whoischels's Reviews (116)

This book is a five star read in that it does exactly what it sets out to do: it describes the Buddha's teaching in plain English. It explains some philosophical questions and arguments Buddhists have and Rahula describes his take on these arguments, with some sternness. I understand the main tenets of Buddhism, and underlying philosophy of mindfulness without all the New Age woo woo stuff, which I now see seems to miss the point of Buddhism. Many parallels between Buddhism and the beliefs of the Stoics, and I genuinely think this sort of spiritual outlook, where morals are part and parcel of a path to being spiritual, is the way to go. If you take Buddhism to be a religion more so than a philosophy, then Christianity--and the ways that many people approach the bare bones of Buddhism--look very rough around the edges and cultish. I look forward to reading more books about eastern religions that approach them this way, on their own terms, without accidentally applying the moral rules of western religions to them (i.e. our understanding of karma in the US has been fully westernized and warped to fit with a reactive god). 

The only drawback here is some of the antiqued terms ("purity, defilements") are a product of their time and hard to apply to modern life without thought. That said, I prefer accurate translations to inaccurate ones, and I trust these are accurate.

 I didn't really enjoy this until I got about halfway through. It felt pretty slow and the cyberpunk aesthetic didn't really pull me in in the way I had hoped. However, once the team goes to Freeside and the plot starts to get more intense, I ended up really enjoying this ride.

I feel like there's some sort of conclusion to draw from the ending, like an opinion I should have about what the point was of Wintermute joining with Neuromancer. I feel like I should have a take. At this point, I don't, and I feel like the take may just be that this was an AI's mission to fully have consciousness. Like the personality portion that Neuromancer had was necessary for Wintermute to be an actual being who experiences existence. That said, Wintermute seemed fully capable before. Additionally, the shadowy, unknown reason for this whole story could just be a shadowy, unknown reason. If an AI gained enough power to have goals, would we ever really understand them? Maybe that is the point.

So unmemorable that I forgot I read it for awhile. Good god. Plotline: Connecticut upper crust girl goes to the Appalachians to teach for a year in order to qualify for her inheritance, genius teen country singer gets record option and she goes to chaperone him and keep him from getting ripped off. In the process she falls in love with the record company president, a dark and handsome man with a past who uh...keeps sexually harassing her. She also appears to have anorexia because she cannonically weighs less than 100 pounds. This is portrayed as a good thing.

This one was better than the other Harlequin novels I've read and actually kind of a cute, nice love story. That said, not thrilled about the portrayal of the main character's internal conflict. Predictably, her internal struggle is a war between repulsion (this time because of her close friendship with the man), jealousy, and attraction. Kisses that she did not ask for, the man just walking all over her when she says "no." At the end, a reveal that he was pretending to date a supermodel to MAKE THE MAIN CHARACTER jealous. So once again, a novel where the happy ending comes as a result of really fucked up manipulation on the part of her love interest. Awful awful awful. Will I read more of these? yes. 

Infuriating. I started reading these to see how romance was portrayed in the trashiest of romance formats, and boy was I surprised in the worst way. Catherine, the main character, is assaulted and manipulated by her hero, Luke, at every turn. There is a recurring theme in these where the heroine is at once repulsed and attracted to the man toxically pursuing her. Perhaps she is repulsed because he is sexually assaulting her. A necessary realization that that is what is happening is far more than can be asked. It turns out that Luke has been manipulating her for business purposes, he was essentially a paid actor who was told to get in her way. And he had feelings for her the entire time. He had to be atrocious to her because that was his job. Catherine goes to his mansion in England and they talk about it and she agrees to get engaged to him that very day. Horrifying! 

This was pretty good. At first I wasn't so into it, there was something a little dry about Murakami's writing style which hasn't bothered me in his other books. I also didn't really understand what was happening and why there were two stories. The lack of character background bothered me as well. That said, as the story progressed and the plot revealed itself, I came to respect the allegorical nature of the story. The main character lacks depth due to his unique mind composition and also, perhaps, due to the brain surgery he has undergone. The female characters, both of whom sort of shepherd him, have strange biological and character details but still seem to be one dimensional. Everything is even more one dimensional in the main character's subconscious and I enjoyed teasing apart the shades of one dimensionality and how they reflected one another in the two stories. 

This book was pretty good. It did a good job of making the internet, in all of its stupidness, beautiful as it fits into the life of a person. The ending suggested that the bigness of an event like your sister having a baby, overshadows the bigness of all of the things the hive mind tells you. That is a kinder moral than I expected from this story. Regardless, the fractional storytelling that I was introduced to by "Weather" didn't really hit the way it did in that book. 

 This book did make me think more about my creative space and what I want out of it. I'm not sure how to implement any of these things in my life given that I don't have a personal space to make things. So that's a bummer. That said, I think Savage has a lot of interesting things to say about organizing and the creative process. 

I didn't really like this. It felt stilted and forced, but it did have a good moral purpose and direction. The story didn't really go anywhere, it was about the experience of the main character rather than elucidating the mystery of what the experiment she was in was. My main beef with this was that it was marketed to me as some sort of new literary masterpiece, which I don't think it was. If this were marketed to me as a racially aware beach read type of book, I'd give it five stars.