Another fad diet, helmed by a guy selling pills on his website and claiming that he has discovered a secret path around the laws of thermodynamics. Yawn.
He pushes paleo but doesn't call it paleo. He says it isn't low-carb, but then forbids all food containing carbs. "You can eat as much as you want, so long as it's only the following foods!" and then the following foods are meat, fish, eggs, and vegetables.
Yeah. If you do that, you'll lose weight, unless you're pathological. You can eat pounds upon pounds of celery and cucumbers with a nice 20 oz steak and lose weight, because you only put down like 800 calories. And that's the dirty little secret of the SANE diet. He makes you promise not to count calories because they're fake and don't consider the all-important hormones, then advocates a diet that would result in a severe caloric deficit no matter how hard you try, unless you overindulge in nuts, oils, and cheese, all of which he explicitly warns to keep in moderation.
OK but why? If calories are fake and our body won't convert to fat if it comes from high-quality, nutritious food, why can't I drink heart-healthy coconut oil and slam a pound of cashews a day? They're high in fiber and protein, and you said fiber and protein are the only things that matter now that we've disproved Calorie Theory!
The SANE diet is a colossal appeal to emotion, attempting to absolve yo-yo dieters of their body shame by providing "the results of over 1200 studies" worth of flimsy, conditional science that says 'don't worry sweetie, it's not your fault.' It tells them counting calories would never have worked, and provides a long-term solution of "unclogging" hormones by eating a diet which tricks you into a caloric deficit by filling up on greens and low-starch vegetables. This is another one that claims fruit will make you fat because there's sugar in it.
Two stars for the studies that make up the supports for the strawman. If it were simple calories in/calories out, we would all be over 600 lbs due to the increase in caloric intake over the past thirty years. There are mitigating factors, and they are hormonal, metabolic, and likely microbiotic. Those things can be true without invalidating the obvious: Bailor's a huckster trying to move shady, proprietary supplements....more
It was mostly just gross. That isn't necessarily a mark against a book, some of the best fantasy books I've ever read have been really gross. The PrinIt was mostly just gross. That isn't necessarily a mark against a book, some of the best fantasy books I've ever read have been really gross. The Prince of Thorns? Deeply gross book. Many elements of the Demon Cycle series were likewise gross, but those are counted among my favorites because of the depth of the characters.
Lapvona was a train wreck because you couldn't look away, but a train wreck full of people you actively dislike so you're not particularly emotionally invested in the carnage. Every single character was horrible. They were all horrible in different ways, and the implication was that they were all victims of their respective circumstances and the sums of their traumatic experiences, but that doesn't make it possible to care about them.
Marik revels in self-pity, wearing it like a shield until he can strike out from under it, but he never feels anything human. Jude is an irreconcilable monster. Ina is a predator, Barnabus is a self-aggrandizing con-artist, Villiam is a manchild in arrested development whose penchant for evil is added as a sort of afterthought, and clashes with the rest of his characterization. There's no one to like, identify with, or care about.
I get that the book was supposed to be disturbing, which is why everyone was breastfeeding everyone else all the time, and I gave it a pity star for being so bizarre, but I can't call it good. Art is supposed to evoke an emotional response, and while disgust sort of qualifies, it's cheap....more
I was brought here by a list recommending books like Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. This was a lie, but it was still a fun, goofy little Gothic tangle that was probably much less fun or goofy in the 1700s.
Prince Manfred's sickly son is crushed by an inexplicably giant helmet falling from the sky, spoiling his marriage to the beautiful and thoroughly Christian Isabella, who has huge... tracts of land! A peasant boy suggests that the giant helmet looks a lot like the giant helmet on the nearby statue of Saint Alfonso, a beloved past ruler of Otranto. Manfred decides that this boy is a necromancer and orders him sealed into the helmet to starve.
Rather than put off their upcoming merger, the noble Prince Manfred resolves the incongruity of his recently crushed son by deciding that he will bear the burden of marrying his hot young de facto daughter-in-law.
"But you're already married to Hippolita!"
"Who?"
Manfred chases Isabella around the castle but can't catch her, which is another facet of May-December romance he hadn't considered. The peasant boy turns out to be named Theodore, and he tunneled out of the helmet and into the castle, whereupon he meets with Isabella and vows to defend her with his life, due to his innate chivalry - suspicious in a man of such low birth! He lifts the trapdoor allowing Isabella to escape to some chapel or other, which she believes will keep Manfred from forcing her into marriage against her will "because it's a holy place", furthering the established Gothic romance trope of the female love interest's tremendous incapacity to read a room.
Manfred busts in and finds that damn necromancer in his castle again. They squabble a bit and Manfred sentences him to death again -- but what ho! Friar Jerome announces that actually, due to a weird birthmark, he is now certain that Theodore is his missing son, and thus of noble birth and inheritor of something or other! He lost touch with his son when the boy was enslaved by pirates.
