books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

Okay, but HOW WAS THIS BOOK SO GOOD??

A 22 year age gap? These big age gaps are my least favourite trope (yes, even more than cheating or secret baby or any of the usual suspects). So, how is it possible that I loved this book as much as I did? Like, one of my favourite books of the year levels of love...

I think it's because this romance was less about an age gap so much as it was about:
- forests of pining
- the most awkward dumb-dumbs being awkward and dumb
- finding a partner that really and truly brings out the best in you

What a delightful little novella!

SUCH a good book. I’m over here self-deprecatingly joking about late stage capitalism, meanwhile economists are talking about how capitalism has been replaced by a new system 👀

This book was called Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Not what *will* kill capitalism. What killed. And it’s a form of feudalism. Oh, great. At least capitalists produce something. Tech companies are over here raking in enormous rents from capitalists and consumers, just because they happen to own some now-essential parts of e-commerce. It’s the Inclosure Acts all over again.

I didn’t expect an economics book to talk about Bookstagram. Turns out writing book reviews on Insta and Amazon makes you a peasant of the new class of techno-feudal billionaires. Oops 😅

Trust me—this economics book was so cool. For a few reasons:
✨ it made such a powerfully accurate argument that it’s history in the making
✨ it definitely had a “Wait. Is this f*cking play about us?” vibe that will make anyone who cares about book reviews, indie authors, AI art, etc go ooohhh no
✨ the whole book was an imagined conversation between Varoufakis and his deceased father, whom he refers to as “you” throughout and it was sentimental af
✨ the audiobook is narrated by Varoufakis himself and his Greek accent was so charming

How do you feel about capitalism being replaced by feudalism? Because I think I prefer my feudal lords to be purely fictional, of the historical romance variety myself 😅

This book has completely changed the way I think about Palestinian liberation.

This is the first book I’ve read that focused on (literally its subtitle) “How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World.”

And seriously, screw those guys.

Military tech, policing gadgets, detention techniques, domestic surveillance, cyber “security” (aka spying)—it’s big business. Like, huge business.

And Israel has cornered the market, for one simple reason: their products are “battle-tested”. No other country in the world has a population of people that they can test this technology on with such impunity, like Israel has Palestinians.

And the result: no matter what new thing gets invented, Israeli firms go to the big cyber security and military trade shows with products that are ‘better’ than the rest. And they get all the contracts.

Basically every single part of this book had my jaw on the floor but here are some things that I can’t stop thinking about:
▪️ no matter where you live, prepare to hear your country’s government mentioned as a customer buying some of the most horrifying (and citizen targeting) tech you’ve ever heard of. The evil sh*t that Canada has bought to target Canadians… 😵‍💫
▪️ but ofc the biggest buyers are the most corrupt and evil governments. And wouldn’t it be nice for them if more countries were like that… 
▪️ and they kinda dgaf what the US thinks. They’re no longer little startups. Occupation has turned them into enormous and powerful companies. Plus, their biggest markets are elsewhere. For now.

👉 Basically, this book unlocked a new-to-me reason why Palestinian liberation is essential:
✨ The occupation of Palestine has turned Palestinians into guinea pigs for some of the most evil technology in the world. And the companies behind this tech have become almost too successful to challenge. And now, no matter where you live, they’re lobbying your governments to buy their products (and loosen laws protecting you from said products).

Ceasefires are good. But we won’t be safe until Palestinians are safe and the occupation is over.

Can I enjoy a single POV, 21 hour long audiobook about two people trapped alone together for 7 years?

Not really, I fear 😅

Even if Queen Ruby writes it. And I really love Ruby Dixon’s brand of fantasy romance: it’s campy, smutty, and romance plot-tacular.

But this one gets added to the pile of Ruby Dixon books originally released as serialized chapters that I didn’t enjoy as a full-length (emphasis on length) novel because:
▪️ it was longggg
▪️ I dreaded the chapter breaks. It kept summarizing (and re-summarizing) what had happened so far (as if I’d forgotten in two seconds) and I was kinda losing my mind
▪️ the plot became increasingly disjointed
▪️ it was too freaking long for the romance plot to have this little drama
▪️ it was almost impressively repetitive in its description of the setting, characters, and plot stuff. I was begging it to please PLEASE pick a new way to explain things. At least some synonyms, I was dying
▪️ did I mention it was long?

And maybe I just don’t enjoy knotting as much as the next person? The book was definitely leaning into the knot and I was getting nothing 😆

Oh well, can’t win them all. I still love this author. By my last count, I’ve given 36 (!) of her books 5 stars so she’s still an all-time fav.

For me, a book is a three star reading experience when I liked just as many parts of it as I disliked. It’s neither a good nor a bad rating to me. It’s a both rating.

