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Review

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism

Let me start off with a word of caution: this is not a well-written book. Its liberal use of various verb tenses mixed together is often confusing. And there are tiny details here and there that make it less believable. For instance, this is petty, but I couldn’t get over the fact that she described Bogotá as hot and muggy. However, beyond that lies something worth learning, something necessary. Something sticky that starts dripping on every second spent on social media, clinging to all that wasted time, turning it heavy. What are we doing? Why are we donating our time, our entire lives to these people? We’re nothing to them, and we’re getting nothing out of this transaction.

I can tell that this whole experience has been very hard for the author to process. It is clear she hasn’t yet come to terms with it, or rather, with the fact that she was a part of it, too. She claims the moral high ground repeatedly, but we must absolve her of all blame because she had a mortgage to pay and health insurance to secure. Financial reasons aside, it’s not hard to understand why she did not walk out of that genocidal Devil-Wears-Prada-esque job when it first started gnawing at her dignity. After all, this is a person who was ignored and belittled by her parents after a literal shark attack as a child. She does not know dignity.

To sum up, this is not the best-crafted book, and it can be infuriating at times, but what’s infuriating about it oscillates between the writing, the author’s cowardice, and the callousness of those she works for—those to whom we have generously granted our personal information and precious waking hours.

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Review

The Let Them Theory

This book is proof that your viral post does not automatically qualify you as an author. I would even venture that publishing houses should not jump on that kind of bandwagon, but virality=money and money is king.

The creator of this revolutionary “theory” is super nosy and a control freak. One day, as she tries to meddle for the umpteenth time in other people’s business, she is forced to realize that she doesn’t have to be either, and now she’s convinced she’s the first human ever to make that discovery. To top it all, apparently the whole concept of this book—which is 95% fluff; you can absolutely notice the urge to reach a word quota—is plagiarism, ripping off from a (you guessed it—viral!) poem.

I need to step away from the “new arrivals” section on my library app for a while.

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Review

Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles

I stumbled upon this book by sheer chance, without the faintest idea of what to expect from it. I thought I might just leaf through the first few pages and then maybe leave it unattended like so many other books on my reading pile. However, once I opened it, there was no putting it down. I ended up devouring it on the spot. It reads like very gripping fiction—it’s hard to believe it all really happened! There’s even graphic evidence to support it. Amazing, disgusting, disheartening. Very exciting to read, though.