Book Thread 2022

Books, comics, TV, music
221

I finished an unusual book this week that is really sticking with me. I picked up Devil House by John Darnielle (goodreads) on a whim. I heard that it was a horror novel written by the Mountain Goats guy, that it was good, and that’s all.

It is not a horror novel. At least, not like the genre stuff I normally read. It’s the story of a true crime author coming to grips with writing about horrible tragedies, and contains several aborted attempts to cover two such stories. The prose is incredibly engaging throughout, and I find myself still idly trying to connect loose threads together days later. If you’re looking for something a bit macabre and occasionally challenging, this was a unique experience.

222

Just finished the first one, Rivers of London, and it was pretty good. It wasn’t Butcher by any stretch in tone, far more of a London bloke getting into the magical but being a regular Londoner throughout. Butcher starts out with a heavy Noir feel and has the joking jackass that’s already established, this was far more about world building and minor British snark. Also pretty bloody and nasty.

There were definitely some areas where the two crossed over, after all the roots of European magic/folklore are strong in the US as well, so there was the occasional pentagram and some basic lore that matched, but the tone of the writing both in exposition and dialogue was really different.

Finally, I do have to throw a bone to Butcher, I bounced off the first book hard the first time I tried, and then a few years later I powered through into the second book and was hooked by the gills. Give it another chance, it’s definitely more of an 80’s-90’s attitude with some awkward noir, but the world building is exceptional.

223

Another thread reminded me, if you have any, any at all interest in MMA and more than a passing interest in noir sprinkled with snark, you really should read Suckerpunch and the next two that complete the trilogy. Fantastic writing about the pain and training that go into MMA, wrapped around some great crime novel scenarios, with very funny internal monologue in first person, but no “The dame’s legs walked in five minutes before she crossed my door . . .” type stuff.

224

Halfway through book 2 now and I really really like this series. I drove the whole way to work this morning with a huge grin on my face listening to it. Exquisite detail, awesome action set pieces, excellently drawn characters, darkly humorous, it is shaping up to be one of my favorite fantasy reads in years.

225

On book 3, and liking it. While Butcher pretty much stays in the fantastical world with noir snark in the real world, these stay in the real world through the vast majority of the book and are police procedurals far more than they are magic books. Really enjoying it.

226

Accurate description!

Peter’s voice is just the best.

227

I wonder if I would be bored if he were American, but I’m enjoying the (as far as I know) accurate internal monologue of a young Londoner a lot. Thankfully he isn’t leaning into the Cockney rhyming slang, which I find insufferable, because I can’t figure it out. ;)

228

I just finished the most recent Peter Grant/Rivers of London book Amongst Our Weapons and it was quite strong. Even at 9 books, the series is maintaining a solid level of quality, with a couple of slightly weaker efforts (the jazz and unicorn ones, I’m looking at you.) But the average book in this series is QUITE good.

And Peter’s voice is quite key. As a side note, although John Scalzi’s Lock In series is sci-fi not fantasy, I feel it is a spiritual sibling to the Rivers of London and Scalzi’s protagonist Chris Shane reminds me of Peter Grant in several ways, including the propensity for property damage (Grant has destroyed more acreage but Shane probably has racked up a higher dollar value; threeps are expensive.)

229

Damn. I tend to enjoy things despite police procedurals elements, not because of them.

230

Can’t argue taste! It’s worth trying the first one and maybe the second, they are quickly paced and not overly long, the procedural element has a bunch of the Laundry Files taste around the bureaucracy (I challenge anyone to spell that word on the first attempt) but aren’t nearly as dedicated to it. Kind of like Peacemaker, I’m pleasantly surprised that all the characters that constitute the police structure are competent, there aren’t any broad-brush schlubs like Butcher has. Even the theoretical schlub makes good by the third book, and he’s a minor-minor player. It’s just “regular London bloke sees magic, wants in, gets in over his head but no major MacGuffins to get out.”

I guess more specifically, there’s no Butcher-esque sneering at the police and their inability to admit magic exists despite blunt examples, instead it’s more of a layered thing where the people who are in the know are already on board, though obviously stepping around it as much as possible in service of keeping the peace.

231

Me from May 2021 in the previous Book thread:

Michael Lewis’ The Premonition just came out. His book The Fifth Risk was so good, I had to pre-order The Premonition when I learned of its existence last month. Michael Lewis is a really good story-teller about things that are happening around us in contemporary life.

I really didn’t feel like reading a book about the pandemic during the pandemic, so I didn’t actually crack it open until this weekend. Oh my god, this is such a good book. I think this might be Michael Lewis’ best book yet. I can’t recommend it enough. You learn so much in this book about how our institutions work, how certain gift individuals can make a huge difference, how the CDC as an organization is so bad at certain things and great at other things, how the health system and private industry are so good at certain things and so bad at other things. It makes you cheer at times, and it makes you groan in frustration at times.

What’s funny is that reading this in 2022, you know where it’s all headed. We know that despite these characters and the stuff they came up with and the difference they made in planning and changing pandemic planning and modeling, things still ended up in a terrible place, so it’s interesting to see it playing out. I’m in that section of the book now where we’re past January of 2020, and things are actually hitting the fan, and there’s a lot that we know as readers, but there’s a lot we don’t know about what these characters that we’ve been following throughout the book, how what they’re dealing with and how it played out. It’s riveting stuff.

