Kyle Erickson

This book was good, and Spencer Schneider's descent into Sharon Gans' cult is pretty crazy. Unfortunately, and this feels bad to say when someone is recounting traumatic events, it feels like he brushed over a lot of it. He was in the cult for over 20 years and I still never got a good sense of how they operated or the overall picture, and as a result Gans' School comes off feeling very run-of-the-hill “bad person says mumbo jumbo to trick people into worshipping them” thing. It was a woman instead of a man, but otherwise, I don't think the memoir delved deep enough to give this a sense of distinction. And ultimately, it is Schneider's life, and he is probably still working through a lot of it, so I hate that I feel this way- while trying to process and recontextualize your life after severing most of what you've known from your adult life, you probably don't think too much about making it feel distinct from other cults. But I think the main missing ingredient here is that I never really understood why Schneider (or anybody else, for that matter) chose to join Gans and put up with her over-the-top nonsense. Sure, he said they were taken advantage of and manipulated it, and I certainly believe him. But the book itself doesn't do anything to convince me.

That said, I do think it showcases how these groups can operate so long undetected and seemingly benign, and the run-of-the-mill quality of it does make it a bit more terrifying, like “how many more of these are out there?”. And I think Schneider wrote the story well, I just wish he had waited to write it or delved a bit deeper. Also, it was narrated very well.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the copy in exchange for an honest review!

7/10

Interesting setting (Egyptian) and plot background (women's suffrage), with interesting characters that suffers a bit from cliche or basic dialogue in more complex situations, and a subpar magic system. The magic system is quite literally ATLA. Not inspired by...it is exactly the same, to the point that there is a conversation in this book about bloodbending (“bloodweaving”) that is almost identical to the conversation Katara has with that old lady in ATLA. It was so frustratingly similiar I docked half a star. Rookie mistake.

But otherwise, a lot to like here. All three of the main characters felt distinct and despite setting up an obvious love triangle, actually veered away from it and did interesting things. If the author improves in the sequel, it could be very good.

This book was mildly entertaining, but if you've read Confess, unless you absolutely love Judas Priest or Rob Halford, there's not much reason to pick this one up. It's separated into distinct categories like “Lawyers” and “managers” and “drummers” and “playing shows” and are some random musings on each subject by Halford. I didn't dislike it, but I also didn't consider it time particularly well spent.

The core of this story was interesting, but some of the execution was lacking. For starters, Picture in the Sand starts with a frame narrative that I hated. College graduate Alex has been indoctrinated into a terrorist cell and he is emailing his grandfather about how his family will never find him. His grandfather had randomly suspected this might be a problem way back when Alex was younger and decided to write his life story -which he has never told anybody, even his son, Alex's father- and just kept on the off chance it would one day be relevant exactly to Alex's life. Sure.

I don't love this, but to get a story going, sure. But what I really didn't like is every single email from Alex throughout this story. What a one note, unrealistic, mouthpiece of a “character”. So Alex's grandfather emails him the file for the book, and every few pages, Alex stops reading to email his grandpa again about what he's read so far. It's THE DUMBEST EMAILS. I would have much rathered little interludes where Alex just thinks about what he's read before, but his emails are the worst part of this book. It'll be like:
actual story “so I met a girl, and she was beautiful.”
-email “wait, so this is grandma? I totally understand why you think you wanted to tell me this, but I am still not coming back, you'll never see me again, take care of yourself, I'll still read more when I have time though.
~three more pages take place, another email ~

I'm exaggerating but it's hard to explain just how jarring and ridiculous I found these emails. And the past-Grandfather story is supposed to be teaching Alex lessons, and so we get emails about his life too, and...it's just a very unnuanced portrayal of why people join terrorist groups. It's basically “white rich people are bad...wait, maybe they aren't ~all~ bad?!”

Anyway, onto the actual meat of the story. It was decent. It revolves around a film shoot in Egypt from the film Ten Commandments, Grandpa Ali is hired to work on the film and has dreams of being a successful actor. He sees Yul Brenner and Charles Heston and all these big movie stars and is swept away in the magic. But his brother recruits him into a terrorist sect that wants to use the spotlight of the big film to do something to make a statement. Ali feels drawn to his brother's cause, but doesn't want to make trouble. The crux of this story is good, although I think this section of the book could have used another ~50~ pages, because the book was pretty short. The ending of the book was okay, but I was left wanting a bit more from it all.

I switched between audio and physical and the audiobook was very good. I probably would have DNF'd otherwise.

