By the Sea, By the Sea

Thanks to the persistence of a friend, we were able to spend several weeks in a cottage by the sea that was willing to accommodate (with some hesitation) our elderly cat.

Wave Hill, Early August

At long last I have completed reading the Oppenheimer biography (earlier posts on it are here and here). While it is excellent, I continue to think that it would have benefited with a trim of about 100 pages and, also, that telling the story through the lens of Oppenheimer was far too constraining. But I am glad to have read it as much as I am glad to be done reading it. Certainly far better than the alternative summertime “adventure” of spending time with plastic toys in a Quixotic effort to invest them with a meaning they cannot and never will possess.

Einstein’s Footwear and Other Matters

Albert Einstein appears here and there in “American Prometheus,” and his appearances are most welcome. I haven’t finished the book as yet, but it has occurred to me that I might have preferred a book in which Oppenheimer alone was not the central character. I think, for example, of Louis Menand’s “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,” in which he moves from one topic to the next, telling the story of this period through the lens of different people while examining different angles. Or, even better, of Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” in which she follows the stories of three individuals who were part of the Great Migration, interwoven with pertinent aspects of the historical context.

One Whale and Two Rabbits

I am reading the Oppenheimer biography. I marvel that the authors are able to form complete, ostensibly intelligible, sentences about quantum mechanics. But of course that’s necessary if one has taken on the task of writing a biography about Oppenheimer.

Floating Children, Peony Buds, and a Deconstructed Rose

I am in the midst of reading the novel “Painting Time,” by Maylis de Kerangal. It received a rapturous review in the New Yorker, which so far I don’t find persuasive. It strikes me as massively overwritten, and I have yet to discern much of a plot. (OK, it’s not fair to compare it to Ian Rankin’s Rebus series, which I had to interrupt when “Painting Time” came in at the library.) Here are the first few lines (the full first page is one sentence):