Iron Druid series, books 1-2 
2.0 Stars
8-30-2024
If the Alex Verus series is the Dresden Files from a better universe, this is the Dresden Files from a crummier universe. It has way too much basic m'lady energy, and when the author noted at the end of book 2 that he wrote that story in 5 months, I was like "yep, checks out". So, I've read worse things than this, but I also can't think of any situation in which I'd recommend this series to anyone. I'm giving this 2 stars rather than 1 star since at least a few of its jokes did land and gave me a sensible chuckle.
Our Hideous Progeny
4.0 Stars
8-15-2024
The resurrectionists were roommates
A slow, languid, emotional, well written, and grounded examination of what would happen if Frankenstein's daughter had found his notebooks and started constructing undead dinosaurs. Once you've accepted the basic premise, the plotting is rather simple and staid, especially compared to all the operatic wildness that happens in the original Frankenstein. Still, the writing is a treat, and the characters are lovely and well drawn. At first I was unsure about this book; there's a thing that goes on in some circles of fiction, where they are really focused on certain things (neuro-divergence! physical disability & a limited spoon supply! queerness! anti-racism! lovely feminism!), and they have all the sign posts of those things, but then they forget to build actual characters and stories around those signposts, resulting in lackluster fiction. This has happened enough that I have started to feel anxiety when I see the signposts themselves. In this case though I need not have worried; there's actual genuine fiction here with well drawn characters and just a general lovely and luxurious flow of words. Even the cads of the piece were enjoyably fleshed out.
One small quibble; they are trying to construct an undead dinosaur in order to prove their palentological theories, but by doing so they are beggaring the question. They assume that the dinosaur should be constructed according to their theories and then build a dinosaur based on their theories. This does not prove that the actual dinosaurs corresponded to their theories.
Actually wait another small quibble. Like with the Ninth House book by Leigh Bardugo, the main character really is not that bad. I hesitate to even say she has anger issues, more she's just a sort of moderately prickly person.
Ravenor novels, 1-3, by Dan Abnett
4.0 Stars
7-30-2024
Can't you see? You are two sides of the same coin!
- Fuck you
- Fuck you. The Emperor protects.
The same, but different. Shares many of the same traits and positive qualities of the Eisenhorn novels, but with a moderately different cast of heroes and villains. Taking the place of the ancient and unreliable Eisenhorn is the Inquistor Ravenor, a hideously injured but psionically powerful MC. Ravenor is about as gifted as you can be while still remaining human, however due to having ~70% of his body burned away he cannot survive outside of his life support tank (it's literally a tank). So he has barely any physical embodiment, and instead floats over the story as an almost authorial prescence, flitting through minds, infiltrating psyches, reading and compelling thoughts, and at a last resort taking direct control of bodies. Abnett has occasional and occasionally beautiful passages where he explores what this sort of existence would mean, to exist purely in a realm of thoughts, though I wish he had delved deeper and more frequently into the subject. I think decisions like that could elevate his writing from consistently and prolifically good to actually great. Well, in any case. These books are still in Abnett's sweet spot, allowing him to tell three individual adventures, while also giving him enough space to play in and shape the larger narrative into something interesting. If nothing else releasing dozens of books has made Abnett a confident writer, willing to go beyond the simple remit of telling an adventure and on to trying to craft long form narrative with more interesting shapes.
Now, as usual, an accounting of the good and the bad. The largest negative to the story is that at several points Abnett has to hand his MC the idiot ball in order to have the plot work out. As many DMs have discovered to their displeasure, mind-reading is simply too powerful of an ability to co-exist with any sort of complicated plot. So the author keeps having to find reasons why the MC does not use his primary power to simply and immediately resolve the most pressing issues. On the positive side, I liked the venture into non-Imperial space, and how it turns out that yeah, there's an entire, wild, endlessly varied Adrian Tchaikovsky type galaxy of aliens and cultures out there, but these characters simply never see it since they spend their lives in a violently xenophobic monoculture. As always I liked the concept of city-planning as a form of macro-magical-ritual, which is explored here just slightly more than it is in Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness. Oh right and I liked how the inciting incident between Ravenor and his nemesis happened in the past and is never fully explained, i.e. Zigmund knows what he did and why he should feel bad about it. Oh, also of course a fan of Unwerth and his deranged and connotative speaking style. In the hands of a less clever writer this might be painful, in the hands of Abnett it's a great way for him to play with language. It's particularly good when you fall in sync with Abnett, and can predict a tenth of a second ahead of time what the next mal-approprism will be. Actually now that I think about it this half-language is in the same category as the command-poetry used by Eisenhorn's band, and in general it's another instance of Abnett's interest in language as a thing in itself. Oh, and as always, I liked that the audio book reader had the chance and the willingness to throw in so many wild voices.