Really enjoyed this sequel. I have to admit, for the first 20% or so, the words “cash grab” floated across my mind, as it felt like the story was trying to bend over backwards to exist. But once the narrative actually started, and the first contact storyline that was teased in Mickey7 is fully explored, I was hooked! I loved the interactions with the colonists and the alien lifeforms. I think this storyline made me like this book even more than the first one.

Also, the audiobook was excellent! Highly recommend listening to this book if possible.

This novella was absolutely fine. It is just...Alien, but with murderbot, kinda? Nothing about it was bad, and I enjoyed my time with it...but it really needed something to make it stick out more. As it is, it's just too similiar to Alien.

3.5, mainly for the last two stories following Valka and Crispin. The rest of the stories didn't do much for me.

Technically did not read this, because I read it all in Fire and Blood. However, I just went through and looked at all the gorgeous artwork and it absolutely deserves five stars for being beautiful. Looking forward to an abbreviated reread of F&B using this book instead.

This book is excellent and should be more wildly read, by everybody. You don't have to agree on the solutions (and I certainly disagree with Reeves on a couple) but it's hard to disagree on the problem and this book will get your mind working. Reeves breaks down the issues that are facing men in the present and future (and by extension, women...did you know we all live in the same world?!) without getting bogged down in political ideology (Reeves does a great job at explaining why X viewpoint from one side is good, why Y is hurtful, and then does the same thing for the other side) and without neglecting or just paying lip service to the feminist movement. The way we learn and get better as a society is by acknowledging problems and working towards solutions, and I think this book makes a compelling case.

I enjoyed this book way more than I thought I would. Essay collections are usually just okay to me, sometimes good, and the audiobooks are easy to listen to while doing other things. I am not very familiar with Wu, only knowing of her from the controversy she talks about in this book - tweeting she was upset her show wasn't cancelled. I've never seen her act in anything.

But I found this collection pretty insightful and compelling, and in many places moving. Even when she is discussing something that on the face of it, I don't have too much interest in hearing about, she manages to write about it in a really interesting way. An example would be the first time she fell in love. I thought this was just a really good essay about how sometimes people slowly change and no longer want the same things, and the way she writes about it shows a lot of maturity and insight into herself and other people. She's also just funny a lot of the time.

There are two essays that really resonated with me. The first is a horrific story when her teacher didn't believe she was smart enough to have written something and she went to all of her other teachers, in front of Wu, and asked if they thought Wu was smart enough to have done it, and they replied no. Absolutely devastating for a child, and it reminds me of all the teachers who dismissed me as a kid because I grew up on a carnival.

The second is the one about rabbits. Her rabbit has the same disease as my rabbit does, and her talking about the whole situation and also the fact that her rabbit is getting old and she will soon miss the little things really got me. Also she defends loving rabbits well, which is something that's annoying in our society.

“people often ask me, ‘why do you love bunnies so much?' and I always want to ask back, “Why do we love anything?”. Listing reasons almost cheapens the love, in my opinion. I don't have an explanation for love. It's also an insulting question. Nobody asks, “why do you love your dog?”. Why is it that love for certain animals is understood, but others require explanation? Everything and everyone is loveable to someone, even if it doesn't make sense from the outside. Love isn't something achieved through merit, its something that happens with time. “

I might as well not have read this for all I could tell you about it or what its vices and virtues were.

Merged review:

I might as well not have read this for all I could tell you about it or what its vices and virtues were.

This book was a fun follow up to Thrice! I think I liked it more. There's a group of people out to get Leaf due to his magic which gives this book a bit more urgency. The character dynamics continue to be good and I really like the central relationship. I do wish these were longer, another 50-75 pages would really let it all breathe in my opinion.

Also the audiobook was really good, except for the sound effects on some people's dialogue being distracting.

I wanted to love this, I expected to love this, I very much did not love this.

All of my thoughts are pretty uncharitable at the moment so I will just say that the writing style did not suit me with the constant info-dumping, stating the obvious, and stopping to describe every bite of food a person ever eats in their life. It was too close to Pokemon for my liking, but I understand some people will appreciate that aspect of it. To me it felt like I was drinking Mr. Pibb instead of a Dr. Pepper and that aspect bothered me. I didn't like the characters or the dialogue. The world was interesting, but instead of letting us explore it a bit more naturally, everything was told in large info-dumps.

