I try to be pretty quiet about which schools actually use the ship for their programs, but since Deakin University has put their logo on our new lower tops’l, it’s no surprise that they voyage with us.
As part of their Audacious Leadership course, students from Deakin voyage with us for eight days. They do the usual sail training stuff - learning proper rope handling, helming, navigation, keeping watch in the middle of the night, that sort of thing. In addition, they have a number of involved discussions with Deakin staff facilitators, who come on board but are not part of the watch system.
Read more...Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a book I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time. As I see it, it’s the dual of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the other well-known constructed social dystopia. The duality is shown well by this comic, and if the original was still up I’d link to that.
Read more...As I keep working through my collection of audiobooks, I’ve come to identify a few criteria that make for an enjoyable audiobook:
The reader must have a strong voice. It needs to be clearly understood over any background noise and be loud enough that I don’t have to max out the volume and strain my ears.
It should be short, or its parts should be short. Once I start a file on my music player, I can’t switch away without losing my place.
It should be fairly light. Uncomplicated fiction works best, because it’s easier to recover from a moment’s inattention.
The reader shouldn’t have a thick accent. Sometimes it fits, but in general it increases the amount of mental effort required to follow the text, which makes outside distractions more likely to disrupt the story.
There must be a single reader. Swapping readers throughout a text makes for a jarring experience.
“Chip’s” reading of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow hits all these criteria. In parts, he sounds like a gentleman retelling a local myth rather than just a reader of a text. The reading runs just under 90 minutes, so it’s a decent starting audiobook.
I recently finished reading Matthew Reilly’s Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves. It’s like every other book he writes: an action movie in book form. Small team of crack soldiers triumph over ridiculous odds while causing big explosions in bizarre set-pieces. It’s reasonably fun, you’ll finish it in a couple of hours, and you’ll want a bucket of popcorn to accompany it.
What’s that? You’re still reading? Well, I have one observation: If you want to give a character intellectual godmode, a great way to give that impression is to take a surprising event from your canon and claim that your mastermind predicted it impossibly far in advance.
There are a few books that I own because I feel they’re worth sharing. This is not one of them.