BOOK REVIEW: Lost Gods

Book Review: Lost Gods by Brom – ★★★★☆

Brom’s Lost Gods was an excellent read. The premise and story kept me interested the entire time. The pacing of the book felt balanced, with the story progressing steadily while also allowing enough time for the characters/world to reach purgatory, where Chet finds himself after dying. Brom creates such a clear image of the characters and environments Chet encounters, such as the weird creatures, eerie landscapes, and hazardous environments, that it is very easy to picture what is happening.

The plot centers around Chet, a man who has just been released from prison and wants to change the course of his life with his pregnant girlfriend, Trish. While they attempt to leave his troubled past behind and build a new life together, they discover that there is no way to escape when an ancient demon enters the picture. Chet finds himself trapped in a brutal and chaotic afterlife (purgatory) where there is no peace attained through death.

Chet learns that both Trish’s soul and their unborn daughter’s soul are trapped in danger from the evil demon that killed him. In an act of defiance, Chet refuses to accept his fate and learns of a legendary key that could allow him to return to the world of the living to save his girlfriend and their child. If he can locate the legendary key, it may give him the ability to return to life and save his loved ones. Chet is very resolute about obtaining the key, and that determination drives him on a perilous quest to find it in the depths of the underworld.

Chet discovers as he continues his journey towards discovering his purpose, that he has become embroiled in a larger battle underway in the afterlife. The balance of power is shifting among the green coats, the Old Gods, and the demons that exist in the chaos that exists between them all. This new dynamic creates an additional level of depth to the world-building and adds to the belief that the afterlife is not just a static environment, but rather a living and changing place.

Chet has flaws, but I found him a redeemable character who was compelling enough that I cared about his attempt to save his family. I enjoyed reading Lost Gods because it was a compelling dark fantasy with good character development, vivid world-building, and a premise that immediately drew me in.

I could easily see coming back to Dr. Gould and his marriage counseling practice in the future. In the meantime, we have a loving couple that just couldn’t seem to make it work until they saw the good doctor. Between his therapy and the vitamins he gives them, the results are staggering. They’re so amazing, our two new bimbos have devised a way to thank him, exploring their sexuality together.

Natural Selection is available from Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Google Play, and Ream. It’s also in German.

Leilani and Ahyoka are having marriage problems. Both women still love each other, but they don’t have time for each other with their academic-based jobs. And that is where Dr. Gould comes in. He’s a marriage counselor who has a near total success rate using a combination of therapy and special vitamins.

But the vitamins slowly change the unsuspecting couple. And it turns out the vitamins are doubly effective when it is two women living together. Even Dr. Gould is surprised by the rate of transformation. And once the married couple are bimbos, they have a very special way they want to thank the doctor for his help.

How will Leilani and Ahyoka survive as bimbos? Will Dr. Gould manage to maintain his professional detachment, or will he become intimately involved with his patients? Find out in Natural Selection.

I feel myself struggle to understand your theology, Ms. Indelicato. The universe, as you describe her, is cruel and uncaring, and god that created universe even more. I agree with you on indifferent nature of reality, but reality you describe same one I see, and I give no weight to existence of supernatural. But you give weight. Much weight. And you claim meaning of life is to follow some form of moral code in hope of uncertain reward in likely imaginary afterlife. Am I correct? Have I described your position?

Fractal Noise - Christopher Paolini

I just finished for my #RetroReads project (revisiting novels I owned and/or read during my youth): THE GREY ONES by John Lymington (1960). Lymington was a pseudonym of John Newton Chance. I’m most familiar with his work as one of the many Sexton Blake authors (writing as John Drummond). His SF novels have been called “potboilers,” and it’s an accurate assessment, but I find they have a sort of sub-John Wyndham charm. In this one, the population of a village succumbs to a mob mentality due to a carrier wave being transmitted from a machine in the local manor. A plant grown from an alien seed has seized the mind of a woman and used her to build the device and begin the experiment. Unfortunately, a rat then ate the plant and the machine is now left running, the woman unable to stop it. The story moves rapidly from one incident to the next and it feels very much like the author flew by the seat of his pants, rarely knowing what he was going to write next. It results in a strangely hallucinogenic atmosphere, tinged with hysteria, which is more satisfying than the actual plot. Quite an oddity, this, but not at all up to the standard of Wyndham, John Christopher, J. G. Ballard, etc.

