c2lem.com Books Feed

Exhalation

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Posting this because I needed something to link to. But also because when I read it prior to this blog, maybe sometime in 2016, I was so excited, happy, astounded by how powerfully good it was. Seriously, I typed out one of the stories in order to print it to give to my then girlfriend who did not read books. Nowadays though, I can’t really remember any of those stories and I need to go back and reread.

Blindsight

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

(this is back-fill into my blog because I loved this book.)

You had me at Space Vampires!

A first contact novel where a crew from a heavily militarized near-apocalypse earth heads out to meet an extraterrestrial presence and they are in waaaay over their heads. The captain of the crew is a vampire. In this world vampires are a distinct species who predate upon homo sapiens and (here’s the clever bit) when they hunt mankind not-quite to extinction, they will hide and hibernate for thousands of years if necessary to emerge only when there is again plenty of prey. Now the government has discovered and recruited(?) a few vampires and use them for extremely hazardous jobs, for which they are much more capable than humans (for example the human crew must be put into hibernation for the journey out beyond Pluto (I think), but the vampire can stay awake - what could go wrong!?). As scarey as having a vampire as your boss (the protagonist is a human scientist), the aliens are subtle and seem harmless … at first. I can’t remember the details enough to explain the aliens… which is probably for the best. This book created then maintained an intense dread/anticipation in this reader all the way to an ending that paid off in the best (terrifying) way.

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

(This is a book I am backfilling because goodreads reminded me of it - memory imperfect but I will try.) Imagine that religions/mythologies are like crime families and they compete over followers (more worshippers == more power, catholicism, islam and hindu are the big fish in the religion game). Shigidi is in an african (old, weak) pantheon as a low level demon of nightmares: he can scare people to death. He is a “working stiff” who hates his job taking orders from his lazy, incompetent superiors. He meets and falls in love with Nneoma a succubus (from a different pantheon of course) and they make a good team, not quite Bonnie and Clyde, but together they work to beat and cheat the spiritual rat race. They get involved with a heist of the titular Brass Head of Obufalon. Along the way Aleister Crowley has a cameo appearance. Very fun fast paced story.

The Book of Love

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Not normally my sort of book (it is romantic sappy, mostly sad at this point, fantasy about teenagers) but I am here because White_Cat_Black_Dog got me. However at around 15% I have no regrets… Now at 100% still no regrets: a year after three close friends mysteriously disappear from their cozy seaside town they are returned from the dead by their nerdy music teacher who is somehow also a wizard who, besides the resurrection, also rewrites reality so that they “were in Ireland on a music scholarship.” The friends are forbidden to tell others about their new reality, challenged to learn to use magic (as having been resurrected they are, in fact, magical) and to discover how and why they died. Then a capricious goddess gets involved and chaos ensues… Anyway, this is a big, warm melodrama about the persistence of love in all its flavors be it romantic, familial, platonic, gay, straight whatever. I am failing to do this book justice.

Ascension a novel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Your basic, man goes on a journey and comes back crazy novel. Told, of course, in epistolary form. Harold, our returned man, is a physicist polymath, thought dead for over 10 years is discovered in a hospital by his brother along with a packet of unsent letters. The letters tell the story of a doomed, and ultimately covered-up, expedition on a mysterious mountain where neither time nor geometry can be taken for granted. In parallel, Harold’s tragic life prior to the expedition is revealed and religion is discussed. I finished this 350ish page book in about two days so I would say it is a bit of a page turner.

The Gone Away World

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is a book with an apocalypse as well as a post-apocalypse and having important characters who include ninjas, mimes(!), a team of (de facto) oil-well fire fighters, in short, a book written on a broad and wild canvas. Which is to say, the sort of book Nick Harkaway would write. I thought I would love it but alas this book needed an editor: while Mr Harkaway’s prose is consistently sharp, clever, unexpected, the plot plods through a back-story that just needed to be redacted/tightened somehow. This is the same problem I have had with some Stephen King books, for example “It” and for egregious example, “The Stand”. Anyway, it became A Mission to complete the book and I managed to miss some details that I assume would make the conclusion coherent to me. All I can really say is that the good guy got the girl and the bad guy got dead, yay!! So, all and all not my fave book, but hey, I am comparing Harkaway to S. King…

Hamnet

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

A fictionalized story of Shakespeare’s personal life where his wife and children live through an outbreak of the black death. Audiobook was slow but I was interested so I persisted. It hit its very sad stride in its last fourth.

Mordew

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The main body of the story in this book is about 675 pages followed by a glossary and philosophical notes of another 150 pages! The story concerns Nathan Treeves, a boy of twelve whose father is dying of lung worms, whose mother supports the family as a prostitute. The family lives in a drafty shack in the slums by the harbor in the city of Mordew. The slums feature a sort of living mud from which can emerge all manner of rodents, insects but even also deformed children; the city features nightly attacks by “firebirds” that come from the Mistress of Malarkoi who is the sworn enemy of the city. Nathan possesses a magical talent that his father has told him never to use. He is recruited to join a gang and uses his magic to help commit crimes so that his share of the spoils can buy medicine for his father. Nathan comes to the attention of the powerful magician known as the “Master of Mordew” and is eventually taken as a student to the master.
I am impressed with the imagination it took to build this rich deep world and this plot. This book appears to be first of at least a trilogy and it ends on a distinct point of closure. What we have here reminds me of Narnia but with much more depth, much more betrayal, much more sadness, and characters of questionable morality: in short, a sick, fucked up Narnia that might be redeemed further down the line. I will be headed to the next book because I am hooked for now.

The Ninth House

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

On the cover Stephen King says, “Impossible to put down”, and godamit he is correct; it took me just over 48 hours to consume this. The premise is absurd of course, but the protagonist is extremely sympathetic; the plot twists come with a perfect stochastic non-rhythm; and the magical stunts are creatively fun.
I know that I don’t have perfect vulnerability to Ms. Bardugo’s craft, because I found “Six of Crows” entirely to be in the realm of books that can be put down, but this book, this book completely bypassed my jaded, picky inner critic.

Yellowface

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

June Hayward is an author in her mid twenties with a with one promising novel but a now stalled career. She happens to be the only other person present at the choking death of a college (Yale) friend and much more successful author. June is in her friend’s apartment and can’t resist pilfering her friend’s sole copy of a first draft manuscript. She revises, edits and polishes the draft, eventually claiming the work as her own and makes a great deal of money as it turns out to be an international bestseller about the chinese labour core during WWI. Juniper is white and the author of the stolen manuscript is Athena Lu, the beautiful daughter of chinese immigrant parents. From that starting point a social media battle over whether Juniper stole the novel (which can’t be proven; only suspected) erupts and consumes the rest of the plot. This satire explores themes of social media, cancel culture, cultural appropriation, and the winner-take-all publishing culture. The writing is paper-cut sharp. I listened to the author carry off at least the first hour of the book on one beautifully polished acerbic, semi-rant describing her envy of Athena’s success and Athena’s insufferable preciousness in self-serving justification of her plagiarism and, while the book can’t extend that wonderful buzz for the entire eight and a half hours, most of the book stays in that initial groove, such that I plowed through the book in two days.

Wild Seed

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I am reading this as part of the black tiktok curriculum project. By chronology this is the first book in the patternist series, yet it was written last. Go figure. Anyway there are five books in the series which, I assume, form a narrative arc.
Big Picture this is a story of a group of black characters over a period of at least three centuries who, through eugenic breeding, manage to (“husband”) develop individuals with superhuman (psychic) capabilities.

This is the story of the relationship between Anyanwu, our protagonist, and Doro who becomes her husband and in some degree her master. At the start of the story Anyanwu could best be described as a demi-god, 300 years old ancestress and healer/protector of several African villages living a solitary existence in a hut. Anyanwu can not only heal but also change form into other humans and animals. She is existing as a wizzened grandmother witch figure when Doro shows up. Doro is in the form of a man but it soon becomes clear that he/it is really a sort of vampire who must feed at intervals by taking over other humans (and then he feeds he discards his current, now dead, host body.) Doro explains that he is much older (maybe 6000 years?) than Anyanwu and that he wants to marry her and take her to America. Doro is collecting other (possible) superhumans with the cooperation of slavers and as a pretend slaver he brings Anyanwu and a boatload of his collected individuals across the Atlantic to a town he controls in upstate New York. Doro is not only collecting humans he is breeding them eugenically with a nebulous goal of creating more powerful individuals who he can perhaps consider as peers. Anyanwu is special to Doro as she is more powerful than any of his collected, cultivated and bred “descendants”, Anyanwu is the titular “Wild Seed”. The rest of novel centers around the struggle between healer Anyanwu and breeder Doro, who at any time could decide that Anyanwu has served her purpose and can be absorbed, replaced by Doro. This novel, to me, is very “seventies” as it centers on psychic/spiritual abilities and yet makes no attempt to explain how or why they exist.

Where the Axe is Buried : A Novel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Krotov had told him the state was not interested in whether people believed its lies. The state was not looking for plausible deniability. A good lie could always be punctured, with enough work. No, Krotov had said-all they needed was implausible deniability. A lie the population would see through immediately but would have to pretend they believed. Even to themselves.

Making themselves believe the bad lie made them complicit. And no one would dare speak the truth. Few would dare even think it.

Our setting is maybe 50 years in the future. Super-intelligent AI is ubiquitous, as is near-impermeable state surveillance (which is supercharged by AI). The story’s plot spans from democratic London to an anonymous, benevolent-AI-governed eastern european state to the (not benevolent at all) Russian Federation.

The Federation is a totalitarian dictatorship with an immortal leader thanks to neural connectome transplants. Naturally, the federation government system is AI-assisted which enables a brutal system of social/political credits and punishment. Russia being Russia, there is (as always) a shadowy, ruthless, resistance movement. As the book begins, the leader of the Federation is in failing health (caused by “upgrades” in the previous transplant/rebirth) and this situation is the catalyst for the story.

A wide-ranging, complicated and compartmentalized scheme hatched by Russia’s resistance aims to replace the Federation’s leader with someone more benevolent. The story tracks various characters, who, whether they know it or not, whether they survive or not, are participants in, obstacles to, or collateral victims of the scheme. Here are a few of the more memorable characters:

Zoya, an elderly, highly influential, exiled Russian dissident, is contacted by the resistance who have an idea of how she can help them replace the government.
Lilia, a genius programmer, trapped in the Federation but rescued by the resistance so she can give them some software that can compromise an AI.
Nurlan, a legislative assistant in Eastern Europe. He lives through the collapse of his country’s AI-controlled government.
Nikolai, a doctor who is helping transfer the president’s brain-state to a replacement body.

While the plot slithers to its resolution the action is embroidered with a multitude of intriguing ideas, such as:

Social status scoring systems of control
the AI as deus ex machina (belief in AI infallibility)
the AI subverting/escaping built-in guard rails
the AI as human romantic partner
The ecology of the Russian Taiga
Russian folk-lore, (the Baba Yaga, bears, magical huts)
Split-brain syndrome and its implications
Massive immortal cloned colonies of plants.

This book is disturbingly plausibly terrifying, yet also so fascinating that I finished this densely structured novel in two days.

When We Were Real

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This book takes place some five years after “The Announcement”, the day humanity was informed that they are actually living in a simulation. The “Simulationists” made this manifest by planting the scrolling message, “You are living in a simulation.”, in the dreams of every single person on Earth. Additionally, in order, apparently, to absolutely refute disbelief, the Simulationists simultaneously revealed multitudes of science-defying easter eggs, (called “the Impossibles”) distributed across the planet.

The book follows a group of travelers on a one week bus tour of “North American Impossibles” starting from NYC, with a first stop in New Jersey at the Frozen Tornado, a tornado that simply and inexplicably stands still, yet if touched, is very dangerously sharp:

it's impossible to take in the whole thing at once. It looks like a wide black ribbon, spiraling downward, the top of it hanging a kilometer in the air as if held by invisible fingers. The first loop is as wide as the Tornado is high. As it corkscrews toward the ground, the loops cinch tighter and tighter until it becomes a spike, then a needle.

The company giving the tour is “Canterbury Trails”, and here is a tip: (that took me most of the book to get) the plot of the book is modelled on “The Canterbury Tales” with characters introduced by label, for example, at the Frozen Tornado “THE ENGINEER”, J.P. Laurent, encounters THE SCIENTIST, Gillian Masch, who convinces JP to help her pay for, join the tour and if this sounds sketchy – it is; we eventually learn that Gillian is fleeing terrorists as well as shadowy government agents while traveling to meet her daughter at the final tour stop called “The Ghost City”. Needless to say, THE SCIENTIST’s backstory and the dangers of her journey become the through-line of the book.

And like the Canterbury Tales there are several diverse characters who round out the cast to provide perspective. For example:

THE REALIST who still aggressively purports that simulated reality (including the impossibles they are visiting) is a hoax which he will debunk on his new podcast.
THE SISTER, THE NOVICE and THE RABBI, all sincere monotheists for whom The Announcement was an implicit crisis of faith and are thus living through various stages of recovery.
THE INFLUENCER, a beautiful seventeen year old who intends to have her baby at the end of the tour while in the meantime, leaving a dense trail of social media to increase the numbers of her followers.

This story is extraordinarily imaginative and funny with dad-jokes a-plenty; the writing is clever, showcasing vivid descriptions of unworldly phenomena. Not only are there many characters, several of them undergo significant, convincing changes; what more can you ask for?

(PS. There is absolutely no need to care about all the Canterbury tie-ins, I am just embarrassed that I didn’t notice given that I read some Chaucer in high school.)

The Women

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This book apparently very popular, places our protagonist a 20-yo Frances “Frankie” McGrath novice nurse, in 1965 Vietnam treating GIs. I got to the part where Frances and her colleagues go out to the local village to treat the natives before I bailed out. Frankie goes through a tough time, but she is supported by a plucky older nurse and a surgeon. My problem with this book is that Frankie does not really have a conflict that she must overcome: yes she has to learn to really practice as a nurse in the harsh, traumatic conditions of the war, but that is the conflict faced by all of the people at the hospital and indeed in all the soldiers in Vietnam. So what makes her problems special. To me this book was just too anodyne - the war sucked, the american women who served in Vietnam were doubly challenged as they were on the cutting edge of women’s equality and were somewhat invisible relative to the men but Frankie with her super-supportive female colleagues would overcome! blah blah blah. This felt like an After-School Special about a very important, very woman-positive, patriotic topic and who can disagree with that? Well I don’t disagree but I still felt that the book was just too heavy-handed in its message and therefore it was just not for me.

The Third Law of Time Travel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Let’s save you some time: Have you read 2 or 3 time-travel books and enjoyed them? Do you enjoy quick reads? Great then this book is for you; stop reading here!

Beth spins on her heel so suddenly the psychologist—a head taller and a solid fifty pounds heavier— takes a cautious step back, hands up, as if she were turning around with a cocked right hook. She locks her jaw to hide the small tinge of pleasure at seeing his fear.

Starting with the good things about this book; our protagonist, Beth Darlow, is a 30 year old widow, mother of a preschool girl, physicist, mathematician, co-inventor of a time-machine, manager of the project to commercialize the thing. In short, she has a very tough life as a mama bear and high achieving career woman. And Beth’s character as written is believable in her attitudes and her actions. Mr. Fracassi’s prose is tight and quick; there are some solid paragraphs, such as in the pull quote and it has some clever transitions that I found zifty.

But let’s get down to brass tacks: The most important task of sci-fi is about coming close to a scientific explanation for something that is not scientifically possible so that the reader can suspend his disbelief and enjoy the ride. And time-travel books are their own subcategory because the author has to find some new way to tapdance around time-travel (and resolve all the time-travel paradoxes cleanly) that hundreds of authors have already taken a stab at. It appears at first that this book did do just that, the time-traveller is only able to see his own past and is not able to do anything in the past he is essentially psychic hitchhiker reliving his/her own past, so no need to worry about causing paradoxes because you can’t kill your father (boy thats a relief). And just to make things super safe, there is a before/after time-travel paradox detection protocol that makes it for sure for sure nothing bad will happen.

What is the point of traveling back in time if you can only see events in your own life and you can’t do anything at all? Bragging rights? The ability to write perfectly accurate history books of a very narrow scope?

Yet with all those safeguards in place, the are still problems with the machine, for one thing it only seems to send Beth to tragic points in her life, such has plane crash that killed her parents and siblings. For another thing, somehow our time traveling superwoman (who only observes) has caused a paradox and her daughter is written out of the timeline! Ok now we’re cooking, Beth’s challenge is to use her invention to bring her daughter back!

As it happens her departed husband (hit by a car a year before the action starts) (and co-inventor of the time-machine) sussed out problems with the machine (but, along with her current assistant, kept them a secret). Now he is somehow communicating with Beth from beyond the grave to help her fix things. And here is where I began to lose patience with the book.

The climax of the time-travel book is supposed to clear up all the paradoxes so Beth can live happily ever. In this story, the climax occurs in fragments because Beth is tied down in the time machine so she can’t watch the important events in the lab where the real-world action takes place. This, is to me a cop out by the writer to hide the crazy implausibility of the events and non-resolution of how things are solved.

I should have read more carefully because, that’s the point isn’t it? For the author to wow the reader with how cleanly every thing resolves. But by that point I knew I only needed an hour at most to finish the book and I DGAF anymore.

Or to put it another way, no, I didn’t really like this book much by the end.

The Sun Also Rises

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This was a bookclub sidequest and all I knew going in was that the plot somehow involved bullfighting and that this book is important. I got to the end of this pretty short novel and thought to myself, “Ok a bunch of 30-somethings go on a week-long bender in Pamplona and Jake is obsessed with manly shit (bullfighting) and why is he not with Brett if they are in love?” WTF? Also yes apparently nobody likes Jews, some N-bombs are dropped, its the 1930s (ish) so racism is kinda normal. Other than that prose is clean and the dialogue is terse which is the famous Hemingway style. After some retroactive googling a light dawned. There are three (only three) passages that allude Jake’s injury and are not at all specific but it is implied that he has been rendered impotent during the war (WWI that is). At that point my lifelong accumulated understanding that the-first-world-war-was-an-industrial-meatgrinder-of-humanity kicked in allowing me to realize that all of the party-goers in this book either had PTSD or were suffering secondary effects and that Jake, as man who can no longer reproduce, has had to reconstruct his identity from chewing gum and popsicle sticks, I mean what is a man without (the ability to use) his penis? It all made sense and I still feel the horrific sense of psychic freefall. If I had known up front the essential gotchas of the book I think that innoculation would have either stopped me from reading or made the exercise more muted in its effect. At the time of this book’s publication, with readers who lived through the war-period, I can imagine that the book was a real soul crushing experience.

The Hunger Games

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I had seen most of the movie and I knew it was a Y-A book but many people in my book club insisted it is still worth a listen. And I concur: the writing is tight, tight, tight with the various plot elements: such as the appearance of mutant animals, preoccupations with food and with the songs of the “mockingjay” (mutant mockingbird/bluejay) are woven cleanly into the story. The characters, so larger than life on screen, are, as written, not as insanely dramatic even though yes, the premise of the book is dramatic and story dynamics, where the characters are participants in a cruel, to-the-death reality show, justifies and intensifies the drama. I listened to the book over two days with great enjoyment and I believe, it very deservedly, got made into a movie.

The Fourth Consort

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

She held out her hand. "My name is Neera Agarwal. I'm here to change the course of your life. How would you like to leave this shit town and that bitch of a bartender behind you forever? Tell me, my sad sack friend—how would you like to be a spaceman?"

Dalton Greaves is an Earth man and a humble, all-around action hero. He’s nine months into his job for “the Unity”—a job that, he’s been told, may make him f-u money back on Earth. The “job” is to be the soldier-diplomat on an expedition to recruit sentient-inhabited planets to join the Unity, with the “lucky” species thereby gaining the benefits of intergalactic civilization and trade.

The expedition has brought Dalton to a planet ruled by an insectoid apex predator species called the Minarchs. Their preindustrial civilization runs on violent, honor-based, feudal hive politics dominated by females, with a queen acting as “first among equals.” Unfortunately, a rival empire known as “the Assembly” is also trying to recruit the planet. After a brief but catastrophic conflict between the two expeditions, only a few survivors remain: Dalton, his crewmate Neera, and an Assembly “stickman” diplomat (called stickman because, I assume, they resemble human-sized walking stick insects). Dalton and the intimidating—yet unfailingly polite—stickman are invited into the planet’s central hive to plead their cases, while Neera stays behind in the heavily armed lander, monitoring the situation and standing ready to avenge him if things go bad.

The two competing diplomats are separately interviewed by the queen and after two days Dalton is informed that he is the queen’s new “Fourth Consort”, a title with unclear implications—possibly sexual, possibly ceremonial, possibly both. Due to shaky translation, it’s confusing, maybe a little horrifying, and definitely kind of funny. Why would the queen pick the horrifically ugly evolved primate when the stickman seems to everyone, a much more appropriate consort? And it turns out the next morning someone attempts to assassinate Dalton. The rest of the story is about court intrigue between factions supporting or attacking the queen’s leadership, with Dalton, now a consort, caught as the queen’s symbolic pawn in the middle of the struggle. Dalton is in extreme danger with several life-or-death decisions to make in the hopes of surviving and succeeding at his job. And during all of the in-hive hijinx there is a drip, drip, drip of Neera sending unsympathetic, unhelpful support and advice.

