Spinning Silver 
3.0 Stars
10-4-2023
Enjoyable fairy tales, but also has plenty of good life lessons for young women. E.g. If you really care about a guy, show him by exorcising the ancient fire demon that has been plaguing him, or by saving his slowly melting ice kingdom from the siege of the summer sun. You *can* fix him! You just need to put in the work.
On the downside, was not a fan of the relentless investment fund propaganda, and how every finance person was clever and trustworthy and industrious and open handed, while every worker was shiftless and deceitful and drunkardly and cruel and violent.
Killers of the Flower Moon
3.0 Stars
9-4-2023
Brutally depressing book about the winding down of a genocide and desultory efforts at justice.
The Spellman Files, Book #1
5.0 Stars
7-30-2023
A story about a slightly dysfunctional family of private investigators. Has the virtues of being well written, humorous, fast paced, intelligent, not too light, and not too dark. Would happily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys stories about detectives.
It's ok to be *Angry* about Capitalism, Sanders
5.0 Stars
7-30-2023
What a delightful young man. A clear, succinct, and beautiful little book.
Phantasmion, by Sara Coleridge
3.0 Stars
7-25-2023
As Phantasmion awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. "Yesssss"
Quite possibly the first fantasy novel, very definitely another silly book. The book has one beautiful protagonist (Phantasmion), one beautiful princess (Iarine), ~30 different nobles from various feuding families and lineages, 7 fickle nature spirits and witches, and a vast overabundance of plot. The nature spirits and witches are *constantly* messing with the mortal characters, moving them from place to place, proposing plans and journeys, and then intervening to undo any progress that the characters have made. So the noble characters end up shuttling from one palace or glade to the next, over and over again, in various configurations of seeking or fleeing or disguise. It gets old after ~100 pages, though there are a variety of hilarious or well described moments that keep the rest of the book from being a complete morass. E.g. Potentilla, the spirit of Insects, transforms Phantasmion into a giant sized water bug. While swimming and flying around, he sees the queen Maudra about to sacrifice her child by throwing it to the water-spirit Seshelma. So Phantasmion swoops down, kicks off Seshelma's face, intercepts the air-borne child, and then flies off with the kid to take home and raise as his own. E.g. Potentilla gives Phantasmion the powers of the cricket, allowing him to leap large distances (seeing a pattern?). Furthermore, she weaves a giant web across a castle gate, in order to distract a party of hostile nobles so that Phantasmion can then steal Iarine out from amidst their group. This works, except Iarine doesn't want to go with him, since she's been tricked by a witch into thinking she needs to go on a quest to get some magic water to heal her father, and so she just runs off into the woods. Phantasmion takes this gracefully, but then he notices a childhood bird that he really liked has gotten stuck in the spider webbing, so he goes to free the bird, but then *he* gets stuck in the webbing too, and so he gets captured. And so Potentilla comes to him in his cell, and gives Phantasmion the the sharp & ridged arms of a something bug so that he can cut his bonds and escape, and so on and so on for another 300 pages. One suprising part of the story is that while the plotting is childish, the writing is occasionally quite good, with some skillfully described scenes of natural beauty or gothic nature vibes. In this it's kind of the opposite of Sister, Maiden, Monster, which had enjoyable plotting but often terrible writing.
Oh right another funny note, the perfect and impenetrable disguise for these royals is dressing up as a servant. As soon as a character has put on servant garb, they are completely invisible to all the other noble characters, even if they've known each other for decades. This tactic is used a at least 10 times through out the book.
Sister, Maiden, Monster
3.0 Stars
7-15-2023
Like Peter Watts' Rifters, as written by an urban-fantasy-romance author on a deadline. Has plenty of liasons, body horror, viruses, and cosmic apocalypses. Or maybe like a slightly more upbeat Laird Barron with his elder gods who create worlds in order to consume worlds, or a Throne of Bones with more eroticism and moderately less cannibalism and necrophagia.
I liked many of the elements the novel was putting out there, and the story is fast paced and often cheerful, but unfortunately the writing is not that great overall and occasionally veers into the downright amateurish. In particular the author likes to pull an anti-Lovecraft, and just immediately and with very little foreplay lay out the nature of the monster, the mechanism by which the monster occurred, and what exactly the relation is between the monster and its elder god or whatever. So, not an author who is afraid of a very concise and complete info dump.
The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang
3.0 Stars
6-10-2023
Sort of a Chinese, YA version of the Traitor Baru Cormamant. The author uses Chinese history around ~1900 as the foundation for her world, removes the guns, renames a few things, and adds in some fantasy elements.
