careythesixth's reviews
791 reviews

This book was awesome, Serj is awesome, and I can't wait to check out all the stuff he's been doing outside of SoaD.

I can't stand this style of writing.

Wonderful and much more emotional than I expected.

This is every adventure I have ever loved. The Chronicles of Narnia, The Chronicles of Prydain, Ender's Game. This is every adventure that made those adventures. This is every adventure that came after. And it's also its own thing. I need the series Robin Sloan wants to write!!!!

This was so good I want to cry. There are a lot of reasons this book gets 5 stars, but the main one is fairly small. If you knew me in the 90s, you know that I was completely obsessed with The X-Files and I shipped Mulder and Scully hard. I ate, slept, and breathed X-Files. I still have most episodes through about season 7 memorized.

The POV character in this book, Misha Byrne, writes a television show called Travelers that is very X-Files based on Misha's childhood love of a different X-Files-esque show. One of Misha's FBI agents is a woman named Carey.

I've never encountered a fictional woman with my name spelling. And here she is. And she's an X-Files agent. I don't know why this means so much to me, but it does. And I will love this book until the end of time because of it.

This was a complete fucking delight. I've been an on-again-off-again wrestling fan since I was a little kid at the height of Hulkamania. I was enamored of these living cartoons and the kayfabe of it all.

I'm writing this review while wearing a Roots of Right Iron Sheik 1983 World Champion t-shirt. But I'm one of those bandwagon jumpers who didn't fall in love with the Iron Sheik until well into adulthood because of his twitter account (I am aware that the account was/is run by others). Sheiky Baby's death was especially hard on my sense of nostalgia.

And this is where I get to this book. Even when I'm not watching wrestling, I devour any wrestling book that comes out. I especially love histories and retrospectives. I've never moved on from my love of larger than life characters solving all the world's problems in the squared circle and I never plan to. When reality is too hard to bear, kayfabe will always be there.

This book is about kayfabe and childhood and growing up. It's also about Tony Atlas and Tito Santana and Sargent Slaughter and Ax and Marcelino Rivera and Hulk Hogan (yo, the RNC just happened so the Hulk chapter of this book was weird to read). But all of this is told through the filter of the life of Khosrow Vaziri, the Iron Sheik. Brad bubba, you've finally written his biography!

I learned new things in this book. I went down nostalgia lane. I legit shed a tear during the epilogue. I was completely delighted at the references to Josie Riesman's book Ringmaster in the Vince McMahon chapter. I loved this book.

I ran out of Spotify audiobook listening time with 10 minutes left in this book. I liked it so much that I spent another $12.99 for those last 10 minutes. 

Seriously though, I came to this book from the podcast and I can't recommend either enough. It's been a lot of fun to go down memory lane with these songs with someone about the same age as me. It's hard to explain the impact of some of these songs (and videos) to people who either weren't there or were there but at a different age. 

This book was a lot of fun, and yes I bought the print copy too. So thank you Rob, and fuck you Spotify.

This book was fucking wild and I loved it. I'll probably have more profound thoughts later, but I will definitely be thinking about this book for a long time. For a lot of reasons. It was funny and gross and thoughtful and weird as shit and wonderful.

Very fun, quick, surprisingly profound read.