All those words — dead ones and the ones that weren’t quite dead but that nobody ever used anymore — were stored in Great-grandpa’s head. He was always wanting to throw out old crockery or toys they didn’t use anymore, yet he kept all the old useless words in the drawers of his brain, never letting them go.

Light on plot, but very heavy on Feelings, imo. Review to come.

A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.

Excellently paced exposé on both Theranos and its CEO/founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The science behind their "proprietary secrets" was easily explained for the layman (i.e. me) to understand the terrible ramifications of what they did do (lied to several thousand patients about the veracity of their blood tests) and what could have happened, if this hadn't come to light (more than one death due to negligence, no doubt).

i'm in love.

I had a theory. My theory was that I was a piece of shit and deserved it when bad things happened to me.
Was I bitter?
A little, of course.
But a loss was a loss. You didn’t ever get it back. Even if you recouped the money, the injury was still done. What was best was to write it off. So long as you didn’t give a fuck you had them beat.

So Book Riot has a challenge to read a book written in prison - and here we are with Nico Walker, Iraq War veteran and convicted bank robber. This is semi-autobiographical in a way that seems barely changed from Walker's memory of real life - just more in focus. Don't go into this looking for anything more than a relentless slog through the shiftlessness of an adolescent-turned-soldier-turned-addict. Our narrator has some poignant things to say about the US military complex underneath the underneath, it's just buried by the heroin and a malignant sense of despair.

I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight, caked in mud and distorted with fury, then I reached for his flailing arms and held on tight. He tried to shake me off, but I kept holding on, until he stopped shouting and I felt the fight go out of him. Then I realised he too had his arms around me. And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field, for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night.

Considering staggering ethical dilemmas the reader is presented in this novel, our narrator Kathy seems fairly numb to it all. The above passage, at the very tail end of the novel, is the only time I really felt anything from her.

On one hand, this was a successful narrative choice, as Kathy's status as a "student" means that emotional mildness has literally been molded into her. But on the other, the impact of what has been done for medical science and how it was achieved seems to pack less of a punch at the reveal.

The day said I am woman. The day got up and walked this far then paused to take stock. It was the last chance to be observant and cry and stomp and take stock. What worth if not be accountable. It would be theater, a spectacle, come pay, or come lie down in fluid bosom of woe mankind.

A murder suspect. Me. Ellison Walford Russell. Mother was going to kill me.

I toyed with the idea of asking Detective Jones to put me in protective custody.

Surprisingly entertaining. Review to come.

4.5 stars.

Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown.
She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you.
Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.

Review to come.

But when we didn't obey what he had commanded, he didn't like us. He hated us. Some days he hated us so much, he killed us; other days, he let other people kill us. We call these days "holidays."

3.5 stars.

Shalom is bitter and angry at his stifled Orthodox Jewish upbringing, but still terrified of God in his "freedom" as an adult. His abusive father's actions were magnified, enhanced and twisted by his school teachers into the shape of their God, leaving him with no choice but to believe he would never be safe no matter how far astray he wandered - He was always with him. His writing can be funny as hell, but as someone who has never had religion in any way, shape or form, the fear he feels so exceptionally irrational that it's difficult for me to see him as a person rather than an exaggerated character. As his wife Orli says: "they really did a number on [him]".

"I am stripping myself of your love, your name. Clothed in my dignity, the only worthy garment, I go my own way."

Review to come.