Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & The Meaning of Life

 I haven't previously read anything by Viktor E. Frankl, but when I saw Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & The Meaning of Life, I was intrigued. I've also been going through a rather difficult time right now, and embracing hope sounded like something worth reading.

Embracing Hope is a collection of four essays, lectures, and interviews of Frankl that were never previously published in the United States. There's a lecture from 1984 that Frankl gave in Austria, A 1977 interview with Frankl from Man Alive, a television show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. An article from 1955, and another lecture from 1946 in Austria. All four pieces touch on finding meaning in life, even when life is difficult. The pieces also touch on issues that are still very topical in today's world such as the fear and fracturing of society into different tribes who do not want to work together.

I really enjoyed both the first lecture and the interview from Man Alive. Frankl had a really great outlook on finding meaning, that, while suffering does lead to meaning, no one should be voluntarily suffering (one of his examples was: if you have a tumor that can be operated on, you should get the operation! Don't suffer needlessly). Humans are driven to find meaning in their lives, and, once found, humans are capable of bearing incredible hardships for that meaning.

He also spoke in most of these texts about saving your accomplishments in the past. The past is a safe place for them: for they cannot be taken away from you once they are there. I really liked that idea, and have used it without really realizing it before. :)

While overall I enjoyed this book, I will admit I had a hard time understanding the final text. It seemed much more dense than the other three. And also seemed to jump around a bit (there were a few places where I didn't really understand his conclusion to a point because it felt like he leapt from one thing to another). For that reason, I think this book will probably benefit from being reread at some point in the future, to better digest this lecture (and any other points I may not have understood in the other three texts).

Play With Your Cat! The Essential Guide to Interactive Play for a Happier, Healthier Feline

It's honestly been awhile since I finished anything more than a graphic novel (I read a few over the last few months that I didn't document here). So I was very happy to actually make it through Mikel Maria Delgado, PhD's Play With Your Cat! The Essential Guide to Interactive Play for a Happier, Healthier Feline. I've been reading the book on and off for a month or so, and finally sat down to finish it this afternoon.

Play With Your Cat! is full of excellent advice for anyone who has a cat and wants to engage with them more through play (which honestly should be everyone who owns a cat - having a cat in your life should mean that playing with them comes with the territory, much like having a dog means you need to be out walking with them!) Delgado goes through the (somewhat lacking) science, busting myths like "some cats aren't playful," and "cats are aloof and don't like people." 

While it took me a bit to get through, Play With Your Cat! is honestly a fairly quick read. I recommend it for all the cat lovers out there who want to learn more about strengthening their bond with their cats through play!

Folklords

I saw Folklords at the library and was intrigued. A boy in a fantasy land has visions of our world. So he goes on an illegal quest to get answers from the Folklords. But there's a legion (the librarians) in his way. And he has no plan of how to find the Folklords!

I thought it was a very interesting story. I liked the worldbuilding and characters (the enchanted forest was really spooky). But unfortunately, by the end of the graphic novel, I felt like there were more questions than answers. And the series was canceled after issue #5, so there's no answers forthcoming. 😞

Untethered Sky

Fonda Lee's Untethered Sky is the story of Ester, a lady who, after a manticore kills her family, trains to become a ruhker, someone who hunts the monsters with the help of giant rocs, the only creatures capable of killing manticores. She is paired with the roc Zahra, training the fledgling to become a fearsome hunter. But the rocs belong to only themselves, and Ester and Zahra's partnership is tested when they become embroiled in the empire's largest manticore hunt ever.

I really, really liked the world of Untethered Sky. I liked how Lee made the manticores so fearsome. We are used to living in a world where we are generally the top predator; in Lee's world, that isn't the case, and the whole human world is rightfully terrified of the monsters. It also takes another monster to fight the manticores - the ruhkers take their own lives into their hands at the beginning of training a fledgling, plus acting as bait for their rocs to kill manticores once they are fully trained.

I also liked the characters. Most of the ruhkers are driven by their love (and obsession) over their birds and Ester is no different. Neither is Darius; their friendship and partnership grows thanks to training their rocs. But they are also all individuals; Namsin is more at home in high society than Ester, and Darius has no interest whatsoever in that world. It made for an interesting dynamic between the three of them.

The pacing of the book is really good, too. Untethered Sky follows Ester and Zahra from the moment they first meet, spanning six years of Zahra's training and accomplishments killing manticores. While I didn't necessarily see the ending coming, it felt inevitable based on what happened. I quite enjoyed Untethered Sky; it was a fast read (it is a novella), and I hope that Lee will one day revisit the world to tell more stories of the ruhkers!

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

 Yumi and the Nightmare Painter was another one of Brandon Sanderson's Secret Projects books (like Tress of the Emerald Sea). It sounded fantastic, so I've been really excited to read it. :)

Yumi is a yoki-hijo, a girl of commanding primal spirits (it works better in her language). She lives a life of ritual, in service to her people, calling spirits from the earth to power devices to make peoples' lives easier. Painter (his actual name is Nikaro, but he calls himself Painter) holds the civic job of painting nightmares. In his world, nightmares escape the shroud, which surrounds his city, and it's up to the nightmare painters to paint them into harmless shapes so they disappear and leave everyone alone. When a spirit asks Yumi for help, Yumi and Painter find themselves magically thrust together. They spend twelve hours in Yumi's world, with Painter inside of Yumi's body and Yumi able to only interact with him and the spirits of objects, and the other twelve hours in Painter's world, where Yumi is physically there and Painter is the spirit. Together they need to figure out why this is happening to them, how they can stop it, and what exactly the spirits needed their help with! And along the way, they become entangled in each other's lives.

