Lucky's Book Lounge

I did not do this book justice. I encourage you to read it for yourself. It’s titled Strange Pictures so it is important for you to look at the pictures. Dissect them yourself. I read this in one sitting, and couldn’t stop. It’s one of the best books I have read in a while. This is a masterpiece. A story that spans decades, with different actors who leave you wondering; how is this connected? Is it even the same story? 10\10 really.

I rushed with the explanations. I did not describe the pictures accurately, the process of figuring them out and their impact. I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to read the book itself. But if you can't, here's an inadequate summary.

It's our One Year Anniversary!!! We've done it.

Not all books I read make it to the podcast. And it doesn't have anything to do with my liking or rating of the book. The question I always ask myself is can I retell this story for 20 plus minutes? I might love the story but find that I can't retell it, especially pure thrillers. Or if I don't know how to talk about the subject matter. Or it's too much for me.

This year, I've read The Vampire Chronicles by Ann Rice. And they have given me a lot to think about. In this episode I talk about the first four books. I'm not sure whether I'll read the other books in the series, and if I do, I don't know when.

I don't talk about these books like I do others. It's mostly the feelings and they stirred in me. This is just one long monologue about my thoughts and feelings with tiny relations to the series. The books mentioned:

1. Interview With The Vampire by Ann Rice.

2. The Vampire Lestat by Ann Rice.

3. Queen of The Damned by Ann Rice.

4. The Tale of The Body Thief by Ann Rice.

My longest episode yet. I should have cut this into two episodes, but oh well.

Ten short stories. From freaky pregnancies to talking animals, cursed objects to doomed humans to mythical creatures, from rogue AI to haunted houses. The magic of short stories lies in the art of fitting the required information into very few pages. Every line carries its own weight, no words to waste. Every story is a punch. A quick thrill. I am familiar with this format and yet I was deceived into thinking it would be a short episode.

I loved all of them. I hope you do. You can always check out the book. It’s always better than my very opinionated descriptions.

This may contain spoilers.

A man's wife suddenly changes her lifestyle. The husband decides he is the ultimate victim of this change. He married her to be one thing and since she has become so inconsiderate of his expectations of her, why should he remain married to her? Why would he be obligated to try to understand her, perhaps even help her?

A man develops a dangerous obsession. It has the potential to destroy the lives of those around him. But why should this stop him? He is an artist, inspiration has struck, the muse must be listened to. So what if it obliterates the lives of everyone, that is not his problem. His only responsibility is to his art and himself.

A woman's life gets consumed by her (literal) dreams. She's possessed by the need to make her life less predatory and more fulfilled. As her life spirals, she has little regard for those around her. Most of those around her fail her, take advantage of her and even those who try to help her barely understand her.

A woman. The eldest daughter. The older sister. The wife. The mother. As everyone around her is committed to pursuing their own desires, she is the one who takes care of them, cleans after them, and maintains sanity. She has desires to give in. To get lost in her own dreams but someone has to take care of everything. And she drew the short straw.

Two sisters.

This was a very uncomfortable read. I tried very hard to keep the episode light but I am not sure I succeeded.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica shows how quickly humanity can normalize previously unacceptable beliefs. It also shows how easy it is to oppress and exploit a group of people once you decide they are different from you.

This book is set in a fictional future where mankind has annihilated all animals and turned towards his fellow man as a source of protein. Cannibalism is legal. But because we live in a society, we cannot hunt each other like animals. So man has to come up with the group of humans, yes, but lower on the food chain. After all, man has always preyed on the weaker man. This just makes it literal.

And to others, it's 232.78 Degree Celsius (erupts in laughter, pats myself on the back.)

'It was a pleasure to burn.' Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451.

Fahrenheit 451 - the temperature at which book paper starts to burn.

I was deeply concerned by the recent reports of AI companies destroying copies of books to scan them for their models. Then keeping the copies, some of them very rare, in their privately owned databases, basically hoarding the knowledge. I was really mad. At first, I thought everyone else was as angry about it as me and my reading friends were. Then I realized, people were not as pissed as they should have been, because this is a very big deal.

