Spoiler alert (lol it's ancient) if you have never read The Tempest:

Prospero really asked a lot of Ariel in this play. I don't know where my frame of reference is, maybe it's living in this pro-union moment in America; solidarity to the workers always whether they're humans or little island sprites. But I was just shocked at what Ariel was putting up with and I was absolutely certain that Ariel was going to lose his/her/its shit and murder Prospero. Like I was just bracing myself for a rampaging sprite.

Anyway, I completely misread the vibe of this 400 year old play. I just finished it and Prospero has a huge change of heart, sets Ariel and Caliban free, and willingly gives up his magic. There's also a love story.

It's pretty good. It's quotable.

I listened to this as an audiobook. I don't think audio was particularly effective medium for this book. I also grew very tired of listening to the author complain about how they could not spend any time with their wife and kids over and over.

I think the last time I was so shocked about untaught history was reading King Leopold’s Ghost.

This is an exhaustively researched look at American foreign policy in the Third World post WWII into and through the Cold War. As evinced by the title, Indonesia and the horrific coup eliminating Sukarno are the focus. The methods by which the CIA influenced this coup and used it as a model for orchestrating dozens of other coups across SE Asia, Central, and South America round out the second half. This book is hugely enhanced by all the first hand testimony Bevins collected.

Highly, depressingly recommended.

I could definitely see myself liking this as a kid when I was in my Susan Cooper / David Eddings era but it is very, very derivative. The protagonist kind of sucks too? He’s hard to root for.

Perfect book to snap a reading slump. It kept getting more and more implausible that people kept believing in this charlatan. Important people! I went into this almost completely cold. I only had vague notions that Theranos did something with blood draws. This was well explained without being pedantic, didn’t overly repeat itself, and walked a great line between helping an uninformed reader like myself understand the science and litigation piece without getting too in the weeds.

If you like non-fiction at all I recommend this.

Graphic novel / Interactive media experience about the ongoing conflict in the Central African Republic and how it impacts the everyday lives of citizens. Much of the graphic novel is centered around the health and welfare of children and mothers unintentionally swept up into the aftermath of a conflict they don't have any stake in. Like so many geopolitical events that don't happen in the Western world, I hadn't read a single thing about this and was just depressed reading it. It's very illuminating. Didier Kassaï's art pairs well with Marc Ellison's photography. Not the kind of graphic novel one "enjoys" but worth reading and drawing attention to.

Great short story about the fragility of the human mind and well, the fragility of pre-WW II Europe.

I saw this title recommended on a piece I was reading about Hypernormalization and the US. This work also lent to the Adam Curtis documentary also called Hypernormalization, published 2016 (haven't watched it, seems far more out there than this scholarly work).

The crux of the idea is this: That people are aware that the society/rules/regulations that dictate their life aren't working but have to endure them away because to do away with that scaffolding would be unfathomable. Alternatives that buck the mold are rejected because they subvert tradition. Tradition loses all meaning because it is an echo of an echo of an echo. If you wrap this sociological blanket around life at the end of the Soviet Union, it's not a stretch at all.

Yurchak gets heavy into semiotics with regard to communist meetings and how the language couldn't change, was edited in a group setting, the personal voice was lost. And so everything grew to have two layers of meaning, the sort of described spirit of the word meaning, and then the signifier of what it had come to represent by the late 1970s-1980s. I honestly hadn't thought much about semiotics since college. These chapters in particular remind me so much of ad word copyrighting. Plugging in different phrases where the only goal is page rank and the intelligible content is an afterthought.

This book is not written for a casual reader and it is not particularly digestible. It's dense and the aha moments are difficult to come by. I wish I could say I enjoyed it more, it was a challenge to read and I read a *lot* of non-fiction. I wish a more accessible book would be written on this topic because it's something I'm fascinated by as an American in this crumbling moment.

Not much you can say about this one that hasn’t already been said. Very well written.

This is such a mess. A lot of misses in Mustich’s list for me this year. Very, very dated language (naturally, it’s quite old) but the story isn’t good enough to give a pass.