review – Page 11 – Cubilone's Dimension

Review: Mort

First, I’d like to mention that this particular edition of the book is pure, distilled class. I found it in Гринуич (Greenwich, written “green witch”), one of Sofia’s largest bookstores. Happily, there’s also “Guards! Guards!” from the same line of beautiful 2014 hardcover editions of the Discworld series on that rotating shelf waiting for me to get my hands on it… All I have to do is swallow shelling out another seemingly-cheap-but-it’s-what-I-should-be-paying-for-my-nourishment-with 20 лв so soon after I did it for Mort with this particular expression on my face.

Anyway, I wanted to include quotes from Mort in my review to yet again share just how witty, pertinent and, well, funny Pratchett’s writing has proved itself to be, but I decided to just put links to lists becase this would grow out of any sort of proportion and my reviews in general need more words like my back needs more hair. The lists of quotes: [1] [2].

Many discheads count Mort as one of the best books in the whole series, and I remember my friend Garret pestering me to read this book in particular for years. My time did come, now that my disc is spinning – you may interpret that analogy at will, by the way. I would say that, compared to Small Gods, the Discworld entry I read before this one, Mort was funnier but lacked part of the punch; Small Gods made me think “hey, Pratchett’s onto something here”, but no such internal exclamations were had with Mort, and rather missed they were. However, I did have to think (relatively) long and hard to decide whether or not I should give Mort 5 stars all the same as a reward for it managing to crack me up so systematically. The end result of that painful procedure you can see before you; nevertheless, let it be known that Mort is funny and that you should read it, even if you’ve never read a Discworld novel before.

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Review: Naoki Urasawa presenta: 20th Century Boys, Libro 1: Amigo

Naoki Urasawa presenta: 20th Century Boys, Libro 1: Amigo by Naoki Urasawa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Manga + Kindle + aprender idiomas = ¡Win! (¡Victoria!)

Estoy enamorado de verdad de la idea de leer manga en mi Kindle, ¡y gratis también! El primer que he probado es 20th Century Boys de Naoki Urasawa, creador de Monster, que me avergüenza decir que nunca lo acabé. Algún día, quizás, quizás… Por lo que conseguí entender, porque una de las razones que lo leo el manga en español es para aprender palabras nuevas y practicar y por eso es claro que no entiendo todo, esta obra se ve muy prometedora. Solo espero que esta vez la leeré hasta el final. No tengo nada de paciencia con series muy largas…

A propósito, no sé qué es la mejora manera de escribir críticas para mangas. No voy criticar todos los libros, ¡eso significaria 22+ criticas por solo un manga! No, debe que haber otra manera… A ver.

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Review: Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I find it very interesting reading non-fiction by writers that are generally better known for their novels. I like taking a sneak peek at how they perceive and document real events and whether their love for the imaginary can affect the way they tell a story.

For some reason I have connected Murakami with magical realism, even if I’ve only read only one other book of his and that not one of the most well-known. This book, then, didn’t feel like Murakami – possibly because I have no clear idea of what Murakami feels like in the first place, maybe because it had too little magical and too much realism in it, the hard-hitting kind, the “it could have been me” a lot of the people in the book kept saying.

However, I don’t want to do Underground injustice and understate the way it moved my imagination and sense of awe(m). In the second part of the book, a later publication which followed the success of what was originally just the first part (the one with the interviews of the victims and the indirecty affected), we get to see what Aum, the religious cult/organisation whose higher-ups were behind the gas attacks, was like from the inside. We get to read the stories of disillusioned still-members, tortured ex-members, believers that achieved superpowers through their association and training with Aum, personal histories that follow certain people’s fascination with transcendence and enlightenment and how ultimately that led them to the cult’s doorstep. These stories, what people were able to do, what peace they found, what secret powers their leaving the “secular world” unlocked in them… To be honest, judging by their motives and lost hopes in the world and by my own sense of being a ship in an endless ocean trying to find an island, I can completely relate; I, too, would have become a member. But would I have done things differently were I in their shoes? Maybe I should be asking myself what I would have done if I was Japanese before I ask anything else, of course!

