stuff i read Jan -Jun 2025

[tabacoychanel]

Kelly Braffet, The Unwilling (2020)(The Barrier Lands #1) If you’re after an epic fantasy where the characters cause things to happen, put it right out of your mind. This is a story about people under siege. Four powerless children are raised by a sadistic megalomaniac in a palace. They’re not children anymore but they’re still powerless. There is an unnatural magic bond between two of them, the megalomaniac’s heir and the foundling. Kelly Braffet is insanely good at writing about intimate relationships—not intimate as in sex; intimate as in they know how to drive the knife in when they hurt each other. I read and enjoyed her debut, Josie and Jack, but that was a young adult novel with no fantastic elements. The Unwilling is much more ambitious. This is not a book for everyone but it was so totally the book for me that I made my husband be on toddler duty all afternoon so I could wallow in it. It feels decadent to do that for a mere book but I was e l e c t r i f i e d.

Years ago I mainlined Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and I realized it wasn’t actually a show about stopping the AI singularity (this was 2008 so it was ahead of the curve). It was a show about people stuck in claustrophobically close quarters, bound by a secret, who were heartily sick of each other’s faces but also: no one else alive understands what they’re going through (since they’re time travelers). The Unwilling reproduces that sense of claustrophobia. The four kids are bricked up in a literal castle trying to survive one tyrannical regime after another. Three of them are quite unlikeable characters, including prickly protagonist Judah. The Goodreads commenter who really spoke to my soul was “I know this is Judah’s story but I would die for Elly” YES EXACTLY!!! Here is what is compelling about Judah:

All her life the only thing she’s had the power to do is say no. No to doing magic, no to Gavin’s suicidal ideation, no no no and the book ends with a cliffhanger where she says her loudest no yet.
Here is my favorite passage, it’s Elly talking to Judah about Gavin:

”He’ll never deliberately hurt you, and he’ll be sorry when it happens, but he’ll hurt you all the same, and he’ll keep on hurting you, because somewhere deep inside he thinks you can’t walk away from him.”

Gavin is one of my favorite archetypes, the charismatic scapegrace lordling who is not bad but weak. How he behaves depends on which quarter the wind is strongest. The nature of his position—he’s the crown prince—versus Judah’s position—no official position at court—militates against any kind of equality in their relationship. But the nature of the magic bond that links them means that she can hurt him physically merely by hurting herself (there is a scene where she filets her own arm to get Gavin’s attention). SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS In an act of rebellion against her highly circumscribed life, Judah takes up with the stablemaster, and it’s nice escape valve until they’re discovered:

Gavin felt as if Darid had tracked mud on Gavin’s favorite rug, or lamed his favorite horse. His. Judah was his. Just because he, himself, wasn’t fucking her—

He thinks of Judah like a possession! Does he also want to fuck her?Probably, but beside the point. All the relationships in this book are so gnarly, I loved every bit of it. Of course it’s also super grim and the humor is dark dark dark.

Anne Bishop, Written in Red (The Others #1)(2013) I remember Anne Bishop being better than this. While I can’t accuse her of neglecting worldbuilding— this book could have done with less worldbuilding— there should be some chemistry between the leads. I don’t understand what Simon sees in Meg. In fact I don’t understand what any of the terra indigine see in Meg, the specialist girl who ever specialed. The terra indigine are the natives of North America, humans are the colonizers, and in this alternate/fantasy history the former have the upper hand. The humans are confined to reservations. Meg is running away from a bad home situation, Simon becomes her employer, and they spend 80% of the book arguing about safety precautions (people keep trying to kidnap Meg) instead of developing actual intimacy. At the 80% mark it goes, without warning, full throttle and the final 20% was one long climactic chase scene that was thrilling to read. The most interesting character is the anatagonist, Asia, who is brazenly manipulative and mad that Simon doesn’t care for her boobs. I would read an entire spinoff series about Asia conquering Hollywood but I don’t think I will continue with this series even if my completionist tendencies pushed me to finish the book.

