Brothers of the Snake, by Dan Abnett 
3.0 Stars
2-5-2024
A perfectly fine novel about a space marine doing space marine things in various episodes that span a career of space marining. Has Greek flavor. The one historically inaccurate part of the novel is that when a guard dog rushes at the MC, the MC makes friends with the dog rather than splattering it with a bolter round. Space Marines = Cops = Dead Dog.
Double Eagle, by Dan Abnett
4.0 Stars
1-30-2024
It was once said about the late, great, Vic Davis that he was like Michelangelo, if Michelangelo only ever worked in the medium of colored macarroni. Dan Abnett is a similar sort; he's a skilled and solid and prolific writer, but he *only* ever writes WH40K novels. Or to put it another way, he's like Brandon Sanderson, except with more interest in Band-of-Brothers type soldierly interactions, and with more heart and humor and cleverness, and with a sufficient amount of rivet counting to ground his fiction, but rather less interest in grand world-building and system-exploring than Sanderson. So, this is another Abnett book, this time about WW2 type air-battles on a contested planet. I originally started it up as a prelude to the new Masters of the Air series, but I'm pretty sure the book ruined the TV for me. Abnett has more freedom in his battles and plotting and events than the historically-bound TV show, and in general he just does a better job of coming up with interesting air men and the various arcs their lives go through as they fight for the skies.
Side note: often times the interests of the reader/viewer are more closely aligned with the antagonists than the heroes, since both villains and readers live for drama. Puella Magi Madoka made that alignment more explicit than usual; the antagonist of the show cannot feel emotions itself, but rather feeds off of the glorious highs and terrifying lows of the characters, and is contantly trying to engineer the most epic, Wagnerian drama possible. So its interests are very similar to the interests of the viewer, and in some ways it is a stand in for the viewer. There's something similar going on in WH40K; the Ruinous powers feed off the various struggles and strong emotions of mankind, but these emotions are also what the reader is there for. In particular this book has continuous, endless, WWII type air battles, which raises the question: are the Chaos Gods boomers? Is it one of those things where after a para-psychic entity reaches a sufficient age and power, it has to choose between being a Civil War buff or a WWII buff?
Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo
2.0 Stars
1-15-2024
Ooof. The author has a real gift for creating stories that seem like they will be excellent, and then steadily tumble downhill in quality until they finally end in a rumpled and dirty heap at the bottom of failure-valley.
Some criticisms: 1) the author takes a low magic setting and then spins it up way too fast to where people are using Burning Hands as an at will power, travelling between dimensions, negotiating with demon lords, etc. etc. It makes the universe feel papery? fan-fictiony? like the author did not have a consistent idea in their head of the world they are trying to create. 2) the idiot ball is broken out of its locker and sees a lot of use here. "We're being hunted by doppelgangers who want to drain our life force, and we can't get rid of them till the new moon! Ok, everyone split up and go to their seperate apartments. Also make sure to go to work and school this week, that's clearly important at this time of imminent and life threatening danger". "We must try to rescue this person despite all odds!/predictably gets 18 people killed doing so" 3) the main character is constantly said to be a rattle-snake, a real hard bitten survivor, a dangerous, low-down, no good baddie, but the proof is not there. At one point the evidence given of this unique hardness is that she lied to her parents, which is like the most universal human experience ever. The constant refrain comes off as silly after a while. The protagonist is not a complete cinamon roll, but she's also really, really not that bad.
In the moderately positive column, there are fun bits scattered here and there through out the story. E.g. the party is being tempted by a demon; to one person it offers political power and visions of becoming a Senator, to another
person career success and wealth, to another the curing of her ADHD and the ability to finally focus on and complete the thesis paper that she's been nibbling at for the last ~6 years.
Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo
3.0 Stars
1-10-2024
A somewhat confusingly named book about that is not about Gideon and Harrow and Necromancy, but rather about Yale and Urban Fantasy and Necromancy. The MC is a down on her luck kid, and it is only her ability to see ghosts that gives her a chance to join the magical world of Yale with its secret societies of spell casters. There's a murder, then a few murders, and then a few more murders, and she is not about to let them go unsolved.
On the upside, the book is easy to read/listen to, decently written, and has a number of grounded, physically thought out rituals that I liked. At its best the book is about grotty, low magic, and costly attempts to change reality. On the downside, the plot becomes gradually dumber as it moves along. In a world with teleportation, face-changing illusions, and mind-control magic, murder plots can quickly become convoluted to the point of farce. There's also a few modest elements in the book I wasn't a fan of; the trauma tourism on the one hand, and the fetishizing of Yale and its trivia on the other. On that second charge the book is ambivalent. It wants to recognize that Yale and the other Ivies have benefited from a false reputation of graduating geniuses and movers and shakers and real solid people, when in reality they are just idiots like all the rest of us. E.g. see the history of the CIA. On the other hand, the book can't quite help but buy into, at some level, the standard myths that have been erected around these places. Apparently the author went to Yale herself, and that made a lot of sense. She can see that it is a silly place, but still can't quite shake off her conditioning.
