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I haven't posted one of these in five weeks due to Wednesday's standing D&D session, resulting quite the "to be reviewed" backlog. I'm clearing it out here with this
MEGAPOST!
and will hopefully keep things on track from now on.
What I Finished Reading This Week
Hammers on Bone – Cassandra Khaw
Noir meets Lovecraft. It’s stronger than most Tor freebies—the horror (both eldritch and human) is well done indeed. But Khaw fails to fully maintain the main character’s heavy-duty hardboiled P.I. narrative voice beyond the first chapter or so, and the abrupt switch to modern-day prose somewhat undermines the overall experience. Hammers on Bone is fine as an entertaining, low investment read, but I don’t think I’ll pick up the next installment unless it's a full-length novel.
Riot Baby – Tochi Onyebuchi
This one was a mixed bag for me. As a pure revenge fantasy, it works perfectly. But as a story, it’s rushed and underdeveloped, particularly the jarring and unexplained jump from the modern day to “the modern day, but with futuristic dystopian technology.” Onyebuchi doesn’t show—or even try to handwave away—how society got from one to the other, a decision that weakens the impact of the actual racist horrors he describes so well.
Welcome to Indonesian - Stuart Robson
This short, incredibly well-written book was a pleasure to read. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the historical development of Malay and Indonesia, which filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the subject. I wish Robson had included more examples in the chapters on Indonesian words and sentence structure, but can't fault him for not doing so: that wasn't the purpose of the book and there's a very good grammar (published by Rutledge) to scratch that itch. Welcome to Indonesian is well worth checking out if you're interested in the subject.
What I Finished at Some Point in the Past Four Months
The Wicked Cometh – Laura Carlin
This one was sold to me as a combination of The House on Vesper Sands and Sarah Waters. And, well. It starts promisingly, with vividly depicted settings, and a scrappy, intelligent protagonist in whose survival I was quickly invested. The first half of the novel is great: quirky, eccentric, and memorable characters; excellent descriptions of London slums and a foreboding country manor, a love interest as intriguing to readers as she is to the protagonist, and a real sense of urgency and danger as the noose begins to tighten and the protagonist—and readers—aren’t always sure who they can trust. The protagonist’s first country outing with the love interest is a masterful combination of sweetness and simmering sexual tension that just really did it for me.
While I enjoy well-written depictions of characters overcoming period-typical homophobia as they realize their feelings for each other, there was none of that here; all the protagonist’s emotional is focused on whether her feelings are reciprocated, and that was actually quite refreshing. Unfortunately, once said feelings were reciprocated the novel bifurcated, to its detriment. The subsequent whodunit developments were as suspenseful as ever, but the romance elements devolved into syrupy, moon-eyed pining, with an overly drawn-out denouement that was both wholly predictable and wildly out of keeping with the plot’s previous gritty realism. Worse yet was how Carlin chose to get the characters to their happily-ever-after: through the tortured deathbed confession of the novel’s lone Jewish character, who experiences parental and spousal abandonment, sex trafficking, the abduction and murder of her children, and breast cancer before her demise. Carlin almost certainly meant this to illustrate how antisemitism compounded the era’s existing social ills and prejudices for this population, but visiting all this on a single character who experiences said ills (one suspects so that Carlin can include them in the novel while having the protagonists escape them), and doesn't get a happy ending while serving as the amanuensis through which the protagonist get theirs, is ironically exploitative. Not even the “two wealthy lesbians set up in a country house to read books and pursue science together” conclusion was enough to compensate for this. There’s lots to like about this book, but it made enough major missteps that I probably won't read the whole thing again.
The Awakened Kingdom – N.K. Jemisin
This is the shortest of the six Jemisin titles I’ve read and the one I liked the best by far; maybe she just works better for me as a short(ish)-story author? The opening passages perfectly capture the scattered, breathless voice of an excited toddler trying to tell a story, and it’s great fun to follow Shill’s growing maturity through the character’s increasingly ordered and self-aware narration. The plot itself was less gripping, largely because I’ve seen the “misogyny, only the genders are reversed” concept done better elsewhere. But Shill’s reaction (Sexism sucks no matter which gender’s experiencing it, so maybe let’s not do it) was pretty great, because, yeah. And I love “I am born! Hello! / Many things happen. / The end!”
