Nightmare Alley, Gresham (1946) 
4.0 Stars
1-20-2022
Get this man a dog, stat.
A grimmmmmm book that follows an unhappy young man as he becomes an unhappy older man. Stanton starts off doing magic tricks as a carnie, and from there learns how to do cold readings & mentalist tricks, then graduates to doing his own stage shows, then to starting a new-age religion and scamming a congregation of well off older ladies, and finally moves on to his biggest con, swindling an industrialist out of a part of his enormous fortune. During this entire process Stanton is deceitful, contemptuous, and terrible to other people, and is himself often miserable as these traits become the only colors he can perceive in the world. So get ready for a cynical and drawn out slog with this book.
And yet...the book has qualities. The writing is solid, occasionally excellent. There is a ton of technical detail; one of the reasons the book is so long is that the author describes precisely how each of the various scams/illusions works. There's also an agreeably elevated consciousness by the author; the core of the book is grim, but there are decent people in its world. They're just not the ones the protagonist is hanging out with. There is a surprising amount of carnie solidarity, and there's a fair amount of meta-introspection as side characters question the nature of the protagonist. E.g. the psychologist who points out his Oedipal-issues-starter-pack, and the sex-positive socialist who points out how many of Stanton's problems are of his own creation, i.e. he's bringing his own meta-physical/moral baggage along & dumping it on the world and then complaining about the picture of the world that he has created. Also, the book is pretty consistently ACAB. Also, gets the fundamental connection between ministers/shamans/psychologists/cold-but-alluring-Swedish-dominatrixes.
So I very much liked the book both for its portrayal of early 1900's America, and for a surprisingly developed understanding of that world.
Other trivia: the author (Gresham) fought in the Spanish Civil War, against the fascists/Catholics. (Not a good war, but it did produce a lot of good writers). Despite that Gresham was pretty bad in a lot of ways, e.g. heavy drinking and adultery in his later years. His wife divorced him, and then she went on to marry CS Lewis. Gresham went on to commit suicide by pills, something he mentions in Nightmare Alley.
Beneath the Rising
3.0 Stars
1-15-2022
Fine? Fine. I had read very high praise for this book, and so perhaps I was expecting too much going in. And it did have competent writing, some decent and well supported twists, and a reasonably fast paced and exciting adventure story. On the downside though, it's a bit too YA, and just a bit too woke (which is really my fault for having been sensitized to this quality by other books that go way overboard on that axis). I also wasn't entirely sure why I was reading the book, besides the fact that it was very cold and my cat was on me and I didn't want to move out of bed. The story is somewhat lovecraftian, but also abandons some of the tenets of the genre (e.g. the main characters should be absolutely fucked, and they should not be able to cast a fireball in order to solve their problems).
Colombus Day, and successive books
2.0 Stars
1-15-2022
Fine? Fine. I originally chose this audio book series since A) there's a lot of them B) it had been recommended and C) and most importantly, it's about people in spaceships shooting lasers at each other. And the recommendation wasn't invalid; the author is making an effort, and he's a decently smart guy, and he avoids the hard-right attitudes that you usually get from mil-sci-fi writers. I did like the initial setup (aliens visit earth; from that point on the humans are buffeted by the whims and politics and economics and campaigns of technologically superior aliens fighting a long-running war with each other). And occasionally I did genuinely enjoy the comedy, although mostly it sticks to the level of an Andy-Rooney-like patter. Some of the problem solving and orbital mechanics and engineering was fine, and I liked the bits about the counter-intuitiveness of dealing with tactical FTL jumps.
Despite the moderately positive qualities, the books get steadily less interesting as they repeat the same conversational bits, or find new excuses for yet more lengthy engineering problems, or avoid any actual consequences in what should be an extremely dangerous universe. I trailed off around book 4, as things seemed likely to continue in the same rut.
