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| B001U9S9ZI
| 4.21
| 40,670
| Jul 01, 2003
| Jul 01, 2003
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liked it
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‘Still Life with Crows� by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is another horror thriller, #4 in the Special FBI investigator Aloysius X.L. Pendergast s
‘Still Life with Crows� by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is another horror thriller, #4 in the Special FBI investigator Aloysius X.L. Pendergast series, that I love! It’s not thoughtful and literary at all and only vaguely uplifting because a very short list of deserving characters live. This book exists only to spray fun, thrills, human blood and classic chills into your day! And corn! Lots and lots of corn! Horror movie-style corn amidst real Kansas farmer’s fields of corn. Gentler reader, Kansas has a lot of fertile, and febrile, areas inspiring fecund minds to grow corn, then and now, and Preston makes of it a superb setting for a monster chase! Who knew? Well, those of us who have seen those movies (Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Scarecrow, Children of the Corn, Signs, etc.) Don’t judge me. I have copied the book blurb: When a series of murders strikes small-town Kansas, FBI Special Agent Pendergast must track down a killer or a curse -- either way, no one is safe. A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground. Is it a serial killer, a man with the need to destroy? Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land? Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America's heartland. No one is safe.� I don’t know how Preston does it, but somehow the classic movie and novel horror scripts of corny, ah, I mean scary, plots of the 1970’s (Carrie, Alien, Jaws, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dawn of the Dead, The Exorcist) have been creatively rebooted into the best, most engrossing, and somewhat gross, horror novel series I have ever read! I highly recommend this series, especially to those of us who adored classic 1970’s horror. I’d start the series with book one Relic ...more |
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Apr 04, 2025
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Apr 06, 2025
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Apr 04, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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| B001VFTYWI
| 3.91
| 40,394
| Oct 16, 2000
| Sep 2021
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liked it
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Patricia Cornwell continues to entertain readers with a taste for reading about horrific crimes in the 11th Dr. Kay Scarpetta mystery thriller, ‘The L
Patricia Cornwell continues to entertain readers with a taste for reading about horrific crimes in the 11th Dr. Kay Scarpetta mystery thriller, ‘The Last Precinct�. This is a very good series if one enjoys horror, sadistic serial killers, and sleeping with the lights on with a gun under the pillow. I have copied the book blurb below, but it has spoilers about the murders in the 10th novel in the series, Black Notice. Readers need to start with book one, Postmortem, since all of the novels after book one refer to plots from the previous books. None of these are standalone. ”Following the death of Diane Bray and an apparent attack on Kay Scarpetta by Jean-Baptiste Chandonne in her own house at the end of Black Notice, The Last Precinct concentrates on discovering the full story behind Chandonne's killings. Kay Scarpetta is also under suspicion for the killing of Bray, due to their known rivalry and public confrontations. Torn between a desire to clear her name and the instinct of a wounded animal to turn against even its would-be rescuers, Kay sifts through the forensic evidence that seems to link Chandonne to past events in her life, up to and including the murder of her lover, Benton Wesley. A major new character is Jaime Berger, from the District Attorney's Office in New York, who believes Chandonne killed a woman in New York two years' before his arrival in Virginia. Kay must examine her own fears, misconceptions, and anything-but-altruistic motives to accept working with another competent woman.� These are extremely dark mysteries, and very graphic since Dr. Scarpetta is a medical examiner who describes the autopsies she performs on dead people in detail. She also is having more hysterics a lot because the serial killer horrors done to people lead her to investigate on her own, getting herself tied up and almost murdered by the killer too in every novel! I’m kidding! Actually, I’m not. Scarpetta is getting more gaga in each novel I’ve read so far. She might be wearing restraints in a mental asylum soon given her exposure to horrific murders and her obviously worsening PTSD. Marvel comics should consider adding Scarpetta to their tortured survivor-guilted hero characters. ...more |
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1
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Mar 26, 2025
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Apr 04, 2025
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Mar 26, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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| B000OIZVDY
| 3.92
| 43,653
| Aug 02, 1999
| 2017
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liked it
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Author Patricia Cornwell does dark crime fiction with flair, verve and, unfortunately for those who are sensitive readers who accidentally pick up a m
Author Patricia Cornwell does dark crime fiction with flair, verve and, unfortunately for those who are sensitive readers who accidentally pick up a mystery featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, excruciatingly detailed medical descriptions of her autopsies. However, for those of us who can’t get enough of icky murders described up close and personal, I highly recommend the Kay Scarpetta series! I am up to #10, Black Notice�. I am sort of re-reading this series, having picked up a Scarpetta novel now and then a long time ago. I had always promised myself to do an in-order read of the series. There are continuing crises carried forward in each book, so I strongly suggest beginning with the first book, Postmortem. These novels are not really standalone. However, I suggest folks should read these mysteries with occasional breaks. I myself need to break away after reading one or two in a row. They are intense and vivid! I have copied the book blurb: ”The decomposed remains of a stowaway lead Dr. Kay Scarpetta on an international search to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France—and on a mission that will pull her in two opposite directions: toward protecting her career or toward the truth.� It amazes me how flat and spare the above blurb is, gentler reader! The book is a soap opera, exactly like the previous nine I’ve read so far, with all of the main characters emoting juiced up feelings every time there is a break in any action because, imho, they all are suffering from PTSD. Of course, because of the intense dramas that occurred in the previous books, they all have cause. Lots of serial killers, explicit torture, killing, buckets of blood, right? I love it. Don’t judge me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 24, 2025
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Mar 26, 2025
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Mar 24, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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| B084357H23
| 4.18
| 1,333,130
| Oct 06, 2020
| Mar 2023
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it was amazing
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I almost put ‘The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue� by Victoria E. Schwab in the DNF bookshelf because several times I thought the story was heading in t
I almost put ‘The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue� by Victoria E. Schwab in the DNF bookshelf because several times I thought the story was heading in the direction of being a Romance. I don’t like the Romance genre. But the plot device was absolutely intriguing! In spite of my doubts, I kept reading, drawn by increasing interest in how things would turn out. I couldn’t help it. Paraphrasing a character from the Star Trek series that most of us are familiar with, I found myself more and more fascinated. For me, the manner of the deal Addie made with the dark god Luc and how it plays out was original and amazing. This is a very cool fantasy read! I have copied the book blurb: ”ŷ� Choice AwardNominee for Readers' Favorite Fantasy (2020) A Life No One Will Remember. A Story You Will Never Forget. France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name. In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life After Life, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab's #1 New York Times Bestselling Author genre-defying tour de force.� I do not think the novel is “In the vein of ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife� at all. Addie is a person who needs to see what happens next as the years pass, more so than she wants to be with a person with whom to spend the rest of her life being loyal and supportive. She does not bounce chaotically around in Time, she travels forward in Time one day after another like we all do. But in its other descriptions, the blurb I’ve copied is accurate. Addie has to live under certain rules. She cannot age or die. Whatever injuries she gets heal after some time, but while she is hurt, she must endure the pain. She also feels hunger and cold and heat but these things cannot kill her. She simply suffers until she can steal, con or sneak what she needs to stop hurting. These are skills it takes her years to learn. But her suffering in learning how to survive in a time when women had no rights, when women did not have much of an education and were often forbidden access to money, businesses or much freedom to roam, left her with few choices if she didn’t want to suffer except those that are criminal. The dark god gave her what she wished for, freedom, but it came with a curse. Whenever she meets someone, they see her, but as soon as they walk away for a distance or leave the room, they forget they met her. When they return to her, it is as if they’ve never seen her before. She remains in no one’s memory. In the deal she made with the dark god, she did not choose her words carefully enough in her ask. Since the dark god, whom she calls Luc eventually, wants her soul, payable when she asks to die, he is not interested in truly helping her in her desire to escape marriage to a man she doesn’t love or in not living out her life as an 18th-century village housewife. He only wants his payment. It is entirely down to the author’s talent in writing that I continued reading this novel to the last page. She meets people that she wishes to love, or at minimum, have as a friend. She is dreadfully lonely. There were slow parts, too slow sometimes. But eventually I saw how necessary such scenes were. Every incident in Addie’s past timeline in the 1700’s and 1800’s and 1900’s, which alternated in every other chapter with her present timeline of 2014, showed the reader how she learned what the limitations on her existence in an immortal state were and how the “curse� worked. It is fascinating! And to me, entirely original! Trust me, gentler reader, the limitations the dark god gives her are incredibly onerous. (view spoiler)[She cannot write anything or draw anything. Any marks she makes on paper or sand disappear in seconds. She cannot tell anyone her real name, or where she was born, or anything about her family because she chokes. Her family does not remember her at all. She cannot get a job or earn money because people forget they met or spoke to her when they leave the room for any reason. They also forget having met or talked to her when they have walked away from her for a distance. They can’t remember meeting her if they wake up next to her in bed. If she goes to a restaurant and a waitperson walks away after speaking to her, he or she will not remember seeing her before or having spoke to her. They forget that she that ordered food. She also can’t rent an apartment or room since the managers don’t remember talking with her before at all as soon as they leave her even for a minute. Besides, she cannot really earn a paycheck so she does not have money except what she steals. She can’t take a job since her boss and fellow employees don’t remember her ever applying or being hired if she was immediately hired, because they forget they had met her if they leave the room or area, or if she comes back the next day. Don’t you forget she can’t even write anything down at all, either, although after 300 years she knows how to speak and read dozens of languages. People get fearful or angry. Relationships are ALL one night stands! But at least she can sleep in a bed for a night. (hide spoiler)] It is a horrific life in many ways. But very interesting to read how she deals with it! I couldn’t help getting very thoughtful about the conditions of Addie’s existence, or the choices she makes to survive without pain. What would I do? I also would have wanted to avoid being a village wife the same as Addie. But to survive without physical suffering as she does, Addie had to harden herself emotionally to live without friends or any relationships. She had to be a low-level criminal to have food and shelter. She has moments of utter despair. However, paying Luc with her soul in order to die, for him to do�.what? with her soul. It is never parsed out, but it doesn’t seem it would be a good thing. Is Luc the devil? Gentler reader, that isn’t told either. But she does enjoy life experiences, travel, seeing the world despite her loneliness. That has value to her, for 300 years. There is also in her an extremely competitive spirit - she is not going to permit Luc a victory over her! I got the feeling it wasn’t only about whatever Luc would do with her soul - I think she wanted to best him. Then she meets Henry. He changes everything because of a startling unexpected development. I couldn’t put the book down! I had to know what would happen? I had doubts a woman like Addie would be able to settle down with Henry, someone with whom she might fall in love, any more than she could with a man selected for her in 1714, especially after the life hardening she underwent which only resulted in emphasizing what her character already was, imho. Other readers came away with different impressions, though. I recommend this delightful fantasy! Not only is the story intriguing, it is, I think, a very original and more engaging YA read, obviously inspired by the famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy, Faust. But it wasn’t ‘Faust� that was my first contact with a story about characters selling their souls for personal gain, nor is ‘The Invisible Life of Addie LeRue�. As a teen, I read a fun American story The Devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benét, another Faust resurrection, so to speak, my first soul-selling fantasy, a comedy, read in high school. There are a lot of novels with this theme out there today, mostly in the horror genre shelf. ‘The Invisible Life of Addie LeRue� is much tamer than those modern horror retakes. I highly recommend it for first time readers of soul-taking stories. No nightmares, maybe, right? But romance readers certainly will find themselves tested, or perhaps, just testy, over the ending. I liked it. Bite me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 03, 2025
