Surprisingly not bad. She’s good at narrating her own book as well, unlike some other authors that sound extremely wooden recounting their own story.

She chokes up at hard parts in her life and laughs pretty often, too; so it’s very easy to connect with what she’s saying. It ends up being pretty candid and relatable (most of the time). It’s pretty steeped in Christian values but doesn’t sound preachy to me, just something important to her and how she got through the day as a pastor’s daughter. And honestly, as someone who was bullied about being abused, I’d say she’s earned looking for whatever gets her through the day.

She bookends the book with talking about her alcoholism and it’s easy to feel for her. I will say that the critical reflection of her life feels a bit stilted at times though, kind of like a half hearted apology. Everything else is pretty on point though. Easy to see why it’s a best seller.

This was pretty dang fun actually. Cinderella as a cyborg in a sci-fi world where earth is in conflict with magical people on the moon. I don’t think it needed to be near on 500 pages but it’s pretty engaging even when it feels like it’s padding against the “big reveal”, which is a bit predictable of course. The dialogue is Very YA sometimes. But overall there’s a lot of interesting things about the world that make up for some of the more eye roll worthy interactions.

It does what it sets out to do and has some very nice prose. But I found myself not really being invested and hoping for more plot to chew on. It was the perfect audiobook to have on in the background for me, as I think if it were a book I would possibly have been much more impatient.

Well written, well realized prose and setting, plus I really like structures that leap around in town—but the pacing made it more of a slog than it needed to be.

DNF’d 25% in. Why is a fantasy western spending its time telling the story of some coked up drug mule in contemporary day? I couldn’t tell you. For me, this shift erased absolutely everything that was interesting about the first book.

This is an interesting bit of reading that could benefit from a mission statement.

The art changes often and isn’t actually codified on the page as to what it is. Is this concept art? An in-game snapshot? Stylization of something in-game? It’s all pretty nice but the strongest pieces are often illustrations, so the constant change ups are actually a bit of a disservice and dampen my hype for the game because it looks worse than what is typically on the page.

The text and overall structure are serviceable but won’t blow anyone away. The perspective changes a lot, I think unintentionally? The problem I had is that it introduces jargon and doesn’t explain it, so it assumes quite a bit from the reader. For instance it never actually explain ICE but explains a different program acronym right beside it, even though ICE is referenced often. I don’t think it actually tells you why money is the Eurodollar either, but I may have missed it in my read through. In any case, there are quite a few questions that popped into my head as I read that weren’t ever answered.

It does explain the world the player will be in pretty well though. But I think people will take issue with some world building aspects itself. This could be an art direction problem but every part of the city seems to have no culture bashing whatsoever. Which is wild. Rich and poor Chinese, Japanese, the displaced Haitians, and Mexicans are isolated groups into their own sectors. Why are the climate displaced people interested in settling in Night City at all with the constant wars? Why didn’t they go to Europe?

Gangs are all depicted as one ethnicity. The opening picture for nomads seems to be someone indigenous and it talks about how it’s mostly rural America. So they mixed with indigenous people? I dunno, man.

I think some of these problems could be solved by expounding on information. I’d wager a lot of this world building comes from R Talsorian games, who do quite a bit of research usually. The answers would be more interesting than how things have settled in the city in this way, to be honest.

But the page count is certainly limiting, I’m sure. But on that note, the layout could have been strengthened a lot by using paragraph styles that extend to the full use of the column. It’d look a lot better, like you’d read in any novel. It’s frustrating that full page layout almost always is the worst layout when it comes to things like that. There’s empty space on the next page because they just dropped text in when they could have just moved the entire paragraph to the next page instead of having it carry over.

However, Most people probably won’t care about that and just want to get some history and see some great art, and on that front the book succeeds wonderfully.

https://medium.com/springboard-thought/in-the-land-of-men-power-career-and-personal-relationship-run-parallel-thats-the-point-76ebaffb7ea0

Adrienne Miller’s memory is a fabulously keen thing. Her memoir is vivid and detailed and, to the dismay of some critics, apparently, approached entirely on her own terms.

Having entered the publishing world of GQ and, later, in 1997, the imminent Esquire, Miller proceeds to carve an almost Mad Men like career. Almost. Her boss only reigns in the spending, otherwise, it appears she is able to do what she likes and does it well.

But even from the start, she feels something is amiss. As though she thought she’d acquired something else with the position… but it had yet to arrive.

Just as consumers do now, truncating the thin barrier that once gave some measure of privacy to the artist in capitalism — too many men in Miller’s lane seem to have no problem whatever dismissing Adrienne’s professional position and person.

It seems to many men in this scene, the only thing that had shifted with her position — was that now they had access to her; a desirable woman.

Adrienne recalls early on that an author’s agent tells her, face-to-face, matter-of-factly, that she “has no authority” to do her job.

