2025 reads, #2. I got convinced at the beginning of this winter to read the entire oeuvre of racially aware crime author SA Cosby, by a freelance clie2025 reads, #2. I got convinced at the beginning of this winter to read the entire oeuvre of racially aware crime author SA Cosby, by a freelance client of mine who writes very similar books; see here for my review of his first novel, 2019’s My Darkest Prayer, originally published through a basement press back when this author was just starting out. Today’s book, Blacktop Wasteland from a year later, was his first to come out through a mainstream press (the Macmillan imprint Flatiron Books), and also the first one to have a huge impact with the public, becoming a finalist or winner for a dozen awards during its first year of release, and becoming the first of Cosby’s now three bestsellers.
And indeed, now that I’ve read it myself, I can see why this book exploded in popularity when it first came out, and even here in February I can predict with some certainty that it will eventually land on my “best reads of the year� roundup later this December. To begin with, although the story itself is nothing more than a typical noir, it’s an excellently done example of noir writing, a pitch-perfect tale about a car mechanic in the Deep South who has a past history of driving getaway vehicles for petty crimes, who has tried to get out of the business but ends up getting pulled back in through desperation over mounting bills, his sick elderly mother, and an estranged child whose relationship he’s trying to mend. But what really makes this story special -- and in fact has become a hallmark of all of Cosby’s books -- is that he tells this traditional noir story through the lens of our protagonist being a poor black man, and shows how the usual beats of the noir genre get much more richly complicated when you add racist Southern cops to the mix, the long legacy of black fathers who abandon their families, and how when black people get into desperate situations, even if they want to use legal means to fix their problems, often they have no other option for digging themselves back out except for the exact crime sprees that our antihero has sworn never to return to.
Put together, it all adds up to one of my favorite types of books these days, one that’s politically charged but not Woke, taking a clear-eyed look at how race informs these subjects but without the book ever wallowing in virtue signaling or Sunday school sermonizing, a novel that in good noir style features not even a single truly decent human being but that nonetheless makes us feel moved by the end for the plight of the average Southern black male, and that makes us understand how much the societal deck of cards is stacked against such men. It’s both a rip-roaring adventure story and a thought-provoking rumination on race in America; and that makes it perfect for our times, and not a coincidence at all that Cosby’s work has blown up so much in public awareness and critical fawning at this particular moment in history. It comes strongly recommended to both traditional noir fans and those looking for the best work out there when it comes to social justice issues, and I have to confess that I’m now looking highly forward to the next book in Cosby’s bibliography, 2021’s Razorblade Tears which I’ll be tackling in a few weeks. ...more
2024 reads, #70. DID NOT FINISH. Back at the start of this millennium, I was as big a fan of Jonathan Franzen as they came, a master of Late Postmoder2024 reads, #70. DID NOT FINISH. Back at the start of this millennium, I was as big a fan of Jonathan Franzen as they came, a master of Late Postmodernism who wrote one of the all-time greatest Late Postmodernist novels, 2001’s The Corrections, a churlish and pessimistic book that nonetheless engendered so much lasting goodwill that even nine years later, no less than the President of the United States was caught begging a bookstore while on vacation to please sell him an early copy of Franzen’s next novel, Freedom. (How much goodwill did it engender? So much that Franzen became the first artist in history to , and even she had him back on the show when Freedom came out.) But as I spent this week reading Franzen’s unpleasant newest novel, 2021’s Crossroads, which made such a non-existent dent in the public zeitgeist that I didn’t even bother reading it until three years later, I suddenly realized that the thing that made Franzen such an unstoppable force 25 years ago is now the exact same thing that’s made his career collapse, which is that he’s so thoroughly a product of Postmodernism that it’s impossible for him to write any other kind of story, which is a huge problem in a world where Postmodernism was replaced an entire generation ago by the cultural movement that superseded it.
Society hasn’t yet given this cultural movement a name, even though it’s almost 25 years old at this point, ever since Postmodernism died the exact moment the planes smashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001; in my own writing, I’ve been alternatively calling it “Sincereism� and “Wokeism,� although I suppose you can call it whatever you want. Whatever the case, like all artistic movements in history, it’s largely defined as a rebellion against what came before it; so while Postmodernism was all about cool irony and self-hating cruelty, Sincereism is about earnest eagerness and plainly-understood emotions being worn on one’s sleeve, a world full of happy little dancing TikTokkers that has no room anymore for mean-spirited stories about families of academic leftist intellectuals who are generally pieces of shit, and who spend most of the story’s page count being awful pricks to each other and the world at large.
That’s unfortunate for Franzen, because that’s seemingly the only kind of book he knows how to write, and 20 percent into Crossroads I realized that this is essentially a cookie-cutter copy of both The Corrections and Freedom, yet another Tolstoy ripoff about gently miserable families of middle-class liberals, full of “quirky� people who do “quirky� things for no particular reason at all related to the story being told, merely because “quirky� was hot during Postmodernism and so “all quirky all the time� shall these stories be. And while I’m not a member of the Wokes myself, certainly I too now find my patience for this kind of story dangerously thin, which is why I quit this book before even getting a quarter of the way in; and that’s because Franzen’s PoMo blueprint was eventually so popular and so pervasive that it essentially birthed an entire wing of indie-movie type at the end of the Postmodernist era. Whether or not you know it, pretty much every movie around the year 2000 that’s predicated on a quirky family full of precociously quirky people (the older or the younger the quirky character, the better), living quirky lives full of quirky moments, is essentially a direct ripoff of Franzen or one of his literary contemporaries, whether that’s Little Miss Sunshine or Napoleon Dynamite or The Squid and the Whale or Captain Fantastic or pretty much the entire career of Wes Anderson, yet another poster child for Late Postmodernism whose work isn’t holding up nearly as well here a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
Like most everyone else, I eventually grew tired of and then completely burned out on these uber-quirky stories about mean-spirited families; but it wasn’t until trying and then giving up on Crossroads this week that I realized that Franzen is the proverbial tree of life that all these movies come from, and that this thus means that I’ve become completely burned out on Franzen’s work too. It all reminds me of something I regularly come across in my hobby as a rare-book collector, which is that the start of every new cultural movement is filled with the last projects of the now elderly members of the previous movement -- for one good example, all those stuffy, barely readable final novels by the titans of Modernism that came out at the beginning of the Postmodernist era in the late 1960s, all those Thornton Wilders and Sherwood Andersons who were still cranking out their delicate character dramas well into their seventies -- which had their fans among the similarly aging academics of that previous era, and even would regularly win literary awards, but that were roundly ignored by the current generation of young people, and then completely fell into forgotten obscurity just a year or two after they came out to no fanfare and no sales. (And note that this doesn’t automatically have to be the case -- just a couple of weeks ago, in fact, I was talking about how the latest novel by Bret Easton Ellis, once just as much a poster child for Late Postmodernism as Franzen, really impressively embraces all the hallmarks of the Sincereist era in a way I didn’t think Ellis had in him.)