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Mar 04, 2025
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Mar 03, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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| 1250875471
| 9781250875471
| 1250875471
| 3.64
| 14,669
| Oct 01, 2024
| Oct 01, 2024
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really liked it
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‘The Sequel� by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a fun read, if you don’t mind an anti-hero who is, maybe, sociopathic! She has her reasons to commit murder, wh
‘The Sequel� by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a fun read, if you don’t mind an anti-hero who is, maybe, sociopathic! She has her reasons to commit murder, which do seem reasonable given her circumstances. She is not sadistic, just very smart. Unfortunately, she isn’t always right. I have copied the book blurb: ”After the “insanely readable� (Stephen King) and “perfectly told� (Malcolm Gladwell) New York Times bestseller The Plot comes Jean Hanff Korelitz’s equally captivating new novel: The Sequel. Anna Williams-Bonner has taken care of business—that is to say, she’s taken care of her husband, bestselling novelist Jacob Finch Bonner, and laid to rest those anonymous accusations of plagiarism that so tormented him. Now she is living the contented life of a literary widow, enjoying her husband’s royalty checks in perpetuity, but for the second time in her life, a work of fiction intercedes, and this time it’s her own debut novel, The Afterword. After all, how hard can it really be to write a universally lauded bestseller? But when Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist. Something has gone wrong, and someone out there knows far too much: about her late brother, her late husband, and just possibly... about Anna herself. What does this person want, and what are they prepared to do? She has come too far, and worked too hard, to lose what she values most: the sole and uncontested right to her own story—and she is, by any standard, a master storyteller.� This novel really is a sequel. It is a truth in fact, not just a title, so readers will be happier if they read The Plot first, which is narrated by Jacob Finch Bonner. ‘The Sequel� is told through Anna Williams-Bonner, and holy moly! She is determined to be all she can be no matter what the obstacles which had blocked her intended path - first by a high school boy, and then her parents, and whoever else who might pop up. The book is a slow-burn, tongue-in-cheek tour of the literary publishing world until nearly the end. The story heats up considerably when Anna discovers who is threatening her with exposure of her past misdeeds. Honestly, I must say I was sort of rooting for her?!? Omg. I must be a bad person, gentler reader. Or the author is very good at creating understandable monsters, and Anna is truly a monster! You know how it is, writers being expert at shaping reality to their liking, whatever it takes, whether that be burying or digging up old secrets� ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 20, 2024
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Oct 24, 2024
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Oct 20, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0425288293
| 9780425288290
| 0425288293
| 4.14
| 1,502,156
| Apr 24, 1967
| Nov 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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‘The Outsiders� by S.E. Hinton doesn’t speak to me on any level, gentler reader. Nonetheless, I felt it was authentic in every way possible! The autho
‘The Outsiders� by S.E. Hinton doesn’t speak to me on any level, gentler reader. Nonetheless, I felt it was authentic in every way possible! The author wrote it when she was in high school, and it is based on true stories that she has fictionalized to a degree. The book is gold! It is narrated by Ponyboy who is thirteen years old, the youngest of three brothers. Their parents were killed in a car accident. Since then, the oldest boy, Darrel, nicknamed “Darry�, twenty years old, has been performing in the role of the adult so they could stay together, getting a job and setting down rules for Ponyboy and Sodapop, the middle brother. Sodapop has dropped out of school since he is sixteen years old and he can leave school if he chooses to do so at his age. Ponyboy will end up in foster care if the boys don’t stay out of trouble. They ARE getting in trouble because of the Tulsa, Oklahoma neighborhood they live in, but they are staying under the radar of authorities. Until one of the boys in the gang they are in kills a kid from another gang�. Since it was first published in 1967, it has been on teachers� lists as a book to introduce to middle schoolers. For this age group, it isn’t just literature, it is real life. Until recently, any teacher could assign it to their kids to read. Florida and Texas have banned the novel. I suppose that means these kids are not supposed to watch the movie that was made based on this book, either. I have a kid brother. He went through some tough times when he was young boy in elementary grades, but I am aware it got better when he became part of a group of boys and girls much like those in ‘The Outsiders�. My brother’s friends were not exactly a gang, but they functioned a lot in supporting each other as described in this novel, a substitute family. I have copied the book blurb: �50 years of an iconic classic! The international bestseller and inspiration for a beloved movie--now with bonus content. This special edition of the groundbreaking novel contains: Never before seen photos and letters from the publisher's archives Original review clippings and media coverage Photos from the author’s personal collection A gallery of covers around the world New material from the stars and director of the iconic film--including Francis Ford Coppola, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, and others And much more! Celebrating 50 years of the novel that laid the groundwork for the YA genre, this is the ultimate edition for fans of THE OUTSIDERS. A perfect way to honor this impressive milestone and a must-have for fans of all ages. Ponyboy can count on his brothers. And on his friends. But not on much else besides trouble with the Socs, a vicious gang of rich kids whose idea of a good time is beating up on “greasers� like Ponyboy. At least he knows what to expect—until the night someone takes things too far.� Ponyboy wants to be a tough guy, a rock-hard man like some of what the older boys are becoming, even though they scare him. But he finds himself crying sometimes, and he has bad dreams, and a lot of other feelings, too, which he tries to hide. However, his brothers know, and they make a point, quietly, without saying much, to comfort Ponyboy or guide him when he needs it. For example, Sodapop will slip into Ponyboy’s bed when he hears Ponyboy cry out in his sleep. The household is, after all, nothing but boys living there or their friends are dropping in to escape abusive parents, so emoting isn’t exactly on their agenda! But they are taking care of each other. It is important to Ponyboy’s brothers that he isn’t taken away by authorities! However, they need to be part of a gang because there is a gang of other boys who drive into the ‘hood to beat them up if they are walking around alone. They issue challenges to each other to have rumbles - hand to hand, and kicking, battles, too. The boys get broken ribs and arms and noses. Why do they fight? Ponyboy does it because the others do it, but when he finally thinks to ask the others, he discovers their answers are all different. My first reaction in reading this book was it struck me as a novel for those kids who had never read fiction as much as me when I was a kid of thirteen or ever enjoyed doing homework or studying. I am reading it now as a seventy year old for the first time, but I don’t think my age is causing bias. I loved homework. I loved reading, so much so that my vocabulary was several grades ahead of my peers (I was tested in the eighth grade), as was my knowledge of the world. (Don’t judge me.) This novel’s world is a world which is a lot foreign to me, gentler reader. I never fit this profile, being somewhat of a loner, a girl, a teacher’s pet and a nerdy bookworm who hung out with other bookworm girls, or at the library or school. I had to get strong glasses to correct my near-sightedness in the third grade, and I wasn’t much of an athlete. I loved to read so powerfully, I never went without a book once I figured out how to read. My third-grade teacher placed me at the table for advanced readers within two weeks after the school year started. I was very poor and somewhat plain and of a mixed-race appearance in mostly racially White schools, and very tall for my age. I don’t know if any or all of that is why I was left alone, not bullied at all. When I was in middle school (or junior high, as it was called back then) and high school, I looked down on kids who preferred to run in the street, getting into trouble because they were with the type of kids who preferred being part of group driving around in someone’s ‘borrowed� car, going to parties where underage drinking/drugging and sexual encounters happened. I went to some parties, though, afraid to be called a “narc� or of being ostracised to some degree. Some of the kids were rich, some were poor, some were middle-class kids. To me, at that time, the kids who didn’t like school, homework or reading were dumb as rocks. I couldn’t even have much of any kind of long conversation with them, actually. Not kidding. I wasn’t going to get arrested by the police or raped or pregnant! I poured my drinks and drugs down the bathroom sink. I was an underclass kid though, my home being in a blue-collar neighborhood full of kids and parents like the ones in this novel. I observed, but did not fit in with these kids, although I hated my parents, too. When me and my bookworm eighth-grade girlfriend were walking home one day, we were disgusted by a bloody fight between two high school boys trying to kill each other. We walked on, passing a huge crowd of middle-schoolers who were watching. But my brother’s life was more like Ponyboy’s when he was in middle school and high school. My brother and I didn’t hang out much since I was two grades ahead of him. But his life apparently was a lot like Ponyboy’s, some of which I learned about only in the last year. We both are retired now. But once, I ran outside to save my kid brother from a beating. I had been reading, and I heard kids� yelling. Looking out my bedroom window, I saw my twelve-year-old brother being beat up in our front yard by a sixteen-year-old boy who needed to shave. I ran out and threw myself on top of him, striking him with my fists and feet. I was fourteen, but taller than the sixteen-year-old. I probably was the same weight. The sixteen-year-old ran off to the jears of the watching neighborhood kids. I pulled my bloodied brother up and pulled him into the house. I was thoroughly enraged with the sixteen year old, and I felt very disgusted by the crowd of kids, no one helping my brother although they were supposed to be his friends that he often played with. I hated them all and wanted nothing more to do with any of that world, which also was my parents� life, too. I only wanted to get the fuck out of that mindset of life and away from all of these goddamn stupid pieces of shit, children and adults. Full stop. If all of my friends were only the looked-down-on bookish girls who wore glasses and liked math, history, music and science, and we didn’t go to parties except at the library, so be it. I didn’t give a damn anymore about being with any of these stupid ‘normies�, pseudo-gangs, or the neighbor kids. I mostly read or hung out with teachers, and I liked being the teacher’s pet, and went to programs at the library unless I HAD to attend some party for appearance sake after awhile. I quit playing the game of ‘fitting in� with the rest of the kids after my high school sophomore year. I was DONE. And, I do not know why I was not bullied like my brother. He was blond and looked more White than me, although he was small for his age until he was seventeen. I don’t know. Maybe because 1. I didn’t care at all about socializing much; 2. I was a tall big girl? In any case, I preferred reading books and learning. Because of what I saw for myself when in lower- and middle-class schools, though, I am completely sold by this novel’s authenticity. I suppose being banned by conservative and religious Southerners, Floridians and Texans is sort of a back-handed recommendation for the rest of us wanting authenticity for ourselves and our kids. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 16, 2024
