review – Page 6 – Cubilone's Dimension

REVIEW: HIJOS DE LOS DÍAS

Los hijos de los días by Eduardo Galeano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Un pequeña exposición por cada día del año tomada de la historia del mundo y de la América Latina. La mayoría son ligeramente interesantes, pero no puedo acordar ninguna en este momento. Bueno, algunas palabras eran más difíciles para mi nivel de español, pero creo que no es mucho que no entendí al nivel de significado. Eduardo Galeano es una importante representación de Uruguay en el mundo, mi primer día en Montevideo era su velatorio, así que tengo un punto suave para este hombre. Quiero ya más libros de él, no sé si en español o otro idioma, Patas Arriba en griego era buenisimo.

Prestado de Roberto

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REVIEW: CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD

Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Vol. 1 by Neale Donald Walsch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t remember where I first heard about this book. I think it was High Existence and one of their many articles/lists on the books that will “violently shift your perspective” or some such. What sealed it for me was when I listened to a podcast (Positive Head Episode #12) where the site’s founder, Jordan Lejuwaan, was invited. When he was asked to name a book he’d take with him on a deserted island, he replied with little hesitation: “Conversations with God.” The best part? The host agreed with him!

Now, these are people who are very much against religion as we understand it and the way we talk about it in public discourse. When I first heard of this book, I recall that I, too, was very skeptical, just judging by the title: “who is this guy with this frankly messianic, banal idea of speaking to God and transcribing the conversation?” It seemed silly, like something belonging to the Middle Ages, certainly not our supposedly progressive-thinking world. Mind you, I’m trying to offer you what had been my automatic thoughts, which I might not actually agree with on a more conscious, rational level.

Having read a badly converted .mobi version of the .pdf I managed to find online on my Kindle—just another hi-tech mode of delivery—, I can now confidently say the following:

If somebody told me: “man, this book contains the words of God”, if I could somehow be certain that they were speaking the truth, and if I did put my prejudices aside, my prejudices that come from growing up in a society built on soul-crushing organised religions that are deadly serious and strict about what God is supposed to be, the contents of this book are close to what I would ideally expect to find. In that way it leaves nothing to be desired. It has a certain something that truly feels divine, superhuman, an oriental or pagan worldview that does not deny people (of all sexes!) our body and all the fun things we can do with it. Here we have God joking around, pronouncing hedonism and all kinds of sex as holy, right next to unconditional love and our calling to be Who We Really Are, which as I understand it means that we become God by creating with our lives the best, most fulfilling, creative and loving version of ourselves.

This book wasn’t pretentious, nor dogmatic, nor close-minded. It was nothing of what you’d come to expect from what we call religion. It does have a lot of common points with Jesus Christ’s teachings as they have reached us today (which are pretty much the same across the board and across historical and famous spiritual teachers), but the book is certainly not Christian, which is a good part of the reason why you needn’t look farther than other reviews of this book on Goodreads to see Christian followers denouncing the book left and right, flat-out refusing to read it because it will supposedly challenge their faith. People, if you want to be devout and pious, at least try to do it right.

I don’t know who or what it was who spoke to Mr. Walsch. I have no idea if it was God, whatever God is or might be. It could be the writer just talking to himself, but why would that make it impossible it to have been God speaking through him? It all depends on how we define God. I’m a realisation of God writing this review right now, you are a realisation of God by reading it, and you are a realisation of God no matter what your response to it is.

I’ve recommended this book to many people already, and I recommend it to you too. It really doesn’t matter what your creed is or what you might be proud of calling a lack of one; contrary to my strong thoughts on what ancient organised religions believe we should be doing with our lives, I cannot see a reason why following this book’s advice would make your life anything but better. Even if you’re an atheist who believes in scientism, I do think that reading this book would do you good. In fact, I’d say that rejecting it without thought would just prove a certain amount of closed-mindedness in you and make you dangerously similar to those aforementioned hardcore “Christians” who feel proud of themselves for refusing to read a book. Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable?

While we’re at it, let me share with you a closing thought that came to me yesterday. We accept that organised religion is a powerful entity—much less so now than in the past, but let’s say that they still have no problem of capturing the imagination of billions. Now, organised science, what we’d call the mainstream scientific dogma—just follow the money—they have power not only over the minds of billions, but also actual power, mainly expressed through the activities of huge techno-corporations that have been setting the rules and the paradigm. Both organised religion and organised science are supposed to be superhuman, and therefore have a duty to be neutral and above the petty realm of “human weakness”.