The Thin Man
3.0 Stars
12-26-2021
Nice. Short, pithy, occasionally dark, and often quite funny. I've already seen the movie for this twice, so I had a pretty good handle on the plot, but I still found the book to be an enjoyable read. The movie cleans up a lot of things from the book to make them palatable for 1940's screens, which is fine, but the movie also loses a lot of the more out there character bits from the book. So they are fairly different experiences.
I also like the fact that the title for the novel makes sense in the context of the novel, only barely makes sense in the context of the movie, and then is completely inaccurate for each successive movie. I like a franchise that sticks to its guns even in the face of all logic.
Domesticating Dragons
1.0 Stars
12-20-2021
The author mixes up the terms "sandbagging" and "snowballing". These are very different things!
DNF. The above mix up was the most enjoyable thing in the first 80 pages, the story was just kind of joyless and boring and pointless. Why envision a fantasy world, and then re-create corporate America within that fantasy world? It reminds me of these pathetically heartbreaking last meals that American prisoners request, just a an absolute capstone on a constrained and blighted life.
The Last Graduate, by Naomi Novik
3.0 Stars
12-20-2021
Fine. It has the same strengths as the first story in the series, but also the same flaws. On the strengths side you have inventive spell/monster design (though not quite as impressive as the first book), solid and distinctive characters, and moments of satisfactory melodrama. On the flaw side there are thematic/story beats that get repeated way too many times, and the world building fundamentally doesn't make sense as it would require every wizard family to have 20+ kids in order to make the child mortality rates work out. Oh and the protagonist is the worst person in bed; she's contemptuous, and selfish, and her boyfriend literally kills himself after sleeping with her once.
There is no Anti-Memetics Division
3.0 Stars
12-10-2021
Not as clever as I first hoped, but I was still affectionate towards the book at the end. The basic idea is that there is an Anti-Memetics Division that is supposed to deal with artifacts/creatures/ideas that can erase themselves from human memory, or which can threaten/destroy people purely through being known or comprehended.
The book originated as fan-fic in the SCP universe, a fan-fic that was gradually extended and collated into a full story told through a number of vignettes over the years. The series has flaws; some low quality writing at the start that only gradually shapes up, plenty of comic book logic, too many thematic elements (ghosts? aliens? spells? orbital cannons?) overly-broad strokes, and as mentioned above not being as clever as I had hoped from the title/conceit. Still! Despite the list of imperfections the story often had a pleasantly gonzo vibe, and was perfectly happy to go through any number of framing devices as it travels backwards and forwards through memory and time.
Codex, by Lev Grossman
1.0 Stars
12-7-2021
This was a superficially normal thriller/mystery, about an investment banker between jobs who has been hired to look for an ancient and possibly mythical book inside a forgotten library. This normal story is then paired with more high-brow literary attempts at adding various meta-textual strands to the story. Unfortunately, none of it works. The story is terrible as a thriller, and it is terrible at trying to do anything new or clever with the meta-text. My assumption is that big-brain Grossman saw the massive success of Dan Brown's **The Da Vinci Code**, thought that he could easily duplicate that low-brow book and rake in the cash, and then completely failed. It's not so easy when you're in the driver's seat!
So, in more detail. The first thing you notice about the book is that basically nothing interesting happens in the first 100 pages. A bold choice. Also, most of the characters in the book range between asshole, cringy, or unmanic pixie dream girl. So that does not help. Later on in the book more interesting possibilities open up, and then absolutely none of them pay off:
E.g. 1) there is an adventure-type video game that the main character plays, and at points the adventure in the video game seems to duplicate or rhyme with the adventure that the protagonist is having. And then you pair that up with the object of his search, a book from the 1400's, of which only second hand and incomplete versions exist, and those versions seem in many ways anachronistic? E.g. the old text has odd and varied creatures, characters die and come back and seem to randomly change in motivation, scenes and countries dissolve and reshape, etc. And it kind of sounds like the description you would get if a 1400's person were to see a modern video game (Fortnight?) and then try to describe said video game. So maybe there are time shenanigans going on? Maybe the author of the ancient text is immortal, or prescient, or had contact with a future person or artifact? (Spoiler, none of this is happens). Tying into this theory, the protagonist meets the creator of the video game, a singularly brilliant, monk like, extremely short dude (it was mentioned earlier in the book how short a 1400's Englishman would be) who speaks in a weird accent, like he learned modern English by watching TV. Maybe he is the author of the Codex as well? (Spoiler, no).
