Mental Notes & Random Musings

Here we are at the post-midlife part of “As Jeremy’s World Turns” the audiobook. Over the last 20 years or so, I have had a steady stream of old classics, new classics, fantasy, science fiction, and history lectures from the great courses. They have all molded my free time in the car, airplane rides, as well as the insanely long amount of time you must hang out in terminals and of course the long walks through town. Music gets stuck in my head, but audiobooks get stuck in my heart. It is impossible to cover everyone I have listened to, but these are the ones I hope nobody misses. Most of them are a hand-arounds at work, as there is a dozen of us who are audio book listeners outside of work, and audiobook discussers at work. I will also talk about the readers of the audiobooks as they really do make the book better, or worse.  Brandon Sanderson: Stormlight Archive – Read by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading  I wouldn’t have known Brandon Sanderson at all had I not decided to star...

As I had rambled on about in Only the Young and Dumb, the books I read as a pre-teen were pre-modern, and the books I listen to now are post mid-life, with a nod to a lot of the in-between. I wanted to take a moment to highlight a lot of these better, and here we are.  Pre-Modern: Anything that I enjoyed that was written before I was old enough to read. This includes the classics like JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Philip K Dick or Isaac Asimov, as well as the ones that were being written around the time I was born like Roger Zelazny.  The Hobbit: All fantasy should start here. Tolkien's linguistic artistry was not confined to English. The fact that he created an entire language out of whole cloth to back up his vision of Middle Earth, was what installed permanence of a mildly veiled epic of Christianity. Many would say it is overtly veiled, but trust me, when you read CS Lewis, you understand how amazingly subtly the Christianity was in this book. It may have gotten more righteous wi...

Amazingly enough I didn’t start watching Will Trent this last season because I was too busy. I had every intention of binge watching the season when everything else went away for the summer, and that just so happened to start yesterday , while I was on the elliptical for an hour. Holy smokes the show somehow got better, and this is despite the full ownership of this IP by Disney now . Yes, I was generally concerned , that a great show that had a lot of WOKE features would have leaned harder into the WOKEness , dump the good story writing, and acting, and become a dumpster fire. This is me, admitting that I was wrong so far. The first episode of season three was a rollercoaster of excellent writing, amazing cast chemistry, and believe it or not even more WOKEness . Again, WOKE stories are trash because they are trash stories. If you write a good story and it happens to be WOKE there is a difference, and this is the proof.   Goodwill goes a long way in a TV series. I say this wi...