Bob @ Beauty in Ruins
PLEASE NOTE: I'm rarely active here anymore, but please feel free to follow me on Goodreads, where I post regularly.
These are the chronicles of a book addict, a photo junkie, and an aspiring author, rewriting the very fabric of reality one page (and one snapshot) at a time. From the strange to the unusual; the abandoned to the abnormal; the haunted to the historic; the supernatural to the surreal; the forests of dark fantasy, the cemeteries of gothic horror, and the post-apocalyptic ruins of science fiction are the landscapes of my imagination.
Currently reading
Into the Black by Rowland White
This was a long, dry read . . . heavy on detail, and even heavier on the technical specifications . . . but still entirely fascinating. I've always been enthralled by the Space Shuttle program, having seen it rise and fall all within my lifetime, so I was excited to forget about the disasters for a moment and reexamine the triumphs that started it all.
This is a book that explores the doubts, the fears, and the challenges of getting a new space program off the ground (no pun intended). Having been too young at the time of Columbia's launch to truly appreciate what a feat of scientific and political engineering it was, I was fascinated to see how it all came about. At the same time, it's sobering to know just how many of those challenges and risks they simply chose to accept, and to know (in hindsight) how they'd come back to haunt them years later.