Barn 8, by Unferth 
4.0 Stars
7-28-2022
Iowa, the death of hope
Delightful. The book completely charmed me within the first 20 pages. Since there's great stuff even at the very beginning of the book, I don't want to spoil anything by going into too much detail of the plot. Instead I'll just say that it's about a cast of yearning, misfit, animal rights activists who decided to do something. The book does a great job of creating a group of characters who are all unique and lovely in their own way and own light. I would give the book 5 stars, except that it kept adding new characters (who are fine!), rather than focusing on the initial characters that I'd already fallen in love with. Anyway. It's short, it's fast, and it's one of the most cheerful and enjoyable books about factory farming and environmental collapse that you will read this year.
The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester
3.0 Stars
7-24-2022
Nobody is impressed. We've all spent 48 hours playing a video game before.
A weird little book. This is an account of a fictional naval battle, as the straight-laced commander of a destroyer group & convoy are under prolonged attack by German submarines. The 2 elements that immediately stand out are A) the war story, which is good, and makes for a propulsive middle half of the book and B) the commander's immersion in Christianity, to the point where he's constantly bible-quoting to himself about the most minor of things. I haven't read any other books by CS Forester, so I don't really have him calibrated and wasn't entirely sure in what light this was intended, but it seems like this meant in a positive light? In any case, the real and hidden draw of this book & half the reason I looked it up is the time-management/shift change logistics. The US Navy apparently subscribed (subscribes?) to the same philosophy as US doctors, that it is right and proper for the head captain/doctor to stay on shift for absurd lengths of time with only the smallest sleep breaks in between. And as a programmer you can only look on this with horrified fascination. There's been countless studies in various CS departments about how mental function inexorably declines with lack of sleep & overwork, and how past around ~45 hours per week the gains from increased work are overtaken by the losses from increased error rates, with the conclusion that it is simply counterproductive to work past that many hours for any extended length of time. And then you go to these absolutely vital fields like medical science, where any mistake could cripple someone their life, and the common practice is to work doctors/nurses for ~18 hour shifts for 100 hours per week. As I said, it seems horrifyingly maladjusted. And for their part doctors seem to be fine with this, partly from tradition & their own hazing, partly from the fact that being mentally impaired dulls the very senses that you would need to detect impairment (e.g. people who think they drive better while drunk), and I think partly because their job is at least somewhat physical, which might further mask to them the degradation of their mental faculties. Anyway! The navy follows this same philosophy, and has the same captain in charge of the battle for the full 48 hours without any meaningful breaks. So a larger and larger aspect of the story is the Captain becoming both utterly exhausted and utterly absorbed in this task. Sometimes this drives out bodily realities, other times these physical needs come crashing back with vividness. Again, we've all been there after a gaming bender. So this was the 3rd element of the book for me, thinking about ways this could have been avoided, and what sort of duplicate/triplicate commander system you would need and with what sort of shadowing and hand offs, so that the commander of the fleet/ship could take sleep breaks and not just be completely blasted out of his mind by hour #28 of the battle. It seems doable; you have plenty of other officers & men there, there's no reason they can't be trained up in this decision making while on the job. And the task of convoy-defense is relatively "local", i.e. you are not executing on a long-term plan, rather most of the decision making consists of reasonable responses/procedures to incoming reports. So in that sense it could be handed off with less overhead. Anyway! The US Navy apparently still has a massive problem with sleep deficits, to the point where their officers regularly ram ~$20 billion dollar warships into the sides of cargo vessels. Save a cargo container, take a nap!
Oh right and the book is meant as a metaphor of some sort. I am 90% sure of that.
Shards of Earth
4.0 Stars
7-21-2022
A fast paced & inventive space opera adventure. It reads a bit like a like a one of the more modern and wild sci-fi RPGs, where you have various ships, aliens, human-alien hybrids, hive-minds, cyborgs, alien-cyborgs, psychics, trans-humans, trans-aliens, gangsters, lawyers, boyars, and tyrannical hierophantical whelks scrabbling with and against each other at the edges of known space. Or here's another angle: it's a bit like Stephen Donaldson's *The Gap* series, except with only 10% as many content warnings and more variety & color & friendliness. Not exactly Iain M. Banks, but also very easy to read in 1 or 2 days.
City of Saints and Madmen, Vandermeer
2.0 Stars
7-15-2022
A much, much, much ... much, much lesser Vandermeer. This is one of his earlier works, where he decided he wanted to create his own version of Perdido Street Station/Etched City/Viriconium and fully realize the life and history of the fantastic city of Ambergris. It doesn't work. This is mostly due a combination of slowness and triteness.
