Little Bosses Everywhere (2025) by Bridget Read

 Audiobook Review

Little Bosses Everywhere: 

How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (2025)

by Bridget Read

  I try to keep at least one non-fiction Audiobook in my Libby mix at all times.  Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, has been on and off my metaphorical libby loan shelf a half dozen times over the past year, and I finally knocked it off during the break.  I've had an interest in pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing since I started work in the world of federal criminal defense as an attorney.  One of my first tasks was reviewing physical documents at the Boiler Room Taskforce in Mission Valley, San Diego, CA.  This was for a telemarketing scam, but the documents I reviewed contained "training materials" that led me to explore this nefarious world.

 Multi-Level Marketing, as Read details exhaustively, is here to stay, and the second and third generations of some of the founding families of MLM are familiar to anyone who knows Cabinet level appointments in the Trump administrations, one and two.  The roots of multi-level marketing are in the idea of the pyramid scheme, which is an actual event that happened in the US, and not just a generic term to describe a type of scheme to defraud.  The history, in fact, goes quite deep, and spans the country, and, in fact, the entire world at this point.

  I knew many of the details, and found the personal stories of the victims (Read doesn't talk to many winners, if any) pretty tedious, but Read, despite her stated thesis that all multi-level marketing is scam, does point to the reason that MLM's endure despite their scam status- which is that people drop out, in fact, everyone who isn't a "winner" under the system drops out, and the winners maintain their status because they can source new people to recruit.  That is 100% the key to success in any MLM, finding new leads and converting them.

  There was an interesting chapter near the end where Read discusses the newest iteration of this world, the growth of "life coaches" or "mentors" as entrees to the MLM business.  Certainly, this seems like something that would be facilitated greatly by all Social Meida platforms, and it strikes me that is more or less a valid way for such people to make money.

All That We See or Seem (2025) by Ken Liu

Audiobook Review

All That We See or Seem (2025)

by Ken Liu

  Chinese American author-translator Ken Liu is known equally well for both- my introduction to him came through his role as translator of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  He also has a fantasy series that I'll never read.  I checked out All That We See or Seem because, despite the hackneyed "girl hacker" premise and obvious IP/multi art form pitch and description of the first book as being part of a series, I was pretty sure that Liu would have some interesting things to say about hacking and computers and, god help me, AI.

 In that sense, Liu delivers- the actual hacking type stuff is amazing, the rest of it, is, at best average and often bad- like the characters, the back story, the overall predictability of the plot. I think that's the idea though, so who am I to say it isn't good.  I listened the Audiobook, but I wish I hadn't- the teen hacker main character is not particularly interesting, so you end spending much of the listen on her tedious backstory.

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025) by QNTM

 Book Review

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025)

 by QNTM

    I happened across this title perusing the shelves at a Burlington, Vermont bookstore, where it had one of those handwritten "employee recommends" cards attached.  I don't know about you, but I always take the time to read these- whether it's a Barnes & Noble or what, because I think you can really tell about a specific Bookstore based on whether the employees can identify books that I a) don't know about and b) want to read.    There is No Antiemetics Division jumped out to me on a couple levels, first, what the employee wrote on the card was interesting. Second, it was clearly a horror-science-fiction genre title that was placed in the wider "new releases" shelf at the front of the store, that shows me the book or author already has escape velocity from the genre shelf.  Last, the cover promised "cosmic horror" AKA Lovecraftian horror without the not-so-subtle racism.  

  You can describe the plot easily enough, a secret government agency labors against the horrors of the unknown, but that doesn't do the material justice.  Specifically, it doesn't describe the role that memory plays in the horror aspect of the plot, thought there is also non-memory based actual horror along Lovecraftian lines. Unlike most first gen cosmic horror, QNTM (a nom de plume for an English author/programmer Sam Hughes), does describe said horror, rectifying a major issue with that genre (how long can an author keep describing a nameless, unknowable horror without actually describing said horror.). 

  I found There is No Antimemetics Division really mind-blowing in the way of most great genre fiction.  The fusion of memory-language sci-fi and cosmic horror was revelatory in a way similar to the initial Matrix movie- genre but transcendent, classic genre.   Worth reading for sure.

Dogfight and Other Stories (1996) by Michael Knight

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dogfight and Other Stories (1996)

by Michael Knight

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 14/18

   This was a good one- sadly a book of short stories. The Gulf Coast of Alabama seems pretty interesting- sometimes people go there on the house hunting shows on HGTV and this is the first novel where you get a sense of that white, upper-middle class existence, also white working-class existence, no non-white characters in this book.  The sense I got from Dogfight was lonely white guys, looking out to the Gulf of Mexico-America. 

Mudbound (2008) by Hilary Jordan

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mudbound (2008)

by Hilary Jordan

Mississippi Delta, Mississippi

Mississippi: 6/18

  Mudbound is a classic Susan Straight 1,001 Novels: A Library of America pick, a book that won some award that Barbara Kingsolver made up for unpublished books- it then got published and sold a bunch of copies.  The version I checked out from the library was the Ebook version of the Netflix cover version of the book from the Netflix version I'd didn't know about.  It's about a well-off but "spinster adjacent" white woman from the upper south who marries a youngish widower- she meets him because he is an engineer travelling around for Government projects during the Great Depression (I think).  Little does she know that it is his lifelong dream to go back home (the Mississippi Delta) and become a farmer.  It's "little does she know" because he does not bother to tell her during their courtship. 

 Nevertheless, Laura McAllan (her married name) is cognizant of her incipient spinsterhood and loves the old lug besides, so she agrees to the thing.  The title of the book is her somewhat whimsical name for the farm that Henry (the husband) takes over.   Henry has a damaged (by service in World War I) younger brother who is a manic pixie dream boy circa the 1940's.  The farm has several sharecropping families, some white and some black, and Jamie (the younger brother) befriends the oldest son of one of the black families, Ronsel, also a veteran, and a tank operator to boot (Jamie being a pilot). 

  If you've been reading this blog, you know how this is going to end up, not well for the African American World War II veteran.  And reader, it does not.