Ben

Cute story, I guess. Literally felt nothing about any of the characters, whether they be main characters or side ones. If you're gonna write a romance novel you have to sell the idea of romance between your intimate characters to your readers. For me, I just didn't buy into their romance, it just sort of happened and wasn't rewarding in the slightest. There was functionally no conflict in either the development of their relationship nor in the broader scope of the world.

I was really worried for the first half of the book. It's a group of teenage boys in the Bronx acting like...well, teen boys. They're super “bro-y”, always talking about sex, which girls are hot, the best blow-jobs they've had, their distaste for common cleanliness courtesies. Obviously it's somewhat exaggerated because it's a YA book, but it is not what I was expecting. I frequently thought “This is not the Adam Silvera content I wanted, give me the GAY!” Once it happened though, it REALLY happened. 0% gay to 100% gay real quick and I loved it.

All of the disparate references to certain events in the book all click together in the final chapters, and it is GUT-WRENCHING. For example, once I realized that Aaron's father killed himself because Aaron finally worked up the courage to come out of the closet, I was an emotional WRECK! I was listening to the audiobook while washing dishes, and immediately started tearing up. The idea of a loved one doing something so terrible to themselves and their family because I disappointed them is something that I feared and struggled with for a long time. I can't imagine what I would do in that situation, and hope I never truly have to reckon with the possibility.

Sheesh, let's just say this book about a fictional disease outbreak is an eerie read amidst the COVID-19 pandemic I refuse to believe Grant didn't peer into a magic crystal ball and try to warn us of what she saw in the fog. Despite the fact that this was published a year before any of us had corona virus on our bingo cards, Kingdom of Needle and Bone details how easily a contagious disease can spread and how poorly most institutions will respond to that threat.

[4.25] Absolutely stellar. The direction this took felt frighteningly real. A world without quick, easy access to water is quite possible, and terrifying to think about. In some ways I had trouble finishing this book; not because I didn't like it, but because it felt too real. The main characters are dumb, and many reviewers have fairly criticized the book for that. I don't blame them for it, but I'm okay with it because it feels purposeful. It makes sense to me. We do dumb shit when we're in crisis-mode, that's just a given. That effect is compounded when it's teenagers in crisis-mode. There were times when I wanted to shake characters by the shoulders and tell them what it be like it do when it am – and that's why it's not a perfect 5-star – but overall I found it really enjoyable.

I actually like this addition to the Wayfarers series more than I do the first. Chambers takes all the best of her world-building and character development skills from A Long Way to Small Angry Planet, and compounds it by adding a beautiful narrative with themes of self-identity and what it means to be human in this book.

[3.75] After the misogynistic dumpster fire that was Zombie Rules by David Achord, I was determined to find better zombie books. This is on a much better track. I don't love it, and I don't hate it either. It presents some interesting questions about the humanity of the undead, and the ethics of a society post-collapse.

Possibly one of the best ethnographies I've ever read? Is that too much praise? I think not. In terms of academic books Garcia does a good job of balancing theory vs. stories. A good ethnography proves it's point by showing not by telling you through obtuse, theoretical, academic language. Garcia undoubtedly shows us the impact of colonialism.

I simply cannot overstate how heavy and important the subject matter of this book is. We are a colonial society and to think that period of history is over and done with is bullshit. It's alive and well here in 2020, and as told in The Pastoral Clinic it is DEEPLY entwined with heroin addiction in New Mexico.

[3.75] Technically only read half, but it was the half required for my evolution of language class, so I'll consider it finished. Plus, half is still like 300 pages, so yeah, I'll say it still counts.

This book was assigned to function as the class textbook, but I'm not convinced it is a good TEXTBOOK. I think it's a decent book in general, but as a textbook I think it has some issues. It doesn't really have that textbook neutrality to it. Fitch clearly has an argument he's making about the evolution of language. He is undoubtedly an expert in the field, and I applaud his skillset both in the discipline and in his ability to compile it all in a single book. But I take issue with the fact that he often provides proof for his argument by citing his own studies. It just really irked me whenever I saw his own name in a parenthetical citation.

[3.5] Really wanted to like this. The Netflix TV show rendition of this book was enjoyable. I actually think the show did a better job of making Kovacs and the cop (forgot her name) likeable. In the book they feel far more extra-judicial and I don't think it felt as warranted as it does in the show, but maybe I missed something.