The book is broken up into a number of novella length stories, where each story changes the genre/time period/perspective on the city. So you have the story of a shattered priest returning to the city after failed missionary work, you have a highly parenthetical popular history of the city's founding, you have a key moment in the lives of several famous artists in the city's modern period, you have a meta-text with the author in a psych ward because the city became too real for him, etc. etc. And there are numerous links between the stories, e.g. the popular history has a brief mention of the lasting psychoactive effects of the jungle-poison on the dart that the priest was pierced with, e.g. the famous artists (Voss, Lake) are mentioned in almost all other stories, etc. etc
The problem is that the quality of the work is not sufficient to keep the reader's interest. The world building is often ... bleh. It's not fan-fic level, but it is also not creative enough or original enough or beautiful enough to justify itself. Instead it's just this long slog through mediocre world building & nice but also quite slow storytelling. And there are easter eggs and cross references and sub-texts and subversions there for you to find, except that if you do not care about the work to begin with these rewards are not very rewarding. As an example, let's dig into the story of the artists (which is one of the better ones). The main thread of the story is about an artist who makes mediocre art and is perhaps wasting his talent, he has a big dramatic traumatic experience, and then after that experience he makes good art. As plot goes, this is trite & unrealistic. The second thread of the story is about an art historian writing about the artist's paintings during this time, and getting things wrong in a confidently bullshitty way. This has also been done before, many times, since artists love to turn their art on the critics who criticize them. It's a super common sub-genre, and often quite cutting and hilarious. And this story-thread is just a mediocre example of that sub-genre. At most it gets some gentle chuckles. The novella isn't worthless, some of the physical descriptions and scenes are excellent, but that quality alone isn't enough to support the novella. If the art-history thread had been dropped, then the pace of the story doubles, and that might have worked fine. As is though the book is too slow, and the shifts in perspective regularly kill any momentum that the reader has managed to build up.
Anyway! I quit around the 300 page mark, as I couldn't deal with another psychiatric hospital scene where it seems like the hospitalized person is insane, or are they?! Perhaps my favorite thing of the whole book was the (apparently) real life talk about Vandermeer's own personal experience with a hummingbird as a symbol of piercing and awakening beauty, which he would later expand into his Hummingbird Salamander. Neat.
I'm not sure how to rate this book, as it's not offensive or incompetent, but I also can't think of any situation in which I would recommend it to someone. I'm going to call that "2 stars" in recognition of Vandermeer's past services.
The Conspiracy against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti
3.0 Stars
7-4-2022
I am a meat popsicle
Reading this book reminded me of the old joke about two mid-westerners who meet and start chatting. They happily realize that they are both Protestants, they chat more and realize they are both Baptists, they chat more & more and follow down the pathways of schism and reform, realizing they both belong to the exact same minuscule branch of their religion... up until the very last branch where it turns out one belongs to the Reformation of 1879 while the other belongs to the Reformation of 1915. They then turn on each other as bitter enemies.
Which is to say that I agree with a lot of what Ligotti writes, and it is only at the last steps that I have strong disagreements with him. Being is consciousness? Check. Our material substrate is inevitably decaying towards pain and death? Check. Our conception of a unitary and self-directing personhood is largely illusory? Check. Our reasoning is strongly psychologically motivated? Check. Life endlessly feasts on itself, a continuous brutal process played out in a thin scum across the surface of a tiny rock in an infinite and meaningless void? Obviously. So we agree on all of these factual points, only to diverge on how to contextualize them, and the proper reaction to them.
So, in more detail, Ligotti's central metaphor for his complaint and for describing humanity's existence is that of the horror-movie puppet, a creature that should not be alive but is alive, a chunk of base matter given an uncanny consciousness. To Ligotti the proper reaction to human consciousness is an unsettled horror, both that there is consciousness housed in matter, and that this consciousness allows us to apprehend the fundamentally negative nature of the world we exist in. So to Ligotti consciousness, a random evolutionary by-product, is a tragic event in the course of our world as it opens up doors of terror and suffering that were previously closed. In his view the proper action would be to re-seal these doors by letting the human race go extinct. To a certain extent he is not wrong in his negative reaction, in the same way that if someone says that cilantro tastes bad to them they are not wrong. It is a subjective statement of taste that you can't really gainsay from the outside. So I fully believe that this is Ligotti's aesthetic reaction to the world, and that there are probably dozens of other people in the world who feel the same way.
And now begins the part where I criticize the book.
First, the metaphor of the horror-movie puppet. Ligotti says that the puppet is horrifying because it is uncanny; I would say that the puppet is horrifying because it will hide under your furniture and then rush out and stab you with a knife. Without the stabbing aspect, the puppet is not half so scary. There are plenty of puppet-figures that we view with affection, e.g. the Nadja-puppet from What we do in the Shadows, Johnny-5 from Short Circuit, and most of the robots from Star Wars and other sci-fi. We are perfectly fine with base matter given life, we just need to know that it is not going to suddenly stab us. Ditto with the other examples Ligotti lists, of actual humans with physical/mental issues that make them behave in weird ways. The scary thing about these conditions is not that they are uncanny, it is that they are uncertain & potentially dangerous, and we are no longer able to read or predict the other person's actions. (Edit: Science backs me up on this! They did an extensive survey, and one of the things that makes clowns so scary is the inability to read their emotional cues,due to their misleading makeup) This make the situation fraught and carries a constant risk of violence, which is half of what makes people scared or anxious when dealing with health issues that cause people to behave abnormally.