We know that organised religion is full of scumbag priests and other subcategories of clergy. So what is it exactly that protects organised science from similar “infiltration”? Both fields promise mountains of money and prestige. How can one safely rest his or her faith with one over the other as the ultimate representative of an accurate and objective world theory? It seems to me that what it takes to be religous is faith and an ability to reject the proof that lies in the material world, it takes an equal but opposite(?) amount of faith and ability to reject the proof that lies in the material world to be an atheist.

Heh, look at me, never missing a chance to attack scientism!

I’ll say it again: if reading, enjoying and feeling inclined to follow or at least consider the life advice contained within Conversation with God makes me “religious”, there, done: I’m religious. If you are unable to tell the difference between the frankly liberating information contained in this book and what has passed off as religion for far too long in the world at large, then that is something you’ll have to sort out by yourself, I’m afraid.

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REVIEW: FAHRENHEIT 451

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another post-war American dystopian classic scratched off the (small) part of my to-read list that’s dedicated to… *pensive look*… older books.

Fahrenheit 451 impressed me. I expected it to be good, but, dutifully as I do when the proper time comes, I made all the right connections that proved in my eyes how a 70-year-old book might as well be speaking about today.

They say that “the past is a foreign country”, yet at some unique moments of lucky insight we can get to realise how much we do share with the people from foreign countries, who at first might seem distant, locked away by the fences of culture, yet at some point we take notice that there’s still the gap between the bars through which we can see the other side. Replace the Parlors with tablets and the Firemen with… I don’t know, the NSA, and there you have it.

While it would be a wild stretch to say that books are even slightly hated or feared in today’s society, I would argue that they’re increasingly insignificant. No, actually, it is not books we’re talking about here—just as Faber told Montag that it wasn’t the books themselves, as in the scrawled, bound sheets of paper, that he wanted to save. What we, in the company of Montag and Faber, are talking about, is books as symbols of mindful dedication, a capacity to pay attention to detail and a thinking or intuiting mind behind the scrolling eyes able to connect with what it reads and care about it.

Some minor spoilers ahead.

In the scene where Montag and Mildred go through the books Montag has saved, try to read them and find they are unable to understand them, I was reminded of young Greeks today unable to understand ancient Greek or even Katharevousa, or me trying to read Dostoyevsky a couple of years back and giving up because “I can’t stand the classics.” Beatty’s admission that books were essentially banned (or, to phrase it more precisely, reading was slowly abolished by the government by discouraging literacy) in order to avoid conflicts of opinion that could make people invested in some idea or its counterargument, brought to mind how there exists now a dominant mainstream narrative that requires from people globally to accept it more or less at face value, while every discordant (rational?) opinion is painted as crazy. It’s got to the point where if one does not believe the official story, they are a conspiracy theorist, which seems to be the broad-brush contemporary insult of substantial equivalence to “communist”.

You can go to Reddit these days to get an idea of what’s allowed and not allowed to be discussed in mainstream discourse, although I like the idea that the more taboo a subject is, the closer it is to our cultural blindspot, what people in the future will laugh at us (or curse us) for failing to see, and in a way to the truth—if we can speak of such a thing without missing the point.

I can’t say whether Bradbury was ahead of his time—this would imply a linear, rational process of how the progress of humanity works I don’t agree with—but what I’ll say is that in certain respects, the times themselves have not changed all that much since when Bradbury was fresh out of school and was typing away in the basement of UCLA on penny-operated, time-constrained typewriters. In certain respects. And that includes man’s (and woman’s! {and genderqueer’s! {{[and other terrestrial and extraterrestrial sentient beings!}}}]) thirst for meaning, and the survival, or the continual re-imagining in the aftermath of disaster, of what truly matters.

In short, yes, you should read this book—as another step to protect its family and heritage from their slide to insignificance. Alternatively, you could listen to the unabridged audiobook like I did. It’s just over 5 hours long and the narrator is good.

