Category: Books
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📚 Beyond Anxiety
Read Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck
Recommended
Note: I listened to this book, and will be updating this post after taking notes from another format.
This was a good collection of wisdom for releasing anxiety.
In many ways, it was an “applied” version of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary.
The gradual movement into the more woo-woo elements was well handled, and didn’t land in any dangerous territory.
My main concern was that with her valid concerns about WEIRD culture (“western”, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic), the proposals were still consumption-oriented and individualistic. We cannot live in a way where we all purchase an increasing number of services from one another, even if those services are creative and valuable to both parties. Some of our needs must be met in non-precarious ways, in community.
📚🎲 The Monster Overhaul
Read The Monster Overhaul: A Practical Bestiary by Skerples
Highly Recommended
This is the best D20 resource I’ve found. Pair with Trilemma Adventure Compendium and your favorite D20 system, and you can have hundreds of hours of great fun.
“Practical” is a great description. This isn’t just statblocks and pictures, but contains highly-useful information like motivations, variations, and tables. It’s packed with inspiration and flavor (including tasting notes and results for creatures that characters are most likely to try to eat 😆). Wizards come with plenty of magic options. Sphinx comes with riddles. Dragons come with hoards. You get the idea.
Every layout is jam-packed with useful information and tables.
You’re encouraged to mark it up and make it yours. I bought a second copy and I will.
📚🕊️ Side note: looking into various traditions’ practices around Harrowing of Hell gave me a clue into why BranSan (who comes up with interesting names for thousands of things) kept using a generic name (“The Spiritual Realm”) for something important in the latest Cosmere book: it’s Mormon language.
📚 A Fever in the Heartland
Highly Recommended
Tells the story of how a grifter and serial abuser manipulated people to gain money and power. Loneliness was turned to belonging. Fear was turned to hate.
Also tells the story of courageous people that helped stop the villainy!
Almost every page has a parallel to current USA politics. A must read in these times.
📚 Read: The Hope of Glory by Jon Meacham
Not a coherent work, perhaps due to being a collection, rather than a planned book.
I was struck by no attempt at explaining how he can hold to both Universalism and High-Sacrament Orthodoxy at the same time.
📚 Highly anticipated (by me): Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth
📚 after months of renovation, my neighborhood library is back open. Celebrating by working there today.
📚 ebooks.com (unlike Amazon and Bookshop) show you clearly which are available in DRM-free format. See here.
Are there other sites (that are not super-niche) that do this for ebooks?
📚 In the USA, Amazon is removing the only (mostly) reliable way of backing up your books (“Download & Transfer via USB”) by Feb 26. One more reason to go elsewhere, and to buy DRM-Free.