Eisenhorn novels, 1-4, by Dan Abnett
4.0 Stars
7-15-2024
Thorn 4 T(zeentch), rising
alternately
What are you going to do, shoot me?
Who watches the watchers? In WH40K's Inquisition, every watcher is responsible for watching every other watcher, which is good, since they inevitably go bad. Also good because they're being gradually infiltrated and replaced by a centuries old Illuminati operation. Also good because if you find that a fellow Inquistor has been corrupted, you might be able to take their stuff before they are thrown on the pyre, and the vile, seething tome that they were keeping hidden probably won't corrupt you like it did its previous owner.
This series follows several centuries of investigations by the Inquistor Eisenhorn, as he tries to expunge chaos plots, warp contamination, alien kissing, and worse. While these books are never truly great, they are consistently good, and the setting/structure of the stories allows them to showcase one the best features of WH40K, i.e. its operatic nature and its massive breadth of thingies. So for example the stories range widely in location, from 3 Body Problem type systems where the population spends years in icy hibernation until their orbit brings them back into the temperate zones, to titanic hive cities, to Jeffersonian farm worlds, to UV-blasted hyper-farm worlds, to dying and left behind rust-belt industrial worlds, to alien relic worlds that bend time and space and reality, to beach-heads of the Warp into reality and beach-heads of reality into the Warp. This isn't quite Ted Chiang levels of world building, but Abnett does put some solid thinking into how these different places operate, and what/why/how you get a cyclopian city of strange angles and how you would train your combat team to operate there. As with locations, so with characters and narrative. The investigations are far ranging in space and time, and the Inquistitors have near limitless powers on what they can requisition for their operations, so you end up with teams of pilots and starship captains, rogues and rambos, spies, psykers, natural anti-psychers, power armored warriors, giant mechs, magical swords, magical staffs, magical chain saws, orbital bombardments, augmented humans, partial cyborgs, full brain-in-a-metal-shell cyborgs, a dozen different types of uplifted trans-humans, AIs, aliens, alien jewelry, sorcerors, demons, demon-hosts, etc. etc. It's perhaps not quite as wild as something that Adrian Tchaikovsky would do, but the setting still has a ton of variety when it's allowed to stretch its legs.
Finally, I liked that the final boss of the series was a fearless and searching moral inventory, asking the MC to reflect back on his stories and examine his own actions and motivations over the centuries. Actually wait I also liked the hapless, Vandermeer-ish biologist who's life gets ruined every 10 years or so by his involvement in these matters. Wait wait I also liked the Rambo character, who leans heavily into his stock role and has great fun with it and eventually makes its own. Like you often know what he is going to do and how he will play out in the narrative, but he still has great fun doing it. Also enjoyed that, in order to mystify any evesdroppers, Eisenhorn and his band use a form of connotative Beat-poetry in order convey messages on the battlefield. Also a big fan of the audio book reader, who like the story allows himself to stretch and luxuriate in all sorts of different roles and voices.
Exordia, by Seth Dickinson
1.0 Stars
7-1-2024
Against my better judgement, I tried another Seth Dickinson while at the library. I liked the parts with the aliens! I also liked the parts where he tries to lay out new basis elements for reality, I always appreciate it when it a creator does that, even in cases like this where the elements don't really work. Really the only problem is when he writes anything at all about humans. These parts are exhausting and dispiriting, as Dickinson is both very naive and trying hard to be very edgy, and the combination of the two is spiritually painful. There was one particular page where I read a sentence, and said "Oooooof" out of vicarious cringing pain. And then I read the next sentence, and again went "Ooooof". And so on. And I realized that as I was reading this paragraph I was basically doing Lamaze breathing as a way to help manage the psycho-literary pain of what I was reading. DNF at around the 120 page mark.
