You let me, the right one, in, by Camilla "Baddy" Bruce 
4.0 Stars
1-5-2024
Why can not two things be true at once?
Black Mountain, Bad Angle, Laird Barron
2.0 Stars
12-25-2024
"Genius Losi" - some idiot who narrates audio-books, a complete fool
On the plus side, I am here for modernish, Call of Cthulu type adventure-mysteries as a former mob-hitter and current private detective gets drawn into brushes with the dangerous and esoteric. On the down side, it's difficult to keep a straight face when listening to much of MC's internal dialog, so you just sort of have to ignore about 15% of his patter (especially the parts relating to his Dale Gribble type mentor). It's like if the Sandman Slim novels took themselves seriously, i.e. dire. Back on the positive side, I do sincerely like the MC's laconic, alcoholic, ex-marine, side-kick who gets the best comic lines and who is more of a real and reasonable person. Also a fan of when the investigation phase is over and the MC gets in a fist-fight with some eldritch herald. As I've noted before, where Lovecraft would just pass over the ineffable and horrible with a few lines and then fade to black, Laird Barron is much more likely to describe in precise physical detail what happens when a Mi-go or whatever removes your brain and puts it into a jar. Back to the negative! The mythological references and allusions don't work, and like the MC's deep-thoughts are pretty cringy. So, eh? I feel like the author basically had one story in him, and he was good at telling that story and it did well, and so he kept at it, and now over the course of ~10 novels he's gradually branching out, developing, widening, and trying to write new narratives that are not that one initial story. I am there for him in this journey! Even if the current phase of his journey is kind of rough.
The Sabres of Paradise
2.0 Stars
12-20-2024
You people need Tzeentch
This history book has been on my to-read book for 10 years? 15 years? since apparently it was one of the influences on Frank Herbert's Dune series. And you can see some of the inspirations that Dune took from the culture of the Caucus; the mountain tradition of personal and familial vendetta, the universal open carrying of daggers, the remote and highly defensible aouls/sieks, the messianic figure in the form of Shamyl (aka the Lion of Daghestan, aka the Third Imam, aka the Shadow of Allah), and the Daghestani supplying the inspo for the Atreides & Fremen, while the imperial Russians provide the inspo for the Houses Corino & Harkonnen. Still, I wouldn't read too much into this influence; the history provided some color and some general themes, but it was really just the slightest sliver of a seed for the Dune novels. It's mostly interesting in the parallels it raises between the modern world and the fictional world; e.g. the Atreides who are often read as the heroes of the fictional story would equate to ISIS in the real world, while in the real world the Paul Atreidies figure ended up being first captured by the Russians, then feted and pampered by the Russians, then spending the last few decades of his life pensioned off and making social calls in a mid-sized Russian town. Sort of universal jidhad dissolving into Jane Austen.
For this book itself, it is only a history book in the loosest of terms. It's more the result of the author's personal passion project and idiosyncretic investigations, and it focuses on individual incident, character, and personality more than it does on the larger flow of history or laying out a clear timeline of events. It's also from the age where authors would talk a lot about the essential nature of the Oriental, or the Frenchman, or of the Russian. It's also super, super fucking depressing, or at least the first 75% of it is. On one side of the conflict you have Imperial Russia at its most conservative and corrupt and brutal; willing to throw away the lives of its slave-soldiers by the hundreds of thousands, and killing or imprisoning anyone showing slightest leanings towards liberty, fraternity, or equality. On the other side of the conflict you have the mountains-have-eyes religious hillbilly zealots, who would love to be dirt poor but in most cases can only afford barren rocks, and who split their free time between praying to God, knifing each other, and kidnapping and raping 13 year olds. At various times during this portion of the reading I thought of the Three Body Problem and its decision to signal the aliens so that they can come and wipe us out, of the God-as-Watchmaker metaphor where he created the universe and set it in motion in order to observe it play out precisely to his calculation and what a boring and awful experience that must have been for him, and of how none of what I am reading is disproving the RadFem hypthosis of "maybe we should kill off all the men?" So, not a great time or area of the world in which to be alive.
As mentioned though, the book takes an odd turn in the last 25%. The Russian Tzar gets replaced, and his successor decides to try ... not being evil? And then Shamyl, the leader of the resistance to the Russians, is finally cornered, defeated, and captured. Rather than being executed, instead he's taken to the big Russian cities, greeted with parades and cheers, becomes a minor friend of the Tzar, and is settled along with his family and retainers in a snowy but pleasant Russian town. During the decades of warfare very little was known about Shamyl with any surety, instead he was just this shadowy and legendary leader masterminding the Murid's attacks on/resistance to Russian encroachment. And then in the sunset of his life suddenly everything is known about him, and is recorded by the Russian aides who managed his estate as well as by the thousands of people he dined with in this last stage of life. He seems to have taken his removal from absolute power with grace. I think most of us would have difficulty with the transition, especially losing the ability to lift a finger and have who ever was bothering you instantly beheaded. From most accounts Shamyl seems to have been Kvothe-like figure; charismatic and tough and talented and lucky and smart, but also constantly scheming to put himself at best advantage and make himself appear larger than life. One of the later-life encounters that stood out was when Shamyl met a visiting illusionist, and he saw through most of the tricks pretty quickly, but then demanded, nearly at sword point, that the other tricks be explained to him. This was a guy who never stopped thinking about stage craft and presentation. Even at a far distance you wish Shamyl had been able to live a different life where he could have put his talents to less murderous use.
Ok, now the part where I recount the more minor bits and pieces I found interesting:
From Civ5 fame, we have the Krepost. This was a Russian/Cossack invention, and referred to basically the smallest fort/watch tower possible, manned by ~5 soldiers. These were the nannites of frontier warfare, and were placed in the thousands along the border, with each krepost only ~100 or so yards from the next. As a hinterland tribe these must have been terrifying, since they prevented infiltration, could reinforce their neighboring Kreposts, could slow down larger raids long enough for larger Russian forces to arrive, and steadily advanced across the frontier in a cordon that contained more and more land each year.
