Reviews and Comments

This book is full of righteous anger coated in wit and sprinkled with humorous anecdotes.

For example the famous bit about the trumpet (which I quoted earlier bookwyrm.social/user/ssweeny/quotation/3538582#anchor-3538582) starts a chapter about how a musical instrument exchange group on Facebook had to deal with a group of unruly racists.

The "Witches" in the title are, of course, feminists. If you consider yourself one or would like to this book is definitely worth a read. Probably even more so if you don't.

There was one thing that nagged at me as I was reading. This book was written in 2019. Before COVID, the 2020 election, the insurrection at the Capital. There's a lot of stuff about how Trump is terrible and enabling all sorts of evil stuff and the whole time I kept thinking to myself "sister, you have no idea..."

Definitely a fun read. Classic cyberpunk setting that just exists in the background without taking up too much attention.

My only real complaint is that the art style changes a bit too drastically a bit too often, to the point where it can be hard to track which character is doing what between pages.

The overall arc is has been done before but there are some fun twists that completely make sense in the setting but that I haven't seen to often.

Time for a bit of ridiculous fantasy to cleanse the palate.

Overall I think this book had some good points to make. Networking, finding "tribes" at work, and using language to influence that tribe to behave a certain way are useful ideas that are actionable and backed by data.

However like many books in this vein it feels as if the page count was padded with anecdotes that slowed down the pace and perhaps spaced the real lessons too far apart. I found myself having to turn back a few pages to remember what the point of a particular story was supposed to be.

Overall I'd recommend the book but it might be sufficient to read the summary at the end of each chapter.

This one was honestly tough to get through. I almost put it down several times. It felt like a tour of cyberpunk tropes as there are several factions (corporations/police, anarchists, drug lords) each trying to control a dirty and dying LA, and the main character just sort of stumbles into each one seemingly without agency and without any real stakes. About 2/3 of the way through, however, my perseverance was rewarded as some actual stakes seemed to coalesce for him, and he began to take control of his story to push through to the end.

This one was honestly tough to get through. I almost put it down several times. It felt like a tour of cyberpunk tropes as there are several factions (corporations/police, anarchists, drug lords) each trying to control a dirty and dying LA, and the main character just sort of stumbles into each one seemingly without agency and without any real stakes. About 2/3 of the way through, however, my perseverance was rewarded as some actual stakes seemed to coalesce for him, and he began to take control of his story to push through to the end.

There is some very useful advice here for how to better keep and organize bits of information, but there's also lots of filler.

Love that Murderbot!

A short story set in the Discworld universe about a boy who goes to visit his grandmother in Ankh-Morpork. He gets pooed on by a bird, and after being told it's good luck he embarks on a quest to collect every kind of poo there is.