Alexander at the End of the World Rothdas book review RSS
2.5 Stars
12-20-2015

My second least favorite book by Holt. Unlike the Walled Garden, which I quite enjoyed, this historical Athenian novel did not work for me. There is a lot of dad-humor in it, and parts of it seemed written by Dave Barry, or perhaps by the Black Company's Croaker on an off day. The central idea of the novel was also poorly implemented. The book is constantly trying to sell you on the theme that the main character, by focusing on ideas and ideals, inadvertently causes terrible damage to the people and world around him. But the actions of the book usually fail to support that assertion. For instance, the main character is walking along and thinking, when the brother he hasn't seen for 20 years runs into him from behind. His brother's leg is broken in this accident. The book then tells you over and over again that it is the protagonist's fault that his brother's leg was broken? It just doesn't make sense. Similarly, the protagonist helps found a new Greek colony at one point in the book. Their neighbors are Scythians, and one of the Scythian teenagers goes on a raid, kills several of the protagonists friends, and is then mortally wounded by the protagonist, leading to an escalating cycle of violence. This violence too is blamed on the protagonist, because he killed this teenager who was on a murder-rampage? That's just kind of karma in action, not some grievous moral fault by the main character. There's plenty of other examples like this; these two just stood out. The theme in of itself is fine, and I'd be open to it, but the novel never really supports the themes. Or to re-phrase: the novel is constantly telling you a theme and then showing you something else. There's also an annoying number of anachronisms in the book. I usually don't notice these, but perhaps because the storyline didn't really work for me the anachronisms really stood out. For instance, you have phrases like "under pressure" which really wouldn't mean anything in the ancient world.

So, what is the story about? It is the memoir of a Greek philosopher, as he deals with life, tutors Alexander the Great, founds a colony, talks to his brother about military campaigns, and so on. The Alexander parts were more interesting than the main character's navel gazing, and oddly in the last 150 pages of the 450 page novel there is some more interesting, PKD type time-slip action going on.

Editor's Note: Despite the flaws of the novel, and despite disliking the novel, I mostly agree with the novel. It belongs to that small class of books which are poorly implemented, but still contain ideas which are both uncommon and correct and useful. I'm not sure how to reflect that in a 5-star rating system, but it is a book where I do agree with its thesis and find myself referencing it every month or so for years after. This isn't because the novel introduced a new idea to me necessarily, rather this is sort of the book I think about when I think of this sort of idea (where the idea is "infrastructure over ideas").




Uzumake - Spiral into Horror
4.0 Stars
12-15-2015

Uzumake is a series of Japanese comic books, or as they call them over there, "visual novels". There are ~20 issues in the series, where each issue covers one incident in the gradual infection and corruption of a village by a supernatural terror. The terror is less of a monster and more of a platonic idea, the idea of the Spiral, which entrances and maddens and transforms and kills the inhabitants of the village.

The collection was surprisingly good, for some values of good. Visually the novel is great. The "spiral" idea lends itself very well to the comic book form, and there are dozens of neat and creative visual motifs and riffs on this form. The stories themselves are not really scary in the sense of a jump scare or an afraid of the dark scare, but rather they are deeply unsettling. I'm not sure how well I can measure this, as thanks to the internet I've already lost most the Sanity Points I have to lose in this area, but I thought that a lot of the imagery was really out there and disturbing. There is a lot of body horror, warts and growths that consume their host, corrupted placentas growing into fungal blooms, babies moving back into wombs, etc. (Ed. Keep it up Japan!) There were a number of shared themes between this and Jeff Vandermeer's Annihiliation series; you have the lighthouse and inverted lighthouse, the transformation of human into beast, the idea of semiotic contagion and corruption, the idea of a region where reality itself has been marked out and claimed by an alien power. Vandermeer is a lot more restrained with his weirdness though; here it is more balls to the wall weirdness from from page 1 through page 500. Partially as a result of that, the stories feel less grounded than Vandermeer's. That's kind of a weird criticism to have of a book of Weird Tales, but I think it can be important to have some sense of consistency or breathing room in the story. I feel like in terms of realism A) There is no way the protagonist actually stays in the village past issue 2, or maybe issue 3. I think any half-way rationale person would be packing the car at that point. And B) there is no way the protagonist survives past issue 10 or so. I can see why the stories are laid out this way (it's a monthly comic book where each issue needs to be its own self contained thing while maintaining the theme), but it makes the story perhaps less interesting than it would be if told as a cohesive whole. Still, a really well done work.




