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Just finished Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, a biography of interwar and early WW2 author Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey. Lev's life was wild and short, coming of age as the son of an Azerbaijani Jewish oil magnate in Baku during the Bolshevik Revolution, jumping in and out of high society as he and his father fled and tried to find their footing elsewhere, with Lev eventually converting to Islam and assuming the name Essad Bey. He proceeded to hide in plain sight for a time in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with the fiction of being an enigmatic Muslim "prince" until dying in isolation and disgrace in Positano, Italy, during the height of the Axis. If I had a complaint, it's that Reiss tends to meander a fair bit, as he puts a lot of words into establishing the context that his subject lives in at any given time. Which is good, because it's fascinating stuff, but it does make the actual life narrative of his subject a bit disjointed. The Black Count, about Alexandre Dumas's Napoleonic general father Alex Dumas, had the same "issue," but was still a great read.
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May 19, 2023 00:08
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 18:37 |
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The Godmakers by Frank Herbert, a collection of related short stories that got compiled into one narrative later on. Follows the career of Lewis Orne, a government agent for an interstellar society that was once fractured apart by horrible war. Now this society, seeking to restore itself, evaluates worlds they rediscover for signs of a warlike culture, and enact various plans to scourge it from those societies they find to eventually reintegrate these worlds as peaceful members. Of course, this scourging is not gentle. When Orne discovers a gently caress-up that nearly lets a warlike society in, he gets picked up by Investigation-Adjustment (basically Internal Affairs) to go searching for other gently caress-ups like that including looking for toxic movements inside interstellar society's upper echelons. This eventually leads him to the world of Amel where representatives of all religions known to humanity collect under an enforced peace, and seem to have their own designs against I-A. Inserted in new chapters between the original stories is a framing narrative of the disciples of Amel seeking to create their own god and the possibility Orne is somehow connected to it. This is extremely prototype Dune material, where you can see Herbert taking stabs at stuff that would become the Bene Gesserit, the Kwisatz Haderach, and Dune's more robust criticisms of power and its use. It wasn't bad, but it's hard to call it good either. It was kind of interesting, though, if only to see those parallels to what would come later. Also as an aside, I'm a fan of the RPG Fading Suns and while Dune is usually listed as a major influence on FS, this feels way more in line with the game. Like I could believe that most of this was written as an alternate history to the Fading Suns setting.
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May 28, 2023 04:43
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tuyop posted:Otherwise, your critique is quite common and the kingkiller books are widely regarded as trash. I have absolutely no idea why people love it so much. Kvothe is a "gifted kid" power fantasy. The people who bought into being able to do anything because they had pretty good grades growing up, only Kvothe doesn't burn out as a kid and he always gets one over on his bullies. Maybe the second book changes that (hahahahaha) but that was my experience of the first and I felt no need to carry on. EDIT: Actual content: finished John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed: essays on a human-centered planet. It was a gift and not something I'd usually seek out, but decent enough. Green apparently started this as a podcast series and then polished them up for essay format. Everything is about some kind of element of the world that is created or changed by human intervention, from various technologies and products (like Dr Pepper) to things like the bacteria/antibiotics arms race, or how the modern lawn has benefited the Canadian goose. A lot of them are fairly heavy topics or turn into meandering reminiscences on his own life, though he tries to keep the tone from getting too bleak. Every essay also ends with a semi-serious, semi-joking rating of the thing in question on a scale of 5 stars. disposablewords fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 21:20
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Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, picked up when I saw it in the library a day or two after Cythereal mentioned it here. Exactly as she described it, dystopic space opera about a young woman who starts thoroughly indoctrinated by her horrible fascist little society that's one of the last "independent" remnants of humanity after Earth's destruction at alien hands. The first... half-ish feels kind of facile about such things, fixated a bit on a "humans are this setting's orcs" metaphor at first, but then events really kick off and everything also gets a lot more blunt yet pointed. The action writing is okay, but often gets really spare and vague, but that's not really the main appeal. I'm also not crazy about some of the storytelling decisions, but for reasons other than how Tesh comes down very firmly about these pricks. it's still pretty good and while my crappy attention span made getting through the first half kind of slow, the second half held me pretty firmly until I finished today.
