At the end of "The Bounds of Reason", the first story in the collection Sword of Destiny, the second of the first two Witcher short story collections, we see the following exchange between Yennefer and the dragon Villentretenmerth: "Forgive me my frankness and forthrightness, Yennefer. It is ...

I like to carry paperback books with me in a backpack. I've noticed that this puts a lot of wear and tear on these books. I can't not carry these books in my backpack, but what can I do to better protect these books.

In The Mysterious Benedict Society series, the Whisperer is a machine that transmits thoughts and implants messages in people's brains, usually harmful. And the Emergency is the tense, stressful situation artificially created by the Whisperer that doesn't actually exist. Are either of these symb...

Neil Gaiman is on record saying the people who captured Morpheus in issue #1 (i.e. Roderick Burgess and the Order of the Ancient Mysteries) are completely rubbish, English, sort of Crowley-esque, hedge magicians Do they deserve this evaluation, though? For one thing, the were able to captu...

When the repairs to the house reached a certain level a native American conducted cleansing or blessing ceremony. The native American may have called the person "Carpenter" and one particular line of dialog was similar to "You do excellent work, Carpenter." There was a woman the "carpenter" met a...

In Albert Camus' book The Stranger, Meursault kills a character known as "the Arab" for no real reason at all. Meursault even acknowledges that he doesn't have to kill "the Arab" It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it. When he does shoot "the...