MINI REVIEW RATINGS

Reading Bingo

This delightful reading bingo image was circulating the social media sites and I found it particularly inspiring. What a fun way to mix up your reading habit and get through all those books in your TBR list!
 
Of course other books will be reviewed here, but this seemed like a fun way to read those books currently sitting on TDBA shelves. The only rule was that each book had to be one I've never read. This is my personal list, so it is very science fiction, science, and nonfiction heavy, as those are some of my favorite genres. However, I encourage you to dig through your personal library and actual libraries near you to fill out your reading bingo.
 
So, without further ado, here is the list!

500+ pages - We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
Under 30 author - Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh
One word title - Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
1st by fav author - Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov
Book a friend loves - Enchantment by Orson Scott Card
Forgotten classic - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Non-human characters - Beyond Human: Robots and Cyborgs by Benford and Malatre
Short stories - American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Heard @ online - Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
That scares me - Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Became a movie - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Funny - Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
Bestselling - A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
10+ years old - 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Published this year - Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus
Female author - My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time by Lone Frank
Different continent - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Based on a true story - Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
2nd in series - The Dark Monk: A Hangman's Daughter Tale by Oliver Potzsch
Number in title - Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Mystery - Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Nonfiction - Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Bottom of pile - Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
Blue cover - Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller

Free Space - Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Seaand of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools,Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn


Micromegas by Voltaire


On a planet revolving around the star Sirius there lived a young man of great intelligence, whose acquaintance I had the honor of making during his recent visit to our little anthill. He was called Micromegas, an appropriate name for great people. He had a stature of eight leagues, or 24,000 geometrical paces of five feet each, or 120,000 statute feet.
 
We earthmen have an average stature hardly more than five feet--one pace--so Mr. Micromegas' world must in turn have a circumference 24,000 times greater than our little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler, more a matter of course. The dominions of certain potentates in Germany or Italy, around which you can walk in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Russia, or China can give but a faint idea of the vast disparity Nature has set between different orders of being throughout the universe.

Given his Excellency's height, any sculptor or painter would agree his waist should, proportionally, be about 50,000 feet around. His nose being one third the length of his handsome face, and his handsome face being one-seventh the height of his handsome body, it follows that the Sirian's nose is some 5,714 statute feet long.
 
His mind rivals the most cultivated among us; he knows many things, some of which are his own inventions. He had not yet reached his 250th year, and was studying, as was customary at his age, at the most famous school on the planet, when he solved 50 propositions of Euclid--18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having, according to his sister's account, solved 32 for his own amusement, became a pretty fair geometer, and a very poor metaphysician.
 
When Micromegas was about 450 years old, and already passing out of childhood, he dissected, with the aid of powerful microscopes, many little insects less than 100 feet in diameter; he wrote an interesting book about them, which got him into trouble.