Half Way Home: My Notes and Kindle Highlights

2015 Reading List



You'll see there aren't a lot of highlights from Halfway Home--look, you aren't reading Howey for lyrical lines that you can tuck away your whole life.  But I look forward to new books by Howey almost more than any other author.  As soon as you open of his stories you know that it will consume the next few days of your life--you will spend the spare moments of your day tearing through an adventure.  The speed with which Howey moves the narrative reminds me of those choose-your-own-adventure books from when I was a kid, except in this case Howey is at the helm--leading us on an incredible story about resilience and bravery amidst overwhelming odds.

Oh yeah.  I should probably give you a teaser as to what this book is actually about:   A master planet sets out to colonize the universe. If one of its ships lands on a planet that is deemed inhabitable, the entire colony is killed off before they can be hatched from their fully grown cryogenically(ish) frozen state.  Until the kill sequence is interrupted and a group survives...

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Intellectual property rights now serve as an ephemeral gold, weightless and invisible, priceless artifacts one can slip into the folds of his or her brain and smuggle anywhere, undetected. These tidbits can then be traded by the devious for real wealth or spread by the loose-lipped like a disease. Either way, information and patents are now worshipped by all. Including the colony AI,Read more at location 68

Oliver was the colony philosopher, one of the lowest jobs within our hierarchy.Read more at location 291

“Free rider,” I said, turning to him. “It’s a problem in game theory, one of the last things I was learning for my profession.”Read more at location 547

“Well, the problem arises when people figure out they can take a little more than they’re putting in and nobody will notice. It makes sense, actually, for each individual to think this, but when everybody does it, you get problems.”Read more at location 552

And that’s when I realized I had been wrong. Hickson and I were nothing alike. Our bodies might be similarly starved, but our brains were still intact. Intact and different. Whatever disease of hate and fear-mongering he had been born with made him something far worse than I would ever be capable of emulating.Read more at location 2844