I’m still a fan of Late Postmodernism as now a historical moment that no longer exists, but it turns out that even I as a snotty little dyed-in-the-wool Generation Xer can now no longer stand brand-new novels written in a Late Postmodernist style; and so that leaves Crossroads out in the cold for me, to say nothing of the other two books in this proposed trilogy that’s still to come (in which we watch the current churlish, mean-spirited teenaged children in this 1970s family eventually grow up and become churlish, mean-spirited adults to an entire new generation of churlish, mean-spirited teens in the 1990s, then presumably eventually even these teens becoming the parents of yet another generation of churlish, mean-spirited teens in our own 2020s times). Just describing that wears me the fuck out, much less the concept of reading another half a million words devoted to it (for those who don’t know, Crossroads is infamously a 200,000-word novel, or in other words even longer than the first three Harry Potter novels put together), so I suspect that I’m done in my life with Franzen for good. If you too found yourself dragging your feet while reading this book, and thinking things to yourself like, “Yeah, but why does everyone have to be so freaking mean to each other?�, might I humbly suggest that perhaps you too are getting burned out on Postmodernism as well, a fact that seemingly everyone but Franzen himself seems to understand at this point....more
2024 reads, #69. A freelance client of mine, a black man who writes crime thrillers heavily informed by race, recently had a chance to professionally 2024 reads, #69. A freelance client of mine, a black man who writes crime thrillers heavily informed by race, recently had a chance to professionally interact with SA Cosby, a fellow black man who writes crime thrillers heavily informed by race; and he had so many amazing things to say about Cosby’s work that I decided to do a completist run of all four of his novels myself. As usual in these situations, I’ve decided to take them in chronological publishing order, which has me starting out with his 2019 debut My Darkest Prayer, originally published on a tiny basement press before Cosby’s career made a huge turn towards the mainstream with his next book after it, 2020’s Blacktop Wasteland. That makes this book a particularly interesting one to start with, because I think it will be fascinating to see how his books change once he moved from a situation with no budget and barely any staff to eventually the mainstream publisher Macmillan (through their imprint Flatiron Books, known for publishing a relatively small amount of titles annually but putting massive amounts of marketing support behind each).
Certainly one thing you can say is that the book is pretty atrociously edited for an author who’s gone on to be on the NYT bestseller list, with the basement press that published it seeming to have done what a lot of basement presses do in these situations, just run it once through Grammarly and then call it a day, without bothering to do any work on the manuscript’s sentence usage or paragraph structure. That leads to a book where technically all the words are spelled right but is still a frustrating reading experience, mainly because Cosby on his own seems to follow the old childhood English class rule that you always start a piece of dialogue as the beginning of its own paragraph no matter what else is going on in the story, leading to this halting and sputtering reading experience where Character A will say something, Character B will start doing something in the same paragraph, then we jump to an entire new paragraph when Character B says something while they’re doing the thing described in the previous paragraph, with Character A now doing something new themselves at the end of Character B’s paragraph, and Cosby now jumping to a new paragraph halfway through their action once again, in order to tell us what Character A said while he was doing the actions described in the previous paragraph.
That’s not a big deal, but certainly something that drove me a little crazy; and while that could’ve been made up for by a truly fascinating storyline, here in his debut Cosby gives us only a by-the-books noir tale, in which a disgraced former cop who now works at a funeral home is pulled against his will into the mystery behind who killed a corrupt evangelical preacher who was a con artist and drug dealer before “seeing the light,� and (it becomes quickly clear) didn’t exactly stop the sinning after being ordained. (Basically, every plot development you guess in advance is going to happen ends up actually happening, exactly the way you guessed it.) No, the real saving grace here, and what I clearly think made early readers fans despite the middling nature of the prose and the plot, is that Cosby has one of the most perfect ears for dialogue of any contemporary writer I’ve ever read, particularly impressive here because of not only setting the story in a small Southern town, but within the black community of that small Southern town, putting these incredibly slang-heavy phrases in the mouths of these characters that sound like he had just been hanging out at the local barbershop last week with his tape recorder on. (Here’s just one example, which I snapped with my camera when I came across it so I wouldn’t forget it: “Nah, homie, Fella ain’t no real crook, son. He a shook one. Shit, he so pussy he meows when he walk.�)
All this added together would normally get the book three and a half stars from me; but I’m happy to round up in this case here at the no-half-star Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, because that’s exactly how I feel about this book, on the excited side of “mehâ€� instead of the disappointed side. For sure I’m now excited about reading his next book, 2020’s Blacktop Wasteland, which is when he finally got a decent editor and a large marketing budget, with the huge jump in prestige and popularity those assets bring with them. (The book either won or was a finalist for almost a dozen literary awards, including being named Thriller of the Year by the Los Angeles Times.) I may sneak in an unrelated book or two before that, but I’ll absolutely be getting to that next novel soon, hopefully before the calendar year is over, so I hope you’ll keep an eye out for that writeup sometime in the next month. ...more
2024 reads, #68. Oh boy, Neal Stephenson has a new novel out! Like Bret Easton Ellis, who I was just talking about here last week, Stephenson’s one of2024 reads, #68. Oh boy, Neal Stephenson has a new novel out! Like Bret Easton Ellis, who I was just talking about here last week, Stephenson’s one of the few authors in existence I can say I’m a legitimate completist of, by which I mean I’ve read every novel he’s ever written, going all the way back to 1984’s The Big U and counting forward another fourteen titles. In my twenties and thirties, I was absolutely blown away by his far-out-there �90s cyberpunk tales and eventually his first historical-fiction saga, the �40/�90s dual story known as Cryptonomicon; and while he’s had better ones and worser ones since then, I’ve at least been equally blown away by the truly special tiles from the �00s and �10s, such as the three-thousand-year alt-history saga Anathem (buck for buck the best book of his career, as far as I’m concerned), or 2011’s truly insane contemporary comedy nerd thriller Reamde, which I simultaneously want to see made into a Netflix series and want Netflix to keep its dirty paws off of.
