K.A. Ashcomb's Blog, page 33

Free Books

Hello friends and fellow readers My books are free for the days to come. They are satirical fantasy novels about the glory and failings of being a human. You know how weird it is to trot through this bizarre thing we call existing. You can seize them on Amazon:

Worth of Luck is a wry, action-packed, humorous fantasy novel set in Leporidae Lop. It is a satire of politics, friendship, and injustice. May contain carrots.Penny for Your Soul is an economic and political satire with human...

Book review: Third Natures: How What You Do Shapes Who You Are by Brian Little

Brian Little goes over here the basic concepts of the big five personality trades and how they influence our lives. He also insists it is our activities that define us, making our personality more flexible than it is often thought. So all this makes it important how we spend our time and what we choose. That is the book in a nutshell. Suppose you are interested in reading about the big five personality trades, in that case, I recommend reading Brian Little’s Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Pe...

Book Review: The Wisdom of Life by Arthur Schopenhauer

I fear I read this book wrong because I utterly detest it. Yet I see everyone praise its wisdom and profoundness. For me, it felt elitist and removed from the world. It generalized masses and saw their short lives as brutish and joyless. Not that he spared kindness for the upper-classes who meander their life away. So here we are, reading the works of a man who sits in his chamber and spews out his hatred towards the world, customs, and man himself. I searched for some understanding, some though...

Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I got lost in this book. I could have kept reading it forever. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words were like a drop of sanity in the chaos where we waste our world for the hunger for more. Her prose is beautiful. Her observations of passion and concern and our relationship with nature were wise. She tells a story of how to appreciate nature and how to look for meaning and importance beyond and with science. She speaks of her Potawatomi heritage and their teachings. Her own history as a botanist, human b...

Character Sheet: Elvira

Hi!

Sorry for not posting a review yesterday or that I haven’t been posting my short stories lately. Things have gotten too hectic with me, and I have struggled to read and write anything extra. Thusly, I have prioritized finishing my fourth book. The first draft is now done, and I have moved on to write the character and setting sheets. So here’s a sneak peek of what is to come. Elvira is just a minor character, mentioned in passing, but as I started to flesh her out, I knew I’ll need to wri...

Book Review: It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

A satire about the rise of a charismatic leader, Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, vowing to restore America’s prosperity and greatness under the economic and political turmoil. You only have to promise money and glory and package them into catchy slogans, and fascism sneaks into the country with its Minute Men, concentration camps, and censored press. Sinclair Lewis shows that such a thing can happen in America as well. It’s so easy to think that our societies are so secure that nothing so horrific can...

Book Review: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

This book is about Jennifer Doudna, the birth of CRISPR technology, and gene editing. The groundwork for why we got Covid tests and vaccines so fast. The road to using CRISPR technology has been rocky. It includes academic jealousy, race to be the one to get the merit, and backstabbing to obtain patents and make a fortune out of the emerging technology. Goes to show how silly we humans are and how murky the areas of inventions are when cooperating with others. You can’t make such a huge thing wi...

Book Review: Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck

When you step into something so familiar, like that memory of your childhood where every possible weird thing is true, you get this sense as you have escaped back and time has stopped moving on. It is like this late summer day when the sun is still up, and there is this soft golden light just for a moment before it’s gone. I felt like that when reading Jagannath. It was like stepping into my childhood through these familiar, bizarre stories. Maybe it is because so many of them have this folk sto...

Book Review: The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments by Lynne Kelly

After reading this book, I wonder if we nowadays take for granted fast access to knowledge? It is always there to be grasped, and there is no need to memorize and internalize it. It feels so. But as Lynne Kelly points out in the book, keeping the shared knowledge alive about the environment and the history of the people has not always been so straightforward. There had to be memory techniques and devices to store the vital information to be passed on to the next generations. Such techniques had ...

Being Peace by Thich Nhat Hanh

The past me would have been skeptical about the benefits of simply breathing and being in the present moment if I hadn’t started meditating every day a few years ago and seen firsthand that the studies praising the practice of mindfulness are spot on. Yet, even when I say this and say such a thing as simply, there’s nothing easy about being present to breathe in and out. Lately, my mind has been wandering around in novelty of all that is going on, and my breath has gotten shorter and shallower. ...