Cozy Ambiance With Tea Book And Rug By The Fire At Home

Spring in the head and heart: teacher, who inspires his students through his teaching of poetry.

I saw this movie a long time ago, it’s valuable, watch it, it’s still relevant today. Together with your son, brother, boyfriend, husband. Robin Williams was a great actor.

Nancy H. Kleinbaum (1948 – 2024) was an American writer and journalist. She was the author of the novel Dead Poets Society, which is based on the movie of the same name.

Dead Poets Society is a 1989 American coming-of-age drama film directed by Peter Weir and written by Tom Schulman. The film, starring Robin Williams, is set in 1959 at a fictional elite boarding school called Welton Academy. It tells the story of an English teacher, who inspires his students through his teaching of poetry.
Dead Poets Society was produced by Touchstone Pictures and Silver Screen Partners IV and released in the United States by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution on June 2, 1989. The film was a commercial success and received critical acclaim. The film received numerous accolades, including Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director and a Best Actor nomination for Williams. Schulman received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work. The film won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, the César Award for Best Foreign Film and the David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Film.
The original script was written by Tom Schulman, based on his experiences at the Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, particularly with his inspirational teacher, Samuel Pickering. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who oversaw Touchstone Pictures, suggested, that Weir read Schulman’s script. On the flight back to Sydney, Weir was captivated, and six weeks later returned to Los Angeles to cast the principal characters. Filming began in November 1988, and wrapped in January 1989. After filmmakers scouted more than 70 universities and private schools, they decided that Dead Poets Society would take place at St. Andrew’s School and the Everett Theatre in Middletown, Delaware, as well as at locations in New Castle, Delaware, and in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. Classroom scenes with Keating were filmed in a replica classroom built on a soundstage in Wilmington. To emphasize a film set back in time, storefronts in Delaware towns were transformed, with all modern conveniences removed. During the shooting, Weir requested that the young cast not use modern slang, even off camera. Weir also said, that he hid a half-day’s filming from Disney executives to allow Williams free range to use his comedic improvisational skills.
The film’s global receipts were the fifth-highest for 1989, and the highest for dramas. The film was voted #52 on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Cheers list, a list of the top 100 most inspiring films of all time.
After Robin Williams’s death in August 2014, fans of his work used social media to pay tribute to him with photo and video reenactments of the film’s final “O Captain! My Captain!” scene. Upon hearing about Williams’s death, many teachers came forward to pay him their respects online and even revealed, that they were inspired to become teachers, because of his character, Mr. Keating, from Dead Poets Society. Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles feature prominently in the music video for “Fortnight” by American singer Taylor Swift from her album The Tortured Poets Department (2024), as a nod to the similarity between the two titles.
A theatrical adaptation written by Tom Schulman and directed by John Doyle opened off-Broadway October 27, 2016, and ran through December 11, 2016.

Everything was forever, until it was no more (Alexeï Yurchak, 2005)

“Although any authoritative language, political or religious, contains many formulaic structures, clichéd “sound bites,” and ritualized features—and is therefore highly citational—the new authoritative language of late socialism had acquired certain unique characteristics.

This language had become what I term hypernormalized—that is, the process of its normalization did not simply affect all levels of linguistic, textual, and narrative structure but also became an end in itself, resulting in fixed and cumbersome forms of language that were often neither interpreted nor easily interpretable at the level of constative meaning.

This shift to the hypernormalized language in which the constative dimension was increasingly being unanchored is key for our understanding of late socialism. (…)

As with authoritative language, from the 1950s on the form and style of visual propaganda became increasingly standardized and centralized.

An example of this development was the image of Lenin.

In the late 1960s, during the campaign for the preparation for Lenin’s one hundredth birthday in 1970, the artists of KZhOI were informed of a circular sent from the CC in Moscow saying that very few people still remembered Lenin personally and therefore he had to be depicted “more as a heroic symbol than a common man.”

Lenin was subsequently portrayed as a younger, taller, and more muscular figure, in a more fixed and repeatable style, in fewer contexts and poses, with fewer painting and sculpting techniques, materials, colors, and textures, and with fixed elements of visual structure from one representation to the next. (…)

Artists stocked normalized images of Lenin in their studios to have enough material to “quote” from.

