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.…

This compilation of horror stories by Junji Ito was pretty good. I don’t have much thoughts on it though, so I’ll just cover one idea that was pretty interesting. Gaslighting is one of the scariest things in any horror movie; the protagonist sees a ghost, or a serial killer, and everyone around them tells them they are imagining things. It’s so bad, because that is the moment the main character realizes they are truly alone in whatever situation they are trapped in. Ito made good use of that in one story, where a girl’s family spies on her out of the fear that she brings guys into her room, and…

“This book is basically the Ancient Greek equivalence of a reddit thread.” That is the first thing I thought after I finished The Symposium by Plato, because that is probably the most entertaining book I’ve read in a long time. It wasn’t just funny; it was absolutely OUTRAGEOUS.  Gender roles in history is a topic I am really interested in, and The Symposium provides a deep dive into what Greeks thought about sex and gender. The first thing I want to point out is that there is no way people still think that Akhilleus and Patroklos from the Iliad were hetero-bro-buddies. If Plato is out here calling them lovers, then…

I have heard of this book by Aldous Huxley for a long time, but I decided to pick it up now to see what it’s about. Honestly, it feels like a more toned down and goofy version of 1984. Most of the time while reading I had no idea what the plot of Brave New World was. It just felt like the characters doing things, and I didn’t feel like I learned much about methods of government control that 1984 didn’t already teach me. Also everything having to do with kids in Brave New World was really freaky, and I have no idea what point Huxley was trying to make…

Two days ago, I went to the bookstore at our local mall. I headed right past the Tik-Tok books section right to the clearance. Usually, there’s nothing that I’m interested in: just printed webtoons, weirdly translated Epics, and random beach reads. But what I found that day was absolute gold. The first volume of the Old Guard comic just for five bucks. The amazon price is listed at $14. Needless to say, I bought it. I mean, the comics section of my shelf is seriously lagging behind the history, science, fiction, and classics sections.  The comics, both volumes, for the Old Guard are really good. Also, there’s just something so…

I randomly decided to pick this book by Hernan Diaz up after seeing on the display of bookstores multiple times. I had no idea what it was about before reading other than the fact that that it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And honestly? I don’t think I really get the book. I followed the book when it was talking about the lives of the characters; reading about their personalities, interests, and romances was actually pretty interesting. But then the book would start yapping about economics, or have the strange unrelated but actually related lines, and I would lose track of what I was reading. I’m sure it won…

Horror is not a genre that I usually read, but Junji Ito’s graphic novels never disappoint. This time, I randomly picked up Uzumaki from the library, and it was certainly a peculiar read. Each chapter is set in the same town with the same characters, but with a different horrific twist on the same motif: a spiral. The town and its residents undergo a slow descent into madness over the course of the volume.  The part I personally found scary was the very beginning. Something about the ceramics dude becoming obsessed with spirals and then becoming one was so unsettling, especially because this was the first strange thing to happen…

This book by R.F. Kuang was a wild ride. I know that most of the internet loved Babel, but I definitely had some problems with it. This was not my first book by R.F. Kuang; I have read Yellowface, and I thought that was great! It was the perfect amount of uncomfortable truth and funny. But Babel was something else entirely. First, let me talk about the good things.  I love reading about translating. Translation is an art: bringing the original meaning across the barrier of language without polluting it with your own biases. Unfortunately, humans are inherently biased, and every translation is bound to have it’s meaning influenced by the translator. When…

It has been a long time since I have started a fantasy series. I decided to pick up Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings because I heard from a Youtube book review that it was unlike anything written before. I read it, and thought it was a mostly alright read.  Kaladin’s story was by far the most interesting out of the three different characters the story follows. It took some time to perceive him as an interesting character, because there were so many changing perspectives at the beginning that were difficult to follow. But once I understood who Kaladin was, I was invested in his struggles and goal to keep his…