Sunday Morning Book Thread - 06-02-2024 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading. Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...(for a limited time only, now with extra syrup!)

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

I attended a demo of a product we may be considering switching to in the near future. This picture was attached to a question on a quiz during the demo. I liked the picture, so I simply swiped it. It's clear the vendor was just using a stock photo from the interwebs. They were demonstrating how media content can be attached to questions/assessments in their product.

SUMMER BOOK STUDY

Although classes may be out for summer, that doesn't mean all academic activity has to stop. I work at a university and from time the department I work will host a summer book study for the folks in our department and for the general faculty who are interested. This year's selection is Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson. Yes, many AI tools are kind of worthless, even if they create interesting outputs. However, the reality is that AI is here to stay. Students WILL use it in their schoolwork, regardless of what professors want them to do. Many professors are freaking out because they KNOW students will use it for cheating. And yes, that's true, but I've seen one research study that suggests the actual cheating usage will remain within normal parameters (about 10-15% of students)--only the tools they are using will change. Most students want to learn if you give them a chance. Students will also be delegating tasks to AI systems in their professional careers after they graduate. In the course I teach (freshman composition), I intend to give my students some tips and tricks on how they can harness AI to improve their writing and communication skills. Some professors are embracing AI by having it create learning outcomes, developing assessments, and assembling rubrics for their courses. My boss teaches a class and she said it only took her about half an hour to get a usable rubric from AI for one of the projects in her course. Normally, it takes a lot longer to create a rubric for complex projects.

The other book study I will be doing this summer will be with my church men's group. We are going to do a six-week program studying Ten Men of the Bible: How God Used Imperfect People to Change the World by Max Lucado. I've flipped through it a bit and it's going to be a tough book! It's a workbook where Lucado asks some very difficult questions we are expected to reflect on as we read his commentary on the ten men and the relevant Biblical chapters. Our first subject is going to be Job, though he's actually the second man listed in this book. On the surface, the story of Job is fairly simple. He is a righteous man who seems to be afflicted by God and loses everything. However, he remains steadfast in his faith and regains everything he lost and then some, though he goes through numerous struggles to get there. However, he seems to be guilty of hubris, as he starts to expound on who he believes God to be to his friends. Then God decides to step in...

Anyway, it is going to be an excellent spiritual experience with my men's group. We always have a good time and enjoy our fellowship together. I always walk away with deep thoughts...

And yes, there is an equivalent Ten Women of the Bible for the 'Ettes. The women's group in my church studied this book this past spring. It seems only fair that the men catch up to them.

SUPERNATURAL HORROR V. COSMIC HORROR

Cosmic horror, for the uninitiated, refers to a genre of horror fiction popularized by H.P. Lovecraft and several of his contemporaries, such as Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith. It's characterized by a complete lack of hope in a universe that cares not a whit for humanity as a whole and certainly has no concern for any individual human being. We are ants to be stepped on if the greater powers that walk among the stars deign to notice us at all--and we usually pray they do not! Attempting to gain knowledge of the true state of being drives one to madness because there are things man was not meant to know. Even gazing upon certain entities can render one irrevocably insane--or dead. Most of the stories are quite cynical about our status in the greater scheme of things. The protagonists may become pawns in a cosmic game, the rules of which are completely inscrutable and unknowable. If the protagonist survives the encounter, most likely he's forever altered by the experience and can never interact with "normal" humans in any meaningful way. And no one is going to step in and rescue the protagonist at the last moment.