There are a couple of good twists to the story and a great deal of deadpan dialog between the different races being translated by AI (Dalton’s fussy translation AI is another character). I actually enjoyed this a little more than I enjoyed Mickey 7 (Ashton’s previous book, now movie). While Mickey 7 milks the gag of Mickey repeatedly being resurrected (which the movie played on to great effect) this book is more about the consistently enjoyable sarcastic and/or deadpan dialog. Dalton starts out as a naive, idealistic, and ridiculously over-qualified protagonist. But over time, he wises up about his job in the Unity and the Unity’s priorities. And for bonus points, along the way he makes a new and surprising friend, which I found to be affecting. I finished this in under a day: it was an amusing, suspenseful, escape-from-the-world-of-woe book and I wish I wasn’t done with it.

The Dharma Bums

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is an important book mostly because Kerouac was an “influenster”, back in the day, for the beatniks, who are basically proto-hippies. Ray, the protagonist (a thinly veiled JK) wanders around the United States as a hobo (or as he would put it a “bhikhu”, a mendicant monk) along with his best buddy, Japhy and several other hangers on. He is a buddhist, an alcoholic in denial, and a recognized poet who receives academic grants for his writing. He does a lot of hiking in California and beautifully describes some beautiful country, notably to me, as a backpacker starting in the 1970’s is that he is able to drink unfiltered water from streams. This an interesting read simply as a travel journal. There is a fair amount of “beat” poetry in the book which is OK I guess. My biggest take away from the book is that Ray and most of his follower beatniks who have rejected materialism and the “rat race” come from a position of privilege (and all the characters are ofc white) that (much like the Buddha) enables their rejection of uptight materialism for the simple life (but then again “white privilege” was not even a whiff of a notion probably until 20 years later, so it’s unfair to hold that against the book). I would have loved more background as to how Ray came to consider himself a Buddhist and some explanation of the Buddhist vocabulary he used and mythos he referred to; in real life, JK read The Buddhist Bible when he was in the merchant marine during WWII.

The Concrete Blonde

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Did Harry Bosch kill the wrong man when he tried to arrest the seeming Dollmaker Serial Killer? The LAPD is being sued for wrongful death by the widow of the seeming killer and then the department receives a note revealing the location of another alleged victim found buried in concrete. The note’s author seems to know police secrets about the Dollmaker murders. Suspicion falls on the officers on the dollmaker task force and the people who interacted with them. Bosch has to solve the case by night while sitting in court during the day having his character assassinated. This one was a little contrived but I can see why the series has dozens of published novels.

The Bright Sword

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“Crouching in the stern, he watched the umbilical of wake that connected him to his island home disperse and fade away. The sky above Mull was wild and windblown, here dropping curtains of gray rain, there lighting up a headland with a clear shaft of sunlight that made it look like a lost paradise. The island’s bumpy silhouette got thinner and thinner till he could cover it with two fingers, and it became the small, insignificant thing he always knew it was.”

Colum comes from a tiny island in the far north of Britain and has trained for more than 10 years to be a knight. After his father finally frees him he spends weeks walking to arrive in Camelot only to discover that Arthur is dead, only a handful of the 80(?) knights remain, Queen Guinevere is in a nunnery and the Kingdom is broken. Will God choose a new King or will Britain revert to the old pagan ways. The Christian god is always in the background remote and silent right up until he grants miracles that are sometimes cruel and at other times merciful (yes angels make an appearance). With no handy sword in the stone around to choose a new king, Colum joins the Knights in a hunt for the new King. Along the way they are severely tested by many different challenges including Morgana Le Faye, Mordred, demons, dragons curses and more mundane power politics by other competing kings. Besides the questing the book tells the personal stories of our remaining knights who have struggled with their identities as christians, as men and as knights.

Mr Grossman’s prose is clever, frequently beautiful and the adventures are of the milieu you expect from the Arthurian canon: damsels in shimmering samite, enchanted swords, mysterious knights of various colors, jousting, riddles that must be solved to lift curses. For added bonus, not just one lady in the lake, and one of them is very put out when she winds up in the ocean because somebody abandoned excalibur in the nearest convenient body of water.

The Black Ice

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Another early (#2) Bosch novel; this one starts as a police suicide but Bosch suspects more is involved. Eventually the plot revolves around Mexican drug (“black-ice” = tar-heroin+PCP) smuggling. Much of the action takes place in Calexico/Mexicali. Again this is a dated pre-cellphone plot but still fun.

The Black Echo

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This was read by Titus Welliver the actor in the Amazon series. I did not like the series for a variety of reasons, amongst those reasons: I think Mr Welliver is just too handsome for the role. But its a cheesy hardboiled detective story with a great deal of grit that comes from its setting: LA and as a narrator Mr. Welliver was just fine. The plot revolves around a bank robbery committed by Vietnam veteran tunnel-rats and it takes place in the late 1980s. So this is a dated, fun look back at life before cell phones, when the Vietnamese population of LA (OC-really) was still novel and AIDs was a big deal. I enjoyed.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Somehow I was never forced to read this as a teen. Just now read because I intend to follow it with (Booker Finalist) James and see what all the fuss is about. I now know why this book is a classic: it manages to be a very pointed satire also funny and charming. The schtick begins to get old towards the end but the ride is still worthwhile. I can imagine that in a less sensitive, politically-correct America (say 25 years or more ago) it was an excellent novel to launch young people into a discussion of slavery and racism with a handy sideline into the wider world of classic literature (Shakespeare and Dumas at the very least) that is explicitly referenced and mangled by various characters.

Survivor

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

(this book is out of print and difficult to acquire, luckily my library had a copy) On an earth compatible planet a group of colonists struggles with the planet’s native sentient species (who as far as I can tell amount to something we would think of as a sasquatch-looking humanoid who have a chameleon-like camouflage capability). The human colonists are religious missionaries and are part of a group of the last “pure” humans since the earth has been infected/colonized with the clayark virus. The struggle is between the colonists and two separate factions of the natives. This book is kind of a mess and its very hard to follow the plot which is not helped by the changing narrators and the two similar-but-different groups of natives. The sci-fi elements are definitely dated and not super plausible even when OB really doesn’t try to justify her creations - She presents us with a distant planet where the native life is recognizably humanoid and can even interbreed with the human colonists (which, even though interbreeding is a theme of the patternist series is in this case, a bridge too far.) I am reading this as part of the OB curriculum and this book, as flawed as it is is included (I assume) because it has a digression about the situation on Earth that explains the interaction and resulting antipathy between the clays-ark survivors and her Doro-descended patternist tribe.

Sourcery (A Discworld Novel)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is my first attempt to read Terry Pratchett (though I may have tried before and forgot). People love the conceit of Discworld, with it’s high-concept absurd mythos and british humor. I wonder if, had I encountered these books near 1980 when I encountered and intensely loved Hitchhiker’s Guide, I would I would be part of the Pratchett Posse, but I guess I am too old and jaded to join that club. Yet I must say that in this novel Pratchett produces a steady stream of wit, and I must strongly proclaim, some really clever descriptive, even poetic, prose. For example:

“Spelter recognized Ovin Hakardly, a seventh-level wizard and a lecturer in Lore. He was red with anger, except where he was white with rage. When he spoke, his words seared through the air like so many knives, clipped as topiary, crisp as biscuits,”

or, “Silence poured from the heavy woodwork. But, unlike the silence that had the rest of the city under its thrall, this was a watchful, alert silence; it was the silence of a sleeping cat that had just opened one eye.”

or, “The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find…”

The book was such a dense thicket of bon mots that it saddens me that I could not reciprocate Pratchett’s prodigious prose with more love, however for this reader there was no character or depth of story that sunk in to my heart such that I felt compelled to know how the story would end.

Rose/House

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

An AI-inhabited (“haunted”) house sits in the high California desert and contains the preserved corpse of its famous architect and owner; the architect’s will permits only one person, the house’s archivist, to visit the mausoleum/house for a total of five days each year; this is Rose/House. One day the house calls the local sheriff’s department to tersely report the presence of a new corpse. Detective Maritza Smith catches the case but due to the house’s enforcement of the will she can not enter the house; she is forced to contact the archivist, who reluctantly returns from halfway around the world so that an investigation can begin. Though its not quite that simple because even empowered by the presence of the archivist, convincing the snarky, deadpan AI to allow the detective to enter is a tricky exercise in legal semantics. This novella is all about its setting and prop pieces: the desert, the house, the AI all serve to magnify the overall creepiness of the atmosphere, it also displays Ms Martine’s ability to draw believable, normal people doing their best to cope in weird situations, but of course, at only 117 pages, the story ends just as it gets it’s legs.

Polostan

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Another fun unique book from Mr Stephenson, who manages to never reinvent the wheel but instead swings between wildly different settings and stories with each new publication. Our plucky, athletic, pretty protagonist, Dawn, was born in Montana to a communist-activist father and an anarchist mother. The principal action is of an 18yo Dawn in 1933. The story has preoccupations with polo (hence the name of the book), Bonnie and Clyde, communism, the 1933 worlds fair in Chicago, and the incipient discoveries in radiation and atomic chemistry that will eventually lead to the atom bomb. The book is merely the opening salvo of what I anticipate to be a very interesting trilogy.

Patternmaster

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The fourth book in the Patternmaster series and it set some 400? years in a postapocalytic future. The Patternists are a small but powerful minority on the planet earth while the clayarks have a much larger seemingly tribal population and are at war with the Patternists. The clayarks are all infected with a virus that makes them strong, and has adapted them to a semi-four-legged existence although they maintain dexterous with their hands. Technology has regressed at least amongst the patternists who now travel from place to place on horseback and rely on “mutes” (non-telepaths) as servants. Our main character Teray has just completed his upper level schooling and now must make his way as an adult. The story revolves around the politics within the Pattern (an oligarchy where more powerful psychics are the bosses) as people struggle to become the successor to their chief, Rayal, who is dying. Long story short, Teray ultimately, surprise, surprise, becomes the successor to Rayal. I was not into to the plot, it seemed to exist only to illustrate the interesting features of the world. And to a greater or lesser extent, all plots in scifi are of that ilk, the skill of the author is in adding elements of the story, characters to make story compelling while at the same time explaining the world.

Old Soul

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is a jigsaw puzzle of a book. Jake is travelling in Japan where he has a chance, yet intimate,(non-sexual - Jake is gay) encounter with a woman whose estranged brother has died recently and the autopsy says the cause of death is ‘Situs Inversus’ affecting the heart. Situs Inversus is a syndrome caused when internal organs are reversed from the normal left-right orientation; it is a birth defect and having it discovered during the autopsy of an adult raised in a country with modern healthcare is incredible. It happens that Jake lost his best friend several years ago and the cause of her death was also Situs Inversus. Jake suspects some sort of foul play and has the money, time and resources to investigate starting with the story of the man’s last days as told by the wife. Based on the wife’s story the primary “person of interest” (Situs Inversus is not “foul play”) is a woman photographer from Germany, who used a fake identity and has already left Japan. The remainder of the story is told through flashbacks and diary entries as Jake tracks down other victims across the globe and getting closer to the woman (monster?), to understanding how and why her victims perish. There is a pretty well fleshed out supernatural explanation for the deaths and the motivation of our suspect. I enjoyed this book. Could it have been better (maybe) written by Stephen King? Yes this would be 90% similar one of his plots, but no the milieu is a little fringey (her victims tend to be artists or at least aspire to art) and the ending is kinda dark for SK.

Nine Princes in Amber

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I read this a looooong time ago (sometime between 1980 and 1990 maybe). The only way I am sure that I read it is that I remember a couple of the plot devices, perhaps the most iconic one is the Deck of Trumps which is like a Tarot deck but each card has the likeness of one of the nine Princes (and some other royal family members) and can be used to both communicate with and transport the Princes to one another. They are the Princes of Amber which is the eternal most perfect most real city (or Kingdom I think really). Anyway that’s as good a place to start as any with this book.

Our protagonist wakes up in a hospital in upstate New York (or maybe New Jersey) and is told he is recovering from a traffic accident. In fact in addition to healing fractures he has almost total amnesia to the point where is he doesn’t even know is own name. But he knows something isn’t right and because he is just the coolest, sharpest cat. And he manages to escape from the hospital having bluffed his way into knowing that his name is Carl Corey, that his “sister” is paying for his stay in that process he acquires $100 from hospital petty cash and a gun. Thus equipped he makes his way to NYC where he barges in on his “sister” in her mansion(?) bluffing her just like he did the hospital goons to determine that his name is really Corwin and that someone he knows arranged for the accident and on it goes with his sister until cousin Random shows up on the lamb from ‘the bad guys’ who followed him on a flight from California.

Cousin Random is actually a brother and together they are going home (again Corwin doesn’t know where home is - he’s bluffing). Their mode of transport: a convertible Jaguar that slowly, over days of travel, as the terrain becomes more magical and arbitrary in its challenges, is transmogrified into a really pimped out carriage pulled by white horses. And this is evidence that they have crossed out of “shadow world” Earth; almost home in Amber. After a minor side quest and some negotiations Corwin successfully walks the magical pattern which returns all his memories (another plot device I seem to remember.)

With his memories back, Corwin enters Amber where begins the struggle with brother Eric who is about to take over as the King of Amber, while of course the noble, proud Corwin thinks his bad-ass self should be King. Its all a big soap opera/power struggle/war that seems to be modelled on a very conflicted royal dynasty (the Plantagenets possibly?). This is only the first book in the series and its ancient so (minor spoiler) Corwin doesn’t become King in this one, he actually spends time in a dungeon, but by the end he has escaped and is ready for eight more books of struggle for power and glory.

There are a ton of Shakespeare quotes and references e.g. the patriarch of the clan is named “Oberon” (The King of the faeries in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and really the Princes of Amber are effectively demigods) This book was published in 1970 and so Shakespearean magical medieval power struggle comes through a very late sixties vibe/slang/non-pc filter: Corwin, who has been on earth since the black death, is a cigarette addict and luckily somehow while in Amber he is able to acquire cartons of Marlboros(!?). Corwin refers to one of his opponents as a “fink” (“fink” wasn’t commonly used in the vernacular in the 70s California.) Corwin and an ally recruit armies out of other (not Earth) shadow worlds and blithely contemplate how many thousands of their “cannon fodder” worshippers will die in their war for Amber. Quibble, quibble quibble…

But, hey this book was (Hugo and Nebula winner) Zelazny’s most popular creation and even if it is over 50 years old, I would say it holds up really well.

Mistborn: The Final Empire

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I give Sanderson credit for developing a fantasy world and a system of magic that, apparently, many people enjoy. But, this story, though it did have two main characters who did seem to be changing in relationship to a struggle, said struggle was dull and did not move quickly enough for this reader and I finally gave it up after fourteen hours. Additionally his prose is no better than mine, which is to say that it is, while articulate and clear, uninspired with neither interesting vocabulary nor any analogies, metaphors, metonyms, poetics that lingered in mind and are therefore worth speaking of.

Mind of My Mind

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This one centers around Mary, a young woman living in a suburb of Los Angeles. Mary is black and comes from a broken family whose mother is an alcoholic and a prostitute. She lives next door to Emma (Anyanwu has changed her name), Emma is still cooperating with Doro and the entire neighborhood has been settled with descendants of Doro. Doro has high expectations of Mary once she transitions into what Doro expects will be strong, unique telepathy skills. Doro expects her to live, marry (and breed with) Karl a white man and a functioning telepath he also expects that Karl will help with Mary’s transition.

Martyr!

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Cyrus Shams is a 20-something insomniac, recovering alcoholic/substance abuser, two years sober. He is also a wannabe poet and is obsessed with being a “martyr” as he would describe martyrdom in the sense that Socrates, Abraham Lincoln and Alexei Navalny were martyrs, that is to say he wants to have a meaningful death. He comes by his mental landscape with definite psychological plausibility as he is the son of a functioning alcoholic Iranian-immigrant father who died only two-months after Cyrus left for college (as if he was just waiting for that event) and a mother who (he has always been told) died in 1986 while Cyrus was still a baby, when she was a passenger on Iran Air flight 655 which was infamously shotdown by the USS Vincennes. The stories of his father and mother are interleaved in flashbacks throughout the book. Having graduated college (on the 6-year plan) and in spite of Cyrus’ stated obsessions and ambitions he is mainly just drifting through life: his main “job” is to roleplay dying patients at an Indiana teaching hospital and he supplements that steady small income with various dubious side hustles. His latest project is to write a poetry book about martyrs (which he sees as a step towards his ultimate, but unfocused goal of martyrdom). One day his closest friend (and sometime lover) reads about a museum exhibit (“Death Speaking”) in New York City where a well-known Iranian artist with terminal cancer lives in the museum and where each day she gives freeform interviews to whomever lines up to speak with her. It doesn’t take much convincing for Cyrus to agree that meeting the dying artist seems like its just too perfect an opportunity for him get out of drift-mode, to act on his aspirations. I’ll stop there. The book is touching, sad, funny and poetic in equal measure.

“How did you discover this?” I whispered to Leila, sitting down with my back to the lake, kicking my feet out to hang into the giraffes’ enclosure. Leila shrugged mysteriously, smiling at my side. We sat there in silence for five minutes, ten, watching the giraffes do basically nothing, just stand there and chew sadly, I never thought about how sad something could look chewing.”

Spoilers

Cyrus is a selfcentered jerk. The dying artist, Orkideh, is in fact, his mother who did not die in 1986 but did escape Iran. (She lent (swapped) her passport to her lesbian lover so her lover could escape from Iran. Then she semi-sponaneously used her lover’s passport to leave by train. All the women took their document photos wearing the chador and so mostly looked alike in passports.) Yeah this is kinda contrived but the book’s other positive aspects outweigh this.

Kindred

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The protagonist, Dana a black woman living in Los Angeles and the year is 1976 is somehow caught in a timetravel phenomena where she is pulled back in time to 1815 by her ancestor, Rufus, the son of a white plantation owner and slave holder. On her first trip in time Rufus is a child drowning. Dana rescues him and after manages eventually to return to her own time only missing 10 minutes. On her third trip to slave times by coincidence her husband a white man is pulled back along with her.
What develops between Rufus and Dana is a standoff of sorts Rufus is a slaveowner and has the right to control and even kill Dana, but he knows that Dana is his protector. Dana also knows that Rufus is her ancestor and she can’t be rid of him until his children exist in order to eventually beget Dana. Rufus is an alcoholic, (I am guessing) manic-depressive, entitled by the institution of slavery and at the same time aware of his dependence on Dana.
This book made me more viscerally aware of the horror of slavery where owners could divide families, dole out extreme corporal punishment.

Karla's Choice : A John Le Carre Novel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Nick Harkaway has picked up beautifully where dad left off with the George Smiley Espionage Universe, given the large existing Smiley-Canon you probably come to this book with high hopes and think those hopes are fulfilled. But if you are coming in cold well, this was a fun listen, its a good story told with original, clever, evocative prose. As well the narrator does a great job with voices, its a great production.
The setting: George should be retired in 1963, but a Russian agent has appeared out of the blue in London where has been undercover for years and immediately is in the wind fleeing his russian bosses. In spite of Smiley’s retired status Control wants him to interview Suzsanna, a hungarian emigre and secretary to the fugitive spy in hopes of finding to spy in order to flip him.

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Abbott, a passive, insulated, isolated 25 year old uber driver of his father’s shiny new white Escalade, is convinced by desperate by a 30yo woman (and a $100k dollars payment) to deliver a large box from california to virginia in three days to arrive by July fourth. He can’t bring his phone or know what is inside the box because neither does the passenger (named Ether), though she insists the job is “totally legitimate, legal, safe, normal”. Through a series of coincidences, one of Abbott’s twitch followers (his only friends are from is twitch show) discovers that he is on this mission (I forget exactly) and is convinced that the box might be radioactive. (Ridiculous, I know, but Mr Pargin pulled it off and/or I am a gullible listener) The journey is documented and debated in a subreddit, hijinx ensue and eventually the Escalade is destroyed. This is a funny yet touching satire about internet conspiracy culture and growing up. The ending hour fizzled a little bit but still, I cranked through all 16ish hours of it over three days where I was not simply driving (my normal MO for audio books)

Frankenstein

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

To quote from the book, “my mind is overshadowed by a cloud of disappointment.” The only developed character who inspires sympathy is the monster. This book is pulpy crap which contains the germ of the idea about a mad scientist who creates a sentient creature. But Shelley was first and got the golden ticket: immortality by way of the literary canon. I feel that this book was worth reading because it gives you this perspective on the canon, that is, that a book can be important while at the same time not even remotely pleasant to read and of no value as an example to emulate. I feel a little unfair criticizing the very young author Mary Shelley but luckily she isn’t around to defend herself.