Second, the suffering. Ligotti lists suffering as one of the reasons for human extinction, but either I don't understand his moral calculus, or he is personally not doing a good job of achieving a decent suffering-to-pleasure ratio. I think for most people, we consider a certain amount of suffering a reasonable trade for a certain amount of life and pleasure. E.g. say that you were to live as long as you wanted in a beautiful alpine resort, however once every 500 years you would fall while skiing and painfully break your arm. This is a good trade? It seems like a good trade, and that the pain of breaking your arm is outweighed by all the other positive experiences you have. And if you were to look back at a life of 3000 years of alpine vacation, you wouldn't really describe is as a bad or painful life full of arm breaking, but rather an overall pleasant one. You can envision other deals with less favorable exchange ratios, where eventually the ratio would be bad enough that most people would be like "yeah, euthanize me please". But in general, especially in the modern day, especially in the rich West, it seems like we have a pretty good ratio, with at least moderate hopes of it getting better. So this part didn't really land for me, and I did not understand the argument that because some suffering is unavoidable, that therefor life as a whole was not worth it.
Third, depression. Ligotti writes a brief but I think quite astute description of depression, and how the very nature of thought and consciousness and the world is different there than it is in "normal" consciousness. And he uses this as an example of how life is fundamentally negative, if only we could see it. I think the experience of depression is instead a hopeful sign? In that if you can conceive of a second fundamental type of consciousness, where the very ground of existence is altered, why not a third or a fourth or a trillionth type of consciousness? Especially for someone like Ligotti, who dis-enjoys both baseline consciousness and depression consciousness, this understanding that there exists entirely different ground seems like a sign that he should do further exploring and possibly psychonaut his way to greener pastures. In a later section Ligotti dumps on transhumanism as another false hope, but to me that has always been the real appeal of that -ism, that through relatively minor alterations to brain organization we could enable new or more sustained states of consciousness rather than sticking with what evolution seems to have landed us on. (e.g. as one small example, the sustained states of transcendental bliss talked about by Segal in her book)
Fourth, the nature of the world. Ligotti argues for a Schopenhauerian view, that there is "black life" behind all things and animating the world. Ligotti brings this up numerous times, of an unsettling presence behind the curtain, or a hidden nature in the world, of which we receive glimpses but shy away from. To that I would say: bro, it's fine. Yes we feast on ourselves, yes there is an endless web of negative meaning, but the proper response to this understanding is a joy and a peace of knowing yourself to be a part of this vast system, that you are connected to all things through it, that it will consume you just like has consumed countless trillions of others. I've read Christians talking about the comfort of knowing that the liturgy they experience in church is the same one experienced by their parents and their parents before them, going back in an unbroken tradition for hundreds of years. How much more comforting to know that you are part of a tradition going back hundreds of millions of years!
Or for another take, we could go to Nietzsche and one of his criticisms of Christianity (I'm not a Nietzsche scholar, if I have got this completely wrong don't @ me), that Christianity looks at this entire vast creation and human life and human desire, and then stamps its foot and says "no, you are wrong". Charitably, this could be viewed as a delightful degree of chutzpah, less charitably, as a sort of pettish insanity and absurdity and smallness. In the same vein, we could look at Ligotti looking at the world, where he recognizes the vastness behind everything, and he says "ugh, I don't like it." Maybe the problem is with you dude, maybe *you* should work on changing your own mindset. Black life matters.
Oh, while we're on Nietzsche, Ligotti does have a very funny if not entirely accurate chapter on him. Ligotti does seem to misunderstand eternal re-occurrence, it's supposed to be a thought experiment or mental exercise, not a statement of actual fact. I've seen this confusion in a lot of other places, hopefully that doesn't just mean that I am misundestanding it.
And finally, to conclude the complaining, let me just toss out a grab-bag of other issues, e.g. the book is in many ways a complete mess, as it is this weird combination of philosophical screed + survey of related philosophical writing + survey of weird fiction. It doesn't so much make a continued and developed philosophical argument as it does collect a variety of related and highly opinionated thoughts that the author has had and then sort of list these thoughts out one by one. The language and reasoning is often extremely sloppy, and it often wobbles quite close to the line of "too edgy and cringy to read".
Still! Despite everything above, and despite disagreeing with huge chunks of the book, I do have a fundamental affection for it. While I disagree with the final take, the book still gets right things that 99% of books simply don't. And some of its references (e.g. Segal, Zapffe, parts of Schopenhauer) seem interesting and worth looking into more. This book could have been better, but it also could have been much, much worse.
