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mikerickson

mikerickson@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 7 months ago

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

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mikerickson's books

John Judis: Socialist Awakening (2020, Columbia Global Reports) 4 stars

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4 stars

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, …

Nathan Tavares: Fractured Infinity (EBook, 2022, Titan Books Limited) 5 stars

A thrilling race across the multiverse to save the infinite Earths – and the love …

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5 stars

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 …

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 …