#mark vanhoenacker

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/solstice-praise-for-darkness.html

From the opinion piece:

What stops at the December solstice is the sun’s apparent southward and night-lengthening (or night-shortening, in the Southern Hemisphere) march across the sky. The true meaning of “solstice” — indeed, the word’s Latin roots refer to the stilling of the sun — was made clear to me by George Greenstein, emeritus professor of astronomy at Amherst. From his home in Pelham, Mass., Professor Greenstein has a good view of the western horizon. He asked me to imagine a continuous movie composed of photographs that capture the position of the setting sun (the rising sun would work equally well) throughout the year.

In this movie — with a soundtrack by Max Richter or Ludovico Einaudi, I’m thinking — the setting sun would migrate back and forth between its southernmost and northernmost positions on the horizon. The sun would accelerate toward the middle of its journey (around spring and autumn, when the lengths of the day and the night change most quickly) and slow down toward the extremes. Once the sun reached an endpoint, it would at last come to rest — as it will on Thursday — before its motion reversed. Earth orbits the sun continuously, of course. But the sun’s apparent annual motion is more like the pendulum of a great clock, one that steadily counts off the planet’s years, and ours too.

What do you read when you’re writing? It’s complicated

You’d think a writer would have the best excuse to read all the time – an unrestricted diet of anything and everything. But I find my relationship with books is somewhat complicated.

Like everyone, I have a stack of titles I’m eager to read – and never get to them unless I declare a special read-what-I-like holiday. Otherwise, my reading is on a permanent specialised regime.

A book in progress…

Dates - 26th - 28th August

Number of 2016 - 41 of 65

Synposis -

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.

My thoughts -.

Vanhoenacker talks about the joys of flight from the perspective of a Captain. One of the most interesting things to see is that you can still be fascinated by flight even though you do it every day.

At its heart, this is a love letter to flight and its possibilities. 

What I did find was that the first two chapters were much for procedural and a little robotic but when you got to the third and fourth chapters, and they are very long chapters, more sections that chapters,  Vanhoenacker took off in terms of the quality of the prose and the love of the subject and it was no surprise that he mentioned in the epilogue that it was these chapters that had been written first and it felt that the first part of the book was their more to pad out the length of the book, albeit there were some very interesting parts in those chapters as well. 

I haven't read much (the shame!) but here's my Halfway Checkpoint post for #WordsandGeeks! #BookBlogger

Reading Status: Page 21 After my action-packed week in Cornwall followed by a week of flu, I’ve read a grand total of twenty-one pages of Skyfaring.  Ouch.  Weirdly all I want to do when I am poorly is watch The Great British Bake Off, Hotel Inspector and YouTube videos, which doesn’t leave much time for reading! Anyway, what I’ve read so far I have really really enjoyed.  I had no idea when I…

Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker Goodreads | The Book Depository Summary: Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply and perfectly through a window fringed with ice. When you descended towards a city, and arrived from the sky as effortlessly as daybreak. In Skyfaring,…

Mark Vanhoenacker, in his book Skyfaring, describes a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who has ever traveled any large distance at all. He calls it “place lag.” Like time lag, place lag comes upon us when we travel faster than our brains can handle.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

Place lag doesn’t require the crossing of a time zone. It doesn’t even require an airplane. Sometimes I’ve been in a forest, for a hike or a picnic, and then later the same day I have returned to a city. Surrounded by cars and noise and blocks of concrete and glass, I’ll find myself asking, how is it that I was walking in the woods this morning? I know it was only this morning I was in that different place; but already it feels like a week ago. (page 23)

I sometimes think that there are cities so different in sensibility, culture, and history — Washington and Rio, Tokyo and Salt Lake City — that really they should never be joined by a nonstop flight; that to appreciate the distances between them such a journey should be broken into stages, and that the imaginative distance might be better discerned if such flights took ten weeks, not ten hours. But no matter which pair of cities the plane links, almost all air travel can feel too quick. We pretend that it’s normal, that London, the place where we were, the place that surrounded us in every respect, has transformed itself into Luanda or Los Angeles, as if it was not us who moved, but rather the place that flowed around us, because after all, no one could move this quickly. (page 24)