read.

In an act of evident ecstatic abandon, the woman turns a slow circle in the living room, then strips off her clothes. Does the man appear reluctant at first? Alarmed, even? Never mind. He is soon naked as well, and they make love pressed against one of the freshly painted plaster walls. With this act, their faces and bodies seem to assert, we hereby claim this house as ours.
Page 19

...and if a day arrives when the idea of removing all your clothes in someone else’s presence does not horrify her, she thinks that she will not feel compelled to limit herself to one lover.
Page 25

There is also a spiral kitchen staircase with tiny steps you can’t even fit your entire foot onto, and Irina habitually uses it instead of the main one because it is weird.
Page 26

I understand doing things because they are weird.

She is discovering that, with a man’s name, she does not get talked to like the twelve-year-old girl she actually is. She just gets talked to.
Page 36

Which I love. I try very hard to do this, having learned years ago with Kim Wasson's kid. Don't. Talk. Down.

Why? Is this irrational? Is she just being moody? From inside the emotion, it’s impossible to tell.
Page 37

When potential customers walk in, see the crowd, frown, and march back out, Eleanor feels responsible. She wants to leave now in order to accommodate what she perceives as other people’s more pressing needs. But she has identified this quality in herself as a personality flaw, and she doesn’t wish to pass it on to her daughter. So she pretends she belongs here and deserves this table.
Page 43

I understand this need. I often consider it as "thinking wholistically" when really it becomes the subjugation of the self.

Irina lets out a noisy sigh and theatrically slams her book shut. She says, “I don’t think I’m good at reading.”

“That’s silly,” Eleanor replies, with a reflexive strenuousness that unpleasantly reminds her, every time, of her own mother. “You’re a great reader.”

“I start reading a paragraph and then something reminds me of something and by the time I get to the end I realize that I’ve been thinking of the thing in my head and not the thing I just read, and I have to start over!”
Page 47

Her instinct is to reassure, but the truth is that she agrees with Irina, she feels the same way about books: about everything, really. Your favorite things are never good enough. They’re idealized by nature; their favoriteness is derived from Platonic forms, perfect realizations that existed only once, usually the first time, if at all. No book, no meal, no sunny day ever equals the one in your head.
Page 48

Never.

He took two steps and gathered her into his arms. The feeling was extraordinary: like being picked up by a warm gust and deposited on some sunny, grassy hilltop.
Page 51

She figured one of these days the scans wouldn’t be clean anymore. And she did not want that day to come.
Page 52

She loves Karl, but her love never wrung her heart out or made her feel like she would die if it weren’t reciprocated. Of course, that kind of love doesn’t last—just read one of her dumb books—but maybe this kind doesn’t, either.
Page 60

She is aware that all of the things about him that presently vex her—his intensity, amorousness, and imperturbability—are the very things that attracted her to him in the first place.
Page 60

But Irina has already hitched the guitar up onto her shoulder and is pushing her way out the door and into the overcast and mildly stinky fall day. She feels bad for letting the real world seize and dispirit her so quickly.
Page 101

She is going to cry! She is looking forward to this aspect of childhood being over—this thing where you can’t control your emotions and they aren’t even about the things you really care about.
Page 105

The other understanding in her family, usually only spoken under the influence of drink, was that the over-recommended full mastectomy was an instrument of patriarchal domination, a means of controlling the sexual power of women. That in fact breast cancer itself was the world’s response to its poisoning by masculine striving. Men wanted to blame the breasts for getting sick, instead of themselves for polluting them. The full mastectomy was a gendered act of violence, a cowardly expression of projected self-disgust.
Page 157

“I’m so bored.”

“That’s your problem.” It is a philosophical tenet of their family that boredom is an ailment of a lazy mind and not the result of a lack of provided stimulation. It is the unsavory byproduct of bourgeois society.
Page 159

After a moment, Irina says, surprising herself, “Is this what life is going to be like now?”

