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mikerickson

mikerickson@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 10 months ago

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

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mikerickson's books

Shelley Parker-Chan: She Who Became the Sun (2021)

She Who Became the Sun reimagines the rise to power of the Ming Dynasty’s founding …

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Genuinely cannot think of a single complaint or slight against this novel I had the pleasure to read. Just the right length, just the right tempo, dual protagonists who mirror each other despite being enemies, expertly-explored themes of gender and unchecked ambition, and delivered with wonderful prose that wasn't over-flowery. And on top of all that, we got not one, but two of the most tragic and memorable betrayals I've ever read (and I'm a sucker for tragic endings).

I feel like a longer review than this won't be able to capture my feelings more accurately than a succinct, "I loved it." Definitely will be checking into the sequel, I need to know what happens next.

Adam Nevill: The ritual (2012, St. Martin's Griffin)

"When four old University friends set off into the Scandinavian wilderness of the Arctic Circle, …

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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. …

Jonathan D. Cohen: Losing Big (2025, Columbia Global Reports)

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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 …

No Fear Shakespeare (2003)

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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 …

Cameron Abadi: Climate Radicals (2024, Columbia Global Reports)

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I feel like a lot of contemporary political books I read that aim to address why certain movements fail to generate results keep ending up the same way. I go into them thinking, "I wonder if there are more nuanced factors at play that I didn't realize and that it's not just leftist infighting and unrealistic purity tests again." But then I read it and the culprit is leftist infighting and unrealistic purity tests. This has happened like four times now.

The subject of climate change and how different countries respond to it does have unique problems though, like how addressing it is just a supercharged Tragedy of the Commons (countries who make no effort to curb emissions will still benefit if others do, so no one ends up wanting to go first). The "macro" portion of this book looking at the big picture honed in on how Western democracies …