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mikerickson

mikerickson@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 6 months ago

Primarily a horror reader, but always down for some historical fiction and gay stuff.

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mikerickson's books

Bill Keller: What's Prison For? (2022, Columbia Global Reports) 4 stars

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4 stars

I'm privileged enough to have never been directly affected by the American prison system, so this was always going to be a pretty informative book for me. But I'm still surprised by just how concise and sweeping such a short book managed to be; damn near every sub-topic I was thinking about was addressed before the end.

This is a well-researched dive into a facet of life that's at the back of everyone's mind but also one we don't like to think about. Early on there's a quote referenced: "If you've seen one prison... you've seen one prison." Jumping around to multiple real-world locations was an effective way to hammer that down, showing the differences in how each place deals with race, college programs for inmates, female inmates, how thy handled COVID lockdowns, and how prisons prepare (or rather how they don't prepare) people for their eventual release. There are …

Benjamin Percy: The Ninth Metal (2021, HMH Audio) 4 stars

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3 stars

I appreciate this kind of pared-back science fiction that doesn't bend over backwards creating super-complex worlds with aliens and centuries of history and impossible physics. Instead we have a simpler premise that still offers a lot to work with: A comet passes through the solar system and misses Earth, but a few months later our orbit passes through the debris field it left behind, resulting in a massive meteor shower. This book follows what happens in the town where it hit the worst, in rural Minnesota.

This is one of those books where the point of view bounces between multiple characters, but we keep coming back to a core three who are completely ignorant of each other in the beginning but end up getting tangled together by the plot. I usually associate that kind of complexity with much longer books, but this was an efficient and tight little novel that …

TJ Klune: The Bones Beneath My Skin (Paperback, 2018, BOATK Books, Boatk Books) 4 stars

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3 stars

This was a book club read and my sixth go-around with this author. Someone else in my club whose also read a lot of Klune's stuff pointed out the plot/structural similarities with his other books, and damned if I'm not gonna notice the Klune formula moving forward. But hey, he's doing something right if he keeps getting published!

This was a weird one for me because looking back at it as a whole, the first things that come to mind are the shortcomings: I wish the central romance felt a little more earned, I wish the weird/sci-fi/alien parts were leaned into more, I wish the 90's setting was better utilized, I wish the ending was more tragic (a common gripe that my book club mocks me for; I just want everything to be Hamlet-levels of tragedy). But it wasn't an overall bad book and I don't regret my time …

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner: Freakonomics (Paperback, 1600, Penguin Books Ltd, Uk) 3 stars

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo …

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2 stars

I was lured in with the promise of a fun, accessible pop-psychology spin on economics in our daily lives. Instead I got an oddly masturbatory criminology lecture hyperfocused on poor black people and everything they do wrong.

Damn near every weekend I find myself in a thrift store and this book specifically appears in droves pretty much everywhere I go. The frequency with which I see this book finally won me over and I gave it a chance. Originally published in 2005, I was curious what a book about economics right on the verge of the 2008 financial crisis would look like. Turns out I'm still wondering what that book would look like, because this one wasn't about economics at all!

There are discussions on "how is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?," how people become crack dealers, and whether or not children given stereotypical black …

Lindy Ryan: Cold Snap (2024, Titan Books Limited) 1 star

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1 star

I wanna say this was a swing and a miss, but it felt more like watching someone who had no business being there at all walk up to bat - without a bat - and get nailed in the face with a speedball. Genuinely don't understand what message I'm supposed to walk away from this story with.

Sometimes a book flounders because it's trying to do too many things at once, and gets pulled in too many directions. Not the case here. Instead we have a singular focus on a newly-widowed mother with intense survivor guilt trying and failing to reconnect with her brooding teenage son by honoring her dead husband's wish to spend Christmas in a cabin in the woods. Which on its own sounds like a strong enough prompt to work with, but it doesn't go anywhere. She remains a high-strung and irrational victim of the same repeating …