Reviews and Comments

On August 12, 2022, a young radicalized Muslim man stabbed famed author Salman Rushdie some 15 times.

Rushdie explicitly disowns the idea of writing as therapy, but also says that he didn't feel like he could move on to write other work without first writing this book, a memoir of his experience. Much of it is a recounting of his journey to recover from his injuries at the hands of an amateur would-be assassin.

However, it very much veers into therapy during an extended chapter where Rushdie imagines conversations with his attacker in a jailhouse interrogation room over four days. That chapter is the most awkward of the book; it invents the workings of his assailant's mind from common tropes about radicalized Islamists, and then knocks those positions down handily.

The rest is engaging. Rushdie writes with humor and reveals enough of his emotions and frustrations that the experience is more than mere recitation. Rushdie is his own narrator in the audiobook, and has quite a talent for it. After this, I very much want to try again to read Midnight's Children, a book I've failed to progress beyond about 100 pages on multiple occasions.

Picked this up because it was on the Washington Posts' best crime fiction of 2023 list. I definitely don't agree.

After the death of her husband, poet Jodi Luna moves back to New Mexico to become a game warden. Almost immediately she's pulled into a case where inexperienced white supremacists abduct Mexican girls and hold them captive in their desert plateau camp. They are, of course, super dumb, and Jodi is super competent. I like me some competence porn, but this doesn't feel like competence porn. Jodi does stuff like, dropping off a suspect in the hands of a lazy sheriff and go home and sleep when there's two body parts discovered. The heavies twirl their mustaches, and the good game warden just goes home because there's no story otherwise.

This could have been such a great story, but this feels like it was written in one NANOWRIMO and edited in a similar amount of time. If that.

The author proffers that dams are the cause of earthquakes, nuclear proliferation & radiation poisoning, and the devastation of wildlife and culture. He's not wrong exactly, but he presents everything from the worst possible case position while also arguing that dam benefits are meager at best. In other words, if you are already convinced, this book will solidify your position. And if you are worried about dams but not already convinced, you'll have a lot of "but what about ...?" type questions that you want answered. As I did.

The book is clearly written for the already convinced, because it includes a chapter on how to remove a dam. The chapter includes lengthy steps all the way from first organizing to actual dam removal. As an overview of just how much work goes into dam removal, it's a great chapter. As an actual how-to, people will need a lot more than a book chapter.

And with this book, I think I've added every book I know I've ever finished to SFBA.club, with the exception of Bibles & cookbooks.

When I tell people I attended a fundamentalist Christian school, I was not kidding. "Dinosaurs: Those Terrible Lizards" was assigned reading in elementary school. We were taught that dinosaurs and humans lived together. We were taught that fossils were tricks of the devil to test our faith. They had us read this book to cement the anti-science teaching.

I can't tell you now exactly when I broke away from that. After 8th grade, I transferred to a Jesuit high school. While Christian, the Jesuits are far more science based than the fundamentalists. By my last year of high school, I was clearly not with the original program.

Duane Gish is a creationist who is famous for his nutso views and the Gish Gallop method of debating. Read this book for some really entertaining B.S. about dinosaurs.

"A Bag For Nicholas", Hirsh Sawhney

Shezad Ansari gets a call from his ex-wife that he can have a job as a musician for a movie if he can make an audition. But Shez decides to make a weed delivery. So many things conspire to make getting to the audition an ordeal.

"Glass Eels", Jeffrey Ford

Len & Marty know a good spot to harvest eels for the black market. They figure a good score will ease their lives.

"Meadowlands Spike", Barry N. Malzberg & Bill Pronzini

A low level mobster decides to come clean about how he killed Jimmy Hoffa and got away with it.

"Kettle Run", Robert Arellano

Ernie and his friend Pervert drive to a secluded place to smoke weed. Keith & Tull, Ernie's dealers, show up looking for missing weed. Interspersed with bits of story about how Ernie got himself into the situation.

Really enjoyed this story too.