Tag: books

Exploring Ambivalence: A Review of Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary” | June 19 2026, 14:11

I finished reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. My feelings are mixed.

On one hand, Weir is an absolute genius of hard science fiction. It’s evident that the universe is developed down to the smallest details. The author doesn’t just make up facts; the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, space navigation — everything is based on real modern scientific concepts. The problems the main character solves are logical, and following the plot development is insanely interesting. Pure delight for the inner geek.

But on the other hand… throughout the novel, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading young adult or even children’s literature.

For instance… Ryland Grace, the main character, behaves not like a leading scientist stranded alone in deep space on a mission to save humanity, but like a hyperactive school teacher (which he actually was). His inner monologue is filled with childlike wonder, and instead of normal adult swearing in stressful situations, he uses amusing euphemisms. And generally, the idea that a single scientist should be able to quickly retrofit a spacecraft on the fly with a “sticks and stones” approach just to make it work is – well.. that’s something.

Too tame and kind space. All conflicts on Earth before the launch are resolved suspiciously easily thanks to the “absolute power” of project leader Eva Stratt. Her actions often look caricatured, not realistic. And when the alien Rocky appears… Their friendship develops by the canons of a classic Disney fairy tale. They instantly find a common language, they have perfect mutual understanding, zero cultural barriers, or dangerous misunderstandings. Everything is very cute, conflict-free, and “on friendship.” Adding some conflict for sharpness would have been nice. Everything always goes smoothly for the main character.

Writing style. Short, chopped sentences, very simple language, chewing over every thought, constant exclamations. The text seems specifically adapted so that a twelve-year-old could easily read it. The plot moves in circles: a problem arises => Grace in panic => Grace calculates something on paper / Rocky helps with an alloy => problem solved. And so every 30 pages. Because of this, towards the end, the sense of real danger is lost: the reader knows in advance that the author has another scientific trump card up his sleeve.

As a result, it turned out to be a cool, very scientifically accurate… comic book. A kind, optimistic fairy tale, wrapped in relatively impeccable physics and mathematics. There’s definitely a lot to praise the book for, but if you’re expecting a deep psychological drama or existential horror from fiction — this is clearly not for you.

Who read it, what did you think? Did you also catch this feeling of a “kindergarten” on a spaceship, or am I being picky?

Rediscovering Pyotr Boborykin: The Prolific 19th Century Wordsmith | June 13 2026, 16:47

I find it astonishing that an unknown to me Pyotr Boborykin wrote heaps in the 19th century, introduced words like “intelligentsia” and “nonsense-maker” into the language. Considered the most prolific writer of the 19th century. Almost no one knows him besides a few philologists. And yet, the guy was a star in his time.

Boborykin was deeply concerned that he would remain in the history of literature as a “secondary” author, so he wrote furiously. He authored about 20 large novels and countless smaller works. 12 volumes, 350 pages each. Essentially, he was the Darya Dontsova of his era. He has a novel “Vasiliy Terkin” which you might have heard of, but not his; you’re likely thinking of the poem by Tvardovsky by the same name, who knew nothing about the novel at all, these were different Terkins.

For instance, finding the novel “Doctor Tsybulka” online is very challenging; there’s only one PDF in the form of a reprint with pre-revolutionary orthography.

Vodka and Revelations: Notes from “Project Hail Mary” Unseen in Film | May 25 2026, 04:15

I’m almost finished with Project Hail Mary. I’ll write separately about my impressions. Today – some notes along the way that somehow didn’t make it into the movie.

Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka from a frighteningly large glass at a meeting, and during the rocket launch, she joyfully screams and downs one shot after another. In her personal baggage for the space flight, 5 liters of vodka in bags are found. Grace directly asks the Russian scientist Dmitry: “Are all Russians crazy?”, to which he smiles and replies: “Yes. It’s the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” Ilyukhina, planning her own death, asks to be provided with heroin. She wants to die from an overdose to experience “maximum pleasure” before death (while the Chinese Yao pragmatically chooses a gun). During the launch of the ship’s modules (cabin, laboratory, and sleeping compartment), broadcasted from the Flight Control Center in Moscow, Russian cosmonaut Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka and yells at the TV: “Don’t screw up my home, bastards from Roscosmos!” But overall, Russian space technologies are occasionally even praised – for instance, it is claimed that experts from around the world have recognized the Russian “Orlan” spacesuit as the safest and most reliable, so it is used in the mission.

When the main character (Grace) sees the Black American scientist Martin Dubois, he turns to the project director Stratton: “Dubois turns out to be Black! Surprising that you allowed that! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk about rap music and basketball?”

