A quick read, and thought provoking. Despite Diamond saying the seven countries discussed in the book are the ones he's most familiar with, the discussions of them are mostly superficial and not particularly useful. I was actually annoyed by the Chile discussion, where he wrote something to the effect of "no-one knows why Pinochet was so brutal" but a mere page or two earlier he quotes the frequent pre-coup graffiti "Yakarta Viene", indicating that the Chilean Junta & Pinochet were openly using Indonesia as an example of how to carry out anti-communist crackdowns. Later, in the discussion of the 1965 Indonesian killings, he seems to equate the killings of at least half a million people with whatever disasters would have been caused by Sukarno remaining in power and the communists not being all murdered. I felt that Diamond understated the Cold War influences (and the US influence in particular) on both 1965 Indonesia & 1973 Chile.

A good fun read, & is a better slavic fairy tale fantasy than the Naomi Novik books. Can't wait to read the sequels! There was a lot about the old gods being replaced by the new, but I wish there had been more about that. I also liked the straightforwardness of the writing. No playing around with will-they won't -they's, no awkward plans awkwardly hidden from the reader.

Page-turning memoir of survival in a survivalist family. The family's survivalism was more an ideology than a functional effort to survive any potential doomsday. The ideology served mainly to isolate the family and maintain the Dad's authority. For all of the dad's worries & warnings about the tyranny of government, the society he was building was itself authoritarian. Of course, (as Educated does a good job of showing) there is no such thing as "Self-Evident" & logical consistency is in the eye of the beholder (or world viewer). Another major theme is the fallibility & malleability of memory. Westover is careful to include not just her memories of events, but also others' memories, even when those memories diverge from her own. The story of Westover's education is remarkable, but I think what is just as remarkable (and probably more bizarre) is her family's sudden turn of fortunes after her dad set himself on fire in a welding accident. Tara achieved what she did with her work ethic, her curiosity, & luck, but what did her family have that turned what should have been a deadly accident into a massive homeopathic & essential oil remedy business? Certainly, had Westover been more of a witness to that story and able to provide details, it would not be so mysterious, but it's still remarkable. Finally, this book is vindication for me for every time I shouted "put on a damn helmet!" at the TV during battle scenes, winter snow storm scenes, construction work site scenes, hog-ridin' motorcycle road trip montages, etc. Educated is a ringing endorsement of workplace safety, and head-protection in particular.

Triple header of graphic memoir. Three separate stories covering work history, medical history, and reading history. The art style is cartoony-minimalist. She often depicts her younger self as an unpleasant dumb-ass, which is funny, & probably intentional. I also liked the depiction of her relationship with her older brother, but that's mainly because I'm fascinated by sibling relationships in general.

Memoir of a trivia collecting Jeopardy hound, who is lonely. A good illustration of why you need to figure out what a friend is before you look for a girlfriend. It felt very romantic-era, with great heights and depths of emotional turmoil. I kept thinking of Frankenstein, and I just realized, that it's because like Rostan, the monster was also very lonely, and also picked up a lot of trivia through reading.

Kind of a hard sci-fi treatment of time travel & reincarnation. The book-jacket synopsis is somewhat deceptive, making Rewrite out to be much less thoughtful than it is. Rewrite is more about the possibilities physics of time & consciousness than aging, memory or nostalgia. Made the alternate timelines emotionally convincing. Kind of got slow in the end as more answers were revealed, so perhaps the ending revealed too much theory?

Three book reviews. The 1st review is of a book that does not exist, the 2nd review is of a book from the future (ca. 2100), & the 3rd review is of a genre of books still to be written. The 1st review is of a reference book collecting a minute's worth of data for all of humanity. The 2nd review is of a book of military science from the future, when all war is made by nanobots. The 3rd review, dealing with the search for extraterrestrial life from the perspective of calculating the odds of the emergence of intelligence elsewhere in the milky way, is the densest & the hardest read. Lem has a dim view of humanity & a dark sense of humor, so it's both surprising and completely unsurprising that he looked down upon his fellow sci-fi authors with whom he shared so much.

Anthropological overview of the world of super poor renters in Milwaukee. As the title indicates, they get evicted a lot. The author tries to be understanding of all of his subjects, but the landlords can't help but come off as villains. At the same time, Evicted does a good job of showing that the slumlords mostly behave the way they do because the rental market is legally and economically set up to reward their worst behavior. To the landlords, the police, & the wider community the renters are always the problem, & kicking out tenants is seen as an appropriate way of improving a poor neighborhood. One thought I had was why do the landlords get to file as many evictions as they want? The housing court system is overburdened, the police have better things to do (even if they seem perfectly happy to serve the landlords carrying out evictions), why don't they get cut off if they serve too many evictions in a period of time? Tenants get kicked out for calling the cops too many times, even when they have legitimate reasons. Seeing the ways that the poorest rental market works under "normal" circumstances also makes it easier to imagine how exactly gentrification can quickly displace & replace the residents of a poor neighborhood.
Finally, I'd been able to read this book earlier in my life. It would have given me great insight into the ways my landlord, neighbors, and neighborhood behave.

With its focus shifting from the cosmic to the personal, & the philosophical to the mundane, this book reminded me of Joe Frank's radio shows and Stanislaw Lem's One Human Minute. The narrator who observes while wandering the earth and wandering through memories also reminded me a lot of Joe Frank. Not sure this book can be called a novel, exactly, since it consists of a number of probably unrelated stories or novellas about travelling, strung together by the narrator who heard them somewhere or invented them somewhere else. If you want to call this a novel, I suppose it's about the narrator, or the author, telling us this all about her travels & travelling in general. Most of the stories contained in Flights wraps up in such a way that they leave one feeling there is more to be known, and in that way each vignette resembles a short story. I'm reminded of a class I took about fantasy literature, or maybe phantastical literature--that is, literature of the fantastical and strange, and not literature about fantasy worlds--where the feeling is always that there is more in the world & even in your immediate surroundings than you can possibly know. Time and life does not automatically dispel all mysteries, and much will always be hidden from all of us. Flights & story about the trip to Vis especially would fit in that class very well.

Collection of graphic stories and/or essays. 3 of the stories revolve around fictional media (a 80s or 90s cult movie, a 90s sitcom, & an underground ambient track of the early 00s). The Movie & the Music ones were kind of about the effects of media phenomena on coming of age. The sitcom one is some kind of weird take on the TV entertainment industry. The story about shrinking reminded me a lot of Stephen King's novella Elevation, and was kind of creepy. The mirror facecook story was also a little unsettling. The comic on the back cover was funny too.