Matt
The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to reassert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites. Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept.
Watership Down
Watership Down
“I couldn't do it again, Hazel,” he said.“You haven't got to,” replied Hazel.
“Don't be afraid, my child. Time is a magic circle here. When you stand up, you will lie down again soon enough.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”, you ask bewildered.
“Once you step on this island, you will leave it again eventually”, the old man answered thoughtfully.
Sugarcane Island
Sugarcane Island
Sugarcane Island
The view from the window is impressive. Your ship is so fast that the whole sky is distorted by relativistic effects. The planets and star clusters seem to ball up behind you. Everything shines in an eerie reddish orange. The stars in front of you have a violet shade. Located in the middle is a jet-black disc - the black hole.
Through the Black Hole
Through the Black Hole
Thick smoke lies over the street. Screams become loud. You make out the outline of people running toward the vehicle. You don't believe your eyes: The people are wearing Mayan clothes and weapons! One of them, a tall man with muscular arms, grabs the professor at the collar and tries to drag him out of the jeep. Chavéz thrashes around. Without much thinking, you rush to help the professor and punch the attacker.
(Quote translated from German.)
When I was a kid, I used to be obsessed with “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and this 1000 Gefahren (transl.: 1000 Dangers) series specifically. I had a bunch of these growing up and some of them still sit on my dusty shelf now. I have many fond memories with them and this one, in particular, had a special standing for me because it seemed so incredibly hard. I remember struggling to find a positive, satisfying ending in this one all the time and I always meant to pick it up again to give it a thorough look-through as an adult now. Revisiting this book now was definitely interesting.
First of all, it definitely struck me as true that this book is full of unsatisfying and sudden endings. I can't say if that's actually something that's more prominent in this one over other books of the series, but I can say that it took a while for me to even set foot in a Maya temple at all. There are plenty of endings that occur before you even reach one. Some of these could even be considered happy endings where you end up remotely uncovering a mystery of an expedition team that disappeared and catch some gangsters. But if your book is literally called Temple of 1000 Dangers you better get to read about a temple too. Everything else is just an unsatisfying ending before the story even really began.
I eventually did find the couple of paths that do let you explore this secret Mayan temple and I found at least three endings that I would actually call satisfying. As in, it's a positive ending that actually resulted from an adventure inside a Mayan temple.
I've probably read through every (or almost every) path while sitting down with it for about 90 minutes. I might be missing a few pages but I generally explored every off-shoot that I came across. Some of the possible stories are pretty decent, but a lot of them are very brief and flimsy. But there are some neat encounters with Mayan deities and the such, although I have no idea if any of that is accurate to their actual culture and of course, it's all written in very flat Middle-Grade prose.
It was interesting though to recognize the “mechanics” of the book a bit more now as an adult, seeing where the threads depart and come across each other. Though one of my favorite moments was when you encounter a dangerous-looking dog and are given two options for how to deal with it, both of which lead straight into endings. One where you get mauled by the dog and one where you pet the good doggo. Neither of which includes a Mayan temple.
There are also some neat illustrations in here that I completely forgot about. Some of it is surprisingly gnarly too.
It definitely did not have the same charm for me as it did when I was a kid, but I don't think this one was ever one of my favorites. It mostly just struck me as memorable for being oddly difficult, which has also been more or less a mystery that has been alleviated now through this revisiting.
I'm very curious though to revisit some of my actual childhood favorites from this series and see if they have more captivating stories.
It became even more important to expose the black sheep. The fact that this requires detective work and sometimes goes hand in hand with investigative journalistic research differentiates the activity of the cartel office at least partially from the dull daily routine of other agencies.
Throughout five decades, its civil servants have demonstrated a lot more investigative skills, dedication, and fighting spirit than the average bureaucrat. In soccer, one might say: The team plays offensively.
(Quote translated from German.)
hopefully
You don't realize that these words they tell you, that you're beautiful and exotic, pretty because you're "different", is a slow, ghastly well of honey, waiting to trap you in your most vulnerable moments.
You lay there, absorbing what you perceive as sweetness, unable to taste its true bitterness. And then, it's too late.
The popularity and objectification of Asian “values” and aesthetics in a lot of Western parts, often tinged with misogynistic elements, is something I've noticed myself over the years. So, it's great to have a book written by someone involved and affected by it, done with a lot of personal passion and thorough academic research into a facet of sociology that doesn't have that much academic analysis done yet.
The widespread reduction of Asian culture by Westerners to “exotic” fetishes, submissive gender stereotypes that support power fantasies, and a problematic perception of sex work/trafficking is examined and connected to historic roots and the branches that reach into the now, including the model minority myth. (I certainly understand better now why alt-right bigots still love hentai...)