Far From the Madding Crowd

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Difficult 19th century sentences and unfamiliar Wessex dialect is challenging. The story of Bathsheba Everdene, a headstrong, impulsive, misbehaving, mistaken sheep and her long suffering but competent shepherd Gabriel Oak is not politically, correctly modern. However the main characters are vividly enjoyable while the descriptions of country life and scenery are poetic and the minor characters are amusing. The plot twists were kinda spectacular as were the brief romantic interludes between our hero and his love.

Empire of Silence

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is the first book in a series that I have been meaning to read for a while. It is a space opera that follows Hadrian Marlowe, the son of a wealthy family on a planet called Terra. The story is told in the first person and Hadrian is writing his memoirs. The book begins with Hadrian dissatisfied with his family’s plans for him; he wants to become an explorer while his father intends for him to take over the governorship (dukedom). He does a lot of whining and then (accidentally on purpose) sabotages his fathers plans. He is also a scholar who speaks several languages and an artist.

Crypt of the Moon Spider

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This novella (100 pages) follows Veronica Brinkley the wife of a wealthy husband. Said husband is admitting her to an asylum presumably to cure her of chronic depression. The year is 1923 and by the way the asylum/hospital is on the moon. And the doctor and his assistant really do not seemed concerned with treating her. They are drugging her and performing operations on her. She begins having dreams and memories that although they seems to be hers are at the same time not hers; for example she dreams of her childhood in a cabin and then “remembers” killing her family with an ax. And then the doctor has another assistant, the last member of the Moon Spider cult, who helps with the operations. Yeah, the hospital is built on top of the caves where the, now dead, Moon Spider and her cult lived. Eventually we see spiders crawling out of the healing wounds from Veronica’s operation. Anyway the book is a surreal nightmare that flies off the handle in a beautiful creepfest. I loved it.

Clay's Ark

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The title of the book is the name of a spaceship (which itself is the name of the spaceship’s inventor) meant to be an ark carrying mankind to a new earth. The Eli Doyle is an astronaut who is the only survivor of the Clay’s Ark expedition that has returned to earth. Eli is infected with a virus(?) that has transformed him to be inhumanly strong and have inhumanly powerful perception (smell, night vision, touch, hearing). This is all because the virus is selfish and wills its survival through infected individuals. Eli has built a “family” of those he has infected and they live in an isolated compound in the mojave desert. The infected clan, per the virus’ prerogative exists to grow by infecting others, who if they survive, will be similarly transformed; and of course, the ultimate goal of the virus is to create a new race to supercede normal humans (Where have we heard that before?). This book establishes this new black-superhuman phenomena seemingly unrelated to the original Doro-spawned superhumans. Anyway the plot is around Eli’s group’s attempt to kidnap, infect a father with his two daughters then the complications that unfold when the kidnapped attempt, semi-successfully, to escape.

Beautyland

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I heard about this book from my sister and that was good enough to intrigue me… and here we are.
This is the life story of a woman Adina, who, from infancy, thinks she is a human incarnate observer from a far-away alien race. Somehow she communicates with them using a fax machine (which is never explained) and as a child/teenager through her dreams. She sends nightly reports and receives terse responses. Her observations are wry, insightful and very frequently funny. This book tells the entire arc of her life from her birth to her impoverished single mom to her lonely entirely too young departure. I say departure because she seems to think she is leaving earth to connect with her home planet, but the ambiguity of the way the book describes this departure I interpreted it as suicide. But she is very isolated as she can not find true acceptance from anyone except her dog and her best friend and they, unfortunately, both die, The book has some beautifully observed moments but was ultimately pretty melancholy. There are lots of clever, elegantly, I dare say, “poetically” written passages such as, "Her past passions sound tinny when clinking against the jar of time.”

1Q84

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Long and kinda pointless but I have enjoyed many other Murakami books so I held on, listening in the car, through all 38ish hours. I probably did not understand some of the symbolism which may be why it did not impact me as maybe could have been intended. That and (our female protagonist) Aomame’s backstory is left surprisingly sketchy: at the beginning of the story she is a part-time vigilante assassin of abusive men and I wish her path to that was explained. Also she has a mystical destined relationship with a man she hasn’t seen in 20 years and who she only “knew” as a 6th grader, but not enough to speak with. Anyway there are some interesting elements to this fantasy but they are all left hanging in the clouds with no strong foundation that I could cling to. o well, its an audiobook that I completed to fill in my Murakami collection.

Catching Fire

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Let’s not even pretend this is a review: spoilers ahoy!

This story continues the PanAm rebellion saga from a year after Catniss survived the previous Hunger Games. All the districts are either rebelling or about to, so President Snow decides to hold a special “Quadrennial” Games only for winners of previous Hunger Games. Thus Catniss, Peeta (along with coach Haymitch) must compete once more to save their own skins and protect their loved ones. I like the premise of the story even though it seems grafted on to the end of what was originally a standalone book (until the publisher came up with phat book advance loot - I’m just speculating here - no actual research - don’t flame me). Its just horrifying that you can have won Hunger Games and are then “rewarded” with a HG redux. (Quit Picking on Plucky Catniss!)

I like the continued love triangle (chaste! so “like triangle”?) between Catniss, Peeta and Gale. We get it from Catniss’s POV and that’s fine: she’s too young and preoccupied to worry about dumb boys. (BTW, Catniss’s last name is Everdeen, just like Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd. Someone, I am sure, has done some good character comparison article pointing out all the similarities between the two characters.) And this time Peeta announces the fraud that Catniss is pregnant with his child in order amplify the drama surrounding their participation in the games. (and nobody from the capital tries to verify this?)

But anyway, the games begin and it turns out that the gaming territory is arranged as a giant clock face, with new monsters, traps, threats appearing every hour in the appropriate slice of the clock. So the games are more arbitrary and deadly than last time. We have new competitors from different districts for Catniss and Peeta to team up from the start of the games. And the other competitors are pretty sympathetic so this amps up the tension in the story because no one wants to kill someone they like. And this ain’t Game of Thrones so I don’t want characters I like getting killed off.

Now for what I didn’t like: The ending is just messy and too hard to follow. Maybe if I was reading I would re-read and understand, but this is supposed to a “popcorn” story that I listen to in the car between errands and I do not want to work that hard!

Catniss and her team plot some sort electrified trap/ambush plan that fails (or is disrupted - don’t know) and then in the chaotic aftermath of broken plan Catniss realizes she has no idea who in the Games is on her side. She conveniently remembers that the real enemy is the PanAm regime, so Catniss shoots an electrified arrow through a gap in part of the forcefield surrounding the games (because, actually the game is in a giant terrarium?!?!) which causes all sorts of explosions presumably hurting the game makers and destroying their evil equipment. Hooray, the games are over!

Catniss has been wounded and is picked up by a hovercraft where she sees Caesar Flickerman (the head Game producer) is waiting, she thinks, to punish her for messing up the games. She wakes up strapped to a hospital bed (because she is dangerous? angry?), we don’t know where exactly. We find out that Caesar is in cahoots with Haymitch, and the rebellion is seemingly much bigger and well organized than we were lead to believe. But Haymitch couldn’t tell Catniss (because she is too important?!?) that her escape from the HG terrarium was planned before the games began. However, oops, they couldn’t rescue Peeta and that’s where the story ends but we know that Catniss can’t lose Peeta without a struggle so there has to be a sequel. (Oh and district twelve doesn’t exist any more, but her family is someplace safe, so don’t worry.) Gah.

I mean this book is actually pretty good, its just a bit sloppy and strains credibility in the last 30 minutes. The disappointment I feel is that it didn’t live up to the immaculate quality of Hunger Games, but that’s pretty tough ask. Stay tuned to see if I can overcome my ambivalence and carry on with the next book.

A Wrinkle in Time

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I have “known” since elementary school that I read A Wrinkle in Time and “loved it”. I think/thought that I read it at least twice. Then, a couple of weeks ago I had a notion that I could bond with Teresa’s grandson, a fifth grader, by reading AWIT together with him. I figured that the book must still be a good choice if Disney made a movie out of it. But then after I brought it up with the child and experienced his very polite but noncommittal responses to the idea, the reality of the times dawned on me:

He has no enthusiasm for reading
He has plenty of other activities to do and relatives to bond with.

Maybe I should just read it to him? So I read a couple pages from the book and wondered if the vocabulary would be too much work. So I decided I’d better read the book first and having done that, here I am writing this screed. First thought: Did I really read this or was it some of post traumatic implanted memory? Literally only one page of the book, very near the end, rang a bell with me.

But now, book completed,I can believe that I read it a couple times if only because of the Charles Wallace character, a genius kindergartner with neither filter nor humility, who I, as another Charles, always the smallest kid in my class, nicknamed “the walking encyclopedia”, could relate to and admire. Another aspect of the book I can imagine loving (at age 10?) is how pedantic it is. How Mrs Who can’t resist dropping literary quotations (on at least six occasions), for example, Spinoza, in the original Spanish then smugly translated. Or how the “tessering” (teleporting/time travelling) plot device has its basis in geometry, that characters are traveling by “wrinkling the time dimension” which is possible because the structure of reality is a tesseract (and there are illustrations that go along with the explanation). That’s the sorta stuff I think would have been catnip to me as a kid, and I probably wandered around explained tesseracts to other kids, or really I just felt smug that I could explain what a tesseract is.

What follows are a bunch of incoherent observations that don’t go anywhere. But I will revisit them.

Wow this book is dated (published 1964; the year I was born): The children live in at idyllic suburban town with creeks and woods where they are free to roam (mostly I assume) when not at school. The serenity of town is disturbed by the women (tramps?) who have squatted in an abandoned house and stolen sheets from a neighbor’s laundry line. And in the first chapter of the story Charles Wallace, because he is a free-range kid with basically no fear, already knows the women, thus he is able to introduce and vouch for Mrs Whatsit, who has arrived on the family’s doorstep in the middle of the night.

Saying the book is dated implies whiteness. The character names: Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, Calvin O’Keefe sooo, sooo white; their special meal at one point: full Thanksgiving dinner, turkey(“white meat please”), gravy, mashed potatoes, white white white.

Also this book is firmly patriarchal in outlook, where angry Meg still needs the protection, comfort and security that only daddy and the older boy, Calvin, can grant her. Or how Mrs Murry is a stay-at-home mom (but has an in-home chemistry lab presumably because she has a PhD) And the town is gossiping about why it is that her husband, the government scientist, has gone off someplace and isn’t writing to her.

The book is corny: “Camazotz” is name of the mysterious world where they have to rescue dad and the minor fortune teller character dubbed “the Happy Medium.” The settings when not on earth are just barely fleshed out to the point where when I tried to imagine them I found myself picturing old television shows from the 60s/70s. For example on Camazotz when they visit Central for the first time and meet “the man with red eyes”, what I imagined was a scene from (original) Star Trek episode “Menagerie”. with the disabled Captain Pike who is speaking through a computer(?). Maybe its just me. And when they visit other planets they just look at things and talk with one another.

And when they are on Camazotz rescuing Mr. Murry and eventually Charles Wallace, they just bumble around and all the “action” is dialog. Literally, the key to the rescue of CW is for Meg to foolishly, incompetently love CW as hard as she can, and having done that, suddenly the whole crew are home again and everything is OK.

Now for the bits I liked. I liked this bit from the first time Meg “tessers”:

“Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.”

I liked the unnamed aliens near the end....

“They had four arms and far more than five fingers to each hand, and the fingers were not fingers, but long waving tentacles. They had heads and they had faces. But where the faces of the creatures on Uriel had seemed far more than human faces, these seemed far less. Where the features would normally be there were several indentations, and in place of ears and hair were more tentacles. They were tall, Meg realized as they came closer, far taller than any man. They had no eyes. Just soft indentations.”

... any yet they provide us with the character, Aunt Beast, the nurturing temporary mother for Meg.

Though what are these characters, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which supposed to be? They are supposed to have lived for millions of years and they can teleport. Faeries? Goddesses who quote from Corinthians? The Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Ghostess (Mrs Which, who sssspeeeaksss but barely ever appears)?

“If you have some liniment, I'll put it on my dignity," Mrs. Whatsit said, still supine. "I think it's sprained. A little oil of cloves mixed well with garlic is rather good." And she took a large bite of sandwich.”

And what really is this book about? On one level its about how conformity to society oppresses the smart people. (Meg’s conflict with the teachers and other students in the school, the town.) But of course as the story progresses its about Christianity vs Totalitarianism (absolute conformity in Camazotz) because what else would a children’s book written at the height of the Cold War be about? I wonder how or if that comes across in the movie?

Now the book is still in print, and though yes, dated and corny, it still has a great deal of charm. I imagine the film rights had to be pretty cheap for Disney to cast the movie with strong brown women bringing the story to the current generation (maybe). I will have to watch the movie and find out for myself. mes

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I actually started this several months ago and 50 pages in I abandoned because I decided this is just silly escapist trash. But I needed something new to listen to in the car and Cybil of all people (“not in to guy books”) praised the audio edition and that was good enough for me to give it a second chance.

Now, having finished book one, I can say definitively that, yes, it is still mostly silly and escapist but there are multiple subplots to make it interesting as well as recurring gags. For example Carl comes in to to the dungeon with no shoes and no pants and never seems to find any, certainly not in loot from monsters…then it becomes evident that the AI(?) running the dungeon seems to have a foot fetish focused on Carl.

I should add that the voice acting is excellent and I can not now imagine reading it when I could listen to it. Judging from the 4.7 stars on 23.8K listens I am not at all unique in my taste for this amazing piece of “LitRPG”

This is a story about a characters trapped in a dystopian universe that I listen to relieve the stress of living in Donald Trump’s America. Now I have six more books to consume, and since clever old Amazon/Audible has camped out on exclusive access to the audiobooks, there will go six more credits into Jeff Bezo’s grandchildren’s children’s children’s inheritance.

On The Calculation of Volume 1

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

A Tara Selter is on a trip in Paris for her collectable books business. She is away from Thomas, her husband and business partner, who stayed at home, in a small town in France. On her second day in Paris she finds that the newspapers, clocks, all sources of date information tell her the same thing: that the date is the same as it was yesterday: the date is November 18. Not only that, a couple of the unique books that she purchased the day before have disappeared from her room, after at the front desk about the cleaning staff and deciding that theft is out of the question, she returns to the shops where she bought the books and, sure enough, they are right back in those very same shops, so she buys the books again and she does so she notices that her bank balance is right back where it was the previous morning. Very odd.

The same day repeats for her but for nobody else (or so it seems.) After repeating a whole day in this way, she naturally goes back home to her husband in hopes of support from someone who won’t think she is crazy. At home she surprises her husband who expects her to return on the 19th not the 18th. She explains her experience to her husband and he is sympathetic; they start to think as a team about this mysterious time behavior; they go to bed that night, wake up the next day and the husband is surprised again to find his wife home a day early from Paris.

There is no suspense you would expect in a time travel page turner, the story has no real special effects or added extraordinary drama, no one’s life is in danger. No, the struggle is that Tara realizes a loneliness living the same day endlessly next to a man with whom she is deeply in love, yet Thomas, nevertheless, is unable to understand and share her biggest problem. She fears this will eventually cause a permanent separation between her and Thomas. So the story continues, documenting Tara’s attempts to understand her situation, her thought processes, her struggles with her morale as all her escape ideas come to nought. Eventually she knows the events of the 18th so well that she lives in the same house with Thomas as invisibly as a ghost, only leaving the guestroom when her husband is running errands or asleep.

If this seems boring, well it could be boring, but the author’s strength is how she can describe precisely, creatively the events and observations of a life alone, as well as the intricacies of Tara’s mental state as she struggles with her subtle, frustrating predicament.

So something has happened after all. Tara Selter, alone in the eighteenth of November has acquired a mood. It comes over me almost every day, not for the whole day, but suddenly it is there, it is noticeable. Today is no exception, I am a bit irritable, maybe it's boredom, but it makes me happy, because there is open space around me and there is room for a mood. It feels almost as if there is someone living in here. A fluctuating mood is rather like a dance, it really swings, even though there isn't much room. There is room enough in here for my mood to shift. Now it shifts again. Gaiety fills the room.

I am not saying I have lost hope. It just doesn't come by so often any more. It has moved away. It was quite undramatic, it did not slam the door behind it, it is more as if, like an animal, it has found new hunting grounds, like a cat that has moved next door or a plant that has scattered its seeds where they are more likely to grow.

Those are just two examples, but I could produce dozens of similarly crafted exemplary passages. All that said, there are seven, 7(!) books in this international Booker Prize winning series and right now the farthest I imagine reading is through the second book. Beautifully written as it is, this book is not Groundhog Day and I just don’t see Amazon buying the rights to this literary property.

The Parable of the Sower

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an “organic delusional syndrome.” Big shit. It hurts, that’s all I know. Thanks to Paracetco, the smart pill, the Einstein powder, the particular drug my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her, I’m crazy. I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts.”

The story establishes a future California, USA which is dystopian, or rather in what could be called a long, ugly decline. Nothing extraordinary about the decline so I assume the primary factor is climate change, but it is not made explicit. This is not apocalypse, there are still lots of people, actual government with paper currency, but of the characters (all brown or mixed-race), they are all struggling to survive; they only see distant glimpses of progress, prosperity such as space travel, wall-sized televisions, safe corporate settlements, paying jobs in the Washington, Canada.

The structure of this book is of a frog being boiled. It begins in a walled village in the town of “Robledo” (20 miles north of LA) with several small tragedies over a few years leading to complete disaster (Lauren is sole survivor in family) in the middle of the story. Our protagonist emerges to begin a pilgrimage north with a slow improvement in conditions in the second half. It ends with Lauren and her new clan settled somewhere around Mendocino and having chosen a mate (but not quite married)

There are few fantastical or technological plot devices:

Lauren’s “Hyperempathy” (which sounds suspiciously like a psychic ability.)
The firebug mobs who burn things because of a recreational drug’s psychological side-effect.

Our protagonist/narrator, Lauren Oya Olamina, is the most extraordinary element in the story:

At the beginning of the story she is 15 but she has been writing a philosophical/religious text, The Book of Earthseed, from age eight(!) in direct contradiction to the ideas of her evangelical preacher father.
She has the foresight alone in her family to prepare for the catastrophe she will face (her bug-out bag containing seeds!)
She is instantly respected by her peers as a leader.

Who could she be modeled after except biblical prophets? This story is Lauren’s origin story and her collected clan contains the disciples of a future religion.

Issues with the book:

It doesn’t pretend to land - there must be a sequel. I assume this has to do with writer/editor/publishing economics: if she was Stephen King the Parable books would be one book.
Lauren’s Hyperempathy is discussed but doesn’t really further the plot in an important way. (If you show us a gun, it better get used)
Whether Lauren is a plausible character is arguable, but I bought/liked her.

A Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands: A Novel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

There is a woman on the platform with a borrowed name. With steam in her eyes and the taste of oil on her lips. The shrill, desperate whistle of the train turns into the sobbing of a young girl nearby and the cries of the trinket vendors, hawking their flimsy amulets as protection against Wastelands sickness. She forces herself to look up, to stare at it face on, the train that looms above her, hissing and humming; waiting, vibrating with pent-up power. How huge it is, how implacably solid, three times the width of a horse-drawn carriage. It makes the station buildings look as flimsy as a child’s toys.

The book is laden down with lush descriptions and the story exists in a nicely crafted alternate Victorian earth where an armoured super train runs from Beijing to Moscow through an ever dangerous, ever changing Siberia. I would love to see this book get the full Moebius treatment. As I was 2/3s of the way through this book, it occurred that I could compare this book to Where the Wild Things Are, but I don’t want to spoil it.

On the other hand, the (more or less) Victorian setting, an era marked in my mind as one of emotional repression, is echoed in the writing in that there are several interesting character arcs that stay vaguely outlined but never come to an emotionally satisfying fruition. These stories include a romance between the exile japanese cartographer and the glass maker’s daughter, the redemption of the scientist, the changing of the guard from the captain to Weiwei the train girl, and especially the origin story with real motivation for the stowaway; I wish that the author could have committed to wringing more depth of feeling in at least one of the interesting plots that she developed.

The Bitter Past

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Wow, this book, by a new local author came to me from the local used bookstore so I didn’t not have particularly high expectations for it: it far surpassed my expectations. It had been sitting in my TBR pile months and started it out of a feeling of guilt only to find an hour later that I was 60 pages into a 300 page novel that I knew I was going to finish quickly.

It manages to be your standard beach-read spy-thriller with a twisty plot, a tough, clever likable hero, a sexy subplot and a scary nemesis. The story revolves around russian agent who arrived in 1950’s Las Vegas to spy on the atomic testing program and never left, now there are Russians killing off senior citizens trying to find the spy so they can return him to his homeland for punishment; unluckily for the bad guys, the first, partially skinned corpse is being investigated by our protagonist, the sheriff of Lincoln County NV who just happens to be ex-military intelligence and speaks fluent russian. Does that sound contrived? Sure, it does: to reiterate this is beach-read spy-thriller.