Supernatural horror, by contrast, can be quite personal, recognizing the individual has a key role to play in the story instead of being a simple bystander or tool of cosmic entities. Like cosmic horror, supernatural horror stories tend to involve otherwise ordinary people who are caught up in events that are beyond their understanding. However, as the protagonist goes through the story, he or she will start to comprehend the rules of the story as it progresses, which usually doesn't happen in cosmic horror. The mystery behind the supernatural events will be revealed in time as the heroes gather more information about the entity (or entities) against which they struggle, thus giving them clues about how to defeat it. One element that supernatural horror has that cosmic horror does not is that there are forces of supernatural GOOD that may be working on behalf of the heroes. This is characteristic of all of the Dean Koontz novels I've read so far--all of them clearly had supernatural heavenly agents working behind the scenes to help the main protagonist, though they may not reveal themselves until the final conflict. It does result in a sort of "deus ex machina" solution to the story, but if it's done right, the reader won't care because we WANT to see a divine intervention at that point. As with cosmic horror, the protagonist is changed by the experience, but often for the better as they now know that the spiritual realm is REAL and that they matter in the grand scheme of things.

There are lots of other horror flavors out there, of course (e.g., psychological horror, body horror, etc.), but these two were on my mind recently because I've been reading Dean Koontz and we've talked about William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

Picked up the new Stephen King collection, YOU LIKE IT DARKER. Uneven, imho, like most of his collections but there's some pretty good stuff in it and since he's working at short length here there's no room for him to go off into multi-page political rants. I think by now he's incapable of leaving them out completely, but they're kept to a minimum here. If you like King's shorter work, it's worth a look.

Ebook edition recommended -- the one-star Amazon reviews are almost all due to pages falling out, so somebody seems to have screwed up in the print edition binding.

Posted by: Just Some Guy at May 26, 2024 09:18 AM (q3u5l)

Comment: I have a theory that some authors are better at one form of writing than others. Some authors are great at writing short stories, but aren't so great at longer novels. Others excel at writing novels, but don't always write short stories very well. Stephen King may be able to do both equally well, though I've not read much of his longer fiction. I have enjoyed some of his short stories, though. As for pages falling out, I have noticed that this is a problem with books that are "published on demand" sometimes. Pages will simply fall out because of the inferior binding process that was used to produce the book. Not all books on demand are like that, but I have bought enough of them to note a distinct pattern.

I read The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom by Michael Nehls. Nehls is a German M. D. and a molecular geneticist specializing in immunology. This wasn't an easy book to read for this non-scientist, 78-year old who isn't as sharp as he once was; but I found this book to be fascinating.

Nehls describes in detail how adult human beings can be robbed of their individuality and conditioned by reprogramming their autobiographical memory center located in the hippocampus in each hemisphere of the brain. During deep sleep our brains transfer significant thought and personal experiences collected from these to the neocortex. The hippocampi also generate thousands of new neurons each day. A healthy hippocampus needs proper nutrition, sleep, social life and exercise.

Nehls is careful throughout the book to label his opinions from scientific facts. In his opinion, most of the governmental actions during the Covid-19 pandemic were put in place to do harm to the hippocampi and to reduce its volume. He lays out a chain of circumstantial evidence that these negative influences were a deliberate attack on our individuality.

Posted by: Zoltan at May 26, 2024 09:24 AM (gyCYJ)

Comment: As we've seen in recent years, there are large numbers of people that seem to be easily swayed to accept a collective mindset. We've even adopted a term for these people: NPCs (which stands for "Non-Player Characters"). This refers to a term from role-playing games where characters under the control of the Game Master can only do what the Game Master commands while the player characters have their own individuality. The NPC meme has gained a pretty strong following because of how easy it is to spot them once you know what to look for. These people will spout any government propaganda they are told to say, even if they are ordered to contradict themselves the next day.

I'm not sure if this is a recommendation or an anti-recommendation, but last week's thread featured the following exchange:

This year it is a copy of People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. Two different people gave me copies of this book think___ I would enjoy it and after putting it off for quite a while decided to try it.

It is the story of The Haggadah "One of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images".

It starts out in current time but as the books history is revealed, flashes back to the beginning of WWII in Bosnia. It is said to be based on a true story.

Only a third of the way in and I am fascinated although some of it seems unbelievable. It posits a warm relationship between Jews, Arabs and Christina's in Sarajevo living side by side without strife. Curious enough to research to see if this is truth or fiction. It is important to the story though.