The book left me wanting to investigate, to slowly discover more of the hidden world that was promised to those people but without the manipulation and the religious aspects, the Leader-centred bullshit. Underground also pushed me in equal parts towards further fascination, admiration for and disgust of the Japanese people and their culture. To illustrate, it would be greatly fulfilling to delve into the psyche of modern Japan -just like Murakami attempted to do with Underground- but at the same time I already know that too many aspects of it would make me feel like I’d be wasting my time and hopes on a lost case of a spent culture with no future. I would certainly be interested in reading a similar account of events of the 2011 tsunami and the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident.

At any rate, from now on I’m going to be subconsciously checking for smelly liquids on carriage floors whenever I ride on subterranean trains.

Thanks Daphne for lending this book to me.

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Review: Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt

Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt by G.R. Reader

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was the first one I finished on my new Kindle, a fact which, in combination with its contents, makes me feel kind of tainted, like knowingly eating dolphin meat or something; posting a sincere review of it here after reading about Goodreads and what happened a few months ago feels in turn like I’m writing about my experience of eating dolphin meat while giving it a star rating. But I’ll go through with this, because it’s not dolphin meat.

I knew that Amazon acquired Goodreads last year from the moment it happened. From the first second I knew what it would mean for Goodreads as a website, as a social network, as a resource. But I didn’t budge. I’ve seen this happen so many times before: great websites or ideas turn “evil”, my beloved CouchSurfing being the most prominent example I can think of right now; I went on, for what could I have honestly done as a single person to stop things, change things, make the guys at the head of CouchSurfing or Goodreads realise that what they had done meant turning on their community, the people they owed all their success to? Should I have changed my profile and alerted people of the fact? Shold I have jumped ship?

I’m still very far from being sure about what the best course of action should be, the perfect balance between convenienve and idealism, both in my offline and online lives. I have wanted to join BeWelcome, the best alternative to CouchSurfing, for example, but I feel as if I have invested too much time to the latter to make a change like that. At the same time, CouchSurfing has become so bad that it has naturally lost me as a user, something Goodreads hasn’t achieved -yet-, but then I’m not a social user of the site and I’ve never felt part of any community in it, unlike most of the people who contributed to this book and were alerted to and alarmed by the changes mostly because of that involvement.

I wasn’t even aware of the censorship before I stumbled upon an abandoned “beacon” profile which had most of its details replaced with anti-Goodreads messages and promotion of Off-Topic. You could say that it was an efficient strategy, because the message eventually reached me, the oblivious user – or I should say, I reached the message.

Having now read the book, I realise I’m supposed to do something with this information, right? But is there anything I can do which would mean anything? Should I make my small revolt against Goodreads, when it was on myKindle where I read this book – complete with Amazon-powered Goodreads integration that doesn’t work as I had imagined it would? Should I move my reviews to BookLikes, like some people did? Why use a social network at all, if I’m ready to give up the convenience of the site for some vague ideology? And at the very end, if to enjoy a free service online, you become the commodity, can there be any escape at all from the sudden-death ToU?

I have sadly become cynical over the years, especially about online activism. I see a lot of people being very sensitive and idealistic on the web but with a seemingly loose grasp of reality. They think that because CS or GR seem friendly and tailored to their own needs – social networks are made to give this impression, after all – that they, alone, can make a difference, just by spreading the message. Often, but not always of course – because there are some people whose character is such that they react very strongly to things like that from all sides – cyber-activists can double as happy, obedient citizens/consumers with a straight face, which boggles my mind. When people get so worked up about these changes that they actively quit sites, I don’t know what to think. On the one hand, their determination and bullheadedness is admirable – it really is. On the other hand, I don’t see what kind of alternative they’re imagining and, most important of all, how they can make sure that their alternative can remain as pure, idealistic and humble as they imagine their perfect social network to be. How they can make sure that the new place will stay better than Goodreads before the natural moral entropy of the web forces them to find their new digital Zion.

