The Shire Shelf

 A mind already lost to ghosts. And a consciousness wired to nowhere.      Neuromancer was a groundbreaking novel, and you can still feel it when reading it today, the cyberpunk movement and its ideas shine even stronger now with the impending growth of AI and the push to bring everyday life and “cyber” usage closer together. The themes of human vs. machine, the spirit and lack thereof, echo throughout the whole novel, and as we get to dig deeper into this world and get to know the characters at play, the clash of personality and consciousness against the cold and calculated rises above everything else.      We get a very good sense of how the world of Neuromancer works all throughout the book: the prevalence of big corporations that hold most of the power, the intense use of cybernetic implants and augmentations, and a world where the cybernetic is not just outside, but inside the body as well. The massive use of technology in this world has evolved...

 It opens like a whisper. And grows into Legend.      This book is special to me; the name of this blog has clear influences and inspirations. The Shire Shelf is not just a name I came up with—it needed to be a good part of who I am as a reader, and the Shire, just like this book, was my starting point. “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit,” as once was said.      Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings not as a standalone adventure, but as one piece of one magnificent world, Middle-earth, and The Fellowship of the Ring is, for me, the most important book in this aspect. Just like in his previous adventure, we start humbly in the Shire amongst the Hobbits, but it slowly grows—first through the intrigue as the One Ring is presented, then as the adventure truly begins and the world expands far from the Shire’s humble borders: to Rivendell’s elvish architecture, amongst the peaks of the Misty Mountains, far under the mountains in Khazad-Dûm, the n...

       Horror told in fragments, not answers. The Monster is known - the danger is not.      I was biased coming into this book, my love for gothic victorian (thank you Bloodborne) and also for the vampire mythos, I came into it expecting to love it, and although the book has a difficult structure, I very much did!      The vampire mythos stands firmly at the forefront of the narrative; Dracula is one of the first characters to appear, his influence is felt throughout all parts of the narrative, and his powers and limitations are slowly demystified by the investigations and experiments of one of our protagonists. Nowadays, vampires take on all kinds of forms and expressions, and this more classic, more restrained style felt refreshing and mystifying. Some differences from what we have come to know today also help to make this version stand out from the rest and solidify his presence as the Dracula.      Talking about the ...