Blog Posts - JARED R. LOPATIN

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt (Audiobook)

12/24/2025

Read by Sean Pratt.

This was recommended to me by a colleague and I have to say that it was quite interesting, especially considering my recent move from high school to middle school. I have always been a bit of a psychology geek and the exploration of the way phones and technology have shaped the mind since the 2010s got me thinking about my students, my family, and my own patterns of thought. The way Haidt lays out the argument that Gen Z's brains were rewired by the ubiquity of the internet and what he calls "phone-based" vs. "play-based" life is hard to ignore, especially when the evidence is presented so clearly. I have to rethink how I approach the use of technology in my classroom.

4/5

THE THIRD GILMORE GIRL by Kelly Bishop (Audiobook)

12/22/2025

Read by Kelly Bishop.

Absolutely loved this book. While I was excited to hear about Kelly Bishop's time on Gilmore Girls, I was even more entranced by her Broadway stories. Hearing how A Chorus Line came together was fascinating. While there were plenty of interesting tidbits about the business, I found myself really captivated by Kelly's personal life. Her perspective on life is inspiring. I want to see more of Kelly's work now.

5/5

Quotes:
- No way would I try to talk somebody out of their dream, no matter what it is. Whatever it is, I believe you immerse yourself in it, work hard at it, express yourself through it, challenge yourself with it. Give yourself every opportunity to fall in love with it and explore the adventures that come with it. If it's the right dream for you that allows you to support yourself so that you're not pursuing your dream at someone else's expense, it will probably last a lifetime. If it stops being enjoyable and fulfilling and you fall out of love with it, if it starts feeling like drudgery to the point where it becomes painful and depressing, there's nothing wrong with saying, "Okay, what else do I want to do with my life?" and start pursuing that dream.
- What on earth would we do if everyone dreamed of being a movie star or a famous rapper, but no one dreamed of being a health care worker, or a teacher, or a dentist, or a mechanic, or a veterinarian, or a police officer, or a soldier, or a carpenter, or a camera operator, or or or. What on earth would we all do without one another, which is why you'll never see me look down on anyone who's earning an honest living exploring their passion?

APPRENTICE TO THE VILLAIN by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Audiobook)

12/19/2025

Read by Em Eldridge
#2 - Assistant to the Villain

I liked it. I was a little lost at first because it had been so long since I'd read the first one but I swiftly slipped back into the world Maehrer created. Sage is always a delight to read and her dynamic with The Villain is really the meat of this story while the world goes on around them. That's not to say there isn't more to the story, of course. I had fun learning about some of the characters that we met in book one. The politics don't intrude too much on the interpersonal relationships but form a nice framework for the story to move forward.

4/5

FELIX EVER AFTER by Kacen Callender (Audiobook)

12/16/2025

Read by Logan Rozos.

I really liked this one. Felix is dealing with the drama of being trans, queer, and a person of color on top of the drama of being a teenager. It's kind of a romcom with some heavier moments. It moves much more quickly than I'd expected it to move but I never felt like it was disingenuous or flat. Callender writes a healthy breadth of characters and the interactions between them keep the reader interested. I'll have to look and see if there are more novels by this author.

5/5

Quotes:

"And I can confirm that there isn't much of a difference between sixteen and seventeen. Seventeen is just one of those in between years, easily forgotten, like a Tuesday, stuck in between sweet sixteen and legal eighteen."
"You know when life is just about as confusing as it can possibly be? And then you think to yourself, "Well, at least it can't get any worse than this." But then Life is like, "Huh. Really? You think so, huh?" And then, just to prove you wrong, it gets even more freaking confusing than it was before? So your entire life is nothing but a whole-ass mystery. Always a shit-ton of questions but never any answers. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, except...not?"

ZED by Joanna Kavenna (Print)

12/13/2025

The ONLY reason I did not rate this higher was the ending. I was really on board for the whole journey. I recognized that this book was not going to end on a necessarily happy note, but it definitely went in a direction that left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied. Perhaps it was the mood I was in when I read it. I think there is poetry to the ending and I suppose, were I to more deeply consider it, I might find a deeper meaning, but it didn't really resolve anything. It feels as though it's meant to be a drop of hope in a fatalistic pool. The rest of the book was really interesting and terrifying considering our world right now. There's just so much technology happening around us and the political machinations that twist words out of their proper meanings in order to suit their purposes, meant to be satirical in this novel, are all too close to the reality.