It is into the chalice of his cupped hands that he mumbles the words “I sure as fuck hope not, dude.”
Page 190

Perhaps it can, in fact, influence events and objects: but how? And what actions might result in which outcomes? The Observer understands this as a problem of equal import and difficulty for the humans: the unpredictability of cause and effect.
Page 194

None of it matters—the coincidences, the connections. Things look connected because everything is connected in a place like Broken River. That’s why people want to leave small towns. Everything reminds them of some stupid shit they did or that was done to them. These people aren’t part of some grand conspiracy. They’re just some fucking losers living in a shit town, like pretty much everybody else on earth.
Page 197

Those are her thoughts. But she keeps them to herself, and Craig goes on talking, as men do.
Page 208

She can imagine how she must look to him right now—fatigued, depleted, disagreeable. Desperate. She doesn’t want to be this way, and neither does he. But here they are.
Page 211

She isn’t sure why she cares. Eleanor does not want to be the kind of person who can become unhinged by jealousy, never imagined that she could be. But maybe when somebody is ready, any available stimulus will do to effect the unhinging.
Page 213

But reading a book, man, that was work. Hours and hours, sitting in a chair or lying in bed, the eyeballs darting back and forth, line after line after line. It would have been an insane mental and physical endurance test.
Page 222

This. Is. Not. Me.

Reading is a joy.

Now, though, the excitement of midnight was gone. It just felt lonely here, lying in bed, being awake for no reason when the rest of world was asleep.
Page 227

“I had these ideas!” she cried; it was late and Father was out in the studio and Mother seemed uncharacteristically happy and relaxed there in her office, with a glass of wine. “And now I don’t like them anymore!”

“That’s because your book grew up while you were writing it.”

“But what do I do?” Irina asked, drawing out the ooooo in dramatic fashion.

“You fix it in the rewrites.”

“How long does that take?”

“Longer than the writing part, usually,” Mother said. “For me.”

Irina whispered, “But I worked so hard.”

“You needed to work hard, to get to the good ideas. The old ideas weren’t bad, they just weren’t what the book wanted to be. It’s okay to write a rough draft. That’s why they’re called that.”
Page 228

“If you’re going to be a writer,” Mother replied, “you’ll learn. Because the thing is, all of the stories we tell ourselves are wrong. All of them.”
Page 229

People come and go and do things impulsively, and they hurt each other and themselves. The outside world doesn’t understand. Do you get that?”
Page 233

“Life is very messy,” Rachel said, “and sometimes it is lonely and painful, but sometimes it is exciting and beautiful. You’re in a lonely part.”
Page 233

It is not necessary to be the way I’ve been, she thinks, as the nurses and doctors swarm and confer, as they ask her questions she hasn’t the slightest idea how to answer. I can be different.
Page 251

I can be different.

Over and over they come together, and if they fail to derive pleasure from these encounters, they find satisfaction in suffering. They are more attached, perhaps, to their suffering than to their pleasure. This stands in direct contradiction to their stated goals, which are those of comity, happiness, calm. But it is pain that gives their lives meaning.
Page 264

The beauty of Craig was that he appreciated everything that happened as it was happening and never betrayed any disappointment when it ended, whether it was a good meal or a professional relationship with one of his writers or half an hour in bed with a woman half his age.
Page 269

But it has understood for some time the folly of wishing to soothe the humans; they are built to feel, and there are feelings they crave, and no amount of information can suppress the emotions they torment themselves with.
Page 270

I wanted and want to like this book. Ursula Le Guin is this famous female science fiction author, and oh so many people like and love her writing and... and... and, well, I just don't. I recall reading other books of hers a number of years, okay, fine, decades ago, as a kid, and I didn't like those books then, and I'm not a fan of The Left Hand of Darkness now. I think Susan or Claire or both really like this book, which made me want even more to like it. I didn't. I am not a Le Guin fan, it seems. Even now, I wish I recalled what the other books were, so that I don't read them again. They were either A Wrinkle In Time or the Earthsea Trilogy, because, hey, they are considered Le Guin's kids books and I was a kid when I read them. Maybe I read both. I don't know, I don't recall. I do recall not being a fan of the story I had read, and that's fine.

