Mostafa Chizari

This book tried to do too much and ended up skimming the surface of it's genres. It’s a time-travel tale where the reality-shattering shock of teleportation is glossed over way too quickly, but also a historical look at the brutality of slavery that it mostly just jumps through. It flirts with some fascinating, messy controversies like whether the oppressors deserve a shred of sympathy, but the overall execution feels a bit wishy-washy.

Butler drew heavily from actual slave narratives but watered down the grim reality to cater to a 1970s mass market. Personally? She diluted it too much. The profound moments are there, but they arrive in frustratingly short bursts, and I wish she’d committed to broader, sharper takes. The silver lining to all this dilution is that it makes for a fairly easy read. While it’s definitely not a breathless page-turner, it’s a smooth enough ride with just enough solid moments to keep you moving forward.

A masterclass in storytelling! Michael Lewis takes what should be a dry subject and turns it into something sharp, funny, and genuinely absorbing. He weaves the financial crisis into a much broader (and sometimes blunt) take on human nature, arguing that these collapses aren’t failures of maths or regulation, but of character.

His cultural observations can be pretty reductive, but they’re delivered with enough wit and pace to feel balanced. The core idea - that people everywhere behave the same way when handed ‘free’ money - is both uncomfortable and hard to ignore. It’s crude at times, sure, but given the scale of the damage caused, that feels almost necessary.

Honestly, I’d recommend this book even if you have zero interest in economics; it’s worth it just to experience how effortlessly the story pulls you in.

Intoxicating, lyrical, and unashamedly poetic. This book is a high-stakes literary flex: two authors at the top of their game showing off in the best possible way.

The background of how this was written - letters sent back and forth between the two authors, then topped off with collaboratively written narrative scaffolding in between - adds a layer of mystique that makes the final product even more impressive. You can feel the competitive creativity in the prose. It’s dense, rich, and frankly, exquisite.

The plot is basically just wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, but to be perfectly honest this is all a distraction from the incredible literary art held within the writing style. The plot doesn’t need to do the heavy lifting when the prose is this evocative.

A short, sharp read, and an immaculate sensory experience.

A beautifully written but difficult read that never fully clicked for me. The opening chapters are incredibly strong — the language is powerful, and I felt completely pulled into the chaos after the uprising, especially the emotional weight shared between the characters early on. That connection dropped off for me in the middle sections, where the relentless brutality and graphic detail made it hard to stay emotionally engaged rather than overwhelmed. The final chapter, though, brought things back around and reintroduced the human core I’d been missing.

I can absolutely see why people love Human Acts, and there’s no denying how skilfully it’s written. Unfortunately, I found it tough to get through and difficult to truly connect with for long stretches. It made me think, but more out of confusion than curiosity — I felt like I needed outside context for parts of it to really make sense, which hurt it as a standalone read for me. A harrowing look at humanity’s fight for justice, but one that felt like too much gore and intensity without enough grounding to hold it all together.

Important ideas buried under a lot of waffle. This felt like a never-ending sprinkling of doom and gloom, and more like falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole than reading a properly shaped book. The subject really matters, but the prose made it a slog to get through; if this were a university lecture, I’d forgive it, but as a book it seriously tested my patience. There is a glimmer of something genuinely compelling in the chapter on materialism and mental health, where some of the connections are sharp and genuinely thought-provoking, but unfortunately that clarity doesn’t last.

Most of the rest feels like information overload without enough philosophical depth or narrative drive to hold it together. Davies keeps hammering home how broken everything is - psychiatry, Big Pharma, the state - but offers very few meaningful solutions beyond “here’s why your life (and society) is bad”. Stripped back, he really only needs a few core points:

1. The chemical imbalance theory flattens deeply human suffering into a clinical label
2. Profit-driven pharmaceutical systems encourage over-prescribing
3. Medicalising mental health keeps it safely apolitical, encouraging you to endure poor conditions rather than fight to change them. It treats the symptoms of a broken system so that the system itself never has to change.

All worthwhile arguments - just not ones that needed this many pages to make.