Joe Gallagher (Author of Night at Suck Mansion)

Joe has read Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Nov 20, 2025 12:34AM · like
Joe rated a book it was amazing The Strangers by Jon Bilbao	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What if you and your partner's slow alienation from one another became literal aliens? Such is the fate of Jon and Katharina, visited by strange lights and weird cousins at Jon's family home on the coast of Spain. The cousins are Markel and his assis ...more
Oct 01, 2025 10:46PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Strangers by Jon Bilbao. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Strangers by Jon Bilbao <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joe rated a book did not like it Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Kudos to Rachel Kushner for breaking through the glass ceiling and joining many great men of letters who have reached a special point in their career: When their editor is too high on the author’s supply to let them know that their new novel sucks. K ...more
Oct 01, 2025 10:46PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joe rated a book did not like it Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Kudos to Rachel Kushner for breaking through the glass ceiling and joining many great men of letters who have reached a special point in their career: When their editor is too high on the author’s supply to let them know that their new novel sucks. K ...more
Oct 01, 2025 10:46PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joe rated a book it was amazing ¡No Pasarán!: Matt Christman's Spanish Civil War by Matt Christman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What is best in life? Chillin' with the anarchist homies in Catalonia. ...more
Apr 01, 2025 06:39PM · 1 like · like · see review
Joe rated a book it was amazing A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The pessimistic take on space colonization every optimist on the subject needs. If you want to a million people on Mars, you need to reckon with the fact that we will need new technology, new laws, and new science to get there. The Weinersmiths lay i ...more
Apr 01, 2025 06:39PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joe rated a book it was amazing A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The pessimistic take on space colonization every optimist on the subject needs. If you want to a million people on Mars, you need to reckon with the fact that we will need new technology, new laws, and new science to get there. The Weinersmiths lay i ...more
Apr 01, 2025 06:35PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Joe and 1 other person liked Maihre's review of Magdalena Between Dimensions: "This is a great read indeed! Talk about dimensions! Who knew there could be so much to like about a ghostly clan and their family dynamics - a truly interesting bunch you have to get attached to. And an NYC of so many unexpected levels - from foreclo" Read more of this review »
Mar 23, 2025 06:18PM · see review
Joe and 1 other person liked Alexandra Sharp's review of Magdalena Between Dimensions: "I loved writing this book!! And I hope you love reading it. "
Mar 23, 2025 06:18PM · see review
Joe rated a book it was amazing The Little Book of Exoplanets by Joshua N. Winn	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
One of the best space science books I've read. Even as his subjects grow more complex, Dr. Winn resists the urge to hit us with pages of formulas or impenetrable physics. Instead, he remains a patient guide, and we can fully appreciate planets where ...more
Mar 16, 2025 05:56AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Little Book of Exoplanets by Joshua N. Winn. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Little Book of Exoplanets by Joshua N. Winn <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Joe has read

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
by Haruki Murakami

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Joe rated a book it was amazing

The Strangers
by Jon Bilbao

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

What if you and your partner's slow alienation from one another became literal aliens? Such is the fate of Jon and Katharina, visited by strange lights and weird cousins at Jon's family home on the coast of Spain. The cousins are Markel and his assis ...more

Joe rated a book did not like it

Creation Lake
by Rachel Kushner (Goodreads Author)

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Kudos to Rachel Kushner for breaking through the glass ceiling and joining many great men of letters who have reached a special point in their career: When their editor is too high on the author’s supply to let them know that their new novel sucks. K Kudos to Rachel Kushner for breaking through the glass ceiling and joining many great men of letters who have reached a special point in their career: When their editor is too high on the author’s supply to let them know that their new novel sucks. Kushner should be proud of this accomplishment, much more than she should be of this slog of a spy story featuring one of the worst main characters I have ever encountered.

Meet “Sadie” —a drunk, miserable American freelance spy sent to the French countryside. Her mission? Infiltrate a group of hippie protestors planning to disrupt a huge construction project that will ruin a town’s traditional farming lifestyle. Sadie hates everything: The car she’s driving, the country she’s in, the French boyfriend she’s pretending to love, her job, her beliefs, anyone else’s job and beliefs, and the fact that she has to wake up every day. At one point she says something like, “I don’t care about these people. I don’t care about anyone.” Did I mention the novel is written in the first person? There’s no escape from Sadie’s curdled ennui.

In one harrowing display of unpoetic dullness, Sadie sees a rock wall striated with veins of color and says, "Rocks should be gray." Yes, this is the person we're along for the ride with as the author makes whatever point she feels compelled to make about agribusiness protests.

Sadie accomplishes her espionage not thanks to her cunning or charisma, but through the lowliest trick of all: narrative necessity. Kushner makes the communal activists so naive, flat, and imperceptible that I wonder if they were hastily called up from the NPC leagues for supporting character duty. Not one of them is immune to Sadie's tradecraft, which consists solely of her thinking "this stupid person will do what I want" and it immediately coming true. One wonders if she is an absolute smokeshow to pull off this confidence trick so reliably.