There's also a lot of references to sex, which I guess has a time and place, but my ever persistent asexuality makes me roll my eyes everytime the author mentions how great someone's breasts are. They're not even well-written sex scenes either: little passion, entirely self-gratifying, ill-motivated, and overall clearly written by a man for other (straight) men.

[2.4] In my opinion this is undoubtedly the worst addition of the currently existing (and supposedly final) Simon Snow books. There's little to no expansion of the world, we learn nothing new about the magical world of our characters other than the fact that goats are important to the school and there are magical surgeons I guess? So much that was built up in the previous two books was just pushed to the side and it seemingly just doesn't exist. The villain, if they can even be called that, is boring and weak (both from a magical perspective and fleshed out character perspective). Additionally, we're three books deep now and I STILL don't buy into Snow and Baz's relationship? It's so one-sided and they're so clearly two entirely different people with opposing lives; please make it end, it's not destined to be!

[3.7] Loved this and hated this. Interesting take on a magic system that uses metaphors and common culturally-known phrases as spells. It's got a nice amount of lore general background info without being overwhelming. I've never read Harry Potter but I saw the movies and it's definitely rockin' a cool Harry Potter vibe.

This all being said. I take a lot of issue with the relationship that develops between Simon and Baz. It reeks of Stockholm Syndrome. Baz is a total piece of shit to Simon throughout their time at school. I don't know if I'm a bad reader or if I forgot, but I can't think of any clear moment of redemption or character development. I think Baz is trash right up to the end. The Saz/Bimon ship shit ain't, wasn't, nor is healthy, and we shouldn't be glorifying it.

I started reading this for the No Dumb Question's Podcast Book Club on my commute home yesterday. I literally could not stop. Some books are just captivating, and this is one of them. Without a doubt, this is my favorite book I've read this year. Even though there's still more than half of the year left, I don't think anything else I read this year is going to top it. Seriously, go read it. More people need to know how awful the death penalty is.

Much better than his previous book “Strong Towns” because of it's narrower lens on transportation issues in North American cities. Marohn discusses how the engineering profession encultures it's members to develop transportation systems designed exclusively for cars through higher education and financial incentives. In schools, civils engineers don't focus on how streets are places that people live and build community, they are instead taught that streets are places that must move cars quickly and safely. These sorts of engineered streets are wide and have no obstructions which does make for a great environment when you're in the (relative) safety of a multi-ton metal box moving at high speeds, but a terrible place for pedestrians or bikers. Many engineers believe that they're just following the best practices, the “standards and codes” of their profession, but totally dismiss that those same standards result in the injury if not death of thousands each year.

Not only is this design philosophy perpetuated in education, it's also fueled by the financial system behind transportation development. The states and federal government provide grants almost exclusively to incredibly massive transportation projects that involve adding lanes to existing roads and highways or building new ones that oftentimes go nowhere in particular. Engineers accept this system because they get paid regardless (sometimes as a percentage of anticipated cost of the project, which encourages them to rack up more expenses). Cities welcome this system because it gives them new expansion space which they need in order to bring in new tax dollars to pay for the maintenance of old infrastructure that they built on a previous grant from the federal government. This is a constant cycle of debt that's unsustainable.

If you can handle an author that is a little repetitive, quotes himself, and have a vague feeling that our cities could be built differently but don't exactly have the language for what's wrong then I'd recommend this book.

[3.8] I recently visited my Mom who lives in a region of California that's functionally nothing more than pockets of suburbs. There's sprawling roads seemingly to nowhere, but sprinkled throughout this vast network are standard North American cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods. On my previous visits I had a tough time articulating why exactly I dislike the area so much. After all, cost of living is so much lower in her area, and there's still plenty of familiar retail and restaurant chains; why should I dislike it still so much? It all became clear to me when I discovered the YouTube channel “Not Just Bikes,” a channel about urban planning and design. NJB points out how much of North American cities are designed exclusively with the privately owned car in mind, and how costly that can be. He did a series based on the commentary in this book, so I figured I ought to give it a read myself.