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter was fantastic from start to finish. I loved the worldbuilding - Yumi's and Painters worlds were so different and interesting. I loved all of the characters. Both the two main characters were interesting and grew a lot. And the other characters from their two worlds were all interesting as well, and really helped place you in each world (everyone from Yumi's life were all about the ritual of her calling, while Painter's felt so modern in comparison, hanging out at restaurants and going shopping. I also really enjoyed the story. I loved seeing how both Yumi and Painter navigated their situation (the book tended to switch perspectives from chapter to chapter, so you would get one from Yumi's view, and the next from Painter's). They really grew as individuals as the book unfolded and I really liked that. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter also had some twists and turns that I definitely did not see coming! 

I really enjoyed reading Yumi and the Nightmare Painter and definitely recommend it! :)

The Debt-Free Lifestyle

I haven't read a financial book in awhile. I wasn't specifically planning to at the moment (I have several other books on the go right now), but The Debt-Free Lifestyle by Christine Conway caught my eye at the library because of the tag line: "We put $150,000 towards our debt in six years - in Metro Vancouver!" So I decided to bite and find out how Conway managed to pull that off.

Spoiler: by living in Surrey BC, not downtown Vancouver like I thought from that tag line.

The Debt-Free Lifestyle is a bit of a misnomer. Most of the book is actually focused on mortgages and the power or prepayments. While interesting (especially since I have recently actually bought a house and am now dealing with a mortgage), I didn't feel like the book was very focused on a lifestyle. Conway's system is super straightforward: look at your paycheck every payday, make sure there's enough money going to the things you need (bills, mortgage, gas, food), and save the rest (probably putting it on your mortgage as a prepayment, but depending on where you are in terms of amortization schedule and time to retirement, you might want to be investing instead). As far as a system goes, it's not earth-shattering. I actually far prefer the approach that Shannon Lee Simmons advocated for in Worry Free Money (which is the system I still use today!)

But in terms of readability and information on mortgages, I did find The Debt-Free Lifestyle interesting. Like I said, I recently bought a house, so I am now actually interested in how mortgages work (I never planned on buying a house, so never paid much attention to mortgage talk in any of the other personal finance books I read). Conway breaks everything down well, showing several mortgage scenarios and how much different prepayments can change your timeliness and how much interest you end up paying. I also found the book a fairly quick read: it was interesting and I didn't really get bogged down anywhere.

If you're a new homeowner, I think giving The Debt-Free Lifestyle a shot is worth it. Conway gives you a lot of tools to help you think through what strategies you might want to employ while considering getting and paying odd your mortgage. But if you're looking for more help with debt or other more general finance topics, you're better off giving this one a pass in favour of other books.

Leopard's Hunt

I don't know what exactly possessed me to take Leopard's Hunt out from the library. I'm not really a romance fan, but the book sounded intriguing so I decided to give it a go. Unfortunately I was fairly disappointed by it from the get-go; I should have stopped reading it, but I ended up finishing it earlier today. I didn't really want to blog about it, but I wanted to make sure I had a record so I don't go taking any other Christine Feehan books out - they're definitely not for me.

Leopard's Hunt is about two leopard shifters who find each other and work through their brokenness to make a relationship. Except they are also special leopard people - they are faster and stronger and have more gifts than regular leopard people, and so need to keep themselves hidden (but go around killing people in front of others (their own people, who they originally wanted to stay hidden from too) with their gifts all the same so they're not really trying). Both of them have ties to the Russian leopard mafia: Gorya was born into it, and had to hide what he was (he worked on taking it down from the inside while training up his leopard and his powers), and Maya was a slave who got out after some horrendous stuff happened to her (this is triggering, but she was r-worded as a child as a sex slave), and so she has devoted her life to tracking down the people who did this to her. Their leopards are mates though (though he doesn't remember it, Gorya and his leopard saved Maya and hers when she was younger), so they belong together for reasons.

This book has a lot of bad stuff in it. The pair are against sex slavery and so take down a huge ring, encountering lots of depraved things (and that's on top of their horrible backstories). Plus every time I thought we were through the bad stuff, more things came up (it ended with Maya's long lost sister appearing, who gave a graphic telling of what happened to her when they were separated as children. I will not write it here). 

The book also was just repetitive. Maya and Gorya say the same things to each other through most of the book, not believing they're good enough for each other, but clearly fine. Maya's tragic backstory and complete dislike of men prior to finding Gorya didn't stop her from giving her all and skipping through their steps to get them to a physical relationship quickly. Surprisingly, there was only one main sex scene - it just went on forever (I think it spanned two really long chapters) and was kind of weird and uncomfortable (I had to Google a few words to figure out what was happening, and a few things sounded really gross the way they were described). I admit that I'm not really interested in sex scenes, so others may like this part of the book more than I did.

So all in all, I didn't like this book. I should never have read it. Once I started it, I should have stopped. Now that I did read it, I cannot in good conscious recommend it to anyone because it has lots of horrible things that happen (and uses a lot of it as backstory). I will not be reading anything else by this author.