Conundrum
It's a nice continuation. There are some interesting developments of the story, but it doesn't look like there is much character development happening. It's cool to see Paul's sister Alia grown up and acting in the world. Harkonnens are all forgotten and now Tleilaxu are the main opponent.
The book is slooow... Events are unfolding slowly because there isn't really much going on. Interesting things happen from time to time. The book hadn't gripped me.
Odyssey is Stephen Fry's last installment in his Great Mythology series. After retelling of the stories of the gods, heroes, and the siege of Troy, we're getting to the end of the most important mythology in Western culture.
Here, there is a lot of stuff that is outside of Odysseus' toils. We have to slog through a lot of preparatory events that settle his journey in much needed context. However, I had a hard time trying to immerse myself in that. I kept thinking to myself “when we'll finally get to Odysseus?!”
When we finally get to it, it is as expected: beautifully written, told with fitting humor, lively. Narration by Fry himself is superb! Just as vivid and unique as in the previous books.
So, we're following Odysseus and his men through the entire journey and all the problems along the time, up to the time when he finally reaches Ithaca. We also hear about little tidbits about things that happened much later. As a bonus, perhaps.
It may be my least favorite book in the series, but it is still brilliant!
All the books in the series are:
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold
Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures
Troy
Odyssey
This is exactly what I wanted: a proper retelling of the Trojan War, from the actions and situations that lead to it, the war itself, and the conclusion. In all its awesomeness, its heroism, brutality, and divine intervention, Fry's image of the famous epic is a pleasure to read. He creates a very dynamic and lively “movie” in the mind's eye, where the events swoop better than if they were real.
I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Stephen Fry himself. It is amazing!
An outstanding continuation of “Mythos”!
Here, we're going much farther in time, where the focus is not on the gods, but more on people, who — endowed with Prometheus' fire — exhibit a rich intellectual and emotional life. Heroes are... not exactly saints — they are people of flesh and blood. All of them are human, all to human, with their passions, stupidity, vices, impulses, but also strength, boldness, courage, love, and smarts. Heroes are usually tragic heroes as they accomplish great things but their end tends to be as violent as their lives were passionate. They are like an explosion: forceful and short.
We get to know in great details not only the accomplishments but also history and origin of great heroes, such as Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, Jason, Oedipus, Orpheus, and others. Sometimes their paths cross, and some of their paths cross the gods who we met in “Mythos”.
Stephen Fry, as always, literally/figuratively breathed live to all the characters in the book. Not only heroes, but gods and secondary characters have their own, unique — well... — character. Each of them speaks with their own voice, with their state of minds and emotions shining through. Fascinating! I read audiobook narrated by Fry himself.
Highly recommended to... anyone really.
This is a very readable book! Set in 16th-17th century Japan, a place remote in time (and for most, remote in culture), goes through many topics that are universal to our human existence everywhere and always.
Miyamoto Musashi was not a genius, someone born with a talent for swordsmanship and a naturally strong character. He was just a punk, nothing special (except for his looks). The reason why this rōnin had become one of the most famous samurai is his dedication, willingness to grown, to learn from everything, even from looking at how a tea cup was made or how flowers were cut. All that he saw he saw from the perspective of being a samurai, of following the way.
In this way, he is a great example of a Hero. As a topos, Musashi works perfectly. He's an idealized representation of masculinity, dedication, ambition, and intellectual honesty.
I highly recommend this book to everyone who's interested in Japan, samurai, but also to those who are interested in great portrayals of universal motifs.
I read an audiobook narrated by Brian Nishii. He's done a stellar job on this one! Every character is lively and very unique. He animates the characters perfectly with his voice. And, since he was born in Japan, his pronunciation of names is perfect, which further adds to the immersion.
“Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold” is the first book in Stephen Fry's series of retellings of Greek myths and legends. And what better place to start than the very beginning? In Mythos, Fry is leading us through a chronologically constructed world of myths, from the moments where only the primordial (and, in a sense, primal) beings existed, and through their actions, both loving and heinous, the world was constructed and changed. Why are there changing seasons of the year? How can we explain the movement of the Sun? How did bees get their stings? It's all there!
We hear about the appearance of Titans, Olympian gods, and finally human beings. The gods are akin to natural forces, driven by impulses according to their natures. They interact with each other in various ways, but in general, we see that the gods are not acting like loving parents, but are as cruel as they are powerful. Still, there are laws, such as Xenia, the law of hospitality, that even the gods must obey.