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Oct 19, 2024
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Oct 16, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0525453679
| 9780525453673
| 0525453679
| 4.20
| 36,308
| May 1888
| Jan 01, 1995
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liked it
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‘The Happy Prince� by Oscar Wilde is a sad and heartbreaking short story about social class, a loving supportive partnership and the sacrificing of ev
‘The Happy Prince� by Oscar Wilde is a sad and heartbreaking short story about social class, a loving supportive partnership and the sacrificing of everything one has, including one’s own life, to help very poor people. I know many readers love this little fable, taking it at face value. Idk. I’m thinking Wilde was being facetious, telling a story that seemed to me condemning of the irrationality of some who feel guilty they were given more happiness, luck and means to enjoy life. I mean, Wilde obviously recognized how poverty leads to starvation and sickness, but it seems to me he was actually being hyperbolic in this little tale of morality. Gentler reader, I think he was intentionally exaggerating. Like saying, “go knock yourself out.� Sounds better than “humbug�. ...more |
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1
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Sep 2024
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Sep 2024
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Sep 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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| B092T7R689
| 3.79
| 35,784
| Feb 15, 2022
| Feb 15, 2022
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really liked it
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I enjoyed the science fiction novel ‘Mickey7: a Novel � by Edward Ashton, but it was only after a few chapters into the book that that was true. For m
I enjoyed the science fiction novel ‘Mickey7: a Novel � by Edward Ashton, but it was only after a few chapters into the book that that was true. For me, it was a slow burner in my liking the novel, primarily because the main character, Mickey Barnes, seemed to me a type of guy I don’t like much. He doesn’t apply himself to really learning a skill, full stop. He enjoys reading history, but only for his own pleasure. His excuse for this lack of intellectual energy or having any self-improvement motivation is he isn’t good at anything. While he is dissatisfied with his life on his home planet, Midgard, he spends his time going to the cafs, using up his meager monthly government stipend on small entertainments, and meeting up with his best friend, fighter pilot Berto Gomez. I would label him a slacker. However, that changes. Mickey changes. When he makes a stupid gambling decision, and becomes a victim under threat of constant torture from a local gangster until he pays off his debt, he feels he must somehow get transportation off the planet to solve the problem. Not having ever applied himself to develop a skillset, the choice he makes to save himself from the gangster is one about which he doesn’t entirely think through the consequences. I have copied the book blurb: ”Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal…and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it. On a fairly routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, Mickey7’s fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties. The idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they will likely be thrown into the recycler for protein. Mickey7 must keep his double a secret from the rest of the colony. Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7. That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.� Some readers wanted a deep literary masterpiece I think, given the themes which are introduced in the story. Some readers probably wanted more in-depth exploring of the various moral and philosophical ideas dropped into the plot, like Dune. But it is simply an inventive, well-plotted beach read, lightly done, with two timelines, the present (Mickey7, the narrator) and Mickey1/2/3/4/5/6/’s past. However, the issues that readers who do want more meat on the bones of their novels are definitely included. Those issues are simply introduced and made humorous rather than ponderous. I enjoyed (eventually) the story for what it is, a lightly humorous and entertaining science fiction. But imho, despite the light tone, it definitely gives much ‘food� (pun intended) for thought. For me, the main themes developed in this novel about duplicating people was not a new one. I first came across this idea in Kiln People by David Brin. I recommend it highly too. ...more |
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1
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Aug 23, 2024
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Aug 23, 2024
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| B00Y7RWXHU
| 3.85
| 77,711
| Sep 22, 2015
| Sep 22, 2015
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liked it
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‘Binti� by Nnedi Okorafor is the first book of a trilogy. This novella-sized story left me wanting more! I have copied the book blurb, because it says ‘Binti� by Nnedi Okorafor is the first book of a trilogy. This novella-sized story left me wanting more! I have copied the book blurb, because it says it all: ”Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs. Knowledge comes at a cost, one that Binti is willing to pay, but her journey will not be easy. The world she seeks to enter has long warred with the Meduse, an alien race that has become the stuff of nightmares. Oomza University has wronged the Meduse, and Binti's stellar travel will bring her within their deadly reach. If Binti hopes to survive the legacy of a war not of her making, she will need both the gifts of her people and the wisdom enshrined within the University, itself � but first she has to make it there, alive. The Binti Series Book 1: Binti Book 2: Binti: Home Book 3: Binti: The Night Masquerade� Binti’s narration seems to me to be in the cadences of an African storyteller despite the science fiction subject of traveling through space to a university on another planet for further education. Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kapipka is only 16 years old, but her origin family believes in the value of studying advance subjects, including in mathematics. But the mathematics Binti’s family members study can seemingly alter the state of atoms! This is not fully explained. However, Himba people do not believe in leaving their community for any reason! They do not welcome strangers of any kind to their villages. When Binti is offered a scholarship by Oomza University because of her academic strength in mathematics, she has to make plans in secret to accept the scholarship. Binti’s family will ostracize her for the decision she has made. Binti feels very alone, given the turning of her family’s back on her, and the whispers and snickers of some of the others she meets when arriving at the terminal where she will board the space ship. As an Himba, she covers her body with a red clay mixture called otjize. The comments she overhears are along the lines of “the Himba cover themselves with shit, actual shit and dirt.� She is the only Himba wherever she goes, so no one understands the Himba people do not have much water where they live. Otjize protects and cleans their skin. Sigh. The space ship, Third Fish, is living technology based on a type of shrimp. It has a living exoskeleton that can withstand the vacuum and radiation of space. On the 18th day of the journey in space, while at dinner, an alien being with the appearance of a jellyfish, called the Meduse, attacks the students at table and begins killing all of them. All. of them. But somehow, Binti escapes to her room and locks the door. This is only a temporary shelter. She knows she will die of thirst before the ship arrives at its destination, if the Meduse don’t kill her first�. The Himba are not fictional! From Wikipedia: ”The Himba are indigenous peoples with an estimated population of about 50,000 people living in northern Namibia, in the Kunene Region (formerly Kaokoland) and on the other side of the Kunene River in Angola. There are also a few groups left of the OvaTwa, who are also OvaHimba, but are hunter-gatherers. The OvaHimba are a semi-nomadic, pastoralist people in northern Namibia and southern Angola, and speak OtjiHimba, a variety of Herero, which belongs to the Bantu family within Niger-Congo. The OvaHimbo are considered the last (semi-) nomadic people of Namibia.� Many reviewers who I admire, and whose reviews I read avidly, were disappointed with ‘Binti�. Well, I liked it. Nnedi Okorafor’s parents are from Nigeria. She visits there often to see relatives. What I enjoyed most about ‘Binti� is that it is written by someone with an authentic Nigerian voice by someone who is a child of Africa. ...more |
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Aug 20, 2024
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Aug 20, 2024
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| 1302953133
| 9781302953133
| 1302953133
| 3.55
| 245
| Feb 22, 2017
| Mar 26, 2024
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really liked it
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‘Deadpool vs. Wolverine� is a graphic comic collection that is a sampling of several comic serials which featured battles between Deadpool and Wolveri
‘Deadpool vs. Wolverine� is a graphic comic collection that is a sampling of several comic serials which featured battles between Deadpool and Wolverine. Most of the comics included in this collection are obviously only one chapter of other continuing story lines which are not included, but enough of the story is summarized at the beginning of each sampled comic for readers to easily pick up the plot. Of course, most of the plots are centered on some misunderstanding or misdirection caused by Deadpool which has antagonized Wolverine into a murderous rage. A few pages at the beginning and end of each comic excerpt are used to explain the plot, but most of the pages between the first and last page are Wolverine killing Deadpool over and over, and sometimes Deadpool killing Wolverine just for fun. For those readers who are mystified by just how Deadpool and Wolverine can kill each other over and over in lengthy bloody battles, both superheroes possess the power of almost instant regeneration of their bodies. Deadpool is an assassin for hire and he seemingly has no internal moral filter guiding him in the jobs he takes. He does try to establish most of the time that the people he is hired to kill deserve it by doing research. Unfortunately, sometimes the research happens while he is in the process of murdering someone. Plus he is also irrational, a rude motormouth, and mischievous. Wolverine is a reluctant hero with an anger-control problem. Wolverine does not really have a good sense of humor and he tends to face things straightforwardly, mostly reacting to ongoing situations. Deadpool is a master of deception and practical jokes, plus he is absolutely squirrelly. He enjoys putting into motion convoluted plans that create chaos. Deadpool likes to push Wolverine’s buttons intentionally, wanting a fight just for fun. But sometimes, since Deadpool is not easy to figure out, Wolverine thinks he has to kill Deadpool to stop him from doing something nefarious when Deadpool is actually trying to be a hero and save innocent people. Neither of them really want people to think they are heroes. Both tend to prefer people think they are selfish and self-serving. I have copied the book blurb: ”Deadpool and Wolverine have one of the most heated rivalries in comics, and these are some of their most epic battles! The Merc with a Mouth takes on the Mutant with the Mutton chops in their greatest battles � and occasional team-ups! Katanas and claws clash in their brutal first meeting � but when someone targets Weapon X survivors, Wolverine must ride to Deadpool's rescue! Doctor Bong tolls for our heroes, then things get hairy over a werewolf! And when a bounty is placed on Logan's head, guess who tries to collect! An assault on a Hydra base will have them at each other's throats, while Wolvie plays straight man to Wade's wisecracker in a showdown with a Shi'ar robot. But things really go off the deep end in the main event � one ultimate, over-the-top, slicing-and-dicing slobberknocker! WOLVERINE (1988) #88, 154-155; DEADPOOL (1997) #27; CABLE & DEADPOOL #43-44; ORIGINS #21-25; WOLVERINE/ THE DECOY #1; and material from WOLVERINE ANNUAL '95 and WOLVERINE ANNUAL '99� The comics are uneven in the writing. Deadpool is supposed to be a hilarious joker with a dark murderous sense of humor and insane tricks, but only some of the writers are able to capture this quirky side of Deadpool. I laughed throughout three of the comics that are included in this collection, but I thought the others fell flat in their depiction of Deadpool’s madcap silliness. The artwork is very different in comic after comic, depending on whoever is doing the drawings and colorwork, but mostly very pretty, if readers don’t mind graphic bloodshed and depictions of pulped bodies. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 05, 2024
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Aug 19, 2024