Quotes about People X are like this, People Y are like that:
"Like all Poles, Przhetzlavski was adept at turning everything to political account. After the
suppression of the Polish risings in 1863, he often spoke ..."
"French preceptors occupied a singular position in Russian households.
Whatever the barriers of geography, politics, or language which isolated Russia
from the rest of Europe, large numbers of French tutors found their way there
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and were followed by an invasion
of English nannies. Both occupied a remarkable place in the westernization of the
country. The tutors may be said to have had a profound effect on Russian
education and culture, sophisticating and Gallicizing their little charges just as
the nannies Anglicized them; superimposing discipline, plain foods and
punctuality on these basically tempestuous babies. Although neither tutors, nor
nannies, appear to have been able to achieve more than purely superficial effects
of logic and order. As soon as their charges grew up, numbers of them were to be
found blowing out their brains over some imagined slight; breakfasting at
midnight; sobbing away whole afternoons sustained by pickled herrings; gambling
or drinking for forty-eight hours on end; or galloping across the steppes in furious
charges against fate. Soudba! Toska! Fate! Spleen! French tutors, and even English nannies, were no match for the Slav soul."
Excuse making when you accidentally kill the Third Imam's cat while he is away on business:
"Early in 1853, when Shamyl was absent for some months fighting in the
mountains, poor Vaska-Nourman pined; refusing all food. In vain the choicest
morsels were prepared for him, the household hanging over him solicitously. In
vain Khazi Mahommed moved into his father’s rooms trying to feed the cat by
hand—it was inconsolable and at last died. The whole aôul was becalmed in grief.
Khazi Mahommed assembled all the available Murid dignitaries to honour his
father’s pet, giving it a special burial and a funeral ovation worthy of a Naib. But
no-one dared inform Shamyl of the tragedy. ‘Now it will go badly with me,’ he said,
hearing at last of his loss. To him, Vaska-Nourman must have been mascot and
companion, someone who shared the days of his glory and who returned his love
unquestioningly—and made even less demands than the gentle Shouanete"
Russia, never a great place to be:
"The Dekabristi—so named from the fact that their revolt took place in
December—were a group of cultivated and liberal young army officers devoted to
reform the liberation of the serfs and, above all, to the formation of a
constitutional government. Their very idealism, in its purity, made them incapable
of carrying out their revolt against the tyranny which Nicholas embodied. Their
abortive stand was a heroic madness, embodying the whole of nineteenth-century
Slav psychology. The time was not ripe. The people were not ready; the idealists
stood alone—and fell alone. Alexander Herzen was to write of them with love and
anguish, throughout his Memoirs:
Between 1812 and 1825 there appeared a perfect galaxy of brilliant
talent, independent character and chivalrous valour, a combination quite
new to Russia. These men had absorbed everything of Western culture, the
introduction of which had been forbidden… They were its latest blooms
and, in spite of the fatal scythe that mowed them down at once, their
influence can be traced, flowing far into the gloomy Russia of Nicholas, like
the Volga into the sea.
The merciless manner in which the new Tzar suppressed not only the
Dekabristi, but every personal freedom or liberal measure, kept the country cowed
throughout his reign, and made him the embodiment of that tyranny which the Dekabristi sought to destroy."
"It had been raining heavily, the children were coughing—those
who were left, that is, about a third, were already dead, en route.
‘Not half will reach their destination,’ said the officer in charge.
‘Have there been epidemics?’ I asked.
‘No… but they just die off like flies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly
creature… he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day and eating dry
bread—then, being among strangers, no father, or mother, nor petting; they just
cough and cough, until they cough themselves dead… And I ask you—what use is it
to the State? What can they do with such little boys? … Well, we must be off… Hey!
sergeant! Tell the small fry to form up.’
‘They brought out the children,’ continues Herzen, ‘It was one of the most awful
sights I have ever seen… Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it,
but little fellows of eight and ten… Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they
stood in thick clumsy soldiers’ overcoats with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful
eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white
lips, the blue rings under their eyes looked like fever or chill. And these sick
children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows straight from
the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves."
Blood Standard, Laird Barron
3.0 Stars
12-20-2024
Apparently I have no idea what I want. I thought a gritty and hard-bitten Laird Barron crime-detective-adventure story would be right up my alley, but in practice not so much. Part of the problem rests with me; I haven't really read many of these stories, and while in theory I thought I would like them, when the narrative actually starts unspooling I'm a bit put off by it. It's just not really a fantasy that I'm enamored with, in fact the opposite. Have none of these people heard of index funds? Why are you getting into fist fights and murdering people rather than checking out new board game designs on Table Top Simulator? It's just this entire way of life and mind set and fantasy that is not super-attractive, especially to me, with my bird-thin programmer bones. Part of the problem though rests with Laird, in that his criming narratives don't really make much sense. E.g. the book starts off with mobsters in Alaska, and I'm just not sure that Alaska can support that many mobsters. Like you have 4 small icy towns with a total population of ~5000, that is not enough territory to support a half-dozen Italians in suits. Some local families that maybe smuggle cigarretes or grow pot or whatever? Sure! But there's only so much organized crime that can really go on in a collection of scattered outposts. Similarly, when the narrative moves to the East Coast, the story is set in a sort of Miller's Crossing world of feuding Italian families and rules of honor, rather than in the actual present day of what, Serbians? Albanians? Russians? Cartels? It just doesn't come off as realistic. Laird Barron doesn't really have this issue with his Cosmic horror stories; if his tales of space leeches and dead worlds aren't accurate, there's no one there to gainsay him. Moving closer to the real world though, I think he could benefit from doing some research for his novels. Related quibbles: A) the NSA does not do field work, they do not have teams of assassins or networks of informants B) FBI partners or police partners do not disagree in front of interview subjects, except *maybe* as part of some ploy. (or at least that's what Rivers of London has told me, and that seems like something that would be true) C) you do generally get arrested if you kill a score of people over the course of 2 weeks, even if there is some corruption in the local PD. There's just no way this doesn't attract all sorts of attention.