But what famously started happening in the late 2010s -- and I say “famousâ€� as in it’s still far and away the most liked review I’ve ever done at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, out of the several thousand I’ve now written over the last 18 years -- is that I ended up passionately disliking 2019’s super ambitious swing-and-a-miss Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell, so much so that it made me question whether I had been wrong with all those other books so many years ago, then in 2021 equally hated the next book after that, the Michael Crichton ripoff Termination Shock. So it’s with great relief that I say we’re back on safe ground again with Stephenson’s brand-new one, entitled Polostan but part of a trilogy that will eventually be known as Bomb Light (and I suspect destined to eventually be sold in a single thousand-page volume under this name, in that this first volume of the series is only 300 pages).
It’s another historical thriller, which Stephenson does particularly well, in this case focusing in on a young woman who spends her childhood to her forties in the years between the Soviet takeover of Russia in the 1920s and the end of World War Two (coming in another volume a long, long time from now), which presumably by the series� name will eventually tell us the long and nerdy tale of how the first atomic weapons came to be. She’d fit right in at the cyberspace hangouts from Stephenson’s early sci-fi novels -- over six feet, with bright blonde hair and striking looks, bilingual in both English and Russian, raised by a mother who hung out with horse thieves in the wilds of Montana, and a dad who was a Rooseveltian radical liberal who got convinced to move to the newly named Soviet Union right after the revolution.
This gives us lots and lots and lots of opportunities for very unique, sometimes zany, always potential-loaded scenes in the book, from Dawn/Aurora (based on which country she’s in) having such notorious run-ins as sharing an intimate dance with a middle-aged George Patton a full ten years before the war, or getting broken out of a small-town jail by a Bonnie-and-Clyde-type gang. Aurora has her eyes on everything she can see, and what’s lucky for her (and for us) is that she gets to go through a virtual Forrest Gump’s life of amazing places to have uncannily been during her youth, from the massive Leningrad performance art piece The Storming of the Winter Palace to the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago (shoutout to the scene in this novel set just down the street from where I live in real life!), and eventually the moment some Soviet scientists decided they wanted to get up above Earth’s atmosphere to find out what the origin of mysterious X-rays are, now in hindsight considered Step 1 of our eventual invention of nuclear weapons twelve years later. She’s witness to it all, because Aurora loves her nerds, just as much as she loves riding horses and robbing banks and toting a machine gun around in a literal violin case.
In fact, there’s really only one big problem here, but it’s an extra-big one, which is that it’s crystal-clear that this is only the first act of a much bigger story to come. I don’t play that game -- I don’t go to the trouble of reading an entire book just to find out that the whole thing was the first act to an eventual payout that may only come in years, may never come at all, and will absolutely cost me more money. I love literary series as much as the next guy, but all volumes in all of them are required to work as standalone tales too (they should all be shooting for the original 1977 Star Wars as far as getting the balance right); and Polostan doesn’t pass the Star Wars Test, but is instead 300 pages where at the end we’re only now entering the Millennium Falcon to leave Tatooine and go rescue Princess Leia. It’s a great read, but ultimately a disappointing one as long as we don’t have a really good payoff at the end; so if each of these volumes are going to be like this, perhaps do yourself a favor and just wait until they’re all finally out and available as a single volume, which obviously this one will eventually be, since the last 10 out of the 14 novels of his career have all been in the thousand-page range. That would normally get it three and a half stars from me, but here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ where half-stars aren’t allowed, I’ll go ahead and happily round up in this case, because I’m glad to see Stephenson back in full form here, writing the kind of blend of heady conceptual ideas combined with intense action sequences and black humor that so define his work at its best. It comes warmly recommended, just...you know, you might want to wait another two years before reading any of them, then read all of them at once....more
2024 reads, #67. It occurred to me last week when I picked up Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published about a year and a half ago but 2024 reads, #67. It occurred to me last week when I picked up Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published about a year and a half ago but that I’m just now getting to, that he’s one of the few authors out there I’m a legitimate completist of, meaning I’ve read literally every novel he’s ever written. Technically I suppose that should make him appear in my Great Completist Challenge I regularly add to here at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, about two dozen writers strong at this point; the problem, though, is that I’ve read very few of Ellis’s novels since joining Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ way back in 2006, so I didn’t have a reason or an outlet for writing reviews of any of those older ones.
My love for Ellis in fact goes all the way back to my freshman year in college, September 1986, the exact same time the paperback version of Less Than Zero was published for the first time, which I picked up on a lark* and was immediately bowled over by. And with Ellis being only five years older than me (he famously started writing Less Than Zero in high school, and got it published by a major press as an undergraduate, because of growing up rich in Los Angeles and so already having footholds in the industry), I deeply connected with his themes of Generation X undergraduate alienation that lay at the heart of his writing, and especially two years later when he published the much more college-focused The Rules of Attraction, when I was now a junior in college myself and had finally had some of the “do too many drugs on a Saturday night, sleep with a stranger, avoid them in the dorm cafeteria Sunday morning� drama fueling that book.
*I’ve told this story several times now, but my freshman year in college, I bought every single contemporary novel chosen as a staff recommendation at my university’s bookstore that school year, and every album chosen as a staff recommendation at the hipster Streetside Records, which inundated me with great legitimate indie projects for the first time in my life, all at once at eighteen.
In fact, it’s fair to say that Ellis eventually became known precisely for this cool ironic Generation X blase attitude about the world, in fact became somewhat of a spokesperson for it, especially when he published the notorious high point/low point of this Tarantino-esque ironic cool world-weariness, 1991’s American Psycho -- a book that disgusted a lot of people, got initially dropped by its first publisher under pressure from moral crusaders, eventually had its reputation changed by Mary Harron’s sly film adaptation that recasts it as a black comedy about �80s white-male Reagan excess, but was never really meant by Ellis to be a comedy, but rather a pinnacle of the cold nihilism Generation X had become known for by this point.