OK.
In the midst of these shenanigans, there's a lot of Scooby Doo spooking all over the castle, and the servants are wetting their britches about it. The paintings keep moving and sighing, and there's a giant ghost knight hand that keeps cropping up and issuing ominous portends.
And then in walks a cadre of armed knights who want to take Isabella back to her father's castle and ALSO he wants the castle at Otranto right now, because he has better claim to it, he's decided.
Matilda frees Theodore from the tower where Manfred put him for safekeeping. He falls instantly in love with her, as only the protagonist of a Gothic romance can. Theodore puts that on the back burner and springs into action, rushing back to the underground church and squirreling Isabella away in a cave, for he swore to defend her to his last breath. He is attacked by the mysterious knight and injures him badly, only for it to be revealed that WHAT HO! The knight is Frederic, Isabella's father himself! They all go back up to the castle to sort things out.
It is then that Frederic sees Matilda, Manfred's daughter, and falls instantly in love with her. These creepy old men decide they are each going to give the other creepy old man their own daughter for marriage, resulting in the aforementioned kingdom merger that has really been coming apart at the seams since that big helmet fell out of the sky.
Fortunately, a skeleton appears and yells at Frederic about how that's gross, and Frederic backs out of the arrangement.
And here comes Manfred again, deciding that Theodore is meeting Isabella for a secret, sexy rendezvous in church, since he cannot conceive of how deeply pious and/or valiant Theodore is. He rushes in stabbing women, but lo! In his mad lust for stabbed women, he foolhardily stabs his own daughter, who he just tried to sell to a rival pervert! Overcome with shame and grief he collapses next to his daughter's body. It is at this moment that Theodore is revealed to be the true prince of Otranto, and a friggin huge ghost shows up and says, "The prophecy is fulfilled!" and blows up the castle walls.
Manfred and his poor, pathetic wife Hippolita go become nuns or whatever. Theodore becomes prince of Otranto and marries Isabella on the spot, boom. He's not happy about it. He was in love with Matilda for upwards of 20 minutes before her untimely death. However, he recognizes that he must do his duty, and begrudgingly marries the huge-tracted princess, and together they settle into a dour rulership of mutual commiseration.
I think the moral of the story is demonstrated in Manfred, and it's "don't be the worst person you can imagine". Absolutely ridiculous. I'll bet this did numbers in 1764. You hear about how Victorians couldn't withstand a Cool Ranch Dorito or whatever, but then they turn around and speedball this overwrought melodrama right into the jugular. I'll bet this was like 50 Shades for Enlightenment-era England....more
An anthology of 17 short stories and an odd poem ostensibly connected by the theme of medieval horror, which amounted to witches, the devil, and weirdAn anthology of 17 short stories and an odd poem ostensibly connected by the theme of medieval horror, which amounted to witches, the devil, and weird bloody goo falling out of your face.
Some of them were pretty strong. The Mouth of Hell was probably the best entry in the anthology. I liked the gross little Final Book of Saint Foye's Miracles, that was nice. I liked Deus Vult even though it was sort of trite. The King of Youth one was middling, but still worth the read.
The rest are forgettable at best and terrible at worst, with Schizzare sticking out as the most profound stinker, but I truly believe that was due to the woeful audiobook narration on that chapter. It was so bad you didn't know what was poor storytelling and what was cringe My First Improv overinflection.
I have been steadily disappointed by every entry I've gotten from these alleged "Books Like Between Two Fires" and I should probably just read Buehlman's other stuff....more
St. Augustine loves God so much, dude. You have no idea how much he loves God. He loves God so much he invented original sin for some reason.
The first half of the book is Augustine crawling on his belly like a pathetic worm beseeching God forgiveness for the time he stole pears when he was seven, and how he liked stealing the pears more because his sinner buddies were stealing pears with him. And then he talked about all the sex he had, a lot, and felt really bad about, and kept having the whole time he felt bad about it.
I know what you're thinking. "Wow, that's the most Catholic thing I've ever heard!" or "As a practicing/recovering/lapsed Catholic, I do the exact same thing every day of my life!" To the latter I say: yes. To the former, you're going to want to read Between Two Fires by Chris Buehlman.
The second half of the book was more metaphysically oriented, with Augustine breaking down Genesis sentence by sentence and waxing poetic about how glorious God is, and also what the universe might or might not be made out of. It was written around 400 AD, so it's got a lot of stuff like:
"Perhaps all of the universe, which are of You, and not You, but an extension of You, oh Great Lord, is made of water? However, this cannot be; there are times when I am wetter than others, and wet is a nominal condition, for though one can become less or more wet, I have never been both wet and dry at once! And if all of Your beauteous cosmos, oh Divine Creator, were made of water, then I would be wet at all times, and unable to distinguish between the states of wet and dry! Therefore, they and You must be made of something else."