(Edit: oh right, not sure where to put it, but a nice Zapffe bit: "Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a move viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will be its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed any peace at all..." Interesting stuff, basically arguing that you just need to let these things simmer for a while before you will come around to Ligotti's viewpoint.
Rome trilogy, by Robert Harris
3.0 Stars
6-30-2022
A solidly written and occasionally moving but also somewhat awkward series of books.
From one angle, these books are what happens when someone gets a detailed classical education and decides to take the historical info that they learned for their degree & transform it into plot points for their novel. I'm not a Cicero scholar, but I would not be surprised if every single historical fact that is known about the man makes its way into these novels in some form. So this gives the novel some awkwardness, as the story is not driven as much by narrative concerns as it is by the surviving historical record. Does Cicero serve a governship for several years, of which no real records survive? Then the novels skip over those years with just a paragraph or two about how they were not exciting & memorable. Does Cicero try a minor court case over 2 weeks, where records of the court case survive? Great, there's now a 5-20 page section in the novel about that court case. And so on. Another artifact of this method of novel generation is that these books are absolutely *crammed* with plot. There's so much plot. So much. So these novels read differently than most, as they are almost like a transcription of a game of Republic of Rome rather than a story with a definite arc. I am in general a fan of plot & so I mind this extremely plot driven stories less than most, but it does make the novels much more dense than you would expect from the page count.
From another angle, these books are a Hamilton-like story of ambitious man makes good through a combination of intellect, hard work, luck, and marrying into money. Unlike Hamilton though it has almost a horror-story vibe, as the initial rise of the protagonist is mirrored by his eventual fall, and then further fall, as he and his society descend through deeper and deeper levels of violence, chaos, and barbarity. It is kind of a tough read? Like the main character has completely failed & has zero real hope, but there's still another book & 400 more pages to go. In addition to it being a tough read, you could also criticize the book on the grounds that it centered on the absolute elites of Roman society, and that while Cicero is bemoaning the increasing lawlessness & violence around him, he is eliding the fact that every other aspect of his society is already built & maintained by enormous levels of violence. E.g. the massive wealth inequality between citizens, the ubiquitous slavery of non-citizens, and the utter rapacity towards conquered and foreign territories that allows the center to maintain its standard of living. The author isn't blind to this; he does tell the story through the words of Cicero's private secretary & slave, and it does mention Cicero's own briberies and corruptions as well as the atrocities committed by various other Roman figures. And yes, Lawful Evil is probably a better way to run a society than pure Chaotic Evil, and yes small bubbles of law existing is better than no law at all. But still, the story is not so much "The fall of the noble Republic" as it is "society converting from 95% brutality to 98% brutality". It is not quite as effective as it might otherwise be. Doubly so since so many of the new problems in the story are the result of old entrenched evils within the Republic, e.g. you have the Roman Senate who absolutely refuses to make any concessions to starving citizens, or to give up any land to the soldiers who have spent 20 years fighting their wars. And since the Senate/oligarchy will not make concessions due to their unyielding and inflexible greed, ambitious generals and future dictators are left to claim these low-hanging fruits. Oh right, another downer, you don't have to read too hard to find parallels to our own time. These books were written in 2006 & by a British guy, so they don't have any direct references to US politics except for some extremely dry and gentle jabs at the War on Terror. But there's plenty of less direct inferences to be read. Where's our student loan forgiveness, Biden? Hmmm? Hmmm?
So, that has been a lot of criticisms. The thing is, while many of Harris' stories have macro level problems, at the level of sentence-to-sentence and scene-to-scene he's quite a skilled writer. He consistently has well written & well described characters that you care about doing interesting things. So in many ways these books are an easy, if slow, read. Also, the fish ponds. So many wonderful fish & eel ponds. All I really want after reading these books is a pool of giant fat eels bedecked in gold jewelry.
(interesting factoid from the book: the Roman's made explicit what we only imply, and require a Senator to show proof of ungodly wealth before they could be admitted to the Senate)
Fatherland, by Robert Harris
3.0 Stars
6-21-2022
A well written noir mystery that is at least partially undermined by its larger themes & world building. First the good: Robert Harris is an extremely solid mystery writer. The book is fast to read, characters are well described, and actions & motivations make sense. He is a "fair" writer, where the reader is given all of the information to understand and reason about the mystery. In particular I would single out a scene about 40% of the way through the book, where the main detective's boss's boss's boss calls the protagonist in for a quick interview about the case. And the main detective quickly lays out the evidence so far & his theories about what is going on, drawing in a number of clues & actions that have been mentioned but not really highlighted in the narrative. And it's all just very solid reasoning and deduction, where everything the main character is saying is stuff that an intelligent and professional investigator could reasonably notice and elucidate. It's just a very well written & plotted scene, in a book that is full of them. For the most part the entire book is like that, and it stands up well relative to other mystery novels.