I recently learned that the author was ~20 years old when she wrote this, and that made a lot of sense, as the book is oddly (pleasantly?) uneven and very melodramatic. The novel has major shifts in the tone/genre, as the story goes through three main phases. We start with an exceptional peasant girl who aces a standardized test and goes to magic academy (mehhh), then move on to a war story as the Japanese invade and her academy buddies and magic friends have to go to the front (quite fun, lot of potential), and finally we have a wallowy story of oh everything is so terrible wah wah wah Unit 731 vivisected my teenage crush how sad (basically unreadable).
As I said above, it's an uneven book. At 25% of the way through, I didn't see any redeeming qualities and it just seemed like a off-brand magic boarding school novel. At 50% of the way through I was enjoying it; I like the Fire-Emblem narrative move of disrupting a school novel with sudden real world events. E.g. there's a Draco Malfoy character who's her antagonist at the start, but once they're on the front lines together she discovers that "oh yeah, the differences we had at school really don't matter much now that people are trying to stab us with halberds. In fact, some of the qualities that made him an annoying adversary in school are actually quite helpful out here in battle". So this part is fine! And then we come to the third part, where things gets dark and we go through the fantasy version of every, single, atrocity that the Japanese ever did to the Chinese/Koreans. Also it turns out that magic has a terrible cost! Also it turns out that the Chinese Empress has betrayed them! Also it turns out that blah blah blah. Two major things go wrong here. One is that beyond a certain point this isn't interesting/enjoyable to read. Two is that I feel like this constant focus on atrocities that happened 100 years ago is kind of just psyching yourself up to be OK with doing your own atrocities in the present day. Like, maybe envision a new and bright future rather than continually leafing through your book of old grudges. So this final part is not good, either narratively or politically.
Oh right, also, this is a world that clearly has the myth and the symbology of dragons (e.g. they are on flags and such), and the world has mythical creatures (monsters, demi-gods, etc), **but** the world does not have any actual dragons in it. Author, I am fed up with your dragon-baiting. Stop blue-dragon-balling me.
Wuthering Heights
3.0 Stars
6-10-2023
BRB, starting my Instagram influencer empire teaching young men how to be more alpha like Heathcliff and to avoid the 10 worst mistakes that beta-Linton makes when dealing with women.
OK, now that's done, my more formal review is that this is another silly goose of a book. There's a summary of Romeo and Juliet that says that the play is not a romance, it is the story of a 3 day affair between 2 tweens that gets ~5 people killed. Wuthering Heights is in a similar bucket, it is the story of the two most emo and self-centered twenty year olds ever created, and how they manage to turn a single melodramatic mis-communication & a few hours of follow up dialog into twenty years of misery for everyone involved. I'm a bit of an emo bitch myself, so I'm sympathetic to their cause, but at the same time there has to be limits to the silliness and this book blows right past them.
Oh right and shout out to my bro Lindon-Junior, the most languid of languid fellows. We lazy people need to support and lift each other up, even if only metaphorically.
Finally, props to the book for pointing out the downside of putting your house at the top of a hill. Yes, you get good views. Yes, you avoid the danger of flooding. But it does mean that you are going to be exposed to the worst winds, which in the long term is a recipe for roof and structural problems for your house. My Mom made this mistake when situating her previous house, with the result that she dealt with years of leaks as the high winds jostled the joinings that kept the metal roof attached to the house. Learn from history! Build your house at a spot with some elevation, but not quite at the tippy-top of a hill.
Books of Amber, 1-5, Zelazny
3.0 Stars
6-10-2023
Some weird, fast, plot-heavy little fantasy books. One of the first thing you notice is that these books have a lot going on; it is rare that 10 pages will go by without a fist-fight, sword-fight, psychic-duel, assassination, battle, invasion, panicked flight, car chase, horse chase, crippling, imprisonment, death, faked death, betrayal, theft, reveal, reversal, seduction, etc. etc. Zelazny definitely subscribes to the South Korean soap opera style of writing. This is helped along by the setting, where a family of centuries old, dimension hopping siblings are competing for the throne of the one true dimension, Amber. To a modern reader it's going to remind you a bit of Rick and Morty, as the main characters traverse/cause problems/flee/summon armies from various sub-dimensions, and are generally cavalier about what is to them an infinity of replaceable worlds and people.
Overall I liked this, but by the end of book 5 and the first narrative arc of the series, I had all the plot I could handle. There's a further 5 books in the second story arc, and I have absolutely zero appetite for them.
This is How you Lose the Time War
3.0 Stars
6-10-2023
A silly goose of a book.