3/10

Okay so with this memoir I can properly illustrate my defense against people who don't rate memoirs. I genuinely do not understand this trend even a little bit because every time the person in question says something like “it feels wrong to rate the struggles this person has gone through” as if there are no other considerations or factors that go into a well written, engaging, or moving piece of work. It doesn't reflect on you to rate a book lower if the author has had crazy, highly emotional, or damaging life.

Pageboy is a good book, and there's no question to me that Elliott Page has had a lot of trauma and bad things happen in his life. The journey is well written, emotional at times, disturbing at others, and I could tell the act of writing it was probably very cathartic. All good things.

However, the organization of this book is just straight up a mess. Chapters jump around with seemingly no rhyme or reason. There is no grouping of events or chapters in any contexts I could tell. Sometimes we are dealing with Page's childhood and then we cut to the next random chapter where it's 2022 and there's a transphobic incident and then suddenly we're filming Inception in 2010 and then the next chapter is the first kiss with a girl in high school. Especially considering there is a throughline of Page's journey of acceptance but we are not presented this journey in a linear fashion or given any context why these scattershot fragments are being presented in this way. It doesn't feel artsy, it feels amateurish.

So there you have it:
Elliot Page - unrated
The life Elliot Page has lived - unrated
Pageboy, the book written by an adult and forced to go through editors and publishers and beta readers and many other people who could offer notes and opinions on how to shape this experience - four stars

Thanks for attending my TED talk on rating memoirs.

This fifth installment of Sun Eater is everything you could want after Kingdoms of Death. It's probably the two books I feel benefit the most from being split (that I've read). Ashes of Man was able to deliver breathing space and emotional beats and a bit more of a ramp up to the next thing after all the crazy events of Kingdoms of Death.

I think I liked the climax of Kingdoms of Death more, but the falling action in this book is some of the stuff I've liked the most in the entire series. This book is harrowing and emotional, but still has epic space battles and pew-pews and laser swords. The characters in this series continue to grow and interest me in new ways, and Hadrian is so old now and been through so much that he feels like a new character from where we started, but in a believable, earned way. I also think this book has Ruocchio's best prose to date; it is extremely well written.

9/10

Absolutely loved this.

Inspiring to the max.

This was really good! I think Nero is usually put with Caligula and Commodus as a crazy Roman Emperor and while he did do some crazy things, he was a way more nuanced character. For starters, the people loved him. What is going on here?

The answer is a mix of genuine atrocity, curious decisions, and post-hoc political disparaging. I thought Everritt did a great job showcasing Nero's entire life and all the political stuff that lead to his end. The stuff with his mother, Agrippina, was particularly good. Highly recommend as a biography for this well-known, but somehow little understood, Emperor.

This book is set in Ireland in the 10th century and is based on Irish mythology/folklore and it was really good! We followed two perspectives, Gormflaith and Fodla, who are different types of magic users that keep themselves hidden from the general population and from each other. Gormflaith has married a king and is very deep into the politics of the region after that king dies and she tries to make his son king of Dublin, whereas Fodla is a healer and keeps herself more low profile, but has been tasked by her leader to infiltrate the inner circle of King Brian Boru, a historical renowned king of Ireland. The historical stuff felt very well done, and these two main characters and their supporting cast were interesting, particularly Gormflaith's. Gormflaith has to use all her political wiles as well as her previous relationships and potentiality for a new marriage in order to manipulate as many people as she can into helping her son become the uncontested king of Dublin. She's kinda like a magical, competent Cersei and I loved following this character., even if she is difficult to root for.

It was kinda fun to imagine this series as a pseudo-sequel to the Last Kingdom series by Bernard Cornwell, just because they take place like a century later and Uhtred the Bold (the person Cornwell is an ancestor of, who gave him the idea to do his Uhtred) makes a small appearance in this book. TLK being my favorite historical fiction series, the similar vibes from Children of Gods was a welcome one for me. It's not a very action heavy book, as it primarily follows the political maneuvering of the kings of Ireland through Gormflaith and Fodla's interactions, with the secondary plot thread of the magical groups trying to stay hidden from each other, but the ending is really awesome and has some good battles scenes. The magic is sparely handled in this book, almost nonexistent, but it feels like it will be used much more in the following books.

On a personal level, this is the first book I've read with dual first person perspectives, and I never really got used to it, which detracted from my enjoyment. While the chapters are named with each POV character, I just had a hard time fully orientating myself as to whose perspective I was in because I'm used to first person POVs being all one character. The writing of each character felt the same to me, so maybe with more differentiation it would have been easier. This was particularly an issue if I had to stop reading in the middle of a chapter, when I picked up the book I would struggle to remember who I was reading about until context clues came in. Other people may not have this issue.

