K.A. Ashcomb's Blog, page 24

Book Review: The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are by Alva Noë

Alva Noë argues that art and philosophy elevate us, that they set us free from biology in a sense. The author draws examples of dance, poetry, and philosophy and how they interplay with who we are, what we do, and how we do things. Dance becomes more when you add a choreography to it. It is an interplay with the dancer, composer, and the watcher. I think you could sum up Alva Noë’s argument with that why he proposes that art and philosophy set us free and make us who we are. He also writes that ...

Book Review: No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

No Gods, No Monsters is an existential novel that gives the reader a world with mythological monsters. Everything starts to unravel for the reader when Laina’s brother is murdered by the police, but that’s not the whole truth. There is more. There’s Rebecca, there’s Lincoln, there’s a dragon, a child, and dead fathers, and ghosts, and secret societies. All played together, laying out a mystery. The book starts quoting the Unbearable Lightness of Being like this holy scripture, explaining what it...

Book Review: 1984: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Contains spoilers

I kept wondering if I should write this review or not. This book is analyzed to the bone. But the book didn’t leave me alone. I kept playing back to the time when I first read it and comparing what I think about it now. There is this disjoint between the past and present, more so because I realized that this type of dystopia has been revisited so many times and better after Orwell that this reading experience couldn’t compare to the first time’s aha-revelation. 1984 is not a...

Book Review: The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu

A cozy occult mystery set in Edinburgh. Ropa is a magician who sees the dead and can coax them back to their afterlife. She is fifteen years old and takes care of her grandma and kid sister. She is gotten used to taking care of herself and her family by any means necessary in a dystopian future where you can’t trust the coppers, and the city has gone to shitters. One day, she is coming home from a gig, and a ghost pleads for her to help her lost boy. She refuses at first, but her grandmother con...

Book Review: The Infinite Miles by Hannah Fergesen

Sometimes, a book comes along that you didn’t know you needed. This was just that. I gulped this book down, unable to stay away. Now, I’m trying to figure out why. Maybe it was the beautiful, haunting prose that pulled me into the story, or perhaps it was the flawed characters that felt ever so familiar, or it could be the concept that felt fresh yet experienced, or all above. Whatever the reason was, I felt a twinge of nostalgia like I had lived through the story before, not as a reader but as ...

Book Review: Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich

There is something captivating about death and dying. It is this final mystery we can’t prove. It is the atonement of our life and what has been left behind. To us, it means to be put in a casket and lowered on the ground to preserve or to rot or to be consumed by the flames and burned into ashes. But to animals, it is part of the cycle of nature. A beetle births its offspring inside a mouse’s corpse, a vulture consumes the carcass left behind, and decay brings forth life. That’s nature for you....

Book Review: All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell

The awful truth is that we all are going to die, even how masked the event is from our society. It would be fun to cheat death and trot around here for the eternity to come as young as we like. But even as I watch the arms that are now strong, I can see the effects of my cells giving out and my flesh not being as young as it was eighteen years ago. And here is this book that takes the veil away from dying, looking into all of those who deal with death in our societies. The undertakers, the midwi...

Short Story: Taken By Them

I have been watching the mountains for three days now through the cabin windows. I know I should be moving already. The walls won’t keep me safe any longer. Yet, I’m frozen inside the darkness. I pretend that they can’t get me here, that the little food I have left will last longer than it does. I crawl back to where I have made a makeshift bed, clutching my rifle as I go. It was a good thing that my father was a gun-loving nut. I didn’t think so when he was alive, when everyone else, for that m...

Book Review: The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

The first bird you see in the new year sets the tone for the rest of the year. Margaret Renkl hoped for a crow, and I got a Jackdaw. I had to check what they symbolize: death and new arrivals, or we could consider their natural tendencies: intelligence, sociability, curiousness, and ingenuity. I don’t know what that should mean for the year to come, but I love watching Jackdaws play on the roof next building over. They love to glide down the snow-covered roof and then hobble back to the top and ...

Book Review: Weyward by Emilia Hart

I am a Weyward, and wild inside.

What a beautiful book. I couldn’t put this down. I had to go on reading and reading, and then when I was done, I wished I could go on. This is a book about three generations of women who are tied to nature, healing, and witchcraft. There is Kate, who is fleeing her abusive boyfriend in 2019—Altha, who is trialed for witchcraft in 1619—Violet, who’s trapped in her family home, forbidden to be who she is and love nature as she does in 1942. All of them are woven...