How I Killed Pluto (Post 1)

Unlike the author, I did not gain an interest in outer space until later on in my childhood. One reason for this is because the author grew up in a sparse area of America while I grew up in the densely populated city of Hong Kong. At night, while the author could observe asteroids and planets in outer space with his naked eye, I would struggle to spot even a single star, blinded by the city lights around me. While I’m not an astronomer, nor have I ever aspired to be one, I think it is only natural for people to be curious about the things that exist beyond Earth. In hindsight, this desire to learn more about what outer space is like, especially from someone with a different perspective than myself, was probably one of the factors that made me choose this book.

 

At times, the author provides details, often very technical ones, about how planets and stars operate. For the average person like myself, the technicalities were sometimes a little overwhelming. However, I think the more important point the author wants to stress is the relationship that he and all his readers have with stars and planets. Overall, I feel the author does a good job in bringing these distant and obscure objects closer to the reader. One way he does this is through his anecdotes of intimate experiences with planets and stars. For me, it was quite profound that something so far away could affect every aspect of his life in both big and small ways. As he claims, the timing of his birth and the crossover of Jupiter and Saturn determined his fate as an astronomer at birth. Later, the moon’s position determined how easily his trek home would be at night (and whether or not he would go home with a poison ivy rash). In addition to anecdotes, the author’s frequent use of personification also helps to make these obscure planets and stars more relatable. There is one part in the book where he jokingly claims the moon is his nemesis. Sometimes the moonlight hinders his ability to see far into space and forces him to do something else aside from researching. This reminded me of a relationship between two long-time friends. Much like a friend would do, the moon also likes to mess with the author to distract him from his work and to force him to take a break from time to time.