The selection of stories is quite interesting as there are many tales we don't normally hear about. Of course, you can expect to hear a newly animated stories of Prometheus, Narcissus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and actions of Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Eros, and all the rest of them. Each story one is very nicely dramatized, with a fitting dialogue with a clear texture of British humour. Yes, some interactions are quite funny... until they become terrifying. Fry has tried to order them in a kind of a chronology to help us follow and make sense of that complex world, even if — as he himself notes at the end of the book — no official chronology exists — or maybe no reliable chronology can be constructed.
From what I read about the book, it looks like Fry is sticking close to the source materials. But, as he says near the end of the book, he takes liberty to refresh the myths with imagination, thus making them alive, in the same way as other writers and poets have been doing for centuries.
I read the audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry himself. And I must say, he is an astounding narrator! He gave every character a unique personality and a mode of expression, and the dialogues are very clear, lively, genuine, and funny.
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Greek mythology, myths in general, comparative religion, sources of European civilizations, but also to those who want to be immersed in a fantastical world of awesome stories.
This is the first book in the series. The other ones are:
Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures
Troy
Odyssey
Just finished listening to Wind and Truth audiobook, narrated by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer, which was nearly 63 hours long.
I took my time with this book, nearly 2 months, even though it is a light read. The beginning quartum was very slow. Not only in terms of action, which was extremely scarce, but also in terms of mental life of characters. There simply wasn't much going on. It was mostly a setting up of the stage in preparation for the story proper.
Once the main story got off the ground, I found myself more and more drawn to the book. I had problems putting the book down. I wanted to stay with the story. And this tells something about the book, as because it is a fifth installment, the world is pretty familiar hence not as fascinating. On the other hand, we have such depth of characters made throughout all the five books that it more than compensate for the not-so-novel worldbuilding.
The world itself has moved and changed a lot. We learn about some important secrets that were hidden from us until now. The characters really mature in this one. They are full of nuance, even the “bad guys”, which I appreciate a lot.
Lastly, Michael Kramer is an amazing narrator: his skill of bringing various characters to life and giving them unique personalities is outstanding!
James Nestor presents interesting results of how breath affects our health, our mental functioning, and our life through engaging narratives: his own personal struggles with breathing and experiments, stories of researchers who studied breath more rigorously, and through anecdotes of pulmonauts — people who discovered or learned about breathing techniques and experimented on themselves.
Because of the presentation, the book is very digestable. It's relaxing and engaging to read about the effects of breathing patterns in this way. There are some exercises provided at the end of the book, so we can not only hear about it but practice it and find out for ourselves how they affect us.
I would recommend this book to those interested in breath, health, performance, and in general to everyone with a curious and open mind.
“No Longer Human” (also “A Shameful Life” or “A Failed Human”) is a short but famous novel by Osamu Dazai. The books is written from the perspective of a young man — Yōzō — who was always different in a very odd way. Nothing really “made him” like that. It seems he was born an odd human. As a child and a teen he always played the fool, but he was conscious of his doing, motives, or forces that pushed him to do act in such ways — never being honest to the people he was close to nor to strangers. We get a striking dissonance when we notice that he is being totally honest with us, though. He's being honest with us to the utmost.
Later in life, as a student, he starts living a decadent life: drinking, having fun, having sex with prostitutes and various girls. All his actions directed at simple hedonistic activities, which could bring him some pleasure but never happiness.
When reading the book, I had a strong impression that if he was a character in some other story, not the main character, but just yet another character, we would be disgusted by him: a decadent youth, selfish, not caring about anyone in his life, even about those we care so much about him and think him “a good man at heart”. We would despise him. But here, we look at the world through his eyes, we hear his thoughts. Somehow, we understand his plight. We feel a weird mix of disgust and compassion for the tragedy of Yōzō's life.
This is not an entirely new concept. Near the end of the book I couldn't help but notice a strong influence of Russian authors. The novel reads somewhat similarly to “Crime and Punishment” and “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and similar to “Morphine” by Mihail Bulgakov. Yōzō even mentions Dostoevsky in the novel himself.
It is definitely an emotionally heavy and somewhat perplexing work.
*) I read the old translation by Donald Keene, the audio book was narrated by David Shih.
