retirement is great

retirement is great: you can worry obsessively about all your health issues without
distraction. nothing new to report. still awaiting results of tests and waiting to see neurologist.
i may be becoming a bit of a pain but so far i haven't got tired of replying to anyone who says " gotta run, i've gotta go to work" . "oh, i don't have to go today" .
I finished an excellent book last week. I enjoyed it alot and i may not have been the only one who liked it since it won the Nat'l Book award last year:

by Richard Powers
The Echo Maker
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

About the Book
Set in Nebraska during the Platte River’s massive spring migrations, this novel explores the power and limits of human intelligence.

About the Author
Richard Powers is the author of eight previous novels, including Operation Wandering Soul, which was a nominated for a National Book Award in 1993. He has received numerous honors including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction. He lives in Illinois.

Not everyone liked it i guess. here is an excerpt from a not so glowing review in the NATION:
Richard Powers has a lot of ideas: complex, articulate, deeply informed ideas about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, relativity, genetics, music and much more. But poems, as Mallarmé told Degas, are not made of ideas, and neither are novels. The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like. And that, crudely put, is what novels are for. .....