So all these years later, that’s what makes The Shards so remarkable for long-time readers like me, even though it’s something that might miss more casual or newer readers of his (we’ll see -- I’m going to start reading everyone else’s reviews right after I post mine); for in his late fifties, Ellis has finally and fully embraced the earnestness and sometimes weepy plain emotions that are now a hallmark of the artistic movement going on right now, the one that started replacing Postmodernism in the early �00s (let’s call its start September 11th, and the date it was fully the new force in the arts Obama’s first election in 2008), which you might call Sincereism for lack of a better cultural term. (Susan Sontag, where are you when we need you?) That’s right, Bret Easton Ellis shows sincere emotions in this novel, and the results are in fact quite good indeed, as if you took a novel like Less Than Zero and gave it to someone now to write a contemporary Woke version of, but still set in 1981.
That’s the first thing to know here, that it’s yet another one of those slippery novels that have peppered Ellis’s career, where he himself seems to appear in the novel as his true self, but with weird and intense fictional genre things going on in the story too, like vampires or werewolves or serial killers or whatnot. Namely, it’s set in Ellis’s senior year of high school, in the tony areas of 1981 Los Angeles, but framed in the prologue as if real-life 59-year-old Ellis here in the 2020s is thinking back on those days, both telling us the story and analyzing the events from the perspective of the much older, sadder and wiser late-middle-ager he now is. Given that the similarly autobiographical Less Than Zero is set only one year later, during the Christmas break of the Ellis stand-in character’s freshman year of college (and actually written back when the events happened), this is essentially a changed, softer Ellis looking back on roughly the same events covered in his first novel, but now with a much different eye and both a compassion and damnation for these stupid little fucked-up kids he and all his friends were that’s lacking in the earlier novel (indeed, what made the earlier novel famous to begin with).
That’s mostly what this novel is about, and I encourage fellow readers to enjoy it at its fullest by essentially accepting all the non-fantastical stuff as probably true, because it probably is, and I personally think that this is why Ellis probably wrote this novel at this point in his life, because he wanted to look back on a rather tumultuous period of his life with clear eyes and a willingness to call out his own bad behavior. Namely, what a huge portion of this novel is about (and what you could argue even the entire novel is about, even the fantastical part, but more on this in a bit) is Ellis’s burgeoning gay sexual identity in his late teen years when hitting the peak of puberty, how he used a lot of subterfuge to hide it in a pre-queer �80s, how he deliberately hid it from some of his best friends and ended up causing a lot of hurt and damage, and especially how he hid it from the girlfriend he had at the time, even while physically exploring more and more with the various boys and men in his life who he got “the vibe� from.
In this, the issue of what “in the closet� exactly meant in the �80s, versus who was willing to have a dick in their mouth or ass, is one of the more complex and therefore interesting parts of this novel, in that Ellis describes a whole series of situations he was in back then (if, that is, you accept that most of what he’s writing about here is based on true stories, of course) -- such as this weed-dealing loner at his high school, for example, essentially living by himself in the guesthouse of his parents� estate, who Ellis is pretty sure isn’t actually gay, but is just a horny teen boy who will take any sloppy stoned sex that falls into his lap that he can get. Or the friend slowly turned lover who in a post-closet world Ellis probably could’ve had a very nice romantic relationship with, but who instead has a tension-filled and ultimately traumatic time with since they were still living in a world that required them to be in the closet. Or the male best friend who he’s had since childhood, but during puberty he developed a sexual crush on, which turned into a messy threeway Freudian fantasy situation in his head when the guy started dating one of his female childhood friends, one he’s always been close to and who have asked each other over the years why they’ve never tried dating, anyway.
It’s the ongoing domestic dramas of the people I just described that takes up 80 percent of this novel (or maybe I’ll say 80 percent of why you should read this novel), and the complex pushes and pulls they all go through as they’re thrown to and fro by hormones, the stress of pre-adulthood, and unwise parental decisions to let them all have easy access to liquor and cocaine. That stuff is very interesting; and while I’ll let the ending remain spoiler-free, I’ll say that it ends in tragedy, and that it’s thoroughly Ellis’s (the character’s) stupid fucking behavior that causes it, which is perhaps the most interesting thing of all. This feels like Ellis really getting a lot off his chest forty years after a bunch of traumatic things happened in real life when he was a teen, especially when he makes it clear in this book that the main reason he ran off to Bennington College all the way across the country was precisely to get away from all these people back in LA he’d deeply hurt, and that the reason Less Than Zero is about the awkward, tension-filled high-school relationships of a college freshman, as he returns to LA for Christmas break, is that this was what his freshman year of college actually was like, including losing the friendship for good of almost everyone involved.
Oh yeah, and there’s a serial killer. Did I not mention that? Because of course there is -- this wouldn’t be an Ellis novel without the inclusion of a horror-film staple! Usually, though, these characters are sort of complexly and obliquely woven in to the “real� universe of Ellis’s novels; but here, though, he makes it extremely clear that we’re supposed to see the newly arrived transfer student Robert Mallory as a symbol and not a legitimate part of the story, not the least reason of which is that he has Robert literally say directly to Bret (the character) during an early tense conversation, “Everything bad you see in me, you see in yourself.� Although high-school Bret strongly suspects Robert as the secret identity of a “Zodiac Killer�-type murderer on the loose in LA at the time, his friends (all of them growing closer and closer to Robert themselves, including his childhood female friend starting an affair with him) think that it’s Bret who’s actually thinking crazy.
And indeed, as the book continues, this becomes more and more of a serious possibility; and in this many will see shades of Ellis’s 1998 conceptual epic Glamorama (which the author has stated before is his personal favorite of his career), from the mysterious beige van that starts following Bret to the freakish encounters he starts having with a Manson Family-type cult in the area, the narrator suddenly turning unreliable with no notice, the difficulty he has understanding anymore what actions he is doing versus him watching one of the other characters do it, starting to obsessively list celebrities at a party, so many and so famous that it can’t possibly be true, etc. But unlike the sorta surreal saga he meant Glamorama as, it’s clear (at least to me) that here Ellis means for Robert to be much more metaphorical, basically the Imp of the Perverse when it comes to the young, stupid teenaged Ellis’s closeted gay status; that is, he’s the external manifestation of all the damage Ellis psychically does to a lot of people around him, by having sex with strange men under strange circumstances while also trying to live a publicly straight life that involves the intimacy and trust of a lot of people.
