Kyle Erickson

Here's the deal; I don't particularly like novellas. Many of them are short stories that the author wasn't willing to kill a few darlings over and lose 30 pages, or they're concepts or characters that could be given a bit more depth and made into something better. But occasionally...a novella is a perfect length.

Elder Race is told via dual perspectives, and one of the perspectives is from a native on a primitive planet; the other is an anthropologist from future Earth that was left on the planet to observe the evolution of culture. One POV feels fantasy, told in third person, the other feels sci-fi, told in first person. Tchaikovsky uses cultural misunderstandings and technology differences (if you don't know what tech is, it's “magic”) to illustrate how these two characters could have struggles with each other. “What we've got here is...failure to communicate.”

Although this is primarily a character study that examines things such as loneliness and depression, cultural evolution, differences in perspective, the role of science and others, there is a central mystery involved. My only gripe would be that this mystery didn't seem very gripping and I was mostly interested in the characters.

I really like the way Tchaikovsky's mind works. After this and Children of Time, I continue to be more impressed with him as an author. I'll definitely be reading more from him.

I'd consider Elder Race one of the few novellas I've read, along with Dawnshard and Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson, and N. By Stephen King to be the perfect length for the story being told.

9.5/10

“Stories are as alive as we are, and surely they change with each retelling. All my stories grow and learn, just as I grow and learn.”

“Everyone is a storyteller. That's how we make sense of this life we live. Misfortune and affliction test us... We have to tell ourselves a story about why to make all the random manipulations of fate and fortune bearable.”

I have the phrase “The stories we tell ourselves” tattooed on my wrist. One of the reasons is because we construct narratives about everything around us to make sense of the world. We truly are the storytelling animal. I think Liu and I agree on this, as the theme of this book is how central stories are to the human experience.

It's tough to talk about books deeper into a series if it's a series with lots of deaths and plots, because even mentioning a character's name can be a spoiler. I am in love with the world Liu has crafted and it feels very lived in. The character work is superb and economical. Characters can disappear for 300 pages, show up again for 5 and I am awed at how complex they manage to be. Two of these characters are so well drawn that I wish more people knew about them so I could gush. Liu does so many bold things with the prose that leaves me constantly wowed- two of my favorite passages are from the perspective of a whale (whales call humans “half-octopuses”) and from a character who is new to human life and learning how to breathe, see, smell, experience for the first time. There are so many fantastic quotes that I eventually just stopped writing them down out of exhaustion.

That said, this was my least favorite of the series, which is a bit unfair. The final book was split in two, and this is the first half. I knew that going in, but the pacing really suffers in the second half as you know the book is reaching the conclusion without any sort of resolution. There's a competition section that went on a long time that I felt could have been trimmed for extra time with different characters. This book is Dune part 1, but it paved the way for an epic ending.


8/10

This book is about an empire of islands led by an Emperor who uses bone magic to create constructs that help him govern and control everything. While it was given some detail, I still couldn't help imagining a bunch of skeletons running around

This was....not for me.

And so, after a little over a year, my journey through the (current) Cosmere has ended, and now my watch begins.

I ended with Elantris because it was his first novel and everyone told me it was subpar or clunky. Then people told me I should have started with it because going backwards is a let down.

Wow, that was a ride. Honestly, the less you know about this book, the better. This short book follows a character named Piranesi who lives in a large, mysterious labyrinth with large statues everywhere called “The House”. The only other person in the House is The Other, who meets with Piranesi twice a week. The book is told from the perspective of Piranesi's journals. From there, I honestly think anything else is detrimental to know ahead of time.

I loved this book. The writing style is so evocative, the slow unraveling of the story makes you constantly want to turn the next page. I read it incredibly fast, I just couldn't put it down.

I had heard from a lot of people that this book was great and I was a little nervous to get to it. Fortunately, it delivered. I will definitely be rereading this book in the future, and I would recommend just about anybody give it a try. The beginning is a bit slow, but once the story settles in, you're hooked.

This book would get a full score except for the fact that it is quite mysterious, and I guessed a good portion of the mystery pretty early on. I think it was because I knew it was a mystery, so my brain threw out every possible suggestion and inevitably, one of them turned out to be mostly right. Still, I shouldn't have been able to guess; I'm not great at solving mysteries, haha.

