Month: March 2019

Fantasy Characters I’d Like To Switch Places With | Top Ten Tuesday

aquapages // eline7 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl to bring bookish friends together. A new topic is posted each week.

This is a dangerous game to play with any fantasy books, because suddenly you’re up to fight a dragon. Do I want that? Young adult romances would just have me at the edge of the drama, scheming about how to avoid most of it and bring peace. I saw through my favourite books and all have a lot of shit I wouldn’t want to deal with. So I’m making this list with the assumption that I don’t get their personality or skills as well, unless they are magical powers.

Harry Potter series: Ron or Luna?

I’d take the place of anyone who attended Hogwarts, got to be in the middle of the final fights without dying and had a good family. At the very least not Harry Potter.

The Kingkiller Chronicle: Elodin

I’d be Elodin over anyone in that series! He’s already through the university as he’s the youngest master and chancellor. He’s not got the protagonist Kvothe’s troubles, many of them still unknown. He’s still got contact with Auri! Knowledge of shit! Mental problems is a huge negative, but who doesn’t in that series.

The Way of Kings: Lift

As a thief she’s incredibly street smart. She’s also got awesome powers through being an Edgedancer, including metabolizing a lot of food and using it to “become awesome” or create the source of magical powers, along with running around with everything sliding off her because of no friction and being able to regrow plants and other things. She’s at the outside of a lot of horrible points of the series, like for example she’s not swinging a blade on the battlefield like Dalinar, but she still is an important figure and takes on the role of being more like a spy. She states herself that she doesn’t make choices or take on the responsibility of protecting others, but her actions says otherwise and I think I would need that level of moral sense, but also not guilt, in a world like hers.

Graceling: Katsa

if you wanted to be any fighter, in any book, you’d want to be her. In her world there’s graces, which is different magical abilities certain people are gifted. Katsa’s ability is a big part of the plot, so I won’t spoil anything.

Short reviews: short fantasy story & more poetry

aquapages // eline2 Comments

Anyone surprised? I love doing short reviews on poetry. Here’s the other short reviews.

soft magic. by Upile Chisala: The beginning of this poetry collection had me worried, but it got better. The style is very minimalistic, instagram-poetry as I’ve heard it described as. It is about being black, family, love, it’s meant to empower. It’s not that I don’t like this style, it is just harder to convey powerful pictures with so few words and make it somewhat unique. I don’t think this collection quite manages it. The message is definitely great, and I think those who pick it up and is looking for that empowerment will like it just as “milk and honey” has been loved. It’s an easy read, good to get people into poetry, but I found it lacking.

2/5 stars. I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, thank you. Goodreads.

The one’s who walk away from Omelas: I found this with a recommendation of stunning writing and story-telling. It’s only about 30 pages. Started out with beautiful, descriptive writing about a happy city and then it took a turn. Ursula gives such a simple, as in few elements, of a moral dilemma. It took some time before it dawned for me the extent of it. And it showed so much through the people’s reactions to it, in just 30 pages. Everyone should read it, especially if you want to tell good stories.

5/5 stars. Goodreads.

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman | Book Review

aquapages // eline8 Comments

Genre: physics, nonfiction

Pages: 140

About the book

Richard Feynman is a well-known physicist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize of physics in 1965 for his developments to the quantum field theory. This book isn’t lying when it claims he’s one of the most brilliant physics teachers as well, particularly well-known for this introduction series of lectures from Caltech university in 1964, that this book is based on.

My thoughts

Rating out of five: four

My background going into this book: one and a half year into physics classes. I read this book a while ago and just now decided to post the review, the day after I sent my application for a physics bachelor at university!

The only reason this isn’t getting five stars are that the lectures are older. This book was first released in 1994, it’s an abbreviated form of the 1964 Feynman Lectures, which has been edited later. I just feel as an introduction this should have more side-notes on later development (just a couple words) and where to find more information on them, because it’s meant as an introduction.

The way Feynman talks about physics de-mystifies it, and makes it accessible. As someone who is going into physics, I’ve already learnt to love formulas. They say so much in so few sentences! It’s like abreviations, but you got to have an understanding of what they mean. Feynman is so aware of this, and instead put physics concepts into words, very elegantly. I really do get why he’s so looked up to. He’s up there with Stephen Hawking, in the quality of his writing. I’ve read parts of Einstein’s biography, and while he was a incredible scientist, his lectures were known from the beginning for jumping straight to the top-level difficult problems, leaving most of his students behind. I think Feynman explains really well concepts of physics, that we look at the universe and create certain rules or theories through observations and experiments that explain what we see. But also gets into more specifics, where my favourite parts were comparing physics to other science fields, the history of finding particles that everything in the world is made of, about the strangeness of fluid physics (especially turbulent fluids, Smarter Every Day made a great video about it that I’ll link to down below) and conservation of energy as a great intro to the concept of energy that everyone hears so much about, but usually don’t understand.

What I felt reading this book: not so weird for loving physics, and that more people would if this was the type of intro they got

A great bit of info on the questions around laminar and turbulent flow (fluid physics) with some nice fontains)