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#the seattle review of books

aesthetic-solar-space · 1 year

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Icebreaker - UCMH #1 by Hannah Grace, 447 pages, published November 22nd 2022 - 🌟🌟🌟🌟 I will openly admit I had one main issue with this book, and thinking on it now I think it was probably the only issue I had with the book. That issue being it was too long, in a weird way. So I loved every scene I wanted to read all of it. But there was definitely a minimum of five chapters at least that just weren’t needed and could have been extra stuff, my thing is these are directly in the middle of the story as a bunch of stuff is going on - we get this lull of happy fluff that in my opinion could have just waited and would have helped with my feelings of feeling like I was being dragged along. All of that said I want to say I did really really like this book and all of the characters within it. There are so many potential paths I can see the following books possibly going down and all of them excite me. Cheers to our Olympic gold medalist Anastasia Allen!! You maybe have started your story in some bad relationships both with people, planners, and food. But by the end you were flourishing and being the best you that there ever could be by surrounding yourself with people who love you (The Boys, Lola, Nathan), working on yourself when it came to food and emotions, and just overall making time to enjoy the moment!! If you haven’t picked up Icebreaker by Hannah Grace yet - I 100% recommended it as an amazing holiday break relaxation read! Also if anyone has anymore ice skating romance books I need them yesterday!! Please and thank you. 💕⛸️

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alexmfrank · 2 years

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Hollow Kingdom

By: Kira Jane Buxton S.T., a domesticated crow, is a bird of simple pleasures: hanging out with his owner Big Jim, trading insults with Seattle’s wild crows (those idiots), and enjoying the finest food humankind has to offer: Cheetos ®. Then Big Jim’s eyeball falls out of his head, and S.T. starts to feel like something isn’t quite right. His most tried-and-true remedies–from beak-delivered…

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#Animals #book review #Domestic pets #Hollow Kingdom #Kira Jane Buxton #Post-apocalyptic #Sarcastic crow #Seattle setting #Zombies

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georgelthomas · 30 days

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Book Review: Together in a Broken World by Paul Michael Winters

Book Review: Together in a Broken World by Paul Michael Winters #ReaderCommunity #ReadingCommunity #BookReview #WritingCommunity #WriterCommunity #Reading #Review #LGBT #LGBTQIA #QueerStories #Romance #Postapocalyptic #virus #gay #Seattle #NineStarPress

Hi everyone! How are you all? It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another review, and today, I’m reviewing Together in a Broken World by Paul Michael Winters. Together in a Broken World will be released in paperback on May 21 2024, by NineStar Press and is 380 pages long. The PlotTogether in a Broken World tells the story of two boys trying to survive in a deadly world where a virus has…

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#book review #gay #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA+#post apocalyptic #review #romance #Seattle #virus

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filipmagnuswrites · 5 months

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The Short Story #116 - Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart by Winston Turnage

Previous | Next Are you in the mood for some nightmare fuel? Excellent, because “Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart”, a flash fiction piece by Winston Turnage, does fantastic work of presenting itself as such. A creature that might be God but is likely something far more sinister has appeared, and it wields power that makes superheroes seem like a joke by comparison. I was made to think of a dark…

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#book blog #Dr. Seattle Opens His Heart #Fantasy #fiction #Lightspeed Magazine #literature #short story review #superhero #Winston Turnage #Writing

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sandythereadingcafe · 6 months

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REVIEW TOUR:

THE STAND-IN (Single in Seattle) by Kristen Proby at The Reading Cafe:

'The premise is captivating and emotional; the characters are determined, sassy and spirited'

Valentine PR & Literary Management

#books #reviews #book tours #The STand-In #Single in Seattle #Kristen Proby #The Reading Cafe

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bargainsleuthbooks · 8 months

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Nora Ephron: A Biography #KristinMargueriteDoidge #AudiblePlus #BookReview #AudiobookReview #ChicagoReviewPress

#NoraEphron is a writing hero of mine, and I recently discovered the first in-depth biography of her for free as part of the #AudiblePlus catalog. Score! #biography #bookreview #audiobookreview #chicagoreviewpress #kristinmargueritedoidge #bargainsleuth