The Ten Thousand Kingdoms – N.K. Jemisin
I wanted to like this book so badly. Sieh is such a great character when readers are getting glimpses of him in the other novels! But oh, this was a slog. The disjointed plot meandered. The most interesting developments regularly happened offscreen while the main character was asleep, incapacitated, or moping around while others took action. As an absolute devotee of the slow burn romance, the instalove triangle left me cold. There are no through lines to any of the characters: their personalities, motivations, and reactions are whatever they need to be to move the plot from A to B. The prose is workmanlike and often relies on clunkily modern phrases, references, or analogies (at one point Sieh describes someone as a ‘teddy bear’) that jolt me right out of the novel’s high fantasy secondary world setting. It’s frustrating, because Jemisin’s premises and worldbuilding have uniformly been things I hear about and think, “Yes, that sounds awesome!” but the execution just does not click for me.
Monstress vol. 4 – Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Be it color palette, atmosphere, or attention to detail, Takeda’s art is surpassingly beautiful and this volume is no exception. I could stare at the conservatory scenes for hours. Liu’s worldbuilding is as epic (and epically confusing) as ever; I need to reread every previous volume prior to starting a new one to retain anything more than a basic grasp on what’s occurring. But again, I read this series not for the plot but for the gorgeous art and darling, delightful Kippa, and as this volume had plenty of both, I enjoyed it on those merits alone.
The Last Graduate – Naomi Novik
I thought The Last Graduate was the conclusion to the story of the Scholomance as set up in A Wicked Education, but nope! It’s the second of (at least) a trilogy. So aaagh, I spent the last quarter of the book upset that the ending was going to be hopelessly rushed, and aaagh, I was upset when I realized it was actually a cliffhanger. But in a good way: The Last Graduate is an even better book than the first, largely, I think, because Novik was setting up the world and the stakes in the preceding volume, and in this one she’s free to force the characters to confront it.
Novik also pulls off a very tricky feat. One thing that gave me pause about A Deadly Education was how unrealistically grim it was: an absolute Lord of the Flies-esque state of nature. But it turns out El is an extremely unreliable narrator, and The Last Graduate makes this abundantly clear without Novik explicitly spelling it out, or El even realizing it—no mean authorial feat. The Scholomance isn’t an unrelenting dog-eat-dog world, El just thought it was, and so that’s the situation in which she found herself. But as she unbends little by little, she starts to accrue first favors, and then allies, and oh my god am I a sucker for “good-aligned character rallies the masses to fight systemic injustice” when the author puts in the time to make it believable, which is what happens here.
My personal speculation remains unchanged: that the enclaves’ magic is powered (at least in part) by the malia generated by fucktons of Scholomance students dying each year, so I’m interested to see how wizard society reacts to the mass liberation/prison break El orchestrated in this volume, particularly given her newly minted mass movement organizer chops. I eagerly await the release of The Golden Enclaves.
Scythe – Neal Schusterman
Oh boy. I did not like this book.
Scythe is not a good book, primarily due to its sloppy worldbuilding. The novel’s premise in a nutshell: it’s the future. All of earth is governed by an omnipotent, all-seeing, infallible AI called the Thunderhead. Countries are no more. Governments are no more. Religion is no more. Disease is no more. The human lifespan is infinite; only complete incineration is beyond science’s ability to heal. Humans can reset their physical age to 21 at any time (and are working on decreasing that limit). Married couples have scores of children over hundreds of years. The Thunderhead has solved pollution, overcrowding, climate change, natural resource depletion, animal and plant extinction, and all the other natural and human-created negative aspects of existence.
But! It turns out some people still need to permadie every year to maintain optimal population balance. Enter the “Scythes,” a hyper-select group of humans whose job it is to decide who lives and who dies, and then permakill the people in the latter group, however efficiently—or painfully and gruesomely—as they like. They are beholden to no laws but those they write for themselves. Not even the omnipotent, all-seeing, infallible Thunderhead can interfere with them.
I was super psyched about this set-up because it creates all kinds of interesting questions. But Schusterman is too lazy to bother answering any of them. To whit:
Why doesn’t the omnipotent, all-seeing, infallible Thunderhead oversee population optimization instead of fallible human beings? When humans entrust it with overseeing literally every other function of human society?
Why is the solution to overpopulation letting a very few human beings kill a set number of other human beings each year, instead of, say, birth control? Science has literally solved every other human affliction that ever existed, but not only has it not managed to pioneer better forms of birth control, apparently nobody uses any form of birth control anymore?
Come to think of it, why doesn't the omnipotent, all-seeing, infallible AI that infallibly determines everything else about human existence just infallibly determine who gets to reproduce, and when?
Why do the Scythes spend years learning how to beat people to death, stab people to death, bleed people to death, drown people to death, strangle people to death, hang people to death, flay people to death, burn people to death, poison people to death, electrocute people to death, shoot people to death, suffocate people to death, and on and on (and on), instead of just shipping their victims off to a slaughterhouse for humans? Humanity figured out how to mechanize the mass killing of animals ages ago; why don't the Scythes apply that knowledge to their human victims?
