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.
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Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn …
"Soul Anatomy", Lou Manfredo
a rookie cop, the son of a US Attorney, shoots and kills a Black squatter. He tells his union attorney the story, and he's pretty messed up about it, but not in a way I'd expect.
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn …
"Live For Today" by S.A. Solomon.
An addict gets a job as a morgue technician, where she works primarily with the bodies of dead junkies.
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn …
Been a while since I read an anthology.
Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. …
Content warning revelation of Linus Baker's character arc may reveal the gist of the plot
Linus Baker evaluates orphanages that house magical children. For some reason, the department he works for is extremely rigid and controlling for their workers (they issue demerits to workers??!). But he's given the assignment to investigate one orphanage by Extremely Upper Management. For reasons I never quite understood, this orphanage is different. Extremely Upper Management pays special attention to them, and nearby residents fear the magical children extra vehemently.
Despite a premise that doesn't quite hold together, a delightful story emerges during Linus Baker's 4 week visit to the orhpanage. The children are kooky! The headmaster, Arthur Parnassus, and Linus Baker develop a friendship. Linus gets to learn that maintaining a distance and objectivity limits him, and he gets to break out of a decades long deference to authority and fear of connection.
If you listen to the audiobook as I did, Daniel Henning does a wonderful job of voicing a multitude of characters that gets to the essence of each of the children and adults. I often find it hard to follow audiobooks with lots of characters, but Henning's narration does such a great job of making each of them distinct and memorable that I had no problems.
On a generation ship bound for a distant star, one engineer-in-training must discover the secrets …
Ravinder "Ravi" Mcleod is training to be an officer on a generation ship going from Earth to Tau Ceti. While not strictly speaking a heredity based society, officers tend to be children of officers & crew tend to be children of crew. The ship (one of three in a fleet) is coming up on Braking Day, the point in the trip where the ship flips around, then fires its engines to begin decelerating. A.k.a., Braking Day from the title.
There's lots of plain drama just from keeping a ship in good shape and heading toward its destination. There's lots of drama because of the hierarchical society that dominates the ship. And there's lot of drama because Ravi starts seeing visions of a girl whose only words Ravi can understand are "help us".
This is a very young adult themed book, though I don't know if it was officially marketed as …
Ravinder "Ravi" Mcleod is training to be an officer on a generation ship going from Earth to Tau Ceti. While not strictly speaking a heredity based society, officers tend to be children of officers & crew tend to be children of crew. The ship (one of three in a fleet) is coming up on Braking Day, the point in the trip where the ship flips around, then fires its engines to begin decelerating. A.k.a., Braking Day from the title.
There's lots of plain drama just from keeping a ship in good shape and heading toward its destination. There's lots of drama because of the hierarchical society that dominates the ship. And there's lot of drama because Ravi starts seeing visions of a girl whose only words Ravi can understand are "help us".
This is a very young adult themed book, though I don't know if it was officially marketed as such. All the spotlight characters are coming of age. Pretty much anything an adult does is either off screen, or an authority figure in opposition to Ravi and his friends. As such, don't expect much in the way of adult motivations.
Young Fitz is the bastard son of the noble Prince Chivalry, raised in the shadow …
This year, I've vowed to read some of the books that I've had on my shelves for a while. This one has been on my shelf since 2009 at least.
The Interdependency—humanity’s interstellar empire—is on the verge of collapse. The extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel …
On paper, I should really enjoy Scalzi novels. In practice, not so much. Every character feels like an extension of Scalzi's social media presence. Fir the first book of this series, I could put up with it because the premise and plot were interesting.
There's nothing interesting in this second installment. it's just court intrigue with a bunch of wise cracking nobles. Scalzi can't seem to write a normal conversation, or plot intrigue that isn't over the top mustache-twirling.
Unfortunately for me, i want to know the end of the saga now. i will read the third book. then please, talk me out of reading any other of his books.
(He seems like a decent guy, but his fiction is just oil to my water.)
The Interdependency—humanity’s interstellar empire—is on the verge of collapse. The extra-dimensional conduit that makes travel …
Ugh. The first book was ok. This is a drag, but now I'm invested in knowing what happens. And there's one more book in the series.
Memory is far more than a record of the past. In this groundbreaking tour of …
As I've gotten older, I have found it increasingly harder to remember nouns, particularly names. Names of companies in my industry. names of software packages and services I use frequently. My sibling's names. My girlfriend's names.
I didn't read this book with the idea that i would learn how to cure my memory difficulties. Rather, I wanted to understand in a basic way how memory works and if research backs up any method for slowing my decline.
The book solidly walked me through things. It includes descriptions of two kinds of memory: episodic and semantic. Things I experienced and might recall vs. facts I've committed to my store of knowledge. Although my memory of things I've experienced is not great, for some reason that's never bothered me. But losing common facts really makes me anxious.
Although a bit florid, i recommend the book for a mostly understandable explanation of about …
As I've gotten older, I have found it increasingly harder to remember nouns, particularly names. Names of companies in my industry. names of software packages and services I use frequently. My sibling's names. My girlfriend's names.