Although this is primarily focusing on the USA and the experience of Asian American people, looking at that specific history and dynamic, it's still a valuable read for non-Americans as what it points out reaches beyond that and largely rings true for any white-dominated country. Aside from that, even just from a sociology and history viewpoint, this is a very interesting look at a very complex cultural development.
It even incorporates very recent subjects like the rise of “incel” communities online and the impact of the COVID pandemic on Asian-American tensions.
I personally wasn't big on the formatting/layout with frequent emphasized quotes and paragraphs, which sometimes made it feel a bit too much like an online article trying to grab my attention. But that is just a bit of a pet peeve of mine and I do appreciate the effort to make the book visually interesting as well. The addition of little art pieces from different artists to break up the passages of text was nice.
Most importantly though, the content of the text is undoubtedly the product of a lot of thorough work and I enjoyed that quite a lot.
Porn was a power trip for me. At the time I didn't understand it, but in reality I was fighting to take back what had been robbed from me as a child. There was a war going on in my heart and I was acting it out with my limbs. I was a sex-crazed, drugged-out wild child and I wreaked havoc on everyone I came across.
This discussion should not ignore the negative aspects of the pornography industry and its documented harmful effects. But it should also not be dedicated to the vilification of this industry, while ignoring both recent developments that make it more diverse and multifaceted and the complex accounts of viewers, which clarify the ways in which many of them decode the visual texts they see online.
Aggression in Pornography
My friend, in this country, if you wonder why something happened, you have to start by making the dead talk.
Earth and Ashes is a short novel about a man trying to see his son to tell him about the death of their family set during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The author himself was born in Kabul and fled the country when the Soviets invaded, which gives his text some undeniable emotional authenticity.
The story moves rather slowly as most of the time is spent with the main character's inner turmoil trying to process the situation and holding the leftover strings together before confronting his son. It's written in the second person, which I love, narrating the story as if the reader is put in the character's shoes.
For being such a short and confined text, the few characters that appear are all very interesting and the text puts some interesting perspectives on how people deal with sorrow. It's effective and engaging.
The sky is grey and the air is grey and this grey seeps into the ground and the stones and the buildings. The only splashes of color are the red and yellow silk flags that flutter in the wind above the fresh graves on the graveyards. You can feel the winter lying like a curled-up dragon across the land.
If the gates of hope are shut before me,
Yet there is death, like a crack in the wall!
I'm very grateful that I was able to get a glimpse of Afghan poetry despite not being able to read the language these texts were originally written in. I'm glad there exist translations despite the possibility of exact intentions and worldplay being changed or lost in the process of translating it.
But judging from a brief foreword of Afghan poet and scholar Khalilullah Khalili himself in this publication, I'm assuming he had a bit of an influence on that process which gives me some confidence that these English versions are fairly close to the original expression at least.
As the title makes clear, this is a collection of quatrains by one of the most famous writers in Afghan history. They all reflect on life, many of them being about the passing of time, about aging, death and love. Some of them are even funny, at least to me, like one mentioning the joy of breaking a law.
Some of them are very clever like the one comparing the moon from a sentimental (“everlasting light”) and a scientific perspective (“dark planet”).
My favorite phrase though might have come from a poem about the fact that we are all the same in death, where we become servants to the worms.
The snow thickened, inexhaustibly falling, incessantly sifting down, spreading a sheet of sterile whiteness over the face of the dying world, burying the violent and their victims together in a mass grave, obliterating the last trace of man and his works.
I didn't know anything about Anna Kavan before reading this and so I went into this mostly expecting something of an icy adventure with some apocalypse elements of an impending ice age. What I didn't know is how heavy it would be on the themes of abuse and trauma, which made sense the more I read about the author.
It ironically took a bit for me to get warm with Kavan's Ice. The dreamlike narration full of tangential interruptions took some getting used to but once I realized what it was trying to achieve, I was more able to follow the text like it was a dream itself that flows from one state into another without any questioning of itself. Fitting of a text with a protagonist whose delusions become clearer with time.
The plot also took a while for me to make much sense. What starts as the enigmatic search for a woman by the seemingly well-intentioned protagonist eventually becomes more questionable as time goes on and occasional flashes of hateful desires or imaginations pop up until the character eventually fully reveals himself in the end as despicable as the actual antagonist of the story.
I'm very unsure if what I'm taking away from this book is what was intended by the author, but the story read to me as being about how the entitlement to be the savior of someone else can become abuse by taking away that person's own agency to live their own life. The more the protagonist felt like the nameless woman needed his help to survive and be safe, the less that woman thrived which in turn fed his blind rage. The victim becomes the victim by having that role pushed on her by people that are convinced she needs protection and don't realize their forceful imposition and pitying is actually what enables the misery.
