Contacts: From the award-winning comedian, the most heartwarming, touching and funny fiction book

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The book did a pretty good job drawing the various characters, switching between following our suicidal main character and some of the recipients of his middle-of-the-night text. There's quite a bit of suicide ideation in the main character's viewpoint, as was to be expected, but I felt like a lot of the other viewpoints nicely balance that out, showing how a message like that would affect the people receiving it. (Though in the mind of someone suicidal, the other viewpoints could also be read as more "that'll teach them, let me get my revenge this way, I want them to feel this scared and guilty" or "that's the way to get people to treat me better/appreciate me more" points in favor of suicide/suicide threats.) What emotions do you think you would feel? Fear? Disbelief? Anger? Incredulity? Horror? You may even wonder if it's a drunken joke. A messy text sent by someone who's had one too many, and will surely feel better in the morning. This story looks at the implications of our relationships. Family, friends, acquaintances. The reasons we lose touch with each other. Sometimes intentionally, but usually not. Life just happens, it unfolds, and we tend to assume that those we know are ok, unless they are going through a major crisis. But what constitutes one of those? You end up feeling sorry for James what with each of these people contributing to breaking him. Death by a thousand cuts it seems for the hero. It is not a happy book though it still manages to keep the tone not too serious. Later measurements from the Hipparcos satellite have re-established the distance to Vega at 25 light years.

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Apart from that, I loved the concept. I think it was really strong. I would have liked if Mark Watson focused on the present with all the messages, rather than focusing on the past. It would have been cool to have each person he texted have a seperate chapter (yes, I know there were 157 or so texts so maybe grouping the 50 or so people that didn't responded into one chapter, as well as the 20 or so people who's numbers were disconnected into another, etc). I had hoped for a lot more from this book. One of Mark Watson's previous novels, Eleven, is counted amongst my favourites and I enjoy both his humour and his writing. But this just didn't hit the mark for me. There were lots of characters and unfortunately the one I connected with the least was James. I don't mean that I wasn't concerned about his fate, it's just that I was more concerned about those trying to help him. I enjoyed the style of story telling, but felt that it was unfinished at the point of resolution for James. What happened to Steffi? What about mum? Did Sal decide to come home?In alternating chapters we see the reactions of the people who receive James' text at all hours across the globe. Their story as part of his life. The good times, the happy memories, the lifeblood that gives us meaning. Sagan named the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after two people: Eleanor Roosevelt, a "personal hero" of Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, and Voltaire, whose last name was Arouet. [3] The character is based on the real-life SETI researcher Jill Tarter. [6]

Contacts by Mark Watson | Goodreads

What ensues is the story of how he came to this point of despair and the ripples created as his loved ones receive the news. The Smartsheet Platform Manage projects, automate workflows, and build solutions at scale with the Smartsheet platform. Learn more Having reached the age of forty, he's an eeny bit overweight and feeling more than a little disillusioned. His partner has left him, he no longer speaks to his sister or best mate, and he's just lost his job. Trigger warnings⚠️ Suicide and suicidal thoughts. Depression and depressive thoughts. Confronting scenes.

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I was also surprised to see (in my Kindle version) the publisher had not included links to suicide support lines. While this book is touted as 'heart-warming' and 'life-affirming' I do worry it could also be triggering for some - particularly as the sub-plot with Gina seemed to have zero consequence for the characters this story. It's almost like Watson got near the end of the book and decided he didn't want James to die. So the woman on the train jumped instead. As a child, Eleanor "Ellie" Arroway displays a strong aptitude for science and mathematics. Dissatisfied with a school lesson, she goes to the library to convince herself that pi is transcendental. In sixth grade, her father Theodore ("Ted") dies. John Staughton, her new stepfather, does not show as much support for her interests. Ellie refuses to accept him as a family member and believes her mother only remarried out of weakness.

Contacts by Mark Watson | Waterstones

Product updates The latest features and enhancements added to the Smartsheet platform. See what's new Acting on the suggestion of "Ted", Ellie works on a program to compute the digits of π to heretofore-unprecedented lengths. Ellie's mother dies before this project delivers its first result. A final letter from her informs Ellie that John Staughton, not Ted Arroway, is Ellie's biological father. When Ellie looks at what the computer has found, she sees a circle rasterized from 0s and 1s that appear after 10 20 places in the base 11 representation of π. This provides evidence of her journey and suggests intelligence is behind the universe itself.

A sequence of prime numbers is a commonly predicted first message from alien intelligence, since mathematics is considered a universal language, and it is conjectured that algorithms that produce successive prime numbers are sufficiently complicated so as to require intelligence to implement them. Mark Watson is definitely an ideas person, but the execution of his work falls flat for me. Not his writing, because his vocabulary and writing style are exceptional, but the fleshing out of the actual ideas that he has. I'm sorry Mark Watson, I loved you on Taskmaster. I liked the sound of this book. Took a shot and I really disliked it.