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REVIEW: SWEET TOOTH

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Sweet Tooth‘s insight into ’60s and ’70s British life more than I did any of the characters, who I honestly didn’t care about all that much. It happens to me a lot, enjoying the setting and background more than the actual story, and it happens to me not only with books, but also with movies, games, sometimes even with people. Often I feel as if everything else apart from the protagonists, the setting, the situations, the world events taking place somewhere unseen and the emotional backdrop are the real centrepieces of a story. Here, it wasn’t Serena Plome or any of her lovers: it was MI5 and the world of domestic intelligence, the Cold War and the sides the public, or rather intellectuals, would pick in the “war of ideas”, be it consciously or subconsciously. Or somewhere in between.

Yes, I definitely enjoyed being transported to that era as a little observer; an era when a lot of things were the same as now, but they didn’t have phones or the internet. However, they did have a growing eco movement. They did have rock—in fact a lot of the rock stars we’re still idolising were alive back then, like my father often observes, who incidentally gifted me this book the Christmas before last; they did have marijuana, leftist movements and activists, they did have secret government services running the show in ways which will probably never be disclosed. A lot of what is still part of public discourse had its roots in that era. We think we’re being original, when we just haven’t done our homework. Am I ranting? I think I’m ranting.

What truly surprised me was the meta ending. I wasn’t expecting it to come from a story such as this, but then again, and this is probably another reason why I enjoyed it, Sweet Tooth was a book about books, authors and literature.

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174 PEARLS OF WISDOM I’VE GLEANED FROM READING 174 BOOKS (LINK)

From my favourite Julien Smith, that guy who’d definitely be invited to the cool people party. Posting here for future reference and inspiration:

I recently realized that I’d been reading a book every week now for 5 years straight.

It kind of made me wonder: what did I really learn? Am I smarter than I used to be?

I started to wonder, and this is what happened. 140 characters per book, for 174 books… 174 things you may not know.

Are you curious? I sure was when I started. Here we go.

REVIEW: DUNE MESSIAH

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’d heard that the second part of the Dune saga is a bit of a disappointment after the grandiose first part, and as I do hate to admit it, I struggled to finish it. I couldn’t exactly follow what was happening, the characters’ motivations, their positions and the parts they were playing in Muad’Dib’s empire. Most of all, I couldn’t visualize how he was visualizing what was happening to him and the intrigue that was taking place around him… or if I did, which I might have, I thought it was confusing and not very interesting. The whole ghola/Idaho subplot (subplot? wasn’t that the book’s main storyline?) left me terribly indifferent.

I’m happy to have put Dune Messiah behind me. I can start seeing why a sci-fi fiend acquaintance of mine told me that he dropped the series because of “way too much religion and mysticism.” Messiah indeed went overboard in this regard compared to its predecessor, but I’m still curious what might happen in the next books and whether the mysticism and religion at least in the rest of the story might prove to be a bit less hazy and interesting. Mind, in the first book, it was a big part of what made it feel so alive.

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REVIEW: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S STAR WARS

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

HAN: —Nay, not that:
The day when Jabba taketh my dear ship
Shall be the day you find me a grave man.

GREEDO: Nay oo’chlay nooma. Chespeka noofa
Na cringko kaynko, a nachoskanya!

HAN: Aye, true, I’ll warrant thou has wish’d this day.
[They shoot, Greedo dies.]
[To bartender:] Pray, goodly Sir, forgive me for the mess.
[Aside:] And whether I shot first, I’ll ne’er confess!

I’m not a fan of Shakespeare. I don’t think I’ve never seen or read any of his plays. Since forever I’d thought that I would find the language or the story boring or something. You know how it is with some things; they rub you the wrong way once and you keep having an unexplainable prejudice against them for years thereafter.

Verily, I stumbled across this work while looking for Expanded Universe publications. At first I was skeptical for the reasons above but it didn’t take me long to discover the brilliance of this here tome. By the way, I read/listened to it in audiobook form, which felt much more like watching the play with the script at hand.

I shall try to be brief. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars not only is a masterpiece of genre mash-up, being something more than the sum of its parts. It made me laugh out loud (for real) with its deliciously tongue-in-cheek yet very serious and perfectly executed Shakespearean interpretation of the story we know and love: for instance, it’s written exactly like the script for something that would be put up in the Globe Theatre, with acts, scenes, entrances, exits, monologues — even Chewbacca and R2-D2 get a few [!!], plus it’s completely written in iamblic pentameter — quite an achievement in itself — and follows various classical drama tropes sublimely. It gave me new insight to the motivations of Han, Luke or Darth Vader; it even made me stop and think why I haven’t read Shakespeare before. In fact, the epilogue by writer Ian Doescher made me realise just to what extent good story-telling has been based on what Joseph Campbell’s introduced and explained in his work
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and how a cross between Star Wars and Shakespeare ultimately makes a lot of sense and can prove thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating.