As an aside, I don't see people mention very often that Clarke wrote this book while suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. It may be a short book, but it is a work of damn art, and laboring under those conditions makes it all the more impressive.

If you need a short book to get you out a reading slump, I HIGHLY recommend picking this one up!!

I will go farther than any dandelion seed; I will lead a revolution.”

Oh boy. It is so hard to talk about great sequels, because I just want to gush about so much.
This book is better than its predecessor in every way. It is a triumph of intelligence. This book made me happy, sad, inspired, anxious (so anxious), thoughtful (so many thoughts), confused, enraged, melancholy and hyped. It is not interested in glorifying war, but is instead a love letter to engineers, poets, philosophers, scholars, teachers, linguists, and other people whose jobs are typically not to save a nation.

The way Liu tells a story is so meticulous but rewarding. There will be sections of this book where a character will go off to learn about cow stomachs or street magicians or how languages evolve or the weight of gas and you're like, “how is this relevant?” but then it IS. The last 150 pages of this book cries out to be on screen, and it is not because of badasses swinging swords, but because of a group of intelligent people with very little in common putting their heads together to spark ingenuity and creativity.

I finally get why the ASOIAF crowd should read this, there is a lot to like here. But there's a lot to appreciate regardless; WoS has political intrigue, rebellion, herbivore-dragon riding Mongolian-esque Vikings, kite assassins, airship battles, giant sentient narwhals, morally grey characters, strong female characters, LGBTQ major characters, Character death...oh lord the deaths.

I admire the focus on different kinds of strength. Not every strong woman is Brienne of Tarth and not every strong man is Achilles. I wonder how much Liu was inspired by men like strategist Zhuge Liang, because I feel his influence all over this book.

I don't rate books against each other, so while I think this book is better than GoK, it will get a slightly lower rating. While nearly everything about this is a triumph in my eyes, there was a giant coincidence in this book that for all my goodwill, I couldn't get over. Plus there was a very oddly placed flashback in the middle of the climax. But overall, one of the best books I've ever read.

9.5/10

First of all, check out that cover!! Damn.

This book is better than its predecessor in every single way. Some intense stuff went down at the end of Voice of War, and it really allowed the opening up of the world and characters. I'm surprised at how much Argyle is able to fit into a pretty small (350ish pages) book. SoL once again follows three POVs, and my biggest complaint about the first book was POV layout related- but this time I was equally invested in all three.

Chrys is the focus of book 1, but he takes a bit of a backseat here to let Alverax shine. Chrys's POV is instead used to provide more insight into the magic, different cultures, regions, and religions of the world. Laurel's chapters flesh out some of the villain's goals and also deals with some of the mental and physical fallout from book 1. Also...PSYCHIC WOLVES. We need more things with psychic wolves.

I think Argyle really shines when dealing with relationships between characters. My favorite scenes tend to be just two characters bonding over something. I also think it's worth mentioning that he writes very good female characters, something I hear a lot of complaints about regarding male authors. The ending was also explosive and surprised me several times.

My only negatives here are the constant usage of “Stones” as a curse word (wouldn't different people have different curse words? I digress) and that the magic system, while interesting, doesn't make the fight scenes very dynamic. It's not a very combat heavy book, though, so this wasn't a big deal.

9.5/10

This is my 50th Stephen King book!

This book is about a scientist inventing a virus to help monkeys slowly develop into humans but oh noooo, mistakes happen and spiders instead get the virus which makes them develop into a sentient spider race on a distant planet. Meanwhile, the last survivors of an Earth apocalypse are travelling the galaxy, looking for a new planet to live on. What could go wrong?!

This was part of a buddy read, which I'm very thankful I did because while I really enjoyed this, it was best when I could see what other people were thinking regarding all the concepts going on. I listened to this on audiobook and while the narrator was great, it was probably a mistake for me, because I had to keep going back and relistening to make sure I got what was happening. Spider civilization is complex, everyone.

The book does dual chapters where you follow the spider civilization through multiple generations of progress, while also following the human characters. Some interesting stuff definitely happens with the humans, but I kept wanting to get back to the spiders. They were so interesting! Who knew I could be so intrigued by a male spider civil rights movement?