So, what is good here? I like Laird's writing, even if the actual content doesn't always make sense. He's skilled at the basic profession. I liked the mild tie-ins to his horror universe, which enliven an otherwise kind of pointless tale. I like that he gifts the MC not necessarily with extreme smarts or deadly skill, but with ~350 lbs of mass and a quasi-supernatural ability to take a beating/stabbing/shooting and still recover from it. I like that the inflection point for the MC and other Laird characters isn't a murder or a bag of money or a dame in distress, but rather cruelty/murder of animals. Going back and mildly spoiling an earlier Laird short story, in the short story the MC is a big game hunter/poacher, and over his life he's shot countless hundreds of buffalo/elephants/etc. And he's with a group of gentleman hunters in the deep woods and they're all contending with a giant satanic moose. Trust me, it's scarier than it sounds. And the MC in this story is worried that the moose will get him, but eventually he gets reassured by the moose that really, there's nothing for the MC to worry about, since the MC has belonged to the moose and his buddies since way back, so there's no need to chomp on him now. With Blood Standard, Laird takes the opposite tack, and it's the MC's violent refusal to go along with a hunting expedition that's the trigger for his modest moral improvement, and causes the MC's path to diverge from the standard doomed/damned Laird Barron MC. So, an argument for Jainism? Or at least veganism. In any case, I liked that it predicates the story on deeper ideology? metaphysics? the basis elements of the Laird Barron universe? rather than on more standard mob/crime/detective concerns. It has a little of the flavor of Tim Powers in its Dashiell Hammett.
The Croning, Laird Barron
4.0 Stars
12-15-2024
What is a Croning but Laird persevering?
I was ambivalent about this book, and at different times during the reading I was placing it at anywhere from two to four stars. The main change in this book is a positive one, in that rather than writing a number of short stories here Laird crafted a longer running narrative. I thought this worked really well and allowed Laird to build and layer a narrative that had more power than his usual multiple disconnected stories. The larger story is still somewhat episodic, as you learn about different terrible episodes over the course of this one guy's life, but it is always building this larger over-arching story that grows gradually darker and more raddled. On the flip side, the crow meme. You know the one. Laird has already used this monster/mythos a couple of times before, and honestly once was enough, so I didn't really appreciate a whole book dealing with the same over-tuned creatures. You can only feed so many level-0 characters into the maw of a space-and-time-manipulating cosmic god and its billions of ultra-tech servitors before the exercise becomes boring and repetitive. I started to wander a bit there at the end; like has anyone tried a flame thrower on one of these guys? The confrontations always seem to happen when the MC only has their bare hands on hand, why not have even one character just have a try at pre-emptively burning their shit down? Or maybe some humor? They're going to torture you for eternity anyway, maybe make fun of them a bit first? Repeat what they say in a silly voice? Point out their tendency to Xanatos gambit any minor reverse?
But! On the flipped-flip side, this book was kind of genuinely depressing, so I feel like that deserves some sort of recognition? If nothing else Laird is a good writer; he might not be writing what I want him to write, and he is usually writing kind of the same thing, but his execution of both the momement-to-moment of the story and on his larger themes is always superb. So, good job?
And now a Laird re-cap and re-stock. For someone who isn't a Laird completionist, I feel like reading just one of his horror books, that is not Occultation, is probably enough. Occultation is the weakest of his collections, but all the others tend to cover the same themes, mythos, story beats, etc at about the same level of quality. So just read any one of them and you should be fine. I also think Laird would be really, really good if he branched out to write basically anything else but this? And great news, he actually has! It seems he's written a trilogy of noir-action-crime stories, and I think these should be a great fit for his style of writing. I'm excited to try them out next.
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron
4.0 Stars
12-15-2024
A surprising number of Satanists
Pretty Lairdish. The stories are similar to the early ones of his that I read, though the tone has lightened by about 20%. A prototypical early Laird Barron story has an unbalanced protagonist that is alcoholic/drugged/suicidal, and they are facing off against God, and God wants to eat them, and then God eats them in a horrible fashion. So there's not a lot of autonomy or chance to survive for the MCs, though in various cases their struggles could be pleasingly scary or memorably horrific or just really unpleasant and depressing. In these more recent stories, I feel like the protagonists have slightly more of a chance; in a few of them the MC even survives with part of their sanity intact. I kind of like this turn by Barron. I also found it gratifying/uplifting that in one of the stories, the monsters at least partly come to the attention of the security state and the NSA, which kind of edges these stories into Delta Green territory, which I generally like and which I think would be a some new and interesting territory for Laird to explore. It's fine to have horrible deaths and monsters and things that are vastly powerful and that we don't even slightly understand, but also it seems unfair to pit these monsters against random alcoholics. Put these entities up against the Mormons in the FBI, CIA, etc., and then evaluate how well they do.
Another change I noticed is that Barron is building up more of a mythology now; where the early stories were a bunch of horrific one-offs, here he is doing more to link his current and earlier stories into a larger web. I'm kind of ok with this, but it also feels a bit like selling out and McStandarizing his stories rather than having them each be their own wild and individual tale of some cosmic horror that we don't understand.
On the downside, there's not one but two different meta-stories in here that involve the author writing about authors. This is always a sure sign that a writer is running out of fresh ideas, and as a reader these sorts of stories become unbearably twee after the first few dozen that you've read.