But I’m grumpy today. A storm in a teacup can bring about good things and I’m grateful that there are people out there who don’t overanalyze themselves out of any sort of action, meaningful or not.

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Review: The Science Delusion: Feeling the Spirit of Enquiry + Quotes ~ Αποφθέγματα ΧΙΧ

The Science Delusion: Feeling the Spirit of Enquiry by Rupert Sheldrake

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have the rational intelligence to be a scientist, but it’s not in my personality to fill in cracks in established mental models. I seek anomalies that open cracks.

~Ran Prieur

Quickly becoming one of my favourite quotes.

Jimmy Wales tells “energy workers” that Wikipedia won’t publish woo, “the work of lunatic charlatans isn’t the equivalent of ‘true scientific discourse'” [link]

Jimmy Wales’ statement is as revolting as the discussion under it. I would suggest that you read it, but only if you have the stomach for tens of “skeptics” parrotting the mainstream opinions about woo, parapsychology etc, claiming the truth and the high ground of knowledge as they usually do. Even the article itself is taking clear sides without shame.

Do these people know anything about the subject? Does Jimmy Wales know anything about the subject, he who with one broad swath pigeonholes so many people as lunatic charlatanes? I don’t know whether this technique in particular has had successes, explicable or inexplicable, in doing what it says it does, I haven’t looked into it to be honest, but I’ve seen the same discussion surrounding “pseudoscience” too many times to count.

Why this hate? Why this elitism? Why this aversion to exploration of the fringes? When did science become all about defending what’s already known? I thought the opposite was the main idea. Is materialist science, peer-reviewd journals, wikipedia, Richard Dawkins and the rest, parts of a bulletproof world theory anyway?

No, they’re not. Far from it. And if you want to know why, you should absolutely read The Science Delusion (title insisted upon by publisher) by Rupert Sheldrake. His main idea is that science and the scientific method are generally good at giving answers about our world, but, just like organised religion 500 years ago did, it has become too inflexible, too bulky, too dogmatic, too rid of assumptions, too sure of itself and too dismissive to be of any real use today. Meanwhile, it’s hindering research that could further our understanding of the world in unimaginable ways.

What’s interesting is that Sheldrake in this book provides us with -what’s normally considered as- hard evidence for a world that cannot be explained materialistically. That includes results of real peer-reviewed experiments that point to the reality of things like brainless memories, statistically significant telepathy and many more chin-stroke-worthy phenomena that truly test mainstream science’s beliefs of what should or shouldn’t be possible.

After reading the book, I checked Rupert Sheldrake’s Wikipedia entry just to see reactions to his work from the scientific communituy. Not surprisingly, the discussion was not much more sophisticated than what I witnessed in the link at the top of this review: accusations of pseudoscience, charlatanism etc pervaded the articles, indications that the skeptics hadn’t really comprehended the criticism aimed at their methodology and worldview, didn’t follow up on the bibliography, plainly assuming that there must have been something wrong with it (confirmation bias), or that they simply didn’t even read the book. Richard Dawkins has said, after all, that he doesn’t want to discuss evidence when it comes to inexplicable phenomena, raising questions about whether he’s really interested in the truth or not – in my personal experience, most skeptics do not have furthering their understanding of our world at the top of their priorities.

In any case, I find the accusations against Sheldrake, and this book in particular, hollow: The Science Delusion has close to 40 pages of notes and bibliography of actual experiments to back it up and Sheldrake’s style and prose themselves are lucid as well as restrained. Even in the parts in which he discusses the inability of science to interpret the phenomena, where he proposes his own theory of morphing resonance as a possible explanation -the parts I enjoyed the least because I cannot exactly grasp the concept of morphic resonance-, he does so without conviction, but rather with the spirit of the curious researcher. A true scientist in my book. The skeptics’ reaction to his work seems to disregard all of this completely; they treat him like they would any old fraud.