Agent Running in the Field, by John le Carre
4.0 Stars
5-20-2023
BADminton, the game of TRAITORS
The last le Carre book. It's not his best, but it's still quite good considering his advanced age, the loss of his long time writing partner, and the topicality of the book. The book is relatively straightforward and quick, as a long time and sophisticated spy, enjoying perhaps the last hurrah of his career, gets accidentally entangled in a web of suspicion due to the actions of a bumbling, Twitter-poisoned oaf. Things end happily and abruptly, there's an unlikely marriage, drinks all around. A few stand out notes: the duets between parents and children, as complicated as any of the spy based interactions. The extreme taboo, in spy circles, of ever asking or even hinting about a project Code Name that you are not cleared for. The ambiguity of the novel, as the at least surface-level certainties of the Cold War dissolve into a cross-national web of gradations, sorted almost not by ideology but by temperament. And as usual, the structural complexity of the spy parts of the plot, with doubling and redoubling. Anyway, a fine novel, very perceptive as always from le Carre at an age when most of his cohorts have been completely cordycepted.
Sandman Slim: Kill the Dead
4.0 Stars
5-20-2023
The second book in this series of proto-Dresden Files urban fantasies. On the one hand, not that great. Several of the plot points don't make sense, I don't remember many of the characters from the first book, and it falls into the Supernatural mistake of introducing God and Lucifer in like Season 4 when there's still 12 more seasons to go. Authors, leave yourself some room for escalation! Otherwise what is already a kind of silly premise becomes progressively more silly as you have to involve steadily higher and higher theological constructs. Or another idea, don't even escalate, just let yourself tell reasonably sized stories in a given setting.
And yet, I did like aspects of the book. The main character was moderately less annoying and edgy than in the first book, and I actually started to like bits of his shtick by the midway point of the book. The story moves quickly, and it was a pleasant and easy distraction while I was recovering from illness. I also liked the point about halfway through the book when he gets *redacted* and his viewpoint on things radically changes for the rest of the book.
The Desert of Stars, by Lumpley
4.0 Stars
5-10-2023
Like the first book, doesn't quite cohere as a novel. The author continues to tell the story of nearish future, hardish sci-fi, space war. I feel though that what he really wants to do is write a history book about that war, rather than a novel set in that war. So there are chapters about diplomacy, and espionage, and space battles, and land battles, and the author somehow has to find a way to have a relatively small cast of characters be involved in all of these things on all of these planets. So you end up with a fair bit of whiplash? dislocation? as characters are rapidly moved around, and no one setting or ensemble really has a chance to gel. It feels like a play where stagehands are constantly running about and changing the scenery as characters try to get out just a few lines. This isn't helped by the author's style of writing, which seems influenced by his time as a news reporter and sticks to a bare and spare style most of the time.
A more modest criticism I would make is that a lot of the espionage and plot developments are rooted in a 1960's CIA view of things, where direct and active ops are used to try and change the course of nations. In the real world, these tactics backfired spectacularly over and over again, as covered in Legacy of Ashes/Jakarta Method, and were mostly superseded by the less risky and more effective method of finding and supporting right-wing crazies in the target country. E.g. on January 6th, Russia did not send a team of Spetsnaz to try and disrupt the transfer of power. Rather, Russia spent years funding and supporting the worst people and aspects of American society, which in turn helped lead organically to Jan 6th and a host of other disasters. You can see how the second method, while slower, is much more effective and has much less risk of blow back.
Anyway, despite these criticisms, and despite the fact that this trilogy of books is likely never going to be finished, I am oddly here for what the author is doing. I find the setting to be extra-ordinarily crunchy, I like the generally real-politik and historically aware world building, and I like how the books are quite fast paced. This was a one-setting meal for me, which is rare.
Delight, by JB Priestly
5.0 Stars
4-28-2023
A series of ~100 jottings, each about some facet of life that has brought the author delight. I am going to include one characteristic entry in full. If you enjoy this entry you'll enjoy the others, and if not, then not. I quite enjoyed them.
Giving Advice
Giving advice, especially when I am in no position to give it and hardly know what I am
talking about. I manage my own affairs with as much care and steady attention and skill
as – let us say – a drunken Irish tenor. I swing violently from enthusiasm to disgust. I
change policies as a woman changes hats. I am here today and gone tomorrow. When
I am doing one job, I wish I were doing another. I base my judgments on anything – or
nothing. I have never the least notion what I shall be doing or where I shall be in six
months time. Instead of holding one thing steadily, I try to juggle with six. I cannot plan,
and if I could I would never stick to the plan. I am a pessimist in the morning and an
optimist at night, am defeated on Tuesday and insufferably victorious by Friday. But
because I am heavy, have a deep voice and smoke a pipe, few people realize that I am
a flibbertigibbet on a weathercock. So my advice is asked. And then, for ten minutes or
so, I can make Polonius look a trifler. I settle deep in my chair, two hundred pounds of
portentousness, and with some first-rate character touches in the voice and business
with pipe, I begin: "Well, I must say that in your place — " And inside I am bubbling with
delight.