I really recommend this book, but it falls into the same issues I have with most sci-fi- it prioritizes plot and concepts over characters. And there is nothing wrong with that- the concepts here are GREAT, and I was always intellectually stimulated. But I was never invested in any of it until near the very end. And I would think that is part of the draw for sci-fi fans. But it will always result in a story that keeps me at arm's length. I also think the ending needed another 1-3 chapters to really breathe and explore what I felt like it needed to. I will definitely be reading the second book though, and more of Tchaikovsky!

This book follows the true story of the Galvin family, who had 12 children- six of which developed schizophrenia. Kolker dives into the struggle that this family had, starting in the 1940s, with not knowing what was happening with their children and how having so many kids with their own unique struggles with schizophrenia in a time in which the illness was not well understood and was heavily stigmatized.

Concurrently, the book goes through the history of mental illness as we understand it, with a focus on schizophrenia obviously.

I really enjoyed this, the blend of psychology history, family drama, and schizophrenia examination checked a lot of my boxes of interest. The Galvins were a big contributor to the study of genetics and schizophrenia; it is extremely rare to have so many documented cases in a family, and their willingness to contribute to research has advanced our understanding of schizophrenia, mental illness, and genetics quite a bit.

However, this book has one huge, glaring flaw. It spends the first 2/3s going through the history of schizophrenia and the history of the family, and the last third just meanders into tangentially related things. There is a LONG section on sexual abuse and the fallout from it. The problem with this section is that it is mostly disconnected from anything else going on- while it does examine the role trauma has on onset of schizophrenia, the section was still quite long and didn't contribute much. The author then spends the entire end of the book giving “closure” to the two youngest daughters and how they have survived their past- obviously the author's main sources, and his favoritism shows. These two things combined makes me think that the author wanted to showcase the struggles of the two daughters more than he wanted to highlight the contributions and suffering of the entire family.

Still though, this was a mostly great read. I highly recommend it if you like learning about mental illness, or if you're into family sagas.

8/10.

What I really want to do is just shout “READ THIS” over and over at you until you finally agree to do it. Unfortunately, that's not really a review, so here goes. This book is one of the best things I've ever read. It's one of those books that I feel like I have emerged from the other side a better person. It is criminal that it is self-published, not because self-published cannot be great but because everyone should be able to walk into any bookstore and see this contribution to literature on the shelves. I honestly think this should be a book they teach in schools for all the deep themes it delves into.

The book follows two protagonists, Misaki and her teenage son Mamoru. Misaki was once a bad-ass teenage crime fighter in a foreign land, but she has returned to her patriarchal, traditional homeland Kaigen to become a housewife and mother in one of the most powerful families. Misaki doesn't want to be a mother and longs for the days where she could fight. Mamoru is just coming into manhood and is dealing with the pressure of living up to his father's name, as well as facing some revelations of how his government may be lying to them and how that fits into his evolving worldview.

That's all the plot synopsis you really need because the plot is not the reason to stay with this book. Although the world is interesting and the combat scenes are incredibly exciting (Wang has a martial arts background and it shows), the characters are just so rich and complex. This is a brutal, harrowing story that will be hard to get through emotionally in some parts. But through pain, comes growth, pleasure, vindication, and understanding. This book examines the human condition and the effects that war has on a society, a village, a person. But it also explores motherhood in such a raw, honest, and gripping way that I have never seen done before. Misaki is such a greatly drawn character, I felt her struggles as if they were my own. Considering she's a 35-year-old mother of four in feudalistic Japan, that is quite a feat.

Besides that, one thing I never see talked about with this book is what Wang is showing with the male characters. The way men are socialized, even in today's society, leaves many unable to show emotion or properly communicate how they're feeling. How is that exacerbated in an honor culture of warriors who are supposed to be the greatest manly men of all time? How does that pressure fold in on itself and devour someone? How does a person survive this culture mentally stable? This book really shows something that most media glosses over: these men are traumatized. And in a book that examines trauma of all kinds, I was blown away by how this was handled.

I could go on for days and not finish all the thoughts I have about this book. I kept pausing to consider the things that were being said or thought and really weighing them.
Some other minor things I enjoyed:
-The unorthodox structure was super well used. The middle of the book is the “end” of most books. This allows the characters to really decompress from the action and rebuild.
-Misaki's sister-in-law Setsuko was great. I understand why we had to follow Misaki, but I think Setsuko is the type of supportive person that I want in my life.
-The characterization of Misaki's husband Takeru is SUPERB. He's a slow burn and not the best person, but very well written. Thoroughly impressed by Wang's writing here.
-All the villains in this book are unnamed, but they are NOT treated as cannon-fodder/redshirts. The fights are visceral with each combatant. This is something SO rare in media, and I get why, but it's also dumb. Almost always in battles, you don't know the name of the person you're fighting, but that person can still be a badass.