But I understand: scientists are also people. What would it have been normal for them to do in the face of rejection of their entire lives’ work plus a few hundred years of tradition? Accept their failure? Accept their dogmatism? Just as scientists are people, science is also a human activity, and as most of human activities do, it also suffers from the same problems human beings generally have, only in a larger, more chaotic scale.

Finally, one more reason I appreciated this book so much was that it was… tender. At the other side of the raging skeptics and this blind rejection there is investigation, there is respect, there is a belief in a state of things that resonated deeply with me. Maybe it’s because Sheldrake’s main field of research has been biology that he shows such love for plants, animals and life in general. For whatever reason, it warmed my heart and made me think that if I ever was a real scientist, Sheldrake would be my rold model: a fighter for truth against the faux fighters for truth, the romantic gardener who everybody calls a hippie but he alone sees what everybody else is too blind to see.

Third five-star review in a row after Μίλα μου για γλώσσα and
Small Gods (lol). Am I becoming softer or just more grateful?

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Review: Small Gods

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A quick note before the review: my friend Garret got this book for me as a gift for my last nameday, and he was also the guy who first introduced me to Terry Pratchett years ago, so here’s a double “thank you” for him.

Now, the review.

I definitely should be paying more attention to Terry Pratchett. All four books of his I’ve read I have greatly enjoyed, and this one not only had as much Pratchettesque humour as I could ask for, it had a very serious and significant message to share as well. That’s probably the reason why my mentor here in Bulgaria, Boris, who I yesterday learned has read ALL of the books in the series, some of them twice, called it “one of the heavier books” set in the Discworld universe. It’s an opinion which I understand but can’t completely agree with. To clarify: it’s not that it wasn’t heavy compared to the other Discworld novels I’ve read, but to me this contrast just made the whole thing tastier. What can I say, I suppose that, myself being a man of contrasts, it feels more… balanced? Natural? Complete in a paradoxical way that makes perfect sense?

It just feels right.

So, what’s next? I will continue to crawl my way through the series like a turtle, of course, but now, with renewed motivation from Boris, maybe I can do it with less of Om’s slugishness and more of The Great A’Tuin’s grace(?).

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Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

You ask me what I think. Think. Neurons flashing up, millions, billions, zeros, on an array of pixels my primitive mind is not fully equipped to understand. The bright lights! “Yes! Follow them”, and they did just that, his super-ergo, his ego, the animus, the shadow self and all of the other assorted invisible, conscious, subconscious, unconscious and extended entities, tied together by the zeitgeist of the universal… Now. Nobody was better fit to understand it but him -or is that them– in that room, with that assortment of pages and memories and experiences and images, in that city that they in the South – but it wasn’t just the South – had no idea about, but who does really? And the assortment of pages, which we borrowed from the city library in Sofia, that city known for the cold but living the heat, “great day today, record highs!“- it took some time, some bits of now, of one-ness and possibilities and pages and memories and experiences and all of that, to decode and understand. But how much of it stuck? Does it even matter? And it’s not like I haven’t dipped my toes in this stuff, mind you. Beginning to understand and creating the dots on the screen this 01010010010100010 111011101010101010 in vast, immense, unfathomable bzzzzzzzz, only harnessed by the computer, the ultimate being, the judge, the jury, the executioner, the Wikileaks activist, the troll and the Spyder – it’s a superbeing unleashed by the lowly beings, that’s it. The Computer -it has to be with a capital C now, don’t you see?- will take my decoded neural flashes and make them into this text that, if people watch carefully, will see that it’s not more than it is. Which part exactly? Hah! So many interesting questions. Tell me more about how much you want to learn about the world.

This was my subjective experience of reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and beginning to write a review for it. What? You didn’t get it? Tsk. First of all: I didn’t ask you for your opinion, and much less did I write it to suit your needs; what part of “self-expression” do you find so difficult to understand? Figures: you’re one of those square types that can’t appreciate a description of an indescribable experience for what it is, aren’t you? For chrissakes, why do you have to push meaning into everything? Look how much good your meaning has done us!

