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Came for a fun parody of the noir detective genre, got a weird incoherent pontificating mess instead.

I partially read a physical version of this book and partially listened to an audio recording of it which was probably the worst way to consume this media after I learned that it was an audio drama first that was later novelized. Consequently it was hard going back and forth because the audio version was essentially only the dialogue bits with all of the added prose present in the book form cut out. But I don't know that my overall rating would've been affected had I stuck to one medium all the way through.

This story leans on a lot of the old tropes you know from noir fiction: underworld crime bosses sending goons to rough people up, crooked cops, mysterious and sultry women with ulterior motives, etc. But it's also kind of modern day in that everyone has cellphones, and the Arab Spring and Gaddafi are directly name dropped? It felt like a story that couldn't decide what time period it wanted to be set in, and I feel like the only reason it was "brought forward" at all was to allow the protagonist (and by extension, the author) to rant against young people, liberals, and vegetarians.

The plot is barebones, and there are entirely way too many characters too keep track of or care about. Women are tripping over themselves to throw their bodies at this man for poorly fleshed out reasons, and nothing that this book is trying to accomplish lands. I really need to just start staying away from any book that even remotely attempts to be funny.

You know how sometimes you don't feel like getting into anything too engrossing or mentally taxing but instead just wanna enjoy something mindless? Military sci-fi tends to be that genre for me, specifically delivered in one of those squat mass market paperbacks. Having already read the first two books in this series, this seemed like the right time to pick through the third.

Our returning main character from the first book is retired ex-military now though, and gets roped into a civilian colony project that quickly spirals into a, "what isn't our government telling us?" mystery with a series of tense backroom discussions. Which is to say this is a more political and dramatic story than I was expecting, and the sole action scene at the climax felt a little rushed and unearned. Oddly, this also didn't feel like a blatant setup for an immediate sequel neither.

All in all it's a fine sci-fi colonization story set in a universe and with a cast of supporting characters I'm growing to enjoy but told from the perspective of a protagonist I don't really care for. This seems to be the last book in the series told from this guy's point of view however, so I'll likely continue with the next three books at some point.

A good book might reveal something about yourself that you didn't know already, but I think a good book can also reinforce something you already knew about yourself. For me, it is the fact that I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever want to go scuba diving.

This book was marketed as Horror/Thriller for some reason, but I think this sits squarely in the Wilderness Survival genre, which I've read before. Unlike The Revenant or The North Passage however, this extreme scenario didn't take place over days or weeks, but more like 90 in-fiction minutes that I honestly found quite harrowing (I'd never imagined the phrase, "palm meat" before, and I don't think I want to again).

But there's more going on than just the pivotal moment literally depicted on the (very cool) cover. Our protagonist is a bitter teenager who had a very difficult relationship with his father that jostled some very deep, specific, and uncomfortable memories of my own dad. Paternal disappointment and filial spite run deep in this story, and hoo boy that hit way closer to home than I was expecting.

Chapters are extremely short - the page count is very deceptive on this one - and are titled by how much PSI is left in the scuba tank. So the first several chapters before we even get in that water are all titled "3000 psi", but the first time that changes (chapter "2974 psi") I'm already stressing out, and Murphy's Law is essentially the secondary antagonist here.

I've seen some other reviewers complain this is just "daddy issues inside a whale", which comes across to me as someone using humor to deflect from addressing a difficult topic. I found that using what honestly is one of the most unique survival scenario I've come across in a long time as a vehicle for exploring grief within an in-fiction time limit was super novel, and executed extremely well. Gonna be thinking about this one for a while.

I did learn a lot from reading this one, which is my usual metric for rating nonfiction, but I'm also aware that a lot went clean over my head. Maybe I just didn't have enough baseline knowledge to come into this one. All the stuff with index funds and ETFs was familiar and interesting, but I wasn't at all equipped to follow the private equity half of the book. (Which I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself for that, considering private equity's whole business model is based upon secrecy and not disclosing things to the public).