No one is dumber than poor Lucien, the rich MFAilson Sadie's banging to get access to his country estate and protestor buddies. He never once questions why his American girlfriend is being a complete asshole to him at every possible opportunity; we’re supposed to believe that Sadie occasionally giving into his sexual advances is enough to con him into anything she wants. I mean, I guess dudes do be like that, but I must emphasize how uninteresting choices like this are for a literary novel where nothing else is going on. The only backstory we get about Sadie are her tales about executing similar sexual manipulations, one of which went so wrong as to get her kicked out of the national security apparatus and into whatever this is.

Look: I cannot fathom any reason to write a novel from the perspective of a person like Sadie. Maybe Kushner is trying to make a point that a similarly nihilistic male character would be gifted a halo of coolness by the typical patriarchal cultural consumer. If her point is that these disaffected heroes are actually boring, I would be willing to consider it. The problem is that the way she makes that point is by writing a very dull and somewhat enraging book. I couldn’t even feel sorry for Sadie, because at no point is any explanation given for her being this way. She’s just a miserable loser who is too depressed to wash a dish (she explains at length how she chooses the “least dirty one”) and who fills an entire room of Lucien’s country estate with her empty bottles and cans.

We receive some relief from Sadie’s nihilism in the form of Bruno, an orphaned holocaust survivor and estranged patriarch of the protest movement who sends emails to the revolutionaries, mostly about how he spends weeks at a time living in cave. Sadie hacks into his account and reads these lectures on Neanderthals mixing with modern man and the nobility of Luddite life. They have a profound effect on her, or what passes for profound in the mind of someone whose every thought hits like a lukewarm beer that you forgot to put in the fridge. That she is moved by Bruno comes as no surprise to the reader, as these periodic looks into his life and his alternate French histories are the only interesting parts of the novel.

As we approach the climactic moments—the mass demonstration and coordinated sabotage at the construction site arranged to coincide with the arrival of a government minister—Sadie’s handler asks her to make sure a protestor murders this official. There’s briefly hope for a twist, something to reward us for putting up with this whiny drunk for so long. Sadie does get about a paragraph and half of comeuppance when her chosen murderer laughs at her for thinking he’d do something so stupid and her French boyfriend is revealed to not be as smitten with her as she believes. But these moments are so obviously deserved that they serve only to elicit a “yeah, that tracks” from the reader. Forget sexual favors, can Sadie not even get me some schadenfreude?

Somehow the government official dies anyway when a sexually active 11-year-old (I can’t even get into that part) lures him to an accidental death. Sadie flees to Spain, thinks about Bruno’s emails some more, and decides to give up the life of honeypot assassin. I cannot emphasize enough how meaningless this change of heart is when you know absolutely nothing about Sadie’s life story, including why she chose to be a spy, why she’s so mad at everything, or why she seems to have absolutely no friends or family. I didn’t really care what happened to her, I was only happy to be done with her bullshit.

The front cover of the novel notes that it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Man, I hope that was a really, really long list. ...more

Joe rated a book did not like it

Creation Lake
by Rachel Kushner (Goodreads Author)

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Kudos to Rachel Kushner for breaking through the glass ceiling and joining many great men of letters who have reached a special point in their career: When their editor is too high on the author’s supply to let them know that their new novel sucks. K Kudos to Rachel Kushner for breaking through the glass ceiling and joining many great men of letters who have reached a special point in their career: When their editor is too high on the author’s supply to let them know that their new novel sucks. Kushner should be proud of this accomplishment, much more than she should be of this slog of a spy story featuring one of the worst main characters I have ever encountered.

Meet “Sadie” —a drunk, miserable American freelance spy sent to the French countryside. Her mission? Infiltrate a group of hippie protestors planning to disrupt a huge construction project that will ruin a town’s traditional farming lifestyle. Sadie hates everything: The car she’s driving, the country she’s in, the French boyfriend she’s pretending to love, her job, her beliefs, anyone else’s job and beliefs, and the fact that she has to wake up every day. At one point she says something like, “I don’t care about these people. I don’t care about anyone.” Did I mention the novel is written in the first person? There’s no escape from Sadie’s curdled ennui.

In one harrowing display of unpoetic dullness, Sadie sees a rock wall striated with veins of color and says, "Rocks should be gray." Yes, this is the person we're along for the ride with as the author makes whatever point she feels compelled to make about agribusiness protests.

Sadie accomplishes her espionage not thanks to her cunning or charisma, but through the lowliest trick of all: narrative necessity. Kushner makes the communal activists so naive, flat, and imperceptible that I wonder if they were hastily called up from the NPC leagues for supporting character duty. Not one of them is immune to Sadie's tradecraft, which consists solely of her thinking "this stupid person will do what I want" and it immediately coming true. One wonders if she is an absolute smokeshow to pull off this confidence trick so reliably.