This guaranteed that the norm was reproduced, minimizing the stamp of the artist’s personal style, but it speeded up the process of painting and that translated into higher pay.

Artists developed painting techniques that can be called “block-painting,” by analogy with the “block-writing” developed by speechwriters, that included exact replication of visual elements, forms, designs, colors, styles, and textures across different contexts.“

Taming the Star Runner, by S.E. Hinton

I loved this one so much when I was a kid, it was easily my favorite after The Outsiders.Not sure why, really, I think it was the fact that Travis was a writer, and the descriptions of him sitting in his room with his typewriter and his cat on his lap was one that I actually related to. Though replace typewriter with journal. It could have been that the time frame was closer to mine.All of that…

Taming the Star Runner, by S.E. Hinton

Taming the Star Runner, by S.E. Hinton

I loved this one so much when I was a kid, it was easily my favorite after The Outsiders.

Not sure why, really, I think it was the fact that Travis was a writer, and the descriptions of him sitting in his room with his typewriter and his cat on his lap was one that I actually related to. Though replace typewriter with journal. It could have been that the time frame was closer to mine.

All of that being said I haven’t read it since I was in my late teens. I still like it a lot, but reading this time I can kind of see why this is the only one of this group of books not to be made into a movie. It is sort of too patchwork to be made coherent on the screen. It might make a good miniseries because it mostly works in episodes.

Travis is a little like Ponyboy. Except Pony was less angry, used toughness as a defense against the way others saw him. Travis, is angry before he is anything else and that is what got him into the mess he is in.

I mean, he has every reason to be angry, his mom, a battered woman, to scared to stand up to her husband who gleefully torments her son.

As weird as it sounds this read through, I kept seeing parallels to Little Women in the parts dealing with Travis’s family.

Travis is a writer, hot tempered. He doesn’t have a family like the Marches but he does go through things that eventually help him settle without breaking his spirit.

Before the story starts, Travis was sent to juvie for beating the shit out if his stepfather with a fireplace poker. The attack was prompted by his stepfather going into his room, gathering up all his writing and burning it.

Travis went further than Jo did on Amy, but considering that there was never any love lost between the two, that isn’t surprising.

Travis is sent to live with his uncle, on a ranch, who is going through his own life challanges. Now this doesn’t perfectly align with Jo going to New York to put distance between herself and Laurie, but it still reminded me of it.

Travis has actually written a novel that ends up with a publishing deal, but is blocked because he is underage and his stepfather won’t allow his mother to sign papers without reading the book first. Travis knows that his stepfather would never approve and his mother would never go against him.

He has an outburst that puts his living situation with his uncle on the line.

Now, again, this doesn’t perfectly line up with Jo and Mr. Beahr ’s disagreement over Jo’s writing, but it did remind me of it. Ir reminded me of it because I always thought that Jo should have told Friedrich Bhaer to go to hell when he told her how to write, because she could write both the personal project and the stories that made her money. Pen names are a thing for a reason. I mean principles are great, but so is eating.

The fact that Travis refuses to let someone else’s opinion dictate how his story would be presented is the correct way to approach it… without violent outbursts though.

The part where his mother actually stands up to her husband and let’s the book publishing go forward is a pretty good light at the end of the tunnel moment.

Another plot in the book is about 18 year old Casey and her riding school that she teaches on Travis’s uncle’s ranch. Travis is attracted to Casey, but Casey really only has time for her riding school and training for her equestrian events with her horse The Star Runner.

This part is interesting as the reader gets to see City kid Travis interact with horses and all the various things that come a long with them. It’s funny, years and years later when I would attempt to watch Gilmore Girls, I would think of Travis every time I would see Jess… only Jess stayed annoying.

In the third plot on the book, we suddenly get the backend of a crime story. One of Travis’s friends. Joe, shows up on the ranch and tells the story about how he and two other friends have been running with a local thug and bugulrizing houses. Joe ran away when one of the other friends was shot and killed by the thug.

I remember thinking when ai read it as a kid, that I wanted to be in that story instead of reading about equestrian events. This time, I felt the same. I wanted to see that play out, not just as a story told by Joe.