Elizabeth Lev, The Tigress of Forlì: Renaissance Italy’s Most Courageous Countess, Caterina Riario Sforza de’ Medici (2011) I don’t know that biographers should be 100% in the tank for their subjects but Caterina Sforza is famous enough it’s fine, there are other people with nuanced takes. This was a slow burn in that it has a weaker storytelling element than I’m used to (the author is an art historian) but all the details are additive, and by the end I was fully immersed in Caterina’s world. I was so invested that I now have a better grasp of Renaissance Italy’s shifting political alliances than I did after mainlining two Borgias shows (Showtime has better acting while Canal+ has better writing). When Caterina came home to Florence at the end of her life—she died at 46, which was young, plenty of noblewomen lived into their sixties—I wept. Nonfiction seldom makes me this emotional. I can’t believe I wrote the words came home to Florence, since Caterina was initially married to the man who tried (ineptly) to assassinate the rulers of Florence in the infamous Pazzi Conspiracy. But that’s what I mean by shifting alliances. How the hell did these people keep their thrones when they had to negotiate with a new pope every few years, and the king of France’s army hovering on their doorstep?! Caterina’s m.o. is she’s athletic, she leads from the front, she’s a doer and every time she’s in a funk her mental health is improved if there’s an army to fight off. Even if you’re not super familiar with the time period you’ve probably heard of Cesare Borgia laying siege to her fortress at Forlì. Caterina’s martial prowess sets her apart from other famous contemporaries like Isabella d’Este or Lucrezia Borgia. For me, the biggest tragedy of her life is that her sons grow into feckless layabouts whining for a bigger allowance, heedless of how much she gave up to protect their patrimony. Where is the filial piety? How is it that not one of these kids inherited Caterina’s vision? One can have one’s fleeting hedonistic pleasures after one builds a legacy. Years ago I visited the Sforza Castle in Milan and the place was plastered in exhibits to Caterina. You would have thought it was the seat of her power. In fact she left Milan at age ten. She is just way more famous than anyone else who ever lived there, and casts a very long shadow.

Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book (2019) “All she had to do, after all, was endure what she already knew—her own complicity.” What if Faerie was explicitly rather than implicitly Catholic? What do people really want from each other and what do we owe each other? This is a wide-ranging tome of a fantasy. I don’t think itquite hangs together but it’s an exhilarating reading experience. It’s about Taryn, who is a writer. Nobody understands Taryn but does she want to be understood, fuck no. It’s about one-sided relationships and how it is imperative that we all behave as if we have souls. There is a descent into the underworld. There is an imperious faerie queen whose allegiance is iffy and who says things like ”I’m carrying every promise I ever made and and I can scarcely support the weight of those I broke.” There are some scenes that are burned into the back of my eyelids, like Taryn and Jacob chained to that tire at low tide. The prose starts out cold & clinical, and it only really pops when we get to Faerie. When we meet Shift. Ah, Shift. Shift is definitely the character who is living rent-free in a penthouse in the author’s head.

Taryn’s foundational trauma has to do with a fire that burned down the library of her childhood home. It’s no coincidence she grows up to write nonfiction books about censorship and book burning. I love the way Knox handles her divorce from Alan as a footnote; in the first section Taryn’s married to Alan and in the second section she’s abruptly not. We are given no details. A detective who interviews Taryn and Alan in their shared flat observes he saw not one single book anywhere in the house. Tell me your heart is closed without telling me your heart is closed lol.

”I promised not to tell.” “I doubt you promised anyone whom you owe more than you owe me.”
She was in pain and waiting for some retaliatory act that would hurt her enough to distract her from the confused hurt
not because she understood her mother’s sadness but because she was angry at being made to witness it.
Most of the good in the world is remedial. It’s fixing things and caring for people.

If Elizabeth Knox ever republishes the various stories-within-a-story contained in The Absolute Book I would buy that short story collection in a heartbeat.

