K.A. Ashcomb's Blog, page 30

Book Review: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson

I’m not sure what to make out of this book. It gives a bleak picture of humans, showing how competition, self-serving motives, fallacies, storytelling, and blindness affect our behavior and relationships with others, not in a good way. But, I’m willing to accept that, after all, we are one species who have invented weapons capable of destroying most of the planet, and here we are, standing ever so close to midnight of the doomsday clock. So that’s not the issue I have with the book. They are rig...

Short Story: The Creation

I’m trapped here in this house, reminded of my bodily deformity by the constant ache in my back. I cannot escape. I have just the tormenting thoughts that follow me around like a demon who reminds me of my worthlessness. I write to you begging to brighten my day, but I have no you to write—just me and myself as my miserable company.

When I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I have withered into this creature of the night. Yet I seek no blood to feel alive. I consume myself with every br...

Short Story: Omens

There in the distance, an owl called three times. She listened to its cries. It was the high-pitched sound of an Eurasian pygmy owl. She frowned. There was nothing special about an owl’s call this time at the night or the season for the matter, but she had been seeing omens all day. The first one was the mouse bones in the garden. She had ignored the sign then. But now, this and the four others she had seen throughout the day made sure she couldn’t keep ignoring what the omens tried to tell her....

Book Review: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

I don’t know how to start the review. There’s so much I want to say, but I fear I have nothing coherent to tell. I could just leave the review to two statements: ‘wow’ and ‘that this is something everyone should read.’ But I want to babble on, so bear with me. Okay, the gist of the story is that David Graeber argues debt to be a cornerstone of our economy and civilizations for a long time. Of course, it’s up to debate what kind of cornerstone it has been. Good or bad? Even so, it has been an int...

Book Review: The Shape of a Life: One Mathematician’s Search for the Universe’s Hidden Geometry by Shing-Tung Yau

No lifetime is as straightforward as we might think. Listening to Shing-Tung Yau’s path to becoming a mathematician made me think about how sometimes randomness rules our world. Sometimes we forget how easily something else might have happened, and we would be on a different path. Yet, despite all that worked against Shing-Tung Yau, he became a mathematician and field medalist. But I think it is not all because of some random chance. It’s the dedication and hard work he was willing to put into h...

Daybook: September, here we come

This is a perfect day to start my daybook and start chatting about what is going on in my life as a writer and human being. Mostly I’m starting this because now I have time to do this as I broke my ankle, and I’m waiting for my surgery. Before this, I was running around, trying to boulder outdoors full-time, fix my first book and write my fourth book, and just started training as an OT at a prison hospital. So you can imagine what load I put on my body. Only sleeping four to five hours a night. ...

Book Review: The Art of Living: Peace and Freedom in the Here and Now by Thich Nhat Hanh

I find this to be one of those books you can’t review. Not in a traditional sense. Or at least, I can’t. Most of the time, books like this come along when you need them, as was the case with me. There is nothing mystical about it. It’s just how our minds work. I have struggled with being too immersed in everything and not finding peace and stillness. I didn’t find it in the book either. It was a reminder of things I already knew about time, the imperativeness of things, and how we play tricks on...

Book Review: The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

I have never really pondered how our universe will end, when, and if. Instead, I have always been more interested in how everything came to be. But that has been silly of me, as the end is as revealing as the beginning. Now I, every now and then, wonder that there is no rule in place that the universe has to trot on. That everything could end just like that. And I find it weirdly solacing. Blip and all this will cease to be.

This is a beautiful book with funny footnotes (with references to Hi...

Book Review: The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew by Alan Lightman

I’m not sure if I can review this book. Not in a proper sense. As I read it, my mind kept wandering on things, being only able to pick up a thought here and there. It was like a stream-of-consciousness meeting another. The book is composed of several essays published before. They handle subjects like religion, limits of our knowledge, art, symmetry, and our need for meaning. The book asks a question: what if this is just an accidental universe?

Yet here we are, governed by the laws of nature,...

Short Story: Autumn Breeze

It’s the strong, cold wind of the Autumn, making the flock of birds swoop over me. I press my feet deeper on the grass as I lay watching the sky. The dark silhouettes remind me of how everything changes, how the land has to freeze and they to leave. But for now, they linger here, as do I. They hear the ocean call to take them to foreign lands. And I wonder if I’m a bird. I hear the call, too. It tells me to let the waters take me. Let me drift along the waves, the wind keeping me up high. I don’...