safekeeper's reviews
94 reviews

As we're all coming to realize, the MAGA movement is not just a populist movement with a propensity for violence and authoritarianism, but a straight up cult, and as their members' behaviour and actions steadily grew more and more inexplicable, I picked up this book to help me understand what was going on inside their heads. The Cult of [Drumpf] was both very enlightening and incredibly chilling, going into detail both about how cults operate and how Drumpf and his movement so perfectly fits the bill. It helped explain to me why none of Dump's countless blunders, speeches full of confused rambling, or outright hateful rhetoric didn't seem to make any difference to his supporters in polling. The silver lining is that I've heard cults have a tendency to fall apart pretty quickly once their leader dies, and the Führer is 78 and in bad health.

By the way, I advise listening to the audio book at 1.2x speed as the narrator reads pretty slowly.

Innocent girl is subjected to a string of violations and ends up killing herself.
Not a good story or book in and of itself, and also romantizices suicide to the point where it led to large spikes  in suicides and suicide attempts.

(PS: On a very topical note, I absolutely loved the recent 1-star review accusing the author of being a misogonyst and 'exuding' his views through an incel character (even though said character is meant to convey the point of this cautionary tale about what Internet echo chambers can do to people, and his tirades are instantly and deftly parried by Ether), for then to make a jab about white cis-males: It so perfectly encapsulates everything this book sets out to warn against --both the knee-jerk outrage and the need to vent frustration at random caricatured/stereotyped groups of people.)

--

First book by Jason Pargin and my god, why did I not discover this mad genius sooner.
I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is about a socially inept Lyft driver, whose whole life seems to revolve around his rideshare job, his edgelord Twitch channel, and getting yelled at by his ex-Marine father, who is infinitely disappointed with him. One day he is offered $200 000 by a mysterious cool chick for taking her and her locked road case from his California hometown to Washington DC, on the condition they leave at once and arrive by July 4th, tell no one they're going, bring no trackable electronic devices and disable the car's GPS, and that he asks no questions. Through a series of bizarre incidents and coincidences, the two misfits' journey soon catches the attention of a retired FBI agent and a bunch of deranged Redditors, and before long, millions of people are obsessing over the duo and where they're headed, what the box's purpose could be, and above all what could be locked inside (halfway through the book, theories range from an alien corpse to a nuclear bomb).

What you're in for is part a dramatic, ever-engaging, funny, and mercilessly satirical road trip with heavy Stephen King vibes and plenty twists and turns, and part a book set in our time, with our technology, that's written like a really reflective sci-fi novel: There's ample commentary about the time we live in, Internet outrage culture and doomers, how viral stories can spiral out of control, often ruining lives in the process, and how despite our Internet-induced anxieties, alienation, and catastrophising, we live in a world that's doing far better than we like to believe. Jason Pargin seems to really understand humans both on an individual and societal level, and the book is jam-packed with observations and life lessons that will genuinely make you think, often based on mundane everyday things we take completely for granted.

There's some pretty heavy tirades by our incel antihero that were genuenely hard to listen to, especially the ones on sexual assault, so be warned about that. Mystery Chick does a good jo at shutting them down, though, so the book is far from an alt-right/incel soap box, more of a way to illustrate how deranged certain people can sound to people outside their tiny echo chambers, and there's character growth throughout the entire book.

Either way, this was one of the most fantastic reads I've enjoyed in a long time. I'm Starting to Worry... was a book I found myself listening to it in small chunks over time because I wanted it to last. I promise, this book will change how you see the world. Oh, and this needs to be adapted for TV or the big screen.

Loved this book. It's one of those books I didn't truly enjoy and appreciate until I got near the end, but once I did, I couldn't stop listening. Holy ◊◊◊◊ what a read.