Fourth Wing, Iron Flame
2.0 Stars
6-16-2024
"“Young Adult 18+ Mature Themes” is how the bookstore designates books that are pretty simple, reading-level wise, but also have hardcore porn in them that children absolutely should not read. This is where most of Ariel’s favorite books reside." - Silicon Age Collapse document
So, this was my first BookTok read, and despite (because of?) the absolutely stellar GoodReads reviews it was a pretty big disappointment. The core problem with the book is that it has too much basic Yin energy, i.e. the main character is very very special, and she gets the best dragon, and then the other best dragon, and the best powers, and the best boyfriend, and he has 8 pack abs and he's also in charge of everything because he's super cool but he's also rebellious and dangerous but also he's royalty and also and also and also and also. For a bit there at the start it seems like there's going to be a love triangle where she has to choose between straight-and-narraow Dain and bad-but-cool Zain, but that gets thrown out the window pretty quickly and then the rest of the book is spent shitting all over Dain. Get fucked Dain, you're dog shit, cucks like you should be executed. Is the message of the book. The best I can say about this is that it makes me feel better about male fantasies, which are really quite upright and decent and original in comparison. Oh right, and then like 75% of the way through the book starts introducing words like "clit" and "armoire", which are not at all appropriate for this book's age group. Hmm, what else. The OC is very special and she can throw lightning bolts with her mind, and lightning is one of the very few things that can hurt the Big Bad that is threatening the world, but she is just too focused on you-know-what to ever actually spend any time mastering this stuff. I can just feel Raistlin rolling over in his grave. Oh right and there's exactly one chapter from the the male lead's perspective, and it is just heartbreaking. Does the author really think that men think this way? Does the author really think that women want men to think this way? Again, heartbreaking.
Was there anything positive? I liked that the author decided to give the characters both dragons and X-men powers. Like, it's fantasy, if you decide you want to go whole hog with your universe there's no real boundary or governing body that can stop you. I know I complained about all the gifts given to the main character, but I'm weirdly OK with this sort of overload when it comes to world building. Like it's not going to be great art, but it might still result in a fun book. I also liked the unreasonable effectiveness of lassos in aerial combat; there's basically nothing a weapon or spell can do that's worse than being pulled off your ride and slammed into the ground at several hundred miles per hour. Also kind of funny the mental image of these wizards yoinking each other off of their respective dragons.
Gaunt's Ghosts, books 1-999, by Dan Abnett
2.0 Stars
6-5-2024
The Emperor protects
I went into this with high hopes, knowing that this is the illimitable Dan Abnnet's magnum opus, his largest and most famous series which ties together the threads of his various standalone books. Turns out, not that great though! Let us enumerate the reasons:
The main issue is that the fundamental verb of the series is not interesting. Abnett's other books are about futuristic aerial dog-fights, or giant mechs blasting each other, or post-human bio-tanks fighting each other with lasers, chain-saws, and magic powers. These are fine activities and perfectly sufficient to carry a book or two. In the Gaunt's Ghosts books though the basic action is "they tried to shoot me with a rifle but I shot them instead". And there's only so many variations of that you can do. And so many of these variations have been covered so many times in so many previous books and movies. You can tell that Abnett can tell that this isn't working; around book 5 or so he starts trying to recast the series as basically anything else but what it started as. So you have a book of blood and snow where it's just a few main characters being hunted in a magically becalmed and be-blizzarded city, a haunted house book of them occupying a billion year old and slowly awakening alien tomb-fort, a book of ship-board naval adventure, a guerilla book or two hunting a single high value target on a Chaos planet, a visit to a dusty Mars world where they decide that it's really just a silly place and the best thing to do is just f-off to somewhere else, a book where the OCs are foolishly fighting a contest of armies and logistics while their enemies are fighting a contest of narrative and religious symbolism, etc. etc. Each of these books tries to vary things up and tell a different story, but also to a greater or lesser degree it still has sections of that basic, uninteresting verb.