This book isn't perfect, however. Wang gave herself worldbuilder's disease, probably because she's been building this world for most of her life. A lot of the details in the beginning are in info-dumps, and a lot of that is unnecessary anyways. She also created a ton of new words for things that is probably not necessary. The biggest offender is new words for units of time- which is a mistake, I think. I read the whole book and I still had no idea what any of those words meant. And the logic doesn't hold up, anyway: If you are writing the word “sword”, you are telling me, the English-speaking reader, that the object is a sword, even if the person in the story may be using a different word. So saying “kukoo” or “Bloopy” instead of “minutes” or “hours” just breaks immersion and doesn't serve any purpose. However, these are small gripes. I believe the book presents a bit of a learning curve because of all this, but once you're in the narrative, it ceases to matter.


I will be recommending this book to people for years. Please read it.

Okay, so this one is a Great Gatsby retelling and I thought I would venture out of my wheelhouse, which is occasionally rewarding. I didn't love Gatsby- Fitzgerald's writing style was pretty dry. But sometimes a retelling can get you way more invested in the original story. Circe is like this for me, or in a different medium, Hamilton. So I thought, let's give it a try! Anddddd I had a bad time.

Look, this book is technically good. It is very well written, and I will definitely check out more of Vo's work. If you love Great Gatsby, it's definitely possible you will really like it. The problem here is me. Either I or the world do not understand the word “retelling”. Because this is without a doubt fan-fiction. A retelling involves telling with some revision. A RE-telling. This is a telling.

There's nothing wrong with fan-fiction. Write yourself into whatever Harry Potter side story you want. But this book kept rubbing me the wrong way. It's exactly the story of Great Gatsby with just a few things changed. It changed Jordan Baker, Nick's girlfriend, into a queer Vietnamese-American woman. Guess who falls into that category? Nghi Vo. And Gatsby was in the public domain for SIX MONTHS before this book was published. She pounced on this at her first opportunity.

Maybe I'm being overly harsh here, I don't know. But I kept thinking that Vo read this book in high school and was like “wow I want to have sex with Nick AND Daisy” and so she went and wrote herself into the story, added a bit of random magic, some casual devouring (PSA: the word devour should not be used in oral sex scenes. Just...no! Go sit in the corner and think about what you've done!) and waited for the minute she could publish it.

This is very much a case of just not for me. Also, everybody in Gatsby sucks!! I had forgotten. They feel extra unlikeable here, but that just may be because I'm experiencing their unlikeability through new eyes.

5.5/10

Okay so it took me exactly a month but I have finally made it through Eye of the World

This series continues to impress! Book two does something very wise and pulls the focus from Senlin and instead focuses on his ragtag crew. The multi-POV structure worked wonders on deepening the characters. The plot in this one is very sparse; it reminds me of Season two of The Wire. Seemingly not a lot gets done, but the world is fleshed out and the characters are allowed to fully breathe, allowing for the next installment to hit the ground running (hopefully).

My favorite trope is probably the Found Family trope. I just love me a found family, and Senlin's crew of five hits me in all the right spots. Each one of them is a dynamic, interesting character that you don't usually see, who all have complex relationships with each other that feel real and lived in. A teenage trapeze artist trying to assert her independence for the first time? Check. A farmer turned sky pirate with a mysterious debt and a mechanical arm? Check. An illiterate Amazonian going through menopause and discovering she is worth more than her ability to kill people? Check. A thief trying to balance his family's safety with his loyalty to the crew? Check. And then there's the man himself, Thomas Senlin. The characters continue to be my favorite thing about this series.

The only drawback I have about this one is a certain malady that Senlin has for almost the whole book. I just did not think it needed as much time as it got. Otherwise, this book was a blast.
9.5/10

I will try to maintain some degree of objectivity, but really, it's Dave Grohl, man.

Dave Grohl is one of the best of the humans. I don't really believe there are people who actually dislike Dave Grohl. Those are people who wake up every day and actively choose hate. Beyond the man himself, the Foos are one of my favorite bands; I have a Foo Fighters tattoo, took a two day road trip to see them in Denver, and I walked out to Everlong at my wedding. There was no way I wasn't going to like this.

