And here’s the August summary.
Apolena Rychlíková, Pavel Šplíchal
Piko is definitely a project worth attention. The empathetic and understanding perspective is very good. The inserted documents, laws, etc. as illustrations are nice, the graphic design is fine.
It’s just that it’s much more of a reportage, almost a short-story book, than a deeply contemplative non-fiction with data and solutions. It has its own pace and style, it has great advantages, but it’s perhaps a bit different from what I expected. But that’s just a genre change and may be a fault of my expectations.
What I missed more was structure. Especially in the second half, I had a strong feeling with many chapters of “fine, but why are you telling me this” and the insights were increasingly episodic, inconsistent. For me personally, a simple outline of “now we’re talking about prisons, because of this, and we continue with that” would be a significant improvement, but that too might just be me.
The main thing is that even though I’d read something on the topic and know a number of users and their lives, it still told me a lot more. And despite all my grumbling, it must be said that it’s significantly above average.
Král, jenž byl a bude / Once & Future (books 2-4)
Kieron Gillen
With comics on the theme of “modernity infused with legends, especially Arthurian ones,” I should be — as someone who wrote zpevy.rolling.cz — absolutely the prime target audience.
But it just seemed weak, sloppy, and very overloaded with action and attempts to be very clever. It’s beautiful when an author plays with reinterpreting legends into the present and it holds great promise. I don’t even mind massive action scenes. But Once & Future has two fundamental problems with both.
The action practically never stops. It’s constant, extensive, frenetic — and without any stakes, surprises, or emotions. If you know the hero always survives, then the fact that stakes are regularly raised and for the third time per issue they’re fleeing from a giant monster and somehow accidentally killing it is simply pointless. There’s no respite, humour, or contrast.
And an even bigger problem lies in the reinterpretation itself. Most characters in the book KNOW they’re part of a story and have certain attributes within it that they must fulfil. This by itself breaks the greatest elegance of new adaptations, where Lancelot betraying Arthur and Arthur killing Mordred doesn’t stem from everyone fatefully saying “well the story just has to work that way,” but is a necessary, tragic result of relationships and environment.
Instead, everyone here keeps saying things like “yes I AM BECOMING CHARACTER X and therefore something.” But not only is this fairly boring and doesn’t make much sense, the books don’t even have the time or inclination to explain it. So in the end lots of people or monsters dramatically say things like “yes, she has become my Nimue” or “I am Galahad, but no, I’m no longer Galahad, I’m a monster” and so on. And of course the way to defeat stories somehow relates to the collective unconscious and rewriting stories: and therefore lots of swordfights and gunshots.
It’s an attempt to look clever and mystical over something that is neither clever nor mystical, but simply takes up space (without us ever really knowing how it’s actually supposed to work), and most importantly REPLACES relationships between characters with a simple statement of “well yeah, that’s how it is.”
But the pictures are nice, I’ll give it that.
Továrna na lži: výroba klimatických dezinformací / The Lie Factory: Manufacturing Climate Disinformation
Vojtěch Pecka
I’d been putting it off for a long time and in the end finished it in one evening.
A solid introduction to the issue of climate disinformation — why it happens, who funds and supports it. It’s fairly problematic that from the start it comes with a clear opinion on how things are and why it’s a problem, which unfortunately probably condemns the work as yet another confirmation and information for people who don’t need much informing. The insight into the Czech environment has aged slightly, but the analysis of the situation around 2010 is excellent. What I rather missed was a closer analysis of what the scene is actually saying today and why, and some clear timeline, for which there was definitely space. But one can’t have everything, and some of that I wrote myself.
Colleen Hoover
Well, for god’s sake.
From the premise “a writer is in a coma, her hot husband hires a ghostwriter to finish some novels for her, and also a lot of children have died,” one could certainly mine all sorts of things, but here the mining was explicitly in the grease pits.
What I appreciate most is that “how certain parts looked like completely idiotic literature the whole time — well watch out, that was DELIBERATELY idiotic literature.” Except everything outside those quotation marks is also just idiotic, dealing with things that aren’t interesting at all, and takes place in a world where it makes perfect sense that children die in droves. If I lived in this world, I’d end it at age four.
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Rob Fitzpatrick
A simple overview where you’ll fairly reasonably learn how to talk to customers, get feedback, and put together a contract or commission. If you’re founding a startup in the US, it’s certainly very useful; if you’re interested in a few small tips on getting quality feedback on your initial drafts, it’s also fine (where fun fact, for writing it works SIGNIFICANTLY differently even in the US, says Straczynski); if you want to feel like a successful person reading useful books, it’s certainly also fine.
The best thing about it is that you can comfortably finish it in one, maximum two train rides to Brno, and Brno is very nice.
Jméno růže / The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
Third reading — which in itself indicates it works.
First of all, The Name of the Rose is not a detective story. As a detective story it doesn’t work, it’s terrible and annoying and gets tangled in side mini-stories. The Name of the Rose is a massive opulent hybrid between an encyclopaedia, a philosophical tractate, a historical treatise, and an attempt to portray along the axis of the plot some fundamental factors of humanity as such: with an often very bizarre medieval seasoning for us today.
The entire book also positively gushes with an enormous joy of knowledge, discovery, dialogue, descriptions, and imagination, so if it’s even slightly your cup of tea, just go and read it.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas
Deeply problematic. The writing is excellent and everything even looks like the result of careful historical research, especially when names drop and contacts to specific actors and their close relatives appear.
However, there are a whole range of problems. First, some errors in geography (Bonn really isn’t a Swiss city) or history are expected but could easily be fixed. The pain begins when the author attempts to interpret Bonhoeffer’s theology, including criticism of the “empty, humanistic, LIBERAL theology” of his contemporaries.
It simply feels so intensely distorted in the context of current topics and toward American conservative evangelicalism that the original Bonhoeffer gets lost fairly quickly. Overall it sounds far too much not like an effort at understanding and finding a person including their mistakes, but a hagiography that also has its own political agenda (as hagiographies tend to).
Separating the author from the work isn’t easy at all here. Reading (of course correct) criticisms of Hitler’s antisemitic policies and divisive politics, disrespect for the rule of law, and attacks on state buildings is extremely strange if you simultaneously support Trump including the Capitol attack. I’m also almost certain that Bonhoeffer didn’t spend so much time and attention on disappointment that American theology is weak.
Nevertheless! Bonhoeffer’s life is so fascinating and the writing is so well done that yes, the work still manages to entertain, inspire, and even pose a few questions. But it would be a weak introduction to the study of Bonhoeffer.