OK, enough with this. Because I do value meaning, I’ll stop here. I hope, however, that this was enough for you to get the picture. You see, Tom Wolfe did something remarkable, though quite representative of his time (that’s 1968 we’re talking about here): he tried to document and tell a story without caring too much about whether the readers would understand it or whether it would make sense at all, but insisting on a specific style to prove a point. The magic of what really happened, which we’ll get to in a second, apparently gave him the impression that having his story mirror what its main actors must have experienced while actually living it, would make for a breath-taking read…

…no-no-no. Let’s put it this way. Suppose the people you wanted to document the life of, their life as seen through their eyes, were tripping on LSD for most of the duration. Bad idea, right? Well, let’s just say that this is the book that had to be written for people to learn why it’s not a good idea.

Actually, the story itself that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sets out to tell is super-interesting: it’s the documentation of the events that made LSD hit the mainstream, the story of the Merry Pranksters, the absolutely bonkers mix of gang, pilgrims, troupe, nomad tribe and religion led by Ken Kesey and how they took over the US underground in the ’60s. Obnoxious and inspiring in equal measure -okay, maybe slightly more obnoxious- they travelled all over the US in that painted old school bus that turned magic and ended up becoming a symbol of their later activity, the Acid Test parties, underground events that in their own right founded a big part of what we understand today as the recreational drug, clubbing and hippie scenes.

Reading about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the crazy things they did filled me with wonder and amazement: so that’s what happened; that’s what living in those times and following this ground-breaking movement must have felt like, being an acid-head cyberpunk 20 year before anyone had even thought of the word. They thought then, whenever they weren’t “zonked out” of their brains, that they would change the world, only they didn’t, and maybe you can understand why -and where things might have gone different- by reading this story.

It’s not Tom Wolfe’s “subjective” style that gives this effect, though. Reading something that felt like it was written while everyone involved was tripping did not make me have a clearer picture of what really took place. On the contrary: the segments of the book more akin to real journalism, the parts where Wolfe decided he could give us readers a break, were the most interesting by far for me to read. However, I can see what he was trying to do: using this kind of language he only wanted to convey the indescribable that is the altered state, the psychedelic experience. Back then it must have felt like a revolution to put it in this way, the culmination of a million different things guiding your hand and voicing the feelings and memories of an entire generation (it says so in the description of the book anyway: “They say if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.”) But now, one or two generations later, it all comes across as rather bad writing. He might as well have invented a new language to try to describe the inexplicable, the “you must live it!” factor. Maybe the new language would have been easier to read through, even.

This is a significant book documenting important and interesting events that distill the countercultural mythology, don’t get me wrong. If you’d like to get a feeling of the psychedelic indescribable by reading it, though, maybe it would be a better idea to watch a recently released cut of The Movie known as Magic Trip – the 16mm film Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters shot during their journeys with Further. I know I will.

Book borrowed from the American Corner of Sofia City Library

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Review: Tricks of the Mind

Tricks Of The Mind by Derren Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this book, Derren Brown, famous British “illusionist, mentalist, trickster, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic”, sets out to reveal the secrets of his work and actually tell people “I have no real powers, and I hope this settles it!”. We get to see all of the above sides of his: amazing breakdowns of his work and shows and spectacular analyses of what parts of human psychology and neurology he manipulates and why. Most of all, however, we see his sceptical side.

Derren Brown dedicates the majority of his book and prose on an excellent and thorough debunking of things like parapsychology, homeopathy and alternate medicine. He goes through them with an aura of “I would like these things to exist but they cannot, and here’s why”. The idea is that they’re all a mix of delusions, confirmation bias, psychological tricks and many other “flaws” of the human psyche he actually explains are the reason he can trick people.