In Strong Towns, Marohn discusses how older cities were built specifically for humans (rather than cars) and how they were built gradually as people gained access to resources. Comparatively, modern neighborhoods are, as Marohn was oft to repeat a little too frequently, “built to a finished state.” Once built the developers leave and so begins the slow decline of the area, and now the local government is saddled with the maintenance costs for decades to come with no true means of paying for it. He describes how the need for cities to constantly grow to receive loans/grants from the state and federal government to pay for the maintenance of old infrastructure is similar to a ponzi scheme. A constant cycle of pushing massive debts further and further down the line. It was an alarming and poignant perspective on the state of our cities, and left me with little hope for what needs to change to make things better.

This reads sort of like a series of short stories that all build up on each other as the colonists establish society on a new planet. There's fun and interesting world building (quite literally), but I found myself wishing the book would just hurry up and end throughout significant sections. I generally enjoy character driven stories, but there were just too many characters for me to become attached to or for me to understand.

Kinda liked how Simmons started the beginning, she built a dystopian world that at least feels somewhat plausible. But then, it just veered off into your standard YA romance with all the young dumb love decisions made therein. Sometimes YA romance is what you want, but it def wasn't what I thought I was getting into.

I'm starting to realize that I really enjoy first-person character driven stories. I totally acknowledge that it can sometimes feel as though nothing really happened in such stories. But for me, there's something really compelling about hearing the inner thoughts of a character experiencing the world they inhabit. A world that is often quite different from my own. In this case, what is the experience of an ostracized fourth-in-line heir to the Elf Empire to feel and do when he inherits the throne he never imagined he'd sit on?

This is not hard fantasy involving a complex magic system and a centuries old war between two great empires. This is the story of a somewhat lonely and scared boy trying to reckon with the new path of life he's been sent down. While the former is interesting, the latter is so much more accessible and relatable with themes everyone can understand. My biggest gripe with the book is that there is a fair bit of name dropping. Totally normal for fantasy, but it doesn't always feel like it's for the world-building, rather it feels like it's simply for the sake of name-dropping.

This is an absolutely stellar memoir. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about why I call Jehovah's Witnesses a cult. Essentially, this is is the publicly accessible version of “Crisis of Conscience” by Ray Franz; Franz did a great job but his book is (in my opinion) more oriented to former Witnesses. Scorah does a good job of briefly explaining why Jehovah's Witnesses do or do not do certain things, but “Leaving the Witness” is not heavy on the structural and theological analysis of Jehovah's Witnesses in the same way CoC was.

She's just sharing her experience as a Pioneer in China, and how over the course of a few years and with the help of an internet stranger she was gently nudged into realizing her circumstances. All it took was one “worldly” person with a kind heart to show her that the world was not as bad as it seems. Speaking for myself personally, I know that if I didn't have associations with people outside of my congregation, I would still be there. I'd be a sad, lonely person, forcing myself deeper and deeper into the closet. Spoiler I might have ended up like Dale, the disfellowshipped Gay man in Scorah's congregation who hanged himself. Books like this are highly personal to me, and make me reflect on my own experiences as a former Jehovah's Witness.

I have a friend (or maybe had a friend is a better way of saying it) that I grew up with; our families went on little vacations together nearly every year, we were at their house for dinner almost once a week, they came to our apartment to swim in our pool on hot summer days. In fact, there was a brief period of time where I might have said him and his brother were my only friends. He got married almost two years ago, and my Mom and I weren't invited. My Mom is only inactive and I have never expressed my doubts to friends in the Hall; neither of us are disfellowshipped. A few months after their marriage, my Mom was in town and wanted to surprise them at their house. I managed to pull my friend to the side and finally five years after starting this journey I came out to him. It was like I was 16 again: I lost the words, there was a big lump in my throat, and I feared this vengeful God. My friend looked so sad and so confused when I told him. When we said goodbye, he (surprisingly) gave me a hug, but I think it truly was a goodbye hug. I don't know when or if I'll see this friend again. I hope that one day we can reminisce about the times we pretended to be spaceship captains in his backyard, or that one time we terrified a couple walking their dog down the street by hiding a walkie-talkie in the shrubs, and making it screech when they passed by. But perhaps most of all, I hope that one day we can share with one another how we realized we had to exit this religion and find a new life.