All in all, I didn’t like this one as much as I did when I was a kid. It is still good, it is just not as cohesive as the others - with the exception of Rumble Fish which feels disjointed by design.

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare, edited by George Lyman Kittredge, revised by Irving Ribner

1984

I picked up Lady El again, its a first novel by a white dude and the co-author he owes his career to, Daina Graziunas.

The book is from 1991 and its about a poor black office cleaner who dies in an accident and her brain is used by a researcher to power a supercomputer. She is become the internet.

The AAVE is not over the top but it is how she speaks; i suspect Graziunas rewrote all her dialog, which is most of the book. At first i was like ::cringe:: but the thing is, as cheesy as this sci fi romp is, it’s also a time capsule of AAVE in 1991. Which, like, was such a time in black literature.

So im appreciating this pulp novel as existing in a similar space to fanfic - sci-fi that speaks truths that literary fic feared to tread. I do belive that is what we call literary merit.

Also it’s a YA book. Don’t let nobody tell you books “for kids” dont matter. Sometimes they matter so so much.

Another hour! Red Rover and Reizo Shibamoto’s Music Movie and Book Catalog!! Peace and Enjoy!!

It’s finally clicking that the 8th house being the house of RESEARCH explains why I can spend literal hours/days/years researching the same topic and going so deeply down the rabbit hole, far past anyone else’s understanding of the topic to the point that I make life-changing discoveries that alter my entire perspective on how the world works and what it means to be human

It also explains why I stop at nothing to find the answers I want. Even if it takes decades I just don’t really lose the drive. I might get sick of failing to find answers but then I just step back for a day and DING have a lightbulb moment that answers my questions and also leads me down a new and even more important path

The reason I write all of this is because I always associated the concept of a house ruling “research” with the 3rd, 6th and 9th houses. Or basically just Mercurials and Sagittarians. But nooooooo no no no. That is not at all the same thing. Mercurials LEARN their subject. Sagittarians teach their subject. 8th housers peel away the layers of information one by one until there is absolutely nothing left to learn about it. One could say they master it.

Using the 8th house and Scorpio interchangeably, it’s soooo fitting that Scorpios have a Gemini 8th house. They approach all subjects as deep pits of information to be learned.

Each time he responds, he sounds even more sure of the words than the previous. The lord general’s profound statements land hard on both of us, taking root within our tether.
‘Do you promise to foster this union until the stars dim forever?’
“Until the stars dim forever.’ He smiles.

The Cerulean Sister - Katrina Calandra

Another hour! Red Rover and Reizo Shibamoto’s Music Movie and Book Catalog!! Peace and Enjoy!!

PEDAL ADVENTURES IN THE APPALACHIANS by GW Tolley. Check this out at Amazon.

The prequel story to the “i am JOSIAH” film project.

PEDAL ADVENTURES IN THE APPALACHIANS: Tolley, GW: 9798251296181: Amazon.com: Books

ROAR: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life (Stacy T. Sims, 2016)

“When it’s 10:30 at night and you’re struggling with inexplicable anxiety and battling to resist the call of a chunk of dark chocolate, it is not a lack of self-control or a freak-out.

It’s your gut flora sending some seriously strong messages to your brain. Yes, your gut talks to your brain.

In fact, it has your brain on speed dial via the vagus nerve, which connects your digestive tract to the tenth cranial nerve in your brain.

You can actually see this at work in studies where researchers examine gut bacteria among people with common cravings.

These studies show that your gut microbes manipulate your eating behavior by tinkering with the taste receptors in your gut (yes, you have taste receptors there, too) to make you want more of the types of food that feed them and help them grow.

For instance, research has demonstrated that individuals who have strong chocolate cravings have different dominant colonies of bacteria in their intestines compared to those who are indifferent toward chocolate.

It is possible that eating chocolate promotes the growth of the bacteria that flourish on chocolate, thus altering the gut microbiota composition and creating additional chocolate cravings.

This might help explain why some people have a hard time giving up chocolate, but once they do, their cravings subside, as the chocolate-loving bacteria die off without the fuel to promote their growth.”

Another hour! Red Rover and Reizo Shibamoto’s Music Movie and Book Catalog!! Peace and Enjoy!!