Here’s the thing: the story is set in the huge region just north of Las Vegas (Nye and Lincoln Counties), perhaps best known as the location of Area 51. This region really makes up a third, and the most interesting aspect of the story. Aside from giving you a notion of the nuclear testing program in southern nevada, the narrative also touches on many other aspects of life in Nevada, from proposition players (paid shill/fake gamblers) at casinos to fundamentalist LDS churches to the divorce resort at Tule Springs, there is a lot more local flavor in this book that barely touches on casinos and gambling.

The Library at Mount Char

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This was fun, weird, right up my alley. Mr Hawkins has a good twisty plot and vivid characters described … vividly, but the secret sauce is that he combines the mundane world with the fantastical in surprising ways and pulls this trick off through out the 400ish pages.

Carolyn stretched her hand out to touch the bronze handle protruding from the deer’s torso. The metal was warm. It trembled slightly under her fingertips, magnifying the faint, fading vibrations of [the deer] Isha’s gentle heart.

My attempt at a synopsis teaser: there is a god, a Zeus-like true master of the universe living quietly, secretly yet in plain sight in a forgotten suburb of New Jersey. In 1978 as part of his retirement plan he adopted a dozen orphans, taught them his native language, “Pelapa”, and began rigorously training the children in diverse schools of knowledge so that one of them would be his heir. But now twenty five years later god, their adopted father, has disappeared and his now demi-god children have gathered together at his home, a magical Library of Babel, to find (and possibly resurrect) him because his godly rivals will surely move to take over as the new boss as soon as they realize he is missing. Carolyn is the daughter who has learned languages (every language past, present and future, and not just human languages) and in this time of crisis her job is to help her siblings as a liaison to “the Americans” (she is the only one still fluent in English) but at the same time Carolyn has her own plan for this crisis…

The Devils

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The sun was sinking. A bloody sunset over a valley of blasted mud, of splintered stumps. Columns of dark smoke towered into the wounded heavens. Specks of ash rained down like snow. "State of this," muttered Jakob, limping on. The path slunk into a forest. But not of trees. Of sharpened stakes, hammered into the earth, point up. Of swinging gibbets and studded racks and dangling chains. Of great wheels like the one on which the Saviour gave her life for all humanity.

A team of “Devils” who do dirty work for the (10-year old girl) Pope (and are otherwise kept under lock and key): set in an alternate 12th(? guessing) century where Rome lost to Carthage, women dominate the sorta-christian church hierarchy, there are monsters and a great deal of magic. I was first on the library waiting list for this book, having read many of the “First Law” stories: all of which is to say that I had high hopes. It is, of course, a well written book with very strong, distinct characters. It started off a little slow but then picked up at the first big battle, unfortunately there were four big battles in the book and I found my self slogging through them because once the characters where developed (around the time of the first battle) they were not surprising me any longer and the battle themselves did not have an interesting connection to the plot. The dialog is just too sitcom for me: it felt like it needed a laugh track. The main through-line of the book is that every seemingly good, noble person who interacts with the Devils is in reality a sneaky snake villain waiting for the right time to betray and if they do not fall in to that category then they are just obviously villains.

This book has a lot going for it, vivid characters, there are some actual character development arcs and the story is built on a fun, interesting world but for whatever reason I was not sucked in, perhaps this is the case where I am a jaded reader who just needs something new(er) to tickle my fancy. I did “finish” the book but I was super-skimming, through the last fourth of the book. It looks like there will be a sequel, the Devils who survived their adventures ended up back in their cells and cages. :-/

The Familiar

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I did not expect to enjoy this after I tried reading a bit and gave it up as too slow. But as an audio book it was engrossing at the same time as it was fairly dark. Ms Bardugo has littered the prose with beautiful descriptive passages:

“Once she had seen Hualit’s patron, Víctor de Paredes, leaving her aunt’s house. He’d worn black velvet and climbed into an even blacker coach, as if he were vanishing into a well of shadow, a piece of night that refused to budge in the afternoon sun.”

This is a well fleshed-out fairy-tale about Lucia, a kitchen helper (scullion), who casts little spells ("milagritos") to help with her chores and when this is discovered, she winds up in a competition to become the King's magician. But in order to get the job she must compete with two other candidates and she must under go the scrutiny of the priests.

Lucia is of a daughter of a Jewish mother and our setting is Reconquista Spain where Jews have been exiled or forced to convert: Lucia’s aunt, her nearest relative is still secretly practicing Judaism. The priests could determine her magic is from the Devil resulting in at the very least prison also, most likely, torture, and not just for Lucia but for all of her remaining relatives.

De Paredes assigns Santángel to prepare Lucia for the competition who falls in love with Santángel, the fixer/bagman/bodyguard of her patron Victor De Paredes. It turns out Santángel has been cursed to immortality in service to the Paredes family.

Long Island Compromise

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is a funny but dark book about Jewish rich people (or rich Jewish people?). Funny, really really funny. I can’t do it justice because I am not a writer, but the New Yorker has an, I am sure, very deep insightful review of the book. Read that and you can stop here… or not.

The story begins with a 20 year old trauma, the weeklong kidnapping of the family patriarch and styrofoam packaging factory owner; the ransom is paid the father returns but although the family insists they have recovered this event casts its shadow over the rest of the events in the story. In the next section, the strongest part of the book, is the story of the very charismatic son Beamer, a screenwriter/producer who has has floated in Hollywood on initial unearned success and then by drafting on his much more talented friend/writing partner along with his family’s money. He is now 36, with writer’s block (he can’t seem to think of any scripts that don’t revolve around a kidnapping!), a drug habit, a philandering habit, a dominatrix habit, three children and a young wife who has suspicions but is in denial.

Searching around for a pull quote I found the following describing the communication style between Beamer and his wife (There are tons of longer and funnier passages to quote but I want to keep this concise):

“And would she even answer a straightforward question? Noelle was a repressed Presbyterian, or just a Presbyterian, and would never share as uncomplicated or direct a thought as “Yes, I’m angry at you, and here is an explanation for why.” Her ancestors had left their ability to share their feelings on the Mayflower and had never called lost luggage to pick them up.

After Beamer’s story, there are sections about his plodding, careful turtle, older brother Nathan he has a better marriage but his law career is stalled at junior partner. Next it is on to the incredibly talented younger sister Jennifer who, out of rejection of her family’s wealth, stifles all of her career opportunities as well as any relationships romantic or otherwise. Anyway, the overall path of the story is of the series of events that seem to be leading the family to financial disaster. I took my time reading this because I just hate reading about impending disaster, yet I did eventually finish the story and it is truly funny.

Jewish humor, I am aware, is it’s own genre of American literature which I have neglected and I probably need to go read some Philip Roth.

War and Peace

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Whew spent the better chunk of a year with this sitting incomplete and now its done: what can I say about this that hasn’t been said by literally thousands of people?

A story with so many characters ultimately only follows the two couples: Pierre with Natasha and Nicholas Rostov with Mary Bolkonskaya. I thought Andrei would make it through but no, Tolstoy teases us with his death early on and then later he seems to die again only to linger on for several chapters. And ultimately the through line of the book is Pierre who in spite of his education and privilege has to learn everything the hard way, and who has no real self discipline or strong emotional foundation with which he can translate his good intentions into good outcomes. As in the first glimpse of him having promised Andrei he will stop drinking, go home and to bed, but then justifies his decision to spend the rest of the night drinking at Dolokhov’s raucous party. And for much of the book we conveniently have the grounded and competent Andrei to illustrate this through the contrast, in particular we see this in how they manage their serfs.

I find it fascinating how Tolstoy chooses what makes it into the tight focus narrative sections within a story that spans eight years, two armies and dozens of characters. For example we don’t just get Anatole discussing his desire to elope with Natasha followed by a scene where he is stopped from entering the house, we get a whole set of chapters where he and Dolokhov discuss it (Dolokhov is mildly discouraging), plan it, gather the supplies, choose the clothing to wear, argue with their henchmen, then we are along on the sleigh ride through Moscow wreaking havoc on other city travelers and property. It reminds me of the present-stealing scenes in the Grinch. So much detail about one, granted, important, episode but the real significance of the episode is Natasha’s undeniable betrayal of Andrei, we don’t need a blow by blow account of the attempted abduction. Another similarly unnecessary volume of detail covering Nicholas’ hunting trip followed by the narrative of the Christmas festivities, seemingly this is all just to lead up to Nicholas’ (almost official) proposal to Sonya. Or the several chapters describing the pointless actions of Rostropchin (“Mayor” of Moscow) leading up to the occupation of Moscow by the French and especially his cruelty throwing a political prisoner to the mob.

Why could Tolstoy not give Helena Bezhukova some narrative around her death or for that matter her brother Anatole? I mean they both spend a great deal of time causing grief to Pierre, Mary and Natasha. As a reader I want some revenge.
I would love an edition of the book that skips over all of Tolstoy’s narrative about history, troop movements (or at least clearly marks them out so the reader could self abridge).

Some of my favorite humorous scenes:

Pierre, like Mr. Magoo, wandering through the death of his uncle, not understanding that all they black clad guys and their wagons are undertakers, not understanding the bitter struggle over the will (Pierre’s inheritance) taking place before his eyes.
Natashas’ obnoxious demand for pudding at the party which she can get away with because she is Daddy’s favorite little princess.
The chapter explaining how Helena justifies her desire to remarry (thus nullifying her marriage to Pierre) because “Pierre would want this for her” and because “these noblemen want her and she can’t stand to disappoint them” as if this is all perfectly normal (and the fact that she, can just brazen out this self serving behavior.)

Lastly, the following description of the oak tree which Andrei contemplates before meeting Natasha Rostov.

“At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of the birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch-trees. Only the dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak, refused to yield to the charm of spring, or notice either the spring or the sunshine.”

And the same oak after his visit to the Rostov home:

“Yes, here in this forest was that oak with which I agreed,’ thought Prince Andrei. ‘But where is it?’ he again wondered, gazing at the left side of the road, and without recognizing it he looked with admiration at the very oak he sought. The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly trembling in the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now.”

Tolstoy's use of that tree as the indicator of Andrei's mental state is a memorable example in evidence of the writer's skill.

Parable of the Talents

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

He couldn’t keep my mother safe of course. No one could have done that. She had chosen her path long before they met. His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

Gah! When this book was published (back when Bush was President) the alternate America it describes was meant to represent nearly unthinkable dystopian politics. But now with Trump as president the dystopia is just too close to home. I had a very difficult time reading this book because our protagonist Lauren suffers what seems to be the ultimate price for her beliefs: the destruction on Acorn, the disappearance of her daughter, the death of her husband, the near destruction of herself and her beliefs: she is enslaved with the collar and nearly killed. Nine months into captivity, thanks to a freak storm and a landslide, she does escape to spend the last half of her life hoping to find and be reunited with her daughter.

The story is told by her daughter as commentary on her mother’s journal entries and it turns out that daughter having discovered her mother as an adult can not entirely respect her mother’s choices and beliefs. The book ends twenty years on from Lauren’s year of enslavement, Lauren’s Earthseed is seemingly on the upswing, America has moved on from monotheist tyranny which was a relief to me. But Lauren’s adult daughter sees her Mother’s religion as a crackpot cult.

Its funny how this book seems to describe the beliefs and yearnings of a large fraction the current populace as the opposition to the (really-not-a-religion) Earthseed yet Elon along with many Trump-allied techno-libertarians also share the Earthseed belief in man’s destiny offworld.

This book manages to be more emotionally painful to read than Kindred.

The Ministry of Time

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee,” I added. “It’s been quite weird to hear people say that.”
“The people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term. We prefer ‘expat.’ In answer to your question, I’m the Vice Secretary of Expatriation.”

“And they are expats from…?”

“History.”

“Sorry?”

[the Vice Secretary] shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.”

Our protagonist (who stays anonymous) is the daughter of a refugee Cambodian mother and a white father. She can pass as white. She joins the Ministry of Time simply seeking advancement because it the job requires top secret clearances and therefore pays better. When she is accepted for the new job and discovers that she is a minder/modernity-tutor (called “a bridge”) for a newly arrived “immigrant”, Commander Graham Gore of the Royal British Navy (c.1809–c.1847).

Commander Gore has been snatched from the Lost Franklin expedition. Note: Gore is an “expat” because the strategy for avoiding a time travel paradox is to bring only otherwise imminently doomed individuals (whose disappearance won’t change the past) into present day. Besides Gore, there are another five expats whose experiences affect the story.

From the second they meet, there is sexual frisson between the bridge and Gore so we get to enjoy the will they/won’t they of the relationship between two very interesting, attractive characters. Also there is the continuing tension of operating on orders as a worker bee in a compartmentalized agency: “Why have these people been brought here from the past?”, is the question that the narrator (and the reader) can only speculate on.

There are many elements to unpack in this story: the general awkwardness and opacity of English bureaucracy, the terror of ongoing climate change catastrophe, and its set amidst the overall background of a grown up Britain still dealing with its colonial chickens come home to roost. The overall plot is a hybrid of a slow burn romance that suddenly becomes a thriller when the espionage elements come to the foreground. But for me, along with the romantic plot, the through line of the story is the charming humor of the various immigrants from history who must adapt to near-future English political correctness, the skeletons in it’s british-empire-closet and modern technology.

Having recently read The Third Law of Time Travel I am immediately drawn to compare this story with that tome which annoyed me to the point of near abandonment. Yet the only thing that compares is that I was equally confused by the time travel plot twists which seem inherent in the genre.

In conclusion, I started reading this on a long day of travel, enjoyed it to the exclusion of my other books and thus pushed my current reading queue further into arrears. oh well. I am hereby joining the general acclaim for this time travel novel.

The Fraud

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

She had of course heard of this monument to Protestantism but the scale of it shocked her. From the water it looked impressive, almost as large as the Vatican. Once inside, though, the design proved reassuringly rational and without beauty, like Protestantism itself.

My first Zadie Smith novel is decidedly difficult to unpack because so much is going on. I have been pondering for several days and likely, my interpretation is wrong, however I gotta put something into words.

By way of critique, I would say this is a slow novel with some beautiful bits and some acidly humorous bits such as in the pull quote above. I am not sure if this was the best ZS novel with which to start, it was challenging to follow the plot and the humorous bits, while very enjoyable, are doled out in a measured portion, presumably for sophisticated adults, in the same way that they enjoy red wine over fruit punch, which is to say, maybe I need my humor in greater measure than her target audience.

Our main character, Eliza Touchet (pronounced “touché”) is sixty-nine and lives as both housekeeper and secretary in the house of a prolific but way-past-his-prime writer, William Ainsworth. The book tells the highly embellished story of Eliza’s life along with William’s, the narrative jumping from “present day” (1869) and then back through extended flashbacks. Eliza is a spinster whose husband died (along with her children) shortly after abandoning her. William is about to marry Sarah who will be his third wife, a 26-yo single mother with a daughter. Eliza is much more complicated than that synopsis indicates and so are her long standing entanglements with Ainsworth but I think its worth reading the book so I will stop there.

Much of the plot of the novel follows the trial of Roger Tichborne, presumably the titular Fraud. Sarah is a rabid believer in the Tichborne claimant and Eliza winds up attending the Tichborne trials as a chaperone for Sarah. By attending the testimony, Eliza develops a her own fascination with the most credible witness for the claimant and former valet of the Tichbornes, an emancipated slave named Henry Bogle (completely fictional). She starts taking notes on the trial and interviews Bogle with the idea of writing a novel. This allows ZS to tell us all about life as a slave in Jamaica and about the Empire’s very unclean hands which it supposedly washed when it abolished slavery in 1833.

Besides the present day thread there is the thread of Ainsworth’s career and his relationships with other literary figures of the time including, most notably, Charles Dickens. At one point in the book, Eliza expresses her admiration for Middlemarch and has to gracefully accept Ainsworth’s response:

William made a face like a dog eating a lemon.
‘Couldn’t get through volume one – and aren’t there seven more to come? Once upon a time decent men satisfied themselves with three . . . What on earth does the woman need with so many? No adventure, no drama, no murder, nothing to excite the blood or chill it! I must say I can’t understand the glowing notices. As if she were a new Mary Shelley! But there isn’t an ounce of Shelley’s imagination. Just a lot of people going about their lives in a village – dull lives at that.”

I have to say I loved Middlemarch, and I speculate that ZS and I are in agreement on that. While The Fraud is not quite a George Eliot novel it is certainly a good modern stab at it.

Sentimental Education

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I chose this book for a sidequest book club when it was my turn. I chose it because someone on Tiktok said it was as if Anna Karenina was written with a male protagonist. I remember enjoying Anna K so that was a good omen. Plus it is a “classic” – what could go wrong? Well, a lot because I quickly tired of the book and yet it was the book which I chose, therefore I felt that it was my obligation to read the thing I conned other people into reading.

For one thing this book seems to be roughly half about our protagonist’s (Fred’s) love life and half about politics and culture. Its the politics part that which dragged me down because its French politics… from 1865. With my half-assed American education I know that there was a big bad revolution in (checks wikipedia) 1789 and then there was Napoleon and then something something something. And the first half of the book is dominated by Freddy swooning about a (married) girl and otherwise doing nothing much but talk politics and culture with his buddies (and his love-object’s cheating husband). And since I have no insight into what Fred (or any other french person) might think about current events all the conversation went past me like the teacher’s dialog in a Peanut’s cartoon.

Eventually, in the third part of the book things pick up; the climax of the book is during a revolution (yet another) in 1865. And Fred has a child with his (call-girl) mistress and then shortly thereafter the child dies. The married love of his life leaves Paris to disappear because her crappy husband (Arnoux) is fleeing debts. His buddy marries the rich, pretty, naive girl (from Fred’s hometown) who Freddy lead on and then dumped. And yet another (also rich) married woman (Dambreuse) whose husband dies is suddenly not so rich and not so attractive and so Fred also ditches her.

At the end of the book (10 years later?) Fred is no longer wealthy and is very much alone. Fred reminds me of myself during my third decade: I was never happy with my love life and I disappointed many people not least of whom: myself.

This novel was not for me and it was a bad choice on my part because I lack the necessary context to appreciate it (nor am I willing to acquire that context at this point in my life). But hey(!) after five months of reading, now I can say that I once read a French realist novel. So I have that going for me. Which is nice.

Mythos

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I started reading this just as a distraction from the longer reads that I was feeling bored with. This book was perfectly acceptable as a distraction for the couple of weeks I needed to finish it without experiencing tedium. The pull quotes on the cover advertise brilliance, belovedness and hilarity, while I found some mild amusement and serviceability as a review of the greek myths. I think that 350 pages split into 28 bite-sized chapters with only a tiny bit of fussy vocabulary is the right size for a casual reader. As a college graduate, long time fantasy reader, only a couple of the stories were new to me, but its a nice survey of the stories that doesn’t gloss over the rude, naughty and/or gruesome behaviors of god, demi-gods, monsters and humans.

Esperance

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Homicide Detective Ethan Krol’s new case begins…

“With a mumbled “Good morning” to the uniform at the door, he stepped past the tape and into a neat, nicely accessorized apartment, pulling on a pair of latex gloves as he did so. The bright blue of Lake Michigan was clearly visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows. He drank the view in for a moment, steadying himself. Only then did he look down.
There were three bodies on the floor. Only two of which were human.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“It’s a barracuda. Leastways, if you believe Carter over there.”

This starts as a "locked room" mystery. A father and his infant are murdered, having been drowned in ocean water. Only problem is the scene of the crime is in a 30th floor high-rise luxury apartment _in Chicago_, so where'd the ocean water come from? (the ocean is at least 600 miles away) Also oddly, the wife is left unconscious but otherwise untouched, and the doctors say she was poisoned with an previously unknown neurotoxin. The murderer has very cleverly avoided leaving any clues (all the cameras magically malfunction in his presence) to this seemingly impossible murder.

So begins our story. A few days later in Bristol UK, Abidemi Eniola a beautiful, intimidatingly tall ebony woman, who speaks an anachronistic slang (because she is from “Nigeria”) is trying to get her bearings in unfamiliar surroundings. In a lucky break, she literally bumps into Holly Rogers, a goth street hustler, who helps Abi fence some diamonds that she needs for spending money and just like that, within a day they have formed a (platonic) team. Ebi, we soon discover is some sort of super spy with technological body enhancements that allow her to survive various violent scrapes. Yes, you guessed it, she is not from Nigeria and she is also tasked with stopping our murderer.

Ethan finds clues that the murderer has ties to Nigeria as the murderer strikes again, this time in Rhode Island, which draws Ebi to the USA and into direct conflict with the police (who as a general rule, don’t like super vigilantes on their turf.) Ebi has a dangerous encounter with Ethan and a Rhode Island colleague while failing to prevent yet another murder.

This is a well crafted suspense novel where two charming but very different detectives, pursue the same killer. The police are obviously way out of their depth as both Ebi and the murderer possess far superior technology. The story builds as the police close in on the killer… And things don’t go as planned. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but it’s worth reading. I enjoyed the characters and the gadgets.