Girl with the Pearl Earring
3.0 Stars
11-15-2015

A pleasant enough book, though I'm not sure I really understood it. The main lesson of the book seems to be that it sucked to live in the 1600's? Or that it 1.2f * sucked to be a woman back then? The story is a bit like Uprooted, with a cold master and warmer apprentice, though this time the subject is painting rather than magic, and there is laundry rather than sword battles, and in general things are woefully under consummated. I liked the tidbits about painting theory in the book, though they were generally more technical than ideological. I prefer Iris Murdoch's take on painting in the SandCastle. I did like though the small details of Netherlandic life that the author put in, and I liked the understated and calm nature of the main character. The ending was also pleasant, though I feel that the author also had a great, uncertain ending ~10 pages before the real ending. I half-wish she had just ended the book early, with all of the possible futures hanging in the air.




Etched City
5.0 Stars
11-1-2015

Nice, really nice. This is a wandering book of semi-fantasy, semi-actual literature, with a mix of adventure, crime, romance, and occasional warps in the fabric of reality. One of the two main characters is a doctor who's idealism has been hollowed out by events, leaving behind a sort of fossil of its shape that continues forward. Aside from her occasional gun fights she wouldn't be that out of place in an Iris Murdoch novel. Actually now that I think about it she has a bit of Tallis in her, though her design is not as perfect as his. The other main character is a blackguard and gunslinger, who does just fine without ideals and instead makes do with an uncanny amount of luck and engaging the world as it is. These two characters are semi-friends, and over the course of the story they move from a bitter, Wild West desert frontier, to a florid and decadent jungle city, and back again. Things happen? The plot is kind of slack or pleasantly wandering; it does not necessarily have the normal peaks and valleys that you would expect. Instead there is just continually beautiful (and frequently brutal) writing.

The tech level in this book seems to be around the ~1850's in our world, though it lacks the same sort of technological momentum and acceleration that ours has. One interesting offshoot from this book was that it made me realize how much of my own idealism is a result of that acceleration. It is much easier to look at some instance of human crappiness and say well, we can at least hope to fix that, maybe not today but hopefully in X decades when we have better tools and technology. Or to put it another way, you can say that yes idealism is completely unrealistic, but it is still not inconceivable that one day we could, Infinite Tsukuyomi style, wrap the world in thicker and more perfect layers of abstraction in order to get something halfway decent.




Version 43, Philip Palmer
4.0 Stars
10-13-2015

An odd, brutal, funny, and well crafted sci fi mystery of shifting perspectives. The book is recent, but in many ways it reminds me of classic 70's sci-fi. Like a lot of 70's sci-fi, it is less about science and more about the fantastic. There are ray beams and space ships and such, but there isn't any sort of consistent basis to them, and they exist right along side quantum powers & magic & time dilation & psychic abilities. The book also has the sort of shifting perspectives & unstable ground that you find in Philip K Dick, or in something like _The Thing_ , where just a few new pieces of information can completely shift the narrative ground you thought you were standing on. Version 43 has many of these shifts, as successive versions of a cyborg cop are incarnated to try and deal with a bizarre murder on a lawless planet. With each iteration and reveal, you learn more about the planet, the characters, and what might be going on. This largely works and is enjoyable, even if it starts to go off the rails a bit in the last 50 pages. Still, Palmer keeps things on the rails for much longer than I thought possible, and he does a really impressive job of story telling and plotting. I particularly liked the unreliable main character, a sort of murderous but lovably arrogant robo-cop with various shifting currents in his unconscious. His beau was also quite adorable. I'm usually not a fan of mysteries, but this one was very well done.