Layne Fargo, The Favorites (2025) “Wuthering Heights but make them ice dancers” is such a killer premise and I’m ecstatic to report this book nails it. The final quarter sort of ran out of steam but overall it recreated the raw power of the original, while making everyone appreciably less awful than their canon counterparts. Heath in particular is so much easier to root for than Heathcliff. On the other hand, all the characters are definitely worse people than their real-life skating analogues, which makes sense in a story built upon the drama of switching partners in pursuit of winning. Layne Fargo really added something to this well-loved, often-adapted text with the addition of the figure skating angle, because it gives Kat something to care about: “Desire for the gold, for the adulation of the audience, for Heath—it all felt the same, flaring bright inside me.” The great tragedy of their romance is that Kat wants to win and she wants Heath, whereas Heath has always just wanted all of Kat. Can two people be everything to each other? In the real world, probably not. But I enjoyed watching Kat and Heath be extra about it, and I cheered the rehabilitation of Isabella and Linton, whom I found insipid in the original Wuthering Heights but in this version their existence doesn’t just propel the plot, you actually understand why Kat and Heath might be drawn to them as partners.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814) The strongest reaction this book provokes in me is Mrs Norris is the wooooorst. This was my third reread and I think I’ve finally settled whether it’s an overly complex book (too complex for my poor brain) or just lackluster storytelling: it’s the latter. Mansfield Park is a story about people whose insides don’t match their outsides. It features Austen’s most timid and passive heroine, Fanny Price. I don’t per se have a problem with passivity; I am a big fan of Persuasion’s Anne Eliot and Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood. Mansfield Park just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It keeps circling around and around and even the set-pieces where you have five or six characters all in the same room don’t move the plot forward at all. Which is not to say that it didn’t raise a quiverful of interesting questions. For instance, is Sir Thomas Bertram a good patriarch? Is there such a thing as a good patriarch? On the one hand you have valedictory moments where he stands up for Fanny like “my niece walk!” and “she must have a fire in the east room.” Otoh it sounds like he’s madder she didn’t consult him about rejecting Henry Crawford than the fact she turned down Henry’s suit. And: What happens when you split Lizzy Bennet’s lively wit and moral core between two characters, Mary Crawford and Fanny Price? Would I like Edmund more if he wasn’t always trying to mentor Fanny (yes, yes I would: Fanny is worth ten of him)? Is this the most Brontë-esque of Austen’s books or does that honor remain with Northanger Abbey?

I remember now why I was rooting so hard for Fanny on my first read: Fanny feels things, sometimes too acutely. She is curious about things, in a way Mary Crawford is not; Mary seems to be sheathed in this chrysalis of cynicism. Fanny feels truly sorry for Mary—Mary, her chief romantic rival!— when Mary is blindsided with the knowledge that Edmund is to be for the cloth. Fanny feels sorry for Mr Rushworth, for the publicly embarrassing way Maria leaves him, because Mr Rushworth is a dullard but he’s a human being. Fanny should have married Henry Crawford, the most nearly-reformed of Austen’s rakes, and you should all read this AU about what would have happened if she did.

Hernan Diaz, Trust (2022) It was rewarding, but a “brain-off” read it was emphatically not. It’s about a fictional Guilded Age finance mogul but I think it’s a mistake to approach this book as literary fiction—instead, think of it as a mystery. You’ll have a much better time, and you won’t be turned off by the torpid first section (“like reading the wikipedia entry of an Edith Wharton novel not the novel itself,” quips one reviewer). Trust is doing something structurally interesting, telling the same story four times from different perspectives, each narrative in conversation with the others. Ida’s section, the third one, is the heart of it. The parallels between her anarchist father and her Wall Street CEO boss are obviously not coincidental. Just last week I had a man mansplain the word “mansplain” to me, so I guess I understand maybe a sliver of the way Ida feels.

David Weber, On Basilisk Station (1993) (Honor Harrington #1) Military sci-fi with its endless strategy sessions and space battles usually puts me to sleep but this was propulsive. Captain Honor Harrington of the Royal Manticorian Navy assumes her first command under impossible circumstances—as in it’s literally impossible to do the task given the resources at her disposal. She makes it work anyway. The sheer grit on this girl! The loyalty she inspires in her crew! If you’re after competence porn, this is the ticket. She singlehandedly sees off a foreign invasion! Nerd alert: During the climactic chase scene Weber splices in a five-page aside to tell us about the physicist who invented hyperspace drives. At times I felt I could see through the story to the Horatio Hornblower books which inspired it. I do enjoy a good naval adventure, and each book in the series seems to be set in a new locale (just like my beloved Temeraire series) but what made me uncomfortable is that Honor has zero qualms about the Navy as an institution. She’s just here to do her job, and she leaves the politicking to the smarmy bureaucrats.