Inversions, by Iain Banks
5.0 Stars
4-28-2023
Classic Banks. Short, clever, tightly plotted, violent. Imagine 1800's Europe, with competing nation states, but at each of two competing courts one of the courtiers is an alien from the Culture. As the name implies, has numerous inversions of roles or expectations.
Dr. Siri Paiboun books 1 & 2, by Colin Cotterill
3.0 Stars
4-15-2023
Low-key murder mysteries set in Laos, just after their mid-70's socialist revolution. Much of the appeal of the books comes from sort of extrinsic factors, e.g. the setting is interesting and new (to me), the tension between socialist Laos and capitalist Thailand just across the river, the beauty of the land, the poorness but solidness of the people, the advanced age of the protagonist and many of the characters. These things are all sort of fun and interesting in their own right. The stories themselves though felt kind of slack. The A and B plots wander around for a bit, before finally petering out after a certain number of pages. This is a minor spoiler, but light supernatural elements are quickly introduced, with the main character (a coroner/shaman) being able to interact with the spirits of the dead and the land. The supernatural elements though take the wind out of the sails of the mystery elements, e.g. a ghost will just straight up point out who the murderer is (but not like in a narratively interesting Hamlet way), a lucky spirit will save the main character from an assassin's bomb, etc. etc. etc. All told you end up with three elements (murder-mystery, spiritualism, communism) that don't really work well together, at least in terms of plot and pacing. The spiritualism disrupts the mystery aspect. The spiritualism also cuts the legs out from the communism aspect, since there are these sorts of Home-Alone type scenes where native spirits run rings around local Party bosses, making the entire story seem a bit childish. Finally the socialism aspect isn't that well handled; e.g. the book tries to be sympathetic to the time and place that it is set in, but it does not entirely escape from the viewpoint of being written by a capitalist author 50 years later. E.g. the setting is kind of an Dr Zhivago one, with sympathetic dispossessed royalty, and silly communist bosses, and no real mention of why people might have wanted to fight for decades to get rid of the previous regime. I know virtually nothing about the history of Laos, and I'm not about to change that by reading a wikipedia article, but I am confident in saying that these sort of anti-colonialist movements usually had good reasons behind them (e.g. decades of pillage and atrocities). (ok, also not trying to white-wash crimes committed by communist governments, I just want the critiquing to be accurate and balanced.)
Anyway! Putting all that aside, these are fine books for atmosphere, if you want a sort of lazy-river experience of elderly gentlemen bantering with each other, enjoying the simple sandwiches in life, dealing with nosy neighbors, and having enlightening chats with spirits, shamans, and monks. There's also murders and people trapped in caves by were-tigers, but these felt less vivid and interesting than the segments of light-character-interaction between humane and grumpy old people.
Transition, by Iain Banks
3.0 Stars
4-15-2023
A lesser Banks. Rather than an infinite sea of stars, the story is set in an infinite sea of multiverses, and at every instant the infinity of existing universes branches into infinitely more infinities of universes. Set in this hyper-infinity is the Concern, an organization that has learned to send agents between universes, theoretically to do good and manipulate events in a positive direction. So, right away the setting runs onto Rick and Morty ground, with issues of what exactly it means to do good or even to act in such an endless sea of worlds. E.g. the Concern has a few tens of millions of people involved, which (to use the old Comp482 joke) you might notice is quite a bit less than infinity. So anything that they do, any positive or negative outcome of the story, is going to affect 0% of existing universes, with that fraction growing smaller at every instant. Besides this structural issue, there's also some content problems (waaaaay too much torture! Also perhaps too much sex and sexposition), and some narrative concerns (a raft of new rules and powers are dropped in, without any setup, in the last 40 pages of the book). So not really a Banks novel that I would recommend to anyone but a completionist. On the positive side, I thought Banks did a good job with all 4 of the main characters that he winds through the story (Temudjin, Madam Ortalon, Kleist, Mulverhill) in that they are all engagingly larger than life. Or to put it another way, what makes a good Bond story? Is it that the villain's plot makes a lot of sense? Or is that Bond, the villainous Mastermind, the Henchman, and the Bond girl are all memorable and entertaining? Banks mostly succeeds at this former task at least.
