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juushikaGames played while listening to these books: Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Astroneer. Astroneer was a solid "it's okay" out of five. I love the lego-clicky-physicality of it and the gameplay loop works well. But that loop isn't diverse or robust enough that it can get away with such minimal narrative; by the time I got to the end I was ready to be done. And that's fine! but maybe not ideal for a sandbox.
Been having solid luck with these books, though.
Title: Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier
Author: Tom Kizzia
Narrator: Fred Sanders
Published: Random House, 2013
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 389,715
Text Number: 1460
Read Because: more true crime on audio while gaming, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is absolutely a premise I've encountered in fiction: a family patriarch uses geography and social isolation to indoctrinate his family into a self-lead cut. And Kizzia takes a novel-esque approach, with a nonlinear narrative and a dual-stream narrative that tracks the family's external perception & interactions alongside its internal events. It's not so much "the truth is stranger than fiction"—just that the truth is compelling and painfully real. The escalations from suspicions of familial weirdness to first-person testimony of the father's abuse feels like a participant discovery in a distinctly culpable way: what warning signs will onlookers dismiss in favor of believing in the romance of a distant wild setting and a certain set of social aspirations? (And what petty community disputes will or won't finally bring those issues to a head?) Nuanced, eminently readable, evocative but in a way that recognizes how those same evocative elements can be leveraged as tools of grooming and abuse.
Title: Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult
Author: Faith Jones
Narrator: Jaime Lamchick
Published: HarperAudio, 2021
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 385
Total Page Count: 392,125
Text Number: 1485
Read Because: reivewed here, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The memoir of a woman raised in the Children of God cult. Jones writes in "present tense," that is, from her changing perspective as she grew up, which humanizes and normalize what could read as an outlandish experience—while contextualizing how deeply fucked those experiences are, the realization not just of "my childhood wasn't normal" but of what normal should or shouldn't be, and how reoccurring (and thus totally "normal") social flaws and systems can be leveraged to build insular, powerful forms of social control. The most important thing I've learned from nonfiction about cults is that cult members can be anyone: specific cults target specific kinds of people, but those people aren't gullible, or stupid, or necessarily different except in their experiences; a memoir, with its local focus within a big picture, really hammers that home. The ending is rushed, perhaps inevitably, as healing falls outside of the scope of the cult and is probably harder to shape into a finished narrative. But on the whole this is compelling, personable, and honest.
Title: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
Author: Judith Flanders
Narrator: Jennifer M. Dixon
Published: Tantor Audio, 2019 (2011)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 555
Total Page Count: 393,250
Text Number: 1487
Read Because: reviewed by Katherine Addison, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This catalogs Victorian trends in crime, crime reporting, policing, and popular culture as they gave rise to the modern concept of police and detectives. As such it's a morass of names and summaries of crimes real and fictional; this worked fine for me on audio, where I could let the book continue apace, sliding over names to get a general feel for the trends. It's dry, but dryly humorous; the glut of detail can overwhelm the author's actual arguments; aforementioned trends aren't surprising but are compelling, particularly the reminder that a) crime is profoundly politicized b) the public's relationship with crime and reporting has long been sensationalist and, most relevantly, c) the police in specific have never existed or operated in good faith or, like … competently.
Been having solid luck with these books, though.
Title: Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier
Author: Tom Kizzia
Narrator: Fred Sanders
Published: Random House, 2013
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 389,715
Text Number: 1460
Read Because: more true crime on audio while gaming, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is absolutely a premise I've encountered in fiction: a family patriarch uses geography and social isolation to indoctrinate his family into a self-lead cut. And Kizzia takes a novel-esque approach, with a nonlinear narrative and a dual-stream narrative that tracks the family's external perception & interactions alongside its internal events. It's not so much "the truth is stranger than fiction"—just that the truth is compelling and painfully real. The escalations from suspicions of familial weirdness to first-person testimony of the father's abuse feels like a participant discovery in a distinctly culpable way: what warning signs will onlookers dismiss in favor of believing in the romance of a distant wild setting and a certain set of social aspirations? (And what petty community disputes will or won't finally bring those issues to a head?) Nuanced, eminently readable, evocative but in a way that recognizes how those same evocative elements can be leveraged as tools of grooming and abuse.
Title: Sex Cult Nun: Breaking Away from the Children of God, a Wild, Radical Religious Cult
Author: Faith Jones
Narrator: Jaime Lamchick
Published: HarperAudio, 2021
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 385
Total Page Count: 392,125
Text Number: 1485
Read Because: reivewed here, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The memoir of a woman raised in the Children of God cult. Jones writes in "present tense," that is, from her changing perspective as she grew up, which humanizes and normalize what could read as an outlandish experience—while contextualizing how deeply fucked those experiences are, the realization not just of "my childhood wasn't normal" but of what normal should or shouldn't be, and how reoccurring (and thus totally "normal") social flaws and systems can be leveraged to build insular, powerful forms of social control. The most important thing I've learned from nonfiction about cults is that cult members can be anyone: specific cults target specific kinds of people, but those people aren't gullible, or stupid, or necessarily different except in their experiences; a memoir, with its local focus within a big picture, really hammers that home. The ending is rushed, perhaps inevitably, as healing falls outside of the scope of the cult and is probably harder to shape into a finished narrative. But on the whole this is compelling, personable, and honest.
Title: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime
Author: Judith Flanders
Narrator: Jennifer M. Dixon
Published: Tantor Audio, 2019 (2011)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 555
Total Page Count: 393,250
Text Number: 1487
Read Because: reviewed by Katherine Addison, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This catalogs Victorian trends in crime, crime reporting, policing, and popular culture as they gave rise to the modern concept of police and detectives. As such it's a morass of names and summaries of crimes real and fictional; this worked fine for me on audio, where I could let the book continue apace, sliding over names to get a general feel for the trends. It's dry, but dryly humorous; the glut of detail can overwhelm the author's actual arguments; aforementioned trends aren't surprising but are compelling, particularly the reminder that a) crime is profoundly politicized b) the public's relationship with crime and reporting has long been sensationalist and, most relevantly, c) the police in specific have never existed or operated in good faith or, like … competently.
