Kierkegaard is the single best writer I have ever come across. This audio version provides a particularly good presentation of the author's complex explanation for the world we live in and gives insights into why Kierkegaard is such a fascinating person worth reading even today. I don't believe in his conclusions, but I can appreciate a well written book and learn from it.

There are multiple dimensions to the story. The author is supposedly telling the story of Abraham's sacrificing of Isaac to Jehovah and the multiple perspectives that are needed for understanding what is really going on. The author will say, "from the ethical point of view it is murder, but from the theological point of view it is an act of faith", and if you can't see the contradiction (the paradox) than you haven't thought sufficiently about the story, and he can "never understand but only admire" the Abraham story.

He says our authentic selves come from our passions, and he definitely would agree with this quote from Martin Luther "it is in vain to fashion a logic of faith". Our faith is not approachable through reason. According to the author, the highest we can attain is to be 'Knights of Faith" who cross over through the acceptance of "infinite resignation". We must doubt before we can become certain. All of our world we live in is built with myths that we have created, and at the creation of all myths there are contradictions (even with our current best understanding of physics with the double slit experiment and the Heisenberg uncertainty principal there will be a violation of the "mutually exclusive' principal of logic, the one Hegel describes as "likes do not exist").

There is a confounding of the world through our being finite (i.e. being is time and time is finite). The author says it is up to the individual Knight to complete their own world (the choice is up to you!). We are constantly surrounded by the absurd. By absurd Kierkegaard means both the contradiction from the paradoxes that surround us (e.g. our faith comes from our doubt) and the absurd existence we have while we are alive on earth because of "a sword that is always hanging above us" (that's a quote from this book, so he does have a very similar structure to Heidegger's "guilt' as presented in "Being and Time").

This book is a remarkably written book (I can't believe how good of a writer he is) and there are many different complex things (themes) that the author is trying to bring across. The biggest is the chasm between reason and faith. That our true selves come from our passions. The noise (idle chatter) that is everywhere distracts us from our potential. Love is our gateway to God. The particular (individuals) need to strive to rise above the universal and become the absolute in order to transcend the ethical and make a leap of faith. Few can become a Knight of Faith, but all can participate in the tasks of living to bring meaning through our desires.

The author is a very wise author. Theologians have done well in embracing this book. Those who want to understand our meaning for existence can gather insights from this book by realizing that our desire for living provides our starting point and the true understanding requires seeing our existence for the paradoxes that we live in.

I'm taking a philosophy class this semester - my first. And we just spent the better part of the last four weeks reading Kierkegaard - my first time for that, too. I can tell you right now I don't really like Kierkegaard. I don't necessarily agree with some of his ideas, and his writing style reveals a personality that is difficult, dogmatic, and ungenerous, to say the least. 

 

But I did have some fun jotting down songs that came into my head as I read or during our class discussions. This isn't meant to be any serious analysis of Kierkegaard, but a tongue-in-cheek look at the free associations of the mind. So here goes, a list of the pieces of Kierkegaard's writing and the songs they drew from my subconscious:

 

"Either/Or Vol. I: The Rotation Method" = Simon and Garfunkel "I am a Rock"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlSVNxLB-A 

 

"Either/Or Vol. II: The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage" = Meatloaf "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C11MzbEcHlw

 

"Either/Or Vol. II: Equilibrium" = Rush "Free Will" 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnxkfLe4G74

 

"Fear and Trembling" = Indigo Girls "Watershed"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ZDfiG2JTM

 

"Fear and Trembling" by the pseudonymous "Johannes de Silentio" = "Crying" Club Silencio cover from David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" (of course) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-ZnqhXSzjw

 

"The Sickness Unto Death: The Despair of Willing Despairingly to Be Oneself (Defiance)" = "Let it Go" from "Frozen" 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0MK7qz13bU

 

Kierkegaard, I know, would NOT approve.

 

-cg

Originally, this was going to be a November blog tour, but in the end I was just asked to review it somewhere at the end of the month. Which in the end is a good thing, because I hate to write negative reviews during a blog tour.

 

Focussing on many different arcs and characters, this apparently is the story of some Parisian vampires, and a man who holds a (reasonable) grudge against them. Unfortunately though, this isn't the story that is told in this book.

 

The blurb claims that this man goes on revenge, but after an entire book he hasn't even made it to Europe, let alone gotten (even a little bit of) his revenge. Instead there has been a lot of scenes I thought weren't that interesting. Besides what I suppose is to be the main arc, only that one of the vampire hunter was kind of interesting. I for some reason expected it to be a young adult novel, but it certainly isn't. Another thing that bothered me was the ending. Or the lack of an ending. I'm aware this is a serial novel, but this is also a collected work, and since this is called Book 1 of the Vampires of Paris I expect some kind, any kind really, of ending. I'm left after this book feeling as if it was stopped right at the middle and nothing has happened yet.

 

I don't think I will continue reading this series.

 

The Vampire Circus is the first book of The Vampires of Paris.

 

Thanks to the publisher for proving me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Vampire novels usually are not really my cup of tea. Time travel, however, definitely is, so I decided to give this novel a try.

 

Moon Bayou follows mother-of-two, vampire private detective Samantha Moon as she takes on a missing person case that will take her to New Orleans, and accidently also to the 19th century.

 

I've read nothing of the original Vampire for Hire series that this new series is a spin off to, but I didn't feel like that mattered much since I didn't get the idea there were a lot of things I was missing because of it. The story really has two parts, none of which were fully closed at the end of this book. I suppose the larger of the two, the one involving time travel will be taken to the next novel in this series, as the ending truly had a cliffhanger.

 

The vampires were quite nice, especially in their bat-like forms. There were also some werewolves, because those seem obligatory these days. Overall, the writing was very fast and easy, making this a light read. I'd liked to see some more closure though, especially on the real 'case file'. I'll have to read the next book to find out what will happen to Samantha.

 

Moon Bayou is the first book in the Samantha Moon Case Files, which is a spin off series from the Vampire for Hire series.

 

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

**I received an ARC of this story in exchange for an honest review**
Sam Moon went to New Orleans. She had been hired to find Wendy, a missing girl who originally went to New Orleans with Habitat For Humanity to help build homes. She had been missing 6 weeks. Wendy also had a missing roommate, Angela Jenkins. Sam is a vampire and a private investigator. Sam had been set up and taken by some bad vampires. Wendy had become a vessel to the vampires. Sam had been sent back in time by voodoo. Sam loved her kids and cared about her boyfriend Kingsly.
She was physically and mentally strong. She had all the pluses of being a vampire, but managed to keep her humanity. When she was sent back in time, she was determined to get home no matter what. I enjoyed the plot, characters, twists and turns throughout the story. I highly recommend it to anyone that likes this genre.