If you like Star Wars, the English language or simply seeing how far-fetched yet creative ideas can strike gold when done right, I cannot recommend this audiobook enough, although apparently the printed edition comes with some clever and beautiful illustrations (check the cover).

Here’s a little snippet I’m posting here I couldn’t post on Goodreads. Just listen to Vader sharing his inner thoughts and motivations with the audience.

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REVIEW: THE AGES OF GAIA

The Ages Of Gaia: A Biography Of Our Living Earth by James E. Lovelock

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It took me many months to finally finish The Ages of Gaia. I suppose it’s because a lot of it was dry in the way scientific writing is dry to people who are not scientists but wish they could understand what scientists say. Daisyworld, for example, is an interesting supposition and thought experiment on how planetary phenomena influence and are influenced by life on a smaller scale — an idea that today seems typically banal but was novel at the time it was brought forward. I understand it intuitively, but the relevant science flew over my head, along with a great part of what else made this book important, I’m sure.

Where Lovelock’s writing was more approachable, I found it profound and enjoyable to read. I particularly enjoy how some of it could easily be divisive among ecologists and could be used to spark discussion, for instance his careful (and in my humble opinion, very balanced) examination of nuclear power, or the suggestion that anything alive is by definition a polluter to its environment, helping some species thrive and others wither away in a delicate eternal dance (or war, if you prefer that analogy). The chapter “The Contemporary Environment” is a must-read for anyone who’s interested in big-picture ecology and where it fits today… or where it used to fit 20 years ago and more. Even his early approach to geoengineering, long before it was an unwelcome reality, is enlightening to read: “So that’s what the scientists were thinking before the big shots took control of global climatic planning.”

Generally speaking, Mr. Lovelock displays great wisdom on a number of different subjects, the discussion of which is seldom characterised by either lucidity or farsightedness (widesightedness?). However, looking at his views today, which show that in his very old age he’s somewhere between trying to be pragmatic and being resigned, they are even more difficult to digest. Has he gone off his rocker, is he paid or is he just that big of a visionary? Google him and you’ll see why I’m asking these questions in particular.

To end with his hypothesis: will Gaia “do” anything (to the limit of her proactiveness) to preserve life on her surface, much in the same way our body would react to anything which could harm the microscopic (our cells and tissues) as well as the macroscopic life — us? Are we really a terminal threat to life on Earth, or could it be that:

“Looked at from the time scale of our own brief lives, environmental change must seem haphazard, even malign. From the long Gaian view, the evolution of the environment is characterized by periods of stasis punctuated by abrupt and sudden change. The environment has never been so uncomfortable as to threaten the extinction of life on Earth, but during those abrupt changes the resident species suffered catastrophe whose scale was such as to make a total nuclear war seem, by comparison, as trivial as is a summer breeze to a hurricane. We are ourselves a product of one such catastrophe, the extinction of many species 65 million years ago. Could it be that we are unwittingly precipitating another punctuation that will alter our environment to suit our successors?”

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REVIEW: UNBELIEVABLE

Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory by Stacy Horn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There used to be a Parapsychology lab at Duke University. It started working during the Interwar period and closed down sometime in the ’70s. Its figurehead was a man named J.B. Rhine. His goal was to scientifically prove the existence and significance of ESP and psi phenomena. Unbelievable is a journalist-style investigation into the story of that lab, the people who manned and womanned it and its discoveries.

We all know today that no such concrete proof exists. That, however, is not so because there are no cases that could suggest their existence. Rhine’s work included many interesting cases, most featured in this book, that seem to have been truly paranormal, in the sense that they’re still inexplicable in the conventional sense. For example, take the case of Hubert Pearce, who scored so consistently highly in the card tests, the only explanation barring ESP would be fraud — and that is, of course, what critics insist all this amounts to. The math checks out, the guidelines were followed, but the research was scarcely taken seriously. It is understandable, however. The effects of telepathy, ESP or psychokinesis were detected in multiple instances, but no kind of underlying theory was ever properly produced. But wow, imagine what kind of shit that would’ve got.

