Characters: 8 out of 10 World: 8 out of 10 Storytelling: 8 out of 10 Old but new, funny and sad. A family to remember, all of them.
Table – Beautiful Start – June 2024
The best ideas are simple. And this book is based on a very simple one: what if the aliens are living amongst us. Because these aliens are friendly, they like to know other people, and they care about the state of our Earth. In this book, we encounter a family -so to say- of aliens. Each family member finds out, after meeting with an UFO, that they are coming from different planets, that is, the father from Jupiter, mother from Saturn, son from Mars, sister from Venus. It’s not explained why. That’s the best part: the origin is used as an excuse to explain the character’s behaviour. Let’s say the world they live – post-war Japan- is in danger of a nuclear holocaust, and they want to help on every way to avoid the expected end of the beautiful star that is our Earth. Will they manage? To find out, read the book. The story flows very well and it’s easy to connect with the troubles of this family that, except by the fact that they are all aliens, could be my own. I’ve enjoyed this one a lot, but I don’t give it top marks because I feel something is missing. What is that, unfortunately, I can’t tell you on this review… something. Maybe a modern twist?
What if all the humans, barely a few thousands, died all 70 thousand years ago? Will the Earth be devoid of intelligence? So when on this futurism article they suggested that we may not be alone on Earth after all, I decided to play along. First of course I tried to locate the scientific source. Unfortunately this time I didn’t find it. Probably it was lead by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who said that Ommaumma, the first interestelar object detected, was probably artificial. But allow me to engage. We all know – or assume – that our planet is quite old in comparison with mankind, and we can compare its age with the time it took us to go from the deserts to the cities, so to say. Barely a hundred thousand years, a glimpse if we compare it with the time the dinosaurs rule the Earth. The dinosaurs time itself is also not spectacular in cosmic terms. So here’s the thing. We could divide the age of the Earth, 4.54 × 109 years, on intervals of 100.000 years. To be fair, let’s start counting after the multicellular life is supposed to appear, which leaves us “only” with 1.5 × 109 years. That will be 15000 civilisation intervals. Don’t forget I’m here being quite rough, so I’ll divide the number by two – extending de facto mankind history to 200.000 years. We have now 7500 civilisation intervals. There’s no civilisation after civilisation, so now we need to add, a la Drake, some probability factors. Drake’s equation is like this:
We want to know N, the number of cryptoterrestrial civilisations. Let’s “map” the other values
R∗ = is going to be the number of civilisation intervals = 75000
fp = the probability of having moving life (no tree civilisation) = 0.5
ne = the probability of having the right challenge (no challenge, no evolution) = 0.2
fl = the fraction of consecutive life changes (so that we end on intelligence) = 0.1
fi = the fraction of intelligent societies = 0.1
fc = the fraction of civilisations with technology = 0.1
L = the length of time for which such civilisations lasted (one for simplicity) = 1 [
After my above leaps of faith (sorry, no science here) my final number is N = 7,5. Which is a big one, if you ask me. So hello, lizard people! Hope you enjoyed watching us…
“So… you are from before the Internet?” She started speaking with me, for some reason I was not able to imagine, when she caught me staring at her tattoos. First she stared a me, then she moved down the earphones, then she oddly smiled at me before popping up the question. I’m a virgin – don’t have tattoos – so all her skin art called my attention. I told her so in my broken interlingua. That seemed to relax her, and she friendly swaps to standard English. “All pre-net people are reluctant to colour, so to be fair I was also curious about you. Even my father got some drawings. Why don’t you?”
“Belonephobia.” She seems to fade out for a moment, looking through the window. Probably projecting the meaning of it on it. Just in case I clarify the word.”I’m deeply scared of needles. I used to faint during a blood test. Now I’m getting better – I have no other way.”
“Some medical? No, you look healthy. Let me guess. Are you getting the Treat?” I nod. “I see. Can you believe you are the first person I really meet who’s taking it? Of course I saw you on vids. But still you are rare. I’m so lucky! I was suspecting you were one. You know what they say, that you become a bot, that an AI is taking your body.” I laugh. She smiles. Her teeth are all white and perfect. I wonder how much of her is adjusted.
“For me, it was this or dying. Let’s say I had no option. What do you think? Do I look like a teen?” This time she laughs. I know I don’t. Her voice has a metallic echo. I wonder if she’s recording, but actually, I don’t care. I can opt out of the record. My AI, although static – he lives in my desktop – is very friendly when I ask her to delete me. Of course we can’t still delete memories and she may tell her friends about me. I look at myself. Black jeans, an original Nirvana t-shirt, no glasses, no visible electronics – I carry it all in my backpack – and a somehow conservative haircut.
“You do not look like! You have old eyes. But also, you don’t look like my old ones. ” Her parents I guess. “You know. You are the new tribe.” She seems to hesitates, the she glances briefly again at the window – checking something? For a moment I regret I didn’t get my lenses. But I was not feeling like today I was going to need them. I smile the best way I can, trying to tell her that it’s OK, that I’m safe. I wonder if my teeth – implants – look weird to her also.”Some people call you returners. Are you offended?”
