

Review: Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
I hate to say this, but you could become the Pablo Escobar of the new millennium. A tour de force in journalism. An immense work, so I'm not gonna sit here and try to summarize it. What I will say is thank god I broke my back in 2024 and not during the age of Oxy being handed out like candy. I was prescribed another opiod, Tramadol, and even then I was advised to try taking half-doses. If I'd been injured just a few years earlier, things might have turned out very differently
★★★★★-5
2 hours ago


Review: Asterix Omnibus #1 by René Goscinny, Illustrated by Albert Uderzo (Spoiler-Free)
This might be the first funny book I've ever enjoyed. (Excluding dark satire, of course. I'm looking at you, Bunny). I picked this up because I wanted something quick to boost my reading goal, but I actually really enjoyed this comic. Typically, I feel a sense of disconnect from comics/graphic novels/manga, but I found that the genre of humorous fantasy perfectly compliments the medium. This charmed me in similar ways that Terry Pratchett's Going Postal did. It's the perfect
★★★★-4
Jun 22


Review: Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin (Spoiler-Free)
People call Shiva Baby a horror movie, but this book is Shiva Baby if it really were a horror movie. Not to reduce this purely to comparisons, but it also bleeds with traces of I Saw the TV Glow (really any Jane Schoenbrun) and Carmen Maria Machado. You may recall that I love I Saw the TV Glow, highly enjoy Shiva Baby, and am a bit lukewarm on Carmen Maria Machado. Most of that rub comes from our misalignment on how sex/desire is portrayed, and it's very similar in Black Flam
★★★-3.5
Jun 20


Review: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will. This is a very interesting read that does a good job at capturing how tuberculosis affected major aspects of history and how it continues to pervade many countries in the present, purely because we've denied them access to the cure. I don't have a ton to say about the content because I think it truly speaks for itself, but I do have something to say about this book's structure:
★★★★-4
Jun 14