I'm glad to have read it, but I'll level with you, I'm not reading it again....more
A good book. A shockingly horny book. Perhaps the horniest high fantasy book I've ever read. It ended on something of an anticlimax, and the whole stoA good book. A shockingly horny book. Perhaps the horniest high fantasy book I've ever read. It ended on something of an anticlimax, and the whole story seems to weave back and forth without really building to anything or knowing where it's going, which was well-executed if deliberate in its attempt to embody the randomness of adventure and life on the road.
Wolfe can turn a phrase. I wrote down, "Flowers are better theology than folios."
I'll eventually read the rest of the Books of the New Sun, but I'm not in any particular hurry....more
It was pretty spooky. It would make a good horror movie because most of the book is written as though it were a movie. You can see the scenes very cleIt was pretty spooky. It would make a good horror movie because most of the book is written as though it were a movie. You can see the scenes very clearly, with the stop-motion Silent Hill Nurse contortions of Faye's somnambulism and the obscured face of the Hollow One, trying its best to ape the human form and failing miserably enough to be described as repeatedly unsettling.
The narrative lurches and jerks around the parents, who know more than they're letting on but aren't saying it for no real reason. It ends on something of an anticlimax because it turns out, surprise, the monster is an analogy for trauma. Just like every other horror movie that's come out since the Babadook.
Still, three stars. Felix can write, even if the protagonist is the kind of guy I would be forced to bully. The narrative made sense, there were moments of mild spookiness, the mythology was tastefully appropriated, and pobody's nerfect. ...more
Pretty good book. Probably the best we have about BPD right now. Most of it is warnings and horror stories, but the actionable bit is the SETUP communPretty good book. Probably the best we have about BPD right now. Most of it is warnings and horror stories, but the actionable bit is the SETUP communication model.
SET is for Support, Empathy, and Truth. It's sort of a compliment sandwich managerial technique, but for when someone's yelling in your face.
1. Support - say something you both already know, like how you like the person who is yelling in your face, because when a borderliner has an emotional response they immediately lose object permanence. It's like that video where the girl goes "forget everything you know abo-" and then it cuts to the dude who makes an increasingly blank face. It's that, only instead of neutrality, it's rage.
2. Empathy - tell them how you're pretty sure they feel. "You've been dealing with a lot right now, and you must be exhausted and livid." This is horseshoes. You don't need to nail it, you just need to get close enough to show that you're trying. There's no guarantee they won't explode, but there are no guarantees anywhere in this life.
3. Truth - the gentlest reality check you can manage. "With those two things in mind, throwing knives out the car window at your mother is not the most effective way of communicating that you feel betrayed again. Like, don't get me wrong. It will communicate that. But we could also use breathing exercises, and maybe write a letter."
The UP stands for Understanding and Perseverance, which warns you that this method may not work every time, so stay frosty. However, it will work more often and more effectively than whatever you've been doing up until this point, and might reduce the chance of getting drive-by knifed out a car window....more
Our protagonist is a spineless Br*tish who goes to visit his brother in the woods only to find his brother going camping a lot. His father studied... something, in the woods, ultimately deciding Jungian archetypes could be magically animated by a particularly haunted section of the woods. The father used this ability to create a feral redheaded minor that he attempted to groom until it led him to disappear into the haunted woods.
The brother, in an effort to follow in his father's footsteps, stumbles across the feral redheaded minor. He also attempts to groom her. It doesn't work out and here's about where our protagonist Steven Huxley hits the scene, discovering her body buried in the shed. His brother had to kill her, you see, because then she would remanifest and he would more effectively be able to groom her. He goes into the haunted woods where he becomes Kraven the Hunter, and devotes the entirety of his being to trying to catch and rape this teenager, while also destroying everything he comes across.
Incredibly, Steven Huxley decides his best course of action is to live in the abandoned shack where his entire family disappeared and wander around the haunted woods yelling, "CHRISTIAN!" Not 100% on what he hoped this would accomplish, but what it DID accomplish was allow him sufficient exposure to the haunted woods to be bothered by Robin Hood (I swear to God) and then, later, for the mythago imprint of that same feral redheaded minor to come into his orbit. For him to groom.
A good chunk of the book then devolves into Holdstock's smelly wild woman fetish fiction. I think this was to illustrate the purity and totality of their love? There are intermittent Robins Hood and mysterious medieval warriors taking goose-fletched potshots at Huxley and his Paleo child bride, to no particular effect.
Huxley decides that he wants to do a flyover of the haunted section of the woods and enlists a nearby biplane pilot who has burns on his face. The pilot tries to fly over the haunted woods but fails because they're too haunted, and he has PTSD from the haunted woods he found in France during the war.
In the midst of this, there is a giant anthropomorphic boar creature running around. He doesn't do a whole lot, narratively speaking, but he's very much there, and has a stupid name like Urscumug. He represents some prototypical early man Ur-legend, like you'd find on a cave painting, but it's impossible to tell for sure because everyone is just babbling incessantly and the writing isn't what you'd call "excessively good".