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Aug 05, 2024
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Paperback
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| 150392677X
| 9781503926776
| B01F94WRMK
| 4.16
| 1,245,773
| Aug 1911
| Jul 26, 2016
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really liked it
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‘The Secret Garden� by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a wonderful children’s book. The lesson in the journey through the pages is cultivating the mind and
‘The Secret Garden� by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a wonderful children’s book. The lesson in the journey through the pages is cultivating the mind and body requires as much care as cultivating a garden! However, it need not be a grueling journey, or one pursued out of stiff-jawed duty. The cultivation the child characters discover is one performed as delightfully as the effort of planting flowers, and then watching them blossom! I have copied the book blurb: ”Rediscover the heartwarming story of a lonely girl’s transformation within a secret English garden—presented for the first time with stunning custom animations and illustrations. When Mary first arrives on her uncle’s doorstep at Misselthwaite Manor, her outlook has been shaped by tragedy. Her new home is a somber place, shadowed by the passing of her uncle’s beloved wife many years ago. But Mary’s ill manner starts to soften as she receives kind encouragement from her cheery maid, Martha, and green-thumbed friend, Dickon. Soon she is daring to explore the wilds surrounding her adopted home, where she unearths a long-buried key to a secret garden. Among the lush, magical blossoms, Mary finds healing and redemption—and the determination to bring joy back to Misselthwaite Manor.� Mary is orphaned in India when she is nine years old. Her parents were busy with their own interests, and her mother never wanted her in the first place. Mary had many servants who did everything she asked, which resulted in her growing up quite spoiled. The heat of India left her enervated as well, so she did not get much exercise. Her uncle, Mr. Archibald Craven, a wealthy landowner in England, is her only relative willing to take her after her parents die, so she is sent from India to her uncle’s large country home. Unfortunately, Craven doesn’t want much to do with her, so he leaves the country on a trip to Europe, leaving Mary alone in the house except for servants. The servants obey her every command. She remains a spoiled, thin, enervated little girl. But she is not alone with the servants after all! One night, she goes searching for the source of sobbing she has been hearing. It is her cousin, Colin! He is also a spoiled child, ten years old. The servants obey his every command. Mr. Craven did not want anything to do with him because Mrs. Craven died giving birth to him. When Colin is ignored by his father, rumors created by the servants cause everyone to believe Colin would die in a few days. He supposedly has a bent back, bent legs. The years pass, but Colin never left his supposed death bed. He is in worse shape than Mary. How do these two horrible childhoods of psychological neglect which have been created for these two privileged children turn around? The servant Martha, who has been assigned to take care of Mary, has a little boy, Dickon, who loves the outdoors. He has made pets of birds, squirrels, foxes. One day, while on a walk, undertaken out of sheer boredom, Mary meets Dickon. Everything changes! I liked this lovely children’s story, but it was written in 1911. Many people who read it today find a lot to criticize. It is not directly mentioned in the book, but clearly it takes place in the White Western world of England, and the Cravens are upper middle-class, if not gentry. The lesson of cultivating the mind and body as happily as a garden is lost on many of these 21st-century readers, as is the fact the book’s audience is nine year olds or younger kids. As an old mixed-race lady of America myself, born in a time when America was primarily a White culture derived from European influences, as well as having graduated in the 1970’s with census counts of White Americans still the majority, being 97% of registered occupants, with very little contact for most of us with the world outside of its boundaries, and schools were teaching primarily a Great Books Western education to its students, I can make an educated guess Burnett was not writing for a multi-cultural audience in the first place. She was no Charles Dickens, either, writing for an adult audience. So. I forgive her her lack of multi-cultural 21st-century sensitivity of class, sexism and racism. I love her writing, and I love her main message of what today’s computer programmers would call, “Garbage in, garbage out.� ...more |
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Jun 14, 2024
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Jun 21, 2024
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Jun 14, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| B081FDB3BM
| 3.67
| 15,723
| Jul 11, 2020
| Aug 11, 2020
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liked it
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For me, reading ‘The New Wilderness� by Diane Cook was like finding myself among people who have a very different outlook and set of interests than I
For me, reading ‘The New Wilderness� by Diane Cook was like finding myself among people who have a very different outlook and set of interests than I can ever understand or want for myself. I have copied the book blurb: ”ŷ� Choice AwardNominee for Best Science Fiction (2020) Bea's five-year old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away in front of her. The smog and pollution of the City--the over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives in buildings on top of buildings, where there is no room for parks or plants--is destroying her lungs. If they stay in the City, Agnes will die. Across the country is the Wilderness State, a huge swath of protected land, remote and unwelcoming, a refuge for wildlife with nowhere else to go. It is a place of open spaces and clean air, wild animals, trees, forests, desert plains. No people have ever been allowed into the Wilderness State. Until now. Bea and Agnes will be among the first. Along with a handful of others, they are invited into the Wilderness State, to live as nomadic hunter gatherers. This motley group of twenty people are part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature and not just dominate it as they have always done. Can they be part of the wilderness and not put too heavy an imprint on the land? They spend their days wandering through this grand country, hunting, gathering, avoiding animal attacks, bickering among themselves, and doing a surprising amount of paperwork. Their nit-picking overseers, The Rangers, wrangle with them and badger them into adhering to the rules of the Government, the most important being Leave No Trace. They slowly learn how to live, and survive, on the unpredictable, often dangerous land, and they build a new kind of community, fighting among themselves for power, betraying and saving one another. Each day they will walk to another point on the horizon and try to make sense of new lives they now spend closer to their animal soul. Bea discovers that fleeing to the Wilderness State to save Agnes means that she loses her in a different way. Agnes grows wild and belongs to the landscape while Bea, raised in the City, will always be of that place and drawn to it, no matter how many deer she skins. The real bond between mother and daughter will be tested by their growing difference. As these modern nomads come to think of the Wilderness State as home, this land will come under attack from the Government which plans to develop it. Do the Settlers stay on as renegades, or move back to newly created urban areas? This mild dystopian book is about some city people who feel a desperate need to do things like hike, camp, sleep out under the stars, to cut wood and hunt deer for their meat to eat and their skins to make clothes. They are willing to leave their apartments and jobs in the polluted and cramped city and learn how to survive in a forest. They are willing to endure hardships, injuries and death from living in the wild. Parents are willing to bring their young children with them. Because they have agreed to form what they call The Community, they travel together as a tribe. They decide to have a democracy, more or less. Decisions on rules of behavior, sharing, hunting, division of labor, how to hike together, are all decided after debate. Couples break up and form new relationships. They have babies in the forest. They love living this way, no matter what other reasons they may have had to join the experiment of becoming tribal nomads like aboriginals from millennia ago. The novel is also about a mother and her daughter. Agnes is only eight years old when Bea joins the experiment of living in the forest. Bea is trying to save her daughter’s life. From a brief description, I think Agnes has some sort of lung disease. After living in the forest for three years, she is cured. She also becomes adept at living the life of a forest aboriginal. She is a wild child of the forest. She vaguely remembers her city life. Agnes loves her mother, but she finds herself often angry at her mother too. Agnes feels deserted by her mother sometimes, and there are more and more things they disagree on as time goes on. There is a final break socially, and Agnes and Bea go their own ways. Agnes, being a wild child, attuned to the forest, is very capable of taking care of herself there. Bea longs for some of the things that are only available in the city, although she also has become adept at living in the forest. The book is beautifully descriptive of the wild forest. The author is lyrical and elegiac by turns in writing of the wonders of plants and streams, of woods and animals. I have sometimes gone on short walks in national parks on marked trails and the book brings those experiences to life. But while the writing is always extraordinarily illustrative and picturesque, I got tired of hundreds of pages describing The Community’s hiking and camping, of their enchantment with the wild. I am not enthralled with any kind of camping. I dislike camping. A lot. I don’t want forests or parks to destroyed! I want them to continue to exist and I believe they need to be protected for their beauty and animal life as well as for controlling global warming! But I really do not enjoy living in them for any length of time. I am a city kid through and through. I also am a bit of a loner. The tribe’s socializing and tiffs and judging each other’s every habit or lack of enthusiasm for some assigned task made me claustrophobic. The group’s dynamics changed by necessity over the years because of the deaths of some influential people and the rise of others who wanted more control over decisions only increased my sense of claustrophobia. I never had kids, so I tend to empathize in Bildungsroman plots with the kid more than the adults, but not in this case. (view spoiler)[I also could not understand why Bea stayed and stayed in the forest when she could have left sooner than she did. (hide spoiler)] In fact, I was not able to really empathize or connect with any character in the novel. In the end I did not enjoy the novel although I continued to see that the writing is excellent from the first page to the last. I have a physical condition called EDS - Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome affects connective tissue, primarily the skin, joints, and blood vessel walls. Symptoms include overly flexible joints that can dislocate, and skin that's translucent, elastic, and bruises easily. In some cases, there may be dilation and even rupture of major blood vessels. I do not have the stamina most people have. I get tired and need to sit down on the ground if I stand up for about an hour, like waiting in a line to see a movie. Although I exercise regularly, I have to limit how much I do because if I do too much I feel ill. I have been weaker than the people around me all of my life. Because my ligaments have too much stretch, my muscles cannot get the opposing force they need to build up like they do when people without this condition work out. When I was a kid, my body operated more like a cooked spaghetti noodle. I could put my heels behind my neck. During physical education classes in school, the PE teachers were well aware I could never be an athlete. I didn’t know why I was like I was until a few years ago, when a physical therapist named my condition, gave me a diagnosis. There is no cure. The older I get, the less stamina and muscle strength I have although I am no longer as flexible. Instead, I must wear compression sleeves on my knees and elbows to be able to bear weight on my joints, to be able to lift, open cans with a can opener, etc. I can no longer do bicycle rides or even walk very far before my joints hurt too much. My joints feel as is they are going to pop out of their sockets unless I am wearing compression sleeves. One of my knees sometimes bends too far the wrong way, sideways, when I turn in bed. It hurts a lot. I’ve had to pop it back where it should be in the joint. So. I do not enjoy the forest. I enjoy parks because they are made comfortable for day walkers, with amenities nearby. I do not like hikes because they are tiring and often painful for me. I don’t like being in areas where bugs abound because I am unfortunately one of those people bugs love more than other people. Being in bright sun has always made me sick for some reason if I am out on sunny days for an hour. I break out in a rash on my arms and face from sunshine over time. I can’t stand hot days at all. Anything over 78 F and I need to lie down or stay immobilized under a fan. I could not understand why I had so many more issues than everybody else whenever hiking, camping, swimming, etc. My skin has always been on the thin side, so I easily am scratched and bruised. I could not have fun when I was feeling utterly exhausted, with itchy bug bites all over, and far too hot, feeling sick. Even going to fairs or amusement parks exhausted me. And then - I was diagnosed with EDS. So. Now I know why I don’t have fun like everyone else. I feel absolutely miserable in forests, fairs, amusement parks, etc., if I am there doing stuff too long. Ultimately I was bored by all the words describing camping life in the woods. I like beautiful writing and I wondered what would happen to Agnes, so I finished the novel. But instead of being connected to Agnes in any way except by my curiosity about her fate, ultimately I couldn’t join her in her enthusiasm for dirt, grime, weather and hiking a lot. But I suspect a lot of literary readers and mothers and daughters with fraught love/hate relationships who enjoy reading books about similar relationships will like ‘The New Wilderness.� Of course, underlying the story, is the prediction of a future dystopia, of how losing the wild to the overpopulation of humans and our cementing over forests and killing wildlife for building houses and polluted cities is a terrible loss of beauty and a reason for humans to enjoy being alive at all. At least, for poor humans. Rich humans will always be able to build and buy their houses and land in a forest. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 25, 2024