Zombie apocalypse outbreak stories aren't really my genre of choice, but it has some cool twists, like the source of the outbreak, and its method of spreading, really not being what you're expecting. It has the usual zombie story tropes, but also the usual Pargin observations about society and human nature, and it can suddenly get realistic in unexpected ways. For example, you run into the typical group of young men who have trained for years and years with guns and indulged in macho fantasies about how they'll be heroes when the ◊◊◊◊ hits the fan, but when the outbreak actually happens they cower in their RV with their guns, and Amy has to bully them into actually doing something. Pargin dryly describes their training with guns in the woods as the antics of a bunch of young men who have stubbornly decided to remain children until the age of 35.

Also, the fact that the protagonists David and John are just two bumbling young rednecks (granted there's also Amy, who appears to have her ◊◊◊◊ together to a much larger degree) who on the one hand seem to have ample experience with fighting the supernatural, but who also keep managing to mess things up and embarrass themselves is funny, too. The book also plays the 'protagonists in horror movies keep doing stupid things' trope completely straight, there's several moments in the book where things would've gone a lot better --or the day could've been saved-- had only the heroes not done something incredibly reckless and stupid.

Also, although it's obviously fiction, it's presented as a non-fiction book, with the author (under his pseudonym 'David Wong') also being a character in the book, and talking about the (I take it fictional) controversy and class action lawsuit against the first book in the foreword, in a little monologue about how you probably shouldn't even read the first book because it makes him come across as a horrible person.

The book also has little gems like this one throughout:

Also, I love that it goes all out on the absurdity at the most unexpected of times:

Again, really loved this one. Got really emotional towards the end, too. Really good book, and I say that as someone who doesn't even really care for zombie stories.

Really nice slice of life story. Liked both the writing and the vibrant artwork. Lovale characters (I actually wanted to live with the protagonist as her roomie), also loved their friendship dynamics. Also as a white dude, it was really interesting to read a story from the perspective of black women. All in all a wonderful book!

Finally decided to read this due to some culture war controversy, and I'm glad I did. This book was informative and I imagine it'll be useful for both cis and questioning kids and youth. There were some things I just couldn't quite understand or relate to, but that's just because I'm on the outside of the trans community, and I guess I should view it as inspiration to do further research.

Either way, I'm grateful for the detractors for making me finally read this. Glad to see it enjoys such a high rating here.

Really didn't know what to make of this one. I recognized many of the same ideas from "I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom", which was my introduction to Pargin (aka David Wong), only taken to the extreme, I suppose, but whereas "I'm starting to worry" was one of my favourite reads in years, this one just didn't do it for me. I can appreciate the humor and absurdity, but it also has unlikeable characters, a plot and setting that didn't engage me and that in my eyes didn't make much sense and had major plot holes, and sooo much misogony. The hero is also brutally injured towards the end of the book, to a degree I just found disturbing, and she's also got a prior history of sexual and physical abuse from her mother's many abusive partners. This coupled with the villain's obsession with hating and wanting to sexually assault women, just came across as overdone and gross to me. Some reviewer said they found the violence against Zoey so exaggerated as to be hilarious. I never got the joke. Also, while the first two supervillains to come after Zoey were genuinely disturbing, I just found Molek... Tiring.

I loved "I'm starting to worry" and have lost count of how many times I've heard the audio book, and will definitely check out the rest of Pargin's bibliography, but... This one just didn't do it for me. It's only Pargin's third book, so I guess maybe he improved from here, but I think my next reads will be John Dies at the End series.

(edit to add: To be fair, I haven't read that many fantasy books and maybe if I had, I'd have understood and liked this book better. His sci-fi books are chock-full of satirical jabs at the sci-fi genre and its fans, and for all I know, this book has lots of in-jokes and references that flew over my head. Maybe I'd liked it a lot more if I had read Pratchett and other fantasy authors)

This was the first Croshaw book I didn't finish. I read (and greatly enjoyed) two of the "Will x the Galaxy for..." sci-fi books, but this just didn't appeal to me the same way. The premise is interesting: It's a darker take on the House in the Cerulean Sea-type setting where supernatural creatures and magic-attuned people are suppressed by the government and fight to be commonly accepted and normalized, but the book just doesn't pull it off well. The pacing isn't that good, a lot of different things keep happening but they all feel pretty unimpactful. There's a kind of angry Gilderoy Lockhart character who's clearly incompetent yet also incredibly full of himself, but he gets monotonous and predictable really quick. 