Now to the world building. The premise of the book is that Germany partially won WWII before exhaustion & the advent of nuclear weapons forced the surviving countries into a negotiated peace. After that point Germany essentially takes the place of the Soviet Union in our timeline, so that 20 years after the war the United States and Germany are in a nuclear-enforced Cold War. And during the events of the book, relations are gradually thawing to the point of detente, and people on the diplomatic side of things have no interest in fresh atrocities being uncovered that could derail the diplomatic overtures.
Ok, that is in the book. In the real world, scholarship/propaganda around the war went through several phases. During the war Soviet atrocities were downplayed in the West since they were our allies, and then after the war the situation was reversed as Germany become our ally and the Soviets our adversary. So for that whole period Soviet atrocities were highlighted, while at least some of the German crimes were covered up. And then, finally, in the 90s, both of these countries were open & neither of them were our adversary, and so we get the fullest and most complete picture of the last 70 years. The problem is that the book was written before this final stage of scholarship, and so its understanding of the war is at least partially incomplete. In particular, the book doesn't really grapple with the full scale of Nazi Germany's crimes, e.g. they were trying to genocide not just the Jewish people but *everyone* in the Soviet Union, and Germany's strategic decisions during the war only made sense in the context of that goal. But in the book Germany has defeated Russia, and there's still tens of millions of Russians running around and causing problems as resistance fighters. And so you get this weird sort of twinning effect, where people in the book are interested in manipulating the news/scholarship/education to serve their political/diplomatic ends, but the author and the book itself is shaped by these same efforts going on in real life.
Anyway! This all just to say that the book suffers from at least a partially unsatisfactory treatment of its fictional world. It doesn't achieve what The Man in the High Castle did, and is instead a good mystery story tied to a middling setting.
I Grow Half Sick of Shadows, Flavia de Luce book #3
3.0 Stars
6-16-2022
A fine but not inspired murder mystery. The main character does not actually solve anything, and instead just sort of wanders into a room at the wrong time and causes the murderer to reveal themself. I liked the gothness of the setting, and I liked some of the bits of character interplay & description. There's all sorts of deeper backstory in the setting, and a little bit more of that gets uncovered, but there's nothing really intrinsically interesting in this mystery plot.
The Power
2.0 Stars
6-12-2022
A book about how women are too emotional to be entrusted with power.
Overall not that great. It reminded me of World War Z, where the formula was [national stereotype + zombies]. Here the formula is [stereotyped gender interaction + gender flipped]. The writing is fine, but for so many parts of the book I would read a few sentences, and then go "oh, right, got it, I understand what the rest of this section is supposed to be." Which is a shame, because the writer is better than that, and the parts of the book that were not the uninspired gender-flips were often fun and creative. The author has some interesting story threads in there: there's a The Stand type spiritual manipulation towards apocalypse, there's a British family crime drama like Down Terrace, there's at least a little Sanderson type exploration of how society would change with minor magic powers. These would all work much better if they were not weighed down by re-occurring slogs through uninspired rule 63 territory.
Edit 1: Actually, wait, after another day at the pool, another thoughts. A) Why does no one in this book ever use their electricity powers to kill a mosquito or a wasp? A definite oversight in the world building. B) on a related note, I think the author does a fair amount of damage to her world building by trying to squeeze everything into this gender-flip template. So much damage. I think a better book would engage in more precise thinking rather than running everything off of this one, constant, simple conceit. C) I think that this book thinks of itself as feminist, but really the message of the book is "someone will always be holding the whip; woe to the conquered". This is perhaps not the best message if you are trying to promote equality.
Blossom Culp, books 1-4
4.0 Stars
6-10-2022
Like the Name of the Wind, but for kids. Follows the adventures of Blossom Culp, a poor & unpopular girl in 1914 rural America, as she uses a combination of wit, deception, and magic to gain a place for herself in a town where established families and established money mean everything. Books 3 & 4 are the better ones, and the ones I accidentally started with, but they all read quickly and have a steady mix of humor, patter, minor conflict, time loops, and occasional poignant observation.
The Color of Law
3.0 Stars
6-5-2022
Fine? Fine. The book is about the effects of racism in housing in America over the last century, with a focus on the legal & governmental policies that resulted in segregated housing. It is aimed more at the
academic or legal reader rather than the general interest reader, and it tends to make its points in exhaustive & minute detail. So even though the book is short, it is also a bit of slog, and many chapters seem like just a simple transform of the citations into verbiage. This would be fine for proving a legal case, but it is perhaps not the most effective format for talking to an interested layman. This is doubly true since I think most of us already know the outlines of these events from general cultural osmosis, and don't necessarily need every point explained in great detail. E.g. we've all seen Lovecraft Country, so we're all familiar with idea of white mobs, abetted by the police, trying to drive out black families that have moved in to a neighborhood.
The things I did learn from the book were not so much about the events themselves, as about the magnitude, directness, & recentness of events:
- E.g. 50 fire bombings, in a single city, in a single month, over attempts to integrate several neighborhoods
- E.g. racist housing policies after WWI, not surprising. Racist housing policies in 1970, much more yikes
- E.g. one of the main points of the book is that many these problems emanated from the very top, since FDR's Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages to black people or even to integrated neighborhoods. This in turn made it impossible for them to get mortgages, and led to a whole series of down-stream evils & inequalities in housing.