3.5/5

Quotes:

- "When was free will a good thing, and when was it an irritant? How might people be free in a way that was generally advantageous to society, rather than in a way that threatened the equilibrium? What did it mean, in a free society, to have free people making free decisions? Should free people occasionally be enticed toward decisions that might make them ultimately more free than the original decision they might have taken, had they taken their decisions freely? And, if decisions that were made less freely made people more free in the end, was free will actually such a good thing after all?" (34)
- "Yet, the other day he had seen a piece of graffiti on a wall in London, an image of a unicorn with an inscription beneath: 'Even though I know you don't exist, I still miss you in my garden...'" (191)
- "Of course, we are influenced all the time - by advertising, by fashion, by the media, by a host of further influences including Althusserian interpellation, or conformity, or fundamental societal givens, or orthodoxies, and so on. Society is a vast tapestry of influence, we might say, and very few of us manage to resist all such influences. Indeed, how might we know we had resisted? Where is the control in this experiment?" (211)
- "The point was made across all the free media. Nothing you are told is real. Remember this, until we tell you something tyou are being told is real. Actually, the thing we are telling you, that nothing you are told is real, is actually real. That thing is real, about nothing being real. Just that thing though and nothing else. Is that clear?" (271)
- "There was great jeopardy in this sort of freedom, in being able to choose your path without being urged or inspired. It was terrifying and beautiful at the same time. It was inevitably impermanent. How could you let people exist, how would you permit them all this dangerous freedom to decide? What might they decide?" (287)

MORNING STAR by Pierce Brown (Audiobook)

12/12/2025

Read by Tim Gerard Reynolds
#3 - Red Rising

I liked this one more than Golden Son but less than [[Red Rising]]. It felt like a good wrap-up to the story. It had more movement in the characters and a few twists and turns as well. Pierce Brown does a nice job of tying up loose ends. It didn't feel rushed; it didn't feel disingenuous. There was a bit of emotion to it as well. I can't say this will be a reread, but I'm glad I read the Red Rising Saga.

4/5

Quotes:
- My body fades. Seconds becoming an eternal twilight. Everything slowed. Everything so pointless and poignant as I see how ridiculous our human strength is in the end. Take us from our bubbles of life and what are we?
- In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them and woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.
- Farmers make culture. Nomads made war.
- Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor.
- If pain is the weight of being, love is the purpose.

THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB'S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES by Grady Hendrix (Audiobook)

12/1/2025

Read by Bahni Turpin

I don't know. I wanted to like this much more than I did but it was kind of a random choice after I finished my previous book. It was available. I liked the overall story; I liked the feel of it, I guess. It just never fully grabbed me. The ending was somewhat satisfying but not completely. The characters were good. A bit of it was predictable but it also went places I was not close to expecting. I would read another of Grady Hendrix's books. This one was not bad but neither did it stand out as a shining story for me.

3/5

THE WELL OF ASCENSION by Brandon Sanderson (Audiobook)

11/27/2025

Read by Michael Kramer
#2 - The Mistborn Saga

I liked this more than I did the first one. I really like the Mistborn Saga series worldbuild. I think the idea of metals as a magic system is really interesting. There were moments that lost me - mostly those of the political intrigue. However, Sanderson's character work is fascinating and I really enjoy seeing how they interact with each other against the background of war. I will continue the series - there are a lot of them, though.

4/5

REAPER MAN by Terry Pratchett (Print)

11/19/2025

#11 - Discworld

I love a good discworld series book about Death. He's easily one of my favorite characters in the series, which must be saying something about me. Death facing his own mortality? That's a twist. Not unlike Gaiman's SANDMAN series but with a much lighter tone. That's not to say there isn't gravitas to this situation; only that Pratchett is much more on the fingertips than in the palm and I appreciate that. I can't wait to see how Death continues to grow over the series. This was clearly a milestone for the character.

4/5

NEXT TIME WILL BE OUR TURN by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Audiobook)

11/19/2025

Read by Emily Woo Zeller and Louise Zhu

I am definitely fangirling over Jesse Q. Sutano. I don't know. I've read so much of her this year and I love her books. She has such a variety of books too. This one is a Sapphic romance being told from an older woman, which I really love, and manages to rail against the misogynistic patriarchy of not only Indonesia, but the world as a whole. I love the characters, I love the method of delivery (grandmother to granddaughter), and I love the ending. It made me tear up.

5/5

Quotes:
- "Girls notice the outfits. Boys only notice what's underneath."
- "I hated walking on my own. It left me with too much space with my own thoughts. Nothing good ever came out of that. I was never someone who could be at peace with myself. There was no knowing where my thoughts would delve and even when they started out happy, they rarely stayed that way."