I just read a very flawed first novel for a friend of mine and so I want to consider this the way I read her book to see why this one worked for me the way her's did not.

In the end it turns out that Abi and Yemi (the murderer) travel using inter-dimensional gates from their distant home world. Yemi is punishing the descendants of the owners of the Esperance, a slaving vessel whose crew, having run out of water while lost at sea, begins dumping their cargo of slaves in order to slow their usage of water. It happens that extraterrestrial visitors who have been observing (and recording) this horrific episode decide to save the remaining slaves from drowning/sharks. Yemi and Abi (Yemi’s daughter) are descendants of those slaves. Yemi believes that biblical style punishment (over generations of descendants) is appropriate for this (truly heinous crime). This is somewhat plausible because the rescued and resettled slaves have very long lifespans thanks to very advanced technology, thus the horror of the 300 year old drownings is still fresh. Abi has been sent to stop Yemi. It is also revealed that the drowning punishments are another use of the same inter-dimensional gate technology this time to move huge volumes of ocean water.

And at this point I thought, "Hmmm, I am not buying it. If the premise of the plot was made clear earlier in the book I probably would have stopped reading. (I mean, if your civilization has inter-dimensional gates then you have better things to do than arranging performative executions on a backwards planet.) Yet, Mr. Oyebanji did know this was the premise behind the plot and still chose to write the book. I have to say that in spite of the shade I am casting on the premise of the book, he managed, through well-paced action, well-developed, likeable characters, and well-used gadget-plot-devices to keep all the balls in the air until about the last 20 pages. And I obviously enjoyed it enough to finish it in a day and then spew this much verbiage commenting on it.

Convenience Store Woman

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

A novella set in Japan about a weirdo, an, I assume, autistic, also asexual, woman, Keiko, who in early childhood realizes a set of rules to live by where she can exist peacefully in a society that has expectations about how people live. Shortly after matriculating to college she discovers that her new job at a convenience store allows her an identity, a social-figleaf as well as the satisfaction that comes from performing a job with skill, even if that job is not particularly important, lucrative or well respected.

Keiko as a little girl after discovering a dead bird at the park…

“What’s up, Keiko? Oh! A little bird … where did it come from I wonder?” she said gently, stroking my hair. “The poor thing. Shall we make a grave for it?”
“Let’s eat it!” I said.

“What?”

“Daddy likes yakitori, doesn’t he? Let’s grill it and have it for dinner!”

The story begins twenty years after taking her job at a convenience store when she is still at the store, the oldest worker who is only a year younger than the current store manager. As middle age approaches, Keiko’s normal obfuscations and excuses have worn thin so that her friends, relatives and co-workers wonder why she has not settled down, gotten married, had a career or children. She must also confront the real existential problem of aging in a physical, subsistence-level job, where any injury may end her economic viability.

This book is only 150ish pages and it concerns the way that Keiko accepts her challenges as a oddball with cheerful honesty and resiliency. I smiled a lot along the way.

Cleave the Sparrow

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

And if you come from Silicon Valley, like Max Merchant and the other tech bros, there’s a certain ideology you probably ascribe to, called longtermism. LONGTERMISTS START with a reasonable premise: Let’s do the most good, for the most people—a fraught but classic utilitarian framing. Only here’s the twist. Longtermists believe in a future of countless digital beings, spread out across the Milky Way and galaxies far beyond. Their conservative estimate, over the next billion years or so, is that these digital humans can reach a total population of 10 to the 58th power—that’s a one with fifty-eight zeros. It’s a number so enormous, it makes our seventy quintillion planets estimate feel like the sad, sparse attendance at a Jamaican singing bowl concert. And for longtermists, it’s the big numbers that matter most.

The story's plot is a nihilist Rube Goldberg machine, BUT it is a fine excuse for a tour of interesting philosophical and scientific baubles. Every bite-sized chapter has a little digression, a little "did you know about such-and-such fun topic such as, the uncertainty principle, quantum bayesianism, rationalism in its current silicon-valley-centric incarnation, and even Sperry's split brain experiments. For a certain type of young male (I don't believe it is a coincidence that the main character is, while not *explicitly* an incel, is suffering from an unrequited love life.) I am sure this book scratches an itch and provides some chuckles. (It seems to be doing very well on Amazon.) And I plowed through it in a day because the prose is very strong and yes, amusing. But ultimately my life is not changed.

The Pillow Book

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

One day in the ninth month, at a certain place, a gentleman who, though not exactly a court noble, was renowned at that time as a man of marvelous charm, taste and sensibility, pays a visit to Lady Someone. Dawn is breaking, thick mists diffuse the light of a glorious moon, and he bends all his powers to the task of producing words that will leave her heart aglow with memories of their night together.
Ah, now he departs – she sits on and on, gazing into the distance after him. A scene of inexpressibly resonant beauty. He makes as if to go on his way, but surreptitiously turns and retraces his steps to secrete himself by the lattice fence. Seeing her deep reluctance to rise and leave, he bethinks himself to say something further to her of what is in his heart, but now he hears her murmur softly to herself the lines:

‘though there in the dawn sky

the moon hangs bright’.

The woman he gazes at in secret is bending forward, so that her hair falls away from her head and hangs perhaps six inches before her face. It glows there like a candle, borrowing added light from the moonlight, and in astonishment at the sight the man chooses this moment to slip quietly away.

This was a tale that someone told.”

While it is an interesting book all about the daily life of an imperial consort around the year 1000AD in Japan. It has many charming anecdotes about life in those times. The overall narrative describes the life of leisure in the imperial court; about people who don’t need to support themselves with labor and therefore concern themselves almost entirely with entertaining themselves, gossip and gaining/maintaining social status.

There are many older books in the western tradition, but all of these works are those that have managed to survive the implicit censorship of the Catholic church (in that the monks decided what works would be copied and passed through history). Nothing like The Pillow Book was ever gonna make the cut as scriptorium copyist material: instead what we get is religion, philosophy, history and math: Aristotle, Augustine and the like.

I suggested this for a side-quest book-club and have regretted it because, although I have enjoyed reading it, it is a memoir of a person with whom I have no particular interest so there is no plot or action or conflict; its just a series of anecdotes and even the anecdotes are not in a chronologic order. I read about 50 pages of it and realized that there was nothing more that I was going to get from it, but I suggested the book so I was obliged to read it. But after two months all of us agreed enough was enough so I an officially DNFing this. All-in-all I read about two-thirds and that’s good enough for me.

Unworld

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

He shrugged, grinning with the milk-fed confidence of the only child. He already knew she would say yes. He strolled through a garden of yes all his life. And yet, how could you say he was spoiled? Well behaved, thoughtful, considerate, kind, grateful. His requests were too modest not to be granted.

Imagine we live, say, 15 years in the future and you can (with enough cash) buy a device sort of like an Apple Watch, but its a full blown AI, an AI with real long term memory and opinions of its own. And it is with you on your wrist capable of knowing not just your heart rate, blood pressure, but also hormones in your bloodstream. And its always listening and if you enable it, it can access all the cameras in your home or car on devices. It turns out when you own one of these things a useful, fun thing to do is to frequently "sync" with it to compare your memories of the day with the AI's memories of the day. How handy would that be? Like if you were on a diet you would have a vigilante buddy keeping you from cheating! Imagine how intimate your relationship would be with this always near, always on device? Now imagine that AIs are legally "people" and that means that your personal AI device can actual come in to conflict with you to the point where it might want to be "emancipated/divorced" and that emancipated is a legally recognized status for an AI.

This device, called an “upload”, is the most salient feature of the possible near future described in this story. Note, probably my biggest quibble with this story is that I wish the author came up with something snappier to call the device – I like “MyGeist” or just “geist”. But hey, if that’s my biggest problem … long story short, yeah: I really thought this book was the bee’s knees!)

The actual story in this world is about a couple, Anna and Rick, the plot begins six months after their 13 year old son, Alex who with no obvious warning signs apparently committed suicide. The couple is visiting the house of their best friends, Jen and Amir, who have a daughter, 17-yo Samantha, best friends with Alex and who was with Alex on the night he died, and for added drama the families have not seen each other since the death of Alex.

Note that all of the adults in this scenario are upper middle class professionals who have each adopted the “geist” device into their lifestyles. Most importantly, Anna has had the device for eight years and it turns out that Anna has allowed her geist to independently perform a significant number of parenting tasks alone with Alex. (And yet we learn that Alex who seems to some degree ADHD/neurotic, definitely had mental issues and a fear of self harm.) Thus with Alex’s sudden departure, some suspicion falls on the geist, and we learn eventually, in fact, that Alex even named the (otherwise unnamed) AI, “Aviva”.

In summary the book is about the already horrific grieving process and the added emotional (guilt) complication caused by the geist’s quasi parental relationship with Alex. Boiled down like that it doesn’t sound like much but the writing (by a man!) is very strong and manages to describe a very melodramatic situation with the emotional nuance of all the characters (especially Alex) in granular, clear detail, such that it lets the melodrama “speak for itself” through the characters words and actions.

I think that this story is more accurately classified as alternate reality not science fiction. As you realize later in the book, that Aviva is still existing as a independent AI, who loved Alex as a son and is grieving just like Anna, you begin to hope that she might have some way to "find" Alex again (because he isn't really dead?) and in fact when she investigates Alex's left over Unworld domain and finds his remaining rudimentary bot that's when I hoped if there would be a happy ending. But that was not to be. If the story had ended with Alex, at least, in some new form of existence then this would definitely be a sci fi book.

Right now, I will be bringing this to my next book club meeting and I am optimistic that my woman majority club will find this to be a fairly attractive read. I don’t think Cybil would call this a “guy book”.

Rogue Male

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“I cannot blame them. After all, one doesn’t need a telescopic sight to shoot boar and bear; so that when they came on me watching the terrace at a range of five hundred and fifty yards, it was natural enough that they should jump to conclusions. And they behaved, I think, with discretion. I am not an obvious anarchist or fanatic, and I don’t look as if I took any interest in politics; I might perhaps have sat for an agricultural constituency in the south of England, but that hardly counts as politics. I carried a British passport, and if I had been caught walking up to the House instead of watching it I should probably have been asked to lunch. It was a difficult problem for angry men to solve in an afternoon.”

This book was gifted to and read by Commander Gore in The Ministry of Time , so my decision to read was in large part due the after glow.

This turns out to be a novel previously unknown to me, a seeming precursor to James Bond. Our (unnamed) protagonist is a renowned hunter (this explains why the book is recommended to Gore), well-known in English society: an English gentleman living off family money and ultimately rents from tenant farmers. He tells us his story as if it is his journal. He tells us that he decided “for sport” to stalk the despotic leader of some anonymous illiberal country that borders Poland. This means hiking on foot for several days to approach the man’s villa close enough that he can see the man through his rifle’s scope.

Unfortunately he is caught (after he foolishly, brazenly followed a patrolling body guard in his infiltration attempt). He is tortured on the assumption that he is an assassin but he never confesses and his captors decide to leave him dangling from a cliff hoping that the fall will kill him with plausible deniability. Of course, he miraculously survives and spends half of the book evading the security and police forces as he flees back to good-ole England. But, it turns out, agents of the country he fled have plenty of agents in England. And because he (tells us) he was never told to perform his foolish stalking and nor did he inform any of his government-connected chums of his activities… Yet if his pursuers capture him it will be a fiasco and bring shame upon his country, thus he decides to that his best choice is to “disappear” within England and eventually winds up camping in a hedge bordering between two large Dorsetshire farms… and still he is unrelentingly pursued…

The prose in this book is very serviceable and the story is fun if you like old school thrillers. If the explanation of this adventure seems implausible its because our protagonist is emotionally stunted and in some degree of denial, but that just makes him more believable as the book resolves. The most interesting bits of the book for me were his digressions concerning his status as a gentleman and his sense of noblesse oblige. Anyway, it was a quick enjoyable read.

Vera, or Faith

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The book is about Vera a very smart, precocious, somewhat autistic fifth grader whose family life is complicated. She is Korean on her birth mother’s side from which genetic fountain she receives beautiful cheek bones. ‘Anne Mom’ is her de facto (on Vera’s word list) mother because her ‘Mom mom’ left when she was still just an infant because (she is told) she was such a difficult baby. Anne Mom’s heritage goes back to the American Revolution: she is a blue blood with a (small) trust fund. Her father is a Russian-emigre entrepreneur/editor/publisher who has been fired from several magazines and is trying to start another one. And finally she has a 6-yo(?) half brother Dylan who frequently takes off his pants and runs around commanding everyone to look at his penis in order get attention.

Her parents fought every day on a variety of subjects, but especially about how she and Dylan were to be raised. Anne Mom wanted a lot of structure, but Daddy said childhood “should just happen,” like it had happened to him, and that until you went to grad school “nothing really mattered,” it was all just a “neoliberal frog-march of the damned.” (Daddy supplied a lot of the words for her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.)

Her story is set in a near future upper-east-side NYC, in an America heading closer and closer to authoritarian government, to wit the shameless propagandizing by the government for a 5/3 amendment to the Constitution (think of it as the opposite of the 3/5 clause), passage of which, seems to be a fait accompli. And of course ‘Anne Mom’, every bit a white do-good liberal, is fundraising from her friends to oppose the amendment. Additionally this future has anti-abortion states enforcing laws allowing them to bloodtest women at their borders to detect pregnancy and discourage illegal out-of-state abortions. On the bright side, the family has an autonomous car that they have named Stella:

“I’m so tired,” Stella the Car said, mimicking Anne Mom, as she dropped them off by the basement entrance on the other side of their building. Stella “knew her audience” (Anne Mom) and the mirroring technique well.

Vera’s story is structured as a series of chapters with each chapter titled for a challenge that 10-year-old Vera faces, beginning with the words “She had to…”, for example, “Chapter 1: She Had to Hold the Family Together”. That chapter title neatly encapsulates the biggest challenge in Vera’s story: the discord between her mother and father. But that’s just one of several of Vera’s problems, including making friends, getting good grades (so she can go to Swarthmore), worrying about whether she is loved as much as her younger brother Dylan (Dad Igor and Anne’s biological son.)

This book manages to be very funny frequently (but not exclusively) by using Vera’s sophisticated ear-hustling and mimicry to mirror the adults (especially her father) in her life. Those adults have real existential fears and hence there is the constant background tinge of fear and sadness to the tone. Lastly, this book is really charming because Vera is sincere and innocent.

I cried at one point. I am not a crier. Also, "frog march of the damned", is still making me smile.

A Sand County Almanac

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

My brother-in-law, bless his aspirational hippie heart, gave me this book last Christmas. I waited four months to start reading it when my guilt told me it was time. Now having been nibbling at it for four more months I will officially retire from reading it.

Much like reading The Pillow Book, this is beautifully written and has no plot to drive you forward; its the sort of book you can keep in the bathroom to just pick up while you take care of business. But where the Pillow Book is a mostly pleasant, if somewhat dull book about finding pleasure in medieval Japan, this book is a melancholy read because, even as it describes beauty in nature the driving theme of this work is the destruction of America’s natural habitat. Importantly, this book was published in 1949 so when it describes a long standing trend of environmental degradation it was a trend 75 years ago and really nothing has improved that I can see.

A big memory of the book is that Mr Leopold went camping at a time when much of America’s wilderness was only accessible on foot, horseback or canoe. And he describes being camped for months at a time feeding himself largely by hunting and fishing. Another memory is a little essay where he describes his idea of a good hobby for him: bow hunting with a homemade bow and arrows!

Anyway if you are really interested in this book, Wikipedia has you covered.

The Mercy of Gods

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Hmmm, the next project from the golden boys who wrote the Expanse, of which, though I enjoyed it, I only consumed it on Netflix. Things that work in one medium don’t always work in other media, but let’s give it a shot. Right out the gate I will say that the prose is serviceable but not even a little bit spectacular, nevertheless, here’s a pull quote:

“Tonner wanted a book. Or music. An entertainment feed showing bad comedies. He wanted a piece of art to look at and a glass of wine to sip. He wanted a café with a live band and a little bamboo dance floor. He wanted food so spicy it burned the next day when he took a shit. He wanted to meet a stranger in a library and to spend an hour flirting with them. He wanted a life. He wanted a possibility.”

The book begins with characters in some sort of research facility on a planet named Anjinn. This is never explained: an advanced human civilization not unlike our own but not on Earth!!! Does mankind have an empire in beyond the Solar System? Did they abandon Earth??? Oh well, this is supposed to be a space opera so just go with it.

The book started out slow with some sort of academic competition, intrigue and I had to reread to get a fix on many of the characters (scientists, assistants and other support staff). But then Bam!; the much more advanced aliens show up, kill one person in eight (to show they are serious) and it turned out that there are really only four or five important characters. Never mind then. Then things are sad and tedious but finally, if memory serves, maybe 150 pages in, we get to the real meat of the plot: the researchers are imprisoned by the aliens and are figuring out how to survive in captivity with no idea whether the rest of Anjiin’s population even still exists.

This is the first book of, what I imagine will be, a several volume space opera of conflicting space empires, of which, at least this introductory volume, this amuse bouche, if you will, did amuse as well as intrigue me enough that I am waiting for volume two.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Of the three stories in this book I read “Rocannon’s World” because I saw a brief article where UKL recommends starting with it for context since she wrote several “Hainish” novels. I intend, eventually, to read Lathe of Heaven or Left Hand of Darkness. Anyway, in this novel, the titular Rocannon, is the original surveyor of his world and has stayed on as the only “sheriff” representing the authority and interests of a space empire in sheparding the civilization to a level where it can really participate in the empire. Rocannon is not secretly surveilling the planet; he is known to the local rulers as “starman”. The planet has several "HILF"s (High Intelligence Life Forms) including a race that is very human-like as well as other races I interpreted as dwarves, elves, trolls(?) etal. And these races have at best something like feudal level technology and feudal governments (with the exception of the dwarves who have been granted steel and electricity by the empire).

The space empire employing Rocannon has faster-than-light ships as well as rockets for getting around. They also communicate using an FTL teletype called an “ansible”. So… yeah this is sort of Tolkien meets Star Trek. And probably, in 1966 when it was originally published, your average sci-fi reader thought it was groovy, but I found it boring and shlockey: it hasn’t aged well and I could not bring myself to really read more than a third of it. Still though, I finished my assignment.

As a side note, having recently read A Room of One’s Own and having lamented of not being able to recognize a female “voice” in a novel, I realize that if I did not know who wrote this book I would assume that it was written by a guy.

A Room of One's Own

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company – in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sank among the cushions in the window-seat.”

The author’s 1929 essay where she was asked (we are told) to comment on women and fiction. And her opinion, stated in the first couple of pages, is that in order to write (any book) a woman needs her own room and 500 pounds a year. (I asked OpenAI what that equates to in 2025 dollars and got an answer of $56,000 however that seems low given that she assumes it seems a fairly high standard of living. I would say $200,000 is a better guess – end digression) She hand waves, which is to say refuses to give opinions on the questions of what kind and what quality of books women might write and the qualities of females in general. She also warns that when she provides names, dates and places it will be strictly fictional; the rest of the 172 pages contain the author’s rambling, peripatetic, indeed, brook-like, flow of thoughts as she justifies her conclusions.

I am very happy with using a metaphorical brook to describe her prose; I have fond memories of summer backpacking trips that followed creeks, brooks or streams and the sensation of falling asleep to the sound of rushing water. Likewise, I found the journey of this essay with few exceptions to be very pleasant as long as I was paying attention (context switching in the prose can be subtle). This is my first book from Woolf and I hope that though it be non-fiction this introduction to her writing style will prepare me to tackle fiction from the “Most important progenitor of stream of consciousness”.

Other take-aways:

I honestly have a hard time with distinguishing female compared to male prose apart from obvious cues of subject matter (e.g. gratuitous violence, misogeny) and Woolf describes various authors having gender-neutral prose (Shakespeare for example). But then again I am a guy so I swim in the patriarchy…
She spends a great deal of verbiage making clear the various, quite stringent, legal and societal obstacles to publishing anything written by a woman up to about 1800 and the gradual relaxation of those restrictions until women received the vote in the decade prior to the essay. And yet, even up until the 1960s in the USA women could not get a mortgage in order to purchase a house. And now we have “tradwives” who are attempting to reverse the pendulum of freedom for females.
And, of course, I have not read many of Woolf’s (especially anglocentric) literary touchstones.

Katabasis

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

It is the late 1970s and Alice, a female grad student in Cambridge’s department of “analytical magic” goes on a mission in hell where she discovers that much of hell bears a striking resemblance to life in academia. Most of the book is told by Alice in the form: action followed by an illuminating flashback; and most of the flashbacks are about Alice’s painful experiences at Cambridge with Professor Grimes her graduate advisor, the patriarchy in general and her unrequited crush on Peter (who, also a magician, is tagging along in hell).

Peter Murdoch and his bird’s-nest hair, scarecrow limbs balanced atop a rickety bicycle, looked like he’d never tried at anything in his life. He was simply born brilliant, all that knowledge poured by gods without spillage into his brain.
Alice couldn’t stand him.