“Not at all. I’m returning, after all.” Returners. I heard the term, but I didn’t think of me as one. Back to the Future I guess. I’m 80 and here I am, speaking with a teenager in equal terms. I despise myself. Am I so despicable? Luckily I don’t care about what they say, and she obviously neither.
“Well this is my stop. It was nice to speak with you, returner. See ya around, ya? Take care!” She stands up in a smooth move, like a wild animal. I flash her my teeth once more, and I wonder if I will see her again. I could track her and she could track me if she wants, so it’s not a sad goodbye. Strange days, now if you speak with someone you may be connected forever with him or her. Unless you know how to break the link. That I know. But I will not. Not in this case.
This time I made it in time for the starting of the month. From time to time, it’s good to make a break and look back and forward, but I can’t always find the moment to do it. First, the boring part. Some kind of activity review. I’m not managing to increase the number of visitors per month, neither the total number of posts, that stays in around … 13 posts per month and 6000 visits in total. The good thing, I don’t care about it so much. As I said long time ago, I’d like to keep here a low profile, so I will not tell you “about it” even if I know it because I’m concerned about getting too much attention. Second, some notes on my blogtheme. So far I’m balancing between my bits – technology related – and my dragons – book reviews mostly, lately – on a 2:1 rate. Meaning there are still morebits than dragons. I’d like to correct that in the future, but for it, I need to seriously recover my old files – they are not lost, just buried in my multiple hard disks – pick up one of my multiple unfinished story plots and see where I end up with it. Third, the life review. I’m on purpose a little bit cryptic about where I am and what I do, but this is a part of the fun. When I look back now, I feel now better. I took the decision of engaging more on out of work activities – like pub crawling – and that has been definitely a source of joy. Unfortunately while I made time for it I may have lost some of the other calls, at work on at home… it’s too early to tell. Nothing serious, I think. Because of that my dad bod is coming back, so in the future, I will need to include more sports in my life. I’m not specially a sports person, and I don’t have a gym around, so this is going to be a challenge. My goal? Maybe to get my shadow back. The one I had, the one it’s fun. But I’m no Peter Pan, so wish me luck 🙂
Characters: 8 out of 10 World: 8 out of 10 Storytelling: 8 out of 10 The epic finale. But not as epic as expected. War and war and more internal struggles.
Table – The Burning God – May 2024
Instead of a review of this book, I decided to review the whole trilogy. Here you can find my review of the first book, The Poppy War, and of the second, The Dragon Republic. Basically, the first one is the childhood of the characters, the second one is the adolescence – where they do a lot of stupid things – and in the third one we find them as adults. So on this book everybody has a determination and an attitude that differs from The Dragon Republic without losing the essence. It feels more philosophical than the previous ones, and there are whole chapters of dilemmas – a little bit too much if you ask me, since I feel they cloud the flow of the story. As bloody as the previous ones, the first one describes an invasion, the second one a takeover by the Hesperians – the particular view of Kuang of Europeans colonisers, while this third one is presenting some sort of forced de-colonisation directed by the main character, Rin, with the help of her magic and some new secondaries. It’s a good plot and a well profiled world, but I feel like the author squeezed the geography presented in the first book and left out other interesting regions. It’s anyway a proper closing. There’s no hole for a fourth book, however, we don’t get all the answers – at least I didn’t – so maybe there’s room for a new instalment, maybe from another point of view. But’s let’s be blunt and compare this with other trilogies, for example, the first one of the Wheel of Time or the first Dragonlance. Does this one reach the level of complexity of the above given examples? Unfortunately not. I don’t know if I can say that, but the writing of Kuang after the first book becomes… let’s call it popular. Allow me to explain the word in this context. One does not describe a sunset you are watching with flourished comparisons. Neither that guy that is fighting with you like a hideous one-eyed villain just to focus immediately after on how his nose look like it was broken several times by a punch. This is not popular. You simply say “Fuck, it’s you again!” or something like that. That is what Kuang does. Assuming you know the guy. A lot. Anyway, it was a fun read. A solid 8. And now back to the classics 🙂
Not literally, since I don’t have any. For me, a dragon is a metaphor of a big trouble. I do have troubles, like the neighbour’s son. But I don’t let them grow. I tend to eat them before they become too invasive and forget about they ever existed. How do I do that, how do I eat my dragons? There are books written on the subject, only not in these words. One way is to cover it in vegetables, like in the picture, and wait until the smell to roasted comes to my nose. Let’s say I’m afraid to get fired, or to become irrelevant. Then I dedicate my working time on running around, performing all those little things that everyone appreciates, and get rewarded by them – my vegetables to hide the dragon. Or I’m tired of my personal situation in general. Of my routine, of my daily dragon. I tend to stop drinking coffee, walk to the next stop, go to a new supermarket, try a new path to the office, until the dragon is cooked. Once eaten, I come back to my previous mode. Or I think so. Maybe I should check the memory dragon also. And you, do you have dragons you’d like to eat?