The idea that index funds and private equity firms are simultaneously attacked by politicians on either end of the spectrum, but also exert too much influence on the economy despite actively trying not to draw too much attention on themselves was an interesting argument to make. And for what it's worth, I mostly bought into it; it feels like the world's most expensive tightrope balancing act is happening in the background of everyday life and we're all ignoring these titans of finance.

This is the second book I've read in this Columbia Global Reports series and I like the "history of the problem -> current/modern-day effects of the policy problem -> potential policy solutions" format. Even if I don't agree with what's rolled out at the end, I do appreciate that something is offered as a fix instead of the author just saying "we're fucked!" and throwing their hands up in defeat.

Either I'm just easily influenced and airline regulation is the latest thing I've been radicalized about, or this genuinely was a well-researched and conducted argument. Or maybe both!

This book walks through the earliest years of commercial flight (had no idea the Post Office was so involved those early days), the 40-year stretch of a regulated industry, the lead up and aftermath of deregulation in 1978, and multiple potential policy changes that can be enacted in the future to tackle the issues we're dealing with today. Nice, straightforward and concise layout that any schmuck who has zero experience learning about public policy (i.e., me) could follow.

I did learn a lot about this industry that typically goes right over my head (dodges tomato), like how pre-1978 the Civil Aeronautics Board would license out routes to private airlines such that popular routes between larger cities would turn such a profit that they would internally subsidize less-profitable routes between smaller, more rural cities. This ensured access throughout the country equally, rather than the literal "flyover country" we have today where state capitals like Cheyenne, Wyoming have to pay private airlines to service them. I also appreciated how "recent" it felt as well; as of the time I'm writing this, the book has been out for just shy of four months.

There were some questions I thought of while reading this, like how do other geographically-large countries with lots of internal domestic flights like Brazil or China approach regulation? Is the current "hub-and-spoke" model of airport routes better for the environment than a "every city has direct flights to every other city" approach? These and others were only mentioned in passing and weren't addressed enough to satisfy me, but for the length of book that this is, it was still very informative. I look forward to reading more from this books series if they're all written with this level of research and quality.

One chapter into this I knew I was going to have a difficult time reviewing this one, and now that I've finished it... I'm having a difficult time reviewing it.

At it's simplest, we have two adult cousins reconnecting after a very long time apart, with the context that one of them wronged the other in a singular event when they were both children. The instigator is kind of rudderless and looking to make amends with his cousin, who despite a rough adolescence seems to have inexplicably landed on his feet anyway. Straightforward enough.

But then we pull back to realize the story is being told by a prison inmate in a creative writing class who is desperate for the teacher's attention that he only sees once a week. So we're juggling back and forth between these two dudes dancing around the emotional landmines of their past in a literal abandoned castle, and also a guy trying to navigate a prison where he has more enemies than friends.

There's a lot of intentional ambiguity in this book, and loose supernatural events have an air about them where neither you nor the character experiencing them are really sure if it's actually happening or not. Not in a "gradual descent into madness" kind of way, but more of a flavoring of events around the central theme desiring connections with others. I do wish those brief eerie and spooky bits were more prevalent, but I respect that this wasn't that kind of book.

Not sure what kind of reader I'd recommend this to, but it definitely wasn't a simple nor predictable read.

This book is essentially a persuasive essay arguing in favor of the study of foreign languages, and specifically degree programs in interpreting and translation (not the same thing!). The first chapter had some "learning languages is good for you because it is good for you" circular logic that was initially worrying, but more interesting points come up later in the book.

A particular passage that stood out to me spoke of how strongly focused certain scientific fields have become towards solely using English as a "language of science". But that's resulted in instances where research is unintentionally being repeated because the English-speaking researchers weren't aware that their work had already been conducted and published by non-English teams. The last chapter also spoke about how native English speakers have a unique "responsibility" to basically meet foreign speakers halfway rather than just expect the world to bend to their language as the default; I found that discussion interesting.

Also just some fun tidbids thrown in throughout like studies suggesting that multilinguals are better at conflict resolution than monolinguals, and also knowing a second language can delay Alzheimer's by about 4 years. Interesting, quick little read.