Schopenhauer's “The World as Will and Representation” is a momentous work. It initiated the deep and serious reflection on the nature of life that concludes in its pessimistic evaluation — it would be better life never have been. This thought stems directly from the metaphysical meaning of the world we live in, and — according to Kant and Schopenhauer — we live in the world as constructed by our peculiar modes of perception, thinking, and cognition in general — the world as representation. This is the single thought that Schopenhauer tries to convey in various ways: reality is twofold, it is perceived from the outside as composed of distinct objects, but it is also felt from within as will (incessant striving).
The philosopher urges us to first read his doctoral thesis “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason”. There, he goes into much detail into the most basic and general forms of cognition such that each thing (thought, event, etc.) are grounded in other things — with the latter being the reason for the former. And indeed, having read it before going into WWR allowed me to properly understand a lot of the things Schopenhauer talked about here. I think it would be very difficult otherwise.
Schopenhauer presents his approach with regard to epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. The ethics part is particularly interesting, since it is at odds with most of the thinking in this domain we come across reading other philosophers.
I do have some criticisms or confusions, though. It seemed like the concept of Platonic Idea was introduced somewhat unnecessarily, and it complicated the system and introduced many problems on its own. For example, we have to somehow accept that Ideas exist outside of time, hence even though many objects occupy the same space at different times, the corresponding Ideas “coexist” (for example, species or individual humans), even though Idea is only ever an object for a (pure) subject.
Another example is the problem of coexistence of many different Ideas, even though we learned that it's time and space that is the principium individuationis that makes multiplicity possible. This point is important, because the reason why Schopenhauer talks about “the will” instead of “many wills” is precisely that will is not in time and space. Yet, somehow this does not apply to Ideas... There are no clear answers to these puzzles in the first volume.
Schopenhauer criticizes Kant for thinking of the thing-in-itself (the unknowable noumenon) as some type of an object, because Kant says that it causes our perceptions. However, Schopenhauer commits analogous blunders, because he claims that the will is constant striving (but there must be time for striving to even make sense, and there must be something to strive for), that the fundamental nature of an individual (the intelligible character) is a unitary act of will (but act is a temporal concept). It does seem like for Schopenhauer will also has some important causal powers (even if not strictly in the same exact sense as he explained in his doctoral thesis on the principle of sufficient reason).
It is an important work. Very thought provoking, moving. It jump-started philosophical pessimism as a philosophical school of thought. There is much to be learned. And the book is very readable, which makes reading not a struggle but a joy.
PS. I'm reviewing the Cambridge edition published in 2010, translated by Norman, Welchman, and Janaway.
This is easily on of the worst books I have ever tried to read. The main character's actions are absurd, stupid, and seem arbitrary. There is no way to actually get in touch with the character. The book doesn't read like a journey, where there is some progression or character development. The main character just randomly stumbles upon a very weird situation, confusingly tosses around, nothing is got from all of this, and then she goes to the next disconnected scene.
At the beginning of the book a lot of trendy social issues are being raised extremely briefly for no apparent reason, because they're immediately discarded. And there is a lot of things like that: something disconnected happens... and we go to the next scene.
I think the author might have had an idea to write a book that would show that people have no free will or agency in what's going on. Maybe. But the result is bad and uninteresting.
I started reading at the end of September of 2022. Now it's the beginning of 2024. I read 40% of the book. Reading it was like a chore, like something I thought I had to do to write an honest review. Life is too short to waste on things like that...
Disclaimer: I have received a copy of the book for free from the author.
It is a good book. The long awaited finale to Khraen's journey to find himself and figure out who he was, who he is, and most importantly, who he wants to be.
The entire trilogy did a great job at not giving the main character too much power, which happens frequently in fantasy books where magic and demons are as common and wind. However, I felt like there were too many repeating thoughts. The main character constantly worrying about what's in the shards, constantly worrying about the motivations of whom he considered his loved ones or closest friends. It was very repetitive.
But overall, I enjoyed reading the book. And I enjoyed reading The Obsidian Path.
This is a good overview of a particular strand of philosophical pessimism — antinatalism, which the author calls rejectionism. He goes through the history of thinkers and ideologies (philosophical, religious) that are to various degrees critical of existence. In certain cases, they condemn life, and in the modern format, they cast judgment on procreation — the very source of existence.