T. Kingfisher, Nettle and Bone (2022) We open with a charnel pit, a harp made of corpses, a dog made of bones. Our protagonist has been set an impossible task. This is the cruel logic of fairy tales. As a reader I immediately have a head full of questions, though Kingfisher is in no hurry to satisfy them. We go about collecting our found family, a motley crew of questers including one (1) sunshine witch and one (1) grumpy witch. Where Kingfisher shines is her imagery. This story isn’t horror but she is drawing on her horror roots; I found the goblin market scene particularly memorable, and I am something of a connoisseur of goblin markets. I also desperately want to to know the ins and outs of fairy godmotherhood, like is there a certificate program I can enroll in?? Night classes I can take?? This book is held together by the dog. The romance is not convincing and the villain is not convincing but it starts with the dog and it ends with the dog. “Some things come into being once it’s inevitable that they will exist.” “But just because you need someone doesn’t mean they are under any obligation to provide.”

Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword (2024) “But of course he wasn’t the one, he thought, there were no ones anymore. The gods no longer make heroes.” ”You’re the other ones, the sidekicks, the spear carriers. The stage is empty now but for the stagehands, and who will play the story?” Took me two months to finish this book because it meandered so much but I was weeping openly by the end. I’ve read four of this man’s books and I still don’t have a read on him as an author. He’s jamming unheroic characters into hero’s arcs. He’s an extraordinary stylist, he does that high-low register-switching thing that you see in a lot of online writing. He reminds me of Tamsyn Muir in that the trappings are goth or grimdark but the core of his characters is good. Collum is on a quest to save the kingdom but his main task is to beat his own demons. I don’t know how Grossman springs these reversals that feel (to me) like they come out of nowhere but always slap: the Round Table initiation hazing ritual, the Lancelot reveal. His fight scenes are unimpeachable. I don’t necessarily enjoy the experience of consuming a Grossman story but I’m glad to have read them because they give me so much to chew on.

Jennifer Armintrout, From Blood and Ash (2020)(Blood and Ash#1) It is impossible to overstate how bad this book is. Guys, it is so bad I was skimming it at the rate of 2 seconds per page. It’s not even a bodyguard romance—I was on a bodyguard romance kick—because it’s clear he’s a secret prince fairly early on. The sex scenes are insanely hot but there is literally no connective tissue between them. How this woman has published seven further books in this series….the mind boggles.

M.L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven (2023) “Even after everything else in the world had collapsed, an invincible shard of Sciona’s pride remained. Thank God Sciona’s ego superseded her immortal soul.” This book well exceeded my expectations for a mindless romantasy romp, and I’m still thinking about it a month later. In fact it’s not romantasy at all, I think i got it mixed up with another title, it’s an immersive steampunk experience that tackles the very topical subject of our complicity in oppressive systems via the evergreen setup of master/slave romance. (Thomil is not technically anyone’s property but a second-class citizen he assuredly is). Wang as a writer understands that the worst part is not that Thomil is attracted to Sciona but that he trusted her and she let him down—don’t worry Sciona spends the rest of the book trying to fix it. Such a firecracker of an ending, this book. I loved it to pieces. I loved that Sciona makes no bones about her ruthless ambition and does not apologize for seeking glory; she does good work and she is rightly proud of it. The toxic misogyny this engenders from her male colleagues is pretty ugly though zero percent surprising. I loved how well-earned the yearning was between Sciona and Thomil, a great example of heat without explicit smut. I loved that Thomil’s daughter, in her first appearance onscreen, tries to kill Sciona….and keeps on trying. I think she pauses her assassination attempts only because Thomil and Sciona rope her into plotting a revolution?? Like, at no point does Cara change her mind about Sciona, she eventually just accepts that Thomil loves Sciona because he’s a weirdo like that. I loved that Sciona’s aunt and cousin, faced with the truth, also don’t care/don’t think the Kwen are human either. These are the biggest-heartiest folks Sciona knows! If even they resist the mildest change, what hope is there for this society?