I didn't read this book with the idea that i would learn how to cure my memory difficulties. Rather, I wanted to understand in a basic way how memory works and if research backs up any method for slowing my decline.
The book solidly walked me through things. It includes descriptions of two kinds of memory: episodic and semantic. Things I experienced and might recall vs. facts I've committed to my store of knowledge. Although my memory of things I've experienced is not great, for some reason that's never bothered me. But losing common facts really makes me anxious.
Although a bit florid, i recommend the book for a mostly understandable explanation of about 300 factors that influence memory.
Everything starts somewhere. For elite military cop Jack Reacher, that somewhere was Carter Crossing, Mississippi, …
A prequel set just before book 1, The Affair tells how Reacher gets pushed out of the Army. The Army sends him to Carter Crossing Mississippi, where a young woman has been murdered and the town thinks the perpetrator must've been a soldier from the nearby Kelham Army Base.
This episode takes us back to early Reacher novels, where he can't put a foot wrong at all.
Including the sex scenes. Reacher can't do wrong, but Lee Child certainly does. These should have been whittled down a lot.
A young Jack Reacher knows how to finish a fight so it stays finished. He …
Second Son goes back to Reacher's childhood, specifically age 13 when his family is newly stationed on Okinawa. Local bullies threaten the new to town Reacher brothers. Reacher kisses a girl on the beach. Reacher acts and, worse, talks like adult Reacher. He gets to solve crimes like adult Reacher, including explaining to military investigators exactly where his father's missing code book has ended up. At age 13. Just scan right.
A brain-bending investigation of why some people never change their minds—and others do in an …
McRaney explores the psychology of persuasion, intrigued by the work of the Los Angeles LGBT Center and their Deep Canvassing technique. The other method that he covers is Street Epistemology, which isn't specifically supposed to change minds. Just make people look hard at their reasons, which if those reasons are bad maybe they'll consider changing them on their own.
The rest of the chapters explores psychological concepts around persuasion and the final chapter is one on social change and networks of human contact. That last chapter is frustrating because McRaney presents it as if the change that spreads through human social thought is inevitably positive in the long run (LGBTQ people are so accepted! Anti-vax people that really opposed covid vaccines are mostly getting vaccinated in Britain now!) The book was published in 2022, so the current backlash against trans people hadn't reached the heights it has, but we've been …
McRaney explores the psychology of persuasion, intrigued by the work of the Los Angeles LGBT Center and their Deep Canvassing technique. The other method that he covers is Street Epistemology, which isn't specifically supposed to change minds. Just make people look hard at their reasons, which if those reasons are bad maybe they'll consider changing them on their own.
The rest of the chapters explores psychological concepts around persuasion and the final chapter is one on social change and networks of human contact. That last chapter is frustrating because McRaney presents it as if the change that spreads through human social thought is inevitably positive in the long run (LGBTQ people are so accepted! Anti-vax people that really opposed covid vaccines are mostly getting vaccinated in Britain now!) The book was published in 2022, so the current backlash against trans people hadn't reached the heights it has, but we've been watching it build for a while so I'm not so optimistic that social change is positive.
However, the methods of persuasion discussed seem intriguing if somewhat distasteful. Both methods emphasize being judgement free of people's bad and harmful positions in order to change their minds. In the context of canvassing, I can do that (I worked on Washington state's 2012 marriage equality referendum). Keeping judgement out of my conversation for short term conversations while canvassing is much easier than keeping it out of a long term relationship with relatives. I might be more successful on topics like housing (with some training, of course) that don't directly threaten people because of who they are.
A worthwhile overview and read, but don't consider this a how-to. For that, read & train up on the methods after reading this book.
There’s deadly trouble in the corn county of Nebraska . . . and Jack Reacher …
Reacher stumbles into a rural Nebraska county while hitchhiking away from the events in 61 Hours. While drinking coffee at a rural motel bar, he overhears an alcoholic doctor turn down visiting a woman who is experiencing a nosebleed. Reacher keeps his nose out of lots of other people's business, but he suspects the woman is a domestic violence victim and badgers the doctor into visiting, with Reacher along for the ride.
The woman turns out to be the wife of a local county heavy, so Reacher is off on another adventure battling local crime bosses, much like a one man A-Team. Before the end of the book, Reacher aims to end their control, at least the terrorizing people into silence part.
Competence porn at its most ok.
A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes …
Voss premise is that negotiating is an emotional exercise rather than an intellectual one. so he presents a bunch of techniques that he says are designed to subtly play on people's emotional processing. I assume they work well if skillfully wielded, though i can't be sure. but he never puts it all together into a coherent method. the techniques remain a grab bag. lastly, the book does not present any way for the reader to practice the techniques, though he talks about such practice in classes he teaches. consequently all except type a personalities are likely to find it intimidating.
"A heartwarming and refreshing debut novel that proves one thing: there's not enough data in …
Michael is a male escort catering to women. Stella is an autistic woman who lacks confidence. She hires Michael to teach her how to be better at sex, then to he better at relationships. Of course it turns into more.
But the conflict relies on characters that hear one thing said and assume it means another. lots and lots of that. And each character blows those meanings up into all sorts of drama that could have been avoided by asking what they meant.