Category: Books

The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

In The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, Mark Boyle relates how he created a lifestyle without electricity, plumbing, and other technological commodities. To demonstrate the practicality of living this way to the reader, he builds the cabin he and his wife live in, an outhouse area, a garden, and interestingly, a natural hot tub powered by firewood, presumably on a piece of land he owns and has enough money to pay taxes on for at least the one year he wanted to experiment with living this way. He makes allowances for some technology like pencils and paper for writing but rejects other tools that would make his work easier in favor of more primitive tools or doing the work by hand. I can’t remember specific examples from the book, but as a generic example, rather than using a wheelbarrow to move stones, he would carry stones by hand. Seeming to contradict his purpose, he indirectly makes use of cars to hitchhike to visit his parents, the local pub to visit with his neighbors, and the modern mail service to send and receive letters.

I don’t think the point of the book was to strictly live without technology though. The author’s purpose was rather to connect himself more to nature and people. His selective use of technology seemed to be for the purpose of forwarding those goals. I related to his rejection of the Internet and phones the most. In our ability to connect with people around the world, we’ve forgotten about the people immediately surrounding us. The convenience of speaking to loves ones over the phone means, conflictingly, visiting them in person less. Despite their appearance of creating connections, these things have separated us from people by being too convenient, too far from our immediate reality, and too difficult to resist.

Ironically, the author’s wife left him toward the end of the book. I can’t say I’d want to live like this either. I don’t like living in reality. 😛 Although, I suppose the author also doesn’t like living in reality, the one where humans are naturally inclined toward progress and efficiency. Still, Boyle has some interesting perspectives nurtured by his enjoyment and sense of purpose in living this lifestyle.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Near the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion promises that you will experience what she did in your lifetime. Specifically, she was referring to the feeling of disbelief following the death of someone dear. For example, following the sudden death of her husband, she described feeling that as long as she thought certain ways or didn’t acknowledge certain things, her husband would come back. She knew he was dead today but wondered, “What about tomorrow?” She saved her husband’s shoes with the thought that he would need them when he came back.

I can believe her promise and relate to her sentiment. Even five years later, it doesn’t seem real that I’ll never see my mom again. My cat Jiji passed away in June this year. I held on to a box of food I bought for her for months. I still have a baggy of her medications in a closet. These things are “special” in some way, a part of her, and can’t merely be thrown away.

A rant about smut and experimental writing

A friend recently recommended that I read stories from the Human Domestication Guide (HDG). This collection of stories takes place in a universe where Earth has been taken over by technologically advanced invaders. These invaders, however, have an imperative to reduce suffering, even if that means imprisoning a miserable person in order to take care of all their physical and mental needs. The stories are technically smut but 90% of their content examines disability, mental health, and gender expression.

It interests me partly because I like researching topics in mental health and gender expression. Additionally, at least some stories are written from the perspective of characters who desire to give someone else total control of their life. This ideology is the exact opposite of my own: everyone should have as much freedom to act as individuals as possible. A government-less society is the ideal… which is about as realistic as the society of post-scarcity, boundless resources, and total control depicted in the HDG. It interests me because I want to understand a perspective so different from my own.

I’m no stranger to picking through smut for other aspects of a story that interest me, but I’ve gotten rather annoyed with having to do so as evidenced by the following rant I gave my friend:

In regard to the Human Domestication Guide, is my fascination with experimental writing showing when I say I’m more interested in the methods the creators use to attempt to maintain coherence across thousands of stories and dozens of writers than I am in the stories themselves? At first I thought the Wiki (which I found first) was the HDG, but then, I found the collection of stories that actually compose it. If it had been the Wiki, that would have blown my mind. Non-linear writing is neat.

I’ve been slowly writing/adding to this “non-linear saga outline,” “digital garden,” thing: https://the-net-digital-garden.vercel.app/. Eventually, it will basically be a collection of my notes, backstories, character profiles, and other things that are too detailed or too irrelevant to put into any book I plan to write. They’re things I needed to flesh out to make the stories and characters that these notes support appear coherent (hopefully) though. At first I thought HDG was something similar that already existed.

I’ve imagined that some writer out there could find my notes and be inspired to write their own story within my universe. I don’t plan to flesh out six planets worth of things after all, just the parts that I need. There’s plenty of room for someone else to write within it… And then I think, “Someone is just going to use all these ideas as a backdrop for smut, aren’t they? I’ve certainly given them enough fuel to do that. -_-”

Smut has it’s place I suppose if it’s allowed HDG to grow as large as it has. It’s just annoying. HDG’s ideas sound interesting enough on their own without pandering to the reptile brain. It’s a plague within experimental writing, too. Even House of Leaves, a book objectively unique and interesting to look at without even reading it, has straight up porn in the middle of it.