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Mar 28, 2024
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Mar 25, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1596951079
| 9781596951075
| 1596951079
| 4.83
| 6
| unknown
| May 01, 2011
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it was amazing
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Guess what, gentler readers? Some in the Republican Party have banned dictionaries from many schools! Dictionaries! Yikes. � Dictionaries were removed Guess what, gentler readers? Some in the Republican Party have banned dictionaries from many schools! Dictionaries! Yikes. � Dictionaries were removed from library shelves in a Florida school district last year as part of an investigation of more than 1,600 titles for mentions of “sexual conduct� that could violate a 2023 state law. Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus for Students, Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary, the American Heritage Children’s Dictionary and other titles were pulled from schools in Escambia County, Fla., where officials are reviewing books for compliance with the law’s prohibition on materials with “sexual� content. Also investigated were the World Book Encyclopedia of People and Places, the World Almanac and Book of Facts, and other reference books on topics including science, mythology and the Bible, according to a list published by the school district and circulated this week by PEN America, a free speech group that has sued the school board over the removals. The review of the dictionaries is a small piece of the larger book ban uproar in Escambia. The district, home to more than 50 schools in the panhandle, began pulling books for review after Florida in May passed H.B. 1069, which also prohibits instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for 8th grade and below. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and his allies hailed the law as expanding “parental rights in education,� and have claimed that “pornographic and inappropriate� materials were being placed in schools. -Washington Post The Republican Party officially wants American children to grow up without knowing or how to spell proper English and maybe, how to read. ...more |
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2
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Jan 12, 2024
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Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024
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Jan 12, 2024
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| B005OOR3KC
| 3.89
| 70,170
| Mar 01, 1979
| Dec 20, 2011
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it was amazing
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‘Bunnicula: A Rabbit Tale of Mystery� by Deborah and James Howe had me howling in delight! And even sometimes yowling, although that was more difficul
‘Bunnicula: A Rabbit Tale of Mystery� by Deborah and James Howe had me howling in delight! And even sometimes yowling, although that was more difficult since my vocal range isn’t what it was. I have copied the book blurb: ”This book is written by Harold. His fulltime occupation is dog. He lives with Mr. and Mrs. Monroe and their sons Toby and Pete. Also sharing the home are a cat named Chester and a rabbit named Bunnicula. It is because of Bunnicula that Harold turned to writing. Someone had to tell the full story of what happened in the Monroe household after the rabbit arrived. Was Bunnicula really a vampire? Only Bunnicula knows for sure. But the story of Chester's suspicions and their consequences makes uproarious reading. Since its first appearance in 1979, Bunnicula has been a hit with kids and their parents everywhere, selling over 8 million copies and winning numerous awards.� I was in my mid-20’s when the first edition of ‘Bunnicula� was published decades ago. Since I never had kids, I had never heard of this novel until last year when it was ‘selected� as an April Fool’s joke by a ŷ club. Out of curiosity I bought it from Amazon. The cover is very cool which is why I bought it instead of checking it out from my local library. What a serendipitous discovery this cute story turned out to be! I’m a little kid again! This is a perfect book to banish any wicked dark creatures of the night. It is fun and funny. You might forget you are an adult though. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2023
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Jun 13, 2023
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Jun 10, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| B0793MV68L
| 3.77
| 1,534
| Jan 17, 2018
| Jan 17, 2018
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really liked it
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‘Sick House� by Jeff Strand is over the top in sadistic violence, horror and haunted-house stereotypes! The book is definitely a hilarious 300-page jo
‘Sick House� by Jeff Strand is over the top in sadistic violence, horror and haunted-house stereotypes! The book is definitely a hilarious 300-page joke, but omg, by the middle of the novel it is one stomach-turning scene after another. I had to skim sometimes, well, maybe more often than sometimes, gentle reader. But I also guffawed. A lot. Like huge belly laughs. Horror genre fans looking for something wickedly fun will LOVE this novel! It’s full-frontal adult horror with genre wit, but also incredibly juvenile in humor! It reminded me of the witty slasher movie, Scream. But non-horror readers, if they manage to read through at least chapter fifteen before wretching, will probably back away very slowly from you if they see what book you are reading and take notice that you are laughing! I have copied the book blurb because it is accurate: ”It's a home invasion from beyond the grave in this novel of unrelenting terror from the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of PRESSURE, DWELLER, and WOLF HUNT. It doesn't seem like the perfect house, but screw it, it's good enough to rent for a year. Unfortunately for Boyd, Adeline, and their two young daughters, it's immediately clear that they chose the wrong place. The nightmare begins with violent coughs and headaches. Food starts to rot almost as soon as they take it inside. A pet tarantula goes missing. Some family members begin to exhibit creepy behavior. Then the ghosts arrive, and all Hell breaks loose...� The book is shockingly disgusting if you don’t enjoy reading horror, but it is surprisingly funny if you do. But if you think horror stories should always be serious, ‘Sick House� will seem disrespectful. And seriously, I will be backing away from you! ...more |
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Dec 18, 2022
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Dec 23, 2022
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Dec 18, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| B007XIC1GI
| 3.81
| 31,521
| 1998
| May 08, 2012
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it was amazing
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‘The Long Hard Road out of Hell�, by both Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss, is an autobiography of Brian Hugh Warner, aka Marilyn Manson. It was publis
‘The Long Hard Road out of Hell�, by both Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss, is an autobiography of Brian Hugh Warner, aka Marilyn Manson. It was published in 1998 and then in 2012. I really would like to see another autobiography covering what has happened since. This book is well-written and funny. I found myself laughing out loud a lot! It has many photos that are artistically fascinating. If nothing else, Manson is very photogenic. He is very smart, witty, and a hell of an artist. He also is a lot of “rage against the machine�, for better or worse. Gentle reader, perhaps you won’t like me anymore, but I think this book is hilarious. I think Marilyn Manson is one of the best performance artists I’ve ever seen. Does he go too far? Yes, frequently. Do I share his views? *ahem* Well. Ok. I agree with a lot of Manson’s views, but I am not exactly in his corner in regards to how he expresses his feelings and opinions. Or lived his life. If you haven’t caught his act, and I do mean act in all of its meanings, he has videos on youtube.com to watch. I am entertained by him. But he is a male human being, and when he is given free candy, so to speak, whatever the source or its condition, he eats it as happily as any nondiscriminating black bear digging through unlocked garbage cans in people’s yards. He IS thoughtful about it afterwords, and sometimes he was during, which made him an intellectual young male human, a rarity. His lifestyle was certainly not rare among rock n’roll bands in the 20th century! I personally knew musicians in rock bands. Not what you might guess, gentler reader - I was the kind of person (secretary, 8 to 5 worklife) who had a friend who knew a friend, or had a boyfriend, so I accidentally became a shocked observer of a lot of completely berserk YA partying. Before I was a secretary, I sold encyclopedias door to door. Seriously, for almost two years. I was a lousy salesman, but wow, the things I saw! Manson uses his real life as inspiration for his art, but he does no social or not much moral editing of his beliefs. He put it all out there on the stage, often symbolically, and over-the-top; this is what brought him notoriety. But the number one thing of what people are missing about his stage act is that it is a staged act. He amplifies what he’s noticed real people are doing in real life through visual tricks similar to what magicians do. His act is obscene and raunchy because life is obscene and raunchy, and that is what he is appalled/fascinated with. He doesn’t want to airbrush any of it. His schtick is about pushing people to see what hypocrites they are, including himself, into the light of day. People love it! His albums win awards. His albums used to end up in the Top Ten of music lists when first released. He made a lot of money for everyone. However. But. He can be truly icky. One of his visual tricks was to wear leather short shorts, with a closed pouch in front for his boy parts, but he wore a cardboard penis sheath over his shorts. He used a lot of fake blood. Kids and girls were put in cages with parental permission or they believed it when the girls they allowed on stage said they were of age. He really did cut himself a lot in his act, so his real blood was mixed with a lot of the fake blood on him. There were dead chickens in the early days. But animals were legally dead, not killed on stage, although some acting occurred about killing. There was partial nudity. Band members smashed up their own equipment. Etc. Etc. Etc. Nothing was actually illegal, but it LOOKED illegal. Consenting adults, right? Stage performances. He won a lot of the lawsuits which people filed against him for obscenity or the supposed killing of real animals, or of the accusations of really raping people on stage and off. There have been death threats, especially by religious people who in theory love Jesus, God and Humanity, but based on the evidence of their vicious murderous threats and desires for Manson’s death in horrible ways, perhaps their supposedly religious-based love is one of those personal social lies Manson likes to expose. He worked very hard at exposing the lies religious people tell themselves. He still writes songs, does acting bits for movies, writes songs for other acts. Maybe he is lucky, too. The weird part, which also amuses him, is he didn’t do any performance art that wasn’t being done on thousands of other stages by thousands of other death-metal bands. In fact, that is why he won one court case because out of all the invited death-metal bands with almost the same staged activities he had, or there was some other band ripping off one of his schtick performances almost exactly, his band was the only one which had been disinvited. In early days, when he was unknown, he probably did cross legal lines on stage, but no one cared. Pure hypocrisies of society in his eyes, of course� The book ‘The Long Hard Road out of Hell� includes a lot of what Wikipedia also has on Manson, but of course, the book expands incidents into more detail with Manson’s viewpoint represented. He is very hard on himself, actually, speaking in a sometimes rueful, often self-mocking, voice. He is “woke�. His stage name represents the innocent and the wicked together - what he sees as representative of both sides of Mankind. He used to wear the happy/sad mask symbol of theater as a pin. Wikipedia’s short version of Manson’s life, including recent activities: I have copied the book blurb because it is accurate: ”When this best-selling autobiography was originally released, readers were shocked: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell was the darkest, funniest, most controversial, and best-selling rock book of its time—and it became the template, both visually and narratively, for almost every rock book since. Marilyn Manson is not just a music icon, it turned out, but one of the best storytellers of his generation. Written with bestselling author Neil Strauss, beautifully designed with dozens of exclusive photographs, and modeled on Dante's Inferno, this edition of The Long Hard Road Out of Hell features a bonus chapter not in the hardcover. In the shocking and candid memoir, Manson takes readers from backstage to emergency rooms to jail cells, from the pit of despair to the top of the charts, and recounts his metamorphosis from a frightened Christian schoolboy into the most feared and revered music superstar in the country. Along the way, you'll hear what happens to fans—and celebrities—who dare to venture backstage with the one of the world's most dangerous rock stars. In the words of Elle magazine, the book "makes Madonna's infamous Sex seem downright wholesome in comparison."