Another issue is that it's not clear that Abnett's story telling really stretches to a long running series like this. He does perfectly fine over the course of one or two books, but he's not really able to stretch these characters and their arcs over the longer term, and so at best they just all fall into stock roles that they repeat for book after book. He also occasionally loses the context over too long a period; memorably one of the characters makes an impassioned and apparently honest minor speech about his dedication to pacifism in an insane universe, while 2 books earlier the same character was using warped blood runes to explosively desanguinate multiple people. I think Abnett just lost track of some earlier bits when it came time to write the later bits. Oh right, and one final quibble, the last book really does not stick the landing.
Ok, so what is good? I like that they use chain-saws to carry out their honor duels. I like basically any section where Abnett tries to portray things from Chaos' perspective; the lore has set him up with basically an impossible task of trying to organize and make sense of the senseless, but the effort is at least usually ludicrous and wild. I liked the book that at various points found an excuse to give ~15 characters a chance to make a minor speech about how they interpret the insane universe they are in. I liked the invasion of Garillon and how life in a real Guard unit should be like, I liked the Mars-ish book where they, for once, genuinely acknowledge that they could just bombard the place from orbit and save everyone a lot of time and sweat. I liked the insane ED-209 kill-bot that spends 90% of a book slowly making its way through an aquifer while the rest of the plots goes on above it.
Finally, shout outs to the few characters having a decent time in this universe:
- that head Scout guy, who manages to do a Shrek and escape to a swamp to live without anyone bothering him
- Fazekiel, the autistic commissar, who a) has a heart of gold and b) is basically in this situation, living in and enforcing the all encompassing edicts of a rigid authority
- basically any of the Chaos characters or ships, who are all just out there trying to live their best lives
Titanicus, by Dan Abnett
3.0 Stars
4-5-2024
Astrobleme; it means star wound
As usual, Abnett does a great job of taking the absurdity of WH40K, and in particular the absurdity of WH40K's 1970-ish mech designs, and somehow turning it into enjoyable and oddly believable stories. So of course you have clashing mechs, but there's also a Byzantium-type religious schism about the unitary or divided nature of divinity, culture clashes between the human and mechanicus peoples on the planet, some amusing Skitarii interludes, a plotline that follows a woefully unequipped third line reserve force as they try to navigate the devastation of battle, a mech pilot struggling against mind-interface-rot, and a few other heroic threads at various levels of the conflict. The Chaos forces are largely absent in narrative terms, which I thought was an unusual choice but overall worked fine. And as usual I think these books are about 10-30% too long, but still a very solid effort of creation from an author that was given basically nothing to work with by his predecessors.
Let the Right One In
3.0 Stars
4-5-2024
A well written but depressing and thematically confused story about a Swedish vampire that goes around, Quantum Leap style, helping out people in trouble. A few notes: from the book's portrayal Finland seems like a truly dire place, where absolutely no one is happy. The participants in the novel are all either depressed, drunk, druggies, hapless, befuddled, unlucky, miserable, sick, pathetic, sadists, criminals, hollow church goers, cops, or some combination of the above. I feel a little a bit about the place like I do when looking pictures of the worst Micronesian islands, that oh wow you guys really got stuck settling the absolute end of existence, where things are just a notch more habitable than the complete void of outerspace. And it shows in their affect. So much of this novel could have been avoided if these people had just managed to live in a place that is not an Artic wasteland, where people could just get a little sunshine each day and relax and feel decent. Note 2: the books go much darker than the movies. It takes a while, but they eventually get to at least the outskirts of Throne of Bones territory, and I can see why the movie adaptations of the book looked at the last third of the novel and just said "nope nope nope" and left it on the cutting room floor.
The Serpent and the Saint, and the Magister and the Martyr, by Dan Abnett
3.0 Stars
3-15-2024
what is this, a cross-over episode!?
