K.A. Ashcomb's Blog, page 51

Book Review: Welcome To The Monkey House / Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What should I say? Collections are tricky. Some stories and thought pieces will make you smile, others make you want to skip ahead. And this book is a combination of two previous collection books. One about Vonnegut’s short stories and another about his thought pieces. There were places where I was in love, like with the futuristic government with equalizing all the citizens alike with handicaps. The skinny had to wear weights, the intelligent had their heads filled with random noises to...

Short Story: Family Tree

She rocked back and forth, feeling the morning dew on her knees. She could hear her mother screaming indoors, but she sang to drown out the noise and played with the white elephant toy. The toy looked back with its button eyes as she made it dance on the grass. Soon its feet were wet too like hers were. The shouting had gotten louder. She jumped up and ran around the yard, making the elephant fly, zigzagging between the flower beds her mother had made. They shined with bright yellow, red,...

Book Review: Torture by Edward Peters

We use the word torture broadly to mean to make others suffer; this book is making a case about legal torture as it was initially used as a legitimate way to get information out of citizens or more like those who weren’t considered as free people, i.e., slaves and foreigners. The book goes over the history of the lawful use of torture and how it has changed until the Algerian War of Independence. Where both sides, the French Armed Forces and the opposing Algerian National Liberation Front,...

Book Review: Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

There is so much to concentrate on reviewing this book. Sacks telling the medical side of hallucinations, the personal side, his and the patients’, the history of it, the different conditions, everything, but what piqued my interest was their relation to the imagination, arts, and creativity. Sacks repeatedly note that these hallucinations might have impacted our cultural imagery from the moire patterns on our art to horrible monsters seen between the wake and sleep as Edgar Allan Poe did....

Short story: Borrower

Hi everyone!

I have been reading lately about growing old and how to stay content and how to find meaning to life (Gerontology studies.) I wrote this because of that. How memories of the life we have lived will carry us on when we are old, but also how they can destroy our happiness, if we can’t let go and accept both the good and bad we have gone through. Human existence is perplexing for sure, but sometimes I wonder do we make it more complicated than it has to be?

Borrower

There are those...

Book Review: The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

Oh, a book about bookshops, now we are going to get stuck in a nesting doll paradox of the book about bookshops in a bookshop in a bookshop in a bookshop. Okay, I stop. This book is about Shaun Bythell, the owner of a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, and his cynical accounts into his diary about the people who visit, about the book business as a whole, about his employees, and everything that happens in a bookshop. It also is structured with quotes from George Orwell and his...

Book Review: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Let’s start by confessing the fact that I had a weird obsession with octopuses. It is because they are closest to an alien life we can get to with their copper blood, suckers, soft bodies, and escape artist minds. They can perceive the world beyond their tanks, separate humans from each other, show dislike towards us with jets of water and cause a massive amount of damage while trying to escape or while trying to shut off the lights, who can blame them? The only downside of octopuses I have...

Short Story: Invaded

It started gradually without me knowing what was going on. At first, it was a weird hand twitch, then my legs stopped listening to me and went their own ways. I would have gone to see a doctor if my legs would have taken me, but they didn’t. I phoned one, but we never met. Also, I’m sure the woman at the other end of the line didn’t believe a word I said. She refused to see me outside of the hospital and recommended me a mental health hotline number. She was kind of right; this was a mental...

Book Review: The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells

This was the first Martha Wells book I have ever read, and I’m convinced. The prose is excellent; the characters are compelling; the setting is gripping; I enjoyed every bit from end to finish. How should I describe the book? It is like this who done it mystery set in the Victorian era world where magic is common but regulated; Where necromancy is forbidden.

But that is too restrictive. This is also a story about revenge and setting wrong to right. Often such stories are poorly made, making...

Short Story: A Passing Thought

How can you calculate the value of human life? If you ask a mother, they would say priceless. Okay, some might say something else, but bet you all my savings their kids would say, “Back at you, lady.” Then if you ask from a politician, they might ask what age. A child costs money until they get a job and start providing meaning and paying back their education, healthcare, and other forms of pampering. But then again, children are the hope, at least if you ask their parents. Adult workers,...