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You know what? Kudos to this book for actually saying something with its full chest. I frequently come across political books that read like, "everything sucks and here's why," but this goes a step further with tangible and direct suggestions for what to do about it; it really is a guide of sorts.

Of course there's the standard solutions like ranked-choice voting and campaign finance reform, but this also discussed a concept of "citizen deliberation" (think of a souped-up round of jury duty except the results get pushed to a public election as a referendum question) that I'd never even heard of before. It even laid out real-world examples of how these have operated in the (then) recent past. There's also discussions on how to tweak recall election rules to better hold politicians accountable in between elections, and just an overall grab bag of specific things that foreign countries do.

The book reads as a little dated now because it was published in 2014 when the Greek austerity programs and the Eurozone crisis was the big news of the day. I did find it curious that even in a pre-Brexit/pre-Trump society the general attitude was described as "literally everyone from the far left to the far right hates establishment politicians". I guess the more things change the more they stay the same. But this is still definitely a book worth checking out if you come across it though.

I don't tend to have the best luck with translated works, but that doesn't stop me from giving them a chance from time to time. I wasn't able to get past that odd ~extra degree of separation~ feeling though, and reading this book felt like it was resisting me.

There's obviously a ton of local nuances and references that are going to go over my head because I'm not familiar with Guatemala or contemporary Mayan communities, but I could follow the general conflicts and points of contention between the haves and have-nots, indigenous vs. industrialists, etc. What really tripped me up is that multiple characters seemed to have more than one name, and the narration was pretty liberal about switching between them. There were times I thought I was following two different people, only to later realize that it was just one. Maybe that was an intentional stylistic choice that worked better in the native Spanish, but it made things challenging to follow.

Other major events are sometimes handled "off-screen" and depictions of violence are described so quickly in so few words that I wasn't always sure what had actually happened. I'm thinking specifically of a protest-turned-mass-shooting (I think that's what happened?) that abruptly pivots to a subsequent funeral a few days later that I reread the passage twice, feeling like I had missed something.

I'm not trying to place blame on the translator or even the original author. Maybe this book just wasn't meant for me and I'm at peace with that.

Gonna be honest, wasn't expecting a book extolling the virtues of the ~15-minute city~ to unintentionally make me wary of the concept. So much time was spent dispelling counterarguments against it that I learned about problems I'd never even considered and didn't know I'd have issue with until I heard about them here.

I've been a lifelong suburbanite (and arguably lived semi-rural for a decade), so no city has ever been a home for me; they've always been someplace I visit for a day or two before leaving. I do have friends that live in big cities though, and I find that they're always uniquely opinionated about the topic. They take pride in city-life things that I pity them for, and they pity me for things I take pride in for living in the suburbs. It all comes out in the wash at the end, but just know that that's where I'm coming from.

I did appreciate how this being a post-COVID nonfiction book it was able to take into account how, yeah, living in a tight radius is cool until all of a sudden you can't escape because of, say, a pandemic lockdown. And this wasn't a solely Western or eurocentric discussion, planned cities like Brasilia and The Line currently being built in Saudi Arabia were brought up. There is a clear favoritism towards Dutch and Scandinavian-style cities though with their bicycle-first approach to infrastructure. I did find it curious that the author posits bicycle riding as something we all wish we could do if the world around us would allow it when that is far from a universal desire in my experience; growing up, whenever I saw someone riding a bike on the road with cars the adults in my life would point them out and say, "That guy lost his license, you don't wanna end up like him."

As for concerns I didn't know I had going into this, apparently people who live closer to grocery stores visit them more frequently and over time end up consuming more calories than less regular shoppers. There were also some valid points of smaller communities becoming more socially isolated and unwelcoming of outsiders, to say nothing of socieoeconomic stratification. Highly-monitored urban zones in the name of "efficiency and safety" also raise privacy concerns that have me agreeing with libertarians, which makes me feel weird. I didn't always find the author's refutations against these points wholly convincing, so I leave this book feeling more conflicted than I did going into it.

I do think that car-less subsections of major cities are inevitable, but maybe another decade or two off, and only in places that are already sufficiently wealthy and have a local culture that wants it. It might be a "build it and they will come" kind of situation, but I don't think shrinking an urban environment, no matter how well intentioned, should be something done against a populace who didn't ask for it.

It's kind of impressive how a book that is decidedly adult in tone and prose still manages to feel like a story on training wheels. Like this didn't read as YA and no punches were pulled content-wise, but I couldn't help but feel like I was playing with bumper lanes set up.

This was a book club read, and it was actually my suggestion that won the last round of voting, so maybe that's why I'm as disappointed as I am that I didn't love this book. There is a central mystery and the narrative jumps between two protagonists: Shea, who is a modern-day true crime girlie, and Beth, a hardened old woman who gives us flashbacks to forty years earlier when she was arrested, tried, then acquitted for the murder of two men. The initial draw of, "what really happened back in the seventies?" is there. So far so good.

But pretty early on there's an explicit display of supernatural phenomenon that piqued my interest and had me thinking we were veering into haunted house territory. But then that aspect was left underutilized until the very end of the story. I was also expecting a more prominent theme about stagnation and lingering on the past, but it wasn't explored as fully as I thought it was set up to be.

This book didn't know what genre it wanted to be, a crucial character is introduced surprisingly late into the story, and the central mystery was solved unusually early on considering how much longer the plot ran after the big reveal. Probably the most damning comment that sums up how I feel about this was when one of my book club buddies said, "this was an airport book." More of a literary product than a piece of fiction in my opinion. Still, there's a time and a place for that, and I've definitely seen it done much worse than this, so that's something.

What starts out as a, "here's how Bernie can still win" bit of expired leftist copium soon becomes a cold splash of water to the face for those who need to hear it. Demographic trends are not destiny, and one can never rest on their laurels before the work is done.

This is a good primer on the different sub-types of socialism (of which this book covers nine by my count), with a focus on American politics, save for a single chapter that detours over to the UK to cover what the Labor Party has been up to between WWII through the early days of COVID. There is special care given to showing how socialist policies tend to fare well with the general public, but how once anyone actually says the dreaded S-word out loud, no one wants anything to do with it anymore.

Parts of this haven't aged well, which is strange to say of a book not even five years old. There was a sense that the government's plan for handling the pandemic (or lack thereof) would further push the public into demanding a post-capitalism future with a state that was more willing and capable of providing for its citizens. A lot of faith was placed in Gen Z's voting trends and distaste for capitalism, but there was only one throwaway line I recall that suggested, hey, maybe watch out for a resurgence of neo-fascism!

If nothing else, the final closing chapter is a hard dose of reality that some people I know really need to take to heart: the average person doesn't care or have the time to study political theory. Demanding purity tests (the DSA refusing to endorse Biden in 2020 is highlighted here) and taking the most extreme positions on cultural issues alienates potential converts and distracts from the central economic goal of combating wealth inequality. If you want to be a relevant political movement, at some point you're going to have to but the treatises down and engage in actual politics.