I think this is a very valid way of interpreting this book (and again, I’ll be interested in seeing what other reviewers have to say), that the “serial killer� here is Ellis’s own real-life inability to come out of the closet in these years, throwing himself into a series of stupid sexual opportunities simply because he could and ending up damaging the lives of a whole circle of people around him. All the people who get injured and/or die in this book because of the serial killer, after all, are the same ones who get deeply hurt by Ellis’s behavior as a closeted gay man; that’s a hard thing to misinterpret, as far as I’m concerned. And hey, I’m not coming out of left field here; Ellis has been talking in the last year and a half during interviews and on his podcast about how it’s only now, in his late fifties and after publishing this book, that he feels that he can really come out publicly as fully just a gay man now, versus the rest of his adult life when he’s been pretending to be bisexual (but being very loud about it, and especially the gay parts, because this too fit into this Tarantino-esque “white males behaving badly� paradigm of �90s Gen X arts). He wouldn’t be saying that if he hadn’t worked through something while writing this book (which he began during the pandemic, and originally released as chapters of an audiobook performed himself for his podcast), so I feel like this is all a fair way to interpret this novel, as Ellis really coming to terms with his sexuality for the first time by going through this trial by fire where he had to acknowledge and then forgive himself for a lot of youthful transgressions (which, if we assume to be true, legitimately are pretty horrific in some cases, making it easy to see why Ellis chose a serial killer as his “id monster� here).
That’s a welcome surprise -- one of the architects of the White Male Postmodernist Generation-X Tarantino 1990s Arts Patriarchy, now embracing sincere emotions and Complex Feels for the first time in his career, and turning in an incredibly insightful, entertaining, and sometimes legitimately chilling story because of it, one that superbly examines the infinite drama that comes with being teenage and gay in a setting where they can’t be public about it. It comes strongly recommended to one and all for these reasons, and I can absolutely say that it will be making my annual “Best Reads of the Year� list coming in another couple of months....more
2024 reads, #65. DID NOT FINISH. I have to admit, I have a certain amount of perverse admiration for Johan Harstad, for daring to write a naked ripoff2024 reads, #65. DID NOT FINISH. I have to admit, I have a certain amount of perverse admiration for Johan Harstad, for daring to write a naked ripoff of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (or at least a ripoff of its Postmodernist conceit that “the footnotes actually ARE the novel!â€�), 30 years after the original and 25 years after the death of Postmodernism (which I considered to have been murdered on 9/11, at the same time as the World Trade Center explosions), a showoffy academic parlor trick that was just barely tolerated even during its popular height and that certainly no one will put up with now. That said, for obvious reasons I didn’t actually end up reading very much of this, once it arrived from the Chicago Public Library and I realized its snotty MFA nature for the first time, nor can I recommend it to anyone besides the most hardcore Pomo hangers-on out there, tightly gripping their back issues of ²Ñ³¦³§·É±ð±ð²Ô±ð²â’s and sipping on their PBR in a can while loudly insisting to anyone who will listen that irony isn’t dead, of course irony will never be dead as long as the world still has postgrad students. Buyer beware!...more
2024 reads, #63. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically 2024 reads, #63. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically proper for me to do a full public review of it. To be honest, I'm mostly listing it here merely so that it will count towards my total number of books read at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ in 2024, so that in the future it won't look like I was lazy this particular year. All the books I read as part of literary contests this year were great, not a single clunker in the bunch, so I recommend them all! ...more
2024 reads, #62. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically 2024 reads, #62. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically proper for me to do a full public review of it. To be honest, I'm mostly listing it here merely so that it will count towards my total number of books read at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ in 2024, so that in the future it won't look like I was lazy this particular year. All the books I read as part of literary contests this year were great, not a single clunker in the bunch, so I recommend them all! ...more
2024 reads, #61. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically 2024 reads, #61. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically proper for me to do a full public review of it. To be honest, I'm mostly listing it here merely so that it will count towards my total number of books read at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ in 2024, so that in the future it won't look like I was lazy this particular year. All the books I read as part of literary contests this year were great, not a single clunker in the bunch, so I recommend them all! ...more
2024 reads, #60. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically 2024 reads, #60. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically proper for me to do a full public review of it. To be honest, I'm mostly listing it here merely so that it will count towards my total number of books read at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ in 2024, so that in the future it won't look like I was lazy this particular year. All the books I read as part of literary contests this year were great, not a single clunker in the bunch, so I recommend them all! ...more
2024 reads, #59. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically 2024 reads, #59. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically proper for me to do a full public review of it. To be honest, I'm mostly listing it here merely so that it will count towards my total number of books read at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ in 2024, so that in the future it won't look like I was lazy this particular year. All the books I read as part of literary contests this year were great, not a single clunker in the bunch, so I recommend them all! ...more
2024 reads, #58. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically 2024 reads, #58. This is one of the books I judged for a romance literary contest this year, and so as such, I feel it probably wouldn't be ethically proper for me to do a full public review of it. To be honest, I'm mostly listing it here merely so that it will count towards my total number of books read at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ in 2024, so that in the future it won't look like I was lazy this particular year. All the books I read as part of literary contests this year were great, not a single clunker in the bunch, so I recommend them all! ...more
2024 reads, #54. I got really behind on my summer reading this year, the usual “beach and airport� reads that also often cross over into my Great Completist Challenge, which happened because of volunteering this year to be a judge in a bunch of romance literary awards (shoutout to all my fellow members of the Romance Writers of America); so here as September winds down, I’m trying to cram in a few more of these summer reads, before I switch over to the cold weather and taking on thicker and/or more intellectual books. (Coming up this autumn, winter and early spring: Gene Wolfe’s “Urth� novels, some early Cormac McCarthy and the newest Jonathan Franzen, a deep dive into Generation X slipstream surrealist David Mitchell, and my first-ever read of the 900-page Gone with the Wind, among others.)
