Reviews and Comments

It's still wild to read books that talk about COVID as a pivotal historical event from a detached big-picture perspective when it's like... 1) wasn't that long ago, and 2) something I and everyone else I know has direct personal memories about. Maybe it'll feel less weird in time, but usually I'm used to reading nonfiction about stuff that happened before my own living memory.

This book makes the argument that it turns out the pandemic was even worse than we thought it was, which is a pretty tough sell considering how much we all agree it already sucked. But this is peeking under some un-turned stones I had not considered, and likely would not have given much thought to otherwise. I'm speaking specifically about modern journalism and how it came under unique pressure from multiple fronts in the 2020-2021 period. This book presented a thorough look at how whether you lived in a top-down authoritarian society or an open, democratic country, your overall civil rights likely took a hit for the worse. Rather that positing a "West vs. Everyone Else" dichotomy, it gives poor grades to everyone, but for different reasons.

My two main takeaways from this book that I'll remember going forward will be the interesting framing of "positive freedoms" (the freedom to do something), and "negative freedoms" (the freedom from having something done to you), but also the argument that local press and small journalism is more important than we previously gave it credit for. A Nieman Lab study was quoted as saying "Local newspapers are basically little machines that spit out healthier democracies," which stuck with me. And I buy the line of reasoning that the average person trusts a local news source over a national or international one because it can't afford to be biased; when your target audience is everyone in a small geographic area, you can't risk financially alienating potentially half of them because you want to put a spin on every story.

I'm already on a big sustainability and "buy local" kick already this year, why not continue the trend with shelling a few bucks out for my local rag?

I like to give smaller authors and publishers a shot, but I also buy physical copies of books exclusively from small local bookshops. That doesn't always offer a ton of overlap, as it makes more financial sense for those places to sell the most in-demand titles, but sometimes you get lucky. This was one of those times where I saw this on a shelf somewhere, realized I'd never seen it anywhere else before, and snatched up the one and only copy they had for it.

Every short-story collection is a mixed bag, doubly so when each entry has a different author. I'll admit I had a bit of apprehension going into this because when I scanned the table of contents I realized I didn't recognize any of the contributors' names. But that's also kind of exciting in it's own way: new writers to follow if I like their stuff, right? Here, I found that while there was a central theme loosely tying them all together, the quality of the entries varied greatly. Overall the good ones outweighed the bad ones though. Rather than rattle through each of the eighteen entries, I'll just round off my top three.

3) "Summons (A Transcript)" by Ally Wilkes is presented as a stenographer's courtroom minutes of a social worker taking the stand to explain what happened in the lead-up to a family's disappearance.

2) "Accidents, Of a Sort" by Kurt Fawver: Two insurance auditors - a veteran and a rookie - are taking a break from reviewing footage of a fatal car accident, trying to determine who was at fault. While talking about this stressful career, the older coworker shows the younger one an old dashcam video that was never resolved.

1) "The Novak Roadhouse Massacre" by Alan Baxter is an unofficial police report filed by a local constable. Several distinct murders on a single night in rural Australia are pinned on one man with a spotless criminal record who died fleeing the last scene. One officer doesn't buy the official story, and does some digging around of his own.

For something I picked off a library shelf at random, this was a really interesting read for me. I like to research and come up with potential future vacation itineraries a lot, so travel is something I often think about (more than I actually do it...), but never really considered my impact on the places I've visited.

There are tons of references to specific organizations and companies engaged in sustainable practices in this book that I'd never heard of. So many, that I found myself stopping damn near every other page to whip out my phone and save a link to look at later. Thankfully they're all saved in one place at dummies.com/go/sustainabletravelfd

Some sections were a bit repetitive and there was one paragraph that appeared in two separate chapters almost verbatim, but that makes sense when remembering the disclaimer at the front that the author was expecting a reader to just flip around and read the parts that seemed interesting to them. I guess a reader going through the whole thing sequentially (like I did) wasn't how the author expected most people to engage with this book, but I didn't find anything detrimental about this.

Definitely a surprisingly influential book that is going to have an affect on my future bucket list logistical planning!

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.