Tag: Nobel Prize

An Abundance of John Green

One of the things I love about my book club, Flips Flipping Pages, is how it opened up new worlds of reading for me.

In the past, I was averse to reading books other people raved about, mainly because I like discovering books on my own, and with the exception of my cousin Dianne, I don’t know anyone who has the same taste in books as I do. The more a book was foisted on me, the more I resisted it, and if I was interested in a popular book, I usually chose to read it long after the hype had gone down.

Making friends with other readers made me realize a bunch of things. One, I was missing out on a whole lot of books. Two, people with entirely different tastes in books can like a same book, or even find different elements to like in one book. And three, you don’t even have to like a book to find it interesting!

Of course, this realization has had its repercussions: the inability to walk out of a book store empty-handed, the triple-layered shelves of TBR books, and transforming from a strict monobookist to a juggling polybookist, but because there are other people as pathologically addicted as I am to books, I don’t really mind.

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Blindness (FFP March Book Discussion)

I’ve never read any Saramago, but my copy of Blindness (mooched over a year ago) has been sitting in my  TBR for over a year.  I knew some of my book club friends count this book as one of their favorites, and I’ve been told this particular novel is a good starting point for Saramago, but I put off reading it because I wanted a fresh reading for the scheduled book discussion (in other words, I habitually cram for the book discussions).

Flips Flipping Pages‘ selection for this month was Blindness by Jose Saramago, moderated by Peter and Gege, both big fans of the novel.

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Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!


I was watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory where Leonard celebrates his birthday, and Wollowitz presents him with a signed copy of Feynman’s Lectures on Physics. By then I’d watched enough BBT episodes to know that Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize for Physics (and is somewhat of a god to theoretical physicists), but I had a nagging feeling I’d come across that name somewhere else.

Last week, I was rooting through my shelves for a book to swap at the FFP book discussion, when I spotted a book I’d forgotten about, a copy of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character), a semi-autobiographical collection of stories narrated by Feynman, caught on tape by his friend Ralph Leighton. I’d gotten it for about P30 at a Scholastic warehouse sale last year, and I got it mainly because the cover looked interesting and I had a bag to fill, but I had no idea what it was about.

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