And finally, a half dozen nice things in this collection:
- a description of a dire-antelope eating a guy's head
- a description of the stars, star-siphoning a guy
- a description of a melee with a bunch of Hills-have-Eyes peasants
- a short but quite likeable story of Selma and Louise and skinshifting
- the crones, who start out extremely creepy and then continue becoming more creepy for every sentence of the next 5 pages
- the buzzing of flourescent lights. For some reason most authors never mention the message being hummed out by flourescent lights, even though this is the sort of lived detail that we all experience and which would do a lot to ground and enrich their novels
Rivers of London, books 8-9
3.0 Stars
12-05-2024
The same, but slightly improved, but also starting to wear slightly thin. The main improvement is that the stories are finally free from the long-running antagonist (FM2) that they were fencing with in the first 7 books. This antagonist was OKish as an antagonist, but he also introduced a lot of narrative dissonance. On the one hand the author wants to have a somewhat genteel police procedural series that sure, has some murders, but also generally has satisfactory endings. On the other hand, the main antagonist has over his life accumulated a ~three figure body count, with the potential to increase that to 8 figures, so this sort of polite policing didn't really match the situation at hand. Like, if you even think you know where the antagonist is you should have the RAF drop a 2000lb bomb on the location, rather than going in and having yet another magical pillow fight with him.
Anyway! These later books tell more one-off stories, and they benefit from having a strong foundation of world building and characters that they can create these new stories on. As with the first 7 books, each new book accretes moderately more magical theory, cosmology, magical beings, and British people. It's fine stuff, though not extra-ordinary and rather leisurely paced. I would also praise the author for being someone who is A) obviously a giant geek and part of geek culture, while B) being able to write, affectionately, about this culture without making you want to jump off a bridge. Oh! And I consistently loved the talking foxes in every scene they are in.
The Peloponesian War, Kagan
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024
happiness requires freedom, freedom requires courage, courage requires setting fire to a cop car
Rivers of London, books 1-7
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024
A slower, more genteel, more English, urban fantasy. In this case the MC is a green police officer, who stumbles into the supernatural while on a case and is gradually inducted into more and more of the mysteries of English magic. These stories are odd? One of the minor themes of the stories is jazz, e.g. the MC's dad is an almost famous jazz muscian, and the second book is about a series of cases in and around the London jazz scene. And the books are a little like the jazz, they sort of noodle along, doot-dootling, taking their time, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. The momement to moment experience of reading them is nice, and they can develop a pleasant patter once they get going, but this slow and unhurried pacing means that the books are never really page turners or thrillers. In particular, when starting a new book, there's definitely a hump of a few hours that you have to get over before settling in to the new story. Usually with an audio book series I'll just listen to all the stories straight through, but with these, in between each book, I definitely needed a few hours of light comedy podcasts before being ready to hunker down and start the next Rivers of London book.
I think part of the issue with the pacing/urgency is that these books lean more on the British police-procedural aspect than they do on the urban-fantasy aspect. So there's (almost) never a case where it is the protagonists against Cthulu or where they are badly out-matched; rather the MCs can always draw on a police force that numbers in the tens of thousands, a dense grid of CCTV cameras, small armies of analysts, tactical teams, etc. etc. The MCs do occasionally face threats to their lives, but for the most part these threats can be defeated/routed/contained if the MCs can just get back to their literally thousands of comrades. Or to put it another way, the MCs (almost) always have a monopoly on violence, and they only need to worry about local and temporary disturbances to that monopoly. So MCs go out on most investigations armed with a baton, or maybe a taser if there's a particularly dire situation, while in the Dresden universe the characters will not walk to the bathroom with less than a .45 and a shotgun. In the Rivers of London series really the struggle is not to defeat a big bad, but rather to solve the case, and to figure out and resolve whatever is happening before more people are injured. There were some parts of these police procedurals that I liked; for one the stories take a thoroughly modern and rational approach to major crimes, with all relevant info being entered into a centralized database for the case, while dozens of investigators methodically and exhaustively trace through every branch and leaf of relevant inquiry. So everyone who might possibly be involved in the case gets interviewed, and everyone and everything they reveal gets interviewed/investigated, and so on in an endless produce/consume loop until the case is solved or there is no more information to process. It's very much a breadth-first, almost organic-AI type of investigation, rather than an investigation that follows the single thread of the whims of a solo genius detective. This leads to a lot of dead ends, and occasional partial successes, and is kind of boring? But it is at least intelligent and sensible, and I'm fine with boring, as again these books do have a nice patter once they get going. I could however see a solid 60% of the urban-fantasy audience just wandering off from these repeated dead-ends. Other notes on the subject of boredeom: the MC talks about real estate like some authors talk about weather or scenery or the sky, basically any new scene will involve a discussion of the area's architecture or the history of the real estate in the area. I feel like this is a very middle-age, middle-class area of concern, i.e. it's something that me and my Mom would talk about, and is perhaps not the most exciting thing that the author could be writing. I also need to mention the Fae; there are dozens of river Gods and Goddesses, the eponymous Rivers of London, and they do basically nothing for like ~5 books? Again, a very weird authorial decision to introduce a Fae court, spend countless pages hyping them up, and then have them basically be uninvolved in the plot except for in the most modest of ways. These characters gradually start to play a more active role in the books, but oh wow does it take a long time.
