Reviews and Comments

A superb musician's biography, beautifully researched threads of musicology, Detroit, influences and connections. I wasn't aware of J Dilla prior to reading, appreciated the tour of 90s and 00s performers I do recognize and the technical transitions in electronic music capability and performance expressed through JD's explorations and legacy. Wonderfully extensive supporting youtube playlist.

Well presented translation, with significant marginal notes on story differences, Icelandic allusions, and historical context for both the translation and Stoker's original.

Unfortunately, we have to wait to see if the series will finish. A return to the first book's themes, revealing more past steadily.

Engaging historical drama, vicious and saucy and wry, and I still just don't care about Tudor England.

Jumping right in to finish the series - er find out how it doesn't yet end.

Two-hour podcast interview with the author on Tin House' Between the Covers: tinhouse.com/podcast/omar-el-akkad-one-day-everyone-will-have-always-been-against-this/

Chance, sense of place in the mountain west, love, home front, racism, what can be washed away and what can be transplanted. Women-focused, twists around an expected plot, hard scenes of loss and violence, I'm not sure they add up to a great whole but has a fitting firmness and solidity.

Faced with genocide in Gaza (and a personal immigrant journey reporting on Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and more confrontations of us vs them), a sharp and painful breakup with the comfortable beliefs of liberal western democracy's morality that allow any of us to look away.

A cozy military sci-fi. On the first hand this is a fun romp of geriatric boot camp with fun technological reveals. Fails in comparison to "The Forever War" for any confrontation with political and social impacts of the endless colonial war context. And introduces several maddeningly open-ended universal author escape hatches for the subsequent series.