The Royal Library of Alexandria (SP Book Discussion)

[OhBollox]

Horror set during the Crusader states, when Christian and Muslim had a long succession of mild disagreements, and a knight on his way home gets tasked with taking a holy relic out of Jerusalem, on the orders of the church, against the wishes of the king. The trip does not go well.

I was pleased to find this is moderately well written and has had at least some research put into it; there’s a lot I could nitpick, but if you’re not a medieval history nerd you won’t notice. It’s also 600+ pages, which I appreciate, because it means the writer had something very definite in mind, and wasn’t aiming for generic tripe carefully edited to fit into 300 pages or less.

[OhBollox]

A Brief History of Fire

[univac]

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. A history of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Shirer had an interesting perspective being a journalist and war correspondent, not a historian, who lived and reported in Germany and other European nations during the rise of Nazism and the first few years of WWII.

[OhBollox]

Ennis’ run of Punisher Max in its entirety is great. I’ve never seen the character to well-defined, and yet reduced to its essentials, with no extraneous bullshit or sympathising.

Score another one for Buehlmann. A fairly basic, but superbly written, story of a man going back to his roots when advised not to. Not as good as Lesser Dead, but still blows most horror books out of the water by comparison.

[rinelk]

Recent reads:
Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey. Neo-noir with Magic, demons, and angels. It felt kind of like it was aiming to be dumb ultra-violence, and did okay with that. I was hoping for something a little more cleverly plotted or likeable, but the main character is a thuggish supernatural hitman, not a detective.

Witch King, Martha Wells. After Murderbot, I had high hopes for this high fantasy. It was decent, but it felt like it didn’t want to give readers a huge worldbuilding info-dump, so I kept feeling like I didn’t understand the implications of anything for the first half of the book. It was a little disorienting, but I’m okay with it. Hope there’ll be sequels.

Last Call, Tim Powers. I tried reading this a while ago, and the POV character in the first few pages aims to do something awful to his son. I’m not keen on violence toward children in my recreation, so I noped out of it for a year or so, figuring I was never going to care about a protagonist who started off that in need of redemption. Finally decided to give it another shot, and I’m glad I did, because that POV character isn’t the protagonist. Still, it pulls the usual Powers magic of weaving supernatural explanations around history, but does it for Vegas. I cannot bring myself to care about Vegas. It holds no appeal for me, and I can’t muster enough judgment to think badly of people who are enamored of it. So I think this was my first experience with Powers which wasn’t a home run. Not bad, just too into the Vegas aesthetic, both in setting and characters, for my tastes.

Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree. I’ve appreciated stories in fantastical settings which aren’t about anything terribly high stakes. So, this is basically a vanilla D&D setting, but starts with an adventurer’s retirement to run a coffee shop. Had a couple of aggravating moments, but it’s basically gentle zoomer fiction of a type I find I want rarely, but which I appreciate as a palate-cleanser.

Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. Very high fantasy, sort of intricate, pretty good. Not sure if I want to continue with the series, because this one ended in a place that seemed like a shift in tone which seemed to pull the whole thing in a direction I don’t love.

Starter Villain, John Scalzi. The dude’s good enough that he can just run with whatever stupid, fun idea he gets excited about and make it work well enough, so long as you don’t take it too seriously. Popcorn.

And, in between all of those, I’ve been reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber & David Wengrow. It’s interesting, well-written, and yet I can’t take much of it at a time. Partly, that’s because there’s an awful lot of “Everyone else says X, but we alone will tell you that obviously not-X”, which is a framing I tend to find tiresome, especially as I don’t know nor care to learn enough about archaeology to know how fair they’re being. I get the desire to make it feel relevant, but it just feels like most of what they’re telling me is selected and interpreted through a motivated, modern lens. So even pretty neat stuff about archaeology leaves me doubting whether it’s leaving me with an accurate picture. I’m still only about halfway through it.

[OhBollox]

[rinelk]

Oh, Declare was terrific. I totally dug The Drawing of the Dark. On Stranger Tides and The Anubis Gates were quite good. Overall, I’m still very impressed with Powers (and I think it was you and others here who brought him to my attention, and you have my gratitude). That’s largely why Last Call, which was inventive and interesting, still managed to be a disappointment.

[OhBollox]

Ahhh, yes, we’ve discussed it before, apologies.

[rinelk]

No need! I’m always glad to see Tim Powers advocacy.

[doublebullout]

I had fun with Starter Villain. Definitely lighter fare, and that’s a Good Thing sometimes. Scalzi + Wil Wheaton = Audible gold.

[whovian223]

Loved Starter Villain! Highly recommend it.

[OhBollox]

Top 10. Alan Moore does superhero cops in a way that doesn’t lose anything from either genre, and it’s just superb. The writing is amazing, how this isn’t a Netflix series is beyond me, and Ha’s art goes from stupendously grandiose vistas to the intimately personal from page to page. This is the first book where I’ve appreciated the individual panel view option because the framing is that good. I still have my original comics of this, and I never managed a complete run. After twenty years I finally have read all of this short series.

Amusingly written, if a little too neoliberal for me, and of course it stops at Elizabeth I instead of getting into the modern lot.