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Jul 7, 2023 06:26
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Translation State, by Ann Leckie. Literally just finished. A follow-up to her "Imperial Radch" trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Sword, and Mercy), set outside the Radch a few years on. I've really enjoyed Leckie's stuff so far, but this was a weird mix of really engaging and yet... kind of underwhelming to me. It doesn't have the same meditative yet angry and blunt mood the Radch trilogy has through its protagonist Breq, and so lacks some of the more evocative imagery we'd get through Breq's recollections and her fiercely opinionated views. A lot of its issues also, I think, come from having three rotating perspective characters. None of them really feels like they get quite enough time to really develop properly, meaning what development we do get is a bit disjointed. One of them really could have just been demoted to a secondary character, allowing things to focus more on the other two. I still really enjoyed it, and the book never left my side until I finished it just now. But it's just not Leckie's strongest work.
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Aug 6, 2023 05:21
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DurianGray posted:The way that Provenance and Translation State seem to be working together as spinoffs/sequels (specifically with having some crossover characters/referenced past events that all impact the Treaty), I'm starting to think (and hope) that Leckie is setting up something really big to happen with the Presger and all the other civilizations we've seen so far in another book or two. She seems really interested in exploring sort of "what happens next." Like you could almost take Ancillary Justice by itself and not read anything else and be satisfied with the revenge ending it has, but the following four books have all been going further and further into the ramifications of what happened in AJ, and just how many ways past events (including ones outside the Radch) impact future ones. I'm definitely interested to see where it goes. I haven't yet read Provenance, this was more of an opportunistic find in my library. (As were the original Ancillary trilogy.) But! I already had the same kinds of thoughts on where the setting seems to be going, just off of Ancillary and TS. It felt to me like Leckie is presenting what looks like a stable but repressive status quo, examining it for faults, and then slapping up the bombs. It's a slow detonation, but shrapnel is already flying.
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Aug 7, 2023 02:00
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malnourish posted:Finished Harrow the Ninth, which I enjoyed significantly more than Gideon the Ninth (a good book in its own right). I'll likely start on the follow-up tonight, although the blurb has me concerned that the mystery will be quite similar. I was under the impression Nona was the last book in the series but it appears at least one more is slated. In short, Nona was originally just the first act of the intended final book (Alecto the Ninth), but Muir found it kept expanding out in various ways so she sliced it off into its own thing. It suffers in some ways from that and if AtN sticks the landing, then NtN will probably be the weakest book in the series. Weakest in the series is still pretty good.
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Sep 5, 2023 19:31
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Just finished rereading Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. Finally. It's not a slow book, but I've become a rather sporadic and distractible reader when I've not got a time limit bearing down on me. Anyway. Science fantasy space opera, where the main character is an infantry captain in the armies of the Hexarchate, an empire that runs on maintaining a very carefully-constructed calendar as proper observance influences the laws of physics. Effectively the empire has space magic as long as they maintain control of the rhythms of the empire's culture. This includes things like amputation guns, where you fire it at someone and their limbs violently pop off. Cheris, the captain, is plucked from her position and made a brevet general to suppress a calendrical rebellion in one of the Hexarchate's most important space stations, both because she has a gift for the mathematics that the space magic runs on. And also because she's otherwise disposable, as she gets the soul of a brilliant but unstable actual general from 400 years ago stapled to her, and he'll have to be put back in "storage" eventually. I enjoyed it a lot back when I first read it several years ago, and then promptly lost track of the sequels because at the time my library didn't have them and I also didn't have an ebook reader of any sort. (Pretty sure there was already a Kindle app for PC, but I didn't think of it. Anyway.) Picked it back up again recently with an eye toward finally reading the sequels, but also I've got some other books on my to-be-read pile demanding attention, too... Hmmm...