This punctuated by lunches and dinners — all established as working — more men treat her as they presumably treat any other woman. Sometimes with verbal abuse. Sometimes submitting unwanted sexual advances.

As when a writer submits a piece of work and is published, Miller’s entrance and acceptance come with the unadvertised dynamics of being transformed into a commodity.

People want a piece of her; whatever they can get, apparently.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t to say that she doesn’t also wield some power, it is just being constantly tested in a series of raptors-attacking-an-electrified-fence-like-encounters by the men in this space.

She’s a tastemaker. She is in the “red hot” center of the literary world. She has sole control over what is published in a pretty big deal magazine.

So what is power, precisely, if it isn’t acknowledged by those in the kingdom?

Miller appears to have been let into a poker game, only no one has told her the rules and she is made to feel like she is constantly bluffing because they keep telling her she is; so she must be.
Is power afforded to women merely a seat at a table with people you’d rather not play with?

For about half the memoir Miller recounts with clarity, detail, and adroit prose, these working years. It is enticing and also proves she was probably fantastic at her job. Her contentment radiates as she talks about how hard it is to reject pieces, which pieces spoke to her, and why. Her enthusiasm is infectious. Despite the cancerous interactions that occur from time to time.
But then a shift occurs.

The latter half of the memoir contains her final years, which become somewhat arrested due to two things: Esquire slowly stops publishing pieces, and David Foster Wallace inserts himself into her life (who, by the way, deserved an actual arrest, apparently).

This shift is also quite clever and unique to any memoir I’ve yet read.

What is it like to work in this Land of Men? The first half encompasses that. What does it feel like? The relationship she has with DFW is an apt analogy as ever there was one.

Clearly, Miller is aware of how her framing of the memoir will be received by some critics today, because she telegraphs it in the critical reactions of other things in her recounting. And she’s right, as she was back then, with her finger on the pulse of the critics.

The reviews online often critique the memoir for her allowing Wallace to dominate a narrative that ought to be about her, for the most part (even as they use pictures of DFW rather than Adrienne attached to these pieces critiquing the memoir, ironically).

Why doesn’t she talk more about the business and the inside baseball? That’s what is actually interesting here, according to them. This could be more feminist, couldn’t it? It feels like it’s maybe two books.

It would be funny if it wasn’t sad.

They’ve missed the point of the memoir, foreshadowed from the start: David Foster Wallace, being the embodiment of the writing scene at the time, is synonymous with the traversal of her later career as an editor.

It is one story. It isn’t inside baseball and then also a eulogy to DFW.

What does it feel like to edit Esquire? You get who she was before Wallace, and the way she was after Wallace, and why.

It feels like being subsumed and gaslit.

Discounted; underestimated; manipulated.

Miller’s romantic relationship with DFW is foreshadowed and, retrospectively, inevitable, when considering the stories he submits to her for publication and editing.

These same pieces she edits professionally become embodiments of how he treated her (and probably others). And because the memoir is about the dynamics of power, even the structure of the memoir itself, with over 50% of it being about Wallace, is in service to that goal.

Her passion for her job and life dwindles within the omnipresence of Wallace. And he must also, therefore, dominate the page count.

Only with 20 years of perspective and reflection is Miller able to see what her story and her career and her relationship was actually like.

People are complicated. Trauma is complicated. Disentangling the two cannot really be done. Why would you ever edit out trauma or, really even the complexities of a man, when the topic and aim is to discuss the negotiation of a man’s world? His world, in particular.

Is it unfortunate that so much of it must involve Wallace?

Sure.

In the sense that it is unfortunate that these things happened to her.

To wish that Miller talked less about Wallace is a banal wish that the world was different and she never went through these things and now feels the way she does about them.

It isn’t a different world.

The memoir is Miller’s story because of and despite Wallace’s overbearing presence in it.

It’s what makes it unique. It’s what makes it good.

https://medium.com/@frasersimons/greenwood-the-cloud-atlas-of-historical-climate-fiction-15838ebfbec6

“Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.”

In the year 2034 and only a few forests remain on earth. A blight called The Withering has already swept the world, annihilated whole eco-systems, and left families destitute. Conditions that are evocative of, and seem to parallel the experiences of people who lived through the Dust Bowl.

Canada, however, is one of only a handful of places that have some protection and seems to have become the most desirable place in much of the world— but it is only a matter of time before it too succumbs to The Withering.

Jake has amassed a hefty amount of student debt in her education as a dendrologist, and had planned on spending her life researching her passion: trees. But after The Withering the only job she can find is as a tour guide for the superrich on an isolated island in Canada, a job she is massively overqualified for but has no choice but to take.

“A person seldom knows they’re starved for something until they get a taste of it.”

Her life, it seems, has become a performance for the rich in order to survive.

But life takes a turn for Jake when an old flame comes to the island with a wild claim: she may be the descendent of the Canadian industrialist whose company owns this very sanctuary. If true, it would change her life. No more debt. No more tours. She could dedicate her life to combatting The Withering as she’d hoped. As proof of the claim, her ex gives her an old journal.

