Category: Books
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Book Bans, Parental Rights, and the Heckler’s Veto
Unsurprisingly, the large majority of book challenges in this country were filed by eleven people. Eleven people have tried in an organized fashion to remove reference to LGBTQ people and people of color from American schools and libraries (42% of the challenges were for books that referenced LGBTQ people and 28% were for books that…
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Nice is Nice: A Review of Legends and Lattes
I wonder if Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree would have taken off quite like it did if it had been published outside of the pandemic. This is not to say that the book is bad, far from it. But it is very much of a time, the Ted Lasso of literature. And while I…
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The Marshmallow Test is BS: A Review of Escape From Model Land
The marshmallow test is some bullshit. First, it is classicist and therefor racist and thus inaccurate. But no one should have taken it seriously to begin with. Any child with half a minute of lived experience knows that adults lie. The chances that they are going to get the second marshmallow are pretty much nil…
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Hopelessness, Art, and Society
I am not a hopeful person by nature. I do not, as a rule, expect good things to happen to me. I do not expect American democracy to survive the Boomer/GenX turn towards fascism (even though I am a GenX-er). I mean, I wrote an entire post about how I had little chance to get…
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You Really Can’t Breathe: A Review of the Excellent Chokepoint Capitalism
This is a difficult book to review, not because it is bad, but because it is so good. I honestly wasn’t expecting this to be as good as it was, to be as thorough and thoughtful as it was. While I generally enjoy Doctorow’s fiction, I have found his non-fiction activism to be a little…
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Profiles in Confusion: Sanderson and the Writers who Write About Him
Brandon Sanderson is all the rage these days, with two profiles being written about him recently. I am not a fan of Sanderson’s writing. I have tried a couple of times to read his work and bounced off it each time. Whatever he has that speaks to so many fans, I cannot hear. And that…
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Let the Story Breath: A Review of Terraformers By Annalee Newitz
I am not sure how much I like Terraformers by Annalee Newitz. Not a great lead for a review, I admit, but honest all the same. The book has a ton of strengths, as most of Newitz’s writing does. He characters work is strong — which is incredibly important given that this book takes place…
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Vanilla and Chocolate: A Review of Beyond the Burn Line
Beyond the Burn Line feels like it is two novels that the author didn’t really know how to make into novel length and so mashed them together. Now, that is not entirely fair. The end of the second half of the book does clear up a mystery established in the first half of the book,…
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It Hasn’t Always Been This Way: A Review of The Dawn of Everything
The Dawn of Everything is a hard book to review. Not because it is poorly written or uninteresting or lacking in relevance to today’s world. Quite the opposite all points. For a book that covers such a breadth of history and topics with so few definitive answers, the book is fascinating, well written and completely relevant…
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The End of Evolution? A Review of Village in the Sky
Jack McDevitt has been writing books in the Alex Benedict series since 1989, though most of them came out since 2004. I haven’t read all of them, but i have generally read most of them. They follow Benedict and his pilot, one time lover, and usual point of view character (the usual conceit is that…