So right now I’m submerged head-first in five or six books. Yeah, I’m one of those folks who dabbles in more than one book at a time because each book breaks my brain in a different way. Sometimes I have to put one book down and come back to it after I’ve retrieved my brain again.
Currently reading:
Hyperspace by Michio Kaku – a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the 10th dimension… excellent physics book that effectively expands my brain until it hurts. This guy has mesmerized me. He was into physics at EIGHT years old! When he was a teenager, he built his own atom smasher in his garage! He’d turn it on and all the fuses in the house would go out and his mother would just shake her head. His family spent Christmas vacations on football fields unwinding 26 miles of copper wire for his scientific experiments. Then he went to Harvard and eventually got his doctorate from UCLA or Berkeley (I forget which one). Today he teaches physics in college and he writes in a way that ANYONE can understand. I’ve just reached the part where he talks about light waves in a vaccuum actually not being light at all, but instead being a vibration of the fifth dimension. Supposedly, in order for light to be a wave, it has to be waving something – right? Well, it doesn’t wave anything. I mean, look at waves in the ocean. They require water to wave. And sound… it requires air to wave. But light?! What medium does it use to wave? The real answer? Nothing. According to the Kaizer-Klein theory, it’s a vibration from another dimension therefore it doesn’t require anything to wave. Now I’m convinced some “leftover parts of things” are in the 4th dimension while the major aspects of it are perhaps in the 5th dimension, such as time. Brain ouch.
Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quanderies by Neil deGrasse Tyson – I just got this book today and so far really like it. I’ve heard the author on tv and read some of this magazine articles in astronomy magazines, so he’s familiar to me. He is the director of the Hayden Planetarium and is adamant that Pluto is not a planet but either an asteroid in the Cuiper Belt or is a dwarf planet. He refused to hang Pluto with all the other orbiting planets from the ceiling of the planetarium which resulted in many crying and screaming 9-year olds on field trips. Although the book isn’t about Pluto, I just remembered the author talking about that incident in the past. Would love to get, yet another, in-depth scientific viewpoint on black holes.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ – an literary perspective of how Jesus views the Bible written by Jose Saramago (who happens to be an athiest and card-carrying communist). I’m still on the first chapter. The author has a beautiful way of describing a scene and setting it up which is admirable and quite easy to see how he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. So far the entire chapter has been devoted to describing the famous Biblical painting in which Jesus died on the cross. I had no idea so much time could be allotted to writing, in great detail, a simple painting that I rarely noticed in the past.
Lucifer’s Flood by Linda Rios Brook – This is a fictional novel describing the possible events that may have happened between the preverbial “God” and “Lucifer” in heaven and how “Satan” was renamed, cast out on Earth with a third of heaven’s angels which were later turned into demons. Although this is set in present tense (an anthropologist is translating ancient scrolls), the scrolls are actually the real writing of the story. The narrator is actually a down-the-middle fence-sitting heavenly angel who accidentally sides with the devil when Lucifer refused to “bow down” in heaven, which resulted in him being cast down with all the others. Now he is a reluctant demon who fears Lucifer and is afraid of him… and can’t get back into heaven and has to follow orders. It’s a thoroughly entertaining read and recommended by two different employees from two different book stores in two different cities. I can see why it’s been recommended. It’s so very “outside the box” in its thinking and delivery. My only negative critique is that the author seems to have a lazy hand in that there are several aspects not mentioned or discussed at ALL (such as why Satan decided to rename the angels as demons) and seems careless in not wanting to reveal “too much” as if we, the audience, can’t handle it. The author refuses to describe heaven, but instead writes things such as, “I can’t even begin to describe heaven because humans can’t grasp it.” And the author took many creative liberties to casually “forget to mention” any important names within great details happening WITHIN the 3rd heaven, as she calls it. If I ignore some of the laziness, the actual reading of the story is both humorous, eye-brow raising, and from my guess, her intuition of possible past events could have been quite possible assuming one believes in dogma.
You’ll Never Nanny in this Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny by Suzanne Hensen – I finished this book in two hours and both loved and hated it. I was appalled by the author’s willingness to expose her employers’ private lives like she did without changing their names. If I knew now what I knew then, I wouldn’t have spent a dime on it. At least it was entertaining.
I’m also reading The Divine Matrix and also Fractal Time by Gregg Braden.
So much to read, so little time!
Love
Isabella
xoxoxoox
Isabella Valentine
April 29th, 2012