I also thought Fodla was just kindof annoying. Her character is very passive and basically does what other people tell her for most of the book, and when she does have opinions and her own agency, it's just so emotion based that I was constantly frustrated with her (this is probably intentional, but it made her hard for me to care about). She also hated mortal men to a degree I found frustrating. She is very old, several hundred years I think, and while she has obviously been heavily propagandized by her leader, she has presumably interacted with men occasionally and seems likely to have developed some form of nuance or insight about them. But every time a man does anything, she thinks “MEN CAN'T BE TRUSTED” or when a man is nice she's like “He's nice now, BUT EVENTUALLY HE'LL DO BAD THINGS” and it was somewhat exhausting. So I definitely preferred Gormflaith's perspective, even if I think the storyline happening in Fodla's chapters is also very interesting.

My final negative for this book is that it uses the word Viking incorrectly, which I hate with my whole heart. It's probably an intentional choice for readership, but the rest of the historical stuff seems so good, to casually call everyone Vikings all the time and say things like “That's the VIking way” just takes me out of the story and perpetuates a phraseology that I wish people would stop doing, so for that I had to take off a full point. Sorry, I'm pedantic, it can't be helped.

But with that said, I really enjoyed reading this book and the above problems are gripes. I would recommend this to anybody who likes historical fiction, especially for people who like the Viking Age but want some more female representation at the center, this is absolutely going to be a hit.

8/10

It is humbling for your sense of individuality to realize that every aspect of a cultural phenomenon that was marketed towards you, hit you the exact way it hit everyone else. Each event mentioned in this book, I had the exact reaction described. I got the exact games at the exact times and saw the exact films on the same days and moved to Digimon briefly and had the same opinions that is described here and then fell off it for the same reasons, and I abandoned Pokemon for Yugioh at the same and for the same reasons. I am, I am sad to tell you all, a basic bitch.


Anyway this book was really interesting. I had never really learned much about the origin of Pokemon and various other Japanese anime/manga sensations around this time and how they all interacted with each other and were largely responsible for ushering in a very different era of gaming.

Also pokemon Crystal is the best

This book was really good, about how we go through grief and heal at our own pace. I really liked the epistolary format here, and Luke Kirby should narrate most things.This one definitely reminded me of Silver Lining Playbook in vibe and writing style. I did call almost the whole ending really early on, which for something playing information so close to the chest, I wish was more of a surprise. Still a really good novel.

This book was so good! Abrams is 2/2 for oral histories with me, after loving his oral history of The Wire. I love good oral histories because you get such a variety of perspectives. There's an art to making an oral history flow well and have the people speaking complement each other and Abrams is fantastic at it.

There are so many cool things I didn't know in here. From the very origins of DJing and scratching and how it started the movement, how the commercialization of rap affected the genre and subculture, to the origins of the west coast vs east coast feud (main sparks: Suge Knight and.....Outkast!?). I thought the book was pretty comprehensive and gave due to artists who don't get a lot of recognition outside of hip-hop circles for their contributions to culture. I have so much homework now. I also have a much deeper appreciation for the different styles of rap and how the genre has overlayed on top of each other in response to other regions/rappers trying something new and levelling up what people thought could be done and the influences that could be brought in. As an aside, it always makes me sad when people dismiss rap as people just talking fast. Rap is art, rap is poetry, it's storytelling and it's culture. And I think this book does an outstanding job of celebrating it in all of its forms, even if I'm not a fan of certain subgenres.

Also, while I knew it intellectually, seeing just how many incredible rappers are mentioned in this book just made me realize how deep the bench is for phenomenal talents that don't get enough appreciation. Highly recommend this book for hip hop-heads but also just for anybody who wants to dig deeper into a subculture, especially one that has influenced our modern era of music so totally.

Michael K Williams is one of my favorite actors ever, and he's played several of my favorite characters on TV. When he died, I was gutted. I was sad for days. I'm still sad. I knew about the work he was doing in the community and how inspiring he was to at-risk youths and selfishly, I wanted to see him do his thing for years to come. When I saw this memoir was coming out, nearly complete at the time of his death, it shot up in my most anticipated releases of the year.