Now, my personal opinion still is that the scientific method is far from perfect and that a lot of what we see that works in these fields but shouldn’t, based on what we can know and understand about the world, is not necessarily less real than what can be proven; conversely, the scientific dogma is trying to concvince us that if it can’t be proven, it shouldn’t work. However, anecdotal evidence from countless sources (which Mr. Brown rejects based on the fact that they cannot be integrated into a greater theory, but how could they ever be?) tells us a different story.

Repeatabiliy, correlations between cause and effect and the need for evidence are concepts inseparable from the scientific method, but the scientific method is only one way of looking at things. You might say it is the one that works more reliably, but that doesn’t mean that it always works or even that reliability should be our end-all-be-all criterion when creating our world theories. For example, how does reliability and repeatability fit in with the double slit experiment? Or how about the decline effect (excellent article by the New Yorker), which questions the whole idea that once something is proven, it should be able to be repeatedly proven anew? What if it fails to? Is it a problem of the experiment or an incompatibility of the nature of things with the idea that, given the same known and unknown conditions, A should always lead to B? Maybe Douglas Adams had it right all along:

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

In short: if Derren Brown is an open-minded sceptic, I choose to be the unorthodox researcher, the explorer of the fringes, the one who looks for the truth that slips between the seams, what gets misunderstood by the scientists of its time, ridiculed, rejected by the dominant paradigm, including the rhetoric of this book of course. “I have the rational intelligence to be a scientist, but it’s not in my personality to fill in cracks in established mental models. I seek anomalies that open cracks.” ~Ran Prieur (there’s more from him coming up)

I believe that the author’s bias towards positivism is a resulf of him, as discussed in the book, being religious at a young age and at some point changing sides completely. Since then he seems to have kept insisting that the paranormal or parapsychology must have the same psychological root as religious belief. This is a bias which can also be seen in the studies he chooses to cite to prove his points, as well as the books he recommends at the end of the book for further reading; most of them are, predictably, reinforcing what he already talked about in the book – more scepticism in line with The God Delusion (which I’m curious to read). Is he making the same mistake of maintaining reverse cognitive and confirmation biases, the very same thing he set out to point out to us that everyone is doing?

All that said, even if I disagree with his scope and can see the limitations of his argument (which could be a cognitive bias of my own, mind you), I did enjoy his argumentation and have to commend his style. He didn’t insult people who fall into the cognitive mistakes he outlines and who believe in these irrational behaviours he has taken advantage of to become who he is now; he didn’t try to hold the scepticist view just to prove a point or win the argument, as too many people to count are used to doing, themselves becoming the very zealots they swore to destroy; he was gentle and careful with his explanations and approached the topics with an genuinely, not just a supposedly, open mind; his whole style gave off the impression that he is actually interested in the truth, that he has the real spirit of a researcher and isn’t just the pretention of one. If we disagree in scope and -naturally- look at things from different perspectives… So be it. All I know is that I gained something from his healthy scepticism and his book is now serving as a platform for further investigation of mine in all directions.

An excellent example: from the books section of Ran Prieur’s website:

Charles Fort was the first paranormal investigator, and he’s my favorite natural philosopher. He spent 27 years in libraries collecting notices of physical phenomena unexplainable by science, and put them together into four books in the 1920’s. You don’t have to be into weird stuff to appreciate his style of thinking: that all our attempts to make sense of the world only seem true by excluding stuff at the edges that doesn’t fit, and we can keep updating and revolutionizing our models to fit new observations, but there is no end to this process. This should not make us feel troubled, but awe-struck and amused. The Book of the Damned is Fort’s first and best book, and his one-volume Complete Books are still in print. Here’s another source of Fort online.

[…]

I’ve been into paranormal and new age writing for most of my life. My advice is not to exclude it completely or your mind will become cramped and inflexible. It’s safe to dip your toes into it, but if you go into it deeply, you have to commit to going all the way through. Because you’ll reach a point where your mind cracks open and you’ll think you suddenly Know the Truth, and you’ll be tempted to stop and set up camp. You must not stop, but keep looking at different perspectives. Then you’ll think, wait, now this is the Truth, and now this… Hold on here! It’s looking like reality itself is so packed and multifaceted that it’s easy to make any nutty system of thought seem like the Truth — including the dominant paradigm itself. Now you’re getting it!