Of course, the trope is that Alice and Peter are in love but too stupid realize it. And the mission: recover Professor Grime’s soul from hell and resurrect him. (Because Grimes was killed while performing a spell with Alice’s assistance, she believes she was responsible for his death. Also she needs her advisor back.)

The dominant theme of the story is Alice’s excruciating experience as a woman in academia walking a tightrope of success under constant judgement from the male establishment. The reader never understands her real motivation; it seems to change different different recollections of Grimes’ verbal abuse, his ridiculous slave driving, his sexual predation to the point where she considers suicide; yet at the same time, “she knew what she was getting into and she will keep a stiff upper lip” because Grimes is an academic superstar, her “meal ticket” and she believes that her career will be over without his support. In a nutshell, Alice has strong but very mixed emotions about her academic career and her advisor.

In addition to the primary narrative provided by Alice, the book also has portions narrated in third person to provide background. The overall production of the book is excellent and I particularly enjoyed the deep male voice of the omniscient narrator who voices the following:

**On Magick**
Magick, the most mysterious and capricious of disciplines, admired for its power, derided for its frivolity, is in brief the act of telling lies about the world.

What magicians of ancient civilizations discovered through accident and ingenuity, and what the English philosopher-magicians of the eighteenth century onward codified into the Euro-American received canon, was that the natural laws of the world were set but fragile. You could cleverly reinterpret them. For brief periods of time one could even bewilder and suspend them, so long as you spun the right web of untruths. Linguistic trickery, logical conundrums, it all worked.

…And that’s the overall premise of magic in the book, along with drawing pentagrams using chalk or blood. I found the magic as a plot device was well developed enough to enjoy having it used throughout the story without pausing to think, “this is bullshit”. For example, sprinkled throughout the story there is discussion of magician’s chalk, it’s varieties and brand names (Barkle’s vs Shropley’s).

Another distinctive aspect of this book is that it is slathered with references not only to literature about Hell (Dante, Orpheus), but also, science, math and logic (especially paradoxes) and according to TikTok some readers found this annoying. I think this is overblown because you are given context for all these little mentions, and it is not necessary to know any of the referenced texts. Lastly there is some humor in the book, but, reflecting it’s academic theme is subtle, for example, at one point a text is mentioned in passing: Penhaligon’s Primer on the Unitarian Hell. But did you know that Unitarians don’t believe in Hell? Ha Ha! And yes, I chuckled, but that just makes me smug and pedantic.

My biggest complaint with the book is that the ending while not totally predictable, was at the same time, not a giant surprise.

Migrations: a novel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

We share a silence filled with the beauty of delicate white wings that carry a creature so far. I think of the courage of this and I could cry with it, and maybe there's something in his eyes that suggests he understands a little of that.

Julia in the book club gave(lent) this to me only for it to sit on the shelf for about a year and a half probably because I knew that though it sounded good it also looked like it would be bleak. Now having plowed through it in a week I have to say: This fucking book is written such that every ten pages it made me want to cry and yet, still, I wanted to go on.

A story told in an alternative but entirely possible future where mankind (at least partially due to climate change) has driven many species to extinction including almost all birds. Franny, a lone woman is on a quest to follow the last of the arctic terns through their globe spanning migration (that is from the arctic to the antarctic). She manages to join the crew of one of the few remaining Newfoundland fishing vessels in order to follow the three terns that she has managed to tag with radio beacons. Along the way she goes swimming in nearly frozen water sooo many times that I am sure I am missing a huge symbol (rebirth?).

At the beginning of the story we want to know how and why this seemingly sane woman is on such a daunting, quixotic quest; of course the book provides the flashbacks to satisfy our curiosity.

The biggest quibble I have with the book is that if Earth’s eco-system has been so catastrophically compromised in terms of extinctions and climate change then I imagine that there would be many more chaotic consequences that would impact the plot of the story (and perhaps detract from the elegetic mood).

Anyway, I found the book riveting and worth the trauma.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“Either way, the time for scalping is well behind us,” I said. “This is a new day, is it not?” I lifted my arms, enveloping the whole grand chapel, and the civilized town beyond it. “Or it’s a single, long night,” he said, looking the other way from the flickering candle, which I perceived was possibly still causing him slight injury.”

The setting is the old, but mostly civilized, west of 1912 where an indian starts showing up on Sundays at Arthur Beaucarne’s Lutheran church in Miles City Montana. The indian wants to confess his many murders and Arthur accepts the task of giving this savage an ear as part of his clerical duty and (we eventually learn) because of a guilty conscience. The indian’s name is “Good Stab” and is wearing sunglasses because of an “eye condition” so Arthur dims the church to candle light. Good Stab’s story will drag out over several Sunday sessions.

Meanwhile the corpses start showing up in the prairie on the outskirts of the city. The corpses are all mutilated and skinned. It’s not a coincidence that Good Stab has chosen Beaucarne to hear his story. Over the course of the narrative it becomes clear that Good Stab is a vampire and he has grievances over what became of his tribe and the buffalo over the last 75 years.

I wanted to like this book, I liked the cover and the ambition of the book, to have a vampire story set in the mostly settled Montana of 1912, where the vampire is taking revenge for the colonial destruction of his culture, his family, his tribe and also for the near extinction of the Buffalo. But, to summarize, while I finished the book, no, I didn’t love it.

What worked:

Our vampire, “Good Stab” is a sad, aggrieved vampire and the book describes vividly the brutality of how the aboriginal people were treated, the mechanical techniques used to slaughter the buffalo, so we can feel the agony with him. The most important, specific grievance is the massacre of his village, that takes place in 1839 in which Beaucarne is a bit player (why Good Stab is “confessing” in Beaucarne’s church)

The book, of course, has its own set of rules for the vampire, for example in this story the vampire will take on attributes of its food, for example if it feeds on deer it will grow antlers, which found interesting (but then again I have not read that many vampire novels…)

What didn’t work:

I did not find the setting, Miles City Montana to feel very vivid: It was always kind of soft focus in spite of it being the setting for half the plot.

When the book tells Good Stab’s story it frequently uses blackfoot terminology, especially for the names of animals: It was confusing and distracting to keep track of “wags-his-tail” (deer), “dirty face” (mouse) and several others, I believe the use of blackfoot vocabulary was fine for adding verisimilitude to the story but, on the other hand, this ain’t Shakespeare, the author could’ve thrown us some context clues to reduce cognitive “friction” for the reader.

And the biggest problem: midway through the book we are aware that the target for Good Stab’s retribution is Beaucarne. But then, apparently, Good Stab decides, to just stalk, to toy with his prey and we get many pages where Beaucarne is just waiting in dread for his fate to be decided and while that might be more frightening for Beaucarne it was boring for me. I found that region of the plot to be long and tedious to the point where I stopped reading for about a week.

What also (finally) worked:

After I returned to the story I didn’t have to read too much more before I got to the final chapter told in 2013 by Beaucarne’s great, great, great granddaughter who gets to tie up the loose ends in the story and the last 20 pages of the book is its best part where our modern day protagonist has to arrange a final resolution for a vampire, in a madcap, macabre, macgyverish, improvised sequence of violence. For me, it was this last part of the book that rescued the story.

Giovanni's Room

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This was not on my normal literary diet of fantasy and sci-fi.

It is a hard book to admit to enjoying because the young homophobic male that lives inside this sixty-year old body wants to run and hide from a story speaking frankly about homosexuality.

It took me a long time to read this relatively short novel because this book is a rollercoaster of emotions and when I was at the crest of the emotional arc I often needed to put the book aside because of the dread I felt for David (the protagonist).

I don’t see any point in discussing this book in detail other than to say as many have said before me: read this book because to me it is a portal to a new appreciation of what a book can achieve.

I’ll let the notes and quotes I collected do the rest of the talking.

“Behind the counter sat one of those absolutely inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outrageous and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountaintop. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash register as though it were an egg.
(this melancholy tone, it hurts so good) “She seems, like most of the women down here, to have gone into mourning directly the last child moved out of childhood. Hella thought that they were all widows, but, it turned out, most of them had husbands living yet. These husbands might have been their sons.”
“I REMEMBER THAT LIFE in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea. Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. ”
“I cannot say that I was frightened. Or, it would be better to say that I did not feel any fear—the way men who are shot do not, I am told, feel any pain for awhile. I felt a certain relief.”
Nothing to quote here. But the scene where Giovanni meets Hella is excruciating and I need to take a break.
“I’m beginning to see,” I said, carefully, “that kids like Giovanni are in a difficult position. This isn’t, you know, the land of opportunity—there’s no provision made for them. Giovanni’s poor, I mean he comes from poor folks, and there isn’t really much that he can do. And for what he can do, there’s terrific competition. And, at that, very little money, not enough for them to be able to think of building any kind of future. That’s why so many of them wander the streets and turn into gigolos and gangsters and God knows what.”
“He did not smile, he was neither grave, nor vindictive, nor sad; he was still. He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen. I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down. My feet refused to carry me over to him again. The wind of my life was blowing me away.”
“When one walked through the gardens, leaves fell about one’s head and sighed and crashed beneath one’s feet. The stone of the city, which had been luminous and changing, faded slowly, but with no hesitation, into simple grey stone again. It was apparent that the stone was hard. ”
“It is hard to say what produced this melancholy, which sometimes settled over us like the shadow of some vast, some predatory, waiting bird. I do not think that Hella was unhappy, for I had never before clung to her as I clung to her during that time. But perhaps she sensed, from time to time, that my clutch was too insistent to be trusted, certainly too insistent to last.”
“And Giovanni, during this short encounter, in the middle of the boulevard as dusk fell, with people hurrying all about us, was really amazingly giddy and girlish, and very drunk—it was as though he were forcing me to taste the cup of his humiliation. And I hated him for this.”
“And told us, too, in delicious detail, how he had done it: but not why. Why was too black for the newsprint to carry and too deep for Giovanni to tell.”
“Then Guillaume enters and Giovanni tries to smile. They have a drink. Guillaume is precipitate, flabby, and moist, and, with each touch of his hand, Giovanni shrinks further and more furiously away.”
“My lips were cold. I felt nothing on my lips. She kissed me again and I closed my eyes, feeling that strong chains were dragging me to fire. It seemed that my body, next to her warmth, her insistence, under her hands, would never awaken. But when it awakened, I had moved out of it. From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I watched my body in a stranger’s arms.”

The Road

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. ”

This story is not graphic but still manages to be emotionally brutal, as I read I felt the same as I did watching ‘No Country for Old Men’, like Anton Chigurh is gonna show up with his hydraulic hammer any second. I had to stop several times because I had disaster fatigue. And yet, when story ends, though mournful, it leaves the reader with at least some small hope and the sense that whatever problems you might have it could always be worse.

Its about a dying man and his 9(?) year-old son wandering through post-nuclear-war (now nuclear winter) America: nothing good happens until the end when the man finally passes away and another family group adopts the boy.

What was most striking about the story is how the man continues on, horror after horror, disaster after tragedy because his priorities have boiled down to one thing only: preserving the life of his child. The man’s resolve to continue in the face of desolation, pain, privation, entirely and only for his son comes through in a way that anyone who is/has been a parent must surely understand. In flashbacks we learn that the mother, the man’s wife(?) has left them to commit suicide because she has lost all hope.

I only noticed two evolutions in character: the boy matures during the story and by the end the man knows that there is no point trying to hide the gruesome realities from the kid since he has hardened to them. And the man who at the beginning of the story intends to die with the child (and possibly shooting the boy) rather than leave him to an inevitable, lonely death is by the end, willing (demanding) for the boy to go on without him.

Dissolution

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The year is 2021, the place is London, Margaret Webb is our 83 year-old protagonist, her husband, Stanley, a once brilliant inventor now seemingly has Alzheimer’s and Maggie’s life revolves around visiting him in a memory care facility and hoping for the increasingly rare “good days.” On top of that, her adult daughter has not spoken to her in a year(?)

“It occurs to me that at some point, you pick up your child for the very last time. And you don’t know. At the time, you don’t know that it’s the last time you’ll ever do it.” He was right, of course: Endings don’t announce themselves. They sneak around you; they shuffle their way past unnoticed until, on some cloudy day, you look out on an empty street and realize everything ended some time ago.”

The book starts ‘in media res’: Maggie waking up in the bottom of an indoor swimming pool with an IV in her arm and a strange man standing over her who tells her that, “Stanley isn’t safe. None of us are safe. Something happened, and I need your help to find out exactly what. Think back: When was the first time you saw me?”. The man gives her a pill to improve her memory and the rest of the story is told as flashbacks told to Maggie’s interlocutor who insists he is trying to help keep them safe.

Of course it can’t be that simple, the helpful stranger needs Maggie to go back through Stanley’s memories searching for a solution to unfolding disaster using the central plot device: the “memory spade” device that lets Maggie literally visit and appear within the memories of Stanley. Used incorrectly or too much, though, the memory spade unleashes “the omega”, a cosmic force that erases the “memory”, that is to say the existence of the user (rendering them vegetables) as well, the traveler’s family and friends forget them, as if they never existed.

Much of the story is told through flashbacks that Maggie witnesses using the memory spade. This, of course, means that there several time loops, for example old Maggie witnesses her own wedding to Stanley. Writing these time loops without confusing the reader (and without introducing plot holes) is one of the challenges in time travel stories which this book does superbly.

There’s a ton more to this story but really don’t want to write more than 500 words so let’s just cut to the chase: this is a very twisty thriller about memory, memory loss, true love and (sorta) time travel. The main character is a very likable, self-described, “old-bat” and the villain would be a very comfortable in a James Bond story. The ending manages to be surprising. Time-travel stories are like stage magic in that you have to distract the audience so they don’t notice the sleight of hand. This story performed it’s magic excellently by providing an interesting rationale for the time travel while moving the complicated plot quickly but understandably to a clean, crisp resolution.

Lucky Jim

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

“DIXON was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. ”

This is an amusing read about class-based prejudice, academia, and the sex lives of college students in post-WWII England. At about 20% through the book, the description of protagonist Jim Dixon’s hangover is resoundingly worth the price of admission. (But you must have had a bad hangover at least once in order to appreciate it, so guess there is a “height requirement” as well.)

The biggest problem with the book is that it is very dated such that I can imagine an entire generation of Playboy readers had this in their lifetime “must/best read” lists. (and even that joke that I have attempted is dated.) It is also a little challenging because of English slang from the 1950s.

The Magician of Tiger Castle

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I read this on the basis of my love of the book ‘Holes’. The book had a nice cover that looked unlike a cookie cutter of other recently published books (Is this a legit criterion? I don’t know but it feels like it should be.) It started out strong, as a story of the princess Tullia marrying the pauper, Pito, in spite of her parent’s wishes to have her marry another, awful, prince, with the help of a bumbling but wise magician. The setting is a European-ish country “Esquaveta” in an alternative earth timeline (sorta like Princess Bride) and somehow, Anatole the wizard, seems to understand entirely too much about the history of technology, but whatever, he’s magic. Anyway the princess and the pauper escape in some clever way that leaves Tullia and Pito as royalty and they all live happily ever after.", that’s the probably the plot this book was meant to have.

But then, about two-thirds through the book after the arranged marriage is foiled, the book loses its way (stop reading right here: I'm spoiling now). The happy couple are fleeing their homeland to the "neder lands" when Anatole is recaptured and returned to Esquaveta where he is made immortal in order to be put in the dungeon for a hundred years and we never find out what happens to princess Tullia and Pito. There are are a bunch of interesting plot mechanisms around potions, and of course a Tiger, but we never learn too much more about these things because Mr. Sachar just sabotaged his book. My mind wants very hard to explain why an accomplished writer would do this to an elegantly constructed story and how it got published; probably the explanation involves money and publishers. o well. And yet I see lots of verbiage telling everyone how great this book is -- they are all in on the scam.

What We Can Know: A Novel

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Our narrator is Tom Metcalf a professor living in 2119 who is attempting to teach pre-apocalypse history to students who DGAF about it. He lives in the area of present-day Wales and in his time a set of islands (Maentwrog, Snowdonia now, at 974’ elevation is, in 2119, Maentwrog-under-Sea) Besides sea-level rise, its apparently hard/impossible to get coffee or chocolate, the center of scientific progress in the new world is Nigeria, the USA is now controlled by various warlord factions (but its hard to know because the internet is broken) and Earth’s population is below six billion.

“They did not want to know or think about a hostile sea. It bored them in advance. They lived on and among islands. So what? Fourteen young men and women were slumped around the table. They had grown up with the consequences, heard their grandparents go on about it. The past was peopled by idiots. Big deal. The matter was dead. The kids attended our course because it was compulsory. But they had moved on. What animated them in those days was a twenty-minute two-string bass guitar solo. Or possession of fashionable pale green and purple linen pants, worn low on the hips by both men and women and secured by a large tin buckle.”

Tom’s passion project is to find a poem, A Corona for Vivian, written in 2014 by Francis Blundy then recited one-time-only, at a 10-person dinner party. Blundy, a celebrity poet (think Tennyson or Lord Byron) and somehow the poem has taken on a legendary quality. Blundy was a climate sceptic and conspiracy theorists think the poem was suppressed by oil companies bribing him. Luckily 2014 had email and there are massive archive “paper” trails through which Tom can delve to find clues. That is the crux of the story: lives of Blundy, wife Vivian, family and friends as discovered through their saved correspondences and diaries.

Which all sounds pretty anodyne doesn’t it? And does anybody care about poetry?

“Chris nodded and said, "Yeah." Poetry had a lowering effect on him. Classical music too. Their cultural weight and solemnity and self-importance oppressed him. He suspected that people were subtly bullied into faking appreciation in order not to appear uneducated fools. Long ago he had proposed this to Harriet. She was so dismissive and irritated that he never mentioned it again. Among the craftsmen and women, marquee erectors and roadies he worked with, string quartets and sonnet sequences never came up.”

But there is a great deal to know about the lives of Vivian and Francis. Vivian comes to Blundy after a previous marriage to Percy who died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. That and on Tom’s end, research is not as easy as it could be because what was once available from your laptop now requires effort, boat-rides, time to go look at and read. Also, short of discovering the mythical poem, Metcalf intends to publish his Blundy research as “almost history”: facts interpolated with speculation: this is considered forbidden to a “historian.”

But, most importantly, somewhere in all that there is a very critical twist that I did not at all see coming. All of the above is my way of saying: YES! Read this book: come for the exemplary prose, stay for the mystery.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This book is like a cheat code for people who read but aren’t going to go to college and major in literature. Mr Foster takes you through aspects of literature such as setting, symbols, characters. It’s a nice resource for mapping out your reading list if you are trying to expand your tastes. I read the book in pieces because the punchline to every chapter it seems is, “if you haven’t read much then you won’t know that X is a symbol for Jesus (or death or whatever) and you just need to read more”. Anyway, another way to use this book is to simply go through the stories/books he references (which is summarized in an appendix) to see what you may not have read and what looks interesting. Anyway, this is a handy little book for non-literature-majors.

The Crying of Lot 49

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I started listening to Pynchon’s new novel and I was overwhelmed with turn of the century gangster slang so I decided to give this book a shot as my first Pynchon: I did not really understand this “Modern Classic” novel. Or maybe I understood enough to think really hard about this book and read it twice looking for meaning.

Lets start with the prose. For one thing, Pynchon loves his crazy, pun-encrusted names and he loves long sentences and he loves obscure references and/or vocabulary. So this is not a book for, apparently, people whose attention wanders because this prose is difficult, for example the following single sentence:

Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to the Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden, reading of book reviews in the latest Scientific American, into the layering of a lasagna, garlicking of a bread, tearing up of romaine leaves, eventually, oven on, into the mixing of the twilight’s whiskey sours against the arrival of her husband, Wendell (“Mucho”) Maas from work, she wondered, wondered, shuffling back through a fat deckful of days which seemed (wouldn’t she be first to admit it?) more or less identical, or all pointing the same way subtly like a conjurer’s deck, any odd one readily clear to a trained eye.

At a very high level this book is about a woman who becomes the executor of a millionaire's will and is the process of these probate-related tasks she discovers a seemingly secret mail/courier service but she is not sure ever in the novel if she isn't being gas-lighted.

Before attempting this book it would be helpful to know a few things. First, the millionaire Pierce Inverarity is modelling closely on Howard Hughes. “Pierce” is possibly a pun on the drill bit (for oil) invented by Howard Hughes Senior which started his fortune.

Oedipa Maas is revealed to be PI’s last mistress and is therefore (I assume) super-model-beautiful, she is also a graduate of UC Berkeley so (I assume) fairly bright. And of course she will go to see what’s in the will down in “San Narcisso”; which is possibly modeled on Canoga Park where there was a big Rocketdyne (Yoyodyne) factory.

Some real things in the book:

What is the point of our main character? To me she is like many 60’s/70’s female characters who are sexual creatures for men (Oedipa is propositioned by literally every heterosexual man in the book) and yet at the same time they use sexual power to achieve their own goals, in Oedipa’s case, trying to research and pin down the tristero while avoiding the wrong men.

