Reviews and Comments

Action thriller with capable light sci-fi themes of shadowy secrets, persuasive control, and corporate surveillance. The linguistic and marketing angles were weak to my cynical experience and central holes in what matters, I probably would have loved this when I was 20. There's a reasonable comparison to Vita Nostra here that puts this as the brash and somewhat flat American branch of the org that's a bit stuck in their 1950s categories and also wants to be a legible action movie?

The narrative half of this daughter-father bakery's cookbook is a positive story of a family and small town community focusing on whatever and however helps get the kid through a depressive period in her teens, and it turns out baking bread and sharing that passion with neighbors and on social media and no pressure to return to school or work for a couple years let's them follow this passion energetically. Love to see it.

What could have been a cute-bloody murder mystery with an underdog staff dealing with the overpuffed wealthy occupants of their space station and a sneaky AI sidekick... is all that but goes extra hard at solidarity and collective liberation. Fun.

Entertaining early adult romance of extravagant differences. As I jump into a standalone story set in a larger universe, it's hard to judge if some of the author-character hand-waving is clever or cheap, and I know I found the concluding twist to be both, but I'll try another.

Account of Creek/Muscogee villages and leaders balancing and negotiating between three colonial powers in and around central Georgia and Alabama. Gives reasonable agency and complexity to groups portrayed by colonial records as legible nations with clear hierarchy and allegiance. Already dependent on European trade, squeezed and transplanted and resettling on town sites previously wiped out by DeSoto's visits, the population pursues their own diverse political ends in the space between over the few generations covered, a bit narrower than I hoped even while it says it right there.

Novelization, reading for comparison and ref in Yumi and the Nightmare Painter.

Bookclub reading for comparisons to Vita Nostra.

Incredible labor history, focused intently on a single tragic factory fire in a small North Carolina town, but with chapters diving deep into the political, economic, and sociological history of why neoliberal American industry sought out and created internally colonized places of ever cheapened government, food, health, and lives. He even fit all that in the subtitle, bravo, highly recommended.

Has more than I care about the English Civil War, but the thesis is strong: the productive marsh fens supported an independent and insurgent indigenous population until commons enclosure and agricultural systematization and a need for wage-dependent labor drove the state to drain and eradicate the communities and ecosystem.

Some delicate photo collage and light writing connecting computer chips with early mayan calendars, incan quipus, power distribution grids... made me want to watch Koyanisqaatsi again?

Fast multiverse combat adventure with a bunch of setup for... well, I'm a bit worried about whether this ever went anywhere beyond each next scene, there's a lot of incongruity in what we're shown to care about and what is plausible once the setting simultaneously covers one vs all and all vaguely-humanity vs all synthetic creation.

I don't normally put cookbooks on here, nor read much of their narrative, but the first half of this one is story, of the father-teen experience of starting a little bakery.

Cite from several earlier readings this year.

Subtle - a history of early computer use in politics, following a mostly uninteresting and overconfident marketing company - Simulmatics - from '50s campaign analytics and simulation to Vietnam War psychological surveys and counterinsurgency to domestic riot prediction. Wherever she can, LePore tells this history from the perspective of the wives and secretaries of these blustering ad-and-war men, and with an eye to the parallel shadows and overpromises of current technology companies.

A little murder mystery on a space station, always nice (with plenty of sarcasm).