My opinion is that, ultimately, sadly but inevitably, no kind of evidence would have convinced the critics. Rhine’s life work was a doomed effort, as many people at his side also concluded by the end. How can you recreate the conditions, usually emotionally charged situations together with other highly subjective variables, to consistently produce ESP-related phenomena in the lab? Until we (somehow) change scientific methodology to include what’s left outside the lab, in order to make it more lifelike and less sterile, science will have very little room reserved for ESP and related effects. That, and it needs a theory.

In any case, apart from the fact that this book is a handy reference for the studies that were the foundations for the scientific inquiry into the paranormal, it was a book that tells a story. A story that is still valuable today, because for all that’s changed from the middle of last century, little really has. The paradigm hasn’t shifted as much as other kinds of progress could warrant. But remember, half a century or seventy years really isn’t such a long period of time. Who knows what science, physics and consciousness studies in a few centuries will have to say about the matter.

Got this book at Green Library last year.

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REVIEW: DUNE

Dune by Frank Herbert

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Unique among SF novels… I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” ~Arthur C. Clarke

I’ll begin with what I saw when I first checked what my Goodreads friends had to say about their experience with Dune:

Thank the gods it was Kivayan, my friend Kuba from Poland, who first made it clear to me how important it was that I read Dune, and not just the first book, no, the whole original series, because only then would I be able to witness the genius of Frank Herbert’s grand image (that there was my attempt to express “big picture” in a more fittingly epic way). Thank the gods it was him and not someone else’s opinion which would have left this book under my personal radar, where it had been for many years.

Scratch that. It hadn’t been under my radar. I’d been aware of it since I was little, mainly from video games or perhaps Karina—I just didn’t know exactly what it was about. All this desert, the sandworms… It looked boring. Like something too slow, deep or intricate for me to enjoy. And let me tell you, I wasn’t wrong: if I had dipped my toes in the spicy sand before I’d reached a certain point in my life, I’m confident I wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. If I had to say, I’d place the point in question around the time I started watching Game of Thrones, playing alt-history games and reading books like The World Without Us or The Dark Tower.

I had started being able to enjoy books like Dune, only I couldn’t make the connection in my head and notice the switch. There was nobody to suddenly come up to me and tell me that the famous, apparently super-influential old SF book I’ve always thought I wouldn’t enjoy, actually involves loads of topics I’d find very appealing: religion, feudal politics, anthropology, psychology, history, ecology and many others, creating a narrative about how narratives, and historical narratives in particular, work, which I expect to discover further in the next books. Well, there was someone: it was Kuba. But if it hadn’t been for him and a few other people like Amberclock who told me about Jodorowsky’s Dune or JMG who often mentions Dune in his Archdruid Report posts, I’d still have the impression that the book is a boring classic, that it’s to SF what perhaps Proust is to modern literature: supremely influential and important, but not enjoyable.

Of course, I was wrong. I may be wrong about Proust, too. But that’s the point: we’re talking about preconceptions here.

What surprises me is that, for it’s alleged importance, very few people I talked to about Dune while reading it even knew of it. For a book that supposedly played an important role in the popularisation of ecology as a word as well as a term and for one which is among the all-time bestsellers of the genre, it is forgotten today by most. I’ll go down a path I don’t think it’s fair to go down on, but how many people know of Tatooine and how many of Arrakis, Dune, the Desert Planet that surely inspired it?

Nevertheless, I found its ambience as a contemporary read very comfortable, even if 50 years have passed since it was written. Water as a super-valuable commodity (with all related cultural conventions) feels right and is played perfectly. Arrakis is majestic. Reading about the Fremen was very interesting and convincing, and I thoroughly enjoyed discovering the book’s unknown world by looking up the juicy neologisms in the appendix (every book like this should have one!)

Not all’s perfect with Dune, don’t get me wrong. Its characters can feel one-sided or shallow, even Paul, who at times comes off superhumany… but then, hey, he’s supposed to be the one, isn’t he? The various political actors and the role of spice in all of this aren’t very clear, but you know, it’s one of these books you’ll read again and next time it’ll make more sense.

But the weak points don’t matter. Dune is a classic, period, and I’m happy for once to have truly enjoyed a classic because it’s a classic, not despite the fact. What can I say? Herbert’s foreword to the book reads:

“to the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of “real materials” — to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.”

Good man.

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