Ok, so after 2 paragraphs of complaining, let me mention some of the positives. The writing is good writing; it's never less than competent and intelligent, there's constant small bits of humor and progress and spectacle, there's long running, low-key character duets between the various members of the police, the British magicians, the moderately magical underground, small time criminals, and the more elevated varieties of Fae and river-deities. I enjoyed the magic system, with its description of magic as being something like a musical note, a series of N dimensional shapes or sounds in the mind that practicioners gradually learn to hear and then to recreate during their training. I liked the ill-definedness and openness of the magical world, and the slow accretion of different magical traditions that the MC is gradually exposed to. Basically no one has a full picture of the magic-elephant; and different groups each have their own slice or perspective in how they interact with magic. I liked that the MC's family were immigrants, and his Mom is a house cleaner, and he spent swathes of his childhood helping her out at her job, and so he's constantly gathering impressions/clues of crime scenes and people's lives by how well they have dusted/cleaned/maintained their domicile. I also liked the solid Londonness of the stories; I think I finally might be beginning to develop the faintest understanding of the various English accents and their implications. I liked the MC's moderate naivete and idealism, and I liked the general upbeat and positive nature of these stories. I liked the author's take on urban-goblins and their combination of low-key criminality, bone-deep shiftyness and absolute inability to give a straight answer, while also being sort of charming and likeable and ever so slightly helpful in a roguish and scuzzy way. Like they will steal your food from the break room fridge, but they also at a fundamental level want everyone to get along and not murder each other over ideologies and desires that seem absurd and incomprehensible to them.
The Familiar, by Leigh Bardugo
3.0 Stars
10-10-2024
Please clap
The library practically forced this on me, by placing it prominently on the "New Reads" shelf and me being bored. It was ... not bad? I've been burned by Bardugo in the past, but this was a slightly more quiet and self contained tale and I appreciated it for that. It reminded me of something that Naomi Novik would write more than anything, along the lines of her Spinning Silver. I think the story also benefits from being set several hundred years in the past, and avoiding some the political/cultural minefields of the present day. So: competently written, a fine historical fairy tale, but also somewhat marred by the standard Bardugo flaws of a pacing that is a bit too slow, situations that seem ~35% too unnecessarily grim, and a magic system that is too loosey-goosey for stats focused scientists like me.
The Library of the Dead, books 2 and 3 (Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle)
4.0 Stars
10-05-2024
More of the same! Wide ranging language and accents, Scottish history, magical physics and magical system building, warm friends and family, and post-apocalyptic wizard politics. The main difference from the first book is that the plots have become considerably more complex. Oh and has a neat thermal/magical explanation for the second book's primary mystery. The MC continues to be energetic and precocious, but also delirously rash and foolish at times. I'm convinced that she's employed by her Dumbledore mostly to stir up the waters and force other actors to reveal themselves, rather than to actually solve any conspiracies. The author also has a real talent for writing posh, condescending, manipulative, and aristocratic antagonists, which I consistently enjoyed. Actually wait I also enjoyed his diplomatic and persuasive peace keepers too. He's just really good at writing people, which I suppose is a useful talent for a novelist.
The Library of the Dead
4.0 Stars
9-20-2024
Bam! You've been Bardo'd!
Another entry in the sub-genre of YA books where magisterial wizards use their young charges to prosecute old grudges against other established wizards. This time the urban fantasy is set in a post-disaster Scotland, where the British Isles have been blighted by some (magical?) catastrope. The rest of the world isn't doing so hot either, but Britain has been particularly hard hit and things have regressed a great deal, and so it's Edinburgh by way of Lagos. And now we are edging up to the main feature of the book and the main reason I liked it, this book is completely packed with *stuff*. There's a whole post-cataclysm Edinburgh to learn about, with its shanty towns and mix of low tech and modern tech and magic, and urban foraging and gangs and districts and strata, and various Edinburgh landmarks that have been transformed along with the world. And there's post-cataclysm politics and political history, and of course there's magic, and magic-systems, and cosmology, and the politics between various mages and their various organizations and histories, and general Scottish history, and the MC's family and friends and their various relations, and then there's the cultures and peoples that have been stranded in Scotland as the world system collapsed, so that the primary characters are a mix of Zimbabwaen, Scottish, and Indian, and then there's all of their various accents and slang on display. I listened to this via audio book, and I think this is really how the story is meant to be enjoyed, and the author even nods to this as the MC talks about how she listens to pirated audio books as she walks around Edinburgh for her job. With the audio version you get to savor/struggle with the various accents and they have an immediacy to them that you would not get on the printed page. So while this is a YA book, in many ways it's one of the more complex and dense books I've listened to recently. In a few sentences you might get words from 5 different languages (I know I know, this is just English), Scottish slang or rhyming slang, one of a half-dozen different accents, and one of a half-dozen different types of world building. The one simple thing about the book is the primary plot; most narratively aware readers will get the basic outline of what is going on ~15% of the way through the book. Really though the book is all about the side quests, and the plotting is like the rest of the texture of the book, it darts in a half dozen different directions and escapades and really finds its richness in these alleyways of narrative and communication than in the main plot of the story.
Hmm, what else to say. The MC is 15 years old, and has led a busy life of public schooling, copper wire stealing, being part of a Fagan-esque underage-breaking-and-entering-ring, and most recently being a ghost-talker (an accredited but relatively low-status profession, of talking to the dead and delivering their messages to paying customers). The MC is quite poor, and is the bread-winner for her grandmother and little sister (both *great* characters, tons of warmth here), so money is a huge concern through out the novel. This novel isn't quite as proficient as The Name of the Wind in using money to outline the contours of their fantasy world, but money concerns do keep things moving along and gives you an idea of the various stakes and proportions at play. Oh, and I liked that the world is appropriately grim. The characters are warm and likeable, but the novel is true to its world and realistic about the events going on, and is perfectly content to say "oh yeah, because of events these X kids died horribly and these other Y people were crippled to greater or lesser degrees. Could have been worse!".