The smartest and most thorough book on the “paranormal” is The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen. Even though his writing style is aggressively clear, it’s still hard to read because the ideas are so difficult. He covers anthropology, literary theory, shamanism, stage magic, UFO hoaxes, psychic research, and more, and the general idea is that it’s the very nature of these phenomena to only exist on the fringes. How can this work? The answer is simple but sounds so crazy that even Hansen only hints at it. Another big idea is that real unexplained phenomena and hoaxes are not opposites, but blend together.

I love the books of Fortean paranormal researcher John Keel. They’re all great, but my two favories are The Mothman Prophecies and The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings. Like Keel, I think UFO’s are an occult phenomenon (which means something very hard to explain), and an even smarter author who thinks like this is Jacques Vallee, whose most important book is Passport to Magonia.

A great source for all kinds of fringe books is Adventures Unlimited.

Some books that try to merge woo-woo stuff with hard science: The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, The Field by Lynne McTaggart, and The Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami. And for a critique of the untested assumptions that underlie science as we know it, check out The End of Materialism by Charles Tart or The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.

[…]

So when Wilhelm Reich developed physical tools to work with the esoteric energy he called “orgone”, or when Royal Rife cured serious diseases with precise frequency generators, or when Louis Kervran found biological creatures transmuting chemical elements (his book is Biological Transmutations), or for that matter, when ordinary people experience UFO abductions or miraculous healings, these are not hoaxes or delusions. They are honest and accurate observations that fail to be integrated into consensus reality… so far!

*deep breath* Okay. I’ve written this much already and I haven’t even mentioned any of the more practical things covered. Mr. Brown included tricks for improving one’s memory and memorising things (like the incredible Method of Loci), techniques for spotting lies and deception, and others shared with the foundation of NLP for disconnecting with bad memories and reinforcing positive visualisations. You can even find the fundamentals of hypnosis in there, but it’s a topic which, to be honest, he muddled through, unable to tell us precisely or convincingly what it is but very keen on telling us what it isn’t. Now all I’m left with is “what’s hypnosis finally?”

Yes. This review is too long. If you skipped to the end, let me tell you that this book is worth it. It will make you think and it will make you look into real techniques that are both impressive and useful, if only you can just sit down and practice them (which it’s doubtful I will, not because of lack of interest but because of lack of dedication – for now).

To think I haven’t even watched his shows…

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Review: Dolphin Music

Dolphin Music by Antoinette Moses

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“The year is 2051. CONTROL, the government of Europe, keeps everyone happy in a virtual reality. This is a world where it is too hot to go out, and where wonderful music made by dolphins gives everyone pleasure. It’s a world which is changed forever when music critic Saul Grant discovers what makes dolphins sing and sets out to free them.”

Wouldn’t this back-cover tidbit catch your attention immediately if you stumbled upon it while browsing through used books? I know it caught mine. It was in the open-air book market in front of Sofia City Library, where I’m doing my EVS. If anything with either 1) dolphins, 2) the Web or 3) dystopian sci-fi is easy enough to pique my interest on its own, imagine my face seeing them combined.

The book itself is only 96 pages long and, regardless of the simple language because the book was written specifically for EFL students of around FCE level, I found it to be quite enjoyable and engaging; not pretentious yet interesting; simplified in language but not messages, and quite relevant ones, too.

To tell you the truth, I find telling a story in the easiest words possible quite charming. Something in the style just makes my heart softer, like ice cream with warm cookies. It’s like watching children’s cartoons and being able to appreciate the simple beauty of it just because you’re an adult. If a universal truth were spoken, I’m sure it would be closer to such language than to the kind reserved for high philosophy. They say that life is complicated; that’s true, but it’s also fantastically simple.