No one is dumber than poor Lucien, the rich MFAilson Sadie's banging to get access to his country estate and protestor buddies. He never once questions why his American girlfriend is being a complete asshole to him at every possible opportunity; we’re supposed to believe that Sadie occasionally giving into his sexual advances is enough to con him into anything she wants. I mean, I guess dudes do be like that, but I must emphasize how uninteresting choices like this are for a literary novel where nothing else is going on. The only backstory we get about Sadie are her tales about executing similar sexual manipulations, one of which went so wrong as to get her kicked out of the national security apparatus and into whatever this is.

Look: I cannot fathom any reason to write a novel from the perspective of a person like Sadie. Maybe Kushner is trying to make a point that a similarly nihilistic male character would be gifted a halo of coolness by the typical patriarchal cultural consumer. If her point is that these disaffected heroes are actually boring, I would be willing to consider it. The problem is that the way she makes that point is by writing a very dull and somewhat enraging book. I couldn’t even feel sorry for Sadie, because at no point is any explanation given for her being this way. She’s just a miserable loser who is too depressed to wash a dish (she explains at length how she chooses the “least dirty one”) and who fills an entire room of Lucien’s country estate with her empty bottles and cans.

We receive some relief from Sadie’s nihilism in the form of Bruno, an orphaned holocaust survivor and estranged patriarch of the protest movement who sends emails to the revolutionaries, mostly about how he spends weeks at a time living in cave. Sadie hacks into his account and reads these lectures on Neanderthals mixing with modern man and the nobility of Luddite life. They have a profound effect on her, or what passes for profound in the mind of someone whose every thought hits like a lukewarm beer that you forgot to put in the fridge. That she is moved by Bruno comes as no surprise to the reader, as these periodic looks into his life and his alternate French histories are the only interesting parts of the novel.

As we approach the climactic moments—the mass demonstration and coordinated sabotage at the construction site arranged to coincide with the arrival of a government minister—Sadie’s handler asks her to make sure a protestor murders this official. There’s briefly hope for a twist, something to reward us for putting up with this whiny drunk for so long. Sadie does get about a paragraph and half of comeuppance when her chosen murderer laughs at her for thinking he’d do something so stupid and her French boyfriend is revealed to not be as smitten with her as she believes. But these moments are so obviously deserved that they serve only to elicit a “yeah, that tracks” from the reader. Forget sexual favors, can Sadie not even get me some schadenfreude?

Somehow the government official dies anyway when a sexually active 11-year-old (I can’t even get into that part) lures him to an accidental death. Sadie flees to Spain, thinks about Bruno’s emails some more, and decides to give up the life of honeypot assassin. I cannot emphasize enough how meaningless this change of heart is when you know absolutely nothing about Sadie’s life story, including why she chose to be a spy, why she’s so mad at everything, or why she seems to have absolutely no friends or family. I didn’t really care what happened to her, I was only happy to be done with her bullshit.

The front cover of the novel notes that it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Man, I hope that was a really, really long list. ...more

Joe rated a book it was amazing

¡No Pasarán!: Matt Christman's Spanish Civil War
by Matt Christman

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1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

What is best in life? Chillin' with the anarchist homies in Catalonia. ...more

Joe rated a book it was amazing

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith (Goodreads Author)

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

The pessimistic take on space colonization every optimist on the subject needs. If you want to a million people on Mars, you need to reckon with the fact that we will need new technology, new laws, and new science to get there. The Weinersmiths lay i ...more

Joe rated a book it was amazing

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith (Goodreads Author)

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

The pessimistic take on space colonization every optimist on the subject needs. If you want to a million people on Mars, you need to reckon with the fact that we will need new technology, new laws, and new science to get there. The Weinersmiths lay i ...more

Joe and 1 other person liked Maihre's review of Magdalena Between Dimensions:

Magdalena Between Dimensions by Alexandra Sharp

"This is a great read indeed! Talk about dimensions! Who knew there could be so much to like about a ghostly clan and their family dynamics - a truly interesting bunch you have to get attached to. And an NYC of so many unexpected levels - from foreclo" Read more of this review »

Joe and 1 other person liked Alexandra Sharp's review of Magdalena Between Dimensions:

"I loved writing this book!! And I hope you love reading it. "

Joe rated a book it was amazing

The Little Book of Exoplanets
by Joshua N. Winn

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

One of the best space science books I've read. Even as his subjects grow more complex, Dr. Winn resists the urge to hit us with pages of formulas or impenetrable physics. Instead, he remains a patient guide, and we can fully appreciate planets where ...more

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Preview — Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

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Preview — A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith

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