Steven's brother returns, now huge and also feral because he has been living in the time-dilated haunted woods for 20 years. He abducts the redheaded teenager because that's all this family does and that's all this book is about. Steven must go after him into the haunted woods, and enlists his burned friend for help. They both travel through the woods and see boats and Robin Hoods and Vikings. They get into a fight with caveman warriors and mostly lose. Steven has a climactic swordfight with his brother, now become The Outsider, and accidentally kills him by being a bumbling fucking clod right after the unsatisfying completion of his redemption arc.
But it's too late. The Outsider already killed the feral teen Steven was grooming. He is heartbroken and keens for a while about the unfairness of it all, until the Urscumug arrives, and it is revealed that he is Steven's father. Wow!!!! Steven throws dirt in front of the dirt portal and the Urscumug heads through holding the dead body of the third iteration of that girl he also preyed on, promising his son that one day the story cycle will renew and she will be returned to him. El fin. Roll credits.
It was spectacularly bad. I've seen a lot of criticism about the hypermasculinity of the text, but I don't think it's fair to blame masculinity for the mess insecurity left. Every action Steven took in the book was embarrassing. It was handwaved away by implying that they were in the thrall of the mythago woods and that natural arcane forces overcame their better judgment, but no one was exhibiting any judgment whatsoever in anything they did, and it made it difficult to care what happened to the characters, especially since the Huxleys were all callow egotists and, not to put too fine a point on it, predatory.
Some of this has to fall on the writer. He didn't write the characters to be despised by the reader. Much of the book was a Pygmalion fantasy about an isolated sixteen-year-old girl, literally springing full-formed like Athena from the foreheads of the men who dreamed her up, who he then proceeds to keep describing in blistering and repetitive detail as erotically smelly and hairy.
There were so many opportunities to explore Jungianism and actual mythopoetic thought. He could've gotten a Grendel in there. He could have veered into religion and brought actual demons to the fore. I know he was trying to stay specifically Br*tish due to some nauseatingly misplaced patriotism and because of the geographical location of this particular haunted forest, but myths diffuse around the world, and the least you could have done was throw a dragon in there. Not one dragon? I don't even like dragons that much, I can just recognize that it would make for more compelling storytelling than another Robin Hood sighting.
What I'm saltiest about, aside from the hours I'll never get back, is this book was specifically suggested to me when I asked around for medieval eco-horror. This checked exactly none of those boxes! A couple Lancelot cameos does not make the book medieval, having woods in it does not make it eco- (that refers to an entire ecosystem, usually lashing back against human intrusion), and the only horror is that this book won an award....more
Made it about 5 minutes before the protag claimed that he saw a dryad, was also the son of a dryad, and made cringe joke about how hot the dryad he juMade it about 5 minutes before the protag claimed that he saw a dryad, was also the son of a dryad, and made cringe joke about how hot the dryad he just saw was that he got wood. I hit that event horizon and said "there's really nothing that will redeem this book for me from here, huh".
Reddit suggested it to me for medieval ecohorror. How surprised can I really be....more
This is the best book I've ever read. I listened to the audiobook over the course of two days, and as soon as I finished it, I re-listened to it in one go.
I've never done that before. I have 1305 rated and reviewed books on Goodreads, and I have finished and immediately restarted exactly NONE of them. My to-read is 36 books, and 32 of them came from an increasingly disappointing reddit thread called "Books like Between Two Fires".
I'm going to go to Chris Buehlman's house and swear vassalage. We're going to take communion and do the Camino de Santiago.
We start in media res with a little squad of bandits eating a donkey and debating among themselves whether or not they will gang-rape an overly trusting tween. The disgraced knight Thomas shuts that down, making oblique references to The Lord Our God, despite being a murderous bandit who parties with rapers. This culminates in an off-screen showdown between Thomas and the bandit chieftain, who Thomas obliterates, having been trained as a knight whereas everyone else in the band just kind of happened into brigandry. I visualize Rory McCann's The Hound whenever Thomas starts killing people, in that he doesn't just kill them, he kills the *shit* out of them.
Thomas accidentally and begrudgingly adopts the tween, who encourages him to use manners and stop killing people. Thomas refuses outright. Their interactions alternate between either funny or touching, and you can usually tell which because Thomas keeps crying manly tears whenever she says something like, "If you die doing something good, then maybe you'll go to Heaven." She tells Thomas that he is full of demons, which Thomas pooh-poohs, but also sort of knows.
And God made no answer.
The tween has prophetic visions which demand she and Thomas go to Avignon. Thomas refuses, then takes her to Avignon. On the way there, they adopt a cowardly drunken priest. Internally, Thomas grapples with his past, the loss of his wife and lands, and the various sins he committed once he went off the rails and blamed God for all his misfortune. The priest, meanwhile, grapples with being gay and keeping it secret, because everyone in 1340s France considers that a moral failing punishable by death.