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Oct 3, 2023 23:43
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John Scalzi's The Dispatcher. It was thoroughly Okay and went by quickly, which is pretty much what I wanted when I picked up it and a heavier book (in subject and page count) from the library the other day. To summarize: one day ten years ago people suddenly stopped dying normally when murdered. If there was another person's intent behind it, 999 times out of 1000 being killed causes a person to evaporate and then reappear in their home with the past half day or so's effects on their body completely undone, but with full memory of the experience. Tony Valdez is a dispatcher, licensed and empowered to perform legal murder to save people from accidental or lingering deaths that wouldn't otherwise trigger the resurrection. And with the disappearance of one of his fellows, he helps a cop investigate the extremely shady poo poo that has cropped up around this changed state of affairs. As it's a novella, the book focuses in on explaining the "rules" of dispatching and resurrection more than anything else, wrapping up the mystery of the missing dispatcher but without touching the larger mystery of why this is happening at all.
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Oct 9, 2023 03:41
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"Whisperer in Darkness" captured the feeling of being in backwoods Vermont pretty perfectly for me, even up to this day, including references to places I'd been to see family. And I mean, my extended family and I all live in very rural areas that nobody ever mentions so it was surreal in and of itself to have him center things in an area I'd visit once or twice a year for most of my life, and still get the atmosphere of it down in a way that resonates today. Sometimes his writing was legitimately pretty good, or at least effective.
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Oct 13, 2023 02:43
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Gentleman Bandit: the True Story of Black Bart, the Old West's Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber, by John Boessenecker. A biography of Charles E. Boles, US Civil War veteran and legendary stagecoach robber who went by the moniker Black Bart after a character in a dime novel story. Boles was notable for doing all his hold-ups entirely solo, never actually harming anyone physically (he only even fired his gun once during a robbery, entirely on accident and after it was all done), and for refusing to rob any passengers. There's at least one story of an early hold-up where a passenger started to hand him her valuables and he just passed them right back to her. And he hid out for years by using his ill-gotten fortunes to fund a modest but quite comfortable lifestyle in San Francisco where he posed as a gentleman mine owner who occasionally left "to check on his investments." The charm of this soured by how he left a wife and three daughters destitute back east when he disappeared to start his career. Interesting overall, though Boessenecker's writing is a little dry. He's very thorough about documenting time and place for all sorts of events, so you could in theory use the book as the start to finding most of the places Boles did his robberies.
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Dec 2, 2023 23:10
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Cythereal posted:Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It tries to be a love letter to classic James Bond type supervillains via a down on his luck schlub suddenly inheriting his mysterious uncle's estate including a volcano fortress, but runs into the problem that Scalzi only has a handful of jokes to tell on the subject and doesn't know how to write this kind of corny but still entertaining plot. It's a quick read that made me laugh a little, but I'm glad I got it from the library instead of paying money. Coincidentally, I just finished my turn with my library's copy of Starter Villain. This is a fair assessment. I liked it, but it's not Scalzi's best. It was kind of interesting as an exercise in how a Bond villain might "actually" work in the world, with only a little exaggeration from what's possible in the present day. Still worth the time to read if you want something light.
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Dec 8, 2023 10:51
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Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee, part two of his "Machineries of Empire" trilogy. Not quite as good as the first book, I think mostly because you're now enmeshed in the way the setting works and don't have the novelty of learning what's going on, nor do you spend as much time with Cheris and Jedao as in the first book. For good reason - the book is mostly set around them, focusing on others dealing with their actions and plans. And the question of who "they" even are, because of the ending of the first book. I still liked it just fine, I enjoyed stuff from the perspective of the other characters and the look at how even a lot of the people in power in the Hexarchate absolutely hate the society but feel powerless to move against it. Or are rendered powerless by institutional momentum and the people around them who do enjoy the privileges of power. Feeling kind of compelled to revisit Murderbot before going on to the next book, though. Well, we'll see.