Nora Ephron was one of the most popular, accomplished, and beloved writers in American journalism and film. Nora A Biography is the first comprehensive portrait of the Manhattan-born girl who forged a path of her own, earning accolades and adoration from critics and fans alike. Author Kristin Marguerite Doidge explores the tremendous successes and disappointing failures Ephron sustained in her…

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danieldukeauthor · 11 months

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Barnes & Noble 'Best Books of 2023' list

‘Jesse James and the Lost Templar Treasure’ by Daniel J. Duke, published by Inner Traditions – Bear & Co., has been listed as one of Barnes & Noble Best Books of 2023 in both the Templar and Freemason genres. The book features hidden treasures left behind by Jesse James with cryptic codes and maps that Daniel J. Duke, his great-great-grandson, decodes and explores. Duke reveals lost treasures and…

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#Barnes & Noble #Best Books of 2023 #bestseller #books #Freemason #inner traditions #Jesse James #Knights Templar Grand Master #Kris Helt #Lost Treasure #nonfiction #publisher #Rachel Dehning #Raves & Reviews #Seattle Book Review #Templar #Timothy Hogan #Whiskey & Wit

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welcometomy20s · 1 year

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January 10, 2023

I have been frequenting Crossroads frequently (It’s the mall with two Dick’s. I don’t know why they don’t use that as a selling point, but whatever) and I have been meaning to get to Barnes & Nobles that opened some time ago, but I haven’t… until now.

This Barnes & Noble was a lot different than other Barnes & Nobles, with their characteristic dark brown shelves and a general library-like setting, which always felt comforting, but the shelves here have this odd angle on its side that made the place more like a showroom which was a bit disappointing. Another disappointment was that all the science books were filed under reference, which meant I had to search for quite a while to find one.

There was a relatively large manga section at the center of the store, which while understandable, feels immensely odd in a Barnes & Noble store. Time and time again, it’s pretty clear that the anime and manga industry doesn’t know how big their franchise is worldwide, and in some sense feels a bit miffed that that is the case, almost. It’s interesting.

Otherwise, it’s a fine establishment, it seems to have enough selection of books, just it doesn’t have the feel or look of Barnes & Noble of yore. I wouldn’t be reluctant to visit the place again.

#books #seattle #review

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booksandwords · 1 year

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New Year's with the Single Dad by Whitley Cox

Series: The Single Dads of Seattle, #6 Read time: 1 Day Rating: 3.5/5 Stars

The Quote: Don’t shy away from love simply because your heart has been broken. The heart mends. The heart is resilient. You are worthy of love. You are worthy of being someone’s everything again. Don’t waste the best years of your life angry at what was, and instead spend those years searching and hoping for what could be. — Zara Olsen

I quite liked this novella. Zara Olsen and Emmett Strong have quite possibly the most delightful meet cute I've read in a while. Twin coffee orders, as in identical and spoken in an almost eerie synchroisity. That is just the first of three unlikely conincidences that ahow their alignment. Their similarly aged children with the nicknames Nono and Jojo. Those super cute and adorably manipulative childrens comfort giraffes Zelda and Ziggy. Even their own childhood comfort toys still so present in their lives (Arabella Blossom von Bearson and Dr Arnold Strong respectivly) tied to their grandparents in diffent ways. The novella plays with the fate. The whole piece takes place over around 24 hours (excluding epilogue). In the first twelve they meet four times which includes them seeing each other in their professional settings as a florist and a doctor. This is a seasonal work that uses NYE as a time of growth and change. The plot can be kinda predictable but that really doesn't bother me if a work is as season focused as this.

I'm just going to add a quute dump here...

