My Brief History ...by Stephen Hawking

This was a short read.  All the hype about the Ice Bucket Challenge reminded me of Stephen Hawking. FaceBook was full of articles about ALS and of course its most famous victim, Stephen Hawking. And who wouldn't know him.

I had read about Stephen Hawking as young girl, in a Reader's Digest article about 3 decades ago. I learned it was called Lou Gehrig's Disease. That name got stuck in my head somehow over the years and I always remembered. I remembered too flipping through my Encyclopaedia Britannica to read more about Lou Gehrig and that info about him being a famous baseball player got etched into my mind too.

And that struck me as funny cos I have discovered that many of my students don't seem to share that sort of penchant or interest to learn something which sometimes may not seem related to our lives at that moment.

Anyway, coming back to the book. The first part was easy enough to read as it mainly detailed Hawking's early life. There wasn't much difference from the biography that I had read about Hawking. The last chapter however, took a little more effort as he went into the discussion about the black hole and the cosmos. But the brevity of his narrative made the reading a very pleasurable activity.

I started reading the book at around 10 p.m. and got up at 4.00 ++ a.m. the next morning to continue reading. I finished before 6 and got ready to go to work.

It's been a while since I read any books. Most of my reading these days are mainly articles and magazines. It is quite nice to 'hold' a book and read one for a change.