Why yes, it is true that the book’s indigenous culture, the Kwen, have no distinctive culture. It’s true the colonizers are uniformly, cartoonishly evil. It’s true the dialogue is clunky, especially when Sciona and Thomil are hashing out their political disagreements. It’s true the worldbuilding is rather ponderous and infodumpy. I don’t care, I think I’m going to need to buy a hard copy of this book (I borrowed it from the library) for future rereads. Obvious pairing is obvious: R.F. Kuang's Babel.

”Is it better to be safe and broke than it is to be dead?”
”So you were right about Bringham,” Sciona said, “and maybe you’re right about everything else too. But you’re wrong about yourself. You’re a good father.”
Sciona’s only distinction among these mages was that she was a more honest monster than any of them. And she would die an honest mage of Tiran: finely dressed and filthy-souled, taking with arrogance what was not hers to take.

Abby Jimenez, The Friend Zone (2019) Not as watertight as Just for the Summer, nor is it plumbing the same emotional depths, but I still had a great time and no trouble turning pages. Damn, Abby really goes hard for these carpenter-firefighter bastions of masculinity; she coulda gone for the trifecta and made him a lumberjack too. The protagonist otoh is a literal Cool Girl, like that passage from Gone Girl that’s making fun of Cool Girls? But unironically. I don’t know how to feel about that. My brain is like “Cool Girls aren’t real! ‘Effortless’ hotness is a patriarchal construct!” Otoh this is not a book that is trying to engage that part of your brain. I’m not saying there’s no overlap between this book’s intended audience and Gone Girl, as I personally enjoyed both, but they are trying to do such different things it’s apples to oranges.

Meg Shaffer, The Lost Story (2024) A portal fantasy about the ways you can/can’t go back home that hooked me from page one. The last time I fell into a portal fantasy was, oh god, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, which was so meta I lost the thread of the story a few times. Shaffer is a much more conscientious storyteller and I read this in one greedy gulp. It’s definitely YA insofar as we’re not here to ask are monarchies legitimate, or how do our adult protagonists pay the bills, but I feel like Shaffer hits that Goldilocks spot: just enough conflict both internal/external to keep you invested without overloading your brain. This book could easily have been about Jeremy and Rafe falling back in love after fifteen years, but that would have been a very one-note story (even if that one note is “childhood friends to lovers,” my actual favorite thing). By introducing Emilie—and Emilie’s pet rat, the real GOAT—the group dynamics shift perceptibly. The first time Rafe shot the spider at forty yards my heart stopped because I knew where this was going: “His father is a bomb and only Rafe can defuse him before he blows again and take everyone with him.” I think this book pairs well with these National Service fics about how you can’t go back to Narnia; mind, the tone of the Narnia fics is much grimmer but I think the themes are a match.

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)(tr. from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Beata Pozniak) “Being healthy is an insecure state and does not bode well. It’s better to be ill in a quiet way, then at least we know what we’re going to die of.” Not my standard fare but I took a chance on this buzzy literary title and it was surreal. I stumbled on some reviews that were praising the tidiness of the mystery and I was like…roll back the tape, there’s a mystery?!! I thought I was just chilling with our old lady narrator and her host of chronic maladies, who thinks animals all have souls, whose life’s work is translating William Blake into Polish, who keeps throwing out these incisive observations about modern life and you’re nodding along and then she chases it with “I have often wondered if the people who did the television programming were trying to display to us their extensive astrological knowledge.” Because she is a 100% sincere astrology devotee. Her neighbors are being murdered left and right but I clearly did not even notice because I was so intent on unspooling this crazy lady’s mind. I don’t mean crazy in the derogatory sense, I think as the reader we are meant to question if it’s really her who’s out of her gourd or if there is something wrong with a society that treats people & animals this way.

Linda Holmes, Back After This (2025) “What sucks is wanting to be thanked instead of loved, because you can believe you deserve it.” A long-suffering podcast producer finally gets to host her own show and it’s not exactly the hard-hitting reportage she imagined: she’s supposed to let some lifestyle influencer set her up on twenty blind dates. This was a top-flight contemporary romance— fyi a little lighter on the romantic relationship and heavier on the existential career angst than the average romance, but I thought it was glorious. I learned gobs about the podcast industry—a rapidly evolving/dying industry like any other industry these days—and I especially enjoyed the character of the influencer/relationship mentor:

“You look so sad.” I had indeed been a little sad, but that wasn’t what she meant. I was pretty sure that to her, “sad” meant something like “unlikely to want a margarita.”