Ok, one final note, I liked the book's explanation of magic specialization, that mages were like Olympic atheletes. I.e. they excel in their field, but the mental muscles they develop for, say, marathon running aren't really the same ones they would need for shotput or for dressage. So while a mage might excel in one field (pyromancy, spirit-talking, or healing), it's very rare for a mage to excel in multiple fields to the extent that they would be comparable with an actual specialist in that field.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
2.0 Stars
9-20-2024
Moderately amusing, but ultimately not very enlightening. This book covers the funerary chants of those OG furries, the Egyptian priesthood. A person is supposed to learn these chants and rules in order to do well in the Egyptian afterlife. A few brief issues; it seems like a great deal was lost in translation over the last 4000 years, it seemed like the person going into the afterlife (Ani) was the worst sort of preening asshole (sorry to speak ill of someone who died 3000 years ago, but I have to speak my truth Ani), and most of the chants are repetitions and variations on simple and boring themes (I'm noble and great, give me stuff in the afterlife, smite my enemies).
Now the moderately amusing parts:
- The complex elements of a human being:
There is the physical body (khat),
the physical heart (ib, they considered it the home of the mind/intellect),
the name (ren, a person's individuality),
the shadow (shut, almost Jungian, it is related to the individuality but can act and move separately),
the life-force or spirit (ka, stays on with the corpse and can be nourished by offerings),
the soul (ba, takes the form of a small bird and can return to the realm of the living during the day).
Mummification was suppsed to be a way of transforming these elements so that they could continue to live on and partially function after death. This more enduring hybrid form was called a "sah".
- "I fly as a hawk, I cackle as a goose; I ever slay, even as the serpent goddess Nehebka". Inspiring!
-"I behold Ra who was born yesterday from the buttocks of the cow Meh-urt; his strength is my strength, and my strength is his strength." Seems like a backhanded compliment.
- "The third pylon, which is guarded by a man headed deity..." (you know it's gotten bad as a furry and you've explored too many possibilities when you have to describe something as a man with the head of a man)
- Ammit the Devourer, answering the question of whether a dog would wear pants like this or like this .
- "Grant thou to me a place in the underworld near unto the lords of right and truth. May my homestead be abiding Sekhet-hetep, and may a I receive cakes in thy presence." (they were very focused on making sure they had tiny cakes in the after life).
- As an example of the lost-in-translation aspect, here's a representative passage: "Behold, thou gatherest together the charm from every place where it is and from every man with whom it is, swifter than greyhounds and fleeter than light, [the charm] which createth the forms of existence from the mother's thigh and createth the gods from (or in) silence, and which giveth the heat of life unto the gods. Behold, the charm is given unto me from wheresoever it is [and from him with whom it is], switfter than greyhounds and fleeter than light." This reads like one of my high school Latin translations, i.e. it's not really understanding something essential to the message. Whether that's because of cultural drift or a failure of translation, either way as a reader today and I'm not really getting the full meaning of what the Egyptians were trying to say.
Iron Druid series, books 1-3
1.0 Stars
8-30-2024
If Alex Verus is the Dresden Files from a better universe, this is the Dresden Files from a crummier universe. It has way too much basic m'lady energy, and when the author noted at the end of book 2 that he wrote that story in 5 months, I was like "yep, checks out". So, I've read worse things than this, but I also can't think of any situation in which I'd recommend this series to anyone. I'm giving this 2 stars rather than 1 star since at least a few of its many attempted jokes did land and gave me a sensible chuckle.
Edit: wait, wait, I listened to some more (don't blame me! I already had the files queued up on my mp3 player). Based on that experience I'm removing the previous charity star. The author is simply a bad writer and should find a different profession.
Our Hideous Progeny
4.0 Stars
8-15-2024
The resurrectionists were roommates
A slow, languid, emotional, well written, and grounded examination of what would happen if Frankenstein's daughter had found his notebooks and started constructing undead dinosaurs. Once you've accepted the basic premise, the plotting is rather simple and staid, especially compared to all the operatic wildness that happens in the original Frankenstein. Still, the writing is a treat, and the characters are lovely and well drawn. At first I was unsure about this book; there's a thing that goes on in some circles of fiction, where they are really focused on certain things (neuro-divergence! physical disability & a limited spoon supply! queerness! anti-racism! lovely feminism!), and they have all the sign posts of those things, but then they forget to build actual characters and stories around those signposts, resulting in lackluster fiction. This has happened enough that I have started to feel anxiety when I see the signposts themselves. In this case though I need not have worried; there's actual genuine fiction here with well drawn characters and just a general lovely and luxurious flow of words. Even the cads of the piece were enjoyably fleshed out.
One small quibble; they are trying to construct an undead dinosaur in order to prove their palentological theories, but by doing so they are beggaring the question. They assume that the dinosaur should be constructed according to their theories and then build a dinosaur based on their theories. This does not prove that the actual dinosaurs corresponded to their theories.
Actually wait another small quibble. Like with the Ninth House book by Leigh Bardugo, the main character really is not that bad. I hesitate to even say she has anger issues, more she's just a sort of moderately prickly person.
Ravenor novels, 1-3, by Dan Abnett
4.0 Stars
7-30-2024
Can't you see? You are two sides of the same coin!
- Fuck you
- Fuck you. The Emperor protects.
The same, but different. Shares many of the same traits and positive qualities of the Eisenhorn novels, but with a moderately different cast of heroes and villains. Taking the place of the ancient and unreliable Eisenhorn is the Inquistor Ravenor, a hideously injured but psionically powerful MC. Ravenor is about as gifted as you can be while still remaining human, however due to having ~70% of his body burned away he cannot survive outside of his life support tank (it's literally a tank). So he has barely any physical embodiment, and instead floats over the story as an almost authorial prescence, flitting through minds, infiltrating psyches, reading and compelling thoughts, and at a last resort taking direct control of bodies. Abnett has occasional and occasionally beautiful passages where he explores what this sort of existence would mean, to exist purely in a realm of thoughts, though I wish he had delved deeper and more frequently into the subject. I think decisions like that could elevate his writing from consistently and prolifically good to actually great. Well, in any case. These books are still in Abnett's sweet spot, allowing him to tell three individual adventures, while also giving him enough space to play in and shape the larger narrative into something interesting. If nothing else releasing dozens of books has made Abnett a confident writer, willing to go beyond the simple remit of telling an adventure and on to trying to craft long form narratives with more interesting shapes.