And oh, how could I let a summer go by without paying a visit again to our old friend Jack Reacher? Or should I say, REEEAAAACCCHHHEERRRR!!!!! The most American American who’s ever Americaned America, ironically the creation of British intellectual James Grant (who writes under the name Lee Child), Reacher is a former career Army military criminal investigator who eventually aged out, and has decided to take some time post-Army simply wandering the backlanes of America, famously carrying nothing with him (not even a wallet or ID) except a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. He’s never looking for trouble, but trouble always seems to find him; and after a first few books written when Child still lived in the UK that are cartoonishly silly in the way Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is, the author finally moved to the US himself in the late 1990s and started cranking out much more believable, much more tightly plotted thrillers, revealing the greater Reacher mythos (Reacherverse?) and giving him a chance to interact more with people he knows from his past, and (gasp) actually spending some time in huge cities wearing designer suits.
At least he does here, in what I suspect will be the first in a whole sub-series of “caper� stories set within this unending catalog of Reacher novels that now exist (29 now and new ones still coming out once a year, while I’m only on book #6), when our hero gets contacted by his dead brother’s former fiance at the Secret Service where the two met, stating that she’s recently been assigned to head the security team for the just-elected new Vice President Elect, and that she wants to hire Reacher based on his brother’s old recommendation to see if he can break her security over the next few weeks and actually come within assassination distance from the VP while armed. She says it’s just customary procedure, but we readers already know the truth -- there’s a legitimate threat to the new VP out there, who can pull off almost magical things like hand-delivering a letter to the office of the Secret Service’s main director in the middle of the night without any security cameras seeing him.
That leads to a kind of cat-and-mouse plot we haven’t seen in a Reacher book before, but is a true delight, as our former military investigator and one of his old compatriots he calls in (Frances Neagley, the character used so effectively in this year’s season 2 of the television adaptation as well) spend the book trying to outguess who this unknown threat is or what they might do next, even as they negotiate with a big government agency like the Secret Service over what they can and cannot officially do to catch the bad guy (this is Jack Reacher, don’t forget, THE MOST AMERICAN AMERICAN WHO’S EVER AMERICAED AMERICA). Weave in a genuinely impressive procedural plotline, add action scenes galore, and present it all while delicately balancing on that fine wire where your audience can’t tell if you’re being earnestly clueless or if you’re in on the joke, and you’ve got yourself a real corker of a read for those collective six hours next Sunday you’ll be spending at the airport, on a plane, or in an Uber, just trying to get the fuck home, why can’t I get the fuck home.
I unapologetically read these kinds of genre thrillers as part of my official summer reading, honoring ten-year-old Jason who used to load up with the kid versions of beach and airport reads for his public library’s annual summer reading program; and the reason Reacher has become so ubiquitous in the world of genre thrillers is because the books are very well-done. You know, for what they are. And after a stumbling start that almost landed Child in Neil Breen territory for good. And just as I’m about to start six months of heavier and “more worthy� reads, so too do I legitimately have time in my life for easier and more entertaining reads, as long as I’m sticking with the best those genres have to offer, no matter what genre we’re talking about. All of these Reacher books should be read in that spirit, that it’s easy to find fault in them if that’s specifically what you’re looking to do, but are actually quite great little actioners if you’re willing to cut the book a little slack because You Want To Believe. Both this novel and the two before come recommended in this spirit (although like I said, you should skip the first two books in the series, when Child was still getting his feet wet as an author); and of course I’ll see you again around Christmas for my annual winter Reacher read, next time being 2003’s Persuader.
Lee Child "Jack Reacher" books being reviewed for this series: Killing Floor (1997) | Die Trying (1998) | Tripwire (1999) | Running Blind (2000) | Echo Burning (2001) | Without Fail (2002) | Persuader (2003) | The Enemy (2004) | One Shot (2005) | The Hard Way (2006) | Bad Luck and Trouble (2007) | Nothing to Lose (2008) | Gone Tomorrow (2009) | 61 Hours (2010) | Worth Dying For (2010) | The Affair (2011) | A Wanted Man (2012) | Never Go Back (2013) | Personal (2014) | Make Me (2015) | Night School (2016) | The Midnight Line (2017) | Past Tense (2018) | Blue Moon (2019) | The Sentinel (2020) | Better Off Dead (2021) | No Plan B (2022) | The Secret (2023) | In Too Deep (2024) ...more
2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for t2024 reads, #57. DID NOT FINISH. The last time Sally Rooney had a new novel out, I used that as an excuse to finally read all three of her books for the first time right in a row, so that I could get caught up on why she’s such the big Indie Lit Brooklyn NPR It Girl these days; and while I only loved the first book but disliked the other two, I did vow that I would at least continue to read her next one as well, because I liked the first book so much that I’ve been willing to cut her a lot of slack. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t even make it all the way through that next one now that it’s finally upon us, 2024’s Intermezzo which was just released a week or two before I’m originally posting this, so my willingness to check out any of her new work in the future is now starting to drop precipitously low.
I suppose it will be satisfying to those who are looking exactly for this kind of book, but I gotta admit that it’s just not my cup of tea -- rambling, precious domestic dramas about the human condition where almost nothing of note actually happens, in which middle-class intellectuals are gently miserable mostly from their own deliberate behavior, written in an overly pretentious style full of incomplete sentences and no quotation marks around dialogue, exactly like the MFAer both she and the most fervent of her fanbase are. I got through the first ten percent, but found it so tedious that I then did my usual thing in that situation and skipped straight to the last ten percent, to see if there’s anything there so intriguing that it will convince me to change my mind and go back and read the full thing; but there wasn’t. (A little tip: If you read the first ten percent of a book and then skip straight to the last ten percent and you can still make complete, perfect sense out of what’s going on, that’s a book whose inner 80 percent is not worth your time.)