And, then again, Pynchon names his main character Oedipa which, since I can’t see any particularly incestuous themes in the novel, means that this symbolic naming is just a red herring. And I would say that this, Pynchon just riffing and bullshitting in order to be provocative, is a major “theme” of the novel.

But like I said, I still really don’t understand the novel, I read this book for bragging rights and just for credibility, what follows is my attempt at a summary.

Chapter 1

It is summer and Oedipa Maas gets letter saying that she is the executor of Pierce Inverarity’s will. PI died in the spring but they only found the will now. She reminisces about getting a call in the morning from PI a year ago (when he apparently told her) he also, jokingly threatens OM’s husband Mucho. Mucho is a DJ but was a used car salesman. He seduces women with his voice. OM tell’s him about the letter and he points her at their lawyer. She gets an early AM phone call from her psychiatrist (Dr Hilarity) that night where he pitches her (again) to take hallucinogens. The next day she see’s the lawyer who gives her no advice (but hits on her).

Chapter 2

OM drives down to SN to checkout PI’s holdings and the Yoyodyne company. The first night in SN, she is seduced and fucks Metzger (aka Baby Igor BI), another attorney also working on PI’s will. (The seduction occurs while OM and BI watch a WWII movie about a submarine battle in an Italian lake. There are many bodies left in the lake.) She also meets Miles the manager of the hotel and member of “the Paranoids”, an aspiring faux beatles musical group (Miles also hits on her). Also, the Paranoids serenade the couple during sex until their electric instruments short out the power.

Chapter 3A

Then a few days later she receives a letter from her husband (who, side note, sleeps with underage girls and OM knows, also she assumes MM knows that she’s sleeping w/ BI or somebody) with a misprint stamp. “REPORT All Obscene Mail To Your Potsmaster”. They go to an oscilloscope themed bar with Yoyodyne engineers where they meet Mike Fallopian (MF), who tells them the crazy civil war origin story of the Peter Pinguid Society (PPS). The whole bar (all/most in PPS) is part of a conspiracy (“the Tristero”) to send mail “illegally” by avoiding the US Mail. She discovers a message in the bathroom which is also related to the illegal mails and has a symbol of “mail horn”. Some days later (waiting for mail from PI’s other business units) they go to Lake Inverarity and the Paranoids steal a boat. They meet “Manny Di Presso” (MD), a buddy of MF who is suing the PI estate on behalf of mafioso Tony Jaguar who should be paid for the “white charcoal” in the Beaconsfield cigarettes (The white charcoal (soldier’s bones) came from the lake in Italy and were imported to the US by the Mafia). The boat drops them on an island in the lake but then MD flees TJ in the boat so the rest of the crew are stranded there. Someone says that this story about bones sounds like the plot of a Jacobean revenge play, “The Courier’s Tragedy.” (WTF?) So the next day OM & BI go to see the play written by Richard Warfinger (RW) and performed by the “Tank Players”.

Chapter 3B (The Courier’s Tragedy)

Duke of Faggio murdered Duke Angelo 10y before play opens by “by poisoning the feet on an image of Saint Narcissus,”. This enables Pascuale (regent) to murder Niccolo by shooting him from a cannon - but this is foiled by Ercole. When the play begins Niccolo as adult tells story. Thurn & Taxis (T&T) hold monopoly on mail in the Holy Roman Empire. Angelo wants to marry his sister Francesca to Pascuale (Franceska is Pascuale’s mom). Domenico gets tongue ripped out by Ercole… etc The last line of the fourth act of the play is:

“He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew Now recks no lord but the stiletto’s Thorn, And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn. No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero.”

The last act of the play is "like a Road Runner cartoon in blank verse.” everybody dies but Gennaro. OM goes back stage to speak with the director/Gennaro (named Ralph Driblette (RD)) about bones but instead RD somehow conveys that the Trystero assassins in act four are his artistic touch (not in the text). And RD hits on OM and tells her she has to go to another bookstore to get a copy of the play.

Chapter 4

OM is now obsessed with the Tristero (why?). She goes to a YY shareholder meeting (and is between two old men who touch her thighs ) OM gets lost and meets Stanley Koteks (SK) who is drawing the horn symbol. SK wants the IP clause dropped from his employment contract. Also Nefastis machine (NM) invented by John Nefastis (JN)… also James Maxwell… Because OM is a “sensitive” who can work the NM, SK gives OM JN’s address in San Francisco. OM goes to Zaph Books and gets a copy of the play. OM goes to Vesperhaven and talks to Thoth about his grandfather and the desperados dressed in black attacking a Wells Fargo carriage. Then she talks to MF but hes no help. Then Genghis Cohen, the stamp expert shows up. OM & GC drink dandelion wine and talk about T&T - existed from the 1300’s until bought up by Bismark in 1867. And GC shows OM many fake stamps (post marks?).

Chapter 5

OM goes back up to Berkeley & stays at a hotel holding a deaf/mute convention. Gets a book the next day: “No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, ran the couplet, Who once has crossed the lusts". All the books are different so now up to UCB to talk w/ professor Bortz, but Bortz has left. OM finds JN and they talk about Entropy (physics and communications), then JN lets OM test her sensitivity (while he watches cartoons: Magilla Gorilla & etc) then, after she fails, JN wants to fuck her on the couch. She drives to North Beach and on the way, muses upon the conspiracy:

“She knew a few things about it: it had opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal system in Europe; its symbol was a muted post horn; sometime before 1853 it had appeared in America and fought the Pony Express and Wells, Fargo, either as outlaws in black, or disguised as Indians; and it survived today, in California, serving as a channel of communication for those of unorthodox sexual persuasion, inventors who believed in the reality of Maxwell’s Demon, possibly her own husband, Mucho Maas (but she’d thrown Mucho’s letter long away, there was no way for Genghis Cohen to check the stamp, so if she wanted to find out for sure she’d have to ask Mucho himself).”

OM winds up at a gay bar and begs the bartender to explain his post-horn & "IA" lapel pin. It stands for "Inamorati Anonymous" which helps people fallout of love and was founded by a Yoyodyne executive in the early 1960s. (references vietnamese monk-fire picture from 1963). OM goes drunkenly wandering around SF spotting post-horns. In a taco shop OM meets Jose Arrabal (whe she knows from Mexico with PI). More wandering. DEATH (Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn). Winds up in a tenement DTs vs dts (Delirium Tremens vs Delta Time). OM goes back to oakland and takes a bus back to the hotel in Berkeley. (How did she lose her car?) The next day drives to Kinneret and goes to see Dr Hilarious so he can tell her that she's crazy. But Dr. Hilarious has barricaded himself in with a gun in his office because he fears alleged NAZI hunters (and is arrested). The next day she says goodbye to WM (who is now on LSD from Dr H) and drives back down to SN.

Chapter 6

BM has gone to Las Vegas to get married. She calls RD but his mother answers. She calls Bortz and gets his wife. She goes to visit Bortz but passes the used bookstore that is burnt down. The neighboring shop owner says its arson. Bortz says the tristero quote is bogus and there is a pornographic one in the vatican library. RD has committed suicide by walking into the pacific and the party is a wake for RD. They watch pornographic slides. OM asks what is Tristero. (no answer) She visits MF again but he won’t really talk to her, but she discovers the meaning of W.A.S.T.E.

“It turned out to be an old American stamp, bearing the device of the muted post horn, belly-up badger, and the motto: WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE.”

She discovers that every place in SN is in someway owned by PI. GK explains that the tristero migrate to the US before the Civil War to work against WF and Pony Express. By the end of the chapter all the male characters who have confessed a connection to tristero are now either, dead, disappeared or estranged from OM. A stranger is bidding on a part PI's stamp collection, lot 49 that contains all the tristero-related forgeries. The book ends just as the auction begins where we might meet the representative of tristero who could, possibly, provide some clarity.

PS, in chapter five, during OM’s SF overnight drunken spree, it appears that Pynchon had her ditch her car in North Beach, but the next day, from her hotel in Berkeley, she takes her car back down to SN. This seems like a plot hole to me, but in the grand scheme of this book, who cares?

Nutshell

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Cybil recommended this after I finished What We Can Know. Our narrator is a fetus whose observations are entirely too canny, acidic and clever while his mother and her lover plot to kill the estranged father. Now that I think about it this should be narrated by Seth MacFarlane in Stewie’s voice.

NOW, TO MY FATHER, John Cairncross, a big man, my genome’s other half, whose helical twists of fate concern me greatly. It’s in me alone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly, sourly, along separate sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self. I also blend John and Trudy in my daydreams – like every child of estranged parents, I long to remarry them, this base pair, and so unite my circumstances to my genome.

Another novel that features poetry along with dark human behavior, both nestled in clever prose. Just to be clear, I really enjoyed both this and What We Can Know, so now I will be on the look out for more McEwan.

Think Weirder Volume I

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This is a fun anthology and these are my favorite stories:

Death and the Gorgon
Twenty-Four Hours
Nine Billion Turing Tests
Our Chatbots said, ‘I Love you,’ Shall We Meet?

There is no Anti-mimetics Division

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I listened to this because amazon seems to think its worth publishing for real. It is an almost “lovecraftian” book in that it is existential horror brought about not by “elder gods” but by some other human-antithetical species(?). It does have a creepy tone but at the same time it was just kinda slow. Luckily 9ish hours just flies by in the car.

The Left Hand of Darkness

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Amazon says, "A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can choose—and change—their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the completely dissimilar culture that he encounters."

And I have to say I that mostly agree. There is a good amount of well-crafted prose:

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”

My biggest complaint about the book is that it is dated by its milieu, its premise is that the Ekumen is a very kumbaya-singing star-spanning civilization: it is very much along the lines of the “the federation” from Star Trek with a very idealistic approach to meeting new civilizations. As a “first contact” book, I would love to see this book written with a protagonist from Ian Bank’s Culture.

The plot is a little melancholy and it slows down. There are really no fights and the last third of the book is about the two main characters trekking across a giant ice cap over many days and slowly deepening their friendship through the hardship of travel and starvation. Yet if you have patience it is an integral part of the plot.

“We stowed the wheels, uncapped the sledge-runners, put on our skis, and took off-down, north, onward, into that silent vastness of fire and ice that said in enormous letters of black and white DEATH, DEATH, written right across a continent. The sledge pulled like a feather, and we laughed with joy.”
“Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.”
“For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.”

Surface Detail

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This week I was sick and wanted something comfortable to read. Mr Banks Culture Novel’s are my favorites and have been for a long time now. I could not follow the plot of this novel, and when I thought about it, I could not really explain what I love about the Culture novels. So here are my notes which elucidate the plot and to some extent justify my enduring affection for these books.

But to a certain extent, this quote sums up my love for these books.

“Also, interestingly, this is – maybe – not the first odd thing to happen in this neck of the woods, either. There was an ablationary plume nine days ago not a million klicks away from that rendezvous they were trying to get you to make in the Semsarine Wisp.”
She shook her head. “You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”

arcane nomenclature.

Anyway, needless to say, the rest of this is spoilers.

# Plot

They both stared at the dark network of threat and promise arrayed before them.
“There is still going to be some degree of blame involved in all this though, isn’t there?” Veppers asked quietly. “No matter how precisely targeted and quickly over it all is; some retribution will be required.”

“Good grief, yes!” Bettlescroy exclaimed. “That’s precisely why we intend to frame the Culture for everything!”

There are three main interlinked plots:

Lededje an indentured servant to Veppers is murdered by him. She unexpectedly is resurrected on a Culture ship and begins her many day journey back to home planet Sichult in order to get revenge. She eventually finds her way back thanks to the Culture ship Demeisen. Demeisen gives Lededje a new, highly customizable tattoo as a “disguise” during the trip.
Shortly thereafter, Yime Nsokyi a Quietus agent, is assigned to catch up with and contact Lededje because they suspect the Hell war will pop into “the real” and it will involve Veppers/Sichult. They think that Lededje will want to contact the ship, “Me I’m Counting” (because his avatar implanted Lededje’s neural lace and took a 4D picture of her)at the Vesperine Wisp on an unfallen Bulbitian. (but that doesn’t happen) Something catastrophic happens there and she is severely injured but, healed, eventually makes it to Sichult.
Conveniently Veppers is running a scam concurrently: His business runs a significant part of Hell on computers located under Espersium his ancestral estate. But he knows that the business will eventually have to close so he decides to have it destroyed and blame it on the Culture. He agrees to preserve the hells for the NR and agrees to destroy the hells with the GFCF. So this is “intergalactic arson” (presumably he has tons of insurance.) and he is double crossing the NR as well as scam/slandering the Culture. Anyway this scheme also involves building a fleet of warships out at the Tsungarial Disk who are to impersonate Culture ships which will carry out the attack on Espersium.
This all culminates with both Lededje and Yime Nsokyi receiving last minute evidence of Veppers malfeasance so they show up just in time to catch Veppers in the last half hour before fake fleet is to carry out Nuclear destruction at his estate removing some art/keepsakes. Yime appears and tells Veppers he’s in trouble; Veppers shoots at Yime so she takes off. But Lededje shows up and chases Veppers into the water maze and with the help of the tattoo which, is, in fact, alive they kill Veppers by straining / garroting him. And they lived happily ever after.

Note how nice it is that (originally intagliated) Lededje’s revenge on Veppers comes in the form of a tattoo.

I am skipping over the sub-plots, Chay in Hell, Prin testifying before a legislative subcommittee, Vatueil’s various fights, Auppi’s anti-smatter activities.

I have simplified the plot, but really its the revenge of resurrected Lededje on Veppers. All the other plot lines are pretty contrived and simply exist to entertain and support the revenge plot. Everything else that happens, all of Vepper’s schemes, the smatter outbreak, is eyecandy, beautifully, lushly described settings, characters and plot devices. And let’s not forget ship names.

Conflict

We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it.
The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.

The War in Heaven seems to be the “conflict” in this novel but while it serves as the background impetus for lots of action it is never a contest; the only justification for the Hells given is that they have always existed and this is “argued” in chapter 22, but not seriously. The War in Heaven is a plot device. The conflict is Lededje revenge on Veppers, but Veppers is a villain, a comical villain who has had his nose bitten off. There is no empathy for him:

"At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it."

Characters

Joiler Veppers (et al) The Villain owner of Veprine Corporation with a very “punchable face”
Lededje Y’breq an intagliate (fancy tattooed) slave (indentured servant) murdered by Veppers
Vatueil Mercenary for Anti-Hell
Yime Nsokyi Culture Citizen, Quietus agent
Prin male Pavluvian survivor of Hell
Chay mate of Prin, Pavluvian, stuck in Hell
Sensia avatar of “Sense amid madness, wit amidst folly”
Himerance avatar of “Me I’m Counting”
Demeisen avatar of “Falling outside Moral Constraints”
Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III - Admiral in GFCF navy
Auppi Unstril a culture operative (a Restoria grunt), independently fighting the “smatter” outbreak

Factions : Tech : Pro/Anti Hell

Sichult Enablement : 4/5 : Pro
Nauptre Reliquaria : 8 : Pro
Geseptian Fardesile Cultural Federacy (GFCF) : 7 second class Culture clone more or less : pro
Culture : 8 : Anti
Jhlupe : 7/8? ???

Other factions

“Special Circumstances” SC The umbrella “spy” organization of the Culture.
“Contact” : the foreign service of the Culture
“Quietus” : a department of SC dedicated to the dead/afterlives. nicknamed “probate”
“Restoria” : the dept of SC dedicated to eradicating Smatter outbreaks. “Pest Control”

Settings

Ubruater capital of Sichult
Espersium Vepper’s estate complete with mansion, 90km from Ubruater

The great torus-shaped mansion of Espersium sat near the centre of the estate of the same name. Espersium was easily the largest private estate in the world. Had it been a country its land area would have ranked it as the fifty-fourth largest out of the sixty-five states that still had some administrative significance in the unified world that was Sichult.

Semsarine Wisp - Unfallen Bulbitian : had been the losers in a great war long ago. The things that people now called Bulbitians – Fallen or otherwise – had been the species’ primary habitats: substantial space structures which looked like two great, dark, heavily decorated cakes joined base to base. They averaged about twenty-five kilometres measured either across their diameter or from pinnacle to pinnacle, so were relatively small by habitat standards, though of respectable size compared to the spacecraft of most other civilisations." “The Bodhisattva entered the six-thousand-kilometre-wide bubble of cloudy air surrounding the Bulbitian very slowly, like a thick needle somehow persuading the balloon it was penetrating not to pop, out of sheer politeness.”
interior of SAMWAF ship
Cavern City Vebezua - “They sat in a paper boat floating on a lake of mercury, lit by a single distant ceiling hole producing a searchlight shaft of luminescence. Veppers had brought an ingot of pure gold specially. He took his mask off for a moment. “Plop it in,” he told Jasken.”
Tsungarial Disk: “Lots of abandoned alien factories no one’s allowed to use … mostly,” the avatar said, nodding. “Anyway, the smatter got into the Disk sometime in the dim and distant and one of our infuriatingly well-meaning Can-we-help? teams has been in there sitting on top of it for probably longer than’s really been necessary – you know; one of those jobs you make sure you never quite finish because you like being where you are?"
the water maze on the grounds of Espersium where mock naval battles are conducted.

Races/Species

Pavluvean : “metre-and-half-long quadrupeds with large, round heads from which issued small twin trunks, highly prehensile probosces with little lobes at the tip resembling stubby fingers.”
GFCF : “Pan-human, smaller and more delicate than the average but generally reckoned to be quite beautiful, with large heads and large eyes,”

Plot Devices

“Smatter” : “Runaway nanotech. Swarmata. Remains of an MHE: a Monopathic Hegemonising Event. Sometimes known as a hegswarm. Your eyes have gone glazed. Anyway, some of that stuff got into the Disk … you do know what the Disk is?”
“Neural Lace” : an implanted device which records and backs up human memory to be transmitted upon near death (so that the wearer is effectively resurrected) This is how Lededje is resurrected.
“Confliction” : Virtual war run entirely in computers to resolve conflicts without “real war”.
Murderer Class Culture General Offensive Unit (GOU) the oldest model
Torturer Class GOU the next model
Abominator Class GOU the ultimate model (Falling outside Moral Constraints)

Echo of Worlds

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Meh. I have read several of his books, the best being, “The Girl With All the Gifts” (and the prequel to this). Maybe I know all his gimmicks now so that I am immune. I would call this Zootopia meets Warhammer sorta; its the continuation of a duology about the apocalyptic struggle between two multiversal empires.
But it never felt like like the stakes were truly serious or I never committed to this book. Mr. Carey can write though:

The children with their bulging bellies full of nothing but air, their xylophone ribs and exophthalmic stares. The listless men and women, exhausted by the endless wait for death.

Sufficiently Advanced Magic

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I was looking for a follow up to DCC (better known as Dungeon Crawler Carl) I overheard Cybil recommend this novel as having a world with a well-imagined magic system so I gave it a shot on audible so I could listen to it and fill time with low stakes; that’s my excuse anyways. And it did live up to having a world with a well imagined magic system.

Our protagonist in Coren Cadence an 18-yo? of noble birth and the narrative picks up with him in a tower/dungeon test which is meant to determine his magic attunement (aka specialty). But somehow his adventure takes a weird left turn and he winds up encountering “Katashi” the “Visage of Valor” who is in a battle with a very powerful sorceror named Keras. Anyway he is thereby involved in some sort of political intrigue. He winds up acquiring a magic book and a magic sword after escaping the dungeon and acquiring his attunement sigil which, he is told, is “Enchantment”.

The world has towers which are built by the ruling deities and people gain power,religio-political status and treasure by climbing the towers. Apparently all technology in the world is magical, for example at one point a new magical car is described. The world is semi-feudal in that only nobles and/or the very wealthy can train to be a sorcerer. It would be interesting if there were at least one non-magical “serf” who could provide some perspective.

After a month of downtime he goes off to a magic school which is somewhere between a military academy and Hogwart’s. Coren’s specialty is creating magic items that he can keep for himself or sell. And Coren’s journey to understand how to use mana and create items with the help of Professor Orden is one of the fun subplots of the book.

Anyway all this world building is fine and dandy even if it is sorta clunky and directly stolen from D&D. The real problems are first that the characters are developed but not really believable the book is told first person by Coren, we know that his brother Tristan has been missing for five years and that Coren is more or less asexual and somewhat autistic (which is coded as “he doesn’t like to be touched”) He is also a disappointment to his father but we don’t understand why he is a disappointment. He and his sister are the most well developed characters but they still seem more like puppets than humans.

The next big problem is that he puts the characters into dungeons and the dungeons are not very creative, at least compared to DCC (where each level has a theme and factions and substories involving the room inhabitants). The rooms all seem to have keys, trap doors or monsters stolen from D&D which is great if you are a twelve year old in 1978 rolling weird dice, but the action around solving these problems is tedious to read/hear about.

The third big problem is that the overall political story arc is confusing and never really resolved in the book. Luckily there are five more volumes according to amazon that I will not be reading in order to understand the intrigue.