A sort of serialization happens over the next couple hundred pages, where the three amigos go on fun gross Catholic Dark Age adventures.
The priest asks Thomas to fight a river monster, promising that he could redeem his honor by doing honorable things. This adds up for Thomas, although it is worth mentioning that Thomas, though large and physically strong, is not especially bright. He doesn't believe in river monsters, so imagine his surprise when he wades down to the river and gets absolutely rocked by a river monster! It's a close one, and due to a scooch of divine intervention, Thomas manages to kill the catfish demon before it kills him.
He heals up in the town Disgraced Knight center and they take their little cart and their little mule and they continue toward Avignon, where the tween keeps having prophetic dreams and waking up with vague instructions from angels. It gets a little wobbly and there's a demonic acid trip situation wherein Thomas agrees to fight in a knightly tourney upon the morrow. The sweet tween refuses to come out of a tree, so Thomas and Pere Mathieu go into the castle and get flexed on, liquored up, and molested by demons. By morning Thomas has clocked that something is up, but he's still in a "when in Rome" headspace, where Rome is Hell, and he squares up against some poncy knight who also turns out to be a catfish demon. The same catfish demon. And it's only in the course of lopping parts off him like Monty Python's Black Knight that Thomas realizes, the man he's fighting fell overboard in his armor and drowned during the war.
The fellas wake up in a field and the tween is like, "Can we go yet?"
Next stop is Paris, where the gang is offered room and board by a kindly woodcarving family who lost a daughter to the plague. They were ready to adopt Delphine (it is revealed here that her name is Delphine because it is asked for the first time, much to Thomas and Pere Mathieu's shame) on sight, but they didn't really get the chance because of all the haunted statues. An animate statue of the Virgin Mary busts through the door saying all kinds of weird, horrible demon things as it kills the woodcarving family. The gang cuts and runs, since there's no stopping the statues, only to find the streets flooded with other religious statuary desecrated into scenes of vulgarity and blasphemy. Yet another reason to skip Paris.
In Auxerre, they encounter a crowd of musty Penitents led by a muscular German who encourages the people to self-flagellate, pushing the doctrine that God will exchange suffering for salvation. It culminates in corpses getting whipped so good that they rise from the dead, though even with a very convincing demon trying to sell that as a miracle, the crowd can tell the zombies are more reanimated than resurrected. Little Delphine shuts that right down.
And finally, onto Avignon, where all the setup of the seemingly random interlocking short stories that comprise the first two-thirds of the book comes to fruition. Everybody in Avignon is affiliated with a church, and most of them have demons either hovering around them or actively inside them, puppeting their skin. A demon pretending to be Pope Clement IV issues a papal bull to annihilate the Jews, calling for yet another crusade. After our boy Tommy resolves the majority of his plot arc, and with a little bit of body snatching, we get to witness the apocalypse as well as a firsthand view of Hell, the completion of the Hero's Journey, and a heartbreaking bittersweet closing shot.
I can't say enough good things about this book. Writing this review made me want to read it again. I left a lot out, but I do want to double back to the chapter where Delphine was trapped in an abandoned abbey with a demon posing as a nun. It's berating and threatening and bullying her, and she's terrified right up until she realizes that it hadn't hurt her yet. It obviously wanted to, but it hadn't. Because it couldn't. And she calls it right out, says, "There are evil critters beefy enough to hurt me, but you're not one. You can't do anything to me unless I allow it. Get rekt."
And then the demon goes and gets rekt. And that's an important lesson, not just about demons.
This review has gone on long enough. Read the book. Reread the book. Tell everyone you know. Amen....more
The first half of the book was insightful and thought-provoking, spinning science until it fits cleanly into a sort of primitive, animist nature-worshThe first half of the book was insightful and thought-provoking, spinning science until it fits cleanly into a sort of primitive, animist nature-worship perspective, though more hobbyist than as a legitimate structure of belief. The next quarter talks about the importance of community and love, which I'm not here to knock. Then, the last quarter is a lecture about recycling and meatless Mondays.
I already recycle and I'm not going to do meatless Mondays.
Here are the quotes I marked: "At a certain point, self-organization or unexpected qualities emerge - a collection of molecules into a cell, a collection of sounds into speech, a collection of individual ants into a colony. In essence, an unexpected whole emerges from simple parts."
"The Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once observed that trying to understand nature through science is like trying to figure out the rules of chess as you watch a game being played -- but you can only see two squares at a time."
"So when a nail is driven by a hammer, the energy used to move the muscles of the body to deliver the blow comes from stores in the body, which in turn are recovered from food, which contains energy obtained from photons from the sun. When the nail is struck, energy is transferred to it and dissipated as heat - in the nail and in the wood and air surrounding it."
