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Phil in SF

kingrat@sfba.club

Joined 1 year, 8 months ago

aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. Also, I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.

2024 In The Books

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Success! Phil in SF has read 51 of 28 books.

commented on Walking Practice by Dolki Min

Dolki Min, Victoria Caudle: Walking Practice (Hardcover, 2023, HarperVia)

Squid Game meets The Left Hand of Darkness meets Under the Skin in this radical …

My Otherwise award list is complete with the addition of this book. On SFBA.club the list should have high resolution covers and book descriptions. YMMV when the list is copied to other servers.

(The Otherwise Award encourages the exploration & expansion of gender.)

avatar for kingrat Phil in SF boosted
John Fortunato: Dark Reservations (Hardcover, 2015, Minotaur Books) No rating

"Bureau of Indian Affairs Special Agent Joe Evers still mourns the death of his wife …

Every time I searched for an Indigenous mystery on Libby, this book would come up front and given the starred reviewed I figured I should read it. Boy, was I not more wrong, what a terrible book. This man is a current FBI agent who used to investigate cases in the Reservations. First things that are off, a dog is killed by a cop ("but you didnt take care of it anyway" says the cop to the Indigenous person), then a coyote & her puppies are killed by an Indigenous Elder because Coyotes are a "nuisance", I have never heard of Indigenous people killing Coyotes especially pups. Final nail in the coffin was when his characters who were leaders of American Indian Movement decide to claim some current issue as a fake reason to raise money.

I refuse to read any book that does not respect & honor Indigenous people …

Johanna Sinisalo: Not Before Sundown (Paperback, 2003, Peter Owen) No rating

Mikael, a young gay photographer, finds in the courtyard of his apartment block a small, …

Been putting together the Otherwise Award list. Got to this book, the 2004 co-winner, which was published under 4 different titles, depending on which country. I added this edition, which was the first edition in English. Then added the Finnish, German, and US editions. Everything looked great.

Then I added the book to the Otherwise list, and everything broke. Every time I refreshed Johanna Sinisalo's page, the editions would show up differently. First as two separate works. Then as five. The edition that showed up in the Otherwise list switched to the 2010 edition (which has a shitty cover). Then finally four works showed up on Sinisalo's author page.

I painstakingly added the editions back to this work and corrected the entry on the Otherwise list. The editions seem to be sticking to the work this time. However, there are still three other works that have duplicate information for editions …

avatar for kingrat Phil in SF boosted
Jason De León: Soldiers and Kings (2024, Penguin Publishing Group)

An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, …

incredible, grim and vibrant.

Even more than I was hoping for, a thoroughly humanizing personal and anthropological narrative closely following several young Hondurans over several recent years in their own experiences of migration up and down Mexico, the relentless gang violence and poverty causing them to be stateless human smugglers, the shrinking space between state enforcement and cartel consolidation for less violent less exploitative routes.

reviewed Money Shot by Christa Faust (Angel Dare, #1)

Christa Faust: Money Shot (EBook, 2011, Hard Case Crime)

THEY THOUGHT SHE’D BE EASY. THEY THOUGHT WRONG.

It all began with the phone call …

Crime victim to revenge plot

Angel Dare, who runs a talent agency for porn stars, gets set up on a shoot, shot and left for dead in the trunk of a car, and manages to escape. On the run from the bad guys and the cops, she turns the tables and starts tracking down the perpetrators.

Simple premise. Heroine who doesn't let bad situations overcome her.

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Edward Niedermeyer: Ludicrous (2019, BenBella Books) No rating

Now I know a lot more about the history of Tesla defects

No rating

Took me a while to finish this, partly because it's a steady stream of what a bunch of bs comes out of Tesla and Musk, but also I'm reading the ebook which is filled with links to the sources, which generally is a good thing and shows how well this book has been researched and not just a diatribe, but it means half the time when I swipe to next page I jump to the bibliography.

Overall, it buttresses my existing anti-Elon disposition (and the book predates the antics of the past year) with a lot more detail about things that went wrong or were lied about and got people killed, and filled in some company background which I didn't know or had forgotten from Ashlee Vance's Musk bio, which I have trashed a bit recently because seems to have tied his career to profiling Musk, but fair's fair, this …

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Akwaeke Emezi: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022, Atria Books)

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty

I read this book on a blind rec from a friend, and it turned out to be a delightful romance book.

It's about learning to find joy again after the grief of loss. It's about Feyi learning to believe her art (and herself) is good enough. It's about the different ways people can love each other and be friends with each other.

Also, it's a hashtag bi4bi age gap romance where Feyi falls for the sexy bisexual Michelin chef father of the guy friend she's not quite dating. Needless to say, it's messy, but it feels believably and justifiably so.