So that’s it, Rooney! I got 136 ebooks currently on my Kindle Oasis, so I don’t got time to hang in there with a book I immediately grew tedious of right from the start (ugh, so many incomplete sentences masquerading as “personal style,� right from the very first page), so it’s quickly on to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing beginning tomorrow! Sorry, authors of the world, but that’s just the way it is! ...more
2024 reads, #55. Read on a whim, simply because it was available from the Chicago Public Library. Seems solid enough, although admittedly I didn’t try2024 reads, #55. Read on a whim, simply because it was available from the Chicago Public Library. Seems solid enough, although admittedly I didn’t try actually making any of the recipes here. Also, if you’re feeling intimidated by the potential amount of labor here, be aware that for many of these recipes such as “mint soap,� the instructions are “combine mint leaves with soap,� so there are lots and lots of beginner-friendly projects to be found here. ...more
2024 reads, #52 and 53. I’m behind on my attempt to read all 134 titles of the Star Trek “Relaunch� novel series, in which for twenty years (2001 to 22024 reads, #52 and 53. I’m behind on my attempt to read all 134 titles of the Star Trek “Relaunch� novel series, in which for twenty years (2001 to 2021) Paramount gave Simon & Schuster permission to create an entirely new persistent serial universe for the Roddenberry-era Star Trek shows that supposedly starts the day after the Deep Space Nine television show ends, one in which major characters are allowed to grow, change and die, when usually these kinds of franchise novels are all supposed to be standalone tales so that someone can just find a random one at a yard sale and not have to read twenty novels before it just to understand what’s going on. That’s generally been fantastic for someone like me, who was a big fan of the Roddenberry-era shows but can’t stand any of the 21st-century ones, and who turned to these novels in the first place in order to get more stories from these characters and situations who I miss and wished I could spend time with again. But after 14 novels so far that I’ve found anywhere from okay to great, I’ve finally come across one for the first time that wasn’t just mediocre but outright terrible, the two-volume super story The Left Hand of Destiny by JG Hertzler and Jeffrey Lang.
The main problem here is with the first book of the two, a 300-page story whose events last only over a single 24-hour period, and whose entire plot can be summed up with the single sentence, “OH EM EFF GEE, KLINGON COUP ON QO’NOS!!!!!!!!!!1!!!� That essentially makes the entire first book nothing but a 300-page action scene; and as I’ve said plenty of times in the past, the one element of genre thrillers I find most tedious over everything else is when an action scene is written out as literary prose, which from a plot and character standpoint (the main two things about literature I care about) can be entirely summed up with, “The battle began, then 300 pages later the battle finished.� And while volume 2 is a bit better than this -- at least it unfolds over several days this time, and involves other characters besides just a bunch of Klingons all trying to murder each other -- it’s not much better, making this a 600-page exercise in intolerable tedium that almost broke me.
I suspect that a lot of the problems here boil down to the fact that the books� co-author was JG Hertzler, the actor who actually played the Klingon named Martok who’s the hero of these two volumes; and stunt-hiring like this rarely goes well, in that most actors wouldn’t be able to write their way out of a paper bag, so I suspect some of the more groan-inducing moments of these books come directly from Hertzler picking scene ideas based on how badass an image of Martok it might produce in the mind’s eye (“OH EM EFF GEE, A POSSE OF KLINGONS ON SPACE HORSES!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!�). The problems are just compounded, then, when you add the other co-author here, Jeffrey Lang, who here suffers very, very badly from what I like to call “Joss Whedon Syndrome,� which is when your characters talk and behave in such an intolerably twee and cutesy way that you almost can’t get through the book because of all the vomiting you’re doing from your stomach rebelling against all the sugary treacle that author is trying to cram down your throat. (Then again, these books were originally published in 2003, right at the height of Whedonmania -- Buffy was just ending that year, Firefly just starting, Angel in the middle of its run -- so I suppose it’s only natural that a bunch of other genre writers would adopt the same winking, TikTokky style of prose in these years.)
That creates double problems that combine powerfully to make these books much bigger stinkers than either of these problems on their own -- not only is barely any story actually being told here (“I’m the rightful ruler of Qo’noS!� PEW! PEW! PEW! “No, I’M the rightful ruler of Qo’noS!� PEW! PEW! PEW!), but the little bit of story that is being told is being told terribly, all cheesy one-liners and adults talking like children, hammy stereotypes belting their lines out to the back row, one bazillion references to “Today is a good day to die!,� and a whole lot of other literary crimes against humanity. The irony is that almost nothing happens here that one needs to know in order to keep the events of the larger “Relaunch� universe straight in one’s head ((view spoiler)[the entire situation essentially resets itself by the end of these 600 pages, with the would-be usurpers chased off and Martok back in charge of everything again (hide spoiler)]); so unless you’re a particular fan of 600 pages of PEW! PEW! PEW!, let me assure you that you can skip straight over these and go directly on to the next book in the series.
And speaking of that, my next read will be an interesting one, because I’ll be veering off from the main line of Deep Space Nine novels with the next volume; for it was right in these years that the related Star Trek show Voyager ended its own TV run, and the executives at Simon & Schuster (mostly Marco Palmieri, the main puppetmaster of this entire 134-book run, who went on afterwards to become a senior editor at Tor) decided at that point to enfold the USS Voyager’s crew into this main “Relaunch� universe as well, and start writing adventures for them that tie into and affect the things going on with both the DS9 characters and our buddies on the USS Enterprise. I was originally only going to read the DS9 books, but I learned the hard way that lots of things happen in these other books that affect the events in the DS9 novels; so at that point I spent an exasperating eight-hour day online one day finally tracking down the titles of every single one of these 134 Relaunch books and the exact month and year each was published (), and will now be reading all the rest of them in chronological order by their publishing date, no matter which corner of the Star Trek universe each are set in. That makes my next read the first of the Voyager Relaunch novels, 2003’s Homecoming by Christie Golden; and since I’m behind on these Relaunch novels, I’ll be getting to this one sooner rather than later. As always, I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one. ...more
2024 reads, #52 and 53. I’m behind on my attempt to read all 134 titles of the Star Trek “Relaunch� novel series, in which for twenty years (2001 to 22024 reads, #52 and 53. I’m behind on my attempt to read all 134 titles of the Star Trek “Relaunch� novel series, in which for twenty years (2001 to 2021) Paramount gave Simon & Schuster permission to create an entirely new persistent serial universe for the Roddenberry-era Star Trek shows that supposedly starts the day after the Deep Space Nine television show ends, one in which major characters are allowed to grow, change and die, when usually these kinds of franchise novels are all supposed to be standalone tales so that someone can just find a random one at a yard sale and not have to read twenty novels before it just to understand what’s going on. That’s generally been fantastic for someone like me, who was a big fan of the Roddenberry-era shows but can’t stand any of the 21st-century ones, and who turned to these novels in the first place in order to get more stories from these characters and situations who I miss and wished I could spend time with again. But after 14 novels so far that I’ve found anywhere from okay to great, I’ve finally come across one for the first time that wasn’t just mediocre but outright terrible, the two-volume super story The Left Hand of Destiny by JG Hertzler and Jeffrey Lang.
