Short-Stories

**I’ll be here all week millennium! ** One of me wishes this would be required reading for sex-ed. At least that way students would learn something while attending the class! Second I wish I had read this during the pandemic, when it would have been a great shared experience to read whilst sheltering in place . I appreciate that like Durant , Decameron really humanizes the late Middle Ages. In the same way that late night comics rip monks and nuns today, Boccaccio pokes fun at the holier than thou traditions of the day. Many of the plots are overtly ridiculous, but done so in a way that is humorous and not overbearing. ...

** 12th book of 2021: Sci-Factoids ** To be a nerdy American millennial is to have unprecedented privilege in asking ‘what if?’ Not only do we benefit from sci-fi’s boom in American pop-culture, but wikipedia and search engines enable curiosity about time-paradoxes or quantum theory to be answered in an instant. So despite, or perhaps because of my proclivities in such pursuits, I found Exhalation underwhelming. As written in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling: We are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What sets a story apart from a wikipedia article is the setting and the characters, which allow synthesizing human emotion with interesting idea. This is Chiang’s achilles heel: settings were often flat and characters felt recycled from story to story. ...