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, by Victor Klemperer
5.0 Stars
12-10-2023
Apparently somewhere between 1915 and 1933 people became fully modern. There were several times that I was reading the diary and was like yeah, these lines are both relevant and helpful in thinking more clearly about an online discussion I was having just a few hours ago. You could revivify Klemperer, give him a 90 minute primer on the last 90 years, and he would be completely at home on Qt3 or Reddit or Metafilter or where ever. He has perceptive observations about language, thought, identity, and politics, mixed in with longer passages about his wife, his relations & friends, his cats, his ongoing scholarly work, his money problems, his hypochondria (despite constant health fears, he survives both the Nazis and the Dresden fire bombing and lives for another 20 years), and his many bungled attempts to nearsightedly drive a car around the area. The author is a fine writer, a lovable idealist, a lovable idiot, and extremely intelligent and educated. There were many passages that I highlighted in this book, but these were my favorite sections.
The diary is also the most affecting thing that I've read this year. His direct thoughts and life work much better as art (in the Murdochian sense) than a novelization of the same times would.
Will of the Many
3.0 Stars
12-1-2023
The Roman Empire. Don't think it, Don't say it
A YAish fantasy adventure/magic school set in a vague approximation of the Roman-empire. The main conceit of the book is ceding, a process enabled by ancient artifacts which allows one person to cede a portion of their strength/will to another. It reifies political organization, and allows groups to form hierarchies of ceding where those at the top of the pyramid are drawing from thousands of others at the bottom. This makes the leaders much stronger/tougher, and also lets them utilize magical Vril powers using all the excess will they've gathered. These vril-based magics are used to power the Empire's infrastructure and its warfare, but it also means that the masses at the base of the pyramid are living maybe ~75% of a life as their excess energy/strength/attention/lifeforce is sapped from them to supply the system. The protagonist does not like this, and decides to make it everyone's problem.
On the plus side, the book moves fast, goes to unexpected places with its world building, and quickly proliferates an array of competing organizations and characters with secret loyalties. On the downside, it can be rather tropey, and while the writing and character building are fine they're never really brilliant. I've heard this book ranked up there with the universally beloved Name of the Wind as one of the best magic school books out there, but I don't think the comparison holds. The Name of the Wind works because while the protagonist is enormously gifted, these gifts are tragic gifts that are enough to allow the protagonist to step over the normal rules of his society, but never quite enough to let him avoid/prevent the fallout caused by his actions. By contrast, In the Will of the Many, the main character is just omni-competent, and if he's not the best at something he can usually get there with a few weeks practice and then everything works great. It's a much more common and much less interesting dynamic, i.e. just a plain old fantasy.
Sandman Slim, various mid books
3.0 Stars
11-10-2023
*Extraordinarily* silly but also decently fun audio books. Sort of like Supernatural if it started off really dark and munchkinish, and then gradually relaxed and de-powered its characters. The series takes a very Lincoln-in-Bardo approach to the afterlife, with the whole cycle of injury->death->ghost->limbo->Hell/Heaven->Tartarus all being carried out by very specific people, entities, and processes. These processes then get messed with to a surprising degree through the series, which is again quite silly, but also apt, since if you're going to give the characters in your urban fantasy these theological levers you can't complain when they actually use them. By the end of book ~6 or so the after-life has been mostly rewritten, things calm down, and rather than facing off against Satan/God/Cthulu the main characters are more worried about a Wolfram-and-Hart type investment firm. This might be the first time that I've seen an author actually take my advice and go from writing stories where the characters face a steadily escalating series of threats, and level it off to just tell more minor stories at a more constant and low-key level of threat. Now that I've received what I've been asking for, I'm not sure I actually want it? The books go into a bit of a doldrums as this de-powering happens, which the series may or may not pull out of.
Also of note, despite the main character being an absurd macho-cliche with the volume knob set to 11, the author of the book is just a normal progressive, and the author has been gradually chilling out the MC, having him learn to relate to others in a more well-adjusted fashion & pick up yoga and other healthier habits as the series goes on. The tears from the conservative fraction of his readership have been hilarious and are another positive quality of the series.
Clark and Division
2.0 Stars
11-5-2023
More of a book report than a book. The history is fine, the mystery is fine, the story and cultural bits are fine. It is just that the writing for all of it is very simple and flat, very YA. Sarah Waters could have taken the same material and themes and made it into an amazing book, but as written it is kind of a straight forward and not very exciting exercise.
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.