So, this book.

Lots of terms that the reader is supposed to pick up from context (or, let's be realistic, search for the term on the Intarwebs these days) began to annoy me. There's a level of explanation required to properly world-build, and, eh, Le Guin errored on the too vague side. With an entirely foreign Envoy, surely explanations could be easier.

And the required suspension of disbelief that any sufficiently advanced planet wouldn't capture and kill any being who landed on their planet from the Void just boggles the mind. Consider our history, and, say, the Inquisition or the witch hunts or the level of blind violence in the last century? No, no interplanetary human, single or otherwise, would be allowed to live, much less have the freedom in the book.

Upside, the plot moves quickly, and is interesting. If only the words hadn't gotten in the way.

So, if a Le Guin fan, this book is worth reading. If a classic science fiction fan (this is the book that put Le Guin on the science-fiction map), this book is worth reading. If you're neither, eh, go ahead and skip, read Wrinkle or Earthsea instead.

But the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman.
Page 94

Okay, why must an entity who is both a man and a woman in our classically defined gender roles be a manwoman? Why is she not a womanman? I'm more than a little annoyed that the male gender comes first, even from a woman author.

Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself.
Page 96

An enemy, in Karhide, is not a stranger, an invader. The stranger who comes unknown is a guest. Your enemy is your neighbor.
Page 97

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Lord Estraven.”

“The unexpected is what makes life possible,” he said.
Page 120

... small cups of a fierce liquor were served, lifewater they called it, as men often do, and they asked me questions.
Page 134

Yep. Alcohol. Totally life water. :eyeroll:

If you play against your own side you’ll lose the whole game. That’s what these fellows with no patriotism, only self-love, can’t see.
Page 144

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.
Page 151

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
Page 151

Here, the government can check not only act but thought. Surely no men should have such power over others.
Page 152

I felt that the truck was going east, and couldn’t get rid of this impression even when it became plain that it was going west, farther and farther into Orgoreyn. One’s magnetic and directional subsenses are all wrong on other planets; when the intellect won’t or can’t compensate for that wrongness, the result is a profound bewilderment, a feeling that everything, literally, has come loose.
Page 168

It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Page 170

Kindness there was and endurance, but in silence, always in silence.
Page 170

I was extremely ill after the last examination; the other, a middle-aged fellow, had some disorder or disease of the kidney, and was dying. As he could not die all at once, he was allowed to spend some time at it, on the sleeping-shelf.
Page 179

Imagine that. Someone dying, allowed to die.

I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bobsled down the steep, dangerous hour.
Page 190

Estraven asleep looked a little stupid, like everyone asleep: a round, strong face relaxed and remote, small drops of sweat on the upper lip and over the heavy eyebrows.
Page 201

I giggled at this one.

He lay in the tent, writing in a little notebook in his small, rapid, vertical-cursive Karhidish hand. He hadn’t been able to keep up his journal during the past month, and that annoyed him; he was pretty methodical about that journal. Its writing was, I think, both an obligation to and a link with his family, the Hearth of Estre.
Page 209

"You hate Orgoreyn, don’t you?”

“Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession. . . . Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
Page 212

Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing.
Page 212

“A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”
Page 213

“I’m glad I have lived to see this,” he said. I felt as he did. It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Page 220

“Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.” He makes fear serve him. I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this?
Page 228

Tormer’s Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.

Two are one, life and death,
lying together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

Page 233

“We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.”

“I and Thou,” he said.

“Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex...”
Page 233

I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
Page 242

Estraven meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if he wrestled with an angel. Winning, he sat up, stared at me vaguely, shook his head, and woke.
Page 242

“Why did you come alone—why were you sent alone? Everything, still, will depend upon that ship coming. Why was it made so difficult for you, and for us?”