- E.g. the police/legal system did nothing against vigilante violence; the usual result of the legal system getting involved was to jail or demote anyone attempting integration, and to let rioters, snipers, and bombers off without investigation. Some of those who work forces, and it is very literal & documented in this case
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
3.0 Stars
6-5-2022
A mix of Wodehouse and Bukowski. The story follows the misadventures of a shitbag-academic in post-War England as he tries to hold on to his teaching post at a minor university. Some parts of this work really well, e.g. the descriptions of Welch, the protagonist's academic advisor, who is is this hilarious combination of absent minded, self-centered, evasive, demanding, and non-committal. The writer of the story is a good writer? And so his descriptions of these characters are very finely drawn, and can be pithy and absurd and hilarious. Other notables include Margret, who is basically this dragon who hoards uncomfortable situations, though sadly this does not entirely become clear until late in the book. I'm spoiling it here, since all of her scenes are much more fun if you know what is going on. Also Carol is a good 'un, and demonstrates the inborn British knack of "pulling on string A, to cause person B to change course, opening a slot up in person C, which allows them to connect to person D, which then disconnects person D from person E & makes person E available". Also, Atkinson & Bertrand & Johns & Mitchie are all fun.
The story works less well when it comes to the main character. He is not all bad as a character, but I do have 2 quibbles. One is that if he is bored and stultified, this is at least partly his own fault. I get that post-war England did not give people much freedom of action, but still, he did play a role in working for a college he dislikes teaching a subject that he cannot stand. He could have studied something else, he could have worked at something else, he could be doing a cleverer job of trying to shape or slither his environment. Quibble 2 is that I couldn't really get behind him in his quest to date his age inappropriate friend, Christine. Part of it is that he's a terrible match for anyone (lazy, a blackout drunk, spend thrift, smokes constantly), with his main positive feature being a sort of very minor charm & social reasonableness. Part of it is they did not have much chemistry. Part of it is that he's well outside the (Age/2 +7) band. And then a final part is that there is a bit of a phase-mismatch between this book and the modern reader, as the main character is ~30 years old, but due to the War and the British single-sex education system and the less developed times, he hasn't really spent any time around the opposite sex. So he's 30 years old, but he reads more as a 15 or 20 year old in terms of his emotional responses. Really, almost all of the men in the story are terrible, and with the exception of Atkinson and Mitchie I can't see any of them bringing happiness to someone else.
Anyway! If you'd like to read a funny British farce comedy, but with more malice & incel energy than Wodehouse, this would be your thing.
Oh ok, one more bit, I particularly liked this description of the main character, deep in the slumps of one defeat, has a new indignity assault him by surprise:
At this sudden appearance of Margaret on his blind side, Dixon felt like a man fighting a policeman who sees another approaching on a horse.
Like I said, Amis is certainly a good writer & if nothing else there are numerous gems scattered though out the story.
Hummingbird Salamander, by Jeff Vandermeer
3.0 Stars
5-26-2022
A Lesser Vandermeer. This is Vandermeer trying his hand at writing a (eco-doomer) thriller, like Lev Grossman did with Codex. And like Codex, it turns out that the task is harder than it seems. The first problem that comes up is motivation, as in why is the main character doing any of this. Our protagonist is a middle aged tech professional, and it is super unclear why she continues pursuing the mystery past the first time she gets threatened. Maybe I'm just unusually cowardly, but if someone was staking my family out and running over my co-workers with SUVs, my reaction would be "ok, sure, calm down guys, I don't actually care about this ARG that much. Here, would you like to buy this super-valuable hummingbird off of me for $100K? great thanks." So for at least the first half of the book, the main character has zero reason to pursue the mystery outside of an idle curiosity, and a whole bunch of reasons to let the mystery drop. And I know, I know, the hummingbird was supposed to be this affecting symbol to her, awakening her to new truths, but I just did not buy it. If the protagonist has ignored the world and all such symbols for 35 years, the likely result is that she continues ignoring such things in her 36th year. As usual, I hoped that the bad plotting was intentional and had a material basis that would be explained later on, as in On My Way to Paradise (or now that I think of it, as in Annihilation). Nope!
The next problem is affect, i.e. why is the main character so very down all the time? Rough childhood, sure, but all the same it's been 20 years & you are a upper middle class software manager, maybe chill a bit & enjoy your family & your mountain home? Also, you must be a joy to work with. Also, why is your software job so serious, i.e. so Glengarry Glenross? Every tech job I have been in has had, at the worst, ultra-nerdy people being passive-aggressively petty about comically minor shit. There's none of this direct rudeness or physical intimidation or threats, that is a one-way ticket to HR. So the character and her job did not read true. Next comes caring, as in why do I care about the detailed history of these people she is investigating & trying to untangle? I don't, and doubly so in the context of the larger issues going on in the world. Next comes revelation. Vandermeer loves to do a series of reveals and rugpulls, but in this story they turn out to be, for the most part, some extremely small beer.