• "Until Valentine’s season hit them like that fat winged-baby’s arrow, that is. Then it’d be all red and pink hearts and more glitter—AKA the herpes of craft supplies." — (Emmett) Omg yes. My besties ex hated like an almost phobia level hate of glitter. It really does get everywhere. • “This might hurt a little. But I’m going to numb the area before I apply the sutures.” Zara swallowed and nodded. “Okay. I’ve been through childbirth. A little sting is nothing compared to that.” — (Zara) This is one the reasons I like Zara she has no filter and I adore it. • "So when I turned thirty-six, I decided I didn’t want to wait any longer to be a mom. Michael and I had Nolan a year later. We lived together, raised him together. Until he met Shane and they got married. Then they moved a few blocks away, and now we share custody of our son and the three of us are raising Nolan.” — (Zara) This is the ultimate love is love to me. Nolan knows • “He’s not dead—as much as I sometimes wish he was. Bastard has two kids with Tobi—with an I—because she’ll tell you. ‘I’m Tobi—with an I,’” Zara said in a baby-doll voice at the same time she tilted her head to the side and cocked her hip. “‘I’m Tobi, with and I and I have the IQ of a lemon wedge.’” — (Zara) Zara is jaded and omg this line makes me laugh so hard. • “Those girls started to be mean to me. Then they took Zelda from me and wouldn’t give her back. Then they started playing tug of war with her and pulled her legs off.” — (Josephine) As someone whose comfort toy was decapitated I can assure you this is most distressing. I can laugh about it now but it can still be a bit of a soft spot if the person who did it mentions it at the wrong time (and I'm 33). • “I’d rather someone tell me I’m doing a great job with my son than say I have a nice ass any day. Looks fade, but our children are our legacy. Our children are a reflection of us … our successes and our failures.” — (Zara) Do know how much this line made me smile. It's nso good to have a woman acknowledge that there is more to her than her looks. Even better that Emmett complimented her on how she raised Nolan first. • "However, I don’t know if I want to wreck my relationship with my florist. Where would I go if the relationship went south? Pike Place Posies? Pffst, no. Zara knows exactly what my mom likes. The relationship between a man and his florist is sacred. I don’t know if I could jeopardize that by sleeping with her.” — (Mason Whitfield) WTF Mason. But okay fair I guess. • grabbing Emmett around the back of the head and, before Emmett could pull away, planting a big, smacking, closed-mouth smooch onto his lips. — This is Mason and Emmett. (view spoiler). The moment just made me laugh and made think that apparently bro don't let bros kiss bimbos.

I got this free as part of a massive kindle giveaway at New Years. So I come to this novella knowing nothing of the wider series, though I do know they can all be read as stand-alone. In this novella, you do see the characters from many of the other books in The Single Dads of Seattle series. The NYE party is hosted by Hired by the Single Dad's Mark and Tori. Mitch and Paige from Saved by the Single Dad are referenced but not present. Mason's novella is Valentine's with the Single Dad, he makes a fantastic appearance including a reference to the shop that is important to that novella Wicked Sister Chocolates. Liam and his relationship with Richelle is the focus of Falling for the Single Dad are somewhat important to this story. Liam is interesting. He's loaded, started the support group and is more than a little jaded. It's a helluva combination. A couple of these are appealing to me. The whole series is a bit unusual with its focus on single fathers over single mothers and some beautiful seasonal themes.

#the single dads of seattle #new year's with the single day #whitley cox #book review #ktreviews #read 2021 #holiday reads #booklr

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o-the-mts · 2 years

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Book Review: Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

Author: Kira Jane Buxton Title: Hollow Kingdom Narrator: Robert Petkoff Publication Info:New York ; Boston : Grand Central Publishing, 2019 Summary/Review: This novel depicts a zombie apocalypse in the greater Seattle region of Washington as narrated by S.T., a domesticated American crow kept as a pet by a loutish man named Big Jim. When Big Jim and the other humans turn feral, S.T. must flee…

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#Animals #Birds #Book Reviews #Books #Crows #Dogs #Fiction #humor #Seattle #Washington #Zombies

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:

https://searchengineland.com/is-google-search-getting-worse-389658

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.

This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/google-paid-26-3-billion-to-be-default-search-engine-in-2021

Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."

And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."

But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"

One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.

BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.

But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.

A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal.

Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/welcome-to-the-cnet-smart-home/

Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.

In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.

An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.

Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.

That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.

Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

#pluralistic #monopoly #seo #dark seo #google #search #enshittification #platform decay #product reviews #spam #antitrust #trustbusting

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