� Like many a ruined boy, Manson went to a Christian school as a young kid and was deathly afraid of both God and Satan for awhile. He had nightmares, gentler reader. However, also like many a ruined boy, and many of us, he began observing judgementally what not-very-Christian things all people get up to, including his own family. He saw pious art(ful) displays we all do to fit into daytime society. He got tortured at school. He learned how people, pretending to be good, were actually breaking bad throughout history. He saw so-called bad and so-called good religious people of all faiths lived their lives without punishment as long as no one talked about the evil things they did behind locked doors. Like most of us, he saw bad people often finish in first place, a lot, maybe getting caught decades later, incurring minimal punishment. He saw so-called godly folk use their godly status to hurt, harm and destroy people. I think he kind of overreacted in his disappointment, though. He was really young, maybe also very sensitive to justice, confused ideologically and definitely very smart and artistic (I am not artistic, so, I can’t judge him musically for sure). It is possible those XY genes led him into thinking with the wrong body parts in handling his confusions surrounding injustice and in having a lot of revengeful rage, too. Christianity, which attempts to repress a lot of normal human behaviors without much explanation other than that of the fairy tale that God will kill you or love you, depending, can cause an explosion of feelings when children, in noticing all adults are partying on in “wickedness�, feel they’ve been tricked/abused/lied to/used, especially males undergoing puberty. Imho. Idk. I’m a girl. Well, elderly woman. Unlike some of us, me anyway, he jumped into the river called Pretending to be Decadent out of rage and hurt and revenge. It got him attention, too, something he didn’t know he wanted until he began getting attention from everyone. He ended up drowning in decadence, becoming the thing he hated. After all, decadence is everywhere in fact, like dirt. Ever hear of “kink clubs?� They’ve been around for millennia, including up through the 21st century, and long before death-metal bands were invented. Sometimes people join them because of twisted brain wiring, but often people join in because of trauma-drama, or in having broken bad, or simply having been broken. Trauma drama doesn’t have to be of a physical nature, it can be purely mental, but if mental/physical damage is paired together, a person’s mind can be turned inside out. From as far as I can tell, and from what he writes in this autobiography, he never was as decadent as Christians and others, especially some important conservative people in authority, claim he was. Number one thing to know about Marilyn Manson - he is a performance artist. However, too much drugs and alcohol did what too much drugs and alcohol does over years of constant abuse. The brain and body become benumbed, the logical and self-preservation centers of the mind shut down, blackouts are frequent, and the Id takes control. (Id - “According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories.�) I know the id exists, even if psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was wrong about everything else, because of my mom, a chronic alcoholic. She was a sweet kind noticing shy person when she was sober. When she wasn’t sober, she was all id. Since she began and continued to drink 24/7 through most of my childhood, I’m very familiar with this frame of mind, and the friends and lifestyle which goes with it. I recognized the frame of mind of most of Manson’s acquaintances, friends and fans, if not himself, too, as he describes it in his book, once drug abuse becomes an everyday occurrance. Many reviewers note the abuse of women around Manson, by Manson and his bandmates and other male musicians, stagehands, everyone who went to drug parties. If these women were like my mom, and/or were kinksters, too, I’m not sure I myself can call them strictly victims of Manson’s mean antics. I agree damage was done to them by Manson, but clearly there was damage done to them before they begged Manson to harm them. Yes, gentle reader, you read that right. They begged Manson to harm them, abuse them. They fought off security to get to him, followed him, wrote him, demanded he use them. I’ve seen this behavior when I was young, a secretary, and observing my friends� friends in drug parties, around musicians, and in relationships. I grew up with a mom somewhat like some of the women who did anything to be with Manson, begging him to hurt them, make them bleed, scar them up. They looked 15, 16 and upwards in age. Even Manson was amazed by this behavior, but of course, it also caused responding reverberations in him, especially if he was out of his mind on drugs and alcohol. I used to beg my mom not to drive a car while drunk. I begged my mom to stop drinking, go to rehab. I begged my mom to stop prostituting herself for a bottle of beer. She was married to my dad and lived with him under a roof paid for by my dad, she had food on the table, clothes on her back, money in her pocket up to and including her dying day. My dad had good insurance despite that we were lower middle-class/underclass. He had a good blue-collar job. But she would leave the house at night and go drinking, find boyfriends. She’d come back, sometimes days later, with cuts and bruises. She lost her driving license, her jobs as a nurse’s aide. (She could always find work as a nurse’s aide when she bothered to work, often going to work drunk.) She had unprotected sex, and several babies she gave up to adoption who must have had some fetal alcohol syndrome at minimum (Fetal alcohol syndrome is a condition in a child that results from alcohol exposure during the mother's pregnancy. Fetal alcohol syndrome causes brain damage and growth problems. The problems caused by fetal alcohol syndrome vary from child to child, but defects caused by fetal alcohol syndrome are not reversible). She would not stop the lifestyle of alcoholism. She was an adult, and she had more choices to do what she wanted than many other women have. My dad never opposed her. She was both a victim and a victimizer. At the end, age 53, she had a stroke. The doctor said she had holes in her brain caused by the shrinkage of brain tissues from chronic alcoholism. There must have been dementia - but could one have said when it started, exactly? Chronic alcoholics do not behave rationally. They choose to not be rational until they cannot be rational at all. Why? I knew she had had a bad childhood. But she was a complete mystery to me. I know she lived a life she WANTED while married to my dad. They never got a divorce. They were married when my mom was 24 and my dad was 28 years old. I do not know the psychology behind any of this, but I recognize this specific mentality when I see it and read it. (My dad was another misery to me, but that’s another story.) For some of Manson’s friends and acquaintances, business partners and fans, the self-abuse was temporary, something they passed through, a stage of life or a necessity of business. For others, it is what they died from. Real life is stranger than fiction, folks. Band musicians see it all, are offered it all. If they accept the drugs and alcohol that are offered to get through the stress and strain, or feel the curiosity and the excitement of seemingly living large, bigger than life, I think partially they eventually hate/disgust themselves and hate everybody else because of the satiation of decadence. It also becomes all negative, negative to see the life of people around them: they only see people suck, people lie about everything, people indulge their ugly selves and then blame, blame blame. However, gentle reader, addicts and non-addict users are mostly unaware for a long time it is the alcohol and drugs amplifying the worst depressions and much of the darkness of soul, the focus on bad shit, the intensity of the feelings of loss and shame and failure, and most of the bad choices. Abuse of drugs and alcohol become ultimately the only cause of the slide to the bottom. Manson’s book is full to the brim of people like my mom. Manson lived, and is apparently still living in a creative rock-and-roll life stranger than fiction, although not drug-fueled anymore. I do not know how much of his book is hyperbole, but I believe in the bones of his story and its outlines. I suspect it IS a curated memoir, but if so, it’s because of faulty memory, a unintentional blinkered interior viewpoint and maybe to protect some people. He doesn’t really hide a lot of the self-inflicted injuries to himself and what he did to others. If the incident or memory didn’t happen in the manner of however he is describing exactly, I feel it happened to some degree. He sees a lot of ironic humor in his story, and so did I. People can be very silly or mean even when they are not high on something. Being high can place people in the most ridiculous situations due to induced stupification of the brain and the telescoping of situational awareness, but a lot of people have momentary brain farts of illogic without illegal substances. Religion, for example, induces a lot of stupification of the brain all by itself. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 15, 2022
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Oct 20, 2022
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Oct 15, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0063052733
| 9780063052734
| 0063052733
| 4.06
| 120,752
| Jan 25, 2022
| Jan 25, 2022
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it was amazing
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‘Notes on an Execution' by Danya Kukafka is lyrical, literary magic. The writing is gorgeous, illuminating, on-point, thoughtful. The author skips fro
‘Notes on an Execution' by Danya Kukafka is lyrical, literary magic. The writing is gorgeous, illuminating, on-point, thoughtful. The author skips from character viewpoint to viewpoint, from the past to the present and back again. I copied the book blurb of 'Notes on an Execution' by Danya Kukafka because it is accurate. "In the tradition of Long Bright River and The Mars Room, a gripping and atmospheric work of literary suspense that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row, told primarily through the eyes of the women in his life—from the bestselling author of Girl in Snow. Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him. Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake. Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men. This book is not about the killings, it's about the survivors. What is justice for survivors? Is it possible after decades, after everyone has picked up the pieces of their lives, or not? The death penalty or life without parole - which is the greater justice? The killer is a survivor of sorts, too. (view spoiler)[The author hints at Ansel Packer's psychopathology. