Reviews and Comments

This book was a great read! Conversationally written, it’s a great mixture of compelling statistics and facts combined with an easy to follow blueprint for how to improve things. In the age of trendy TikTok influencers making videos like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT?” challenging us to do some magical THING that will fix waves hands all of this, it’s refreshing to have an adult tell you that there are no quick fixes.

Indeed, this book states several times that the only way forward is through the long, boring task of, well, basically going to work. But how we build our workplaces, how we organize them, how we make them more democratic is actually the most important thing any of us can do.

After all, even if the cool Leftbook edgelords do somehow get their “revolution”, then what? We as a society will still need to make things. We …

I feel like if someone who had never seen a leftbook meme in their lives were to read this book it would be very eye opening for them. Unfortunately (?) I have already been looking at memes about urban planning and the evils of capitalism for well over a decade, so there was not really any new information in this book for me except for a few fun historical facts here and there.

Once again, I find myself frustrated by authors who spend a great deal of time bemoaning how terrible the state of the world is and very little time talking about how to actually achieve any alternative.

Most of the examples in this book aren’t indigenous, pre-capitalist societies like I would expect. Instead, most of the examples are from relatively modern Western society. Many of them are just religious sects and most of them were either short-lived or …

Despite having several witchy friends, I have never pulled my birth chart or held astrology for anything but made up woo. But a very close friend (who does not own a single crystal and whose book recs I always trust) loaned me their personal copy and told me I had to read it.

This involved first going to the author's website and entering your exact date, time, and city of birth, which gives me the ick knowing how secure any data we put on the internet is (not). Which meant I had to text my mother and ask what time I was born. With my sensitive personal data entered, I was emailed my birth chart to print. Printout in hand, I sat down to analyze it with this book.

I quickly realized that the chart I printed out did not correspond to the explanations included in my email. The Sun …

Imagine Braiding Sweetgrass was written by an annoying Californian yuppie and that’s this book. I’m glad I read it. It has a lot of good ideas and it challenged me to think about how social media and my internet use affect my life, which is what made me pick up the book in the first place.

However, it would have been a lot more effective if she had trimmed a few hundred pages of fat and just gotten to the point. Overall, though, still a good read. 

I consider myself pretty well versed in the shortcomings of capitalism, but this book still managed to shock me time and time again with tales of the brazen greed of tech companies over time. It was an easy read, which I appreciated, and I greatly enjoyed the conversational and sometimes colorful tone of writing.

Yet even though the author said multiple times that he would explain how we go about fixing the problems of Big Tech, he never really did. That is, unless I somehow figure out how to suddenly make Congress listen to me instead of a huge corporation, or learn how to reverse-engineer my own social media company. Nevertheless, it’s a great read, and one that more people probably should. 

This is the first time I have been exposed to a socialist who seems to have as much disdain for the socialism/communism of the 20th century as they do for capitalism. This book challenged my concepts of what socialism really is and has made me realize that I have a lot of internalized capitalist concepts that I need to consciously unlearn.

This book is a fantastic primer to thinking about a new socialism for this century. I wish it got into more specifics as to how to put the theory into practice, but then again this book is actually just a collection of essays and speeches made by the author throughout his career. 

This book has permanently changed the way I think about the world. It made me so overwhelmed with emotions that at times I had to set down my phone and cry for a few minutes. But it is beautiful. It is poignant and important and it has given me renewed hope for a world that is increasingly terrifying. 

This series gets more addicting with each installment. The first four books were almost too short, and reading this one felt like I was finally really getting to dig in to the world of Murderbot. Consider me thoroughly hooked!

I just don’t get tired of Murderbot as a character. Plus, now that the world building and characters are more established, it’s easier to follow the plot, which was something I found a little difficult in the first two books. I cannot wait to keep reading this series!

This was my favorite Murderbot book so far. The fact that so many robot characters in this series are incredibly wholesome reminds me a lot of the video game Stray. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the terrifying stories where robots turn on the human race. 

I can’t wait to read the next one!

It’s rare to find a compelling sci-fi book that also has a hefty helping of humor and sarcasm baked into its tone. I will definitely be reading more of this series. 

Murderbot is such a fun character. Never thought a construct could be so relatable but it’s just the cutest. I love when it gets bewildered by humans.