"Although well-fed and cared for physically, the monkeys exhibited abnormal behavior when they grew up, including a complete lack of interest in raising young. Thus, experiments with primates reveal both the powerful need for love - where the merest hint of a loving parent was chosen in preference to food - as well as the tragic, persistent consequences of deprivation."
It's the literary equivalent of a junk drawer. Alsadir careens aimlessly from topic to topic without any real payoff, mostly babbling about how her daIt's the literary equivalent of a junk drawer. Alsadir careens aimlessly from topic to topic without any real payoff, mostly babbling about how her daughters are smart and Drumpft = bad, occasionally peppering in thought-provoking but prescriptive woo psychoanalytic nonsense. I made it more than halfway through and after the ninth run at psychologically profiling Donny T, I had to check out.
Not in defense of the man, understand, he's vile and embarrassing, but that's a personal opinion based on my limited exposure to his public character and I'm not going to have it masquerade as a clinical assessment.
And yet still, here are quotes I liked:
- Psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott considers play to be "the gateway to the unconscious" which he divides into two parts: the repressed unconscious, which is to remain hidden, and the rest of the unconscious, which "each individual wants to get to know" by way of "play", which, "like dreams, serves the function of self-revelation.
- "So far, about morals," writes Ernest Hemingway, "I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
- Or, as poet E.E. Cummings has it, "since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you."
- "No animal in the wild," writes security adviser Gavin de Becker, "suddenly overcome with fear, would spend any of its mental energy thinking, 'It's probably nothing'." ...more
Not the best written book, more a collection of lists than anything else, but still an important book about a prevalent concept that gets no recognitiNot the best written book, more a collection of lists than anything else, but still an important book about a prevalent concept that gets no recognition in most psych circles....more
A really solid read. A productive and direct means of addressing health anxiety and hypochondria, as well as non-judgmentally connecting it with chronA really solid read. A productive and direct means of addressing health anxiety and hypochondria, as well as non-judgmentally connecting it with chronic conditions and emphasizing the role of the mind, framing, and stress management.
I think the best part was early on, when he laid medicine bare: A doctor doesn't give a shit if it's not cancer, heart disease, or infection. If you come in with symptoms and it's not one of those immediate emergencies, you are moved to the back burner and dealt with eventually, unless you get impatient and leave. And if you can leave, then hey! Looks like they were right.
He goes on to say that symptoms =/= conditions. You can have a condition or a disease without having any symptoms, as in the case of the 30% of people with bulged or herniated disks who experience no back pain whatsoever, and never would've found out about the issues in their spine if they hadn't stumbled on it during routine checkups or looking at something else.
And you can have symptoms without a condition. This is huge. Sometimes, you just have symptoms. Sometimes you have a runny nose and it's because you have a runny nose. Sometimes, things bleed for no reason. If you ask WebMD, that's boneworms, that's gooch cancer, you're cooked dude. You've got 2 weeks to live. If you ask a real doctor, they say, "Huh! Weird! Well, sometimes there's blood! You know how it is, containing blood."
We vastly overestimate the capacity of medical professionals. Medicine is an idiot science. Barbers were bleeding people until the mid 1920s. All the medicine you know of today is around a century old, and there haven't been all that many huge advances in it outside of antibiotics and the polio vaccine. That doesn't apply to most other vaccines, lest we forget.
Doctors are trained as interventionists. You come to them, and they give you pills, or they do some cutting. That's what they're for. If you bring them a problem that does not involve pills or cutting, the doctors are going to say, "Huh! Weird!" And probably recommend you see a psychiatrist.
And as fucked as it is, they're still usually right, because you literally cannot conceive of how many psychogenic symptoms a body can engineer. Anxiety alone, you're looking at tachycardia, brain fog, musculoskeletal malfunction, nausea, vomiting, indigestion, constipation, sweating, dry heaves, nutrient malabsorption, insomnia, panic attacks, seizures. Full on seizures. You live like that for a few weeks and the body gets run down, things can start to fail. You have vitamin deficiencies, fainting spells, psychosis. And pain. Pain everywhere, worse and worse.
And the truly insidious part is, you can get these things by worrying that you'll get these things. No physical cause to it, but one hell of a physical effect.
On a long enough timeline, it can kill. I worked with a hypochondriac who wound up dying from it. A psychotherapist, ironically enough. She had been self-medicating with over the counter stomach medication because her "doctors didn't listen to her" when she came in complaining of constant tummy troubles. The medicines she took and the quantity she took them in, in conjunction with stress-induced GERD, chewed a hole in her stomach lining. She didn't notice the difference since her stomach always hurt, and on the day she died she refused to go to the hospital because "I don't have health insurance and I'm not going to pay out of pocket for them to do nothing".
Chilling last words, in retrospect.