Characters: 9 out of 10 World: 9 out of 10 Storytelling: 9 out of 10 A Nobel prize post-morten work. Light, irrelevant, and quite pleasant to read.
Table – Until August – May 2024
It’s fun to criticise a Nobel Price winner, so let’s do it. This book deserves to be analysed maybe, as a clear exponent of greediness, or as bibliofilic necrofilia. It’s interesting because since you are reading clearly an unfinished product – the author died 10 years ago – it makes you, the amateur, feel close to the excellent writer that Marquez is. Don’t expect a short version of 100 years of Solitude. This story is correct, but to the level of the winner of you High school’s short tale prize. In other words, drop the magic out of the realism. Nothing out of the ordinary happens. You can feel it’s there, down under, but death didn’t let poor Gabriel include it in the world. And he knew it, that’s why he did’t want to see this published. What a character, the Colombian. Speaking about it. This seems to be the only writing of him having a woman as a protagonist. I’m no woman, but I like how he depicts her complexities, I mean, her feelings. In comparison her husband and other characters are, once more, very good sketches, and I’m sorry I can’t get to know them better. The same way I’m sorry I can’t explore more the recurrent island she’s visiting in Summer. This book was supposed to be a longer, more complex work. And sadly, you can feel it. So this ends up as a glimpse, like the draft it is. Now, as a punishment for this desecration, I need to revisit 100 years of Solitude before the Netflix drama arrives. We’ll see if I manage!
Characters: 8 out of 10 World: 8 out of 10 Storytelling: 7 out of 10 A continuation that could have been two. It feels like a transition.
Table – The Dragon Republic – April 2024
The Babbel book of Kuang seriously impressed me as you may know. This one, the second of the trilogy, took me a little bit more than I expected to finish because of the evolution of the characters. We learned to love Rin, the main character, across the first instalment. Well, this book kind of managed to change my infatuation with her. From a survivor and a charming girl she mutates onto a drug-addict disco pimp. It was very confusing. Across the pages you see how she gets close with her enemies from the Sinegard school, and you discover that she went from drug use to abuse. I guess this can happen to everyone, but this is not meaning I like to read about it. There’s certainly a common mood in both books so far, they are bloody and sometimes disgusting, but here there are more easy profanities than I would have enjoyed. There is quite a trip also in terms of alliances. It feels a little like this is a transition to the third and last book – that I just started. If so, it was a risky one. It’s not that it’s a confusing storytelling. It helps to learn a lot about the World, the countries on this fantastic china, and their religions as well. It’s that it looks a little bit forced. Or maybe underworked. But it’s still worthing the time I spent reading it. By the way I backposted this to match the moment I finished the volume… and here you have the goodreads synopsis if you want some more spoilers.
Characters: 8 out of 10 World: 8 out of 10 Storytelling: 8 out of 10 A remake, yes, really!
Table – The City and its Uncertain Walls – April 2024
I love Murakami’s books. When I read his books I feel like I’m dreaming. So I may not be very impartial here. I’m slightly disappointed, and it looks like I’m not the only one. I went deep into this one with a crave for a good Murakami story (he’s his own genre) and I didn’t find it. There are a lot of common places in his work, but this time, they feel repeated. And they are! When you reach the end of the book there’s an epilogue that explains why. Minor spoiler ahead. Murakami wrote Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World based on a short story he published when he was a teenager. What I understood is that, during the pandemic, he had time to think about how he performed the transition from a tale to a novel of that story and he didn’t like it, so he decided to try again. With an odd result: every element in the story looks familiar, specially if you have read Hard Boiled already. The unicorns, the city, and so on. So is it a good story anyway? Yes it is. Is it different from Hard Boiled? Also yes. I’m going to say some classic elements look a little bit elongated like chewing gum – too much jazz – and others are missing – there’s no weird sex – so there’s no Bingo on this one. In short, unfortunately this book is not the classic I was looking for.
Some days I feel different. I have a variable level of energy. It doesn’t relate with the working load, and I’m afraid it’s also not connected with what I have experienced in previous days. I do know how to break my bad mood, and it’s with optimism. Optimism is a beacon of hope in a world that often presents challenges and uncertainties that accumulate up to incredible heights. Mountains of troubles. It is my belief that, regardless of the current circumstances, the future holds positive events. Embracing it is not about ignoring life’s difficulties, it’s about viewing them as temporary or avoidable. Or a part of the background, like the cliffs in that Alps postcard. The positive mood empowers me to approach my obstacles with confidence and resilience, and a mindset filled with persistence and creativity. I walk thought the valley in the middle of the mountains of hopes and despair, admiring the nature that surrounds me, even knowing it could kill me.
Feeling optimistic is choosing to see the glass as half full, to find the silver lining in every cloud, and to believe that every setback is a setup for a comeback. You can rise from the ruins of your project and enjoy the look of the them. Rise and shine. At least for the moment 🙂
Bits and Dragons 
