Hugo Jonker

There I am, all by myself, far away from friends and family, what does one do for leisure? Obviously, I sometimes call friends and family, occasionally chat a bit, and waste some time browsing the web. However, I found myself turning once again to reading. Somehow, when the going gets tough (or stressed), the tough start reading :)

And I have been reading quite a bit:

• Dan Kieran & Ian Vince – Three men in a float (across England at 15 mph)
  Three guys get together to make an epic journey from the easternmost part of England to the westernmost part. In a milkfloat — an ancient electrical car used (in a previous age) to bring milk to all. It’s the level of a summer read: the kind of book you bring with you to the beach and leave there. Somewhat entertaining.
• Dan Brown – Angels & Demons
  Dan Brown again. Except for some horrific abuse of physics, okayish read. Entertaining, not great but interesting enough. Same thing basically as the Da Vinci Code: crap, but interesting enough to read through it once, if you don’t have anything better to read or do.
• Jodi Picoult – My sister’s keeper
  Made now into a movie, and, judging from the book’s cover, a typical girl movie. The book poses some interesting questions — although the characters are somewhat too simplistically motivated at (crucial) times. Nevertheless, posing these moral dilemma’s is in itself already engaging, and makes you (well, made me at least) think about it for a second. Again, a good book for the summer, and more engaging than the above
• Kelly Armstrong – The Awakening
  Feels like Twilight fanfic. I didn’t even recognise the fact that a particular scene in the book was probably intended to be quite arousing to teenage girls. Goes to show how far off-target I am, I guess. Anyway, I’d venture to guess that if you like Twilight, you might dig this. Haven’t seen Twilight (nor read it), but based on this book, I can avoid it. While it was more entertaining to read than the Float book, the Float was clearly not having any pretentions about having an interesting story. This book… it’s simply just not good enough.
• Neil Strauss – The Game
  A story on a guy who learns how to pick up girls — easily. As a thought exercise for yourself, analysing how you go about picking up girls, and how you could go about it if you approached it more scientifically, interesting. As an actual story: skipable.
• Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason – The Rule of Four
  Interesting book, bad timing for me. Right now, I’m not that in the mood to read a book where the main character loses his girlfriend because of his obsession with his work :)
  Still, read 3/4ths of it before it resembled reality too strongly for comfort. That part is definitely read-worthy.
• Angus Donald – Outlaw
  Haven’t finished yet, but so far this retelling of the Robin Hood story through the eyes of some child who joins his band at a young age is quite okay. Don’t expect to read great Robin Hood things, expect to read about the kid’s experiences. Definitely recommended.
• Roger Penrose – The Emporer’s New Mind
  Haven’t finished, and doubt I will before returning. This book is quite strongly in the line of Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”. It tries to pose a direction for an answer where human intelligence originates from, and in the journey there, crosses just about any beta-science known to man (it feels). I always figured I had this very high-level awareness of Einstein’s relativity theory. Turns out that one of the leading theoretical physicists view of “high-level” are disturbingly more deep than mine :)
  Yes, I love a challenge. Just finished the chapter on classical physics. To my surprise, that included general relativity (although frankly that is not that surprising, I just hadn’t thought about it that much). Much more surprisingly is that Penrose sketches that the idea of an independent framework can be traced back to at least Galileo. Definitely thought-provoking. Also definitely not light reading material: I will have to reread that chapter again :)

Other than that (as mentioned previously) I indulged myself when Jen was here, and we watched Harry Potter 1-5 on my brand new DVD player. And, surrounding that, I watched a lot of Farscape with my neighbor. Almost finished season 1 in roughly 3 weeks. On top of that Michiel swung by the other day. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and it was really good to see him. Being a father has changed him, but in a way he’s also still the same :) Was good to see him. Am curious to see Barbara and Daniel too, will try and swing by in the near future.