But I was still surprised at how good it was. Naming your book The Storyteller is bold; but it's apt in this case. I listened to this audiobook in less than 24 hours. There are a variety of stories and reflections that range from inspiring, thoughtful, hilarious, or heart-warming. Dave's ability to speak on the power of music is infectious; after hearing him pontificate about music, I'd want to pause the book to go rock out.

Added to that, he was surprisingly candid about Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, and his thoughts on Kurt's death are pretty intense. The reflections on being a parent were poignant and touching; you can really tell being a father is the most important thing to him. Even the stories where he just talked about meeting famous people, a trap that memoirs fall into often, were awesome because Dave's enthusiasm just gushed off the page.

There is nothing to critique about this book, besides that I wanted it to be longer. Write another, Dave? Please? Also, I love how much of his actual career he skips over in this short book, but still has a whole chapter about coffee

I look at my own life and all I see is ambivalence and confusion. Nothing dramatic happens, at least not suddenly. In real life, nothing happens quickly. Everything just erodes. And it's confusing and frustrating and dull. God, can it be dull. But then you have the Parlor, and everything has a point. Yes, it's simple. Yes, it's stupid. But there is a plot. A week ago, I would've given anything for a life with a plot. Now, I say, bring on the dullness.

A third of the way into this book, I was nervous. I was nervous that I thought it was going to be a slog. It had opened strongly, but it was so bizarre and seemingly directionless, that I thought it had been overhyped and would disappoint me. Thankfully, I was wrong.

Thomas Senlin, a headmaster from a small village, has dreamed of going to the Tower of Babel his whole life. For his honeymoon, he decides to take his new bride to his dream location. However, the Tower is not at all what he expected. Within minutes of arriving, his wife Marya is separated from him, and he must find her. The Tower, however, is a microcosm of activity that Senlin doesn't anticipate. He must resist the influences and trials within in level of the Tower in order to be reunited with Marya.

“You've made it impossible for me to read a book in peace. When you're not here, I just gaze at the words until they tumble off the page into a puddle in my lap. Instead of reading, I sit there and review the hours of the day I spent in your company, and I am more charmed by that story than anything the author has scribbled down. I have never been lonely in my life, but you have made me lonely. When you are gone, I am a moping ruin. I thought I understood the world fairly well. But you have made it all mysterious again. And it's unnerving and frightening and wonderful, and I want it to continue. I want all your mysteries. And if I could, I would give you a hundred pianos.”

Tom, as a superior student of the Tower, keep after your wife. It is easier to accept who you've become than to recollect who you were. Go after her.

Because, see, by the time they get this deep into the Tower, most have had the character beaten out of them. They are willing to say anything to get what they want. You can't reason with them or trust them. To know a person, to understand their character, you must know who they were before the Tower shook them to their roots. If you do not know how they changed, you do not know who they became.

“I hope it hasn't come to that. We shouldn't have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity.”

I'm going to feel very weak, and you're going to feel very dumb. But that's how it always is in the beginning. Learning starts with failure.”

I am quite interested in bias studies. I read Jennifer Eberhardt's great book Biased last year (which Nordell references several times) and was really happy to have discovered an in-depth look at something that has seemed obvious to me all my life but that many people seemingly just don't grasp- we are all extremely biased., and for the most part, we don't even realize it. Nordell's book explored the topic in a somewhat different lense than Eberhardt, which was great, although they do both dedicate quite a lot of time to police bias (rightfully so).

But The End of Bias combines neuroscience, sociology, psychology, gender studies, explorations on race, mindfulness, history, politics, tech, and pop culture to examine the many different avenues that bias can and does affect every single one of us. Nobody's above the law here: you cannot woke yourself into waking up one day without biases. The best we can do is be aware of how our biases affect us and how we are being affected by bias, and try our best to mitigate it. This is probably the only place where I delve from the author- the book is named The End of Bias, but I don't actually think we CAN end bias. We can hopefully end the way that bias creates large societal blind spots that harm others, but some degree of bias will always remain. Nevertheless, I think it should be our goal to try to reduce and examine our own biases as much as we can. This book is a brilliant starting point for people wanting to learn more about the subject. It examines bias against basically everyone but focuses primarily on POC, women, LGBTQ, and children.