Our Ithacan Snake Boys are back! It turns out that the earlier Iron Snakes novel was an origin story rather than a series of stand alone vignettes, and now the characters from that book are mixed in with those from Abnett's more grounded and human level series. It's still sort of a high-level campaign, and as usual there's a fair bit of repetitiveness, but there's also a lot to like in these two books. E.g. the basic war stories are fun, the author has a consistent tactical inventiveness and ability to turn the absurdity of WH40K into weirdly belieavable and interesting situations, he does a decent job of representing the post-human space marines, and he does a great job of representing and making oddly sympathetic the traior marines opposing them. Hmm, what else. There's easily as much body horror as in Ballingrud's work, but as usual with Warhammer it's just thrown in there as a lagniappe rather than being the full deal. There is also, as the title implies, the saint that the entire 20 novel series revolves around. I'm not sure how I feel about that aspect. WH40K has always had this issue that it is nominally satire, but after 20 minutes and a few drinks it forgets about that and devolves into straight faced whatever-40K-is, and then this book folds imperial religion into it, which is kind of also a little bit Catholicism?, and at some point I lose the thread about what exactly this is supposed to be. It kind of works, after all who does not want to follow a Joan of Arc/White Rose figure into battle, but it kind of does not as I got lost in the various thousand folds of imitation and satire and I'm not sure exactly what the text is supposed to be conveying. Is Dan Abnett Catholic? Is he doing a mirror image of what Sanderson is doing, and trying to sneak his religion into a 5000+ page series of fantasy novels? It is a frightening thought.
Oh and I also liked the elderly married couple in their paired Warhound mechs.
Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell, by Ballingrud
2.0 Stars
3-1-2024
hell is forever and it's meant to suck a lot
Like Throne of Bones, but for NPR listeners. There's a lot of grossness and gore, but it comes off as somewhat cartoonish and oddly safe. It's not bad exactly, and it does successfully make you feel a bit off, like you ate some slightly bad chili, but the events are not placed out there with the sort of skill and panache that you need to pull off a really good or gross horror story. E.g. compare to someone like Laird Barron, who, for all his faults, has a real physicality to his writing and can genuinely make you feel ill and sick to your stomache with his memorable horror stories. Like you ate some bad chili that was really off. Oh right and if it wasn't clear yet these are not stories of horror-adventure, where the characters have a chance to fight and survive, but rather stories of horror-they-are-fucked where none of the MCs have the capacity/autonomy to really do anything about the events happening to them. Kind of a depressing genre really.
A bit about the details of the stories themselves: They're Sunless-Sea/Fallen London type stories of high magic and dark urban fantasy; a small town colonized by ghouls and their ghoul religion, an infectious imp that falls in love/hate with the young diabolist that inherited it, a librarian sent to retrieve a hell-tongue, a sailing ship voyage to the border of hell, etc. etc. The usual stuff.
The Witch in the Well
2.0 Stars
2-25-2024
there seems to be no escape from this sordid tale
A skillfully enough written book, about two long-time, small-town frenemies who are both writing a book about a "witch" that was thrown into a well in the 1800's. The only problem is that one the MCs, the one you spend ~70% of the book with, is a desperately toxic, bitter, and unpleasant lady. There are plenty of valid reasons for this in the story (ill luck in childhood, kelpie-blight, witch-dream influence), but it also makes the experience of listening to the book genuinely unenjoyable. The problem is compounded because the bitter MC takes over progressively more of the narration as the story continues on to its conclusion.
Actually, wait, if you want to there is also a reading of this book where there are no super-natural elements, just a truly dismal and unreliable narrator writing/editing the entire thing. That would be worse.
Sword of Liberty
1.0 Stars
2-15-2024
There is a sub-genre of sci-fi that I like, which explores the hypothetical of how quickly could we colonize/industrialize outer space if Earth turned all of its surplus energies towards that task. Notable members include Seveneves, the Three Body problem novels, the various Lumpkin novels/Terra Invicta, and now this book as well. Unfortunately this novel is a verrrrry amateurish entry into the genre. The characterization is terrible, it doesn't really consider the world outside of America, and it doesn't really engage with any of the many, many technical problems of the task. There's a notable part early on where they're talking about building a new breed of space ship, but they haven't yet decided on what the ship will use for propulsion or what it will use for power. Which is, like, 99.8% of the difficulty of building a spaceship. Fortunately the author quickly handwaves these problems away. The one positive thing I will say about the novel is that the aliens, their reason for arriving, and the unfolding of their ship-complex was moderately creative and interesting.
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.