Another R.F. Kuang book, another conundrum. I was expecting another Babel going into this, but Katabasis was most definitely not. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. Well, let’s get started! The first half of the book was pretty awful. Every second Alice and Peter spent in hell bickering with each other was so incredibly annoying; the writing felt very cringey and juvenile in comparison with the plot, which was supposed to be complex. For an example, I never want to hear the words “pizza anus” ever. It’s not funny or clever. It sounds stupid. It was little situations and mentions like these that made me…

This biography by Andrea Elliot was very impactful. It follows Dasani, a homeless African American girl who lives in New York City, throughout her childhood. Her story is representative of a completely different America those under the poverty line experience, and it is terrifying. The research Elliot did was remarkable to me; she gives the reader so much information about Dasani and her family. And getting to know Dasani through this book left me with so many confusing feelings. Dasani was around the same age as me by the end of the book, and we live in the same country. But that is where the similarities end. Her resilience comes…

When it comes to books popular on the internet, I always wonder whether the appeal is due to it having marketable tropes or it genuinely trying to be a work of art. For this novel by Heather Fawgett, I still can’t really place my finger on which one. On the former’s side, this book does tick a lot of boxes for the viral fantasy book: an academic who loves books, enemies to lovers storyline, and of course, faeries. Maybe it is a carefully curated product, but I can’t really say that because of the latter. There is something about this novel that doesn’t feel soulless, and gives me the impression this…

The formal systems have officially gotten a bit too complicated for me in this chapter. The system that finds prime numbers was very difficult to understand, and I didn’t understand its connection to negative space. But the concept of negative space on its own was fascinating. Meaningful images can appear as both the figure and background (the negative space) of Escher’s pieces, like shown in this image: This technique creates mesmerizing artwork. But the real A-ha moment for me was connecting the idea of negative space with Bach’s polyphonic music. When I play Bach’s inventions, the right hand and left hand both are the melody; both the figure (the right…

This chapter was a little bit more complex for me to understand; reading it again when I am older will definitely give me new insights. A main theme of GEB Hofstadter discussed in the introduction was that meaningful knowledge can be drawn out of meaningless constructs. For an example, the pq- formal system by itself is meaningless symbols with rules attached.  – – p – – – q – – – – –  But when the p is assigned the meaning plus, the q is assigned the meaning equals, and each dash represents a unit, the meaning suddenly becomes clear. 2 plus 3 equals 5.  A literary connection I made when…

Let’s keep this short. This memoir was terrifying. It’s difficult to imagine going through something so horrible and being forced to face a deeply flawed system that favors perpetrators. I’m still in shock how this memoir proves how little control women have over their own lives. The world should read and acknowledge the fact that one in five women go through this. Everyone should know the name of the author. Chanel Miller. 

This is a historical fantasy novel by Shelley Parker-Chan, about a girl who assumes her dead brother’s identity and attempts to also take his fate of greatness. I will say that this book was pretty entertaining and had some good ideas. However, there were definitely some things that took away from the overall effect the author was going for.  I just couldn’t ignore some of the plot holes in this book. In the beginning, the main character was a child living through a famine. As a girl, she had no hope for her future, and her brother and father made sure of that. Basically, when her brother was a baby,…

This chapter begins with the MU puzzle, which is meant to represent deriving theorems from a set a rules. Basically, the goal is to produce MU from MI.  Rule #1: If a string ends in “I”, you can add a “U” to the end. For example, “MI” can become “MIU”.  Rule #2: If a string starts with “M” (i.e., is of the form “Mx”), you can double the portion of the string after the “M”. For example, “MI” can become “MII”.  Rule #3: If a string contains “III”, you can replace it with “U”. For example, “MIIII” can become “MUI” or “MIU”.  Rule #4: If a string contains “UU”, you can remove it. For example, “MUU”…

Immediately upon starting Göodel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, I knew this was going to be a goliath of a book to finish. For this reason, I have decided to upload my thoughts in parts.  What I have gleaned from the introduction is that this book is going to be an examination of knowledge from the perspectives of mathematics (logic), infinite artwork, and music.  The Canon is a form of music in which the stated theme is repeated in many different ways; I modeled an example given in the book using Online Sequencer: https://onlinesequencer.net/4807786  The tune of Good King Wenceslas is the stated theme, found…

My sources for book recommendations all seemed to love this book, but I absolutely did not get the hype when reading it. However, some of my own preferences with the genre may play a role with my perception of Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. First of all, I am a sucker for stories about a person and their cat. Donut’s full name (Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk) and character was probably the only thing that made me laugh in this entire book. Other than that, I don’t get the humor at all. There’s nothing worse than a comedy book that’s not funny, because then it just becomes boring.…