From there, the narrative begins its dive back in time. Each jump a story linked still further back in the connecting tissue of her family history. The stories begin to collapse into each other, then build-up and stretch into completion; finally returning to conclude Jake’s own story in 2034.

Eclectic people across history are drawn together in astonishing ways. This history begins to form a latticework as the multi-generational family stories are ferreted out and connected. A simple carpenter in Vancouver. A foresting super-magnate. A shell-shocked war hero, now transient with a baby he’d found in the woods, alone, hanging from a tree. The fixer of a wealthy patron. A single woman who starts a soup-kitchen and soon owns and operates her very own farm.

Time is a bridge for all sorts.

“What if a family isn’t a tree at all? What if it’s more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought… what are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason. And like all stories, families are not born, they’re invented. Pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.”

And this would have been a satisfying story in of itself. But what elevates Greenwood is how thickly intertwined the themes are with each individual story and the meta-narrative that engages in a push-pull exercise of whether or not Jake is a legitimate heir or not.

Multiple stories allow for a more nuanced telling than one story could have.

Generational trauma, ethical consumption, notions of justice, punishment, and penance, all pulse together within a realistic, but hopeful framework that depicts mankind as cyclical and timeless.
Troubles and perseverance, it seems, have always governed mankind. If only we had a more protracted memory.

Jake is waiting to discover what is true — and whether or not she will allow this information to alter her. What path is right? The culmination of all the choices of every character marks this as pivotal.

And yet this is just the vehicle that allows the exploration of how Canadians have allowed for the abundance of natural resources to be pillaged for the equivalent of the American Dream for the far-too-few.

If it’s true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary justice…then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip our the Earth’s most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheaply to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again — that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.

This prevalent notion Canada has cultivated as ethical and good is welcomingly contradicted — beginning with the story furthest back, as the family immigrated and the very first thing they need to do to prosper is to drive the First Nations people living there off of ‘their’ land.

Contrast that with what is happening today in Canada, where the country is still being auctioned off, and this becomes an incredibly prescient book with so much to say it is staggering to unpack.

“Time…is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates — in the body, in the world — like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light, then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done.”

https://medium.com/springboard-thought/the-fantastic-microworld-of-our-grandmothers-in-carpe-glitter-fe01623908e6

'…when she left stepped off her stage, she left in a scintillating dazzle, like a fairy queen stepping off her throne.
All that shine. And at home?
She was a grubby hoarder."

Literary microworlds, such as cyberspace in cyberpunk, abound. But it is quite rare to find one that you haven’t come across before, let alone one that is also well realized. Carpe Glitter offers exactly that, and more, of course.

Persephone’s absolute character of a grandmother has passed away, willing her all the earthly possessions in her home. All she has to do is catalogue it all and then she can sell them. Easy right? Well… the house is actually three interconnected houses. And her grandmother was a hoarder… so it’s packed from corner to cupboard.

It’s, uh, a bit of a task, it turns out.

Over the course of the novella, Persephone undergoes the monumental (seemingly) task of sorting through all of these widely eclectic and, sometimes, kind of disgusting, if I’m honest, knickknacks and oddities, squirreled away who-knows-where.

Throughout, Persephone’s mind drifts from childhood to young adulthood as she moves from room to room, tossing in the memories of her life — revealing that not everything is as it seems.

Sure, there are the ‘normal’ tensions between her mother and grandmother, dynamics, no doubt, some people will be familiar with. And that would have been a perfectly lovely little novella.

I was on board with this sojourn Persephone was embarking on because Cat Rambo masterfully expounds on a hoarder's house, and her assets, into a world of discovery that encapsulates the complexities and feelings for the lives of grandparents surely most people have, or how I feel about mine, anyways. Just to imagine that feelings behind the discovery of those people we truly cannot comprehend when we are young is compelling and vivid.

Shrewdly, Carpe Glitter incorporates this with something that deftly conveys the many, many hoarder house encounters in my previous line of work. There is honestly nothing like it. You never know what people may be hoarding. I’ve been in houses where people hoard meat. Whatever the case, it is always a window into the mind of the occupant that can’t really be compared to anything else. Moreso with the added dimension of it being a loved one.

‘I scoffed. “You’re acting like all of this is real.”
He just looked at me, scorn twisting his lips.
We both knew that it was real.’

To then go further and literalize the fantastical nature of negotiating spaces such as this is simply ingenious.

When casting about for clues about her family's persistent strange nature, Persephone goes down a rabbit hole containing nazi experiments, hidden, magical artifacts, and even such items dripping with the mystique of evocative starlets that only previous eras could really convey in any measurable way.

Mysterious, lustrous, and smart — It is no wonder Carpe Glitter took the recent nebula award.

“A good magician never reveals their tricks.”