I would give the book an extra half star, but the 70's combination of magic, psychics, time-travel, etc. kept the story from feeling grounded or consistent enough for me to really, truly connect with it. It always felt more like an clever tale being spun out of cobwebs rather than something happening to real people. To paraphrase Simone Weil, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the novel".




Rainbows End, Verner Vinge
2.5 Stars
10-3-2015

First off, I like Vinge. He is a genuinely smart fellow, and while his characterization is often wooden, and his plot lines are occasionally flat, he has well thought out science fictional and programming related ideas that I usually come back to in my later ponderings. This book though, ooof. Unlike the other Vinge that I have read which deals with space ships and alien races, Rainbows End is set in the America of 2025. And because of that, and because of Vinge's less well thought out political ideas, this book often comes across as laughably unrealistic and absurd. Alien spiders, AI, FTL, sure, that sounds fun, I can suspend disbelief and think about them in the context of the story. But a hyper-competent and good hearted Department of Homeland security? Lol, my sides, they are in orbit, moving away at 0.2C. Why not add dragons and unicorns? This book also has an entirely justified American invasion that just *barely* manages to pre-empt a WMD launch; the evil doers even hid their WMDs under an orphanage! America has also switched over to a hyper efficient libertarian marketplace by 2025. And as we know, once you remove all constraints from corporations & add even more radically invasive technology, you get a really great and productive and innovative society. This idiot libertarianism lends just about every aspect of the story an air of pure fantasy. Here is one small instance: a character undergoes multiple, radical medical therapies; there is no mention of the cost or insurance paperwork. Really? Meanwhile in the real world, a pharma company just increased the price of a swathe of drugs by 5000% each. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. If you don't get the drugs you die or are crippled, so pay up. I have difficultly believing that our current situation gets better once you remove all constraint from the pharma companies/medical industry. Another instance: most of the characters make money by selling each other virtual goods; basically they are all employed making TF2 hats for each other in the Steam of the future. That's great, but it does raise the question of how they actually pay the rentiers who own the land, energy resources, app stores, medical patents, and all the existing copyrights. Oh, another small question, why does anyone want to buy the hat that a high school kid made, rather than the hat made by a professional triple A team? Or here, what about someone who isn't above average? I hear there are a lot of them these days. Or what about someone who doesn't want to keep running on the treadmill of global competition in their 50's and 60's? Is there any place in this society for them?

Ok, at this point in the review I think I've just accepted that I'm only going to list negatives.

Negative N: one of the conceits of the book is that teams of analysts can be rapidly assigned to new problems, and can evaluate and respond to these new problems within minutes. Near the end of the book, *thousands* (or even more?) analysts are added to the DHS to help with a crisis, and somehow this helps & quickly gives super-intelligent responses? I mean, a woman can have a baby in 9 months, so 50000 women should do it in 10 minutes, right? I did not get this part of the book at all; it takes time to get up to speed with a new problem, it takes time to coordinate workers, it takes security clearances & contracts to even be allowed to see the data, and even then each new person increases the risk of leaks/theft/other problems. This was particularly galling since one of the fundamental anti-patterns of computer programming is to add more people to a project if the project is taking too long. You would expect adding more people to speed the project up, but in reality it causes significant slowdowns in the short-to-medium term as the new people need to be integrated and brought up to speed on the work.

Negative N+1: At one point, a main character has their arm brutally destroyed. In the remaining chapters, that character barely thinks about the trauma of the experience, or the difficulties of going through life without a significant chunk of their body. Earlier I said that Vinge's characterization is wooden, but man, this was a new high, a towering red wood of woodenness.