For what it is, Dolphin Music is really good. I started off by giving this book three stars but writing about it made me happier. I can’t see what should stop me from giving it four.

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Review: Η κομψότητα του σκαντζόχοιρου

Η κομψότητα του σκαντζόχοιρου by Muriel Barbery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aν και μου άρεσε γενικά πολύ, περίμενα να αγαπήσω τον Σκαντζόχοιρο περισσότερο απ’όσο συνέβη, μάλλον από τα λόγια της Δάφνης. Κατ’αρχάς, η Παλομά και η Ρενέ δεν φέρονται σαν πραγματικοί άνθρωποι αλλά είναι εκεί για να προβάλλουν τις απόψεις της συγγραφέως για τους πλούσιους και ρηχούς ανθρώπους που φαίνεται πως έχει γνωρίσει πολύ στην ζωή της χωμένη στους φιλοσοφικούς κύκλους της Γαλλίας. Το ότι η κα. Barbery είναι καθηγήτρια φιλοσοφίας φαίνεται πολύ σε μερικούς -ακαταλαβίστικους από μένα- μονολόγους, ειδικά απ’τη Ρενέ, η οποία αναλύει το τί σημαίνει ένας πίνακας του Ολλανδικού χρυσού αιώνα ή οι σημύδες στην Άννα Καρένινα πολύ περισσότερο όπως θα το έκανε μια καθηγήτρια φιλοσοφίας και πολύ λιγότερο μια καλλιεργημένη θυρωρός.

Aν εξαιρέσουμε αυτά τα κομμάτια που πάντα με κάνουν και νιώθω χαζός, ίσως επειδή δεν μου αρέσει η κλασική τέχνη όπως αρέσει στη Ρενέ (γενικότερα απολάμβανα περισσότερο τις σκέψεις της Παλομά, βέβαια το πώς ένα 12χρονο μπορεί να είναι τόσο μπροστά είναι μια άλλη ιστορία), το βιβλίο είναι πλούσιο με αιχμηρά και ταυτόχρονα εύθυμα αποσπάσματα που αξίζουν το χρωματιστό μολύβι που θα υπογραμμίσει τη σελίδα ή την παράγραφο, όπως το εξής κορυφαίο και αγαπημένο μου, ήδη από τότε που είδα την ταινία που βασίστηκε στο βιβλίο (η οποία πολύ μου άρεσε και μάλλον περισσότερο απ’το ίδιο το βιβλίο):

(για τις διαφορές γκο και σκακιού)

…δεν είναι το γιαπωνέζικο σκάκι. Πέραν του ότι είναι παιχνίδι, που παίζετα σε τετράγωνη βάση και οι δύο αντίπαλοι έχουν μαύρα και λευκά πιόνια, διαφέρει από το σκάκι όσο ο σκύλος από τη γάτα. Στο σκάκι πρέπει να σκοτώσεις για να κερδίσεις. Στο γκο πρέπει να δημιουργήσεις για να επιβιώσεις.

Μάλλον η ταινία μου άρεσε περισσότερο τελικά γιατί αυτά τα κουραστικά φιλοσοφικά λογύδρια έπρεπε να κοπούν ή κάπως να σουλουπωθούν. Επίσης, γιατί λόγω του οπτικού μέσου υπήρχε μεγαλύτερη άνεση για να βγει το χιουμοριστικό και καλλιτεχνικό της ιστορίας και της διάδρασης χαρακτήρων, ακόμα και μεταξύ των υπόλοιπων ένοικων της πολυκατοικίας, οι οποίοι στο βιβλίο είναι απλά ονόματα αλλά στην ταινία έχουν σάρκα και οστά.

Τέλος, παίζει πολλή ιαπωνοφιλία εδώ πέρα, στα όρια ή και στην υπερβολή του κλισέ, αλλά γουστάρουμε οπότε στα τέτοια μας!

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