Finally though comes the good parts. It's a fast read! Once I got into the book, I downed it in a single sitting. Vandermeer is just an enjoyable guy to read, and while he doesn't always hit the mark he does have occasional passages of lyric beauty or genuine surprise. Overall I did like the ecology doomerism, and I did like the overlap of themes between this and Annihilation, i.e. of the line between us and Nature, of brightness, of change and changed understanding. Oh and I liked the mid-book Riven Tower energy that was going on. So despite all issues with the thriller, I wouldn't exactly call it *bad* like Codex was, just a bit of a structural misfire.
Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
4.0 Stars
4-5-2022
A prototypical example of "good" Fritz Leiber; it is consistently intelligent, fast paced & actiony, inventive in its world building & mechanical details, and playful in its plotting & style. It has the joy of surprise, where new and unexpected paths open up in front of the reader at regular intervals.
The basic plot of the book is a sort of Player-of-Games scenario, where people are trying to overthrow an empire by subverting its main thesis. In this case a future Earth is ruled over by a caste of neo-Catholic atheist-priests, who keep the vast mass of humanity in chains with religious dogma, superstition, and technology enabled miracles. The revolutionaries in turn make use of their own tech-enabled Witchcraft and mummery and misdirection to prey upon the superstitious fears of that society. The story goes through several phases; there's a somewhat slow introductory phase, followed by several wrenches in the direction of the plot which make things more interesting. The book holds up amazingly well for being written in 1940, and when evaluating the book I kept constantly coming back to this realization that "wow, Leiber wrote this before they invented the vacuum tube." There's a surprising amount of now standard tech & sci-fi elements that are found in this early book; e.g. there is a NASA-style command center where an ops team has their sub-screens that they work with while a giant global-screen dominates the rest of the room (note; he wrote this before the invention of screens). There's fairly reasonable space travel, some light sabers, and the now standard neo-lemur designed species that our astronauts use to do the fine mechanical work in the cramped tubes and crawl spaces aboard space stations. Leiber really was a visionary in addition to being such a fun writer.
Cannery Row, Steinbeck
4.0 Stars
3-20-2022
A collection of ~50 short, semi-connected stories about various down-and-outs along Cannery Row. These stories are all super-succinct, well written, and somewhat funny/interesting, like something an elderly good-old-boy would tell about their teenage adventures. Not a lot of deeper meaning, or not a lot of deeper meaning worth paying attention to, but the stories are eminently readable and the style is great.
Alex Verus, Books 3-12
4.0 Stars
2-28-2022
"He turned me into a Djinn!"
"A Djinn?"
"I got better."
(trust me, in the context of the stories this is *very* funny)
There's a lot to like in these books. The most general, positive thing I can say is that this is a book series where you have a "coming down" period after reading it, as you make the adjustment from the world that the author has created back to our own reality. The main character's magic is that he is a Diviner, and is able to flip through possible, near-term futures. This is such an amazing comfort blanket. It's not that the protagonist cannot be killed, but his awareness of danger does give him a layer of foresight and security that obviously we don' have in real life. The author even plays around with this at a few points, where the main character's abilities are disabled/subverted, and how terrifying and crippling it is for him to not be able to constantly look ahead to see the effects of his actions. This makes a lot of sense! The author doesn't go super-super deep into the psychology that the protagonist's magic would create, but he does touch upon some of the main issues that could come up, e.g. the difficulty of going to sleep, since it means giving up this protective cloud of possibilities & awareness of danger and becoming vulnerable.
Other positive things: the books have a nice ensemble cast, and I appreciate that the author gives these secondary character the freedom to grow, change, leave, and occasionally die. E.g. Luna starts off as a miserable stick in the mud, before gradually blossoming into a jaunty & self-directed asshole. Varium starts off as a confrontational asshole with a heart of gold, and then continues being exactly that. Etc. etc. The villains are also well chosen, with a variety of different archetypes and levels of fucked-upness. Particular credit goes to the big bad, who spends the vast, vast, vast majority of his time calmly talking, questioning, debating, and negotiating with people. Ok, the other 2% of the time is ultra-violence, but it's still a very different villain than you usually get in fantasy stories.
On the negative side, I think the book hits a few story beats a few too many times (e.g. the Alex-Council conflict, though that does have a nice eventual pay off). Also, the general world building makes even less sense than usual for an urban-fantasy novel, and you just have to accept that there's this weird little world of murder wizards that is somehow adjacent to the more normal modern world. Also, the book sort of assumes the continued importance of Britain to the world, when really even if the worse case happened and all of the characters died, the wizards over in India or China or wherever could just come over and clean things up over the course of a long weekend. Also, Tallis gets hit with the idiot ball pretty hard in the later books, which is unfortunate since he was an early favorite. Also, the psychology & metaphysics of Anne was, uhh, pretty unrealistic, but whatever, that's a big load bearing part of the story so I guess we'll just roll with it.