“It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it. Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons. I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy.

"But there’s more to it than that.

"Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical.

:In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model...

"So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don’t know. Yes, it has made things difficult. But I might ask you as profitably why you’ve never seen fit to invent airborne vehicles? One small stolen airplane would have spared you and me a great deal of difficulty!”

“How would it ever occur to a sane man that he could fly?”
Page 259

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I went on, “except acute chronic fear.”

“Fear’s very useful. Like darkness; like shadows.”
Page 267

“It’s queer that daylight’s not enough. We need the shadows, in order to walk.”
Page 267

On the blank leaf glued to the inner back cover I drew the double curve within the circle, and blacked the yin half of the symbol, then pushed it back to my companion. “Do you know that sign?”

He looked at it a long time with a strange look, but he said, “No.”

“It’s found on Earth, and on Hain-Davenant, and on Chiffewar. It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.”
Page 267

We lay in the tent for three days while the blizzard yelled at us, a three-day-long, wordless, hateful yell from the unbreathing lungs. “It’ll drive me to screaming back,” I said to Estraven in mindspeech, and he, with the hesitant formality that marked his rapport: “No use. It will not listen.”
Page 268

His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.
Page 269

Hunger can heighten perception, but not when combined with extreme fatigue;
Page 270

To those fishermen-villagers who live on the edge of the edge, on the extreme habitable limit of a barely habitable continent, honesty is as essential as food. They must play fair with one another; there’s not enough to cheat with.
Page 272

“Sometimes you must go against the wheel’s turn,”
Page 276

And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
Page 279

I did not know if I had done right to send it. I had come to accept such uncertainties with a quiet heart.
Page 280

I had not had in mind when I spoke the contemptibility of suicide to these people. It is not to them, as to us, an option. It is the abdication from option, the act of betrayal itself. To a Karhider reading our canons, the crime of Judas lies not in his betrayal of Christ but in the act that, sealing despair, denies the chance of forgiveness, change, life: his suicide.
Page 286

“Estraven would be a good man to pull with, on a crazy trek like that. He was tough as iron. And never lost his temper. I’m sorry he’s dead.”
Page 294

I'm pretty sure I picked up this book during a moment of complete not boredom, but perhaps in a moment of known not doing. The title intrigued me, so I decided to try it.

The book is short, takes maybe two hours to read, but it isn't a fast read. The main message is, "Look, you're filling your life with busy-ness, and with that busy-ness comes anxiety because you aren't giving your brain enough time to process all the short events, enough time to relax. So, take time to relax, to be bored if you will. Here are some ways to do it."

What caught me off-guard was the different definition (than mine) of "bored." To me, bored is the tired feeling one has when one is unoccupied and uninterested in finding a stimulating activity. The book's definition is more the feeling of engagement one feels when in a state of relaxed concentration. Or maybe the nature of slowing down and being. In that state of being, you can still do activities, but you're not in my definition of bored, you're in that relaxed concentration state. In the slowing, you're taking time to let the brain engate with itself instead of being driven by the world.

The book is in three parts: the why of this book, the ways of being (book-defined) bored, and where being bored is important. The why is self-evident for anyone with any level of anxiety surrounding today's ALWAYS ON THE GO life. The ways include writing about the inner-self and reflecting, reading (yay!), going to see artwork and being with the art, not just rushing through to check off yet another box on the accomplishment list, and concentrated contemplation with activities such as painting, bird-watching, fishing. The where is also self-evident, pretty much everywhere in life, work, relationships.

The book has a list of another dozen or so source material and inspirational books to read, going into depth for the topics. I've read Flow, among that list, having been working in a bookstore when it was first published, and being fascinated by it even then.

That I exceeded the 10% limit of quotes from the book tells me that the book made a stronger impact than I realized it would when I read it. For this, I have to say, the book is worth reading.

Related: we are the first generation to banish boredom. This does not bode well for society.