Negative N+2: One of the neat aspects of the story is the augmented reality layer that people place over the real world using advanced contacts and ubiquitous sensors. Again, Vinge is a smart & technical fellow, and its neat to see his take on these technologies that are starting to come to fruition. But again, I feel like he largely glosses over the downsides of these new technologies. Things like: this.

While I am interested in some of the basic ideas of this book, and about how we might navigate between the Scylla of an all pervasive security state and the Charybdis of potential garage-level bio WMDs, this book is not the one to explore these ideas. It basically just says that "Yeah, Scylla is great, she has a good heart and will never use her tentacles to do terrible things to your orifices".

[Edit] Reading back over this review, man, I was really hard on Vinge. Part of it is that I hold authors I respect to higher standards; it is not so much that Vinge is history's greatest monster, and more that it is disappointing to find (what I think) is a blind spot in an author I like. As with his other books, I like many of the technical ideas explored in the book, and think that there is a great deal of intelligence and thought put into them, even if the resulting story isn't all that great.




Uprooted, Naomi Novik
4.0 Stars
9-26-2015

An enjoyable fantasy story about a kingdom (and an odd-couple wizard duo) fighting a malevolent, powerful, and infinitely patient forest spirit. The forest spirit is somewhere between the omniscient antagonist in _The Wise Man's Fear_, and the distributed and near unkillable giant plant from the Ruins. I liked it! The characters were neat, the writing is snappy, the world building is fine, the magic is crunchy, the antagonist is interesting, and all together it just lays out a nice Dominions 3 scenario. Even more than Novik's other books, this one is a romance in addition to an action story. I find most romances to be boring and templated, and have difficulty paying enough attention to read them. However! With this book and with Jacqueline Carey, I've learned that I can actually get into Romances, so long as you warm me up first with 150 pages detailing the strategic/magical balance of power :) As with Novik's other books, these were not great literature, but they are at least well-constructed & enjoyable pandering that I enjoyed reading.




Consider Phlebas, Iain M Banks
5.0 Stars
9-20-2015

This was a re-read, as I wanted to sample this novel again before giving it as a gift. And wow, Consider Phlebas is still really, really good. Let me just start listing off superlatives: hugely inventive, great detail and descriptive scenes, memorable characters, intelligent themes and layering of themes and variations of themes, exciting action, uh, and I think that covers most of it. Banks has this wonderful quality where he will just create huge, generous streams of character and detail and scenery; it is like walking through a ticker tape parade, where as most authors will just throw a sad handful of confetti at you. For example, take the recent read _The Goblin Emperor_, which was not a bad or uninventive book. Two weeks after reading it, I would be hard pressed to describe many of the main characters, except as general statements about their personality. His wife? Uh, likes astronomy and kind of nice? His secretary of state? Helpful, trustworthy, tactful, traumatized by that one land owner. Whereas with Phlebas, I could give more detailed descriptions of at least a minor dozen characters. Banks has a very crunchy & memorable writing style, the closest thing I have to it today is my favorite RPG blog, Goblin Punch.

Anyway! In terms of what the book is actually about, it is about a galactic war, and one small episode within the war. Two agents on opposite sides of the war are trying to claim an AI core that has been stranded within a planet owned by a neutral and powerful elder race. There are adventures through out the war zone, and then again within the neutral planet. People die. There are explosions, nuclear explosions, anti-matter explosions, and love making. Why, why has no one turned the Culture novels into a series of movies? They are just begging for it. Hmm, perhaps because the books are depressing? Despite the action-movie nature of the book, it is really an extended reflection on the loss and pointlessness? waste? tragedy? of war, and of downward seeking behavior in general.




The Goblin Emperor, by Sarah Monette
4.0 Stars
9-15-2015

Editors Note: I read this entire book while on 4 hours sleep, and while stranded on a balcony. I do not claim that this review represents my normal, completely objective and impartial opinions.