E.g. 2) At one point, the protagonist has reached a fail state in the video game, and also seems to be at a dead end in his investigation. This was interesting? Like what if you had a mystery novel where the investigator simply makes the wrong choices and fails to solve the mystery and the novel just disolves around them. And it would explain the poor quality of the novel, as a sort of shambling mis-production that falls further and further apart (e.g. something like like Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading, or the BBC's A Christmas Carol). This does not happen, the investigation gets back on track.
E.g. 3) The protagonist is seeking a book for a rich English Duchess, and apparently the book contains a secret that is extremely relevant to the modern day. The secret turns out to be that the book **implies** that 600 years ago the Duke of Wentworth's ancestor had an affair and a baby with a commoner. Which is just the most underwhelming thing ever, and that nobody would care about in the present day except the most neurotic of nobles.
E.g. 4) The protagonist has no reason to do any of this. Basically he meets the Duchess once, and after that point he is under a Geass/Charm to seek out the book. His actions don't fit with his personality or his position in life, and every time he speaks with the Duchess it's like an electric wire in his brain. So maybe there is something odd going here? E.g. rather than just being bad writing, maybe there is a super natural explanation? Is this book part of The Magicians extended universe? And you do notice that the Duchess and Duke's other servitors have a similarly slavish quality to them. And then, spoiler, no. There is no interesting explanation. This is indeed just bad writing and plotting, where people do idiotic things that are against their character purely to advance the plot.
Final Notes on the novel: don't have sex while committing a robbery!
The Expanse, Book 9
3.0 Stars
12-3-2021
A fine ending to the 9 books of the Expanse series. This final book has many of the same thematic elements and plot beats as the earlier books, and though they've reached their expiration date, they haven't truly begun to go rancid and stale. So: you have the protomolecule up to its usual protomolecule bullshit, although this time on a slightly grander scale as it's trying to NeonGenesisEvangelionize the whole human race into one sublime and gooey entity. There's also the creatures from beyond, who continue to try and mess with our precious universal constants. We find out a bit more about them; it turns out that this whole inter-universal war is because they are NIMBY's who object to our ring-space uglying-up their universe. And finally you have the Laconians, memorably represented by the omega-asshole Tanaka. The idea at the end of the last book was that it was not necessary to orbitally bombard the Laconian homeworld, since their main fleet was gone and their precursor ship yards were destroyed. Surely this would be the end of things and the Laconians could just return to being one world among many, without the need for committing yet another war crime. Nope! The Laconians are back and in full flower in this book, so, nice going Naomi. Fortunately the Roci is on the case, and wraps everything up semi-neatly. I think the ending has some problems, since the protomolecule is still out there and just waiting to be experimented on again, but eh, whatever.
Overall it is not great? But it is fine, and it is fast reading, and I do still love the parts where the author retreats from hand-wavy alien-tech and just returns to life aboard ship, and the minor clashes among the gunships and destroyers. As with the very first book, the authors have a deft hand for the audible, and for the thrums and sounds of their sci-fi vessels. I want to be in a crash couch when a rail-gun fires! It seems like it would be so delightful and cathartic, like combining the visceral feel of a roller coaster ride with the excitement and danger of paintball with the serene joy of a computer game.
Inspector Garrmosh, #6.5, by Louise Penny
2.0 Stars
11-30-2021
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. These novels seem to be childishly simple in terms of writing and plot. And the portions are small too! This mystery story was only 65 pages long.
