Certainly one of the months with no specific highlights.
Book of the month: Careless People;
Flop of the month: Slavic Mythology Collection, the sheer laziness of the edit is killing me.
Alexander Chodzko, Emily J. Harding (Translator), A.H. Wratislaw
(Pre-sleep listen with my fiancée)
Massive collection with very little (more like nothing) in terms of annotation or analysis, a very wild choice of stories (closer to TV Fairy tale classics than trying to get deeper in any topic) and, well, some stories that are outright repeating themselves: Twelve Months appear at least twice without any changes, same with Goldenhair.
Honestly, this was a letdown. There is so much treasure in Slavic mythology, from bogatyr tales and bylinas to tamer West Slav things or some Balkan fusions and there is much to tell about those stories. This is just a massive copy paste of what feels like wikipedia re-reads without any editing work.
Also, the audiobook version suffers from some simply horrible pronunciations, really underlining the „hot mess put together quickly“ kind of vibe.
One star – especially because I believe that a week of editors time and some cutting and actual annotations would make a massive difference.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
This is not self-improvement on HOW TO HANDLE THINGS BETTER, this is self-improvement YOU WON’T HANDLE THINGS BETTER AND YOU WILL DIE.
And as such, it works much better than I expected, including the active fight for the value of time investment and the fact that sometimes it’s really good to invest loads of time inefficiently, because I get something else important in return. Comparing everything based on “meaning per hour” doesn’t work.
Highly recommended, especially if you already have some background in stoics or Heidegger.
Solid, practical handbook with some tips on how to construct basic character arcs with very simple examples. Nothing more, nothing less.
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
Look into everything that is bad with AI – or, more precisely, look into some problematic, extremely disjointed areas. From plight of gig workers to deep fake porn, this reads mostly as disjointed articles concerned with „these things are not ideal at all“. And…they are not, the main problem is that these fields change so fast that its hard to see where will the ball of trouble end up next week.
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside
Solid and fun overview of „this is happening in the Chinese countryside“, lots of ideas are inspiring, while more of them are actually frightening. Was a bit hard to see any connecting theme here, but enjoyed the read and learned some new things about China. Time well spent.
Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture
Good start for public history, with a wealth of examples and many, many comments simply stating „this exists“.
This exploration is of course necessarily shallow (and some parts about games were really simplifying things a bit too much), but when the goal is „all popular history must be described“ then well, hard to go deeper.
If American Psycho was British and female, it would be this. And same as American Psycho, the madness / horror elements are there just to describe a bit more of the internally mad contemporary human condition.
Violence, crazy art, random sex and drugs, selfdestruction are all a plenty. It does not say a lot in the end and the gimmick gets old quite quickly, but hey, the book is quite short, the prose is good. Not a waste of time and I guess that for somebody this could be shocking and super interesting.
Tao Te Ching: The Essential Translation of the Ancient Chinese Book of the Tao
Is this the best translation possible? After comparing some verses with other versions (also based on the reviews here), well, I am really not so sure.
Is this useful? There is certainly a lot of wisdom here to be confronted, at the same time – I quite honestly think that the mysticism and metaphors go too hard and open doors for too many interpretations. Some parts are straight up weird today (repeated musings on erect childs member), but that feels mostly like a trap for attention, the important problem for me lay elsewhere.
The problem of the book and all very mysticism based philosophy for me is the central dilemma between being _extremely_ humble and „you should not even speak of the Dao“ and at the same time very, very certain about everything. But the projected humility along with the cloak of mystery makes all that not subject to discussion, not subject to reasoning.
I find that inherently problematic and honestly even a bit dishonest.
Eliza Clark is edgy, creative and can work with brevity and body horror.
At the same time, the humor can wear off quite fast (The King was twice the length that would work) and the „unspoken“ is sometimes just „oh, there is nothing more here“.
Story by story review:
Build a Body Like Mine – in the end, for me probably the best story in the book. Revolting and still realistic, relevant to real problems.
The Problem Solver – The ambiguity and pure stress of this one is _great_.
She’s Always Hungry – closest to Lovecraftian horror, interesting and provoking matriarchy setup, cool one.
The Shadow Over Little Chitaly – a gimmick that does not wear out it’s welcome, cool review thing.
Hollow Bones – solid scifi / body horror, but did not really connect with that.
Goth GF – subtle and fun, short relationship study, cool.
Extinction Event – surprising meditative apocalyptic / SF one, really liked it.
Nightstalkers – vibe, drugs, very low key sexy vibes and just a night in life. Really liked that one, especially because it would work even outside any horror anthology.
Shake Well – disgusting and weird. Honestly one of the stories where two sentence summary would work better for me.
The King – did not really work out for me, despite the humor, references and so on.
Company Man – just twisty enough to provide cool ending to the collection, loved that one.
Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics
We picked this up as a listen before sleeping with my fiancée, trying to broaden our perspectives on different spiritual traditions. We wanted to learn more about female mystics, their teachings and their unique positions.
The book is about them in some 5 %. Most of it is about author herself and her wisdom, very random poetry and literally experiments meshing together all spiritual practices of the world into one divine soup – the soup which is completely spiced with a very clear gender divide, where everything good and wise is female (including male mystics with female souls) and every single occurence is ground up in flavor that is not bringing anything to the table.
