Month: June 2026

Eldest

Despite killing a major character and disappearing another within the first ten pages, Eldest by Christopher Paolini is much slower than its predecessor Eragon. No more do paragraphs summarize weeks worth of events. The book occasionally, however, forces odd topics into character conversations. I can almost hear Paolini saying, “I need these characters to talk about this thing now.”

Another enhancement is that Eldest has multiple narrators. Eragon and his adopted brother Roran are the primary narrators. Nasuada, the leader of the Varden resistance, also narrates a couple chapters, but it feels random, like she’s a narrator only because Paolini found no other way to introduce important characters and concepts. I also had the feeling that Roran was a narrator to slow the book down and prevent Eragon from plowing through the plot as he had in the first book, but overall, the pair of them swapping chapters as narrators feels fitting and intentional.

I believe Paolini also reveals himself as a fan of Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF when a side character exclaims, “Barges? Barges? We don’t want no stinking barges!” It sounds so out of place and suspiciously similar to a quote from UHF, that it has to be an allusion to, “Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no stinking badgers!”

As my final random thought… I’ve read Eldest at least three times now. I’ve always accepted that it made sense for the elves to reject eating meat. It was an admirable lifestyle even. I’ve since been spoiled, however, with keto and lion diet ideology, fitness nutrition, and conservative talking points. How can the elves possibly get enough protein from plants to maintain their inhuman strength? They would need to have industrial-level production of soy and beans. Even Mark Boyle, who recounted his experience living off the land and rejecting modern technology in his autobiographical account The Way Home, conceded that he had to give up his vegetarian diet and eat meat to survive. He would no longer have access to all those canned beans and soy products from distant lands to supplement his vegetables. I suppose the elves have magical abilities that include speeding up and manipulating the growth of plants, but it’s still ridiculous. I’ll save most of my complaints about this point for the next book in the series Brisingr though, where Eragon’s choice to also abstain from eating meat makes even less sense.

True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition (Book 1-3)

An omnibus is a volume containing several novels or items that were previously published separately. In the introduction to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition, author Romeo Vitelli justifies his choice of publishing the book as an omnibus by claiming that together his books form a more coherent whole. Each book is a collection of assorted true crime stories based on posts from Vitelli’s blog. If he means that together they form a more complete history of all crimes that have ever been committed, I suppose.

His writing reminds me of David Paulides’ Missing 411 series in which he chronicles missing person cases with strange circumstances and commonalities and seemingly supernatural elements. At the end of each case, he has a tendency to insert himself as the researcher, tying the case to similar cases, reiterating his confusions or amazement with the circumstances, or describing his frustrations with the authorities. It comes off as amateurish and repetitive. While Vitelli isn’t as egregious in self-referencing his research efforts, his writing still sounds amateurish. His style is inappropriately belittling and informal for the subject matter. Using phrases and words like “somehow” and “for some reason,” it’s like listening to a narrator who finds his own stories and the people in them ridiculous.

What attracted me to listen to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe, however, was the narrator “Virtual Voice,” a computer-generated narrator for audiobooks as Audible explains. I’d never listened to narration produced by AI and was curious what it sounded like.

Well… with all the time they saved by having AI read a 17-hour-long audiobook, they could have at least listened to it and revised their prompts accordingly. Or maybe the producer of True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe did listen to it and, despite all the pronunciation inconsistencies and other signs of Virtual Voice lacking comprehension of the English language, decided to dump it on Audible anyway.

Here are a few highlights:

Virtual Voice pronounced EEG (electroencephalogram) as “eeeeeeg.”

A few stories included excerpts from song lyrics or poems. Virtual Voice ended each line with a verbal “slash” rather than a pause.

Vitelli snarkily wrote something like, “Why would he be there in the first place?” Virtual Voice read this as if “the first place” was an actual place rather than a phrase.

“etc. etc.” was pronounced as “Et See. Et See.”

One story featured a legend about wendigos. It also featured every possible pronunciation of “wendigo”: WENdigo, wenDIgo, WINdigo, etc.

Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World

Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World is an audiobook written and narrated by Michael Pollan that I forgot I’d listened to and Audible kept hawking it at me. So, I’ve listened to it twice now. Oh, you want to know the content? It tells the story of, as the subtitle suggests, how our population’s addiction to and dependence on caffeine created the modern world.

A fact about caffeine that I’ve always remembered since my first listen to this book: because of low water quality in the past, boiled coffee or tea was one of the safest things to drink alongside alcohol. People were more likely to live if they drank caffeine, helping to perpetuate its addictiveness.

Another fun fact: the minute hand of the clock was introduced alongside caffeine.

I don’t drink coffee, energy drinks, soda, or caffeinated tea. My caffeine primarily comes from chocolate, but I doubt my daily fix contains enough caffeine to compare to that consumed by caffeinated beverage drinkers. The world seems fast to me. There’s always a billion things to do. In some ways, I do a billion things everyday, but in other ways, I look at other people and feel incredibly slow. I tend to think that I process some information slower that other people; I prefer to process some information slowly and completely; I need more recharge time in comparison to other people; or I get slowed down by perfectionism and anxiety. After reading this book a second time, however, I wonder if the world seems fast because so many people are drinking caffeine and genuinely doing more than people who abstain from it like me could possibly do.

IT: Welcome to Derry (Season 1)

I don’t know if I can fairly judge IT: Welcome to Derry because I was extremely distracted by things that had nothing to do with it for half to a third of the episodes. Does it say something about the show that it failed to distract me from my distractions? Probably not. Getting into a political argument with a friend and ordering Doordash to the wrong address is extremely distracting. I saw enough of the show, however, to have no desire to revisit any of it, so these thoughts are as close to a review as I’ll get.

IT: Welcome to Derry is reminiscent of Stranger Things in that it features a cast of kids and adults in a seemingly normal town until they become entangled in supernatural events. Welcome to Derry, however, takes place in the 50s instead of the 80s, so it doesn’t have the charming nostalgia. In fact, as with other media that takes place in the 50s–such as the Bioshock video games… and Stranger Things–the 50s-theme is instead used to create a creepy, horrific atmosphere. Additionally, while Stranger Things preserves the lives of its cast, Welcome to Derry begins violently murdering and maiming its child characters within the first episode.

Sure, Welcome to Derry is a horror series. I should have expected everything to be gross, horrific, and creepy, and comparing it to Stranger Things, an adventure series, isn’t fair. Still, I didn’t find the horror elements conducive to sympathizing or bonding with the kids or wider cast. It felt like it wanted to be a Stranger Things with a cast that could endure for eight episodes and beyond, but it was also obligated to kill its characters and disgust its audience. Maybe it wasn’t for me, or maybe while I was distracted I missed the good bits.

Shows like Dark, Welcome to Derry, and Stranger Things have evoked the nostalgia of the 50s and the 80s. What someone really needs to do is make a show about the good old days of the mid-2000s when the Internet and technology was young but fun. That seems like prime real estate to piggyback off the popularity of Stranger Things!