clacksee's reviews
1116 reviews

This just really wasn’t for me. I disliked both main characters. 

Mac is a man with a traumatic past. He’s working hard to overcome what’s happened to him. 

This wasn’t my favourite Breedlove story. It’s more focused on romance than journalism. That’s not the book’s fault, though. 

It’s really hard to  know what to say about this one without spoilering everything. This book is classic Brookmyre. It will suit fans of his work. Anyone else … maybe. 

If you haven’t worked out what’s going on by two-thirds of the way through, the twist is going to slap you in the face. 

I’ve read at least 15 Brookmyre books. I know where I stand on the genre-bending mashup. But not everyone is me. 

For me this one wasn't as impactful as I’d hoped/expected. I didn’t disagree with anything; I just struggled to connect and found my mind wandering. 

The one thing that really stuck with me was the notion that ‘elite’ is not a static group; it’s very much situational. That’s important to remember. 

 It’s still very good, but it felt like it could have been longer and better structured. 

This book was a bit heteronormative / gender-normative for my liking, but you can’t go wrong with a bit of cosy ridiculous fluffy sci-fi.  

I think I missed the part where this was YA. I’m not a big fan of YA, but that’s hardly the book’s fault. 

I’m still not sure what the hell I just read, but it was sweet and cosy and adorable. More, please.

I've recently read a number of books that set out how colonialism and empire caused so many of the problems the world faces today: racism, wealth inequality, patriarchy, etc. 

In many ways, this book picks up where those left off, showing us just how much the US has interfered in the running of other countries, basically using them as laboratory experiments.

Until I read this book, I thought the various crises around the world were caused by unfettered capitalism. I assumed that, in the absence of regulations, the very powerful had found ways to benefit. I didn't understand that so many of those crises had actually been engineered in order to destabilise economies and/or governments. I didn't know that so many unstable countries around the world were in the predicaments they were precisely because American economists wilfully and systematically broke them.

I do have two complaints about this book. Firstly, it's so long that it's hard to maintain the anger it to rightly stirs up. It's exhausting listening to planned catastrophe after planned catastrophe – to the point where the atrocities start to lose impact. Yes, it's all absolutely vital info. But it might be more meaningful split into two.

Secondly, I have to take issue with the language employed throughout the book. Klein repeatedly talks about how this is Adam Smith's principals of laissez-faire in action – this is what the free market does. Except it's not and she demonstrates that over and over and over again. This is very much not hands-off; it's the opposite. 

What the author has shown is that the markets are being prevented – through strict controls and deadly force – from acting freely. Calling this laissez-faire is like building a dam to change the course of a river and then claiming that's just nature running its course.

Anyways, this is a very worthwhile read. Shocking, actually.

These little tales were absolutely adorable. My favourites were Think Tank (the second coming does't turn out how people expected) and Strangers in the Void (a space station worker is alone in the shower when the lights go out).

Weird and vivid. Often violent. Sometimes tender. Occasionally, poignant.