Category: Books

Siddhartha (Guest Review)

  08/30/2015       St. Elmo's Fire      36 Comments

Siddhartha is a Buddhist philosophy novel, written by a German guy in 1922. I’m not much of a philosophy guy myself, but I was interested in Eastern philosophy to see how it was different from the philosophy I was used to. In addition, Westerners tend to “fetishize” Eastern philosophy; a lot of hippies in the 60’s heralded it as this perfect wonderful truth that would solve all our problems. I assume that one of the earlier pieces will be less distorted because it won’t have that echo chamber effect; in addition, my English teacher swore up and down that this was totally legit Buddhism.

If it is, though, this book convinced me to not touch it with a ten-foot pole. (more…)

   Books      , ,

UnWholly Opening

  09/04/2015       Farla      10 Comments

I decided that with measels in the news, I felt like checking out this monstrosity again.

See, the whole vaccine connection would be somewhat topical, you know? I keep hearing people on the news trying to explain that when parents choose not to vaccinate, it’s not just their kid they’re affecting, it’s all the other kids! Because it’s okay to kill your own child, they’re your property.

So imagine the fight being about conflicting parental rights, and the fallout is that stuff which impacts other people’s children is mandatory, like vaccinations, and stuff that doesn’t impact other people’s children, like cutting them up for parts, is entirely up to the parent. You can even keep the abortion ban because thinking women need to suffer unborn children have rights and actual children don’t is a sort of doublethink we’re already familiar with.

You’d still have your teen appeal of parents betraying children and children not having rights. It just stops being presented as prochoice = murder and instead focuses on another issue that affects all children right now.

But that would not be endlessly terrible, so that will not be this book. Let’s just hope no more magical leprechauns show up to pretend to be an actual human ethnicity. (more…)

   2. UnWholly, Books, Unwind Series     

Dresden Files: Fool Moon Chapter 1

  09/07/2015       Farla      18 Comments





I never used to keep close track of the phases of the moon.

This is a great opening in both the intended way – it raises all sorts of questions and clearly has to do with some sort of magical thing – and in the unintended way of establishing Harry doesn’t actually know much of anything and is pretty lazy. From the first sentence, you know that it’s a mystery, it’s got magic, and the magic system isn’t going to make much sense. (more…)

   2. Fool Moon, Books, Dresden Files     

Dresden Files: Fool Moon Chapter 5

  09/09/2015       Farla      8 Comments

I got out the lump of chalk I always keep in my duster pocket, and the circular plastic dome compass that rides a strip of velcro on my dashboard, then squatted down, my voluminous coat spreading out over my legs and ankles. I drew a rough circle upon the asphalt around me with the chalk. The markings were bright against the dark surface and almost glowed beneath the light of the nearly full moon.
I added an effort of will, a tiny investment of energy, to close the circle, and immediately felt the ambient magic in the air around me crowd inward, trapped within the confines of the design.

MAGIC

And it only took us five chapters to get there. (more…)

   2. Fool Moon, Books, Dresden Files     

Dresden Files: Fool Moon Chapter 8

  09/16/2015       Farla      25 Comments

The police headquarters downtown consists of a sprawling collection of buildings that have sprung up over the years as the need for law enforcement has increased. They don’t match, and they come from a wildly varying selection of styles and designs, but they have somehow adapted themselves into a cohesive whole—much like the force itself. Special Investigations operates out of a big, run-down old building, a huge cube that has managed to hold up solidly in spite of the years, the grime, the smog, and the graffiti sprayed on its walls. It has bars over the windows and the doors and sits hunkered amidst buildings much taller than it, like a faithful old bulldog amidst a crowd of unruly children, struggling to maintain peace and order.

I actually liked this up until he realized that since noir, unneeded metaphor that adds nothing. (more…)

   2. Fool Moon, Books, Dresden Files     

Dresden Files: Fool Moon Chapter 9

  09/18/2015       Farla      34 Comments

A block from the Forty-ninth Street Beach there was a run-down garage, the sort of place you only find in the worst sections of big cities. The building consisted of corrugated metal on a steel frame, oxidating in the rain and the mist rising off the lake so that gobbets of rust ran down the walls in streaks and pooled on the sidewalks in uneven puddles. On one side of the garage was a vacant lot; on the other, what looked like the sort of pawn shop where crooks traded in their spare guns and knives for a few extra dollars when things were tight.

I…I don’t think that’s how crooks work, Harry. (more…)

   2. Fool Moon, Books, Dresden Files     

UnWholly Ch1 Part 1

  09/18/2015       Farla      23 Comments

So before we dive in, I’d like to do a quick recap about what these books really are.

Although the book claims there was a big fight between prolife and prochoice people to kick this mess off, the actual book is written from the perspective of someone who is really obviously prolife and doesn’t seem to have any idea what prochoice people believe. This is not to say the prolife side is portrayed positively but it’s a dystopia based around the idea of what if the prolife side went too far and were evil like those horrible prochoice bastards. It’s sort of like if someone wrote a story where women could choose to do anything they wanted to their unborn children, like have them blinded or chunks of their brain removed so they’d be as smart as cats or altered so they’d only live to age three, and also free abortions any time you felt like it even up to the point of actual labor, which is a really bizarre but not totally baseless extension of the idea the mother should get to choose what happens in her body, and then said it was a compromise between the prochoice and prolife people who are both just as terrible even though nothing I just said has anything to do with what the prolife lobby wants and a bunch of what I said are things that would horrify them far more.

The book is written with the idea that abortion is just about murdering kids for the lulz and the only reason for not sucking it up and being a mommy is that liberalism has sold you on the idea that you’re a victim and can just abandon your sacred responsibility to be a childish leech on society. Its idea of being far and balanced is wondering if creating a world of hideous child neglect is worse than aborting the children and coming up with an epic shrug.

I myself am pro-abortion. I think abortions are great, be they for the health of the mother, birth control, or mercy for those who wouldn’t survive birth itself, and I view stopping abortion as saying you want women to die horrible deaths for having sex and leave behind broken families because that is objectively what happens when abortion is prevented. You are not banned from disputing this in the comments, but there is a really good chance I will respond with vitriol to you.

(more…)

   2. UnWholly, Books, Unwind Series     

Dresden Files: Fool Moon Chapter 11

  09/23/2015       Farla      56 Comments

The demon trapped in the summoning circle screamed, slamming its crablike pincers against the unseen barrier, hurling its chitinous shoulders from side to side in an effort to escape the confinement. It couldn’t. I kept my will on the circle, kept the demon from bursting free.
“Satisfied, Chauncy?” I asked it.
The demon straightened its hideous form and said, in a perfect Oxford accent, “Quite. You understand, I must observe the formalities.” Then it took a pair of wholly incongruous wire-frame spectacles from beneath a scale and perched them upon the beaklike extremity of its nose. “You have questions?”

Okay, so the explanation is, there are actual rules saying demons must attempt to break out of the summoning circle and, should they accomplish it, must then kill their summoner.

This is so fucking stupid and it’s really only there because the author wanted to do the whole sudden tone shift you see above, which any non-hack could’ve accomplished by just mentioning the “crablike pincers” snapping etc and it being a demon in a circle followed by the glasses and snooty accent. (more…)

   2. Fool Moon, Books, Dresden Files