Just got done with GK Chestertons “The Man who was Thursday” and now I’m starting Tolstois “War and Peace”, which I am really excited and a little intimidated by. So far mostly doing research on the period, will start reading probably tomorrow. I already read some of his older and shorter novels and hated them, Ivan Iljytch aside. I am hoping that the younger Tolstoi had smarter ideas than the misogynist religious fundamentalist of the later period.

Anyways, since I can’t speak on War and Peace yet, here is my review for Chesterton:

Chesterton crafts a humorous and thrilling mystery, plunging his readers and his hero, the poet-turned-detective Gabriel Syme, into a nightmarish chase through London and northern France as he tries to unravel a vast and sinister anarchist conspiracy. It is hard to discuss this novel without revealing too much, so I will tread carefully.
The plot starts out simple enough. Two poets meet in a park and discuss the autheticity of their anarchist beliefs. One turns out to be a detective, the other part of a real anarchist lodge. In the following 15 chapters Chesterton gradually adds layer upon layer until the story seems to have changed completely from it's point of origin, only for it to come full circle and show that our first expectations were wrong all along. The characters and the reader reach this realisation together: their assumptions have sent them on a quest that is not what it seems. How expectations and biases shape our reality is one of the book’s strongest themes, and it fits Chesterton’s obvious distrust of materialism and rationalism.
The style follows the same arc. At first the writing seems fairly conventional, apart from some comic and eccentric touches. But these grow stranger with every chapter, until the final masked ball feels closer to the ritual in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut than to a detective story.
That said, the book has clear weaknesses. Its portrayal of anarchism is hardly fair and is at best a caricature. Whenever the text talks about anarchism, it has about as much credibility as my grandmother talking about drugs: mostly sensationalist headlines with little substance. There is some critique of society, but it comes from a perspective that is not interested in fundamental questions and is fairly comfortable with the status quo. The strong religious themes won’t be to everyone’s taste, though I found that they never became preachy. There are also some parts that seem a bit repetitive, but I can understand their addition from a structural perspective.
Overall, I found this quite entertaining and fun. Chesterton is definitely very talented when it comes to writing. However, it didn’t impress me as much as I expected given its reputation. Perhaps I simply dislike cops too much to ever truly enjoy a story centered around them.

Haven’t tried poppies yet in large enough quantities to feel anything, but I’d assume yes. Also similar to other mild natural drugs, like Khat or Kava or Nutmeg

Not really, you gotta chew a lot or drink a lot of tea to feel anything and then it’s more like drinking a few cups of coffee

Anything can technically kill anything if you are pedantic and creative enough. But at that point every statement becomes useless. Especially when a work of fiction is concerned.

Yeah, approaching these things with stringed logic breaks them usually. Same goes for vampire reproduction for example. If they turn the people they feed on, how come the world isn’t filled with vampires by now? There should be exponential growth in the number of vampires. Or Dracula needing to sleep on sacred home soil. Does it have to be from his exact crypt? How does he know the limits? Could he dig 1000 meters down and the soil would still work? How does a new vampire find their home turf, if they don’t have a family with a crypt?

You can go on endlessly poking holes, but that just takes the fun out of it. A good level of suspense of disbelief is always needed to enjoy those stories.

Dracula cannot be killed by sunlight. At least in the Bram Stoker novel. He’s out and about during the day quite a bit. What sunlight does, is keep him from changing shapes. Same for garlic, crucifixes and holy water. He can’t stand them and they weaken him, but nothing in the text says they would be fatal. Silver isn’t even mentioned.

It all depends a lot. There are different types of fragrances, for example an eau de cologne will smell less long than an eau de parfum which will smell less long than a “real” perfume. So depending on your day and type of fragrance you might need to refresh it during the day, or not. How much you use at a time can also vary quite a bit by person and smell. People who have been using a particular fragrance for a long time tend to use more since the nose gets blind to smells pretty fast. In general I’d say less is more here. Obviously the size of the bottle makes a difference as well. Finally, a lot of fragrances will not last forever. If you keep them too long they will spoil like the food in your fridge. Usually this takes a long time though.

To give you some concrete examples, a 100ml flacon of Brioni Eclat, which is an eau de parfum, will last me about two years. I use it most days, with one or two sprays per day. A 75ml flacon of a cheap eau de cologne I liked before that lasted less than a year, because it needed more applications. The shitty Abercrombie fragrance I used as a teenager started smelling funky after about 4 years of laying in some closet.

I understand making a point like that but this looks to me more like cheap posturing than anything. If you wanna make a stand, do something and stop value signaling.

Just finished this:

People say that writing an anti-war war story is impossible. Even if the patriotism, the institutions, the politics and the propaganda are all revealed to be hollow  excuses to justify sending another generation to their doom, the camaraderie, the sacrifices and heroic deeds of the individual soldiers will make war look glorious. Many have tried to avoid this trap; most have failed. William March’s Company K succeeds in this goal, but at a high price. There are two main techniques that are instrumental for this: First and foremost is the structure of the text. The book is a collection of 113 short vignettes, each one about a soldier of the company. This results in the reader never getting attached to any particular person, since we never have time for that attachment to form. But this also kills any semblance of an objective for the narrative and therefore the tension. Joseph Heller‘s Catch22 has a similar episodic structure, but we stay with Yossarian and his companions for a long time. The objective is clear: Survival. This allows for the narrative to develop stakes and tension. Will they survive? Who will die? In Company K we follow the collective, but a company can’t die, and we already know how the war ended. So there isn't really any objective.  There aren’t any stakes and neither is there tension whether the objective will be achieved or not. 

March's second method of achieving the anti-war war story is the tone of the story. It's remarkably bleak, even amongst its peers. The "good guys" do terrible things and commit horrible crimes, justified only by hollow propaganda that is also portrayed as such. Even the humor is black as night. This makes for a quite depressing reading experience. 

In summary: this might be one of the best tries at achieving the anti-war war story, but it definitely isn’t the most readable try.

Henry David Thoreau - Walden

So far I only read the first chapter, Economics, and I’m not sure what to think of it. On one hand HDT clearly had a great capacity for identifying issues with society and capitalism, on the other hand his reaction to these feels like a capitulation, almost like a suicide. He diagnoses all those social issues, but instead of looking for a collective solution he takes the most individualistic course possible. He even states that this isn’t feasible for everyone and that wants others to go their own way. But if everyone lived his way there would be no human society possible. He states that cooperation isn’t really possible while at the same time taking advantage of cooperation (living on people’s land, help setting up the cabin, his mom washing his clothes, etc). The Indians who he praises so much were living under very cooperative social constructs, helping one another. Looking forward to seeing where this is going…

Some nurses at our hospital have rolled their experiences over into a book deal. Why don’t you try writing as a side job/hobby for a while and see if it would work out? I know nursing is a stressful job with little down time but if they can manage, you might be able to, too.

I already guessed you might feel like the liver king gives you guys a bad rep. Just had to ask since he’s the most visible „carnivore“ out there. So if you like it or not, I think some people might see him as a sort of representation for the movement.

No need for excusing yourself, I didn’t take it that way. Just was trying to be extra clear about it since you seem to get a lot of flack. Thanks for being so welcoming and open