It's an interesting perspective on abusive relationships and how they can be caught in a perpetual spiral. The text builds all of that up with quite a lot of fantastical atmosphere as well. The description of the freezing-over landscapes is amazing. Lots of great language about the ice and snow. The glaciers and frost. The cold comes across the page very, very well and matches the cold subject matter.
Afghanistan sits in a dangerous neighborhood and its people are justly
proud of their historical ability to maintain their autonomy. [...] Living in a
land whose crossroads status has been as much a curse as a blessing, Afghans have cultivated a pufferfish strategy to repel outsiders.
The Middle East has always been a gap in my education and I felt like finally fixing that a little bit by reading this very comprising book on the history of Afghanistan. Thomas Barfield covers a very long stretch of time and fills the book with very information-dense text chronicling the major happenings in the country throughout centuries.
It definitely helped me get a better perspective on the country, and presented more than enough interesting people and events for me to want to learn more about. Although it felt to me like the balance was a bit too much on the political history and didn't cover too much of the cultural aspect.
There is so much ground to be covered that I did wish at points that it would look a bit closer at certain events, but that would also make this already fairly thick book even heavier. As a first comprehensive overview of Afghanistan's long and complicated history, it's already very expansive with much to take away from.
Barfield seems genuinely personally invested in the history of the country but manages to tell the story from a rather objective perspective.
Some chairs, and a dismal old black cabinet, completed the furniture of this apartment: it wanted but a ghost to render its gloom complete.
I stumbled over this author, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, by accident and while having a Wikipedia deep-dive on the fellow, stumbled on this novel in particular, which intrigued me. William Makepeace Thackeray was so sick and tired of the authors of his time picking real-life criminals and romanticizing them in their fictional texts that he took it upon himself to teach the public a lesson. So he chose a criminal himself out of the Newgate Calendar, a popular magazine about recent executions of the Newgate prison, and began to write this novel to show once and for all that criminals are not to be glorified for, in fact, their stories are actually miserable and vile if told correctly.
For the subject he chose Catherine Hayes, a woman that was burned at the stake for murdering her husband about 100 years prior.
It's a fascinating concept, especially for the time, although I went into it fully expecting a misogynistic depiction of a woman painted as the devil herself. Luckily, that hasn't exactly been the thing as there are plenty of male characters surrounding her that are far worse than her and, although it's not exactly intended that way, you could easily come out of this story taking that Catherine was driven to her awful crime by the abuse she endured at the hands of these men. Reading this, Catherine was much more sympathetic than the author probably wanted her to seem. I'm sure the 200-year difference between the writing of this text and me reading it had some part in that too, as the domestic abuse and cultural elements that are part of this story have a much different weight nowadays than they did back then.
But even aside from that, apparently Thackeray himself stated that the exercise that was this book was a failure and even he began to feel for this fictional version of Catherine Hayes that he created.
That being said though, I'm certain that both this fictional Catherine and the real person deserved better.
Anyway, what this novel ends up being then is a somewhat pulpy romance that feels like a parody of itself. At moments, the book manages to feel like an ugly collection of misery, as the author probably intended. But for most of the book, it almost works like a literary episode of Mystery Science Theater where the creator of the story takes time to poke holes into his own text and desperately tries to convince you that criminals just don't make for subjects worth romanticizing.
Thackeray goes on tangents of describing how a scene might have been written if it was written by one of his contemporaries, in kitschy and dramatic wordplay, but then doubles down that he refuses to do that to drive home his own point. He also makes out-of-character quips at points or rants about the Newgate Calendar, that aforementioned popular magazine of ongoing executions that seems to be read for entertainment and used as inspiration by authors. He even namedrops popular novels of the time that took real-life criminals as characters and he apologizes to the viewer for introducing the reader to characters that are “so utterly worthless” but, alas, that's what the public seems to want.
All of this has a surprisingly lighthearted aura to it and didn't match the cynical expectations I had beforehand. Whether it be the intended effect or not, Thackeray's Catherine was, for long parts of it, a funny commentary on crime/romance novels, written by a witty and fairly charming, if somewhat unconvincing, author.
The story itself moved on at a rather quick pace too and aside from the usual tangents of the time was a genuinely pretty engaging plot. Almost every character with a name in this book is a criminal and not a good person in general, but their escapades are still interesting. Catherine herself is depicted as not innocent as well and she admittedly does make some odd decisions, but all in all she read, to me at least, as a complete victim of her circumstances, and as the final pages drew closer, I couldn't wait for her to perform the infamous crime because of which she had been chosen for as the titular character in the first place.
The ending even, allegedly, cites real newspaper texts of the time in an attempt to draw the murder as realistically cruel as possible, which is a wonderful cherry on top of this uptight exercise of a moral lesson.
