adastra

15 July 2025

Death of the Author: Life after Gaiman

I’ve been a fan of the works of Neil Gaiman since roughly 2003, when I read American Gods. During the 00s, I read most of his published works, including Neverwhere, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and various short story collections. I even went to book readings by him, first in 2007 in Cologne (weirdly, it took place inside a car dealership), and then again in 2014, also in Cologne (but in some more author-appropriate location). I always loved how dreamy and philosophical Gaiman’s works were, and how they weave something magical into something utterly ordinary. Especially their concepts of religion and […]

17 June 2025

The Baltics and a new way to travel (for me)

Last week I visited the Baltic countries, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I’ve been interested in visiting them for a while since they have such a fascinating history, and they are three countries that are as similar as they are different. Lithuania in particular was interesting to me because the language, Lithuanian, is one of the oldest and most archaic of all the Indo-European languages. For this journey, for the first time in my life I actually booked an organized group travel via Intrepid. There are plenty of similar companies that offer such tours, such as for example GAdventures and WeRoad. […]

22 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: The Data Science Edition

I previously wrote a spoiler-free overview, a series by series reading experience report, and a deep dive into the book series Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. This post here will conclude my blog posts about Realm of the Elderlings with some data, both about the books themselves, as well as my personal reading statistics and ratings. First, let’s look at the books and the series as a whole. I have read the physical paperback books published by Harper Voyager UK, so all my stats are based on those editions. There are 16 books in this series, which can […]

19 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: A deep dive

After I gave a a spoiler free overview of the Realm of the Elderlings, as well as a very long series by series review and reading experience report, I want to analyze some aspects of this series as a whole (but mostly regarding the books with Fitz as the main character). In this post, I’ll dive deep into the characters and themes of the series. SPOILER WARNING: This entire post contains heavy spoilers for the Realm of the Elderlings book series! Proceed to read at your own peril! Born a conflict FitzChivalry Farseer is the protagonist of 9 of the […]

15 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: Series by series reviews and reading experience

How was it to read The Realm of the Elderlings? After my spoiler-free overview in the previous post, this post will contain more in-depth reviews which were largely written as StoryGraph reviews as I was reading each book, and then later assembled here into a coherent post. Some books or sub-series were definitely a lot easier to read than others. Each was a somewhat different experience, but to summarize it: once I really got started with this series, I was hooked and it was easy to go through these tomes that average roughly 683 pages. The Farseer Trilogy I picked […]

12 May 2025

Realm of the Elderlings: A spoiler free overview

Never in my life before have I undergone such a monumental task as reading a 16 book series. I’ve read a book series here and there, mostly though with only 3 books or in rare cases, up to 7 or 9. This achievement is a first for me, but hopefully not the last. The series I’m writing about is The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb. Her novels were recommended to me by friends and BookTubers alike, so after having had them on my to-read list for a year, and the first three books waiting on my actual to-read-bookshelf […]

29 April 2025

What 3 Australian TV shows taught me about life

Tired of American TV shows, or just America in general? Why not go down under for a bit? There are certainly a lot of hidden gems down there, and it’s most definitely not only Bluey that’s the greatest thing Australian TV has produced in the past 10 or so years! I’ve tried a lot of Australian movies and TV shows over the years, and while there were a lot that I couldn’t get into at all, either because they just bored me or they were way too cringe (Cleverman, Underbelly, Glitch, Deadloch, Colin from Accounts, Fisk), there are also a […]

17 April 2025

Dear producers, please stop with the shaky camera

After I just had to stop watching the 4th TV series within a few months about 10mins into the first episode because I could not handle the shaky, handheld camera, I would like to use my humble blog, which definitely no TV show producers will ever read, to rant about this absolutely stupid trend. I just cannot watch anything with shaky camera. Very similar to how first person (and some third person) video games make me nauseous, so do movies and TV shows that use a handheld camera. It makes me feel dizzy, and in the worst case, nauseous. I’m […]

13 March 2025

Horror story reviews, by someone who doesn’t like horror

I’m not a big fan of horror movies or TV shows, because I’m not a big fan of jump scares. I’m generally way more into fantasy, sci-fi and dystopian fiction than any other genre – except perhaps some of Anne Rice’s works/adaptations. But every once in a while, a horror movie or TV show comes along that I do actually enjoy. Hannibal was such a case. In more recent years, I’ve discovered the works of author/director Mike Flanagan, and after having watched 3 of his shows, I think what he does is absolutely brilliant. His works are not just horror […]