Health anxiety is not having anything wrong, but believing something is wrong so hard that something becomes wrong. This is vindicating for the victim, because when something is finally wrong, they get to yell, "I told you I was sick!"
And, sure, they were, after a fashion. That's what makes this book so important. This six-week method reduces the severity of the health anxiety. It lets these people back off their identification with their constant parade of pain and misery, it unclots the offices of various medical specialists (who have just been charging their insurance and shrugging at them anyway), and it allows them to be accountable for administering their own reality check, so there isn't the defensive doubling-down on how sick they truly were all along.
My mother died of cancer. They gave her weeks, and she made it decades. She beat it twice. The chemo always beat her up worse than the disease itself, but right to the end, she maintained optimism and a fairly high quality of life. A disease doesn't guarantee symptoms, symptoms don't guarantee a disease, and neither dictate an individual's response. If you wallow about your symptoms, whether there's a disease underlying them or not, they will become worse, and you will become more miserable.
So put in your six weeks. Do the work and take back your life....more
Food part is good, exercise part is ridiculous. Piggyback isn't a lift. Still, good effort, good intent.Food part is good, exercise part is ridiculous. Piggyback isn't a lift. Still, good effort, good intent....more
Distractions aren't fun. Fun is immersive and requires connection, spontaneity, and creativity. If you are doing something that you think is fun, and Distractions aren't fun. Fun is immersive and requires connection, spontaneity, and creativity. If you are doing something that you think is fun, and it's missing those components, you are wrong.
There's a mild caveat for things you enjoy doing alone but Price maintains that those aren't fun so much as a synonym for fun like "diverting". Her distinction is drawn along the lines of real fun and fake fun. Real fun is when you're having a peak experience, when you hit you a flow state. It often occurs because you suspended your tendency to harsh self-judgment and just booled out with some friends doing something goofy. Fake fun is doomscrolling or playing Vidya.
I would argue that real fun can be temporarily achieved playing Vidya with the homies, but that gives way to fake fun pretty quickly. ...more
It's not what I'd normally read, but I liked the Lottery and figured I'd give Shirley Jackson a real shot. I'm on a medieval horror kick, or trying toIt's not what I'd normally read, but I liked the Lottery and figured I'd give Shirley Jackson a real shot. I'm on a medieval horror kick, or trying to be (if you have medieval horror recs send them to me either here on Goodreads or at http://YouTube.com/@bucksbooks ), and this one looked spooky and had the word "castle" in it.
Again, deceived. Same thing happened to me with Mythago Woods. Not a castle to speak of. Still, this wound up being a nice little foray into psychosis.
Merrikat Blackwood is an insane young lady who lives in a sort of Castle Frankenstein situation overlooking a neighboring village full of neighboring villagers, all of whom she despises. Fortunately, the feeling is mutual. She shares her Addams Family mansion and surrounding forested property with her senile, paraplegic Uncle Julian and her older sister Constance, who is in a constance state of denial.
The villagers hate the Blackwoods because of The Event. As the story goes on, you learn that The Event was a mass poisoning, arsenic in the sugar at family dinner that wiped out most of the Blackwood line, save for the only three characters in this novel. Merrikat was 12, and sent to bed without dinner, probably for being insane. Uncle Julian didn't take enough sugar to die, but he's still not doing great. Constance got off scot free. Cut and dry. She was charged with the murder of her family and ultimately acquitted because the evidence just wasn't there.
For six years, these three weirdos have been living in isolation, with Merrikat making weekly jaunts into the village for groceries and library books. The villagers resent the Blackwoods, both for their wealth and for all the murder. Constance's agoraphobia looks that much more suspicious since she hasn't left the giant, beautiful house since her family died and she has her tween sister do her shopping. Whenever Merrikat goes into the village, the locals try to intimidate her into leaving town or sing mocking nursery rhymes about poisoned tea. Merrikat responds with vivid fantasies about killing them.
The family dysfunction functions well enough, with Constance doing all the cooking and cleaning, as well as enabling Merrikat in all of her obsessive compulsive behaviors, encouraging her to do her witchcraft, nail stuff to trees, and arbitrarily burying valuables. Connie also cares for Uncle Julian, whose mind is well and fully gone; he spends every moment of the day obsessing about organizing his papers for a book he plans on writing about the night his entire family died.
Enter Cousin Charles, who decides to start setting things right. He tries to convince Connie to leave the house, to put Uncle Julian in an appropriate level of care, and to get the Merrikat situation taken care of, though he's vague on this last point. He's making some headway, despite Merrikat's pushback; every attempt he makes to confront the girl results in her babbling non-sequiters about life on the moon, or listing the properties of various poisonous mushrooms available in the family garden. He also throws a sequence of fits about Merrikat burying money and nailing gold chains to trees, trying to bring to Constance's attention that items have material value, which, when sold for currency, can be exchanged for goods and services. Connie laughs it off and continues cooking and cleaning, comfortably nestled in her Stepford delusion, though there are moments when bleak reality shines through and she hyperventilates about "letting it get this far".