It Was All a Lie, by Stuart Stevens
2.0 Stars
11-30-2021
Kind of a mess. This book was brought to my attention by Driftglass, who singled out Stuart Stevens as the sole Never-Trump media figure to fully admit that the Republican Party's problems did not start in 2016, but rather have been building for decades. And this is true, Stevens does admit problems, and he does have a few genuinely funny zingers about his party. Despite that though the book was unsatisfying to me. This is partly because the history of Republican corruption that Stevens lays out was already long familiar to me, and so I wasn't that interested in yet another accounting of those events. Another thorn is that while Stevens is honest and repentant for a Republican, that is still like meeting an enlightened kobold. Yes, he is quite advanced for his race, but he is still below-average when compared to normal people. So you have these bits where Stevens can look at Trump and realize that "yeah, we must have fucked up to arrive at this point", but he still can't bring himself to say "We should all be supporting the Democratic party". Or he insults orange-racist, but he still can't bring himself to say anything good about Hillary Clinton. Or he thinks he cares about campaign finance reform and reducing the corrupting influence of money in politics, but he cannot recognize that Elizabeth Warren exists. Or the opposite version of this happens, where Stevens realizes that something terrible has happened in the Republican Party, but he hasn't really back-propagated that information through the rest of his brain. And so he is still dropping positive anecdotes about these Republican party figures like they were not stepping stones towards ruin. It has an Eichmann at Jerusalem feel; Stuart Stevens recognizes at some level that killing millions of people was wrong, but he does still very much want to tell you about how nice some of his co-workers were and oh take a look at this medal he got for making the trains run ahead of schedule.
In summary, Never-Trump Republicans are a good example of why Stalin had to send landlords and shopkeepers to work the farms. These people have spent decades steeping in conservative propaganda and it has left their brains raddled and useless. They need long years of de-programming, reflection, and radical introspection just to bring them up to the level of a reasonably intelligent ~20 year old.
The Barrow, Book 2 and Book 3, by Mark Smylie
4.0 Stars
11-15-2021
Great, but also greatly deranged. Continues the story of Stepjan Blackheart, a power-hungry power-bottom who lives for drama, as well as a cast of 100+ other characters as they slowly, ever so slowly, advance the timeline of the Known World.
First the good. At least to my mind, Smylie is an excellent writer. I love his little vignettes, I love his world building sensibilities, and I think he writes great pieces of action-horror. I came into this book with zero excitement, but within ~20 pages I was remembering why Smylie is such a personal favorite. I like that Smylie creates something different; he has a style and a world that is refreshingly separate from the main lines of fiction and fantasy. There were some slight, slight nods to contemporary politics in these books, and while it is nice to know that Smylie is on the good side politically/culturally, I was also saddened to find even the lightest connections between the world he creates and our own dumb timeline. Other notes: a character from the Artesia RPG's sample adventure makes an appearance in the first book, which I know because my brain decided that particular bit of information would be worth preserving for 20 years. Thanks brain, top notch work.
And now, the not so good. As best as I can figure out, Smylie started out trying to write a gigantic, Game-of-Thrones style saga that would cover massive events from many different angles over many different years. He then realized, like a indie-dev trying to make an MMO, that whoa this is actually a vast amount of work and there is no way I will ever finish this. And so in these books we are getting the pieces that Smylie did finish, but they have all sorts of oddities since they are just randomish parts of a much larger, incomplete vision. This comes through clearly in the first book, which is ~200 pages long, and introduces well over 100 characters. Which is simply insane, and could not have been the intent when he started out writing. There's also the characteristic Mark Smylieisms, e.g. the random mixing of in-depth lectures on geography, history, religion, trade, dynastic relations, etc. etc. with action-horror, ultra-gruesome magic, fairly complex deceptions and spy work, main battle, assassinations, and extremely graphic sex. And on top of that there's a complete overload of information, with Smylie dumping out hundreds of character names, place names, details of several religions, the ultra-specific details of dress and armor and armament, etc. etc. Too much, too much! It completely reads as outsider-art, which is part of the reason I love it, but is also part of the reason that people who don't have a 20 year investment in the writer will be turned off. Oh and I think a lot of the action/events of the novel will only make sense in the context of the RPG it is based on? Like there is a mechanical reason that characters occasionally launch into poetry/prayer/song, but that won't necessarily be clear to a fresh reader.
