colin finished reading Bring up the bodies by Hilary Mantel
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. …
This book rules?
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colin reviewed Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen
Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen uses nuclear weapons knowledge gleaned from declassified documents and expert …
Insulting
1 star
Honestly found this book insulting to its readers. The author loves sentence fragments and will make a point in a single sentence then pad it with half a dozen fragments from a batch of their favorite phrases. I don't think you need to work very hard to find a reasonably plausible scenario for an actual nuclear exchange, but the scenario in this book appears to be "the unnamed leader of North Korea decided to launch a decapitation strike against the USA for funsies". At one point the author has a sentence along the lines of "We don't know why NK launched this attack" -- MOTHERFUCKER YOU WROTE THE BOOK! YOU PUT THE IDEA IN THEIR HEAD!
There's random math errors that probably aren't important but are certainly confusing. There's a lot of arbitrary twists and turns to ensure the worst case outcome. Also, there's a lot of talk about EMP …
Honestly found this book insulting to its readers. The author loves sentence fragments and will make a point in a single sentence then pad it with half a dozen fragments from a batch of their favorite phrases. I don't think you need to work very hard to find a reasonably plausible scenario for an actual nuclear exchange, but the scenario in this book appears to be "the unnamed leader of North Korea decided to launch a decapitation strike against the USA for funsies". At one point the author has a sentence along the lines of "We don't know why NK launched this attack" -- MOTHERFUCKER YOU WROTE THE BOOK! YOU PUT THE IDEA IN THEIR HEAD!
There's random math errors that probably aren't important but are certainly confusing. There's a lot of arbitrary twists and turns to ensure the worst case outcome. Also, there's a lot of talk about EMP attacks in this book. It might actually be the bulk of the content here. This is particularly noteworthy because the author is largely (and directly) echoing right-wing talking points from the Newt Gingrich EMP people. We don't even know if an EMP would work at all, but in this book NK manages to get one off so successfully that it's unclear why they decided a nuke was required at all.
Editing this to mention that the President of the United States parachutes out of Marine One for some reason.
Anyway, you shouldn't waste your time with this. There's a pile of better options available to you if you'd like to be scared out of your wits about nuclear weapons. Read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, or just go watch The Day After.
colin commented on How to Blow up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm
Why resisting climate change means combatting the fossil fuel industry
The science on climate change …
Been thinking about this book a lot this past week, how it somehow threads the needle between being seemingly vital and absolutely not up to the task of actually dealing with the current situation. So frustrating.
colin reviewed Ocean of Sound by David Toop
Great
5 stars
Honestly half the time I was reading it I had almost no idea what was going on and I mean that as the highest compliment. Part stream of consciousness, part dream journal, part interviews and memoirs and history. Can't wait to read it again.
colin reviewed M : Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati
Slogged through it
3 stars
This book definitely intends to be antifascist, but by essentially making Mussolini the protagonist of the novel (at the very least, centering everything around him) it falls into the trap of trying to make him way too much of a sympathetic character. Between that and the weird use of citations at the ends of chapters that repeat something a character often just said verbatim, I found it to be a bit of a slog.
colin stopped reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who …
Couldn’t find a way into it.
colin started reading London rules by Mick Herron (Slough House, #5)
"London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one: Cover your arse. …
At some point I'm going to run out of these.
colin rated Having and Being Had: 5 stars
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss
"My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts," Eula Biss writes, "the time before I owned a washing …
colin rated Becoming a Man: 4 stars
Becoming a Man by Paul Monette
A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, "perfect Paul" earns straight A's and shines in social …
colin finished reading Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant
The true story of what happened the first time machines came for human jobs, when …
This is a really solid book but tbh it left me wondering why I didn't just read one of the books it's based on
Gravitas by Amy Berkowitz
Frank, conversational, and darkly funny, Gravitas examines the tendency of MFA programs to teach women that their lives aren’t worth …
colin rated Remains of the Day: 5 stars
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's …
colin finished reading Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place …
Umm, this book rules?
Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil
For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build …