Laughed my back off. Essentially, if you haven’t seen Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace then you should, and this book is a continuation of the central conceit, a horror writer incapable of anything but terrible prose, overwriting, self-inserts, and generally mistreating everyone around him. This is up there with Ayoade’s audiobooks, and only the man himself can do them justice. Wanders close to becoming turgid at times, but is relentlessly rescued by plumbing minutiae, crassly-written female characters, awful nonsensical plotting, and every other writing sin you can think of, finished off with the commentary of a talentless hack who doesn’t understand anything and has zero self-awareness. Perfect.

[rinelk]

Babel, R.F. Kuang. I can see why it was nominated for the Hugo. Ultimately, I was a bit disappointed in how consistently angry it felt. That could have been sufficiently leavened by cool etymology and a magic system all about words, but I’m kind of feeling like I’ve had enough of books telling readers how important books and stories and words are. I get that the audience self-selects, so books can make readers feel special this way. But it feels like empty pandering, and, now that Get X is making strong inroads in the “domination of Christmas music” and “stupid media/toys from our childhood becoming culturally massive” space, I feel like I’ve just had enough of that.

I’m cool with books about why colonialism is bad and how to resist it. But this one just banged that drum a lot in proportion to the hope or insight it had to offer. And it clearly flirted with moral complexity by choosing China as the primary aim of the anti-colonial effort and briefly noting that the Chinese were also limiting the export of valuable knowledge, but it just sort of … moved on from that, and treated China purely as an uncomplicated victim of empire.

In retrospect, I felt like the mood of the Poppy War series was just a bit more mean and bleak than I was really able to enjoy, and that’s kind of how I felt here, too. I’m thinking I just don’t get on well with Kuang’s overall vibe, despite finding the worldbuilding excellent.

[rinelk]

I finished the Earthsea series recently. Embarrassingly, I have always gotten Ursula Le Guin confused with Madeleine L’Engle, and what I read of L’Engle’s work seemed fine, but not entirely to my taste, so I never got into Le Guin in my youth. Earthsea struck me as insightful and gentle in a way I don’t always want, but sometimes find very appealing (and a nice contrast to Kuang).

So, I went to our bookshelf and found that my wife had an old copy of The Dispossessed. She had told me that it was just okay when she read it as an adolescent, and it’s … still just okay. Reads a bit like Bradbury’s deliberately anachronistic futures in a few places, which is entertaining, because it’s only because technology has gone in different directions than it was expected to. Culturally, that’s a bit weirder, because there’s an attempt to think through a truly egalitarian society which only mostly works (there’s one scene of sexual violence late in the book which lands very strangely now, and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given the rest of the context of the perpetrating character). But it’s very much an exploration of the idea of anarchism more than a pure story, and it’s pretty neat that it basically does what it needs to do: imagine a radically different set of social norms to enforce anarchism, and also consider how those would gradually erode the basis for anarchism in the society and replace it with power structures which maintained the illusion of freedom and equality.

Not a great book, but effective, in its way. But then, it’s relatively easy to write a book which leaves people thinking that the ideals of anarchism are noble, but that it would be massively challenging and unstable to set up. If nobody’s taking your imagined society as an end they could reasonably hope to aspire to, it’s not going to get the sort of scrutiny it might if it seemed more imminent. So it’s possible for the imagined society to be shallowly conceived in certain ways, and readers won’t notice.

[OhBollox]

A novel that quickly slides from bizarre comedy into horror. A series of crimes replicate the murder of Emmet Till, except with white victims, and then things start really getting weird. A lot of deadpan humour, which I like, and although it gets a little too strange very quickly, and the early part of the book loses some effectiveness because of it, overall it’s well worth buying in to.

[SpiceTheCat]

Recent reading. Zone One is a decent enough zombie novel set in the recovery after the zombie apocalypse, following a team clearing office buildings in lower Manhattan. Obviously it ends badly.

The Antony Beevor book is by now a classic, showing just how bad a general Montgomery was and how bad a plan Market Garden was. Obviously everything ended badly, especially if you happened to be a Dutch civilian in the occupied Netherlands afterwards.

Number Go Up has a few interesting strands. One is following FTX and Sam Bankman-Freed during the collapse of the business, and it’s clear that Zeke Faux didn’t know what conclusion to draw. The impression is that SBF was just entitled and careless, rather than actively criminal. A second strand is the pure weirdness of the NFT market and the subculture. The final, darkest, strand follows Tether and its links to human trafficking and organised crime, and wonders at its inexplicable robustness.

Plus a bunch of books about running as I’ve taken up dragging my increasingly creaky body around the local park and woods and need the inspiration.

[biffpow]

@SpiceTheCat

Plus a bunch of books about running as I’ve taken up dragging my increasingly creaky body around the local park and woods and need the inspiration.

I have run off and on throughout my life and often start again in the spring. This is the only book I’ve ever read about running, and it’s very good.

[whovian223]

Love the Beevor book.

I think I actually reviewed it!

[OhBollox]

Pulls no punches in depicting necromancy and violence in Europe during the Renaissance, as a witch attempts to avoid becoming the latest in a long line of victims of a necromancer. Excellent prose, some fine characterisation, and a well-realised historical setting.

[SpiceTheCat]

And I have now read it too. So very good.