Book Review #9

 The Beginner's Guide to Divination

    First things first, I am/was pleasantly interested in the main four topics this book pulled for: tarot, astrology, numerology, and palm reading. These things have always been a curious subject for me, and three out of the four I am an amature knowledge-seeker for. With all of this in mind, I found my biggest gripe at the end of reading this book and beginning my review. 

    There are four resources this book pulls from. I was under the impression that this book had one author until the very end of the book when I realized how different the writing styles were between topics. For the sake of clarity, I don't mind that four books were complied briefly into one introductory book. But I wish that was more obvious from the get-go. Because my initial assumption colored a lot of the rest of my view of this book. 

    First off, the book's cover mentions the book is to "learn the secrets of astrology, numerology, tarot, and palm reading - and to predict the future." While I happy to learn "secrets" in this book, I was a little less enthused with the idea of "predicting the future" of my life. It goes against the truth that I have held for some time about the future: the future is unpredictable, and that unpredictability is what makes the future so beautiful. There are so many things that can alter the future, and the fact that a simple act -like writing this post at night instead of during the day- can change that amazes me. I find the idea of trying to predict the future a little delusional personally, but I will admit that it might be different for others. 

    Secondly, the four topics in this book seem to carry a very disjointed connection to each other, which is the fact that all of them require more intuition than actual method. Sure, there are certain solid ideas in each topic that lend credence to the idea that all four topics can lead to understanding yourself and your life, but they all recommend (rightly so) to trust your intuition and to rely on that as a complimentary force rather than solely relying on the topic to do all the heavy-lifting. 

    To complete the trifecta, I found that two out of the four topics (astrology and numerology) came from authors who seemed more confident in their topics than the authors for tarot and palm reading. Granted, all four authors seem to have some solid experience in their fields and were well-versed enough to provide some insight that I had never really thought about. But the authors of the topics on tarot and palm reading seemed to have less of a solid voice about their topics than the authors on astrology and numerology. 

    I will admit, a lot of this might be because I have some of my own knowledge on three out of the four topics. 

    In the end, I would recommend this book to someone who has little to no knowledge on these four topics and is curious to get a basic general understanding on the topics. If you do have some knowledge already on one or more of these topics, I would recommend either skipping this book, or just reading the topics you have little to no knowledge on.