In one month, I managed to recover from Revachol, take a week-long trip to Albania, definitively part ways with the Pirate Party, and — yes, read some books.
They had absolutely zero correlation with what I was doing at the time though.
Ecstasy as Medicine: How MDMA therapy Can Help You Overcome Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression…and Feel More Love
This is definitely not a book for self-therapy with any substances. But it is informative, solidly sourced (albeit with a very clear, very positive agenda), and apart from the anecdotes and personal stories (it was hard to count the times the author „burst into tears“), it is well written.
If you have any interest in the topic, this is a good starting point. As long as you can work with author’s clear bias there.
This time with hints of a plot and slight shifts, but overall still mainly cozy, relaxing reading without ambitions or deeper meaning. But the art is beautiful, it’s clearly leading to something at least mildly conflictual, and probably better than staring at the wall.
Kamome Shirahama, 白浜鴎, Stephen Kohler (Translator)
The story could work as a stand-alone (even if it gets a little too full of action at times), some of the mini arcs are actually interesting, and once again, it’s a short, cosy read. Best of the series yet!
When the Body Says No: The Cost Of Hidden Stress
I wanted to get to know more about stress.
I got to know a lot about how the author thinks stress causes cancer based on very shaky basis and lots of ideas around things like “guilt”. Very, very bad and misleading thing.
Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors
Sometimes confusing, always full of kitsch, very, very rich in the sheer number of stories, and actually full of heart. Very solid ending to Cthulhu Casebooks, redeeming the whole series quite a bit.
Really hard to feel anything about this. The basic idea is something that has been tried more than enough and then it goes to so many levels of meta and mind control that it’s just…yeah, cool, if you control someone’s mind, you control them. And I guess it is not great to torture people. And governments do evil things because power corrupts.
I think that I probably read too much books like this to be moved in any direction. Fills an afternoon, I guess, dutifully crosses of it’s plot twists and comeuppances while it goes to the inevitable ending. Maybe I have become too jaded, maybe this is just too run of the mill.
Solid reportage with no higher ambition, no intention to get a bit more under the skin of the industry or tackle the more complex topics. Most of it also just shrugs off „death marches“ and crunch: which is a legitimate approach, it really is, but then why does it give so much attention to them to just say „yeah I guess it is just a feature“?
In the end, the book does not actually say anything apart from a number of anecdotes. And that is fine, if you treat it like a collection of disparate articles.