I was surprised at the amount of science in this. Studies are referenced quite often, which is always a good sign. There was also a very nuanced chapter about police, which I greatly appreciate. In our current public discourse, police seem to be reduced to “police bad” or “police good” and both of these are ridiculous. Nordell does not give police a free pass in any sense, but she mentions plenty of programs and police officers who are dedicated to changing the way the police operate and see the world. She also shows how officers are primed to expect danger, which can be mitigated in a number of ways. There was a section about a study where cops engaged in mindfulness training that had really interesting results that I hope gets expanded upon.

I would recommend this book to anybody; indeed, I likely will add this to the list of books I recommend regularly. It also gets bonus points for taking time out of its busy schedule to shit all over Twitter, which I didn't think added much to the author's argument, but hey, I am a sucker for hating on Twitter.

Son of a Liche is the sequel to Orconomics, an SPFBO winner from a couple years ago. Orconomics was super charming; it involved satirizing the classic DnD type adventuring, and while I thought the plot was lackluster, it was laugh out loud funny quite often, and was never boring.

Liche is a bit of an opposite situation. I found the plot and characters much better this time; after having the characters and world develop a bit in Orconomics lent this book a helping hand. However, the charm of the premise and humor faded quite a bit for me. A lot of the humor in the original stems from how the world itself works and how that leads to amusing situations. This book wasn't unfunny, but a lot of that was lost. Instead, we had a lot of repeat jokes about never splitting the party and how Dwarves don't like people.

The main problem is that this book does not justify its length; it is nearly DOUBLE the size of Orconomics. And it's just not necessary. The middle of the book could almost be cut out entirely and I don't feel like we would have missed anything.

But this book is not a total bust, and I did enjoy it. If you loved the first one, I believe this one will have enough for you to enjoy. This is my favorite quote, which genuinely got a good laugh from me:

“One could imagine uses for Great Eagles on just about any quest the Heroes guild could undertake! Why, how many strange and dangerous journeys could heroes skip if Great Eagles were at hand to carry them to their destination? And what dangers could they escape if the eagles were waiting to take them away? I should imagine you'd want to employ these eagles all the time.”

“Oh, we would, sir. But the accursed creatures have unionized!!”

I would rate this as a 3.5, rated to a 4 for making me laugh out loud a few times, which is hard to do.

If you ask me who the most imaginative and creative writers in modern fantasy are, N.K. Jemisin is near the top of that list. The Broken Earth trilogy is incredible and made me put the rest of her works on my TBR. This collection of short stories has her imagination and unique worldview going for it. But it still falls into the trap that most short story collections do- mixed quality. Some of these stories were fine, some were good, some were boring, some I probably didn't understand, and a couple were great. The narrators for the audiobook were all very good.

But it's hard to gush over such a mixed experience. If you want to try Jemisin for the first time, I'd recommend one of her actual series first. If you already like her, this is probably worth your time. Jemisin's prose and concepts are still at the top of barrel. My favorite stories were “The Eternal Engine” and “On The Banks of the River Lex”, as well as the last story, which has too long of a name to remember.

This is a review in the form of a question:
Why can't drummers write good books??

I enjoy a good musician memoir. I've read most of the notable ones. The first one I ever read was Slash's when I was 14 and it changed my life. Since then, I read Steven Adler's and both of Duff's, so I had to read Matt Sorum's autobiography as well. Unfortunately, Matt is pretty pissed about not being included in the reunion, and it shows. This book is just gripes, sex stories, bigger gripes, drug stories, bigger gripes, and times in which Matt Sorum saves the day and nobody thanks him for it. The only chapters I read with any sort of interest are the Use Your Illusion tour chapters, because that tour was chaos.

But I should have known this book would be bad, because there's a deeper, secret truth: drummers can't write good books. Wait, I hear you saying. That seems not true! Alas, I go where the data points tell me. And after reading terrible books from Steven Adler, Tommy Lee, Jeremy Spencer, Joey Kramer, and now Matt Sorum, I am left to the inevitable conclusion: drummers shouldn't write books. There it is. Five data points out of an entire sea of drummers :p can't argue with that!

But for real, skip this book unless you're a GnR superfan.

Okay, I debated on whether to review this, but I decided to do it because I have a social obligation to prevent others from reading awful things.