232

Couple random books I’ve read recently:

The Wizard’s Butler by Nathan Lowell. This was not what I expected! Basically, a combat vet with anger issues takes a job as an old man’s butler because he can’t hold a job post-Afghanistan, and falls in love with the calming nature of the routine and the satisfaction of helping out an old guy. The author is pretty skillful at presenting that core conceit, and keeps the narrative moving while also depicting the coziness of the (tight first-person) protagonist’s whole situation.

The magic is there but almost completely incidental. This could have easily been a mundane setting, but the magic does add a nice sense of wonder from time to time. Works overall quite well I thought.

Some clumsiness in the conflict and the antagonist, but eh. That’s just there to give some kind of actual skeleton upon which to hang the meat of the novel. Less of an issue here than you’d think.

There’s more than a little wealth worship and “nobility of service” nonsense going on here that I have some issues with, but there’s also some real appreciation for beauty and selflessness.

Regardless, as something very different and actively an inversion of typical adventure fantasy, I enjoyed it. Six bespoke dinner jackets out of a round seven.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson. World War Z, but with robots – a series of vignettes that sketch in an AI that achieves the singularity and decides to turn all the many near-future servant robots and smart cars and whatnot to the popular pastime of murdering all the humans, but with the twist that its goal is the study of life in all its infinite variety, so no nukes etc. Surprisingly compelling given how lukewarm I remain on the core conceit. Author has an advanced degree in robotics and it shows; the robo-porn (not actual porn, like engineering porn) is really good, and feels in many ways like good mil-sci-fi.

Some horror elements here and there. Definitely feels written for the screen in a lot of ways. Ultimately pretty shallow, much more action-oo-rah than idk Murakami musing on the human condition by way of whatever awful fever dreams he’s gripped by this week, for sure.

Popcorn, undoubtedly, but I also motored through it in I think two nights. Would easily recommend it to the Weber or Crichton crowds. Seven spider-tanks out of eleven.

233

I was on the fence about adding it to my list until this right here. Thanks.

234

There was a 1959 Nero Wolfe pilot that never went anywhere. It may have been mentioned here but if not it’s on Youtube. It’s notable for William Shatner playing Archie Goodwin.

235

Wow, thanks!

236

I made my way through The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson, who is, as far as I can tell, an actual professional historian of ancient Egypt. It was a pretty good political history of, well, several thousand years. (It’s totally wild how long the pharaohs were around for.) I was hoping for more daily life kind of stuff; part of my fascination with the subject is just that it’s so old and I figure things must have been so totally different even from how I imagine it. I guess that there’s just not that much writing that’s survived about daily life, especially from the Old and Middle Kingdoms–it’s mostly propaganda and prayers, and I guess accounting that he didn’t really go into. Still, he did make a point (repeatedly) about how the Egyptian state existed basically just to extract as much as physically possible from the peasants, and that it wasn’t like some great antediluvian communal paradise or something.

While I do wish there was more detail about how we know what we know (i.e. historical and archaeological evidence), I can definitely recommend it to the interested layperson. I now feel at least somewhat competent in my understanding of Egyptian history; I could tell you that putting a chariot in your scene of pyramid construction is about as anachronistic as having a Roman legionary fighting against a chariot. (Much more so, just going by the numbers; some 2000 years separate the pyramids and the late bronze age, so it would be more like putting a tank in the Roman coliseum.)

237

I also just finished Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace, and it’s definitely a fitting sequel to A Memory Called Empire; if you liked the latter you should also pick up the former. I think it develops the (what I find to be) more interesting science fiction ideas (such as shared consciousness) much better than its prequel, and similarly cuts back on a lot of the (again, IMO) overdone worldbuilding about being a barbarian in a great empire where everything is about ~poetry, sigh~.

Definitely give the series a spin if you’re looking for good, contemporary science fiction.

238

I finished reading Age of Ash, the first book in a new series from Daniel Abraham. Now, I’m a huge Daniel Abraham fanboy. I discovered him with the story The Cambist and Lord Iron, which you should read. I mean, now. Go, click, read. That lead me to the Long Price Quartet, which has one of the most unique and interesting magic systems in a fantasy series I’ve encountered. Then The Expanse, of course, and also The Dagger and the Coin, a more straightforward epic fantasy, which is not really my bag these days, but had super interesting bad guys and went to some cool places.

So now we have Age of Ash, the first in the promised “Kithamar Trilogy”. And I found it incredibly disappointing. It doesn’t have clever, unique ideas like his other works. It move ploddingly. The central conflict isn’t revealed until halfway through the book. It is mostly about characters who are part of an underclass in their city and their struggles to survive from day to day. Which is fine, but this goes on for hundreds of pages. If you want to read a fantasy novel about characters finding as many gig work jobs as they can, this is for you.

The character arcs just feel very rote and predictable. It commits the cardinal sin, which is that it is boring. I don’t understand how Daniel Abraham wrote this. I certainly hope he returns to his more interesting, creative works when he’s done with this.

239

If you want to dive more into the archaeological foundation of what we know about the pre-dynastic, old kingdom, and middle kingdom - as well as more about day-to-day life vs political history - I would highly recommend the two books by John Romer - A History of Ancient Egypt Volumes 1 and 2 which is very grounded in archaeology and period texts, and purposely tries to avoid speculation and projecting later period information into the past.

Beyond the history of the period, he goes into the history of the history - how we came to know what we know. The famous archaeologists, tomb raiders, and scholars - what they learned and how they passed it on to us.

240

Wow, thanks! Definitely putting that on my list.