We are both very liberal, I am Old Catholic, fiancée is agnostic with animist / shamanist leanings. We are also very open to different frameworks of mind and ecclecticism, well, why not. But the moment Buddha meets Persephoné and Allah, Jesus and all the Hindi gods get pressed together into a concept of „beloved“ while the author warns against dangers of cultural appropriation, we get into territory of disjointed ideas glued together by idea of holy femininity. If this would have been marked as an autobigraphy, it could be interesting. In the current state, it is honestly a bit frightful, especially if people actually do decide “yep, lots of wisdoms to reach here“
(Of course, the basic ideas like „be nice to yourself“, „be open to people“ and „work and achievement are not the most important things“ are not bad advice. But the sauce around that is very, very problematic.)
Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness
Marc Aixalà, Jose Carlos Bouso (Foreword)
The opening intro is quite detailed on the history and context (perhaps a bit too long), at the same time it mostly requires some basic orientation in therapy and therapy adjacent issues.
For me personally, the book could be reasonably split into parts inspired mostly by Grof and parts mostly inspired by Frankl (in a very, very simplified dualistic model).
The parts connected to Grof were a good extraction of what is still reasonable there, but my problem with Grof is that well, I do not consider the great majority of that reasonable or even meaningful in any way.
On the other hand, the parts focused on logotherapy, integration, specific integration exercises and quite often a very „down to Earth“ approach to problems were interesting. At the same time, there is this weird feeling when the author goes through many well grounded exercises and reflections: and then feels the need to talk about mysticism and shamanism for a while in what really feels like a mention that he felt he needed to do, but does not really advance anything.
G. Willow Wilson, Christian Ward(Illustrator), Sal Cipriano, Alexandra Niklíčková (Translator)
I was ashamed of how few comics I’ve read lately. And… well, this wasn’t a great choice.
The art is beautifully colorful and the world has a couple of nice ideas.Otherwise, it didn’t really work for me. The plot meanders terribly, the BIG ROMANCE has no build-up or meaning, the relationships between different factions and characters are a bit confusing, and even though everything is constantly super high stakes and JUST ONE STEP AWAY FROM DEATH AND TOTAL SYSTEM FAILURE, things always somehow work out — usually because a character says something like “wow, let’s do THIS,” followed by a very tangled illustration where… well, something happened, but I honestly have no idea what.
Sōsuke Natsukawa, Louise Heal Kawai (Translator)
I love cats. I love books. I am very fine with cozy, simple stories.
Yet, maybe it was a translation issue, but I simply could not connect with this. It was all too much on the nose, everything repeated all over and being very, very literal. We listened to it with my fiancée before sleeping, but even with that quite open and generous frame, it did not really work out.
On the other hand, even weeks after finishing it, the personality and charisma of the titular cat stayed with me (and reminded me of Rosenkrantz of course). So, in the long run, that kinda works and I will probably pick up the second book in the series.
Liu Cixin, Ken Liu (Translator)
Second attempt reading it went much better. The first time, I was held down by the writing, very shallow characters and certain naivity in the directness with which the story is communicated. Maybe it was a mood thing, maybe it was more experience with East Asian and specifically Chinese literature, but it all came together into an interesting meditation on life, science, survival and society. Sometimes still a bit too much on the nose and simple (the „rowdy police officer“ was really too much), but an enjoyable read for sure.
Liu Cixin, Joel Martinsen (Translator)
This is a tough one with many layers to reflect on.
As _mostly_ hard scifi (including few pretty crazy ideas and a final massive GOTCHA), it works very well. Really, it takes it’s premise, it tries to connect it to what we know about the world and it does not try to ignore some pretty bold concepts and ideas: like “what will world look like in 100 years, realistically”. It is quite interesting that on some level some of its predictions have already failed and have been surpassed by real technology (see: AI), but considering the sheer variety of predictions, it works very well.
Those parts, if you accept the concept of the book where characters (with exception of Luo Ji) are mostly just placeholders for wider societal trends, work really, really well. And even if point of the book is kinda spoiled by the title, it still delivers enough plot twists and interesting concepts (that are all subject to critique) that it is a great read.
However, some of the problems are too pronounced here and they need to be mentioned. First, if characters are mostly shallow and present trends, women are basically nonexistent, with horrible characterisation and literally being mostly incompetent or massive femme fatales that are desired: and that is basically their role. The author probably tried to rectify that, but it just did not work, even with female soldiers towards the end. Too little, too late.
Second problem is the first third of the book. It is slow, draining and does not really bring much to the table.
Third problem, and the one that can be either accepted as part of the genre and maybe even a message of the book or can really irk you is the main character. Luo Ji is clearly the main character, his story being the one most detailed and elaborate: which is a bit of a problem, because mostly he is just horribly boring, weak and at the same time the book does not really reflect that enough for things to make sense. In the end, it mostly worked for me (saviour of the world being a douche and all that), but I can understand why people would turn this down.
Should you read it? I do not know. I am glad that I did, but your mileage might significantly vary.
Durian Sukegawa, Alison Watts (Translator)
Once again, I really had issues connecting with the prose and style of writing – and the overall naivity of parts of the text, the same as being too sweet and too emotional in times.
But it _just works_. Great reading before sleeping, very sweet, very soothing with enough rough edges, I liked it. That is basically all that is to be said: it is more of a lyrical experience, very honest and simple one.
