its_kievan's reviews
184 reviews

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

adventurous tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

A car crash of a book. The plot is nonsense, the romance is absurd, the relationship conflicts are contrived, the characters are one-dimensional, the prose is awful, the twists come out of nowhere, the setting is monstrously underdeveloped, and yes I do already have a copy of the next one and will be reading it immediately.

Also it is deeply funny to me that Yarros said "there's a bit of my husband in every book boyfriend I write" when her husband is a white military veteran and Xaden is a POC guy fighting to overthrow a propaganda-fuelled military regime. Much to ponder there.

The Fisherman by John Langan

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Honestly not like any book I’ve ever read. Weird, disturbing, sad, and still strangely tender and beautiful.

Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations by Evo Morales Ayma, Vijay Prashad

challenging dark informative medium-paced

2.5

I would have eaten this up when I was 19 and angry, but while I'm still angry I am no longer 19 and so I have some qualms.

First off, a lot of this book is very, very good. Prashad channels his righteous anger at US imperialism, violence, and hypocrisy into a series of compelling case studies. You can't help but share his hatred and horror when you read about the baldfacedly vile actions of US diplomats and politicians who are willing to sanction mass murders if it lines their pockets or scores a point against an imagined all-powerful enemy. This shit really happened, and it's still happening, and we need authors like Prashad to show people exactly how the world works.

That said, Washington Bullets is a polemic, not a history book, and it has some issues. The most minor is the editing. The book is often unfocused and meandering, making it feel a lot longer than it actually is. There's a lot of assumed knowledge, and a fair few sentences that don't really make sense. There is also a lack of supporting evidence. Prashad quotes from documents, but does not cite them; from people, but often does not name them. In his "Sources" section, he basically says that he spoke to a lot of anonymous people and he's been in the anti-imperialist movement for a while, so just trust him. And I don't think he's deliberately making stuff up, but that does make me hesitate.

The big problem is that Prashad is writing a book about the evils of Western, capitalist, American-led imperialism. The book contains an afterword that warns about the danger of Manichaean (black-and-white) thinking, but ironically this is exactly the trap that Prashad falls into. Every overthrown or assassinated leader is a saint, dedicated only to the welfare of their people. Any complaint about their rule is the product of fascists, oligarchs, and US propaganda. Any socialist government is wholly good, and no socialist nation (or successor to a socialist nation) has ever engaged in imperialism. When Russia annexed Crimea and the Donbas, they were simply acting defensively against NATO encroachment - and yes, this is an actual example from the book. US imperialism is bad and awful and wrong, but so is any kind of imperialism. And imperialism is not wrong because all leftist leaders are perfect paragons of virtue, but because it is morally wrong for a foreign country to depose a democratically-elected leader of any political affiliation.

Anyway, good book with some serious flaws. I'd happily give this to any first-year uni student, then talk them off the ledge with something like The Jakarta Method.

The Runaway Jury by John Grisham

challenging informative tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

It's fun to read an old dad novel and be like ohhh this is why that author's a multimillionaire now. And, yeah, Grisham knows exactly what he's doing.

Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party by Geoffrey Kabaservice

informative slow-paced

2.0

Clearly well-researched, but ends up being very dense and repetitive. It's also burdened by the author's ideological blinkers: conservatives have no real political convictions, just a vacuous desire for power at any costs, while Democrats are slavish devotees of big government who are "controlled" by their left wing (a claim he makes with zero evidence. Rule and Ruin is a great resource if you are interested in the movers and shakers of moderate Republicanism, but little else.

Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

A real struggle, one of those books where even halfway through I wasn’t entirely sure if I liked it. Turns out I do, despite the fifty billion names I had to memorise, and I’ve already borrowed the next book. A classic of the “kicks ass but I totally get it if you bounced off” genre.

Stasiland by Anna Funder

dark emotional reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

A deeply strange, beautiful, and melancholy book about a period in history that still defies understanding. Absolutely not what I was expecting from this book, but I’m so glad I read it. In my mind Stasiland deserves a place alongside Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried as something so much less and so much more than a history book.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Rape and Murder

Minor: Cancer

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

We did it, we’ve created romantasy books for those guys who are really into Ancient Rome

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Rape

Pines by Blake Crouch

dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Not sure how I feel about the ending, but nobody's doing "adulterous husband trapped in an insane world" like Blake Crouch

Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler

adventurous tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

“That's the danger of Fascism, of state-worship. It supposes an absolute, an egocentric unit. The idea of the state is not rooted in the masses, it is not of the people. It is an abstract, a God-idea, a psychic dung-hill raised to shore up an economic system that is no longer safe. When you're on the top of that sort of dung-hill, it doesn't matter whether the ends are in reality good or bad. The fact that they are your ends makes them good—for you." (215)

Based as fuck. I miss when all the good spy novels were written by socialists.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Mental illness

Minor: Suicide