Dave

A long and detailed list of grievances about how the people in the United States are racist and terrible. Written during Trump's time in office, I have heard many of these complaints before so I found it a bit dull. Since it was a disparate set of essays, there is not a united theme that carries them through other than people are racist.

I guess there's a lot in here about how Jewish people might see Trump's actions and how he relates to Israel, which was sorta new to me but seems not as relevant given the recent terror attacks and genocidal response. This was a fresh perspective though, and gets the stars I award.

I also got into an argument with the author on Blue Sky where he misconstrued a comment I made, then dove deep on an irrelevant link in a paper and tried to gaslight me about what the paper said. Then he said I was wrong and he was right and that's that. So I don't know if I believe the research in these essays too much given that interaction.

I've heard countless tales of teenagers reading atlas shrugged and the fountainhead and it twisting them to be selfish assholes and call themselves libertarians for a while. This book was like that for me but instead I was inspired to go on a many drug fueled adventures as possible and collect crazy memories.

Aside from that, this book and f&l on the campaign trail are incredible snapshots into the counterculture view of Nixonland and just how horrible it was. It also made me really sad at the complete lack of interesting drugs available to me when I was young.

This is a big collection of short stories from Bradbury, I could swear there were a few from the Martian chronicles that I remember from being a kid. I think he does a great job telling stories about simple people with a big feeling and getting you to think about how you'd feel there too. There's two separate stories in there that think about the first rocket trip and how you would feel (or your parents would feel) being the first one to rocket to somewhere. The ones I liked the best were the one about the suit that 6 guys bought to share and feel fancy (I think it's called the ice cream suit) and there is one in there about a guy who gets off a train at random at a tiny quiet town and has a unique encounter. *SPOILER* it turns out that at the station there's a guy that says he's been waiting for someone unknown to the community to get off the train so he could kill them. But the encounter doesn't go as expected *END SPOILER*

That last one was a bit creepy and quite good.

This is my second read of this book, I first read it probably like 20 years ago when I was trying to read everything Crichton had written. I think it's a decent story and I like the technical details, kind of future tripping on how awesome just a few years from now will be. It's like going to tomorrowland at Disneyland and seeing the old exhibits like Mission to Mars or whatever.

It's got a bit of a manly man of science kind of lens on what's happening and it has a Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of ending that spoil it a bit for me.

Picked it up for the Steven King story, and that was really not great. It's a literal re-wording of the Tell-Tale Heart by Poe with 70s phrases and I'm just surprised that King tried that out. Woof.

But the rest of it was decent enough, so I'm glad I went past that.

This was an interesting idea, and fairly well told. I thought it really dragged out a lot in parts, especially as the detective folks were catching up to what was going on. I found this especially funny as there is a quote in the book that says when writing stories you need to trim out unnecessary fluff. I still think King excels at the short story format, he has great ideas and writes well but this was full of extra baggage that I didn't think needed to be in there at all.

This is a very long slog of describing how things were technologically and economically and how two competing ideas have shaped major idealogical forces in the twentieth century. The major take away I had from this one was brought up near the beginning. You have two economic ideas:

1) The market is perfect and man serves the market to drive the most efficient outcome in all cases. If there are troubles with the market, it is because someone hampered the market from being completely free. (Hyak)

2) People feel that they have rights and want things to be fair. Since these are both subjective concepts it is difficult for me to think about this being factual based, especially in this post-truth age. People will resist politically policies that they feel are violating their status quo or rights and/or result in things not being fairly allocated.

This book walked through the long century of economic growth with these as the filter with which to view events. I went through it once, but if you really wanted to absorb the details you'd have to revisit it. It's very long and a little detailed.

I shouldn't maybe have checked this one out, it's aimed towards young readers, but then again the writing implies like a young teen reader and they talk about getting loans that you wouldn't be able to do until 18. Idk, very basic walkthrough about how starting a business is going to be, very high level.

This lacks a lot of hard information about what are your definitive next steps and more like a persuasive pamphlet on why it might be a good idea to become an appraiser and at a very, very high level what you might expect from that decision. So take the title as 'Why it might be good to become an appraiser" instead of "How to become a real estate appraiser"

Clive Barker writes stories on a really grand scale when he's going for a novel. There is an enormous amount of world building that goes into it and it's fantasy at scale hard to conceive of. This isn't an exception, detailing the pursuit of mystical power by a lone man unsuited for it. The arc of his rise and fall is pretty great.

I don't like the coda setting it up for the ongoing saga of Trello battling evil, so I dock it a star.