Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

www.anceintmarinerbigread.com

Tara Westover - "Educated"

Immensily gripping rooted in autobiography story of a girl growing up in a conservative Mormon family. Particularly how her dad assigns every action to God and his angels, how he hurls iron bars and other heavy objects in the junkyard towards the pile where his daughter stood, not caring whether the thrown junk would hit her "because angels guide us". Or how she got pierced by metal and fell down. How twice they crashed with their car after driving at night. The feeling I had when she described how she didn't know the word "holocaust", or how her brother kept dominating the family. It was gripping until the very end. For two days I tried to wrestle meaning from the textbook's dense passages, but terms like "civic humanism" and "the Scottish Enlightenment" dotted the page like black holes, sucking all the other words into them.

Ewun - "Phone Tap"

industrial with phone sounds.

DEVS

Enjoyable scifi series about a super-magicky Googly-ish company that developed a quantum computer able to simulate basically everything, thus being able to see both backwards and forward in time, all because its founder (played by Nick Offerman, him of Parks and Recreation and the best "There's only one thing I hate more than lies, and that is skimmed milk. Which is water lying about being milk.") lost its daughter. Lots of discussions about multi-vs-single world. Nice, but... geeks don't all know fibonacci sequences by heart. That's not what coding looks like. There's technical illogic (why can't she reinstall dead boyfriend's phone from the cloud *again* after it has been wiped?) Where are the Russians? They don't care one of their operatives & handlers just disappears? (oh they do. sorta) I didn't like the end. Suddenly they run simulations as a world? And why is there no DEVS machine in the simulation? That would make it really interesting, and make the jump to "we are living in a simulation" ourselves. 6 out of 10, I'd say. Also, had a bit of a Utopia feel to it. And I did like some of the visual tricks to show multiple worlds.

Lucio Battisti - "E penso a te"

The original of Tanita Tikaram's "And I think of you". That one was from 1996. The original from 1970...

"Contemporary British Short Story" (edited by Philip Hensher)

Mr Philip Hensher has strong opinions when it comes to short stories. I liked some, but have not properly kept track of which ones. Except that I remember Lucy Wood's "Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict" as beautifully haunting and melancholic, about an elderly couple living close to the beach where more and more waste keeps turning up.