When they decide to send Grace to space forcibly, they lock him in a special room at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This room resembles a college dormitory but has a steel door and bars on the windows. The hero quips about this: “Why is there a prison cell at the Baikonur launch complex? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.”

Grace complains about how the work with malfunction reports is organized during the spaceship’s preparation. Instead of sending an email, they bring him stacks of paper documents. Grace: “Because Russians do things a certain way, and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.”

Out of scientific curiosity, Grace decides to observe how his alien friend Rocky eats. It turns out, Rocky is a “monostome”, meaning he both eats and excretes through the same opening in his body. Grace watches as a gray lump falls out of the alien’s stomach with a moist sound, after which Rocky tosses pieces of fresh meat into the same opening. Grace concludes: “The subject defecates from the mouth… Yep, that was pretty disgusting.”

The caricature nature of the characters, stereotypes, fantastic coincidences, and “plot contrivances” like deus ex machina are somewhat annoying.

Asian Fair Discovery: The Uni-ball Pen and Its Surprising Study | May 18 2026, 18:13

We recently had an Asian fair here – Japanese, Chinese, Korean goods, and street food. We bought a pie and some kind of pen for 6 bucks from Japanese vendors, which they beautifully packaged and asked for a review on Instagram. The pen is just a pen. Compared at home with our existing gel pens – no difference. But I Googled it out of curiosity.

“These inks are not just good-looking — they can even help you learn better. A study conducted at Ritsumeikan University in Japan showed that students who reviewed material from notes written with a black Uni-ball One pen retained information better than those who read notes made with regular black ink.”

I wonder who conducts such ridiculous research and who orders it. No surprises at all. Mitsubishi Pencil (the manufacturer of Uni-Ball) goes to the university, finds Professor Masashi Hattori (服部雅史) from the psychology department at Ritsumeikan University, and he organizes a report about a ‘memory reproduction task’ conducted on high school students: it compared the memorization of handwritten text with pens of different ink density, resulting in the conclusion that text written with dense black ink from the sponsoring company was reproduced more accurately than with regular gel ink.

Some of the co-authors of the report were Mitsubishi Pencil employees. There was no peer-reviewed article, only a conference presentation at the 38th Congress of the Japanese Society of Psychonomics (日本基礎心理学会第38回大会) on December 1, 2019; the results were also presented at the 32nd International Congress of Psychology ICP 2020+.

So, that’s the story with this pen 🙂

Gender Dynamics at The Great Gatsby Musical | May 18 2026, 01:23

Watching the Broadway musical Great Gatsby. It’s striking that the proportion of girls parading in dresses significantly exceeds the proportion of guys escorting girls. It made me wonder why. The explanation seems simple. If a girl wants to go to a musical and she doesn’t have a boyfriend, she will bring at least one girl, better yet two. Whereas a guy is more likely not to go at all than to show up with a buddy. Well, with certain exceptions.

Comparing Work Cultures: From Conflict to Courtesy | May 15 2026, 15:12

I reminisce about working on various projects and in different companies up until 2016, comparing it with what I see from the USA (projects in the USA, Europe, and Asia), and I notice one interesting thing – there are no screaming matches during calls, no hysterical outbursts, no unhinged managers yelling at everyone around, and getting upset over every little thing. There are no overt conflicts. Of course, there are still covert games and politics, but if someone is unpleasant to someone else, they do it with a smile and politely (though, overall, not often).

In my past life,” this was a common occurrence that nobody really considered abnormal. Especially if the hysterics were over some genuinely important work issue, and the person was truly passionate about the results.

What I’m really interested in is – what has changed? There are four likely explanations, probably working in conjunction:

1) I moved to the USA

2) times are different

3) people are on meds

4) online etiquette is different.

There’s also an obvious fifth reason – “I have changed,” but it doesn’t quite fit here, because I’m not talking about conflicts involving me or with me, but about observing others’ interactions, which are unlikely to have changed. From my perspective, as I observe, interactions during meetings have become much kinder, but I can’t tell if times have really changed everywhere or if Russian companies are still the same, and I just don’t see it for obvious reasons. Or is it the nuances of online meetings, where yelling at a computer somehow feels odd? We’re talking about major serious companies, not a meeting at a city sports committee.

Human Behavior Under Isolation: Lessons from the SPHINX Experiment | May 10 2026, 18:01

In the book Project Hail Mary, Stratt tells Grace that in the USSR there was supposedly an experiment where people were locked up for several months to see what would happen, and that the people almost killed each other, leading to the experiment being halted. That wasn’t the case, but I googled and found there was another experiment – SPHINX in 1999.