The author makes good observations with respect to the problem of dealing with existence. He focuses on this issue a lot. A particular way of approaching the problem of life — non-procreation — becomes prominent starting with Zapffe and culminating in Benatar. For the author, this particular way of rejecting existence is the best one, as it applies not to the one who's already struggling with existence (we, the living), but it's about preventing existence itself.
He ends with a chapter, where his own voice takes center stage, where he discusses a potential for building communities focusing on popularizing and practicing morally grounded abstention from procreation as the surest way to prevent the suffering of future generations.
I'm giving it only 4/5, because there are many editing errors virtually on every page, some important thinkers are omitted (most notably, Julio Cabrera), and because the author himself could have contributed more of his own philosophical thinking into the book. But I would recommend it to anyone interested in antinatalism, the critique of procreation of population ethics, and philosophical pessimism in general.
A magnificent book! We often read books going through the various ideas of this or that philosopher, but it is very rare to have the most important arguments the philosopher in question made be presented in a such an explicit, clear, and thorough way. We get so much more than just learning what Kant thought about certain difficult issues. We get to know why. We learn how we argued for these bold claims. Reading the book gave me so many joys of understanding. I cannot recommend it enough!
What an amazing book! Such a creative idea to have minds essentially stolen from people (children) to be used as super advanced computers to be used by mafias, military, and corporations. Somewhat gruesome because of this, but damn!
The characters are varied and have their own unique voices, styles of thinking. This really is a character driven story.
Michael R. Fletcher is easily one of the most creative and interesting fantasy and sci-fi writers of our generation.
Merged review:
What an amazing book! Such a creative idea to have minds essentially stolen from people (children) to be used as super advanced computers to be used by mafias, military, and corporations. Somewhat gruesome because of this, but damn!
The characters are varied and have their own unique voices, styles of thinking. This really is a character driven story.
Michael R. Fletcher is easily one of the most creative and interesting fantasy and sci-fi writers of our generation.
This was a very enjoyable read. The narration is very smooth. The dialogs don't feel stiff or forced, but are natural. This is not a character-driven story, since the characters are put into an unknown situation and the movements of politics and war push them through the story. But it is also not entirely a world-driven story, because the book focuses a lot on the characters, having the world be only the stage for them.
The ending is very touching.
Sometimes characters do a lot of exposition to explain to the reader how some things work. This could have been handled in a better way.
This is... an interesting book. It's not interesting due to the power of the arguments, but due to what the reader gets out of critically reading it. A critical reader will likely find various particular ways in which Kastrup's arguments fail — sometimes he reaches too far, sometimes he uses a specific (not generally accepted) interpretation of scientific results, etc.
The difficulty for the reader is in the book's reliance on a lot of fields of study — philosophy of mind (regarding the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness/meta-cognition), psychiatry (dissociative identity disorder), neuroscience, quantum physics (non-locality, the problem of observation). Kastrup's presentation of snippets from these fields is biased and his interpretation of results is tendentious. A reader not familiar with disagreements and debates within these fields is lead to believe that Katrup's presentation is the common view, the consensus. It is not so. For example, the author repeats the idea that [human] observation leads to a “collapse” of a “quantum wave function”, and this results in reality actualizing a particular state of the world (at least in a given small region). This is definitely not an accepted view as “observation” and “observer” in physics do not mean a human attached in a given point in space-time looking at something, it's just one system sending a signal (electromagnetic field, say) and receiving back some data (e.g. noticing how the electromagnetic field changes). A casual reader may not realize this.
One good thing about the book is Kastrup's anticipation of counter arguments that could be given to some of his ideas and addressing them. However, they are addressed in an unsatisfactory manner.
The book should have been better edited. There really was no point in repeating the same things (from introductions to the essays) over and over again.
To reiterate, the value in the book is not in how good the arguments are and how it leads to the conclusion, rather, the value is in the reader having an opportunity to critically evaluate bad arguments and in learning how these arguments fail.
Waiting for Godot is a perfectly executed story. The place is utterly irrelevant. The barren crossroads with only a tree. The entirety of action takes place between the characters.
The atmosphere is very absurd, but hints towards nihilistic. Why do the main characters wait for the mysterious man? Is he really someone who can “save” them or is this just a mirage so they can hope there is some tomorrow, something to do tomorrow, something to go on?
I listened to the audio book produced by Naxos. The delivery by the actors is superb!