There's also satirical jabs at how people in Western societies can twist ourselves into pretzels trying to not offend people and wondering endlessly what words we should use for different people, conditions, and groups, but to be honest it felt a bit overdone, and the analogies felt reaching. To be frank, part of the time it just came across as him trying to be funny at the expense of trans people and other minorities (for example, the trite "but I identify as x" joke was thrown in).

The book also didn't succeed at setting up mysteries that actually hooked me --there's a killer going around murdering shoggoths, but I found myself not really caring who they were. I didn't really care about the shoggoths either, for that matter, they weren't written to be that sympathetic or likable, like the children in The House in the Cerulean Sea, more like a generic minority group that needed protection and spoke funny (their gurgling, slimy way of speaking actually got downright irritating when listening to the audio book). Angry Gilderoy Lockhart is hiding something, but what? I found myself not caring too much about that, either. As a matter of fact, all of the characters felt pretty shallow and stereotypical.

All in all, this was an interesting idea for a book, but in my eyes it didn't do a good job with the story it set out to tell.

I read the last book in this trilogy first (I didn't notice when buying it that it was part of a series), and I have to say Croshaw's writing skills have improved greatly since this book. Will Save the Galaxy for Food has the same quirky humour, satire, and endless sci-fi parody writing as Will Leave the Galaxy for Good, and that many of us already know from his Zero Punctuation game reviews, and the worldbuilding is still quirky and interesting, but it's also far less refined. The pacing isn't as good, the jokes aren't delivered as well, even though to be fair, they made me chortle lots of times, and to be honest I found that the plot lacked direction. To be honest, when I was a few chapters from the end I was just ready for it to be over.

I love the idea of there being a whole society of Han Solo-type space heroes, each with their personal starships, who were all rendered unemployed when the invention of teleportation made space travel obsolete. No longer able to save planets from aliens or space travellers from pirates, the now-starving star pilots desperately hawk for gigs like guided tours of the locations of their heroics, while reminiscing of the "golden age of star pilots". This is an excellent setup, and it's well-handled and built upon throughout the book. Add to this an anonymous author who struck it rich by writing fiction novels which are basically uncredited accounts of the star pilots' exploits (a fact for which the star pilots collectively want him dead), an evil corporate supervillain, and a variety of evil aliens and cyborgs for the heroes to face off against, and you have yourself a yarn that takes the heroes of the tale through a wide variety of locations and situations. 

Perhaps this is my biggest problem with the book, though --it doesn't linger in one place or situation for long, instead the protagonists are quickly whisked away to the next location by the plot every time you feel a story arc starting to get interesting.

All in all, this book wasn't bad by any means --it made me chortle plenty of times and it's also a wonderful sci-fi genre parody, but if you're only going to read one book in this series, I recommend you pick up Will Leave the Galaxy for Good instead.

This book is what the Hillbilly Elegy could've been, if JD Vance was actually a person who had grown up in an Appalachian community, and not just a grifter who just wanted to talk smack about a people he never belonged to.

First and foremost, this book was a lot. The Westovers get in horrible accidents all throughout the book, and one of the characters is also horribly emotionally and physically abusive. The book is part a depiction of growing up in a family that's isolated itself from society in many ways, a book about abuse and its after-effects, including gaslighting and denial, and a story about emerging into society at large after growing up so isolated you get your birth certificate at the age of nine, think Europe is a country, and hear of the Holocaust and the civil rights movement for the first time in university. Tara lived in such a dysfunctional family that she never learned the importance of showering more than once or twice a week, washing her hands, or even keeping a living space clean --in her words, if the stench was bearable, the apartment was clean (naturally, her flatmates in uni would come to disagree). Still, despite everything, she managed to pull through and do a phenomenal job in college, which is nothing short of incredible.

All in all, the book was one of the most riveting reads (listens) I've had in years. It's a cliche, but I literally could not put it down, and finished it in record time. I felt Tara praised her own achievements a bit too much sometimes, but still, overall a great book.