There were several groups. In the first, there were four Russians and during the New Year celebrations with alcohol, they beat each other up (10 minutes, blood, they had to be pulled apart). Another group had three guys and a girl (Judith Lapier) and the mission ended because during the New Year’s celebrations, driven by excitement, Judith was attempted to be kissed twice, leading to the mission being terminated.

As VICE reports, the dialogue was “We should try kissing, I haven’t smoked for six months. Then we can kiss after the mission and compare. Let’s experiment now.”

The team included doctors with degrees (Lukyanuk, Karashkin, Murashov) and Haider Hobikhozhin, who essentially was a randomly included technician with secondary education, taking the place of the Japanese man to the right in the photo and who was first in the second photo. Who beat up or kissed whom is now somewhat forgotten.

Vadim Gushchin, a coordinator from IMBP, after the scandal stated that the fight was “friendly,” and that Lapier “ruined the mission, the atmosphere, by refusing to be kissed.”

At the Canadian Space Agency, Lapier was told that such behavior is normal for Russians and that public complaints would be considered taboo in the culture of the host country.

Navigating Simple English in “Project Hail Mary” | May 10 2026, 15:30

I’ve read about a quarter of Project Hail Mary so far. The English is very simple, easy to read, captivating; the movie so far follows the book closely, but still, it makes reading quite interesting. However, I generally find it hard to read fiction because I keep getting distracted to google stuff. I reached the phrase “..I used the bathroom (or “head” I guess, because I was on the ship)…” and it got me thinking, it’s interesting to learn that the toilet is called differently on a ship not just in Russian. And why “head”? Turns out that “galley” in Danish and German is “head”. Interestingly, galleys are also found on airplanes, and historically, galleys were used only by sailors; officers did not use them.

The text is very childish, and understandably so – the main character is a physics teacher at a school after all. All these motherfluffer and dang it, gosh darn it, fudge, holy moly, for cripes’ sake instead of for Christ’s sake, there’s even bull-puckey instead of bullshit. “To go wee” is how they say “to pee” in the book. I recall, the day before yesterday we entered a mattress store, and the consultant, while discussing the topic “if one of you goes to the toilet, the other won’t even notice that the first one got up” – well, because the mattresses are so soft – actively used the verb “to pee”. So what? 🙂

Update: when the physics teacher encounters an alien ship on page 120, the chapter ends with holy fucking shit! That’s what all the rest was leading to;)

Occasionally, there are quite funny expressions that can even be used in life 🙂 For instance, the main character asks, “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” which is the idiom “to poop in someone’s cereal” – “who messed up your meal”.

In conclusion, if you’re choosing your first book to read in English – this one is at the top of my list. Even something seemingly simple like “Harry Potter” is more sophisticated, in my opinion. Here, there’s a lot of dialogue, school level but almost slang-free vocabulary, and a pretty interesting plot. Plus, it’s real science fiction, where the author educates the reader about the scientific method, how the world works, etc., all from the viewpoint of the hero, a physics teacher, who shares various facts and thoughts on how physics works, relating it to the plot in his interactions with other characters or thoughts to himself (rather than directly to the reader). It’s middle school level so far, but maybe it’ll get more complex later on.

Exploring Word Clusters in Religious Texts from Gutenberg’s Library | May 02 2026, 03:28

It’s interesting that if you take 8000 books from the Gutenberg library and construct a graph for each based on word connections to see how “friendly” words are—if word A often appears with B, and B with C, then how often does A appear with C? There’s a metric for this—the average clustering coefficient. Then, simply sort the books by decreasing this coefficient, about 70 percent of the top will be religious books—bibles, the Book of Mormon, the Quran. Well, some of them are duplicates in a sense, because a Bible in different formats remains the Bible. But clearly, its different parts are grouped together, meaning, they definitely share commonality in these triangular words.

But what unites all the books in this top— is that they were written many years ago or, as in the case of The Night Land, written relatively recently in the same style as many years ago.

By the way, among these books shines An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly. This is a French language textbook, written in English during the Tudor times (around the 1530s). Soverayn lorde kyng Henry the Eight. It was written by Gilles Du Guez—a French teacher at the English court. This particular textbook was compiled for Princess Mary (the future Queen Mary I, known as “Bloody Mary”), the daughter of Henry VIII. Check out a page from the textbook. Very cool English 🙂 …ye must pronounce it letyng your lippes jointe close, so that there be but a lyttell hole in the middes.

So, I delved into this textbook. It mentions a fruit called “openarses.” As you understand, this is “open arses” in English. In Tudor England, they called a medlar an openarse. If you Google what a medlar looks like, you’ll have no questions why it’s called openarses 😉

In the anatomical section (MEMBRES LONGYNG TO MANNES BODY), the author mentions next to the eyes and ears “the nether beerde” (literally— “the lower beard”).