In this book, Ray Bradbury presents this society where reading has been outlawed. Firemen set books on fire and most people are okay with it. In fact, they turn each other in for having books in the first place.

So, how does a society get to this? Disregard any form of intelligence? At first you think, the government obviously, Big Brother. But you would be wrong in this case. Sometimes it is the people who slowly permit these things. Who turn what used to be normal and useful into something unlawful. After all, people make a society and whatever they agree on goes.

Is this happening to our society? Are we slowly losing our reading culture and treating it as normal. With book summaries everywhere, bots helping you read and write, what does the future look like?

P.S My continued apologies for the ghost that continues to haunt this podcast, the editing team promises to take exorcism lessons.

Have you ever thought about what hell would feel like? You do not have to believe in any religion to imagine what your worst experience would be. Hell surpasses religion. Real hell is unimaginable because eternity is not something our minds can understand. Eternal suffering is scary as a concept but can we really comprehend it?

While reading A Short Stay in Hell by Stephen L. Peck, I tried to understand what eternal suffering would really feel like through the main character. In the end, I decided it would be very miserable, and yet, I did not completely understand it. It escaped my imagination, and I have a very vivid one. I failed to understand eternity, but I vaguely got the idea of eternal suffering. Suffering is unfortunately easy to relate to.

Try to imagine this version hell presented, maybe you will understand the concept of eternal suffering.

P.S I apologise for the ghost haunting this audio. It's definitely not the producer's fault.

This is a collection of thoughts, opinions, and the occasional fangirling.

This episode is supposed to serve as a kind of bridge between the last episode (Severance by Ling Ma) and the next episode (A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck). The two books are not connected in any way, they just happen to be next to each other on my nonexistent reading list.

I had some thoughts related to Severance that I needed to share before closing that chapter and I have some thoughts to share before starting the chapter on A Short Stay in Hell, hence this break.

For Severance; I engage with The Stand by Stephen King (finally checked the publishing date on this, it was 1978) and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

For A Short Stay in Hell, I checked the short story that inspired it, and as luck would have it, I got it as a short story collection: The Library of Babel and Other Short Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. I decided to talk about these stories in this episode and set the stage for my next episode using The Library of Babel.

I would like to say that this is where it ended, but, I went off topic, talked about other books, and let out my obsession with The Sandman. It got weird. I had to cut out a lot but I decided to release this. Here you go, indulge me.

This book was a total surprise. The first time I heard about it, I assumed it was the inspiration for the TV show Severance. It isn't, but it's every bit as gripping and satisfying. It captures the quiet beginning of the end in a full-blown epidemic world; imagine COVID-19, but with a brutal mortality rate.

One of the most eerie things about this book is that it was released in 2018, well before the pandemic, and the parallels between this imagined universe and the world we actually lived through are chilling.

What I loved most was the intimacy of it: we follow one character, her interior life, her behaviors, as everything around her unravels. The book never reaches for some grand, profound meaning about humanity at the end. It stays on one woman, dealing with catastrophe in her own way. I didn't see myself in her, didn't even fully identify with her, but I found myself rooting for her anyway, the way you'd cheer on and support a friend.

And the story was steady, unhurried, almost meditative. I enjoyed reading it.

This is a love story.

Imagine a world where corporations have conquered the solar system. Mars is where you go for fun. The moon, for parties. Saturn? I vacationed there last month. Venus is for honeymoons.

Now imagine those same corporations have conquered something else: your mind. Feednet is the internet, wired straight into your brain, stitched in before you're even born. It's how you think, how you talk, how you reach the rest of the universe.

This is the world of Feed by M.T. Anderson: corporate greed, consumerism, environmental collapse on a literally planetary scale, total surveillance. Sounds bleak, right?

But even here, some things survive. Envy survives. Jealousy survives. And yes, falling in love survives.

This is a love story about two young people who meet on the moon, and try to hold onto each other while everything around them, them included, is falling apart.

This is a love story.