I think that Thackeray's original point had some merit to it but the execution seemed a bit misguided and not very convincing. Nevertheless, it made for a decently entertaining read, be it intentionally so or not.
The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw cold day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was most depressing.
These are the first Dickens texts I've read now after reading the infamous classic Christmas Carol last year, which I enjoyed decently enough. I felt like giving other spooky works of his a shot as well to see what else this classic author has to offer besides one of his big titles.
Unfortunately, this little collection of short stories didn't really click with me and I only really enjoyed one of the three stories.
The first story of the haunted house confused me a bit because I didn't know that Dicken' text was only a small part of a bigger project that had authors add their own stories to this collective haunted house concept.
The second story about the murder trial had a decent idea but didn't really come across very well for me.
But the final story of the Signal-Man managed to build up a decent atmosphere and I found the titular character actually fairly intriguing. The ending is of course rather predictable, which also stems from its age, but I still found it to be a rather comfortable read.
Even throughout the stories I didn't care much for, there were individual paragraphs that I really enjoyed, like the opening quote I chose. Dickens has a great way with words sometimes. But he also likes to go on tangents and generally I felt like the writing style of the first two stories in particular didn't quite age as well as it did with Christmas Carol.
To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.
Levé's Autoportrait is a unique sort-off memoir. It's not a chronological retelling of the author's life or an assortment of memories guided by a coherent thread. This book is a string of random individual thoughts from the person about the person. Little glimpses into a personality.
Between mundane observations and trivial opinions is the occasional heavier facet of his life, but all of it is presented in a neutral way. It's funny at times, thought-provoking at others, and knowing some of Levé's other works and his ultimate fate makes certain parts stand out even more.
At one point, Levé writes “My death will change nothing.” But I'm certain that his death changed how people read this book.
Coming to this after having read Levé's Suicide (twice) made the stream-of-consciousness writing seem very familiar. Reading Levé's candid thoughts about his own struggles with depression and experiences with suicide attempts buried between a hundred different mundane statements felt intimate. While Suicide always brought with it the question of whether the text might have been Levé's own musings about suicide or maybe a premature suicide note for himself, hidden in fiction, here with Autoportrait there is no game to play anymore. He's looking you right into the face and telling you, nonchalantly and seemingly unbothered, his casual feelings about his own struggles. Fiction and reality kind of connect here.
It's even more interesting when he proposes ideas for his future or offers assumptions about his later life which, as we as the reader now know, will never happen. He writes that he expects to die at 85, but his life ended at 42. He also claims that he will not lose his eyesight or hearing because he will die before that happens. That has become true. He writes that he would like to visit Japan before he dies but has a feeling that won't happen. Seeing that he died three years after writing this text, he was probably right.
He also thanks his parents for giving him the gift of life.
But he also writes that the hole is his “favorite part of a sock” and that he thinks “the big toe is doomed to disappear”.
Near the end, during one of the longer tangents, he describes how he spent some of his favorite moments with a friend who he had many drunken conversations with in the past. He then continues to say that this friend, one day, told his wife he forgot something in the house when they were about to leave to play Tennis, went back into the house and shot himself with a gun placed in the basement.
It came out of nowhere, but I immediately recognized it as the setup for Levé's other book, the aforementioned Suicide, probably his internationally best-known work. I remember reading a lot of theories in the past about who people think that book might have been about. Seeing it here, described in this context, three years before he wrote that Suicide, ultimately linked the personal autobiography of sorts with his fictional text.
Autoportait makes for a brisk and at many moments entertaining read, but also gives a very candid and intimate look into a man's personality.
Édouard Levé was an interesting man. Not because he was special or glamorous, but because he was an ordinary person, with his own unique experiences and thoughts, which he decided to put to paper in such a straightforward way. His life ended way too soon, but parts of his mind are forever left behind for curious people to read.
Autoportrait is like a randomly shuffled deck of personal experiences which makes it a more intimate and human experience than some written-out, elaborate autobiographies that I have read.
The airships rose in a thick swarm, black gnats shooting up in triumph from a dead carcass.
Reading Dick's classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? earlier this year and loving it made me curious to explore more of his bibliography. Checking out this freely available short story collection seemed like a great idea to get a good overview of his general writing.
The short stories in this ebook vary in length and quality. From lengthier texts about the cultural impact of war to brief pages that feel like a Goosebumps story. Not everything lands and some stories are just lukewarm, but others are very engaging and present more unique ideas from this creative author.
If you've never read another Dick text before though, you'll get a pretty clear overview of his typical themes including the theoretical parts of large-scale conflicts, interplanetary contact, existentialism, and high concept technology.
Besides writing engaging conflicts and vivid world-building, he seems to be really good at pulling together established sci-fi concepts in unique combinations.
If you like reading science fiction, this collection is a pretty easy pick-up to get through bit by bit.