Dave

The joys of having little kids are listening to tons of Goosebumps books. This one is better than most, and the twist isn't something bizarre like they were all aliens or robots in the end. It's a straightforward story, a girl wants to scare some kids who continually scare and tease her. She goes to a mask shop and gets hold of a creepy and realistic mask. When she takes it home and tries it on, she finds that it is taking control of her and changing her personality. It's got a twist that is ignored in the sequel that I thought was predictable, but my littles thought it was great.

It does a great job outlining how the GOP hypocrisy and outright lunacy seem to be completely shameless. Many examples of things that would sink anyone else are cited, and they aren't wrong. The book is fairly light on details about how we can battle to save our democracy, so I deduct one star. It's on the tin; it should do that.

This has great world building, a pretty good story, and a lot of overwrought thinking that you get to listen to. I especially thought the escape from eros is really overdrawn. Tighter editing and this is a five star

It wouldn't make sense to the story but I'd love to understand the interaction between corporate power and government. I'll try the next one and see how that goes

Not only have I not read the first book, but I also am not a Christian so this wasn't a great fit for me. I thought it was interesting to weave a tale of court intrigue into a story of Jesus. But not that interesting.

It's fairly conservative in how it encourages you to save and where to direct your savings. At the end it has a call to action for ways to vote to stabilize social security as well as a quickly laid out plan to build a national pension plan. Looking at the published date of 2015 tells me how the author could be so optimistic about us coming together and working out a government solution to a problem.

The advice here on how to calculate what is enough for retirement and a focus on holistic plans for living in retirement make this a decent book to read especially if you are an average income earner.

This reads like an old story; the characters are simple, and there aren't many surprises. I read these as a tween and wondered if they held up. I say maybe, but really I think it's a tween book solidly. The main character wrestles with how to be an adult and man in the world, and everyone else around is a caricature of the people you meet. This set of stories got me interested in D&D, role-playing, and reading other fantasy stories, but I read them at the perfect moment in my life.

I've read a few of Christie's books, and I don't care much about the Poirot books. They have a lot of nonsense in them. They follow a pattern where a dude shows up, more people start to die, and then there's a lot of clucking of the tongue about how tragic it all is.

If you want to hear people moan about the hippies, I guess this book is for you. It wasn't for me.

Probably because it came from AAR and maybe award citations, I found the different sections to be a bit repetitive and use unusual phrasing to convey the feeling of the combat experience that sucked me out of it. I liked the part where it described the transition between WWII infantry experiences and, say, modern-day infantry, especially mech infantry. But I really feel the thesis that the spirit and will of the infantryman dictate the course of a battle is still not true to this day. Yes, you have to have someone on the ground to take the spot you blew up, but the grit of WWII, especially in the Pacific theatre, is really not found in the stories of today.

It's an ok read. Wouldn't recommend it for a lot of people. meh rating.

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 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"

This is a tour of what democracy means to people past and present. Focuses a lot on American ideas of democracy and promised not fulfilled in this area but also touches on other kinds of democracy tried in the past. It features an examination in detail of some contrasts that are experienced in democracy.

When we say democracy is government of the people, who are the people? In the US, it has gone from white male land-owners to somewhat universal suffrage for any adult. This book looks at not only this idea of changing who the people are but also looks at tricks that are played to make it so that one person's vote isn't equal to other people's votes and how layers of friction are added to make it so that people in power try to keep power.

Another major contrast that is examined in detail is how the people's vote may be overridden with the systems we have in place, both by different layers of government and also by financial coercion by foreign holders of capital and debt.

There is little suggestion of how to form a more perfect union. I do remember proportional representation by party as seen in some parliamentary western nations being held up as solving some of the problems seen by gerrymandering, but really I don't recall other gleam's of hope. It is a long catalog of horrors.

I thought was a easy read, (well, I listened but still) but I found the arguments to be a little too pat in some places. Liberalism in a classic sense has got some troubles as a philosophy, and as described I've heard about it from both sides. I used to consider myself fairly in the camp but it's embrace of technocratic solutions for political problems and siding with corporate interests over human ones has made me rethink it.

Interesting, and I would like to read some of the earlier books about liberalism due to this book, but I'll be honest it's probably going to slide off my brain pretty quick. Nothing brought up here is new or thought provoking to me.

Good basic advice

The book covers basic scenarios in good depth. I especially appreciated the chapter summaries with lists of things to do

This book is an older one, but was recommended and loaned to me by a friend when I asked for an example of good sci-fi writing. I found the story to be pretty engaging and it had several side stories that described a vision of the future I thought was decently believable. No magic dressed up as science, and I enjoyed the examination of what alien life might be like. It didn't get to crazy into details, but imagined several distinct life forms that weren't just humanoid things with antennae. I'm happy I read it.

This was a book filled with half-assed common advice you get off of a website, told in a gruff “tough-love” manner. It wasn't particularly useful nor will I remember much of the advice from the book in a couple weeks time because of the broad scope of the life problems talked about.

None of the advice seemed particularly harmful though, so I don't hate it.

This book had a good start and I liked some of the ideas they were hinting at in the beginning. I started to not like the book when some comic book store guy showed up with all the exposition and the ending made me almost give it a one, it was seriously crazy hokey.

If you like supernatural stories with white and black magic, maybe you'll like it. I can't recommend it.

It did not go into enough depth, but it was a check list of questions you should have asked yourself if you know what your plan is about X. It's like how to be responsible with money as an adult.

This was good for me, I like short stories and it's nice to get a mix of some people you might not have read before. None of these were bangers, but they were decent yarns.

A blog turned into a book

This had some interesting ideas, but felt like I was reading a listicle. There was nothing wrong with the writing but few were practical.