So! The Goblin Emperor. It is a bit of Hamako's _Long Live the Queen!_, where a half-goblin-half-elf (or "golf" as they are called) is unexpectedly promoted to lead a tradition-soaked Elven empire. The Golf must determine what sort of ruler he will be, and must survive treacherous political waters and various threats. On the whole the book is enjoyable. The main character and many others are likeable, there are inventive and cleanly described scenes and environments, and there are some neat twists to what could have otherwise been a more standard tale. I particularly liked the interviews with the sabetours at the end. There is some difficulty/confusion in the book, since you have to learn a boatload of elven names and terms, but I interpreted this as a way for the author to convey the difficulty the protagonist has to face when first plunged into the Imperial Elven court. The writing is of a general high quality, and like with _Authority_ I enjoyed the descriptions of political/psychological/organizational struggles.

There were a few flaws in the book. The main character Maia is very likable, and reminded me of an elf/goblin version of Avatar Aang. Maia's psychology never really fit for me though. Aang is who he is because of a naturally cheerful disposition, and because of his warm and careful upbringing by Buddhist monks. While Maia had some positive early influences from his Mom, that stopped when he was 8 years old, and just about every experience after that was bad. It did not entirely fit for me that a childhood of abuse and neglect produces the enlightened 18 year old in the novel. Or to put it another way, his psycho-history didn't really ring true, and there wasn't an entirely convincing explanation for it in the novel. Still, there are worse things than having a largely cheerful and wise protagonist. A second complaint that I would make is that in some ways, the hero doesn't really do that much. He survives the plots against him mostly through other people's interventions or just luck. He would *not* have made it far in the environment of _Long Live the Queen!_. The hero does make positive changes in the empire, but again a lot of that is due to placing his trust in bystanders who happen to be trustworthy, rather than through positive or direct action of his own. Or to put it another way, he is not really a Tywin Lannister, he is more someone who exemplifies the Tao and then has that flow down through his subordinates. I think I might like a sequel more in this regard if we were to see the hero after he has come into his own, and & can play a more active role in manipulating/guiding the politics of the kingdom. Like with Ancillary Justice, I think there is a lot of promise in the universe that Monette has created.




Leviathan Awakes
3.0 Stars
9-13-2015

This is sci-fi. This is a big, 500 page block of sci fi. It is not bad? It is not original in its ideas at all, but the execution is pleasingly competent and generally enjoyable. It is a bit like an actiony 1970's sci-fi book, but updated with modern graphics. The setting is a few hundred years in the future, where we have developed fusion drives and have started colonizing the solar system, but do not yet have AI's, FTL, or any truly transformative technologies. Events occur! There is tension between the wealthy inner planets, and the frontier miners of the outer planets. More Events occur! The characters are quietly likable & usually not too obtrusive. There are some brief moments when the author tries to introduce larger ideas or psychology, but these can be safely ignored. The author does a better job with the small details of Belter life, and in the thought he has put in to the habits, tics, trade, and living quarters of people who have never been in a gravity well. I particularly liked his aural descriptions, both of the everyday sounds of spacecraft and of when they are falling apart.

I'm not sure I want to read the rest of the series in my current state of supreme physical wellness (apparently the author has written enough of these novels to fill a small shipping container?), but I would definitely turn to them if I was bed-ridden by tuberculosis.




