Crack, pure crack... Don't you people know I have finals?

Buzz Aldrin's No Dream is Too High: Life Lessons from a Man Who Walked on the Moon (co-written with Ken Abraham) was a spontaneous get from a clearance section, and when I picked it up I assumed that this was his memoir? It does have elements of a memoir, in that Aldrin tells little stories of his life experiences, but his actual memoir is titled Magnificent Desolation, which I will have to get another time. This book is more a presentation of neat little soundbites for the purpose of inspiring people, and especially younger people, who look up to him and want to pursue their dreams.

Aldrin clearly has a lot of feelings about doing as much as possible while he's still alive and able, and this book is part of the activism of trying to keep interest in science, space and space-faring activities alive. He wants to inspire excellence! Unfortunately that's not really what I'm interested in, speaking as someone whose dreams are much smaller, so reading this book was a case of "that's nice, but not really relatable" which is frustrating because not everything has to be relatable, but the book's prose is trying so hard to make ALL of it relatable, and urging the reader to Innovate! And Think Out of the Box! And Not Be Afraid of Rejection! Aldrin is so upbeat and positive, there's outright whiplash when he drops tidbits out of the blue, eg. how his mother died, before right on back to going, Surround Yourself With People Who Will Bring Out the Best in You! Don't Be Afraid To Think Out of the Box! Be Open-minded! Stand Up For Yourself!

I don't mean this to denigrate, and I totally get Aldrin's frustration that NASA stopped going to the moon, and efforts to get to Mars are taking so long, that he needs to pour that frustration into this book (along with other projects) to remind people of the best of humankind's accomplishments and capabilities and to be unafraid to pursue excellence even when times are hard... and have unfortunately become harder since the time this book was published almost ten years ago. For example, this book gets dated for his namechecking Musk and Bezos as innovators who make the world a better place.

For Aldrin's purpose, the book is what it is, a collection of anecdotes to inspire and encourage optimism, so there's a sense of flattening and simplification for that. There's only allusions to Aldrin's difficulties in and after NASA, his depression and alcoholism, or even his time in the Korean War -- which, as he writes it, he remembers that war fondly, and not much more than that.

I got Karen Armstrong's memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness from a book fair ages ago, but kind of avoided reading it because although I knew that Armstrong used to be a nun and that informs her perspective of religion, I was nervous that knowing Armstrong better might make me enjoy her other books less. As it turns out, knowing a bit more about life experience has indeed changed the way I view her books that I've already read, but in ways I wasn't expecting, and most of the guesses I'd made from her style of writing turned out to be pretty close.

( Cut for length. )

Anyway, great read, enjoyed myself even through the difficult parts, I have a better understanding (I think) of the ways that Armstrong thinks that differ from my own, but still illuminate routes that are useful to think about.

I bought Alexander Freed's novelisation of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story back when the movie first came out and I was fannishly excited over it, but I didn't read it. I think it's because most of the time novelisations don't really work for me, either by overexplaining what I prefer to be open, or going for characterisation choices that I disagree with. This novelisation does both! But enough time has passed, and Andor has opened the world further into its own thing, that I can process the novelisation as a product of a specific point in time.

Also, good thing I didn't read it back then because it completely undoes my missing scene fic, in the usual ways that crack me up, eg. my thinking that the timeline as seen didn't make emotional or plotworking sense in order to accomplish all the things that film needed to do during the Yavin 4 interlude, but the movie script, and from there the novelisation, disagreed with me.

The novelisation itself was interesting, and I suppose scratches that itch for world details and setting the scene. But its blank spots are funny, eg. Cassian really has nothing going on emotionally, except (1) mission and (2) Jyn, with the second point overtaking the first pretty quick; no insight into Chirrut's headspace at all, since he only gets the one scene (where he dies) since everything else is given to Baze, I think due to limitations in being able to flesh out the Guardians of Whills lore; Bodhi really does not get his due for what he actually did and sacrificed in order to get the plans out. The movie's already a little waffly on the last part, and I get that the story is wholly Jyn's, but... the novelisation's Jyn is not the movie's Jyn either, so I couldn't really pin emotional investment there either. The broad strokes of the character are the same, but the novelisation (and the script's?) Jyn is way angrier, conflicted and traumatized that movie!Jyn's heartbroken stoicism. So there's that! But I did like the imperial bureaucracy and Orson Krennic parts, which I suppose are difficult to get wrong.