Merrikat, fed up with Charles, chucks his burning pipe into a wastebasket full of newspapers. This burns down the dang house, taking the roof off and rendering it "like a castle, turreted and open to the sky". While the house is burning down, the villagers come up and laugh at them and smash up some windows and jars of preserves. Classic villager behavior. It screeches to a halt when it turns out Uncle Julian died in the fire, probably of heart failure, chasing around his papers.
And it's during the fire that we get the big reveal, it was Merrikat who poisoned the family. Obviously. She's been fantasizing about dead bodies and arbitrary vengeance since page 4, of course she poisoned the family.
Cousin Charles bails, and Merrikat and Constance hide in the woods for a bit, then move back into the charred wreckage of the house. They seal off the destroyed portions of the house and continue their sad, isolated life, reclusivity cranked up to 11, sleeping on the wet remains of a burnt mattress and wearing Uncle Julian's clothes. They don't attend his funeral. They just stay inside and play with the cat and bake onion pies.
Neighbors come by, ashamed of having gone feral while the house burned down, and leave them guilt offerings of home cooked dinner, which the girls eat and critique to one another. Cousin Charles comes by again and tries one last hustle, but Connie is wise to him now. The Blackwood sisters swear to never answer their door again, but they listen out the smashed out wreckage of the window like methheads and hear their neighbors either struggling with their own shame, or old women using their likenesses for witch stories to scare little kids.
"Oh, Constance," ends the book, "We are so happy!"
Chilling is a fair word. It's an exploration of how far things can go if no one pumps the breaks. Uncle Julian is too far gone, and seems like he was an ineffective, mooching blowhard before then. Merrikat is a perfect storm of neuroses, with OCD, dissociation, and garden-variety sociopathy figuring pretty heavily in the first glance. In theory, some of that could be improved with boundaries and proper socialization, but those are the only things Constance does not have on the menu, since her entire character is a Martha Stewart version of the Mia Goth crying-while-smiling face in Pearl.
I'll probably read Hill House, but not until I read some actual medieval horror. Preferably eco-horror. Love a swamp thing. ...more
No idea how I ran across this one but deeply glad I did. 5/5 perfect score because it's too short for anything to have gone wrong. Gallen the mercenary once did work for the church, but then he was excommunicated because he smoke too tough, his swag too different, his bitch too bad. Not a lot of character development was available in 52 pages, but it was made pretty clear that Gallen had done a bunch of things he wasn't proud of in the service of Mother Church. Deeply relatable to us all, I'm sure.
Nowadays, Gallen doesn't take church jobs. Nowadays he leads a band of charming sociopaths identified primarily by their choice of weapon. This is how you know the story was actually about a D&D one-shot and not legitimate historical fiction, because if it were the latter, Gallen's band of brothers (and sisters, as lampshaded on a number of occasions to hit the inclusivity quotas required of 1370s Bohemia) would have weapons that cooperated with each other. A bunch of spears and shields for a tasteful phalanx or tortoise formation, or a couple greatsword/warhammer bruisers to dispatch knights and a backline of archers to deal with anybody who didn't need to get untinned to access the meaty filling. Instead, everyone has one of everything from the armory section of the Player's Handbook. I don't begrudge Kristian this. Variety is the spice of life.
The writing style walks the knife's edge of purple prose but manages not to nick itself. The story starts gritty and gets grittier. The reason I'm giving it such a glowing review (yes, this is glowing) is how much it reminded me of the Broken Empire trilogy by Mark Lawrence. I love grimdark, but sometimes it's nice to lean all the way into the grayscale brutality of a Nietzschean, amoral world, and most grimdark has the good sense not to take itself too seriously. The Broken Empire stands on the business the whole time, and so does Hellmouth, no matter how over-the-top the setting is getting.
Psychic nuns, decapitated monks, dark rituals, a derelict church carpeted with fresh entrails and human excrement, leading into an acid trip Dawn til Dusk cannibal demon orgy and the appearance of Satan the Devil himself. The story ends with the narrative suddenly splintering, but in fairness, how else could it have ended? Where do you go when Satan the goddamned Devil is center stage and flexing on your fresh-hatched one-shotter antihero?
I am absolutely going to read the rest of Giles Kristian's stuff, and you probably should too, if you like your historical fiction dripping with an unsustainable quantity of Sam Raimi black metal splatterpunk gore....more
A beautiful book about trauma. Doc Akhtar survived plenty, and the animals she talks about are usually going through their own. Our emotional experienA beautiful book about trauma. Doc Akhtar survived plenty, and the animals she talks about are usually going through their own. Our emotional experiences are more alike than they are different, and this has compelled the good doctor to become an outspoken animal activist and vegetarian. ...more
Loading...