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his parents, moving from foster parent to foster parent, but he was torturing animals, too. He imitates normalcy, unable to have some emotions he sees other people experience. He feels the lack, the emptiness. He wants to love, but humiliation of any kind brings on a killing rage, a sexual urge to dominate. He thinks Good and Evil is nonsensical (my words), made so by the multitude of alternative universes created by choices made. He doesn't know why he did what he did. He very much wants to live. (hide spoiler)] Why do we remember the serial killers and not their victims? Why do we forget the families of victims, or if they 'come out', releasing statements or give interviews, we avert our eyes eventually, uncomfortable, feeling our voyeurism openly at last, the moral ambiguities of our curiosity. I also wonder at the journalists who either investigate or cover the story as part of their job. Some are them are like us watchers of their stories - avidly curious. Some are already bored and moving on to the next thing the minute they are done with the story - also like some of us. Most of us react, think a lot, wonder, and feel, eventually, morally ugly. Why do we watch the movies, the TV shows, the news media so avidly if they have "if it bleeds, it leads" stories? Serial killings in particular fascinate people. Women vie with each other to marry imprisoned serial killers (the vast majority of serial killers are men). We readers have read most of the books - non-fiction and fiction. I am curious as well, fascinated, too. I stare at car wrecks. I look at the gruesome pictures of mafia killings, wars, murder victims - horrified, fascinated, staring. What happened, how did it happen, what does Death look like, what ways are there to die? Why didn't they escape Death somehow? Could they have escaped? The majority of us have this curiosity, this avidity, in what many call morbid interests. Even us nearly-killed victims of violent men. Serial killers are scary, one important reason we care about them. They can kill as easily as we all breathe. No wincing, no hesitation; in fact, they are delighted in hurting you, eager as we are to eat ice cream to hurt and kill you. We want to be able to recognize them. It's like being a soldier in a war today - you want to be able to recognize the signs of a buried improvised explosive device, or of an ambush, or of a suicide bomber. It's about self-protection, learning what people are capable of. It isn't all about salacious fascination. However, many of us also can't believe in a serial killer's, or any killer's, killing. We know there are killers out there, but some of us feel killers couldn't be our father, our uncle, our childhood friend. I have met many "Pollyanna's". I cannot understand these people. I have never felt what clearly they feel - supportive of killers despite evidence, despite facts, despite dangers. Willful blind spots! The novel is also about the law, America's legal system. In this fictional novel, one woman KNOWS it must be Ansel, but she cannot prove it, so she has to let him go. Another woman cannot at all see Ansel as a killer despite that she has been with him for years. Ansel isn't smart or a genius. But the legal system, and women who love him or fear him, helps him escape justice. Here I go, off the grid, outside the lines.... After turning the last page of 'Notes on an Execution' by Danya Kukafka, I am thinking about the way America is killing criminals sentenced legally to death by the State. We the people usually execute the condemned prisoner today on a horizontal cross of sorts, like Jesus!, a comfy one though, with drugs that apparently feel like a burning fire in the blood. I am thinking about how we the people mostly ignore legal executions that are done in our name, unless we are made to pay attention by either the media or some sort of personal interest. Many of us believe executions are justice done. Some of us are invited to watch executions - usually those who sought justice and others whose job it is to see justice was done in the name of we the people. Most of the rest of us are able to tolerate the fact of legal executions. Most of us move on with our lives after hearing about a real-life execution, and we almost never give it another thought, primarily because it isn’t in front of us as a public event. However, most of us watch millions of fictional executions in our lifetime on television and in movies, some supposedly legal but most are sensationally criminal. We the people generally are very entertained by these shows, as Nielsen ratings demonstrate . I am thinking of how the execution of Jesus was done, which was a legal execution by the State in the name of justice for the people as we do today, also. My research on crucifications turned up some facts I did not know. The Persians and the Jews were doing crucifications before the Romans existed, for example. These executions were public events, but people didn’t have to go and see them if they didn’t want to. But they did, some being invited, just like today. People who could write wrote about them, so we know how it was done. Of course, Western cultures were peculiarly fascinated by how one particular crucification might have been done. Executions are an interesting event, and have been for millennia for most people. Most people aren’t killers, of course, but a killing does seem to interest people. Jesus was somehow secured to a cross, stories differ, but probably it was iron nails nailed into his body extremities and the wooden cross. Whatever. Death on a cross is presumed to happen by a combination of slow suffocation and dehydration, skin crisping under a hot sun or freezing from rain, wind, chilling temperatures. Ancient Romans executed people convicted of only certain crimes this way. Excerpts from Wikipedia: "Crucifixion was most often performed to dissuade its witnesses from perpetrating similar (usually particularly heinous) crimes. Victims were sometimes left on display after death as a warning to any other potential criminals. Crucifixion was usually intended to provide a death that was particularly slow, painful (hence the term excruciating, literally "out of crucifying"), gruesome, humiliating, and public, using whatever means were most expedient for that goal. Crucifixion methods varied considerably with location and period." "The person executed may have been attached to the cross by rope, though nails and other sharp materials are mentioned in a passage by the Judean historian Josephus, where he states that at the Siege of Jerusalem "the soldiers out of rage and hatred, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest". Objects used in the crucifixion of criminals, such as nails, were sought as amulets with perceived medicinal qualities." "While a crucifixion was an execution, it was also a humiliation, by making the condemned as vulnerable as possible. Although artists have traditionally depicted the figure on a cross with a loin cloth or a covering of the genitals, the person being crucified was usually stripped naked. Writings by Seneca the Younger state some victims suffered a stick forced upwards through their groin. Despite its frequent use by the Romans, the horrors of crucifixion did not escape criticism by some eminent Roman orators. Cicero, for example, described crucifixion as "a most cruel and disgusting punishment", and suggested that "the very mention of the cross should be far removed not only from a Roman citizen's body, but from his mind, his eyes, his ears". Elsewhere he says, "It is a crime to bind a Roman citizen; to scourge him is a wickedness; to put him to death is almost parricide. What shall I say of crucifying him? So guilty an action cannot by any possibility be adequately expressed by any name bad enough for it." "Frequently, the legs of the person executed were broken or shattered with an iron club, an act called crurifragium, which was also frequently applied without crucifixion to slaves." "The gibbet on which crucifixion was carried out could be of many shapes. Josephus says that the Roman soldiers who crucified the many prisoners taken during the Siege of Jerusalem under Titus diverted themselves by nailing them to the crosses in different ways; and Seneca the Younger recounts: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet."" "The length of time required to reach death could range from hours to days depending on method, the victim's health, and the environment. A literature review by Maslen and Mitchell identified scholarly support for several possible causes of death: cardiac rupture, heart failure, hypovolemic shock, acidosis, asphyxia, arrhythmia, and pulmonary embolism. Death could result from any combination of those factors or from other causes, including sepsis following infection due to the wounds caused by the nails or by the scourging that often preceded crucifixion, eventual dehydration, or animal predation." "A theory attributed to Pierre Barbet holds that, when the whole body weight was supported by the stretched arms, the typical cause of death was asphyxiation. He wrote that the condemned would have severe difficulty inhaling, due to hyper-expansion of the chest muscles and lungs. The condemned would therefore have to draw himself up by the arms, leading to exhaustion, or have his feet supported by tying or by a wood block. When no longer able to lift himself, the condemned would die within a few minutes. Some scholars, including Frederick Zugibe, posit other causes of death. Zugibe suspended test subjects with their arms at 60° to 70° from the vertical. The test subjects had no difficulty breathing during experiments, but did suffer rapidly increasing pain, which is consistent with the Roman use of crucifixion to achieve a prolonged, agonizing death. However, Zugibe's positioning of the test subjects' feet is not supported by any archaeological or historical evidence." The Romans didn't invent crucification. It was happening hundreds of years before their time in history, as well as by other neighboring cultures. "The Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, king of Judea from 103 BC to 76 BC, crucified 800 rebels, said to be Pharisees, in the middle of Jerusalem." "Alexander the Great is reputed to have crucified 2,000 survivors from his siege of the Phoenician city of Tyre, as well as the doctor who unsuccessfully treated Alexander's lifelong friend Hephaestion. Some historians have also conjectured that Alexander crucified Callisthenes, his official historian and biographer, for objecting to Alexander's adoption of the Persian ceremony of royal adoration." "In Carthage, crucifixion was an established mode of execution, which could even be imposed on generals for suffering a major defeat." "The oldest crucifixion may be a post-mortem one mentioned by Herodotus. Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, was put to death in 522 BC by Persians, and his dead body was then crucified." Still with me? What I saw that shocked me as I went exploring one year was the art work in some Catholic and Evangelical churches. The crosses with Jesus nailed to them had red paint dripping down Jesus' face and sides and scalp. The expression on Jesus' face was one of extreme agony, mouth open in a silent scream. I was surprised into stunned laughter. To me, it was worshipping the incredible torture of someone. This really jolted me, gentle reader! I've never gotten over it. Or forgotten the transfixed faces of some of the Christians around me. A person unfamiliar with Christianity could definitely misunderstand or misconstrue the feelings of worshipers. Even if one understands the story of Christianity, it makes for a sickening image - worshipers appearing to admire the vivid agony of Jesus being crucified. I wondered what they were actually feeling, looking at that? I have asked sometimes. I was told: veneration, love. Also indifference, because it has become a background object, something ordinary, an everyday visual, like wallpaper that has been seen for all of their lifes. Unnoticed except by a casual glance, quickly forgotten. Never repugnance. I felt repugnance, though. The symbolic spectacle of Jesus' suffering, being tortured, not yet dead (many Jesus-being-crucified statues have painted-on open eyes rolling upwards) being loved by churchgoers! The cross is a cause for some people to become enraptured, spellbound by the dripping painted blood or by the agonized twisted expression on Jesus' face! I also saw people completely ignoring the statues or paintings or stained-glass windows, no longer noticing the representations of Jesus' agony or that of tortured Saints. Everyone is accustomed to the gory pictorial violence, internalizing the images and symbols into thoughtless acceptance. TV and movies weren’t the first to objectify violence for society. These horrific Jesus crosses caused me to watch religious people with a lot of thoughtful conjecture in the past and now, again, after reading this book. And today, we kill people on comfy horizontal cruciform beds in America, inviting people to watch the spectacle of justice, or the carrying out of a legal order, depending on your point of view. Just like the Romans, the Jews, the Persians. Feeling perhaps morally ugly whatever our sense of justice or revenge, or we simply feel safer. Just like the Romans, the Jews, the Persians? Did humans 50,000 years ago sacrifice people in horrible ways (very likely - remember the Aztecs, and the artifacts of other,pre-literate societies we have dug up). I think about cultural conditioning. I think about the cultural necessities of socially dressing up or redirecting what clearly is the internal savage impulses of most of Humanity throughout millennia. The fascination for serial killers might be because we mostly keep the fire-dragons inside of us on a leash - violence is awful and nauseating, but the killers among us don't - maybe can't - leash the dragon at all? So we are fascinated as well as fearful? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 09, 2022
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May 14, 2022
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May 09, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0060580674
| 9780060580674
| 0060580674
| 3.96
| 53,301
| Jun 29, 2004
| May 01, 2005
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really liked it