Will report more as I get more,into it.

Posted by: Sharon(willow's apprentice) at May 26, 2024 10:21 AM (t/2Uw)

That book is false and the author is politely put full of shit.

I own a facsimile of The Sarajevo Haggadah. It's a Kabbalist tome, steeped in alchemy. It's quite beautiful, don't get me wrong. I've owned multiple copies and given most away, my current is a sleeved edition from Jugo 1966?

Other Jews have been after that thing for generations and I know/knew one of the guys in on the museum heist that left the original on the floor.

It's not at all the first illustrated Haggadah, but any others extant are held in secure archives in the Kremlin.

Posted by: LenNeal at May 26, 2024 10:37 AM (vF0BS)

Wow LenNeal, way to give away the ending. I was already suspicious of the Arabs hiding Jews from the Nazis but was interested in how the War comes to affect daily life, first slowly and then all at once. As a Jew, trying to understand how they allowed themselves to be herded like sheep onto those trains was difficult. Until I started reading books that opened my eyes to how cruel and evil humans can be.

And seeing what is going on today...

From that perspective the book is interesting so far.

But I will read it as fiction, not fact.

Posted by: Sharon(willow's apprentice) at May 26, 2024 10:52 AM (t/2Uw)

Comment: I looked up this book on Amazon and checked out the 1-star reviews, as I often find them very revealing, especially when it comes to books that may be controversial in some way. The very first 1-star review gives an excellent breakdown of the problems within this book, including the forced diversity perspective found in postmodernism applied to 15th-century characters.

More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (1000+ Moron-recommended books!)

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.

Dragonlance - Defenders of Magic Vol. 2 - The Medusa Plague by Mary Kirchoff

Several years have passed since the last book. Guerrand has been assigned as the High Defender of Bastion, the keep that was created to prevent mages from accessing the Lost Citadel. Unfortunately, he now has a mortal enemy who was once his dear friend. Lyim, whose arm was magically deformed in the previous book, has been seeking a cure for his malady and his only hope is to find a way into Bastion, where he might be able to replicate the circumstances that caused his deformity and thereby gain a cure. Guerrand, in his role as High Defender, absolutely refuses to grant access. So Lyim concocts a particularly brutal means of luring Guerrand out from his fortress. In some ways this is a book that shows just how petty evil can be and the lengths people will go to in order to achieve their selfish goals.

Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Wars Book 2 - Slave Ship by K. W. Jeter

Honestly, I am not quite sure what the plot is in this series of books. It mostly seems to be a character study of Boba Fett, demonstrating just how badass he is in the Star Wars universe. He goes from one tough situation to another and shows how crazy prepared he is, no matter the circumstances. He toys with his fellow bounty hunters, though he doesn't see it that way, of course. It seems kind of ridiculous that bounty hunters really play that much of a role in the Empire, so I have a hard time buying into the underlying premises. It's not badly written, though, so I am able to gain some entertainment out of the series.

Star Trek: The Original Series #15 - Corona by Greg Bear

This is a very short Star Trek novel, clocking in at only 192 pages. That's barely enough time to set up the main plot, which involves sentient protostars taking over a remote Vulcan scientific research colony. Naturally, the Enterprise is sent in to investigate. By the way, did you know Captain Kirk has an implant that allows him to receive coded Starfleet messages directly into his brain when he's sitting in his captain's chair on the bridge? I didn't either until this novel! Part of the plot involves the potential creation of a new universe--at the expense of our own, of course. Which is interesting because that was also the plot of Star Trek #13 - The Wounded Sky and Star Trek #43 - The Three Minute Universe. I suspect there are more Star Trek novels (in all sub-franchises) that also have a similar plot...

Forever Odd by Dean Koontz

This is the second book in Koontz' Odd Thomas series. Odd must track down the man who presumably kidnapped Odd's childhood friend. Because this is Odd Thomas, you can bet something unholy and supernatural is really the culprit. He must use all of his wits and gifts to defeat an exceptionally cunning enemy.

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