Authority, by Vandermeer
5.0 Stars
9-6-2015

Authority is the delightful sequel to the wonderful Lovecraftian gem that is _Annihilation_. _Annihilation_ is a constant stream of action, revelation, and betrayal. From the very first the protagonist is struggling to survive in Area X, a normal seeming but immensely dangerous wilderness. _Authority_ is a slower book, and this time the deceptively dangerous environment is the government institution set up to watch over Area X. Here the operative mode of the story is not the constant physical threat of death/dissolution, rather it is in the sudden leap between normalcy and the utterly insane and alien. For this reason the book is a bit slower; it first has to setup a relative normalcy in order to later disrupt it. This is not say that the Authority is slow, there is tons of fighting, but most of the fighting is of the organizational, political, administrative, and psychological variety. I enjoyed this political infighting, even if it is not quite as compelling as the original. Authority is still in the LoveCraftian/Delta Green genre that I love, but this time it is less about the dangers of the field and more about institutional corruption and shadow wars.

I worry that in describing Authority I will fail to say how much I liked it. I liked it! I liked it enough that I read the 350 page book in basically one sitting. The problem that Authority faces is that its predecessor was basically a perfect novel in the genre, or at least perfect enough that I could not point out anything I would change. Authority is very good, but it is not quite perfect. The protagonist, a CIA manager, is not quite as relatable as the biologist from the first novel. His acerbic, absentee, and domineering CIA mom also reminded me a bit too much of Archer's Mom. :) And as I said, Authority is a bit slower. It also does not do quite enough to advance the plot/explore the mystery. We don't learn much more about Area X. The things that happen in this novel are, basically, what the biologist thought might happen in the first book. We don't get any new paragraphs of awesome, insane cultist gibberish (though I guess we do get a few neat cultist murals). In short, in terms of world building it felt like the author was just fleshing out the lines that he'd already laid down in the first book, without adding much more that was really new. Compare this to the first book, where every 25 pages there is a sudden lurch as something new is revealed and the situation completely changes. Ok, enough of my quibbles. Authority is a highly enjoyable read, and it has at least three completely wonderful, laugh out-loud, terrifying and f'd up moments. I'm looking forward to the third book in the series, even if like the second book it is merely excellent and not perfect.




Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
3.0 Stars
9-4-2015

A decently written but rather silly space opera. The basic (and neat) idea is that there is space emperor, who has used cloning and brain implant technology to create countless duplicates of herself. Each duplicate is linked via brain-implant to the others, so that theoretically they all have the same identity. Each one is put in charge of a different sector or system of the empire. However, as the empire has grown to thousands of worlds, propagation delays have caused the versions of herself to drift apart, to the point where after centuries of plotting the two factions of herself are now openly in conflict. So! This second book in the series starts off with the galactic civil war just getting underway. The fate of thousands of planets are at stake! Our hero has been given command of an FTL warship, and sent to a vital system with orders to protect the system. At which point our hero starts doing fetch quests. Her first order of business is to improve the plumbing and health-services for the ~100 or so people in the poor-person's block of the system space station. Not to, say, figure out the loyalties of the other warship captains, or to get her hands on the AI overrides for their ships. After her first bold move, she progresses on to similarly important tasks like making sure this one space station cadet gets out of a mildly abusive relationship, or improving working conditions for a small portion of the tea-growers on planet. Oh my lord lady. It is like in a JRPG, where there is this world-threatening evil, and you ignore addressing it in favor of doing fetch quests or finding a lost cat for townsfolk. Here is an idea; if the tea-harvesters have a crappy life, have some fricken' robots do the job instead. Now that that issue is taken care of, you can turn to the more important issues like making sure the whole place isn't nuked in the incipient interstellar war. The author does make some small nods to automation as a solution, by saying that most tea is made by automated factories, and only the prestige brands are made by hand. But that just leads to the question of why given the means of production available (mass automation and robotics, advanced AI, thousands of FTL ships, plenty of pleasant and sparsely inhabited planets, centuries of peace and reasonably competent rule), everyone is so incredibly, incredibly poor. The space ship crew can barely afford tea, a new officer can barely afford rum. Even the elites of the society are terribly poor; the grand oligarch of the planet only has a few McMansions and a few hundred indentured workers. I think the source of this problem is that the author wants to write a very social-justicy novel, and to do that you need injustices to highlight and fix. This doesn't really work though since A) the injustices the author comes up with are basically from our world and don't fit with the technology/sci-fi situation presented, and B) it often felt like pandering; e.g. have a laundry list of current social justice issues (colonialism, racism, income inequality, spousal abuse, etc. etc.), and then have our physically deadly and morally righteous protagonist slice through them. [Editors note: Someone on GoodReads described the novel as the one-sided continuation of an argument the author had on the internet; that seemed apt.] And in the end, I have to ask to what purpose? Even if the hero fixes all the inequalities in their system, she has only delivered its people into something moderately worse than a middle-class American existence. Why not have some imagination instead? You have AIs and anti-gravity and cloning and brain CRUD! Go to town! Create an actual positive vision of a humane future like Iain M Banks did, where people aren't wasting their lives as soldiers, or butlers, or manual labors. Let them flourish to the limits of baseline human potential, or let them go far beyond that if they wish. Oh! Or here is an idea, just fully accept that you don't care about the science in your science fiction, and instead write space romances, about the love between the AI ships and their captains. Make it the full focus of the novels like Termeraire did, and happily ignore the sillyness of the world you have built up.