And it really delivered. MKW talks candidly about his upbringing, his confusion regarding his sexuality, how he was bullied as a child and found refuge in the arts and dancing, his descent into addiction, and some figures in his life that really set him straight. He details his journey from model to dancer to actor to community activist with poignancy, honesty, and wisdom. I feel like he really gets to the core of why art is so transformative, and so valuable, and why acting is such a powerful therapy tool for many (without a doubt, a lot of actors are working through their own baggage while playing roles). The way Williams discusses working through his trauma with the roles he's played, using Omar Little as a paper tiger to hide behind, using Freddy Knight from The Night Of as a mirror into his nephew's life and the life he could have had, using Montrose Freeman from Lovecraft Country as a way to explore generational trauma and how that his impacted his life, as well as many other examples, I really feel like this memoir is a love letter to the arts.

The last 40% of the book really focuses on community outreach and things Michael had done to engage and give back to the communities he's lived in, the youth who need guidance, and other very admirable programs and events he's given his time to. He seemed like a very good person who was using his gifts to change lives. I would say that if this memoir had been complete and released as is, it'd be a four star, because there isn't enough depth on the personal level during all of this (he talks candidly about many topics, but the last 15ish years of his life are basically glanced over) and I personally just like more breadth of experience, this memoir was very short. But of course, it wasn't finished, and who knows how much MKW was planning on adding if he'd had time. Jon Sternfeld did an admirable job making this feel cohesive and final, as if it was intended to be this way all along.

If you like Michael K Williams, or want to learn more about how art can transform lives, or learn about some of the harrowing things that people go through in these rough, poverty-stricken neighborhoods, I cannot recommend this highly enough. Rest in Peace, Michael. Ay-yo, Omar Coming.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Milch has so many excellent thoughts on art and storytelling, but I did find large portions of this book fairly dull. The stuff about NYPD Blue and Deadwood were very interesting, but then he does weird tangents about gambling and why that lead to Luck, which I understand, but was just bored by. However, the final chapter, when he is dealing with Alzheimer's and also trying to finish a Deadwood film, was EXCELLENT. I'd probably recommend reading the book just for the final chapter.

7/10

Reread, Aug 2022- The audio is fantastic as well! Baldree doesn't ever disappoint in narration.


This self-pub low stakes fantasy novel by Travis Baldree has been making the rounds and in between all the large chunky books I've been reading, I decided to dip into it. It's incredibly smooth to read and I found myself halfway through in no time, so I decided to binge it pretty quickly.

So what did I think?

I think it deserves its hype! Legends and Lattes follows an Orc mercenary who decides she's done with killing and retires from the Merc life to start a coffee shop in a nearby city. Only, nobody has ever heard of coffee. Viv has to learn how to run a business with a product nobody knows they want, while dealing with the fallout of her decision to retire and trying to navigate new relationships with the people she recruits to help her run her shop.

Fantasy has a tendency to get bigger and bigger and more epic and introduce more factions and more POVs and sometimes you just want a nice story about found family and new beginnings. I appreciated that this book didn't turn the cheese factor up to 11 like some books in this subgenre (looking at you, Cerulean Sea). It's a bit more subtle in how wholesome and fun it is. Also, it's gonna make you hungry. I really wanted -nah, still want- a cinnamon bun while reading this book. The end of this book manages to be emotionally affecting without feeling manipulative, and at the end I definitely wanted more with these characters.

If you're looking for a light, fun read with low-stakes and compelling characters, give Legends and Lattes a try. Baldree is a first time author, but one of my favorite audiobook narrators, and I'm excited to see what he does next.

9.5/10

The Bosch series is pretty consistently good, but I've really enjoyed the addition of Renee Ballard to the overarching series, because their dynamic is really good. The previous one was actually my least favorite of the series, but Desert Star is a return to form. This is just good old fashioned crime fiction done well. Bosch is one of my favorite non-fantasy protagonists.

One aspect I don't see talked about is the audiobooks. Maybe it's just on my mind because of the very end of this book, but I've never seen audiobooks done the way the Bosch universe does them. The actor who plays Bosch on the show, Titus Welliver, went back and recorded some of the older Bosch books and now does all the Bosch audio. The voice actress who does the Ballard books also does Renee Ballard. So these collab books have trading viewpoints, but the dialogue of the opposite character is always done by the respective voice actor (so Titus will voice Bosch in Renee's POV chapters) and Connolly has a third series, the Lincoln Lawyer, which also crosses over occasionally. This book had that character in for a single conversation and they brought in the voice actor for those books to do like 10 lines. I just really like this approach. I wish more series did it.

8/10