ethanjpatton's reviews
324 reviews

Looking forward to rewatching American Fiction sometime. I may actually prefer the movie for once, but I still really loved this book. 

The treatment of the mental health and trauma depicted in this is an extremely interesting time capsule as well as a mixed bag, which is to be expected.

Loved the narrative voice in this and plowed through in a day and a half. 

My first time reading the Oedipus tragedy in full, this is a great edition and translation. Fitzgerald remains my go-to for Ancient Greek works.

Read largely at Fuel Pump and Garden Grove. Finished at Garden Grove a couple weeks prior to its permanent closure. 

More of a picture book than a book book, but that’s okay.

An interesting person and career, but a downright bad book. A lot of political books are like this, but there's just no compulsion here outside of the occasions when the facts of the events themselves are compelling. 9/11 and Jan 6th were compelling historical events that require no special writing skill to convey. Everything else though suffers from the flat and dry writing as well as narration by Pelosi herself. Instead of communicating the story of her rise to power or skills of the trade, she spends most of the book relitigating events that we are already deeply familiar with. 

I believe a biography written by someone else would be a much better book than this. I also believe she should not run for re-election again and should pass the baton at this moment of desperate need for generational change in our politics. 

I thought this improved on Specter of the Past slightly, which makes it my favorite Thrawn novel of the now eight I've read so far (Heir to the Empire trilogy, Zahn's 2017 Thrawn trilogy, and this duology). 

Really wish I could listen to a single Star Wars audiobook that doesn't prominently feature an alien species that is painful to listen to. The cave bird creatures in this book were awful and made Luke's storyline a drag on the book as a whole. I tried to factor that out a bit in rating since it wouldn't bother me in a physical copy obviously. 

Even though this is the updated version of the book, it is once again showing its age relative to the age of “framing” we live in today in a second Trump term. The concepts are sound. The examples of how they could be implemented are less and less likely to be realistic in a modern debate.