Anyway! When the book can be bothered to turn back to the main quest line, it can be good. There are the seeds of interesting stuff in trying to suss out the loyalties of the other captains and governors and AIs in the system, especially since brain-implants and AI overrides can come into play. The main plot wasn't all that well developed, but I liked the parts that were there. And like in the first book, the protagonist is unobtrusively gender blind, which as in the first book I liked but was generally blind to. I believe this blindness is because I am similarly enlightened myself, and failed to notice the abscence of something I don't pay much attention to. Either that or I am an unobservant and lazy reader. :)




Pale Fire, by Nabokov
4.0 Stars
9-1-2015

Enough has been said about this book elsewhere that I'm not sure I need to elaborate on it too much. The first time I read this was about ~15 years ago, and I loved it at the time. And I still kind of love it? There are sentences and paragraphs that just make me laugh for the pleasure of how perfect they are. The writing and structure of the book are simply brilliant. And when I say brilliant, I do not mean brilliant in my usual "desperate-search-for-adjectives" kind of way. It really is just genius level thinking that went into the creation of this story. Still, I wasn't as motivated/entranced when reading this a second time, since a large part of the pleasure of the book is unwrapping/decoding what is happening. And since I had already unwrapped the main part of the book, the things that are left to unwrap are the smaller and more minor puzzles, and to really do that I would need to start taking notes or reading other people's commentary on the text. And I'm not sure I want to commit quite that much time or go quite that meta. :)

One thing I did appreciate the second time around was how the commentary actually makes me appreciate the poem more. Initially, I did not particularly like poem that is the heart of the book (the constant rhyming throws me off and feels a little silly?), and I skipped over parts of the poem when I first came across it at the start of the book. However, the negative/acidic commentary makes a nice contrast to the poem, and helps me appreciate the poem more.

Anyway, if you enjoyed Pale Fire, I would also recommend its more modern incarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtpT5u5eOa0&list=PL8cGaJKvM_-73lQO-4fTjrVjkgcide_5I




Ficciones, by Borges
4.0 Stars
8-20-2015

A series of brilliant but dry short stories. The stories tend to be abstract, self-referential, and experimental. They are what you would expect from a very smart South American who is skilled at writing and has an advanced CS degree. But the thing is, Borges didn't have a CS degree. o_O. Borges wrote all of these about 30-50 years before his ideas really started filtering out to other authors. Despite the clear genius of the design, his writing never really grabbed me. The stories were a bit too puzzle like, and I read each one focusing on identifying the trick or conceit of the story rather out of any enjoyment of the tale.