The Stranger

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

replace me

Talking of Marie, he said: “She’s an awfully pretty girl, and what’s more, charming.”
After a while Marie tugged my arm and said Masson had gone to his place; it must be nearly lunchtime. I rose at once, as I was feeling hungry, but Marie told me I hadn’t kissed her once since the e…

I don’t get this book so I am mulling it over still. The book is blessedly short.

The protagonist is, Meursault, a young man in Algiers (French colony) sometime before 1942. He has attended and graduated from college in Paris and makes a living doing some sort of bookwork for a company. Presumably he is 25ish though we are never told, nor do we know his first name. His mother is in a “old people’s home” for the last three years, which is some sort of public service the best choice for the indigent mother of a young man with limited means. He seems to be respected for his education and reasonably prepossessing. Our protagonist’s mother dies and he attends her vigil (where they sit together all night) and then a funeral the following day. Because of his exhaustion he drinks coffee and falls asleep that night. At the funeral he attends but does not “make nice.” He returns home and lives his life. He meets Marie and falls into a sexual relationship with her. She wants to marry him and he is willing to marry her - but its not his idea - he has no faith in legal marriage. He meets Raymond who is bad news: a pimp who abuses women. But he continues to grow a relationship with Raymond Eventually, the Arab friends/relatives of the girl Raymond beats up return to get revenge. This happens at the beach and Meursault takes Raymond’s gun for self-defense. He winds up shooting and killing one of the knife-armed arabs. Part 2 of the book begins with Meursault in jail awaiting his trial. And there is not much to it other than the prosecution tries him not on evidence but on character assassination (centered around the his lack of demonstrable grief at the death of his mother, for example, what sort of monster can’t stay awake all night for the vigil!) and his public defender is simply a placeholder. The farcical trial ends in a predestined conviction and the death penalty. The book ends with Meursault visited by a priest who wants him to accept Jesus before his execution (by guillotine), but Meursault isn’t having it; he is an atheist through and through. The world moves on.

James

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

In Huckleberry Finn, especially in the last few chapters, poor old Jim puts up with so much bullshit, especially galling is that Jim has been emancipated and has this fact withheld from him in order for Tom Sawyer and Huck to play pretend heroes. And of course the Twain version of slavery wasn’t even attempting to hold a candle to the existential horror of real world slavery.

In this book Jim (James) can mock the whites who assume he is dumb. And then the plot spins out of control to the point where James is taking bloody revenge on the whites who are holding his wife. And finally we see James escaping to Canada.

This book could not exist without Huckleberry Finn and you should read Huck Finn before you read this.

King Sorrow

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

A group of mostly 20 year old adults at a New England college decide to help their less privileged friend who is being blackmailed by a couple of drug dealing thugs. And of course their “help” turns out to be an occult summoning (and ritual binding) of a dragon. They agree that in return for killing the blackmailers on their behalf they will provide a new target for the dragon (who the kids named “King Sorrow”) to kill every easter. The rest of the book concerns how the group ages from easter to easter and the ramifications of the dragon killings.

The narrative starts in 1989 and does not complete until 2022. The characters are mostly believable and take some interesting character journeys (including dying.) Likewise the narrative takes you through brief sketches of pop culture. So overall you have long term soap opera with likeable characters, something for everybody and you just want to understand how the kids will somehow get free of the curse they unleashed.

Fun read. I enjoyed especially the explanation of origins of “internet trolls”.

The Passion According to G.H.

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

I pushed today to finish this thing. And having finished, I have to wonder, why did I finish this book?

“I was seeing something that would only make sense later—I mean, something that only later would profoundly not make sense. Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning—that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees. The lack of meaning would only overwhelm me later. Could realizing the lack of meaning have always been my negative way of sensing the meaning? it had been my way of participating.”

That quote is very representative of all the prose in this story(?) and, additionally explains perhaps the overall meaning of the text. Or it doesn’t.

The overall narrative is by and about the protagonist G.H, a self-made, independent, wealthy sculptor who lives in the penthouse of an (I assume) Rio de Janiero skyscraper. The day after her latest maid quits G.H. investigates the maid’s room and discovers that the maid (apparently) drew on the wall behind the door a bas-relief floor to ceiling drawing of G.H. and a man. Though not stated specifically, I assume the image was not flattering.

G.H. then starts poking around looking for further damage and in that process opens an armoire only to discover a cockroach which starts crawling to the front of the cabinet. G.H. freaks out, impulsively slamming the cabinet door, which then crushes the cockroach leaving its head and eyes half emerged. Then some white pus(?) emerges from the bug’s broken carapace and G.H. spends a significant amount of verbiage debating on whether or not she needs to eat the white goo. She also passes out at one point. Later on, she does eat the white goo then she spits out the white goo.

My takeaway is that the entire book is cryptic with each chapter a self contradictory screed. G.H. comes off as petty and mean. I have the feeling that there ought to be some intertextual communication between this text and “The Metamorphosis”… if only I could explain it.

The biggest benefit to me reading this book is that it gives me a writing style that I would love to be able to mimic, so I have an exercise for myself.

Tigana

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Some guy on tiktok says this is better than Rothfuss’s “Name of the Wind” and began reading this to find out. What I found out is that this is a much more ambitious novel than Rothfuss. But I also found that it was slow and I lost patience with it. It seemed like each time the plot began to move forward it decided to digress to some new aspect of the world (or the struggle of the protagonist). Or maybe the problem was me and that I am a little burned out with reading. Anyway with about a hundred pages left I bailed out and skip, skip, skipped ahead hoping for some traction which I never found. So sadly, in spite of interesting likeable characters and strong verbiage, I am outta here.

Atonement

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

The long afternoons she spent browsing through dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were “esoteric,” a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in “shameless auto-exculpation,” the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a “cursory” journey through the night, the king’s furrowed brow was the “hieroglyph” of his displeasure.

I read this because I was looking for a “car” (audio) book and it was on sale through audible for fifty cents. (Note, not that much a bargain as I could have put this book on hold at the library and gotten it in a couple weeks - damn those clever marketing emails.) I had already read a couple of McEwan’s books and I had a pretty strong idea as to what I would experience, that is, dozens of collectible crafted passages and at some point, a twist that would make my stomach sink.

The setting is a hot day in July, late 30’s england, a manor house not too different than from ‘Downton Abbey’. The book tells the story of one seemingly simple then suddenly very traumatic day in the lives of the Tallises and then the aftermath.

Our main characters are Briony Tallis is a 12-year-old very precocious writer who is going to put on a play she has written. Cecilia is Briony’s older sister who is back from her first year at college. Robby Turner is also back from his first three years at Cambridge where he is doing extremely well such that he wants to study medicine. Robby is the son of the Tallis’s cleaning woman whose father left when when he was a small child, Mr Tallis has chosen to sponsor Robby’s education in spite of class differences.

The story’s core is with Briony who innocently observes the sudden unexpected conflagration of a love affair between Cecilia and Robby Turner, which begins with a fight over a broken vase. Later in the day various family members including Robby are invited to the Tallis’s for a dinner party. Robby who has realized that he is in love and carelessly asks Briony to give the note that contains some naughty words to Cecilia which, Briony, of course must read. Things take their course and the affair is consummated when the couple sneak off into the library; sneaky, curious, Briony, of course, naively witnesses the (non-explicit) intimacy in the Library.

The rest of the story is quite dramatic and worth reading. No spoilers.

Venomous Lumpsucker

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

We had pawned those animals, intending to buy them back one day when things were a bit less stretched, and now the pawn shop had burned to the ground with all the animals inside.

This is really dark and yet funny and yet, at the end still dark and yet, I still say funny/dark and I plowed through it at high speed.

The main plot device is the idea that this an earth maybe 10 years in the future where earth’s environment is degrading so quickly that ecological regulation is controlled using “extinction credits” analogous to “carbon credits” (eg with carbon credits you get money/tax incentives for planting trees/not cutting down trees and with extinction credits you are incentive-ized not to destroy species.) In any case, the rules are that if you extinct one “normal” species it costs one extinction credit but if you extinct a species which is “certified intelligent” it costs thirteen credits. (Yes, the central premise is flawed but IMHO, plausible enough.)

Our two protagonists are Karin Resaint, a biologist who evaluates species for potential intelligence, and Halyard (no first name ever given), a bureaucrat in charge of using and managing extinction credits for a large mining company. Resaint has just certified that the titular species of the book, the Venomous Lumpsucker is “intelligent”. Halyard is the functionary who has sold out the extinction credits that would be paid for the intelligent fish. And suddenly a unprecedented hack attack has destroyed all the world’s biobanks, a disaster with the secondary effect that causes the price of extinction credits to skyrocket, and therefore Halyard’s seemingly minor accounting fraud to also skyrocket in value (making the buy back of the sold credits disasterously expensive). That’s the setup. Halyard tries to convince Resaint not to certify her fish as intelligent and when that fails all sorts of hijinks ensue as Halyard attempts various gambits to avoid prison.

This story works because the personalities of Halyard and Resaint are entirely plausible, with Resaint as rational to the point of seeming autism, fatalistic but functional while Halyard is completely amoral but also just a normal guy who didn’t do anything millions of tax-cheats haven’t done but got unlucky. As well, the writing is funny because Mr. Beauman creates plausible but ridiculous situations for our characters to navigate (sorry I can’t just quote things - too long) Lastly, this being science fiction, those situations often revolve around science and technology being used in unconventional, amusing ways.

Leftists sometimes asserted that within a capitalist framework there could never be a solution to the extinction crisis that was untainted by profiteering and abuse, because the free market was like some malevolent AI, infinitely more devious than the humans who thought they could constrain it; but Resaint’s own proposal was simply that each of the hundred thousand wealthiest individuals on earth should be randomly assigned a vulnerable species and then informed that if their assigned species were ever to go extinct they would be executed by hanging.

Letters From an Imaginary Country

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Someday, I would like to write a book that isn't about Rick Chambers or Astarte. It would be the sort of book George Eliot could have written, about life in a country town and the people who live there, their jealousies, their ambitions, the minutiae of their lives. How they fall in love with the wrong people, or the right people at the wrong time, or lose the mercantile business on which their fortune is built. Or misplace wills. You know, literature.
But I’ve never experienced any of those things myself. All I know is monsters.

This is an anthology of stories by Theodora Goss and the first story, which seems suspiciously like the best one, is “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter”. The story is about the female children of literary mad scientists (Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, Dr Moreau etc) who get together and rent a house then they live their lives, knitting, having tea, doing charity work, whatever, happily ever after. Does that sound entirely calm and cozy? I hope so.

I read most of the stories and found them all entirely well crafted and generally enjoyable if not entirely riveting. If you want riveting, then read Exhalation by Ted Chiang.

Bel Canto

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser, et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle, s’il lui convient de refuser.
Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame, and it is quite in vain that one calls to it, if it chooses to refuse.

I can almost read the french part (from the opera Carmen) thanks to Duolingo. :-)

I picked this up out of my TBR as a break from two good but loooooong novels. Its an oldie but a goody. Amazing writing and very difficult to choose just one pull quote.

Set in an unnamed South American country (Peru maybe?), a diplomatic dinner party is held with the entertainment provided by a world famous opera soprano singer Roxanne Coss. During her performance the venue is invaded by terrorists who then hold everybody hostage. After a couple days most of the women and servants are freed so that there only remain fifty-ish men, and the singer who stays to care for her male accompanist. The negotiations with the government drag on for more than four months. During that time intense relationships form between the hostages, Roxanne and even their captors. The story, told in third person, shifts narration to follow multiple characters but the main POV is that of Gen the polyglot translator. The stories of the relationships are very engrossing but you begin to be aware that all the relationships will (and must) come to a sudden inevitable end as do all hostage dramas.

When she got the song exactly right she took it straight through to the end without a flutter of hesitation. It was impossible to say that her singing had improved, but there was something in her interpretation of the lines that had shifted almost imperceptibly. She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room. A breeze made the sheers at the window shiver for a moment but everything else was still. There was not a sound from the street. There was not a sound from the two yellow birds.

The Teleportation Accident

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Woodkin's diction was so gracefully servile that it didn't sound like he was speaking out loud so much as just drawing your attention to a particular combination of semantic units that he wondered if you might find appealing.

I am on a Ned Beauman jag because I enjoyed Lumpfish so much that I had to try out his other published works.

The novel begins in 1931 Berlin and it has as its protagonist a young man, Egon Loeser, a wealthy, german intellectual and theatre set designer. Egon’s biggest problem is that simply can not “get laid”, such that early on in the story he believes that he had a “near miss” with an attractive young lady, Adele Hitler, and he spends the remainder of the novel pursuing her, in the process emigrating first to Paris and then to Los Angeles. His non-sexual obsession is to develop a theatrical “teleportation device”, that is to say a “prop” with special effects to “teleport” actors to different areas of the stage during a play. The device is in homage to his idol, a famous set designer, Lavancini who, in 1679, somehow blew up a theatre, killing 25 people, during a play which for the first time included a teleportation device.

This is weird book that I would compare to “The Big Lebowski” in that Loeser is very quirky and clueless, for example, he is terrified of riding in anything but a tram, but he comes to LA(!) and attempts at first to get around on foot. While he does not identify as a “detective” he is, throughout the book, trying to find his “damsel”, Adele. Of course he runs into people who thwart his quest and in at least a couple of cases the situations he encounters are hilarious. Much of the book is concurrent with World War II and Egon keeps encountering Jewish refugees, prior “friends”, he thought he left behind in Berlin, all the while Loeser sincerely professes not to know anything about politics.

This book will be for some readers, such as me, hilarious but I gotta figure this is not for everybody.

Boxer, Beetle

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

With the help of his theories, his experiments, and also, in some less tangible way, his nightly examinations of the boy, he had bred this beetle as mighty as a rat or a dog, this Seth Roach among insects, this creature of snuffed candles and iron railings and dried blood crushed up in the fist of science, and it still had the deconstructed swastika on its wings, prouder than ever. He had proven his genius. He imagined vast maternity wards named after him, babies doing calculus and callisthenics in their first weeks of life.

This is two stories in one, in present day London, Kevin Broom, a professional collector of nazi memorabilia, and sufferer of “trimethylaminuria” (a horrible genetic defect that renders the sufferer permanently to smell like rotting fish, to the point where they are entirely isolated from other humans) has somehow gotten on the radar of a hired assassin. Apparently the hit man is trying to find a specimen of an extremely rare (possibly extinct) beetle, ‘Anophthalmus hitleri’ and he takes Kevin along with him for help.

The central second story occurs during the run up to WWII when british fascists and sympathizers were accepted in public life. It concerns the beetle’s discoverer, Phillip Erskine a young british entomologist, fervent believer in eugenics who has used selective breeding to develop the aforementioned “hitler beetle”. Erskine is a closeted, self-denying homosexual who, when not selectively breeding insects, develops an obsession with Seth (‘Roach’) Sinner, a five foot tall, gay, rabidly alcoholic, self destructive jewish boxer whose incredible strength, toughness has him destined for a boxing championship, that is, if he can control his urges. What the beetle and the boxer have in common, is immense strength completely out of proportion to their diminutive size.

The story follows, mostly, Phillip’s visit to his father’s (seeming) castle where a yearly meeting of other wannabe nazis is happening and Sinner comes along for the ride because Erskine knows that Sinner can’t be trusted on his own. The story dwells on the silly obsessions of the british upper classes and far right and at the same time manages to explain how the hitler beetle disappeared.

Bauman seems to enjoy writing about people who are quirky with excruciating, politically incorrect behavior and he wrings remarkably rich humor from these misfits. I was entertained but I will freely admit that this not the sort of narrative that will appeal to most other readers.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

Last week I saw a tiktok where a young woman breathlessly described this book as “swashbuckling” (or was it “adventurous”?) and all I could think was that she watched the Guy Ritchie movie and assumed that it had some bearing on what happened in the book. And actually having read the book cover to cover (mostly) I can say that the best thing about reading the book is having the right to say to that tiktok influencer, “I have read the book and you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about!”. And also it gives me the ability to watch three or four different movie-adaptations and commiserate with the poor screen writers choices about what to cut/streamline in the shambling mound of spaghetti that is the plot of this novel.

Having said that, and feeling much better I gotta give Dumas credit because he wrote that thing to be released a chapter at a time every week or two and there aren’t any gigantic plot holes (that I know of. please don’t flame me.). On the other hand I have to say that the book is slow, verbose as well as hard to follow at points, which, now living in the time of rampant AI, isn’t a problem because you can just ask, “what did I just read?”, and get instant gratification. Overall the prose in this book is just ok though a few passages, at certain critical junctures are striking. (and anyway this is a translation from french so whats the point of ragging on prose?)

I am not a historian of fiction so I can’t tell you if this is the first revenge thriller ever, but the best movie analogue I thought of is Mission Impossible, because a big feature of the plot is that Dantes disguises himself in order to use the Abbée Busoni and Lord Wilmore as his alter egos.

This book has lots of “wealth/power porn” where Dumas name-drops the painter of the paintings on the walls, the manufacturer of vases on the tables, the lineage of a horse, where the amazing, delicious fish came from, etc, the same way current writers tell you exactly what model of Porsche the hero is driving. And the Count never goes anywhere at normal speed, and instead arranges horse relays, has a yacht waiting for him, etc so that his travel takes hours when normally it might be day. I think contemporaneous male readers of his story appreciated this, while the 19th century brand-placement goes over a modern readers head.

And going back to my earlier point about this not being a “swashbuckling” novel, it isn’t swashbuckling “on screen” by the Count, but, his servants act, in, at times, swashbuckling and/or gallant ways on his behalf, for example when Ali stops the runaway horse for Mrs Villefort. And then there are his bandit friends in Italy and Haydée his beautiful greek slave girl. He has a lot of really nice swashbuckling acquaintances and props, but the Count never actually breaks out a rapier (though he does practice with a very expensive flintlock).

His actual revenge methods are relatively indirect, with Danglar’s downfall the most directly caused by the Count. In particular you see the Count commit wire (telegraph) fraud (in one of the most amusing chapters) in order to harm Danglar’s investments. And then, when Danglars flees his bank failure in France, the Count’s italian bandit friends (at Dante’s direction) capture and extort from him to enact vengeance, Danglars remains alive though poor at the end of the book.

On the other hand, the count’s most important and guilty victim Villeforte’s demise is also non fatal: he goes insane, but his insanity is the result of his wife being a serial murderer (poisoner) and the revelation that he has a bastard son, Benedetto who is a criminal on trial for murder. Now, Dantes did find Benedetto, set him up with a false noble identity (Cavalcanti) and give him a very handsome, though temporary, salary with the intent of getting him married to Danglar’s daughter Eugenie. But the Count did not engineer Benedetto’s murder and resultant appearance before before Villeforte, nor did he arrange Madame Villeforte to be a serial killer. This is all deux ex machina Dumas, but hey, I’m sure it made the readers happy. And, my point is, that any adaptation of this book is probably gonna rewrite this part of the plot to give the Count more direct agency in Villeforte’s downfall.

Yes, I am skipping over Dante’s crisis over the morality of his revenge and probably ten other important points, but I am done. Anyway, in keeping with my tradition, here is a nice pull quote:

Morrel advanced with a firm, manly tread, and poor Barrois followed him, as he best might. Morrel was only thirty-one, Barrois was sixty years of age; Morrel was deeply in love, and Barrois was dying of heat and exertion. These two men, thus opposed in age and interests, resembled two parts of a triangle, presenting the extremes of separation, yet possessing their point of union. This point of union was Noirtier, and it was he who had just sent for Morrel with the request that he would Waste no time in coming to him, - a command which Morrel obeyed to the letter, to the great discomfiture of Barrois.

Razorblade Tears

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:28:36 GMT

This was a distraction from the longish books I will be reading for a least a couple more weeks. Ike and Buddy Lee are the mourning fathers of married couple, their sons, victims of a vicious, unsolved murder. Ike, if he was cast in a movie would be played by Issac Hayes or maybe Ving Rhames, Buddy Lee would be played by Sam Eliot (as noted twice in the book’s dialog ) The boys are both very old school: homophobic ex-gang member Ike, and racist, ex-moonshiner Buddy Lee. They have an odd-couple partnership, where they must both overcome their atavistic impulses to succeed in the investigation of their son’s murders. Of course the murderers are members of a bike gang… this book is just over 300 pages and it has a happy (ish - I mean you know from the jump that Buddy Lee must die) ending.

The prose is smooth and SHARP not unlike (maybe) moonshine…

Buddy Lee leaned his chair back on two legs before letting it rest on all four again. He rubbed his face with his left hand. The wound on his right hand was pulsating under its bandage. He took a sip from a mason jar that had a nebulous form floating near the bottom. Once upon a time it had been a half of a peach. He’d found the jar in his closet hidden behind his winter clothes. Like a squirrel and his nuts, Buddy Lee sometimes forgot where he kept his emergency rations.

Its the type of book that could be a screenplay by simply reformatting the document and as mentioned earlier I have ideas for the casting.