A Briefer History of Time
by Steven Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, unabridged, read by Erik Davies, 2005, Random House Audio
I have a remodeling project going on and that is why I have so many audio books listed versus hard print (in addition to the fact that I am currently wading through a 937 page novel in print). I thought I would give this one a try since I started out as a physics major in college (for one semester anyway). The subject matter was pretty interesting and I had just a bit of knowledge to build upon. However, listening to this book rather than reading it is, in my opinion, a mistake. This is not due to a lack of talent on the part of the reader, but is rather because of the lack of time that I had to think about the material. When listening to the examples that were provided, I quickly lost the sequence of thought because I didn’t have a chance to go back over them in my mind. The information was so complex and presented in such rapid-fire succession, that there was no opportunity to pause and reflect (I certainly couldn’t hit the pause button because my fingers were full of faux paint).
I also think that the authors tried a bit too hard to make the explanations as brief as possible to fit in with the title of the book. Maybe a bit more explanation or even repetition of some of the complex trains of thought would have helped. The book does provide the reader (listener, in my case) with some thought-provoking ideas regarding the origins of the universe, predestination, and whether we will ever know how we and our world came to be.
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