I love Skillet. I have always really liked John Cooper. I have a picture with him that I love, and I think his ability to advocate for his faith while not being over-preachy in their music is fantastic. I saw today that his book was added to Kindle unlimited, and it was really short, so I decided to give it a try.

A quick note here, I am agnostic. I shouldn't be picking up books about Christianity. This one was on me. But I have read religious memoirs before and I always thought John had a great way of talking about his faith. Not when it's in book form, apparently.

This is pure drivel. I finished this book in like half an hour because I kept only reading half a page and then skipping ahead. John is completely out to lunch and full of half baked, insane theories. At one point, he stops to define the word “intersectionality” and somehow gets it 100% wrong. The person he quotes the most in the book is Jesus, the second is Jordan Peterson. It's poorly edited and poorly structured. He keeps talking about how straight white rich men are under attack. I cannot find a single positive thing to say about this propaganda booklet. My love for Skillet will remain unaffected, but I'm just going to pretend this book never happened and then never listen to John talk again.

This book is beloved by many, and I was excited to finally read it. Unfortunately, the hype train missed me on this one. It is a very heavy book, dealing with heavy topics, such as rape, assault, poverty, child abuse, war etc. The prose is really well done, and I think the author does a great job making Afghanistan come alive in all the necessary detail.

However, the narrative is where this book loses me. The narrator is just so unlikeable at every turn, and is telling the story in an overdramatic, insufferable way. The plot itself is relatively unbelievable, but also very obvious and I called every “twist” way beforehand. There was also way too much incredible convenience- a boy who rapes someone in front of the MC grows up to be a Taliban member who just so happens to be in the perfect spot to obstruct the MC's goals 20 years later- and the way this is resolved is absolutely ridiculous. This was my least favorite part of the novel.

Overall, I did not enjoy my time reading this, but there were some poignant bits and the ending was pretty well done. I can see why other people loved this book, there were just things I personally couldn't get past.

This book was an SPFBO finalist last year and has been on my radar since then. I decided to give the audiobook a try, which was a great choice because Adam Gold did a phenomenal job.

I really enjoyed this book. High fantasy books tend to be dense, or large- and this one is neither. You follow three main POVs- Chrys, Laurel, and Alverax. Each character is distinct and nuanced. Chrys is a general and is about to be a father for the first time. The theme of familial ties and what you'd do for family is very strong throughout the novel. I enjoyed his story the most, plus it's rare to see a story with married protagonists where one of them (always the wife) is not immediately killed/captured/attacked/leaves. The concept of the story is essentially “the Chosen One's parents” and that's an interesting angle to explore. Parenthood, especially new Parenthood, is not explored as much as you think it would be in fantasy, and it's well done here, although not delved into as much as it could have been.


The world and magic were also well done, and reminded me a ton of Sanderson (which I'm sure was intentional). There is a creature called Chronawolves that are pretty cool that are essentially “Chekov's Chronawolves” for the next book, haha. No complaints with that! My one issue with the book was structural/pace related. The third POV comes in quite late and dominates much of the second half. I understand why that happened, but it was a bit jarring. The book was pretty short, another 50 pages or so to flesh this out a bit more or introducing the character earlier would have been great. But the ending of this book is explosive and pretty much demands you to pick up book two, which I will be reading soon!

What a book. If the name is unfamiliar, Chanel Miller is the woman who was assaulted by Brock Turner behind a dumpster a few years ago- an assault his father disregarded in court as “20 minutes of action”, something I had actively repressed until it came up in this book. The memoir deals with Chanel's life before and, mostly, after this event and how the assault and the media attention affected her.

The sad reality is that many of the people who need to read this book the most- that is, the people who villainized her or defended Turner- will never read it. Regardless, it's an absolutely haunting, infuriating, and enlightening read. I think many women who have experienced similiar will find this book validating and/or inspiring and Chanel states that's the main reason she wrote it. I also think many men could gain some insight from this book about how women are treated regarding sexual assault. The way that Chanel was treated during the trial made my blood boil.

The way she describes events or the way she was feeling was so powerful. If I wasn't listening on audio, I would have stopped many times to write down some poignant quote or another. My only negative for this book was the length/pacing. The stuff dealing directly with her case was mostly paced well, but she started delving into things like Trump's presidency and police violence against black men. While a tangible point could be made with this, it felt out of place and more like someone just shouting “And another thing!!” at the end of their argument. Still a book I would strongly recommend to anybody.