And perhaps over all there is also a feeling of melancholy, in that A) it is very unlikely that Smiley will finish his series in any meaningful way, unless he starts writing more than ~50 pages per year, and B) even the stuff that he is writing is mostly filling the details and side-paths of a time period and location that he's pretty well covered in his earlier books & RPGs. E.g. the same stuff he was covering 20 years ago. Finish it off! Mark a line through it on your checklist, and move on to fresh projects.
Anyway, despite all the criticisms I am happy that I read these books, I would buy more of them, and I wish all the best for their talented and insane author.
Her Body and Other Parties
1.0 Stars
10-15-2021
Well, this is no Tabloid Dreams. I read a few of the short stories and the author seems sad about something? Unclear what it is. Has she tried getting outside and walking more? Would that help? Maybe watch some anime? DNF.
Ancient Dreams - Ancient Ruins
X Stars
10-5-2021
A new entry in the genre of LitTRPG (Literary Tree RPG). Reading this made me deeply ambivalent. One the one hand, it makes me think we should revert to an earlier save. Just erase all the books, movies, tv, and other stories we have created over the last 100 hundred years, and then start again fresh. On the other hand, maybe we should allow every weirdo autist with an internet connection to publish and audiobookize their fan-fictions. Let a trillion deranged and retarded flowers bloom. I'm not sure which course would be better. DNF.
(Book #5 in my Autumn of Auscapism series. Also the last one I think. A random sampling of what the internet likes has brought me only grief.)
Zodiac Academy
1.0 Stars
9-30-2021
Ok, first the good. The author follows the old advice about catching the reader's interest within the first few lines/pages, and starts her story with the protagonist trying to sneak through a window, but really having to struggle because her dump-truck ass is just too wide to fit. Brilliant writing.
From there things go downhill though, as I realize this is not a Fantasy book but rather a "Romance" book. E.g. Terrible people, terrible love interests, nobody has ever heard of consent, Azad Azad, etc. etc. These romance writers are some sick, sick people. They need Jesus, or Tzeentch. Anything really but these same, dumb, terrible, boring patterns. Did not finish.
(Book #4 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
Moarrrr Warhammer40K audio dramas and audio books
3.0 - 4.0 Stars
9-25-2021
The Oubliette: Heresy: sometimes ok?
Deacon of Wounds: A documentary about Florida's COVID response.
Darkly Dreaming:A short and not particularly distinguished drama about a masked ball. Pour one out for Deshi though, the only genial, diplomatic, and self-effacing character in the entire Warhammer universe.
Moar Warhammer40K audio dramas and audio books
2.0 - 4.0 Stars
9-15-2021
Some of the take-aways here are that A) horror stories really lend themselves to audio book readings and B) WarHammer stories do this in triplicate, since they give the authors and readers license to take everything to an extreme and really reap the full benefits of the audio medium. I liked basically all of these stories, even though they did have a certain sameness after a while (hint: everyone dies). Despite this similarity these stories mostly distinguished themselves by enlivening and embroidering their tale far beyond the point a less skillful or enthusiastic team would, and in really just going whole hog with the horror of the different situations. In more detail:
Perdition's Flame: Too angry to die! I'm not 100% sure what was going on here but I enjoyed the squelchy ride. I think there was some more detailed WarHammer lore I was supposed to know which would have made the ending make more sense? (Edit: after further research, the lore is that some GamesWorkshop folks saw GhostRider and thought "That is cool, that should be part of our setting".) But I am always here for a Nurgle story. *heart_emote*
The Way Out: Too cold to die! A fairly straightforward but also quick and varied murder fest, as a crippled ship's crew goes from bad to worse.
