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Always feels good when you luck out and read multiple good books back-to-back. The fifth book of a six-book series I was seriously debating bailing on was not what I was expecting to continue the streak, but a welcome surprise nonetheless!

This is a strange format because it's really a collection of self-contained standalone vignettes that when read in the printed order presents a more cohesive through-line. My understanding is that the author just kept knocking out these shorter snapshots until he had enough of them to slap them together and call it a book. There are recurring characters, but sometimes they're given reintroductions at the beginning of a chapter and previous events are recapped as if you're reading the current chapter in a vacuum. Can't recall ever reading another book in this style.

This franchise has had some serious highs and lows for me. The worldbuilding is a good balance of serious and whimsical and there's some really creative scenes that play out with high-tech inventions. The biggest thing that detracted from my enjoyment of the previous entries was the protagonist, who thankfully has finally (in-fiction) retired and does not appear at all in this book. Instead, it was basically all of the good parts I liked (the setting, the aliens, the politicking, combat scenes) without all of the bad parts I didn't (bad attempts at humor, Boomer-coded main character, undeserved ending).

There's no real resolution to the central conflict here and this absolutely is a filler piece of media, but I find that I don't mind because the individual mini-arcs were so entertaining on their own. And having come this far, I definitely think I'll give the final book a shot thanks to the refreshing momentum this one gave.

As someone who enjoys coming up with trip itineraries and researching far-away lands, the thought of going on a vacation abroad with your friends and everyone having a really, really bad time is a special kind of hell for me to think about. Which I know was not meant to be the actual scary part of this book, but that's what happens here and I didn't realize that was a personal nightmare of mine.

So this was an unexpectedly contentious book club read (the woes of being the only horror girlie!) and it was my pick, so naturally I'm a little defensive here. The general consensus was: too much introspection, not scary enough. Which I kind of dispute because I find pedal-to-the-metal nonstop horror without lulls to fall flat, and there are two distinct spooky scenes in this book that will stick out in my memory long after finishing it. So yes, the haters are wrong.

A common critique I saw mentioned about this book is that there's a very distinct first part and a very distinct second part, so at least I was prepared for that going into it. It is a continuous plot with the same protagonist, but there is a very strong tone and momentum shift as we go from wilderness/creature-feature survival horror to cult shenanigans (which I don't think is much of a spoiler given, you know, the name of the book). I was really rocking with things until we hit the narrative speed bump that really slowed things down in the second half, but we do get things moving again towards the very end and into the climax.

Peaks and valleys notwithstanding, I found Luke to be a relatable protagonist because he was wrestling with not being able to reconnect with old friends after a hiatus apart and also recurring anger issues, both things I struggled with myself when I was younger. The main differences were that he was still going through this well into his mid-thirties instead of right after college, and he can drive a manual transmission vehicle, which I cannot.

My personal anecdotal evidence suggests that if you don't typically read horror, you're not gonna like this one. But if you do, give this a shot and just know that it's kinda two different vibes stitched together.

I feel like a lot of these single-issue, "why is no one talking about this?" deep dives all kinda boil down to: the kids™ are not alright. In this instance, the kids are 18 to 35 year old young men - and particularly men of color - as if they didn't have enough going on.

At this point even someone like me who doesn't follow any sports is just one degree removed from someone who frequently bets on games. I have a coworker who I still mock for betting on FIFA streams during the height of COVID lockdowns because nothing else was playing, but it seems like his behavior is becoming more the norm than an outlier. This book does a good job laying the groundwork for how sports betting got legalized in 2018 and how individual states experimented with their rollouts (or lack thereof). But really the main focus that I'll take away from it was the detailed reasoning of why gambling addictions are unique from other substance-related addictions and how and why they need to be handled in their own way.

A specific interviewee the author established contact with while researching this book is highlighted throughout as an example of what a crippling gambling addiction looks like in this day and age for Gen Z men. Referred to only as "Kyle", the guy in question went through some shit and self-admittedly avoided the worst-case scenario because he had rich parents who wanted to support him once he came clean about his self-caused financial ruin. Though in a book that kept stressing how young men of color are uniquely at risk from this kind of gambling, I was curious why the book didn't follow any of their stories.

As far as nonfiction goes, this book felt a touch more colloquial than other entries in this Columbia Global Reports series that I've read (lots of people were catching strays, from the Denver Broncos, to the state of New Jersey in general, to professional wrestling), but not in a way that felt overly biased towards the author's perspective; it still read as a presentation of a contemporary phenomenon rather than a persuasive essay. And to its credit, this book does also spell out specific measures that could be followed to protect vulnerable gamblers without resorting to a kneejerk reactionary return to prohibition.

Maybe I'm just a cynic old bastard, but nothing here surprised or shocked me. I'm at the point where I learn something new and terrible is happening and my first reaction is, "sure, this may as well happen too."

Shakespeare has long been a cultural blindspot of mine, and I also don't tend to consume plays or dramas in published book form, so this was a novel reading experience for me. Luckily this version had the original text on the left page and a colloquial "modern" "translation" on the right, which ended up being more helpful than I should probably admit. There were multiple times I thought I got the gist of the original lines, only to realize I'd missed a negation somewhere and the passage in question actually meant the exact opposite.

As for the story itself, it read like low-stakes shenanigans and hijinks and misunderstandings with plenty of twists and turns. What got me though was how well the underlying humor has held up so many centuries later. There aren't really fourth wall breaks as we understand them, but there are characters putting on a play (within this play) that do so in specific moments to the in-fiction audience in genuinely funny and (intentionally) stupid ways.

I'll likely give The Bard another go around in the future, but I definitely appreciated having these bumper lanes set up for me; I don't know that I would've enjoyed it as much without footnotes or additional context.