Now, as usual, an accounting of the good and the bad. The largest negative to the story is that at several points Abnett has to hand his MC the idiot ball in order to have the plot work out. As many DMs have discovered to their displeasure, mind-reading is simply too powerful of an ability to co-exist with any sort of complicated plot. So the author keeps having to find reasons why the MC does not use his primary power to simply and immediately resolve the most pressing issues. On the positive side, I liked the venture into non-Imperial space, and how it turns out that yeah, there's an entire, wild, endlessly varied Adrian Tchaikovsky type galaxy of aliens and cultures out there, but these characters simply never see it since they spend their lives in a violently xenophobic monoculture. As always I liked the concept of city-planning as a form of macro-magical-ritual, which is explored here just slightly more than it is in Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness. Oh right and I liked how the inciting incident between Ravenor and his nemesis happened in the past and is never fully explained, i.e. Zigmund knows what he did and why he should feel bad about it. Oh, also of course a fan of Unwerth and his deranged and connotative speaking style. In the hands of a less clever writer this might be painful, in the hands of Abnett it's a great way for him to play with language. It's particularly good when you fall in sync with Abnett, and can predict a tenth of a second ahead of time what the next mal-approprism will be. Actually now that I think about it this half-language is in the same category as the command-poetry used by Eisenhorn's band, and in general it's another instance of Abnett's interest in language as a thing in itself. Oh, and as always, I liked that the audio book reader had the chance and the willingness to throw in so many wild voices.
Eisenhorn novels, 1-4, by Dan Abnett
4.0 Stars
7-15-2024
Thorn 4 T(zeentch), rising
alternately
What are you going to do, shoot me?
Who watches the watchers? In WH40K's Inquisition, every watcher is responsible for watching every other watcher, which is good, since they inevitably go bad. Also good because they're being gradually infiltrated and replaced by a centuries old Illuminati operation. Also good because if you find that a fellow Inquistor has been corrupted, you might be able to take their stuff before they are thrown on the pyre, and the vile, seething tome that they were keeping hidden probably won't corrupt you like it did its previous owner.
This series follows several centuries of investigations by the Inquistor Eisenhorn, as he tries to expunge chaos plots, warp contamination, alien kissing, and worse. While these books are never truly great, they are consistently good, and the setting/structure of the stories allows them to showcase one the best features of WH40K, i.e. its operatic nature and its massive breadth of thingies. So for example the stories range widely in location, from 3 Body Problem type systems where the population spends years in icy hibernation until their orbit brings them back into the temperate zones, to titanic hive cities, to Jeffersonian farm worlds, to UV-blasted hyper-farm worlds, to dying and left behind rust-belt industrial worlds, to alien relic worlds that bend time and space and reality, to beach-heads of the Warp into reality and beach-heads of reality into the Warp. This isn't quite Ted Chiang levels of world building, but Abnett does put some solid thinking into how these different places operate, and what/why/how you get a cyclopian city of strange angles and how you would train your combat team to operate there. As with locations, so with characters and narrative. The investigations are far ranging in space and time, and the Inquistitors have near limitless powers on what they can requisition for their operations, so you end up with teams of pilots and starship captains, rogues and rambos, spies, psykers, natural anti-psychers, power armored warriors, giant mechs, magical swords, magical staffs, magical chain saws, orbital bombardments, augmented humans, partial cyborgs, full brain-in-a-metal-shell cyborgs, a dozen different types of uplifted trans-humans, AIs, aliens, alien jewelry, sorcerors, demons, demon-hosts, etc. etc. It's perhaps not quite as wild as something that Adrian Tchaikovsky would do, but the setting still has a ton of variety when it's allowed to stretch its legs.
Finally, I liked that the final boss of the series was a fearless and searching moral inventory, asking the MC to reflect back on his stories and examine his own actions and motivations over the centuries. Actually wait I also liked the hapless, Vandermeer-ish biologist who's life gets ruined every 10 years or so by his involvement in these matters. Wait wait I also liked the Rambo character, who leans heavily into his stock role and has great fun with it and eventually makes its own. Like you often know what he is going to do and how he will play out in the narrative, but he still has great fun doing it. Also enjoyed that, in order to mystify any evesdroppers, Eisenhorn and his band use a form of connotative Beat-poetry in order convey messages on the battlefield. Also a big fan of the audio book reader, who like the story allows himself to stretch and luxuriate in all sorts of different roles and voices.
Exordia, by Seth Dickinson
1.0 Stars
7-1-2024
Against my better judgement, I tried another Seth Dickinson while at the library. I liked the parts with the aliens! I also liked the parts where he tries to lay out new basis elements for reality, I always appreciate it when it a creator does that, even in cases like this where the elements don't really work. Really the only problem is when he writes anything at all about humans. These parts are exhausting and dispiriting, as Dickinson is both very naive and trying hard to be very edgy, and the combination of the two is spiritually painful. There was one particular page where I read a sentence, and said "Oooooof" out of vicarious cringing pain. And then I read the next sentence, and again went "Ooooof". And so on. And I realized that as I was reading this paragraph I was basically doing Lamaze breathing as a way to help manage the psycho-literary pain of what I was reading. DNF at around the 120 page mark.
