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This book felt twice as long as it actually was.

A lot of different themes are being attempted here. We got: anti-consumerism, exploitation of oversea labor, first- and second-generation immigrant experiences, complicated mother-daughter relationships, religious fervor, and the collapse of society just to name a few. And while they were set up, somehow each one felt abandoned? I feel like I was watching a juggler constantly throwing balls up in the air with no intent to attempt to catch them.

Our protagonist come across as extremely passive, like a buoy just gently bobbing about as the mildest of ripples (in the form of external events) roll past her. I struggle to point to any development she exhibited by the end of the book (which may have been the intent, but I wish her resistance to change would've been more explicitly pointed out if that were the case).

This was a book club read, and one of those "we all hated this, right?!" kind of discussions, and somehow I enjoyed it the most and I'm still only giving it two stars.

Books like this are why I'm always apprehensive to quit reading one if I'm not enjoying it. After a middle that sagged a little too much for my liking, the final act and climax 100% reeled me back in and made up for it, and I'm glad I powered through.

It's odd to think that a "Western" doesn't have to be set in the United States, but this really does check all the other boxes aside from the geographic location. Latter half of the 19th century, people eking out a tough living on a homestead in an unforgiving landscape, conflicts between white settlers and the native populations; scrub away the details and the premise could easily pass for a Wild West story, but this is a uniquely Australian tale at its core.

Two teenage brothers witness something they shouldn't have, get coerced into a lie, and their lives are functionally destroyed as a result of that moment of weakness but it takes so long for both them and you as the reader to understand exactly how. A reluctant revenge story becomes a genuine one, but even after it's over it doesn't feel like it was worth it. Not because of any failing on the author's part, but because the wrong that these two boys experienced could never truly be righted.

This is a violent book that pulls no punches, and there's a particularly disturbing massacre that happens in the middle that is plot relevant and not just thrown in for shock value. We also have what amount to two separate antagonists, each with their own agendas and not always aligned with each other, one of whom was an intense yet fascinating guy that had me on edge every time he showed up. And while I'm not usually a fan of coming-of-age novels, but this was not a gentle and gradual ascension into adulthood; this was a shotgun blast to the chest of trauma and these boys were forced to grow up overnight.

If you want yet another example of how toxic masculinity is such a fucking prison to yourself and everyone around you but also want the occasional kangaroo in the background, give this one a try.

We've seen this story before. Ex-criminal gets out of the life and manages to go legit, but they eventually find themselves in a financial pinch. They hear the siren call of their old ways pulling them back for ~one more job~, but then things spiral out of control. It's a good story, so that's why it's been done before and why we'll see it again.

What sets this one apart for me personally is a satisfyingly interesting protagonist. Beauregard ("Bug" to his friends) is known for being a competent getaway driver, but he's a lot more than that. He is a meticulous planner who layers contingencies upon contingencies and has borderline eidetic memory which helps him come up with airtight schemes, so long as everyone sticks to the plan. Unfortunately, not everyone else can.

This is a tense and violent book, reminiscent of Pulp Fiction with regional crime lords sending hitmen and whatnot after each other. There are some characters that (I felt) were very clearly going to have bad things happen to them and that there was no way they were going to make it to the end of a story like this unscathed, but I still managed to be surprised by the inevitable.

Pick this one up if you're in the mood for a darker crime thriller where the cops are barely present and it's more criminal vs. criminal.

When you think about it, "the scientific community" is a really nebulous concept, and it is odd that it exists at all considering it ignores national boundaries, doesn't share a common language or faith, and doesn't have an overall "ruler" for lack of a better term. There's no "Pope" of science, and everyone who engages in that community are simultaneously in cooperation with each other peer-reviewing work and replicating others' experiments, but also in competition with each other over scarce grants and research contracts.

This short book did a good job giving an overview of the history of how scientists deal with each other. It felt a touch euro-centric, but when your starting point is in the 18th century when colonial powers were kinda at their height and already disproportionately important on the world stage maybe that's unavoidable. Also wish it had attempted to peek into the near future a bit, and the possible outcomes of the replication crisis, but maybe it wanted to stay in a narrower lane than I did.

Came for a fun parody of the noir detective genre, got a weird incoherent pontificating mess instead.

I partially read a physical version of this book and partially listened to an audio recording of it which was probably the worst way to consume this media after I learned that it was an audio drama first that was later novelized. Consequently it was hard going back and forth because the audio version was essentially only the dialogue bits with all of the added prose present in the book form cut out. But I don't know that my overall rating would've been affected had I stuck to one medium all the way through.

This story leans on a lot of the old tropes you know from noir fiction: underworld crime bosses sending goons to rough people up, crooked cops, mysterious and sultry women with ulterior motives, etc. But it's also kind of modern day in that everyone has cellphones, and the Arab Spring and Gaddafi are directly name dropped? It felt like a story that couldn't decide what time period it wanted to be set in, and I feel like the only reason it was "brought forward" at all was to allow the protagonist (and by extension, the author) to rant against young people, liberals, and vegetarians.

The plot is barebones, and there are entirely way too many characters too keep track of or care about. Women are tripping over themselves to throw their bodies at this man for poorly fleshed out reasons, and nothing that this book is trying to accomplish lands. I really need to just start staying away from any book that even remotely attempts to be funny.