This retreads some ground from Seven Feathers, the authors other book. But it’s also an expansion in a humanizing way, where she interviews people in the community of (primarily) thunder bay to bring indigenous issues to the forefront of Canadians’ minds. It spotlights some of the myriad of ways our culture is inflicting constant, irreparable harm to indigenous people.

Well worth a listen. Wont take much of your time. Great production values. No reason not to get educated on this, and this is a great springboard for doing just that.

Kind of a strange perspective. Essentially reads like an article that incorporates a bunch of quotes from all of the people but remains at a distance from everything happening. Ultimately it feels a bit strange for a novel, to me. It doesn’t really feel like it’s telling the victims stories, just recount events as best as they know, despite some of the dialogue having to be an extrapolation.

You do learn what happened in chronological order, stitched together from research and interviews. So if that’s what you want and expect, you’ll get that. It’s just formatted in an odd way in order to tell this particular story. It almost feels like an oral history you’d watch on those true crime shows that reenact what’s happened.

Actually pretty fun, and short. An interesting thought experiment about the ramifications of certain historical moments and what if type speculation.

Not quite as high on this as I expected. There’s a lot of hype around it so was expecting a bit more. I like the prose, the structure, and thought the plotting and pacing in particular were quite good. People found this a lot more enlightening and clever than me though, I think. It clipped along enough that I wasn’t boring and had more to say than revealing a plot, but it certainly didn’t blow me away. It is, however, quite unique, which is what bumped it up a star for me.

I’m always a little amazed people remember so much minutia. I imagine once you get going it all comes back, but you’d expect it wouldn’t be sharp.

At any rate, this was a nice and chill, contemplative recounting of the authors life. It’s very much an assumption of the writer as to what is interesting or not; this time being you obviously want to hear about the punk rock scene in the UK and a sort of behind the scenes meets my life hooked on drugs.

That meets my expectations. It is quite candid and unapologetic (the way I expected it would be based on his personal), what-you-see-is-more-or-less-what-you-get way. He is certainly not painted in a great light, problematic in the ways you’d expect, raised in the 50s. I imagine this will put off some people. You’re not a great person if you give your girlfriend VD, invite her to move in because you feel bad, go on tour, shack up with some else, and completely ghost the ex who doesn’t know she’s an ex.

I imagine this about the same as most of these stories, a bit of embarrassing stories, wow I was an asshole, but also there’s some stuff I’ll never air and it is what it is.

It is more enjoyable because it’s read by the author and the delivery is great. It’s genuinely interesting if you’re interested in the scene or him. It’s granular in his early years and then the pacing kicks it up when he starts writing poetry and getting into the scene. It stops somewhat abruptly as he says from here on out it’s more of the same.m, which is odd because there’s none of the ‘Here’s what I became’. It’s anchored solely in growing up and professional career/ The Scene, with some personal accounting of addiction and who he was dating at the time.

It’s unnecessarily sad a bit that his more progressive thoughts and actions don’t make the cut after the most “interesting” part of his life, kind of. I suppose it might have undercut the more shitty/dramatic aspects of the narrative? Or perhaps that bits saved for another book. Who knows.

Not bad! This is helped out by some commercial fiction practices, most notably pacing wise. Everything in this clocked into fine; a click up from commercial fiction but nothing mind blowing.

But I think that’s sort of the target it was trying to hit. It goes deliberately against epic fantasy conventions and expectations and I think that will garner a decent readership. It doesn’t have long ass info dumps, let me tell you about my fantasy city, or diatribes. The characters aren’t incredible but there are some character moments that are quite good. There’s fun/interesting/cool setting details and magic system stuff. It’s not one billion pages.

It’s pretty much exactly what it says it is, so 3 stars for me. It didn’t exceed expectations, but it’s a perfectly serviceable fantasy romp. I’m not sure I’ll continue with it. The narration on audible was pretty good, not fantastic. Characters are different enough that most of the time it’s easy to follow, but not always. And I wasn’t blown away, so I’m debating whether to continue with the trilogy or try and find something that I’ll like more.

I would say this won’t blow your mind if you are aware of the subjects targeted already, beyond simply reading about them in the newspaper of course, but it covers a wide range of topics posed to the author. And because it’s fairly old, originally published in 2002 I believe, it gives a great, micro picture of leftism at that time.

The funny thing about this book is most of the things Nonsky is criticized for by self identified leftists as well as the right, are addressed here—either organically by answering certain questions, or else specific questions about the social perspective and media perspective of him—and what you find is that he doesn’t actually say or believe the the popular perception proliferates. I routinely scroll Twitter and see people saying Nomsky says X and does Y, etc etc etc. And so we can conclude he’s not leftist enough, or is pro capitalism, actually. Yet, ironically, he those things are just the spin on his views. If you actually read him, he will outright state that use of violence is justified but it will be used to undermine the cause, but there is no moral tension in using force. In fact you have to use force. Yet you often see out of context quotes where he seems to be completely against it. It feels very much like the spin on MLK in some ways.

Anyway, I digress. I think if you want to get at the actual core values and idea of Chomsky, this is a great book to consume because of the Q and A structure.

More enjoyable than the first instalment. Lots of payoff, a better approach to “aliens” and communication/language/interactions, and all around more inclusive than most stuff in the genre. If you liked the first one, I would think you’d like this at least as much as the first one. It was more interesting to me because there’s far more worldbuilding and some more questions answered.

Also the narration on audible is fantastic. Far and above what you generally end up getting, imo.

Sometimes uneven but enjoyable. I wish the quality of the prose was more consistent but it’s still pretty pleasurable. It seems to have held up reasonable well, though it’s very overt in its parable moments. Still, always prefer an author who dares to make their stories About Something.

I remember there being a bit of a hubbub about how the movie diverged from the newest movie, but from what I recall the movie seems to be the same? Maybe it’s just been a while and I can’t pick out the differences? Or perhaps it was more about the older movies being better because they didn’t jump around in time as much. I really liked the movie, whatever was going on there. It’s what drove me to pick up the book.