[this is the third book in the spin-off of the spin-off of Ice Planet Barbarians. There’s weird alien peen and snow, that’s all you need to know]

So, for this book I liked:
✨ the silly and camp-tacular tone Queen Ruby brings to all of her blue alien books
✨ experiencing a new human-alien culture clash in this world
✨ just seeing all my beloved side characters again
✨ I love a virgin alien MMC dumb-dumb plus some fated mates horniness
✨ I was rooting for these two! I thought they were really compatible

But I disliked:
▪️ the one-sided language barrier didn’t fully scratch my itch for this trope
▪️ the romance plot was more restrained than I’d hoped it would be
▪️ I didn’t get the Tia redemption arc I wanted. She’s been kind of the villain of Not-Hoth in many ways. And I didn’t come around to her side as much as I’d expected to
▪️ we did some scene repeats from book one (because both stories start with the same event)—but not in the way I like. Instead of fully recreating the scenes, they got all floaty and summarize-y. But the scenes were too central to this story not to fully recreate them here, imo.
▪️ there was a too-obvious solution to the romance plot drama for it to take them the whole story to figure it out (although I’ll grant that they were both kinda idiots so that maybe made sense)

There you go! This is exactly how I talk to myself when a book is getting three stars.

This was great! It did two things I’m obsessed with:

❤️ It pushed a friends-to-lovers storyline to its angstiest, messiest limits. You name it, we had it: friends with benefits fails, unhealthy amounts of pining, and not being able to make up their minds between doing everything together or moving to a different city just to get away from each other. Add in some ‘I need to move in with you temporarily because my apartment flooded’ and bam, THE MESS. I was entertained 😆

❤️ It gave these characters some compelling flaws. Yes, our hero was a conscientious sweetheart, but he was also an overthinking doormat. And our heroine was a coolly chaotic independent woman, but she was also a self-sabotaging man eater. And I loved the way the romance plot specifically forced them to grow as characters.

It had flashbacks, which I love in a many-years-long messy friends-to-lovers journey. And the audiobook was great (if you’re like me and your mind doesn’t immediately populate with ideas when the heroine’s voice gets compared to Joanna Lumley, then I’d recommend this audio 😆)

There were a few little things that kept this from perfect, though. The bossy-boots (him) and brat (her) thing felt a bit… forced? I spent way too much time rereading sections of the book because I couldn’t decide if this dynamic was awkward because a) it didn’t make sense with their personalities or b) this kink-adjacent language felt weird in their conversations as friends. Maybe both? Maybe just the latter? I can’t decide.

And for all the flashbacks and on-page forced proximity, I don’t know if we ever fully took off from Instalove-Landia Airport… but I’m so picky about this in a friends to lovers story—take that with a grain of salt.

Disability theology wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card. But maybe it should have been.

I didn’t even realize this was a theology book until I’d already grabbed it and noticed its subtitle: “Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church”.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved the theology in here. I found the Bible references nostalgic (I grew up Catholic), the hermeneutics philosophy-adjacent (and therefore lovely), the moral ontology refreshingly deep, and anytime I see progressive minds reclaiming theological ground ceded to conservative jerks I just want to cheer them on.

I love own-voices nonfiction (our author is a Black pastor with a disability). And there were some really interesting points in here about ableism’s role in the legacy of slavery and the early American Christian churches.

That said, there is a suuuper specific form I’m looking for in a book like this, and this didn’t really have it. I want Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Frantz Fanon (and dare I say, Hegel?)—a thinker who successfully marries the theology/philosophy of moral arguments and text-focussed hermeneutics with social and political info and current events. And in this book, those two elements stayed too disconnected, imo.

But I’m happy I got out of my comfort zone with this one, randomly picking it to fulfill a prompt for The Diverse Baseline challenge.

History has proved this book so correct that it has to get 5 stars. And if I had read this book a year ago, I probably would have thought it was exaggerating 🙃

Written at the end of a Trump term just as Biden was about to take office, the message was basically this: don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Or,
▪️ Trump’s pro-Israel politics, although less subtle than most of his predecessors, was merely a continuation of decades of Democrat and Republican policy (despite the illegality of the occupation and its many human rights violations), and
▪️ all signs pointed to Biden continuing this bipartisan support of Israel so… peeps who care about human rights, don’t get too excited 🤷🏻‍♀️

It was written for a specific audience: those liberal centrists and lefties who think Black Lives Matter, occupation is wrong, human rights are important, racism is bad, and the cruel treatment of innocent people by the police or military needs to gtfo—yet don’t pressure their political leaders to do anything about the US’s involvement in Palestine.

Aka, the PEPs: Progressive Except for Palestine.

And yeah. I don’t think history could have proved this book more completely and utterly correct. All the warnings came true. And there was just something about reading a book that was so carefully and cautiously constructing an argument for an audience it assumed wouldn’t believe it... To now read it when the entire world has first-hand knowledge that this whole argument is completely valid. It was a lot.