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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.

Historically I have a pretty bad track record with time travel and parallel universes in media; it never lands for me and I never enjoy it. But I guess from this point on there's gonna be a little asterisk at the end of that statement that says, "except for Fractured Infinity, that one did it right."

We have a great protagonist in Hayes Figueiredo, who is kind of a washed-up asshole, but he's trying to be a better person and we actually see those attempts from him. He's also an indie filmmaker, and that background was utilized so perfectly, interwoven into the narrative prose but also the actual content of the plot at certain points. His first-person explanation of events truly benefits from his eye for cinematography in a way that'll make sense if you read this.

Even just the setting (the initial one, before we start jumping around alternate realities) was compelling to me. Set sometime in the early 2100's, the world has mostly tackled climate change, developed a cure for cancer, has started colonizing the moon, etc., etc. ... but it's clear that things were bad before they got to this point. We're kind of following the first generation to finally breathe a sigh of relief that the troubles of the 21st century are over. It read to me as simultaneously optimistic but also tempered by realism.

The pacing had just the right peaks and valleys, the central romance felt genuine, and the two main antagonists were sympathetic and justified in the actions they took. And it felt important that this was a gay romance; I don't think that if you swapped out the leads for a M/F couple that it would read the same, which I appreciated. For all those reasons and whatever else, this one worked for me.

Also shout out to Tom Picasso (the audiobook narrator) for nailing the pronunciations of all the Portuguese names and quotes that popped up from time to time.

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 even separate chapters focusing on the staff at these facilities, and how prisons in other countries compare.

I was expecting more suggestions or proposals for future goals of prison reform, but this read more like a journalistic exposé rather than a persuasive essay. Regardless, this series/publisher continues to be a great source for polished examinations of niche contemporary subjects, but this stands out as one of the better ones I've read.

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 accomplished it in about 300 pages. It's interesting because the author is clearly talented - there were a few scenes that absolutely held my attention - but at times it also felt a little clumsy. I'm thinking about peripheral characters that the reader was clearly not meant to sympathize with being portrayed as comically evil, almost outside the realm of credulity. Besides these occasional eye-roll moments, there's some solid writing here.

Looking ahead, it seems the next two books in this "trilogy" are set in the same time frame, just in different parts of the world with completely different characters. That alone is intriguing to me, signaling that there are more stories to be told about this cosmic event beyond these characters in this book, and I'm inclined to agree. I'll likely pick them up at some point.

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 with it.

However there is a very blatant and blunt Heaven's Gate reference that was so on-the-nose that it almost felt disrespectful to me? Like, that was an actual, real-world mass suicide event; seemed weird to me to fictionalize a nearly identical version of it in an otherwise feel-good story. I don't know, just rubbed me the wrong way, enough so that I felt like mentioning it here.

I continue to not enjoy child characters in fiction, but that's subjective and nothing new. Still, I could see myself recommending this to certain people, and it's not something I would intentionally steer others away from.