How I Discovered...

[Wildling]

Unfortunately I think I need to read the rest before I can visit the City Of Jade. Which wouldn't be so bad but the only ones I can find on audio are the Iron Tower and Silver Call.

I don't get a lot of time to actually read so I listen to audiobooks while I drive 5 hours a night.

[Avatar]

That's a hell of a commute.

--A

[Wildling]

I know right?


No, actually, I do deliveries to care homes and stuff. So I'm working while driving and listening to books.

[sgt.null]

right after Julie & I married, we were living in Lebanon, NH. I went to the public library and sitting there on the new arrival shelf was Einstein's Dreams.

fell in love immediately hunted up his other books.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lightman

I enjoy fiction as well as his books on science.

[peter]

In Plymouth for the day with my girlfriend. Picked up LFB in a bookshop and on the front cover it said 'Comparable to Tolkein at his Best'. On the back it said 'Cursed by a terrible disease....' [didn't say what]. Bought it and started reading it on the train home. Within a week I had bought TIEW and TPTP - and read them. The girlfriend left me - the books never did. [38 years ago all this].

[sgt.null]

while living in Vermont I was reading the Sunday Boston Globe with Julie when I read a review of a poet I had never heard of. they excerpted the following poem and I fell in love immediately.


Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall


into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids. They can swim
a little, but not for long


and they can’t climb the ladder out.
They usually drown—but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving


the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if


you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.


And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors


and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up


again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld


of your socks, and that even—
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams—
they may tell the others


in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man’s


that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.