Linguistics has long been a big interest of mine, especially linguistic anthropology. It was one of the first classes I ever took in college, and it hooked me in immediately. Now I'm #blessed to be studying anthropology in one of the best programs in the world. Whenever I do interviews for ethnographic assignments, I always cringe at how my voice/language sounds. Nothing makes you more aware and self-conscious of how you sound than listening to recordings of yourself. One of the big ways I speak and understand the world, like many younger people, has been through the internet. The internet has woven it's way into the fabric of everyday life for millions if not billions of people. This book does a great job of taking internet language seriously without brushing it off as stupid or irrelevant. Whether you're a citizen of the internet or staunch technophobe, there's still something to be gained from this book!

Before I wrote down my thoughts, I wanted to let this book sit and linger in my mind for a couple of days. It was a rough book. Not rough in the “Ugh, there's such clunky academic language” sense of the word. De León is undeniably a spectacular writer; you don't need to be familiar with anthropology to understand this work. It's rough because it's just so damn heartbreaking. It's rough because I feel helpless to make it any better. It initially feels really invading and strange to read such vulnerable accounts, and De León is self-aware of that criticism. The author doesn't sugarcoat the depravity of American border policy and the lives it has cost. He argues that to do so would be to unfairly sanitize those policies and decenter the people most effected by them. He's so people-focused because the border policy in question dehumanizes border crossers in everyway it can.

At some point De León quotes Ruth Behar where she writes, “anthropology that doesn't break your heart just isn't worth doing...” and it's a quote that has stuck with me since then. I think it applies to the investigative professions in general. If your work isn't causing some sort emotional reaction — whether it be sadness or frustration — in you or your audience then maybe there's something wrong. While it's important to have raw data and a logical approach to things, humans are inherently story-minded people; let's (ethically) use that to make positive change.

I've been in a big reading slump since like mid-November 2020. I've started a lot of books, finished few, and the ones that I have finished have taken me a long time. This was not one of those books. I plowed right through this; I finished the second-half basically in one session.

The story combines some of my favorite elements. It's told from the perspective of an 18-year old girl, Lauren, a girl who grew up in a very different world from her parents and the community around her. That old world is gone, but everyone from her perspective is slow to accept that change except her. The world Lauren knows is an all too possible near-future Earth in the midst of societal collapse, the governments of the 50 states and nations of the world exist — at least nominally — but their reach has drastically diminished. There are police officers and firefighters but neither will come for the majority of incidents unless you can pay for service and even then they might just take your money. If you find yourself in debt and unable to pay, your debtors can lock you into slavery. This post-collapse world becomes a lens for our narrator to develop a new religion she calls Earthseed. Her new faith doesn't just wax and wane woefully about the world that once was, nor does it entirely embrace the new world they're surrounded by. Instead, Earthseed's fundamental idea is that God is change, and that people are agents of that change. The world-building of the societal collapse and this new religion are what kept drawing me back for more.

My biggest issue with the book is the hyper-empathy syndrome that Lauren has. It felt like an idea from another draft, or that Butler had recently read something about synesthesia and thought that could be a compelling hook for a character and it simply didn't get filtered out as the story developed. In a world that seems all too real, the hyper-empathy felt like a curse of magic than reality.

[2.75] So when I was in the 7th Grade I had a really laid back English teacher, probably a little too laid back, and she would periodically tell us about what books she was reading. It was her way of encouraging students to be interested in reading and to socialize with her students. One of those books she told us about was this book called “Fledgling.” She explained that it was a vampire book, and it being the height of the “Twilight” books and movies this interested a lot of students. She had to quickly explain that this probably wasn't a book for kids our age. Now nearly a decade later, I see why she added that disclaimer. In retrospect, I now realize she probably shouldn't have brought the book up at all to the class, it's got quite a bit of descriptive violence and sexual content. And it's that sexual content that makes me deeply uncomfortable even now as an adult.

In the story, our main character is a young girl of 10 or 11 (it's been a couple weeks since I actually read it so I don't remember exactly) who wakes in a cave, badly injured and with no memories of who or where she is. She eventually finds herself walking on a road where a man in his 20s picks her up. This man is almost immediately infatuated with her and she with him, and they start a relationship...with sex (and bloodsucking). Yes, you heard me; a 20+ year old character and a ~10 year old character have sex in this book. Through the course of the narrative we later learn that she's actually 50+ years old but because vampires age differently she looks 10 by human standards, but still it's a 10 year old's body! I could not get past that element of the story, and it happens a lot, because vampires in this world essentially create a personal harem of humans to drink from and have sex with. It's really fucking gross and a big reason why I'm marking it lower despite some other interesting themes of race and belonging.