The Wicked and the Mad: You have an overzealous commissar (Mad; also the weakest story as it was a bit too long), a soldier haunted by the black deed she committed (Wicked; with a genuinely scary ghost and a brilliantly realized ship and ship's company (also a great narrator)), and then the final story which is sort of WarHammer meets Alien, where a Lvl 1 priest goes up against the steadily mutating warp beast that is stalking the station (Mildly wicked? the main character is not a moral exemplar, but also holy shit was he out of his depth).
Reverie: WarHammer meets Annihilation; an audio book about a gate to the Warp that is slowly infecting and subverting the land around it. Has fan-favorite themes of symbolic contagion, revelatory texts written by madmen, reality slips, time slips, time loops, reincarnation, and bodily liberation. I liked it. It suffers from a common Warhammer problem of being about 30% too long, but if it had sharpened the story up a bit and made the structure of the story a few increments weirder, I think it would have been genuinely excellent rather than just good.
Sepulturum: By far the weakest of the set. The general description is that it's a Walking Dead type series of adventures in a hive city, as survivors of a zemi-zombie plague deal with the undead and each other. The story is undercut by A) the plot makes no fucking sense, B) mixing random elements and themes in ways that make no sense, and C) being too long. The narrator was fine at her job, but for some inexplicable reason there was no indication of when the PoV changes. From one sentence to the next, the meaning of "I" changes and you have to figure out from context that they have moved on to a different thread in the narrative. This was particularly confusing the first few times it happens! To add to the oddness, the narrator does say the chapter headings like normal, it is only the breaks inside of a chapter that are nulled out.
The Dragon's Banker
1.0 Stars
8-23-2021
A comprehensively deranged artistic creation. On the one hand I don't want to criticize the book, since I think that gives the book more validation than it is worth? On the other hand, I also *really* want to criticize the book.
The first thing you notice with this book is the audio-book reader, who is the author, and who has a slight and reedy voice that is always *just* on the verge of cracking. It is uncanny how bad of a speaking voice he has, and it is weird that there was no one in his life who could have told him not to do this thing. The next thing you notice is that the author has inexplicably named his main character "Sailor", so that any number of sentences start with phrases like "Hey, Sailor..." Which makes it sound like it is going to be the lead in to a raunchy proposition? But it never is, because the author is not a fun or humorous person. For the plot of the story, I'm not going to delve too deep into it, but the basic idea is "what if neoliberalism was not bad?" It takes place in a fantasy world, with dragons and renaissance level tech and a protagonist who is an investment banker and supposed to be a good guy. But even in this self created fantasy world the author still can't make his premise hold up. The protagonist flat out murders 50 innocent people by sabotaging their ship, and his dragon friend incinerates another several thousand dock workers. This is why blood-red is the color of Communism, to help you remember that Capitalists have murdered and will murder any number of workers in order to maintain their class privilege.
(Book #3 in my Autumn of Auscapism series)
Tipping the Velvet
4.0 Stars
8-20-2021
Lesbians!
...
...
...
Waters returns to form with this book and then some. It is waaaaaaaaaaay more prurient than her other books, and is also slightly simpler and sweeter and more broadly drawn. Kind of like a Dicken's story, but with more fisting. That's not to say this is a simple book though, it's just less of a jagged puzzle than her others.
The Watcher in the Rain
4.0 Stars
8-18-2021
I was expecting a long Warhammer40K audio-book, instead I got a short WarHammer40K audio-drama. It was delightful! The audio team leaned into the strengths of the medium and was wonderfully over the top, while the writing was sweetly succinct and greatly gothic. They should really make more of these audio-plays.