Alex Verus, Books 1 & 2
4.0 Stars
2-20-2022
An enjoyable, low-key, Dresden-adjacent series of Urban Fantasy books. I liked it! The book takes an interesting tack in making the protagonist a Diviner, someone who does not have supernatural strength or spells or whatever, but who can see the future. Or at least likely futures, or at least the likely futures that aren't too far in the future. Since the protagonist lives in a world of powerful mages and other supernatural beings, he spends a lot of time hiding, running, and generally trying to use his limited pre-cognition in order to avoid being killed.
The author has a lot of fun with the concept, and does a decent job of exploring both the exploits and boundaries of pre-cognition. One of the good choices is that the pre-cognition isn't absolute or cost free; rather it is like having to parse through the server logs of the universe. Doing so is a skill that takes time and attention to use, and becomes progressively more slow and complex the further out you go and the more relevant branches & factors there are. Some quick examples:
While the main character (Alex) is talking to the villain, Alex mentally flicks through several conversational gambits and sees that they cause his own death in the next ~10 seconds. Alex then chooses the conversational path that does not result in immediate violence.
Alex needs to talk to someone to get information. Rather than actually traveling to them and conversing, Alex stays on the couch and searches for the future in which he did get off the couch, travel, and converse. So he gets the information without having to go through the intervening steps or actually do the work. As a lazy person, this is an intensely appealing power fantasy!
Other minor notes: I appreciate that the series is set in London, and avoids all the US cultural bullshit that you find in the Dresden novels. E.g. there are no cops or priests, you can assume everyone is an atheist, the MC doesn't have a gun on him all the time, etc. etc. The female characters are also 80% less cheese-cakey. On the downside, the side-kicks are less interesting than in the Dresden series. Luna is a particular stick in the mud, with her constant complaining about "waaaah, my curse kills everyone who I care about, waaaaah". Lady, we all have problems. Alex is also a complete duff romantically, and fails to follow through on the obvious love interest, Delio/Rachel, the insane-Nietzschian shadow mage. A catch like that is not going to stay single for long! On the neutral side, I wish the author had gone slightly deeper and weirder in his exploration of what it would be like to have your consciousness exist in this hybrid of the present & possible futures. The author touches on this (e.g. the main character has seen his own potential deaths many hundreds of times), but I think he could go a bit further.
Anyway! Apparently there another 100 hundred books in the series, and I'm looking forward to seeing where the author takes the story.
Red Queen
1.0 Stars
2-15-2022
A survivor of last summer's audio-book downloading binge that I found in my folders. Sort of a Hunger Games meets X-Men, that had some initial green shoots of cheesy interest before gradually losing my attention as the story wandered randomly around. DNF.
Editors Note: A year later, it has come to my attention that the audio book site where I purchased these audio books displays their results in *chronological order*, not in order of popularity. So while I thought I was purchasing the ~10 most popular fantasy audio books, I was actually purchasing the ~10 most recently published audio books. This explains a great deal about the quality of the results, and at least partially answers the question of "why are these all so insane"?
I feel like the true lesson of this exercise is that no matter how bad your idea, or how bad your execution, you should never feel bad about putting your deranged artistic works out there for the world to see. Other people feel fine just publishing wild shit, you should not feel any shame for doing the same.
A Country Doctor's Notebook, by Mikhail Bulgakov
4.0 Stars
2-15-2022
Extremely short, which is a quality I like in a book. Has a series of brief, semi-auto-biographical stories about the author's term in ~1917 as a country doctor for several thousand villagers. The general theme of the stories is that the doctor faces medical challenges and self doubt, struggles against them, and mostly over comes. Kind of a light competence-porn, as the doctor gradually develops his skills and confidence and reputation among the villages while dealing with various cases. Except for a few aides, the doctor is alone in the wilderness, forming the front line of knowledge & civilization against disease, snow, and glacial ignorance. It certainly was a different time, when superstitious peasants preferred quack cures and charms over sound medical advice and treatment. It really is difficult to even imagine such a time.
I believe his prose would be described as "muscular".
The Razor
2.0 Stars
2-5-2022
A book that has moments of promise before dissolving into a mediocre action movie. There's bits of Pitch Black, there's bits of Dead Space, there's various people stuck on a terrible prison planet that becomes more terrible as legendary killers, government bio-weapons, and alien artifacts come into play. This is making the book sound more exciting than it is, but really the last half of the book had the feeling of an action movie template, even if I could not quite describe the template itself. Maybe the author had a copy of _Save the Cat_ open beside him? Anyway the book was not leaning into the strengths of the novel as a medium. The writing was often fine, but it dipped more and more frequently into the bare-bones & skeletal as the script progressed.