The Player of Games, by Iain M Banks
4.0 Stars
8-4-2015

This was an inadvertent re-read, as I had purchased a copy for a friend and wanted to just refresh my memory of a few parts. Lol, we know how that turns out. I enjoyed the book on the second time around, though not nearly so much as the first. I found parts of the book to be more preachy and heavy-handed than the first time through. I was also more aware and bothered by a flaw that I mentioned last time, that the game Azad, which is the primary field of contention for most of the book, can never really be described. There are large parts of the book where there just isn't anyway for the author to have any detail in the writing, since the thing he is writing about is so nebulous. The McGuffin becomes the Albatross. Banks does better with the smaller games mentioned earlier in the book, since these he can actually outline and fill in some detail for. So, not a bad book, but I think it suffered a bit on re-read. Still very fun, snappy, and creative in many respects.




The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Borges
2.0 Stars
7-30-2015

I picked this up since it seemed like it might be neat, and at the very least I could mine it for ideas to use in different games that I run/make. I ended up with the "least" scenario. The book is not particularly fun to read. It's not bad, but it's not something I would read if I were not looking for ideas for imaginary monsters. The book does have the usual Borges conceit of intertwining the fantastical and the historical, which is kind of cool, but in this instance it is not functionally different from the usual Monster Manual strategy of taking something that exists in the real world or in a real world myth and using it as a template/inspiration for your new fantastical creation. Or to put it another way, what Borges was using as a delightful literary idea 50 years ago has become, through the vagaries of the nerd entertainment complex, a standard and slightly lazy method to churn out product. Anyway. I was not unhappy that I read the book, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is not GMing or game designing.




Invitation to a Beheading, by Nabokov
5.0 Stars
7-11-2015

A wonderful, absurd, surreal, and darkly comic novel about a man condemned to die. It is like Nabokov took the last section of _The Stranger_, stretched the narrative out like taffy, and then subjected Meursault to a hundred different farces and indignities. Except in this case the protagonist is more likable and more innocent than Meursault, and the society that imprisons him more totalitarian and more Zemblan, and the ending more ... something? In any case, there is a neat sort of solipsistic shadow struggle carried on through out the book, and naturally it reaches its climax at the final scene.

Overall it is a delightful book. Two notes of caution though: Note 1) the first 20-30 pages are a bit slow, so stick with it for bit until the pieces start fitting together. Note 2) In my printing, the back of the book had horrible, terrible spoilers. Like, 3 sentences that just ruined some of the wonderful situations that Nabokov set up. So, grade A trolling on the part of the publishers. I'm not sure why people complain about 4Chan or Reddit when hooligans like Random House are allowed to roam free. If you are interested in the novel at all, rip the back cover off the book and toss it to the wind.

Ok, I cannot resist, here is a final bonus note. The next book on the Nabokov list is _Pale Fire_, which I would be reading already if I hadn't accidentally reserved the audio book version from the library. Pale Fire is a re-read, and while doing some browsing about it I came across this original, hilarious, NYTimes review of Pale Fire from when it was first published.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-r-palefire.html
Wow. I'm sure I've misread a book this badly at some point in my life, but fortunately I've never published it on the internet to be preserved for all time.




The Enchanter, by Nabokov
5.0 Stars
6-13-2015

I started off my new Nabokov campaign by randomly choosing this, and Wowwwwwww. The Enchanter is like the Wasp Factory on crack. It is the hipster version of Lolita, for people who were into old men who were into young girls before it was cool. A stunningly uncomfortable 100 pages.




Single and Single, by Le Carre
5.0 Stars
6-10-2015

Another wonderful Le Carre book. It starts with a brutal and amazing in media res, and moves outward from there to explore the various ties of family, friendship, love, history, money, and betrayal in an international criminal conspiracy. Like with many Le Carre books, it is quite sweet despite the subject matter, with a focus on character and relationships that is only occasionally interrupted by AK-47s.




The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy
4.0 Stars
6-7-2015

Lol. I am definitely giving a copy of this to two of my engaged friends.




1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23