Edit: oh right there is a 5th main character, Adrian Cubish, but I completely forgot about him since he is irrelevant to the otherwise tightly twined plot of the other 4 characters.
Random ShadowRun series, books 2 & 3
1.0 Stars
4-7-2023
"Meat is a drag on the electron spirit", too true buddy, too true
Not the best series. The main character is a twit, and most of the book is about him trying to take his sister, a strong and independent Wendigo, and make her back into a weak and boring human being. Which seems like a cruel thing to do. She is living the dream, 3 meters tall, claws like lawn mower blades, instant regeneration, hunting people in the forest, breaking hearts, eating hearts, yum. Anyway, while trying to "save" his sister he gets countless other people killed along the way. Unclear why any of these people are helping him. A few other flaws; disconnected writing that felt like it was skipping around a lot, a lack of any real structure or arc to the stories. It felt kind of mechanically generated, like you had an AI play a video game against itself and then transcribed the results. There are elements going on where people's actions and emotions and memories are being manipulated by external magical forces, but you can't really distinguish it above the background noise of bad writing and bad plotting.
On the plus side, I like the general idea of heists that simultaneously take place on 3 planes of existence (physical, astral, cyber). So the general idea is fine, it is just that the implementation is continually bad.
Kill Six Billion Demons
5.0 Stars
3-20-2023
A free internet comic that has been a labor of love for one artist for Demiurge-knows how many years. The story and the universe take a while to develop, and the plotting can sometimes lean too much into simplistic or anime tropes, but wow, the art. The artist has been absolutely unstinting in the generosity they show, and has created page after baroque page entirely filled with beautiful images, precision, creativity, humor, world building, foreshadowing, and a thousand slice-of-life details of living in the Red City that stands at the center of 777,000 worlds. It's like Michelangelo decided to paint a several dozen Sistine Chapels in his free time, and then just give them away for everyone to enjoy. All together it's one of those achievements where you are like "yes, I am happy that this person decided to devote X decades of their life to creating this thing, the effort was entirely worth it." +1 for civilization.
Oh, and it turns out that the artist for this comic also worked for a moderately well known RPG called Lancer. I'd skimmed over Lancer before and thought "eh, neatish, but not my thing". Knowing that Lancer was made by the same people though makes me have a lot more affection for it, and it's been fun to go back to Lancer and see all of the artistic overlaps between the two universes.
Lost Fleet, Books 1 - 111
3.0 Stars
3-15-2023
Space Opera that is heavy on the Opera and light on the Space. There's a lot to talk about in these novels, since the author varies the concerns pleasantly from novel to novel. There are space battles, there are empires at war, there are far voyages, discoveries, aliens, visits to old Earth, political campaigns, civilian politics, military politics, bureaucratic infighting, espionage, viruses, whistle blowers, and of course the love triangle between the protagonist Admiral, the tsundere Senator/political agent meant to keep him in check, and the murder-bunny ship captain who worships him but cannot fall in love with him because of their Honor! and! Duty!. The main flavor through all of this is a sort of patriotic liberal centrism. Normally I might white a bit about this, but the genre of mil-sci-fi is such a minefield of far-right authors that this author is a welcome relief.
Now begins the part where I mention the sort of quietly positive things that the book does well. The multiple alien species that are encountered are nice; with each one the author leaves a realistic amount of mystery to them, how they think, and what their goals are. Some are never understood at all, and even the most communicative and helpful are still creatures with their own values and patterns that are of course alien to our own thinking. I liked the author's choice of main villains; the Syndicate Worlds are a libertarian hellscape run by insufferable CEOs who are all delivered straight from central casting. There's a reason that so many sports and rom-com movies have the antagonist be some variety of smarmy rich person, it's an easy archetype to dislike. I liked how the characters in this far future practice a generic form of ancestor worships, and that at perilous moments the protagonist will pray to his ancestors for guidance, and will receive it from the author who is his presumable ancestor. Kind of a silly but fun little bit of metafiction there. I liked the work that the audio book team put into the production, and how there are characters and accents from all over the globe in the story and out there in space.
In the negative category, it's not clear that the space battles make any real sense, even in the context of the universe, but, eh, whatever. A few of them are too long/repetitive, but as with the rest of the story the author does make a good effort to break things up and bring different concerns into each situation. Probably more notable of a downside is that while the stories are fine, the author is never aiming for or achieving anything other than light, popcorn and pretzels type entertainment. So it's fine for audio books, but it is not a Patrick O'Brian type achievement.