The main problem here is with the first book of the two, a 300-page story whose events last only over a single 24-hour period, and whose entire plot can be summed up with the single sentence, “OH EM EFF GEE, KLINGON COUP ON QO’NOS!!!!!!!!!!1!!!� That essentially makes the entire first book nothing but a 300-page action scene; and as I’ve said plenty of times in the past, the one element of genre thrillers I find most tedious over everything else is when an action scene is written out as literary prose, which from a plot and character standpoint (the main two things about literature I care about) can be entirely summed up with, “The battle began, then 300 pages later the battle finished.� And while volume 2 is a bit better than this -- at least it unfolds over several days this time, and involves other characters besides just a bunch of Klingons all trying to murder each other -- it’s not much better, making this a 600-page exercise in intolerable tedium that almost broke me.
I suspect that a lot of the problems here boil down to the fact that the books� co-author was JG Hertzler, the actor who actually played the Klingon named Martok who’s the hero of these two volumes; and stunt-hiring like this rarely goes well, in that most actors wouldn’t be able to write their way out of a paper bag, so I suspect some of the more groan-inducing moments of these books come directly from Hertzler picking scene ideas based on how badass an image of Martok it might produce in the mind’s eye (“OH EM EFF GEE, A POSSE OF KLINGONS ON SPACE HORSES!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!�). The problems are just compounded, then, when you add the other co-author here, Jeffrey Lang, who here suffers very, very badly from what I like to call “Joss Whedon Syndrome,� which is when your characters talk and behave in such an intolerably twee and cutesy way that you almost can’t get through the book because of all the vomiting you’re doing from your stomach rebelling against all the sugary treacle that author is trying to cram down your throat. (Then again, these books were originally published in 2003, right at the height of Whedonmania -- Buffy was just ending that year, Firefly just starting, Angel in the middle of its run -- so I suppose it’s only natural that a bunch of other genre writers would adopt the same winking, TikTokky style of prose in these years.)
That creates double problems that combine powerfully to make these books much bigger stinkers than either of these problems on their own -- not only is barely any story actually being told here (“I’m the rightful ruler of Qo’noS!� PEW! PEW! PEW! “No, I’M the rightful ruler of Qo’noS!� PEW! PEW! PEW!), but the little bit of story that is being told is being told terribly, all cheesy one-liners and adults talking like children, hammy stereotypes belting their lines out to the back row, one bazillion references to “Today is a good day to die!,� and a whole lot of other literary crimes against humanity. The irony is that almost nothing happens here that one needs to know in order to keep the events of the larger “Relaunch� universe straight in one’s head ((view spoiler)[the entire situation essentially resets itself by the end of these 600 pages, with the would-be usurpers chased off and Martok back in charge of everything again (hide spoiler)]); so unless you’re a particular fan of 600 pages of PEW! PEW! PEW!, let me assure you that you can skip straight over these and go directly on to the next book in the series.
And speaking of that, my next read will be an interesting one, because I’ll be veering off from the main line of Deep Space Nine novels with the next volume; for it was right in these years that the related Star Trek show Voyager ended its own TV run, and the executives at Simon & Schuster (mostly Marco Palmieri, the main puppetmaster of this entire 134-book run, who went on afterwards to become a senior editor at Tor) decided at that point to enfold the USS Voyager’s crew into this main “Relaunch� universe as well, and start writing adventures for them that tie into and affect the things going on with both the DS9 characters and our buddies on the USS Enterprise. I was originally only going to read the DS9 books, but I learned the hard way that lots of things happen in these other books that affect the events in the DS9 novels; so at that point I spent an exasperating eight-hour day online one day finally tracking down the titles of every single one of these 134 Relaunch books and the exact month and year each was published (), and will now be reading all the rest of them in chronological order by their publishing date, no matter which corner of the Star Trek universe each are set in. That makes my next read the first of the Voyager Relaunch novels, 2003’s Homecoming by Christie Golden; and since I’m behind on these Relaunch novels, I’ll be getting to this one sooner rather than later. As always, I hope you’ll have a chance to join me here again for that one. ...more
2024 reads, #50. As always with books like these, I have an important ethical disclosure to make here at the start of my write-up, which is that Lucie2024 reads, #50. As always with books like these, I have an important ethical disclosure to make here at the start of my write-up, which is that Lucie Klaassen is one of my freelance clients and that I was actually the editor of this book, so my opinion here is far from “objective� and you should take that into consideration when reading my thoughts. That said, I can honestly say that I really enjoyed this book just as a simple reader, despite the fact that I’ve never actually interacted with a horse even once in my entire life. That’s because of the fascinating theory that Klaassen puts forth here, that highly intelligent horses are essentially like the much better known cats and dogs, in that they have individual personalities, can profoundly sense when the humans around them are happy, sad or angry, and respond to training much better when they can form a profound emotional attachment to the person training them, which you can essentially facilitate through many of the theories we currently have for human mindfulness.
Her guide here to the subject is both a fascinating and a practical one, leading you step by step through the process of connecting with your horse, making sure they’re in the best emotional and mental state possible through external cues like how high or low they’re hanging their heads, what angle their ears are at, and the kinds of noises they’re making as you’re going through the training. Essentially she’s calling for the end of the old mindset behind horse training -- that is, that the horse’s rider is the whip-wielding “master� over that animal, and that your main job is to teach the beast “who’s boss� -- and her results speak for themselves, including through calmness and empathy that became a huge viral hit at Instagram several years ago. I can’t personally attest to the accuracy of the training methods, since I’ve never trained a horse myself; but I can tell you that this was an extremely interesting read even not being a horse person, which makes me suspect that actual horse people will find it mesmerizing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit. ...more
2024 reads, #39. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #39. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
2024 reads, #40. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and 2024 reads, #40. I had the fun experience this year of being a judge for the Prism Awards, celebrating the best in paranormal romance publishing, and this is one of the entries I ended up reading for that. Therefore I don’t think it would probably be ethically good for me to be actually sharing my thoughts about each book’s quality here publicly, but I can at least confirm that all of them were great (not surprising, given that this was a contest and we can therefore assume everyone will submit their best work). Frankly, I’m mostly logging this simply so that it will count towards my total number of books read in the 2024 Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Reading Challenge, so that I don’t end up reading all summer long and then have nothing to show for it here afterwards. ...more
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