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I LOVED 'Sandstorm' by James Rollins! It is pure old-fashioned adventure much like the Doc Savage series by Lester Dent. Reader, if you love thriller I LOVED 'Sandstorm' by James Rollins! It is pure old-fashioned adventure much like the Doc Savage series by Lester Dent. Reader, if you love thriller novels which combine adventure, fantasy, and black-ops excitement, I beg you to read once in your lifetime the Doc Savage series beginning with Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze! If you can. Amazon shows these novels are out of print, alas! They are also not politically correct. I don't care! But I digress.. I have copied the book blurb about 'Sandstorm', which IS a politically correct novel: "An inexplicable explosion rocks the antiquities collection of a London museum, setting off alarms in clandestine organizations around the world. And now the search for answers is leading Lady Kara Kensington; her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator; and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, into a world they never dreamed existed: a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert. But others are being drawn there as well, some with dark and sinister purposes. And the many perils of a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmare waiting to be unearthed at journey's end: an ageless and awesome power that could create a utopia... or destroy everything humankind has built over countless millennia." Almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, much like the serials of the 1930's. Omg, gentle reader, I'm in fricking heaven! I'm so glad I have discovered these books! Omg, I hope the rest of the series are like 'Sandstorm! I will be absolutely devastated if they aren't. This novel, anyway, is a throwback to matinee serials like the one starring Buster Crabbe, star of Flash Gordon and the fictionalized novels of other comic books. What others you ask? Ok, nobody is asking me, but I'm going to show you anyway. Needless to say, they ALL are politically incorrect, but when I was able to get my hands on one of these pulp comics or novelizations I went out of my mind with joy! This! This! This! *ahem* Sorry. But these dime novels were the start of my adult love affair, so to speak, with reading, once I found them with torn covers, missing pages, and stained with coffee cup rings in the damaged paperbacks bins at my local Salvation Army store. Originally, it was novels like The Complete Sherlock Holmes series and The Black Stallion series that were my elementary school loves, but it was the silly 1930's pulps which cemented my adoration of reading, discovered when I was in junior high (or middle school to non-baby-boomer generations). 'Sandstorm' was printed in 2004, and it involves an up-to-date team of competing scientists and military teams, but it also includes what are to me the absolutely delightful touches present in the movie 'Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark' I hope my library has the next one in the Sigma Force series, Map of Bones! I haven't felt this happy since I read Relic! I love early pulps! And the radio shows, too! Like "The Shadow" , "Adventures by Morse", "The Creaking door", Arch Obeler plays, "CBS Radio Mystery Theater", "I Love A Mystery" - to name my favorites! No, I wasn't born when these shows were on the radio except for CBS Radio Mystery Theater, but there was, and is sort of a cycle of bringing them back every fifteen years or so. A lot of these are available as podcasts today. However, warning they often are not politically correct. Don't judge me. My life is small. P.s. Many of these early pulps are terrible, awful. I laugh and laugh! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 02, 2022
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Apr 11, 2022
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Mar 02, 2022
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 125017466X
| 9781250174666
| 125017466X
| 3.61
| 36,204
| Feb 16, 2021
| Feb 16, 2021
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really liked it
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'The Echo Wife' by Sarah Gailey is flawed, yet brilliant! The book is a dark literary satire! The novel symbolically takes on all the ways that parent
'The Echo Wife' by Sarah Gailey is flawed, yet brilliant! The book is a dark literary satire! The novel symbolically takes on all the ways that parents (whether planned, accidental or adoptive) program/design their progeny (whether the children are naturally born babies or are cloned adults in a lab). The dark comedy is buried (literally) for quite awhile in the book, gentle reader, because the author's intentions are serious and they write in the 'show, not tell' style. I believe this novel could be a good Broadway play as well, given the plot's, perhaps somewhat allegorical, broad strokes! The author plays it straight, but I thought there was a LOT of dark comedy going on. On the surface the book is about many subjects: the social impact of cloning people if cloning was a scientific business; the lifelong effects of a bad childhood; how a bad marriage can alter one's path; horrible moral decay that is invisible to society because of normalized familiarity; and patriarchal selfishness. But clearly, the themes of the novel, some overt, some not, will cause a lot of arguments on a lot of levels! -scientifically, culturally, on the insidious ways that moral-values rot can happen, etc. I've copied the cover blurb below: "I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married. It took me so long to hate him." Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be. And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband. Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up. Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty. My number one advice to readers is to ignore any conversations about the accuracy (or not) of the specific activities on the cloning process in the book since that particular plot point is clearly a pure speculative plot device! Every cloned body supposedly being manufactured in the novel is a science fantasy! The author obviously, on purpose, has vaguely described the cloning process! Don't get sucked into that conversational black hole about the author's cloning process accuracies. How cloning is really done was not the focus of this story. At first, the presentation style of Evelyn's narration by the author irritated me. She is telling the story to you, gentle reader, of what happened, and she is also partially revealing her epiphanies in the moment at the same time. It is a VERY annoying manner of telling a story when it happens page after page. However, I got accustomed to Evelyn's speech pattern. But when I finally realized this novel was actually a dark satire, I began to relax and enjoy the ride! I had picked up the book as a book club recommendation, and I hadn't really known what it was about. It's gruesomely funny! And awful. And mean. I am recommending it! ; p (view spoiler)[What I took away in finishing the novel was how the programming of brains was the key to all of the drama. Evelyn’s father and mother ‘programmed� her emotional and intellectual development through abuse and example, and so did her marriage. We call it out often as PTSD and experience and emotional scars, but it’s also programming, sure enough. Martine was programmed too, but it was openly acknowledged, unlike Evelyn’s programming. Nathan’s programming was in his display of patriarchal selfishness. The human clones were dehumanized by everyone primarily because they are an openly programmed being - which is a dark joke I suspect, because all beings are programmed by DNA and environment, unrecognized as this might be. Evelyn finally recognizes that she couldn’t be what Nathan wanted her to be, and the marriage had always been doomed. If-then-else programming modules are by nature limited to those modules that have been written into the schema and Evelyn wasn’t equipped with the if-then-else branching modules Nathan wanted to be there in her programming: - If woman marries, then she will want a baby. - If she gets a baby, the woman will run the housewife routines mechanically. -If Nathan gives a command, then his wife obeys happily without questioning. Evelyn begins to see Martine is actually a person with growth potential because of education, but she decides to restrict Martine’s possibilities of growth the same as any patriarchal man because that makes Martine more useful to her. The abuse in Evelyn's childhood by her father has programmed her into accepting a comfortable schema. She has become her father, the powerful controlling mentor instead of choosing the weak personality, her mother, in the marriage of her parents. She doesn't have the capability of thinking outside her schema. To me, this novel is as much about the effects of child abuse as it is about how many societies� patriarchal hierarchy structures around the world are similar to programming modules. Social programming = C++ or Basic or JavaScript or Assembly or Pascal or Python �. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2022
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Feb 04, 2022
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Feb 01, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 4.11
| 116,882
| Jul 06, 2021
| Jul 06, 2021
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it was amazing
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'Razorblade Tears' by S. A. Cosby is a propulsive action thriller! The novel is pure wish-fulfillment Hollywood-movie candy. I could hardly catch my b
'Razorblade Tears' by S. A. Cosby is a propulsive action thriller! The novel is pure wish-fulfillment Hollywood-movie candy. I could hardly catch my breath feeling the feels! The written is excellent - a bit snarky and a lot pitch perfect in the capturing of the vernacular of Virginia characters. It's still a fairy tale of sorts, but I loved it. I have copied the book blurb because it is accurate: A Black father. A White father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance. Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s White husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy. Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys. Provocative and fast-paced, S. A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears is a story of bloody retribution, heartfelt change - and maybe even redemption. I LOVED THIS NOVEL! I got a copy from my library but after turning the last page I decided I am going to buy it! Very exciting beach read! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 18, 2021
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Sep 20, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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aPriL does feral sometimes
>
Books:
don-t-judge-me
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Apr 06, 2025
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Apr 04, 2025
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| 3.91
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Apr 04, 2025
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Mar 26, 2025
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Mar 26, 2025
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Mar 24, 2025
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it was amazing
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Mar 04, 2025
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Mar 03, 2025
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| 3.64
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really liked it
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Oct 24, 2024
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Oct 20, 2024
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it was amazing
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Oct 19, 2024
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Oct 16, 2024
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| 4.20
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Sep 2024
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Sep 01, 2024
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really liked it
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Aug 24, 2024
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Aug 22, 2024
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| 3.55
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really liked it
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Aug 19, 2024
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Aug 05, 2024
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| 4.16
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really liked it
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Jun 21, 2024
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Jun 14, 2024
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| 3.67
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Mar 28, 2024
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Mar 25, 2024
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| 4.83
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it was amazing
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Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024
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Jan 12, 2024
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| 3.89
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it was amazing
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Jun 13, 2023
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Jun 10, 2023
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| 3.77
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really liked it
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Dec 23, 2022
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Dec 18, 2022
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| 3.81
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it was amazing
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Oct 20, 2022
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Oct 15, 2022
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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May 14, 2022
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May 09, 2022
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| 3.96
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really liked it
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Apr 11, 2022
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Mar 02, 2022
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| 3.61
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really liked it
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Feb 04, 2022
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Feb 01, 2022
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| 4.11
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it was amazing
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Sep 20, 2021
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Sep 18, 2021
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