Fourth Wing, Iron Flame
2.0 Stars
6-16-2024
"“Young Adult 18+ Mature Themes” is how the bookstore designates books that are pretty simple, reading-level wise, but also have hardcore porn in them that children absolutely should not read. This is where most of Ariel’s favorite books reside." - Silicon Age Collapse document
So, this was my first BookTok read, and despite (because of?) the absolutely stellar GoodReads reviews it was a pretty big disappointment. The core problem with the book is that it has too much basic Yin energy, i.e. the main character is very very special, and she gets the best dragon, and then the other best dragon, and the best powers, and the best boyfriend, and he has 8 pack abs and he's also in charge of everything because he's super cool but he's also rebellious and dangerous but also he's royalty and also and also and also and also. For a bit there at the start it seems like there's going to be a love triangle where she has to choose between straight-and-narraow Dain and bad-but-cool Zain, but that gets thrown out the window pretty quickly and then the rest of the book is spent shitting all over Dain. Get fucked Dain, you're dog shit, cucks like you should be executed. Is the message of the book. The best I can say about this is that it makes me feel better about male fantasies, which are really quite upright and decent and original in comparison. Oh right, and then like 75% of the way through the book starts introducing words like "clit" and "armoire", which are not at all appropriate for this book's age group. Hmm, what else. The OC is very special and she can throw lightning bolts with her mind, and lightning is one of the very few things that can hurt the Big Bad that is threatening the world, but she is just too focused on you-know-what to ever actually spend any time mastering this stuff. I can just feel Raistlin rolling over in his grave. Oh right and there's exactly one chapter from the the male lead's perspective, and it is just heartbreaking. Does the author really think that men think this way? Does the author really think that women want men to think this way? Again, heartbreaking.
Was there anything positive? I liked that the author decided to give the characters both dragons and X-men powers. Like, it's fantasy, if you decide you want to go whole hog with your universe there's no real boundary or governing body that can stop you. I know I complained about all the gifts given to the main character, but I'm weirdly OK with this sort of overload when it comes to world building. Like it's not going to be great art, but it might still result in a fun book. I also liked the unreasonable effectiveness of lassos in aerial combat; there's basically nothing a weapon or spell can do that's worse than being pulled off your ride and slammed into the ground at several hundred miles per hour. Also kind of funny the mental image of these wizards yoinking each other off of their respective dragons.
Edit: Ok, I have since learned that BookTok does not refer to "people on TikTok that like books" but rather "horny people on TikTok that like books". So that explains the disconnect between what I expected and what I got with this book.
Gaunt's Ghosts, books 1-999, by Dan Abnett
2.0 Stars
6-5-2024
The Emperor protects
I went into this with high hopes, knowing that this is the illimitable Dan Abnnet's magnum opus, his largest and most famous series which ties together the threads of his various standalone books. Turns out, not that great though! Let us enumerate the reasons:
The main issue is that the fundamental verb of the series is not interesting. Abnett's other books are about futuristic aerial dog-fights, or giant mechs blasting each other, or post-human bio-tanks fighting each other with lasers, chain-saws, and magic powers. These are fine activities and perfectly sufficient to carry a book or two. In the Gaunt's Ghosts books though the basic action is "they tried to shoot me with a rifle but I shot them instead". And there's only so many variations of that you can do. And so many of these variations have been covered so many times in so many previous books and movies. You can tell that Abnett can tell that this isn't working; around book 5 or so he starts trying to recast the series as basically anything else but what it started as. So you have a book of blood and snow where it's just a few main characters being hunted in a magically becalmed and be-blizzarded city, a haunted house book of them occupying a billion year old and slowly awakening alien tomb-fort, a book of ship-board naval adventure, a guerilla book or two hunting a single high value target on a Chaos planet, a visit to a dusty Mars world where they decide that it's really just a silly place and the best thing to do is just f-off to somewhere else, a book where the OCs are foolishly fighting a contest of armies and logistics while their enemies are fighting a contest of narrative and religious symbolism, etc. etc. Each of these books tries to vary things up and tell a different story, but also to a greater or lesser degree it still has sections of that basic, uninteresting verb.
Another issue is that it's not clear that Abnett's story telling really stretches to a long running series like this. He does perfectly fine over the course of one or two books, but he's not really able to stretch these characters and their arcs over the longer term, and so at best they just all fall into stock roles that they repeat for book after book. He also occasionally loses the context over too long a period; memorably one of the characters makes an impassioned and apparently honest minor speech about his dedication to pacifism in an insane universe, while 2 books earlier the same character was using warped blood runes to explosively desanguinate multiple people. I think Abnett just lost track of some earlier bits when it came time to write the later bits. Oh right, and one final quibble, the last book really does not stick the landing.
Ok, so what is good? I like that they use chain-saws to carry out their honor duels. I like basically any section where Abnett tries to portray things from Chaos' perspective; the lore has set him up with basically an impossible task of trying to organize and make sense of the senseless, but the effort is at least usually ludicrous and wild. I liked the book that at various points found an excuse to give ~15 characters a chance to make a minor speech about how they interpret the insane universe they are in. I liked the invasion of Garillon and how life in a real Guard unit should be like, I liked the Mars-ish book where they, for once, genuinely acknowledge that they could just bombard the place from orbit and save everyone a lot of time and sweat. I liked the insane ED-209 kill-bot that spends 90% of a book slowly making its way through an aquifer while the rest of the plots goes on above it.
Finally, shout outs to the few characters having a decent time in this universe:
- that head Scout guy, who manages to do a Shrek and escape to a swamp to live without anyone bothering him
- Fazekiel, the autistic commissar, who a) has a heart of gold and b) is basically in this situation, living in and enforcing the all encompassing edicts of a rigid authority
- basically any of the Chaos characters or ships, who are all just out there trying to live their best lives