I reread Vurt by Jeff Noon a few years ago and realized that it represents everything I dislike reading and everything I dislike about experimental writing. It’s a book about drugs and incest (and robo-dog-cop-vurt-human-shadow hybrids) and written from the perspective of a guy writing a book (that’s a different rant). Yet, I still loved the basic story, the characters, and the subtle experimentation with perspectives, which is what I remember most and remember liking a lot back in high school. I realized I’ve kind of spent the past twenty years trying to recreate what I liked so much about Jeff Noon’s writing but without all the smut.

400 Things Cops Know

I’ve been reading cop-related books lately for some writing research. Here’s a few relevant things I learned while reading 400 Things Cops Know by Adam Plantinga:

To kick open a door, kick it immediately beneath the knob.

Mediation Clinics offer mediators, often law students, to help resolve disputes between family members, tenants and landlords, neighbors, and other people outside of court. I had created a concept like this in a book I’m writing and was surprised that such a thing actually exists!

Cops don’t advertise that they’re cops outside of work because it attracts the attention of people who don’t like cops. This potentially puts the cop and/or their family and friends in danger.

Police are required to read someone their Miranda rights only after they are in custody, and they have begun interrogating them. They don’t have to tell them their rights immediately, contrary to what commonly happens on TV. What suspects say prior to being read their rights and interrogated can still be used in court.

The best TV show about cops is The Wire created by David Simon.

The best book about cops is Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.

The Madman’s Hotel

In The Madman’s Hotel by Niall Breslin, a descendant of Julia Leonard, a former patient in the now-abandoned St. Loman’s Hospital, reaches out to Niall, a mental health advocate, for help finding Julia’s body after almost all markers and crosses are removed from the hospital’s graveyard by Ireland’s health department, the owner of the hospital’s grounds. Julie’s determination to bury her great-grandmother’s remains next to her grandfather is surprising and remarkable given what little information she and her grandfather had about Julia.

It’s an interesting story that wants to be like other audiobooks where the narration is interspersed with snippets of interviews, but its bizarre editing style hampers and distracts from it. The audio editor frequently cuts off an interviewee’s answer with a hard fade while the narrator takes over speaking for them or over them. Sometimes the narrator even speaks over himself in his own interview. It’s as if the producers assume the listener doesn’t have the attention span to listen to the interviewee’s answer in their own words.

Alternatively, it’s possible the interview audio was so bad that it would have been distracting to use more of it. The interviews often sound as if they were conducted in an echoey room without the proper equipment to pick up clean audio. I’ve listened to audio books like this in the past, and they can be annoying and difficult to listen to. Even if that were the case, however, My Mom’s Murder’s approach, where the narrator repeats what the interviewee said when the audio is difficult to decipher, would have been a less distracting choice.

30 Days to Thrive with ADHD

I frequently listen to Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, on the Healthy Gamer YouTube channel. As a monk-turned-psychiatrist, his lectures, video essays, and Q&As cover topics in psychology and Eastern medicine, meditation, and practices.

His latest book 30 Days to Thrive with ADHD is an Audible exclusive and narrated by him. It’s much like listening to one of his YouTube videos/podcasts except more structured. The book features thirty strategies for managing common challenges those with ADHD face. The strategies and reasoning for them seem practical to anyone who has problems in the areas they address though. For example, if you can’t sleep because you’re restless, you may have missed your window for going to sleep. This window is when you’re tired enough to go to sleep but not so tired that your frontal lobe can’t control your thoughts and impulses to allow you to sleep.

I often wonder when watching videos on ADHD, autism, introverts, personality types, etc., are these symptoms, solutions, or tendencies really specific to this group? Or are they specific to unique individuals with or without a formal diagnosis in this group? Dr. K has more credentials than other random YouTubers and the misinformation they spread, but I still found myself asking these questions once in a while. Regardless, he shares practical tips that seem applicable to everyone!

My Mom’s Murder (Seasons 1-2)

My Mom’s Murder and My Mom’s Murder: Season 2 follow Lauren Malloy in her investigation into her mother’s unsolved murder after she was contacted by a stranger 30 years later. The audiobook is composed of Lauren’s narration and recordings of interviews she’s conducted in the years since her investigation began in 2020. Many of the recordings are of low-quality phone conversations, but Lauren does a good job of repeating what the interviewee has said when it isn’t clear.

At first, Lauren struck me as a journalist who happened to discover this bizarre event in her past. She is contacted by Louise, supposedly her mother’s best friend in childhood, who tells Lauren that her mother didn’t die of natural causes as she had been told her whole life but had been murdered. Lauren’s inclination to begin recording her calls with Louise almost immediately seemed like someone hunting for a story, and she so happened to strike gold in her own life. She also seemed adept at interviewing.