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Dec 24, 2023 05:16
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Bookshops and Bonedust, by Travis Baldree. A prequel to his previous Legends and Lattes, about a big gay orc adventurer lady having cozy times in mostly-peaceful communities between adventures. It starts with Viv, the orc lady in question, getting her leg sliced up bad during one of her first jobs and having to convalesce in a small port town, because for all the D&D-isms there isn't much instant healing magic here. She ends up befriending the proprietor of a dilapidated old bookstore, helping clean it out and turn it around in exchange for reading material to keep herself from going mad from boredom. And, of course, the adventure inevitably comes back to find her. It was alright. Very light reading, a bit predictable overall but fine. It takes a long while for the "adventure comes back to find her" bit to actually happen so the climax ends up feeling a little rushed. Baldree mentioned in the postscript that it came together after several other books failed to work out, but that he got to salvage chunks from those other books... and it kinda feels it, you can see it where for example a character obviously from one of those other books gets slotted in to the back third without much done to establish their sudden presence. It was on the library's new arrivals shelf and I just grabbed it while browsing. That's pretty much where Baldree's work so far belongs in my mental rankings, I think - I'll grab them at the library if I find them, but not inclined to seek them out otherwise.
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Feb 4, 2024 22:24
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I love the sandtrout, more of them please. If you keep up with the series, good news!
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Mar 2, 2024 04:19
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Mort is an earlier one before Pratchett fully hit his stride, but it's one of the better of his earlier. It does mostly stand alone just fine, too. So it's a good starting place if you don't want to start from literally book one, and still gets better from there.
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Mar 16, 2024 18:06
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Exit Strategy by Martha Wells, the fourth Murderbot novella and effectively the end of the "book" those first four novellas make together. In between picking up (and mostly bouncing off of) some other things, I've been picking through those books because I wanted to get back up to speed on the series. Still fun and breezy reads.
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Mar 25, 2024 00:52
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Continuing on my Murderbot reread having just finished Network Effect. Again, by Martha Wells. I wasn't super into it the first time I read it a few years ago, but came away feeling much more positive on this reread. The main adventure plot of "Murderbot is abducted and has to protect the people caught up with it when the abduction happened" takes up most of the narrative, but a major secondary thread is the ongoing psychological effects of the first "book." Murderbot is clearly dealing with its own variety of PTSD from previous events but is also strongly in denial over it, and so as the narrator comes at the topic rather elliptically, swinging in and out from confronting the idea and some self-destructive tendencies. Oddly, while this book is spent entirely outside of the Corporate Rim (an array of star systems dominated by corporate powers, which the prior stories took place in), it feels like it says more about the CR than the prior stories did, this time from the outside looking in. The corporations are clearly awful and exploitative in the earlier stories, but Murderbot is still spending a lot of time in more public areas where the corps put on a good show of being prosperous and welcoming. But in this book, we see more about how they act away from the public eye, how the corporates even more aggressively exploit people on the fringes. And a glimpse at how brittle they really are, behind the facades of eternal profit and power.
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Mar 31, 2024 08:13
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 18:37 |
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The Dragonfly Gambit by A.D. Sui, a pretty good SF novella that is also pretty drat queer. The narrator is Nez, a former pilot for the interstellar empire of the Rule, who is extremely angry about basically everything to do with that "former" part as she was tossed aside after an accident left her disabled. Now she's being forced back into service under the Third Daughter, supreme warlord of the Rule, to improve the war machine so they can go back to crushing a profusion of little rebellions across the empire. Nez is a mess who despises and loves everything about her former life including the Third Daughter herself, and so is plotting her own rebellion against the Rule from within. I really enjoyed it. It's a lean, focused book. My biggest criticism is that it could've used a close-inspection proofreader pass to catch some stray issues. It's dark and Nez can be as brutal as the empire that made her. Her disability is central to the plot and storytelling. Violence is always harsh and unpleasant - when she gets hurt, she hurts, and when she hurts others (emotionally or physically) she doesn't hold back and ends up paying for it in some way herself.
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May 6, 2024 16:16
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