Month: August 2019

No more showing off: now there are two hamsters

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I played around with moving the blog to a separate hosting and eventually decided that there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. So, the blog has returned to WordPress.com, along with all the posts I made since “going independent.” All subscriptions have been restored, and everything is accessible again.

However, I decided to make some changes in the process: it’s now a joint blog for my wife and me. We’ll be posting under different names. You can already see several of her posts, like A Housewife Against Society. For now, some pages still act like it’s a solo blog, but we’ll fix that soon.

Also, for old WordPress subscribers, I’d like to remind you that the blog now has its own Telegram channel, where I post links to all new entries. Feel free to subscribe: https://t.me/knari_gluk (only in Russian).

Henry Lion Oldie “A Hero Must Be Alone”

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“A Hero Must Be Alone” was the very first book I read from the works of Henry Lion Oldie. Probably because I’ve loved Greek mythology since childhood. I remember how this novel opened up a new author for me back then. Soon after, I read the next book in the “Achaean Cycle,” but I didn’t get to the third one until many years later. Although “The Grandson of Perseus” is the third book in the cycle, it’s the first one chronologically, as it tells the story of Amphitryon, the mortal father of the legendary Heracles.

After reading it, I decided it was time to go back to the beginning and reread “A Hero Must Be Alone“, the book I loved so much in my younger years. This year marks a special anniversary for the novel—25 years since its first publication. A solid milestone for a test of time. I’ll admit, I was a bit apprehensive because I’ve been burned a few times when rereading novels I had the fondest memories of, only to realize that each book has its time, and now it no longer resonates with me as it once did.

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Subjectively About Film Adaptations. Part 2

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After my list of the best adaptations, let’s talk about the worst ones—again, from my perspective.

Leading by a large margin in my ranking is World War Z. I absolutely love the book. I consider it the best piece I’ve read on the theme of “we’re all going to die.” The book delves into the psychology of people in critical situations. It shows what makes modern society so vulnerable to global threats. Most people are unprepared to live without the comforts of civilization. Some will exploit others for profit until the last moment, while others will cling to false remedies, believing they won’t be affected, that the government will save everyone, or something else. There are heroes and cowards, and being a coward isn’t always bad. In short, the book is very much about people.

The zombies, too, are described in such a way that it becomes clear why humanity nearly fell: they’re slow but tireless, and they summon other zombies with their sounds. The infection didn’t spread immediately, which allowed the disease to reach global proportions.

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Subjectively About Film Adaptations

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Today, I’d like to talk about books. But not just books—my husband writes a lot about those, and does so interestingly—but about film adaptations.

Film adaptations are tricky. Translating the content of a book into a screenplay can be difficult, even for the book’s author, as cinema is an art form with its own rules and demands. Another challenge is casting actors that both fit the book’s characters and satisfy the director and fans. In the end, we get what we get.

I’ve compiled my personal ranking of the best and worst film adaptations from those I’ve both watched and read the original books. Today, I’ll share the best ones. And just a heads-up, everything is subjective.

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Boris Akunin “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals”

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Boris Akunin is an extraordinary author. Whatever he writes, it always turns out to be interesting. True, some of his books may not be great overall, but they are always engaging to read. In much the same way, I used to follow his posts on LiveJournal, where Boris Akunin would share notes about people and events that piqued his interest.

The book “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals” is essentially a collection of those posts, gathered under one cover and published in book form.

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Sasha Galitsky “Mama, Don’t Worry!”

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Interestingly, the book Mama, Don’t Worry! by Sasha Galitsky was given to me by my wife. Not with any specific intent, she just liked the description, and she knows that in recent years I’ve been very interested in the topic of growing up (see my previous post, which touches on this as well—We Will Sing With the Voices).

The book has a subtitle: How to Learn to Communicate with Elderly Parents Without Losing Your Own Mind? It’s not that my parents are elderly yet (may they outlive us all), nor that I’m losing my mind when talking to them. But it’s interesting to explore why this issue might arise at all, and where I might end up in my own “development.”

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We will sing with the voices

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I write a lot about books, but I’ve decided to turn my attention to life and music videos—songs that have intertwined with my sense of self in surprising ways.

Age brings interesting changes to how we perceive the world. I’m sure I’m still far from the wisdom of the elders, but even at 42, I can see how different I am from my twenty-year-old self.

We start to enjoy books we once thought were boring, while the ones we once loved now seem odd (how could I have liked that?). The same goes for songs, even from artists I never listened to before—they suddenly feel relevant.

But deep down, you still feel like the same young guy, thinking not much has changed. Then you catch your reflection in the mirror or look at your kids and realize that others no longer see you the way you feel. And you don’t even have to look far. At work, you see all these truly young people, full of energy and just beginning their careers.

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Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

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Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.

Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.

I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.

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Brandon Webb, John David Mann “Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL’s Guide”

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We all fear something—some things more, some less. And some fears begin to eat us up from the inside. The recently released book Mastering Fear tries to show how to change our attitude toward fear. Not to defeat it, because fear will remain, but to stop falling into a state of shock or paralysis because of it.

Formally, the book has two authors, but all the descriptions state that it’s a book by former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb, and the narrative itself is built as though it’s told by one person. So, let’s assume that John David Mann simply helped Webb “package” his thoughts properly.

Webb did indeed serve as a U.S. Navy SEAL, was a sniper, and later trained snipers. So, he’s immediately seen as someone who “knows no fear”—a real macho who eats fears for breakfast by the hundreds.

However, using his own past as an example, he shows that soldiers are simply trained to control their fear. He then shares his method for managing fear. He says: “You don’t need to fight fear. You need to accept it.”

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A Housewife Against Society

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Looking around, I’ve concluded that one of the most devalued things in today’s world is the role of a mother and keeper of the home. Saying in polite society that you’re a housewife is like blowing your nose on the tablecloth. At best, they won’t understand you; at worst… Of course, some of the critical remarks are based on real dangers. Many men, when leaving their families, tend to forget about their previous one, and it doesn’t matter if the man was the one insisting that their children shouldn’t go to daycare and that the wife should stay at home. Starting work at 30+, let alone at an older age, is very difficult. But beyond that, being a housewife is not just unfashionable, it’s humiliating. There’s this pervasive notion that a non-working woman will inevitably become uninteresting to her husband, that she is far inferior to the woman who builds a career—not just in terms of opportunities, but also in intelligence and beauty. By default, she’s seen as growing dull, wrapping herself in the kind of robes that seem to say “goodbye, youth,” as if aging faster simply by staying home.

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