Minds are lonely places. We can never share our thoughts and feelings without translating them into words or actions, nor can we ever look into those of others. The best thing we can do, is to assume that the complex workings of our minds are also present in those of others. But it is precisely […]
Although written slightly dry, it’s a gripping read. Not as apocalyptic as 1984 or Brave New World, but definitely in that category, as perhaps this near reality scenario is equally frightening. What’s compelling is the total descent into a world without privacy that happens with reason, albeit the wrong kind of reason, and the fact […]
Exponential storytelling. Slow to start, but after three-quarters of the book, it becomes utterly gripping. There’s a great level of detail and the amount of work put into an assassination is made clear, and works around the central theme of how a professional is less likely to make mistakes rather than a murder committed in […]
If you want a joyful or entertaining book to read, look elsewhere. Lolita is slow to read and the story itself, dare I say it; boring. Yet Lolita consists of prose perfection on a grim subject, and I learned afterwards that the book helped introduce the idea (and policing) of sex abuse of children in […]
This week, a political party in Catalunya, Spain, labelled grid girls as the reducing of woman to lust objects, and announced its intention to ban these girls from the MotoGP and Formula One events that are held in Catalunya each year. In a discussion on Reddit, the common reaction was that the girls have to […]
Does the quality of your life come from the quality of your decisions? Or, does the quality of your decisions come from the quality of your life? At first this seems like a chicken-and-egg kind of dilemma, a search for causality. But the present day mantra lays heavily on the former; decision making is the ultimate solution to […]
When we’re young, we understand that insects eat plants, that small predators eat insects, that big predators eat small predators. We understand that all of life is connected, that tadpoles become frogs, that rain turns to clouds to become rain again. When we’re young, we think about ourselves in unlimited impossibilities, how we’ll become fire fighters, […]
I love Salter’s confidence in writing, his poetic style, his sense of rawness. But the story barely has a narrative, and the story it does tell is generic. Every paragraph filled with a metaphor, which becomes annoying and causes the pace of the book to be sluggish. This book is easy to admire, but for […]