I also had theories that perhaps Lauren was a TikToker trained to find and record content to gain attention. This theory came from her mentioning that she shared her investigation and frustrations on TikTok. Occasionally, she has discussions with her best friend, who seems to be in the audiobooks only for Lauren to talk to (because a podcast is often more entertaining with two people than one). Lauren has also attracted the attention of the news in the past when she found and reunited with her long lost siblings or step-siblings several years before the events in this audiobook series. Perhaps she’s an attention seeker… but if she is, it’s for the purpose of tracking down her family’s mysteries.

It turns out she wasn’t a journalist or a social media influencer; she worked somewhere in the tech sector, and may still. What she does as a non-journalist, however, is impressive. She doesn’t trust Louise, often suspecting her of lying and even of being her mother’s murderer. Despite this, she talks to Louise as if they are friends for more than a year, all to coerce as much information out of her as she can. She treats other suspects and interviewees similarly, acting as their friend but secretly acting as a journalist, undercover cop, or detective. She built a large social media following for the purpose of forcing the police to take her seriously and reopen her mother’s cold case. Along the way, she built an organization to help others seek justice for deceased family members. She seems like she genuinely took all these roles out of a need to understand her family history, which is a common trait that’s impressed me about the narrators or interviewees of other audiobooks I’ve listened to recently like The Secret Daughter and The Madman’s Hotel.

At times, the audiobooks, particularly Season 2, feel more like a family gossip fest. Before the latest DNA results are revealed, let’s hear more gossip from Louise and everyone else who has an opinion on the latest turn of events! But perhaps this is because the murder is officially unsolved and the listener is invited to form their own theory from the conflicting evidence presented.

While Lauren judges all these people–who’s lying and who’s telling the truth?–as a listener, I’m also judging her, and like Lauren’s, my judgments changed quite a bit throughout the two audiobooks. Very meta. 😛

The Art of War

I was expecting The Art of War by Sun Tzu to be a multi-hour long audio book. When I saw it was only about an hour on Audible, I thought it must be a cliff notes or abridged version. No. Ancient Chinese military experts simply don’t waste words.

I probably knew this at some point and forgot, but the lyrics for “Art of Conflict” by VNV Nation are all The Art of War quotes.

The Demon Next Door

The Demon Next Door by Bryan Burrough tells the story of serial killer and rapist Danny Corwin. Perhaps it was the audiobook narrator’s somewhat goofy voice, but at a couple points, I laughed at how absurd the descriptions of the murders were. And I don’t know if it was intentional.

Danny failed to kill the first woman he attempted to murder, so a long recollection exists in this book of all the things Danny did to her. They are ridiculous. He waited outside her car in the school parking lot. When she arrived, he pulled a knife and demanded she let him drive her car. She laughed at him and refused but eventually allowed him to drive. He took her to a remote location where he demanded she take off her clothes. She refused until he got out of the car, which he did. Later, when he told her to get out of the car, she refused until he gave her her clothes back. After getting kicked in the crotch, he did. She got out of the car, went where he directed, and hoped he’d leave her alone. Instead, they ended up on the ground where he stabbed her experimentally.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked.

The book/narrator described it like two teenagers, which they were at the time, doing something extremely stupid and regrettable while fooling around. Granted, this first victim knew Danny and probably genuinely believed he was harmless and then couldn’t believe what he was doing. A couple other points in the book, however, give the same impression: Danny has no idea what he’s doing and the victim thinks he’s ridiculous.

In a different type of comedic moment, another victim Debra Ewing sees the shadowy figure of Corwin with a knife in the parking lot at her place of work. Panicking, she runs to a bathroom and pounds on the door. Her coworker inside answers the door.

Debra dropped her purse. “I just peed all over myself!”

“Well, what’s wrong?” her coworker asked.

It’s an appropriate response for the victim to have under the circumstances but delivered as if it were a punchline. Why include this detail in the description of events leading to a murder?

Or perhaps it’s just me, and I’m a sadist. O.O

In other news, I found this audiobook more engaging than We Own This City, and I wonder if it’s related to my theory about the lack of mystery in most of We Own This City. In The Demon Next Door, I’m always sure that Danny is the murderer, but for a few of the murders, the writer doesn’t name Danny as the murderer right away. Instead, they are presented from the perspective of the detectives, suspecting Danny but struggling to find the evidence or motive to prove it.

The Secret Daughter

The Secret Daughter by Forest Sounds is the audiobook version of a documentary with a narrator describing the stories events and occasional interview snippets of the story’s subjects.

I spent most of the audiobook thinking how stupid it was that the producers hired actors to pretend they were being interviewed. Only at the end of the book did I consider the possibility that the interviewees were actually the people in the story, which they probably were. Whoops. I blame it on Crimes Scenes! The Secret Daughter was more sensationalism but not true crime and, in retrospect, probably not told through dramatic reenactments.