This book is generally pro-influencer, insofar as influencing is a job like any other job, and I can’t help but contrast it favorably to Jenny Mollen’s City of Likes which also features a regular-girl protagonist who falls under the thrall of an influencer. That book was so hollow and this one has such heart. I do think the ending is not as satisfying as it could be, but the first few chapters are so gripping:

Brad the ad guy: We’re talking to a company that does meals especially for single people.
Cecily: Isn’t that just Lean Cuisine?

Bad unfair stuff happens to Cecily but fundamentally she had some agency and she made a hash of it, and she almost loses the guy over her poor decisions, but don’t worry this is romance and we get our happy ending.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) The power of a punchy title! Four thousand weeks is just the average human life expectancy, eighty years. That’s it. A former/recovering productivity geek writes an NYT bestseller stuffed with nuggets of philosophical wisdom—I started taking notes by chapter 2 because every one of his quotes is a winner— and the keyword that recurs over and over is “discomfort.” We’ll do anything, in our daily lives, to avoid it. That’s his central insight. What form that avoidance takes may vary from person to person—I personally found the “boredom” and “distractions” chapters less useful but I felt very called out by the “indefinitely deferred future plans” chapter. Idk I think it’s kind of ironic that a book like this that preaches “hard choices, no shortcuts” has achieved such a cult status that Burkeman’s publishing team has pushed him to write tie-ins (there’s one called Meditations for Mortals). Gotta admit, you are not going to find another book in the self-help genre whose prose goes down as smooth as this one:

The reason it’s hard to focus on a conversation with your spouse isn’t that you’re surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table. On the contrary, “surreptitiously checking your phone beneath the dinner table” is what you do because it’s hard to focus on the conversation—because listening takes effort and patience and the spirit of surrender.
defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain.
”missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.
treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state
There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, to which we could steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.

I think this book pairs well with “The Reenchanted World” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, an essay that kind of meanders in the middle but please stick with it.

C.J. Cherryh, The Dreamstone (1983)(Arafel #1) Giving major Tolkien energy as far as the sheer scope and lived-in-ness of the world. The world is in a time of transition, it’s the dawn of the age of men, one of our POVs is the last of the fairies. As far as the human POVs I kept thinking we were going to stick with this one and I’d turn the page and the next section would be his grown son riding out to battle. In a society bound by kinship and fealty, what sort of faith do we owe to those who are faithless to us? This book is certainly a minor entry in Cherryh’s (vast, impressive) oeuvre, and I would not recommend anyone start here, but I never regret spending time with Cherryh even if reading it is more effortful than I initially bargained for.

T. Kingfisher, Swordheart (2018)(Swordheart #1) Ah, Kingfisher can spark heat between her romantic leads, and this is the proof! This book made me giddy down to the tips of my toes. Halla is a housekeeper slash penniless widow; Sarkis is an immortal sword sworn to protect her. They are so gone on each other. I read Kingfisher’s Nettle and Bone quite recently and I have it fresh in my mind, and while I think everything else about that book—the secondary characters, the magical system—is more interesting, Swordheart’s romance is far and away more convincing. And I liked the stakes are not “save the kingdom.” With a few minor tweaks it could have been published as a romance, but of course Kingfisher has an established fanbase as a fantasy author, and publishers are in the business of selling books. I say this with trepidation but the obvious pairing here is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls, less for the widow-having-a-midlife-crisis-falls-for-a-swordsman angle and more for the weird little theological sidequests the authors send their character on. Trepidation because it’s unfair to compare anyone to Bujold writing at the height of her power, of course. Bujold is working on whole other plane. Swordheart otoh asks sensible questions about whether it’s more pernicious to be bad or to be weak; whether we should give people the benefit of the doubt or look for assassins lurking behind every corner. A thoroughly engaging book that delivers exactly what it promises, brimming with humor.