Welcome to Litsy!

The good: there is some interesting information about the Soviet space programme.

The bad: the author is deeply, deeply biased against the Soviets. He can't admit that they ever did a single thing right.

Also, he snidely dismisses Wally Funk's space flight in a paragraph in which he gets the facts wrong. He claims she was below the threshold (the Kármán line, 100km), but Blue Origin peaked at 107 and WAS above the Kármán line.

This... is very anti-Russian, in a way that feels like being anti-Russian is a principle for him. Like I get their space programme was an omnishambles, but there's just this air of total contempt about it that doesn't feel limited to hatred of incompetence. Not sure if I will finish it.

Thanks to @Chelsea.Poole for this excellent #AuldLangSpyne recommendation: a brief but deep book about six astro/cosmonauts from various countries circling the globe together in 24 hours. It‘s a wonderful exploration of bridging cultural differences, with awareness of how connected we are on this tiny planet. Harvey poetically explores big issues and personal pain, in the life of one astronaut and an incident on Earth that none were connected to.

I probably should have given up on this, but it‘s so short so I just kept speeding up the narration 🤷‍♀️ I think I just have to leave the Booker winners alone, they never seem to resonate with me, no matter how I try. In this one, yay space- but it‘s completely observational and then reflective and has zero plot which I just can‘t do without it seems. But it did win the Booker and many readers do like this, so don‘t just take it from me!

Maybe we‘re the new dinosaurs and need to watch out, but then maybe against all the odds we‘ll migrate to Mars, we will start a colony of gentle preservers, people who want to keep the red planet red. We‘ll devise a Planetary flag, because that‘s something we lacked on Earth, and we wonder if that‘s why it all fell apart. And we‘ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old Earth and will say, “Do you remember?” “Have you heard the tales?”

I found 4 cool books at the shop yesterday. The 1st was a biography of Rasputin. The 2nd was called How the Irish Saved Civilization: it was about how European art was preserved in Ireland during the Dark Ages. The 3rd was historical fiction called The Rebels of Ireland, but it was #2 in its series. The 4th was the one I ended up buying. It‘s an account of the Challenger disaster by Adam Higginbotham. His book on Chernobyl is great.

This is more than just about the Challenger but rather a comprehensive look at NASA 🚀🧑‍🚀👩‍🚀

I‘m not going to Mars. Just New Jersey! Final tally of reading material that I‘m taking with me:
-7 magazines
-6 books from my shelves
-3 library books
-2 Libby books
-1 book borrowed from my brother-in-law
-1 audiobook for the drive

No, I‘m not going to run the vacuum cleaner or do laundry before I go.

Don't squander a life so miraculously given, since I, your mother, could just as easily have been with my mother that day at the market if any number of things had been different, one of the youngest victims of the atomic bomb and you would never have been born.
But here we are, and here are these men on the moon, so you are on the winning side, and perhaps can live a life that honours that? And Chie had said silently to her mother, yes, I see.

Poignant & ephemeral, a galactic meditation on our fragile & interdependent existence. This meticulously researched story gives a glimpse of human perspective from a space station parked on the outskirts of planet earth. It makes us wonder & marvel at the preciousness of time we have here & to synonymously long for a collective march toward valuing & defending her intricate veil of resources.