Why does human society in Schusterman's post-crime, post-religion, post-aging, post-illness, post-mortality global utopia continue to perfectly replicate lightly conservative 21st century American social norms, right down to 12 years of compulsory education, soulless middle management office jobs, and reproduction only within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual marriage? (It's not the book's gravest sin, but it's the one that pisses me off the most, because holy crap! So. Much. Wasted. Speculative. Fiction. Potential. Here.)
Why does no one bother at any point during the first 3/4 of the novel to use the foolproof DNA tracking technology that apparently always existed? Why does the foolproof DNA tracking technology suddenly stop working when one of the protagonists (but no one else) stands downwind of it? Why does it also suddenly stop working when one of the protagonists (but no one else) holds their breath when it's being used nearby?)
Why does the Thunderhead's airtight network of facial recognition cameras never fail to record evidence of a crime, until it does? Why does it never fail to track the whereabouts of every human being on the face of the earth...until it does?
Schusterman doesn't bother to answer any of this. And in the rare instances where he does try to handwave these contradictions away, it's beyond implausible. For instance:
Should someone with absolute immunity from any retaliation arbitrarily decide, out of all the billions on earth, to kill my parent, sibling, child, partner, or friend, I would hate them until the end of time, and I will only know any of these people for, at most, a single human lifetime. But after Scythes in Schusterman's world arbitrarily kill parents, siblings, children, partners, and friends people have known for thousands of years, the grieving survivors are totes okay with it, because the Scythe invites them over for a home-cooked meal afterwards. It's beyond ridiculous.
I could give many more examples in this vein, which, combined with the obligatory, underdeveloped romance and generally two-dimensional characters, did not leave much to recommend the experience to me. TL;DR: holy crap this "worldbuilding" is bad and the plot and characters humdrum. I am unlikely to read anything else by this author.
When the Tiger Came Down from the Mountain – Nghi Vo
This was definitely one of the better Tor freebies. I enjoyed the Vietnam-inspired fantasy setting, and Vo’s descriptive language is beautiful. She does an excellent job of creating a sense of space and place, of a world that’s much larger than the glimpse readers see of it in this novella, and I loved that. The Rashomon-esque story, with its bickering tiger youkai and staunch scholar monk, was a little more predictable, but well done all the same. I have added the The Empress of Salt and Fortune to my reading list.
蟲師 7 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 7 – Urushihara Yuki)
The stories in this volume are darker in tone than those in previous collections—more Magnus Archives than Welcome to Night Vale—and that really worked for me here. I especially appreciated the final two chapters, “Road of Brambles,” which were a multipart story! That called back to a story in an earlier volume! And were deliciously creepy. (Plus, parts of it reminded me of one of my favorite settings from Silver Diamond, and yeah, anything that reminds me of Silver Diamond is going to win me over.) Mushishi is really well done for what it is, but I will always enjoy a multipart story with at least some overarching plot more than I will this series’ mushi-of-the-week format. And while this volume is still very much MoTW, it was just slightly less so than other volumes, which is why it worked for me more.
蟲師 8 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 8 – Urushihara Yuki)
Alas, we’re back to Mushi of the Week in this one. The tone is also pretty dark in this volume and the last chapter contains some very Magnus Archive-esque body horror (although it obviously predates said podcast). But then there’s also the “pregnant female bodies are scary” chapter that worked much less well for me, because Japan’s “female bodies are scary” trope is not my thing in general. All that said, “Hidden Streams” was probably my favorite chapter for the atmospheric beauty of the art, and the story’s sweetness and gentle f/f potential.
What I Am Currently Reading
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends – Nicole Pelroth
The first chapter is riveting. Unfortunately, Pelroth spends the next airing personal grudges, a la trump-lite, and I just do not care, Dear Author.
River Kings – Cat Jarman
So far, this is excellent.
Mencinta Hingga Terluka – Julianto Simanjuntak and Roswitha Ndraha
My current “30 minutes a day until it’s done” read.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I picked up River Kings by Cat Jarman, Kim Krans' The Wild Unknown Tarot deck in pocket format, and Living Language Italian. (Which, do I need to learn Italian? No. But there it was, factory sealed, in the Little Free Library, and I love the Living Language format and system. And after eight years of formal Latin instruction back in the day, I should have a bit of a leg up on Italian.)
これで以上です。
MEGAPOST!
and will hopefully keep things on track from now on.
What I Finished Reading This Week
Hammers on Bone – Cassandra Khaw
Noir meets Lovecraft. It’s stronger than most Tor freebies—the horror (both eldritch and human) is well done indeed. But Khaw fails to fully maintain the main character’s heavy-duty hardboiled P.I. narrative voice beyond the first chapter or so, and the abrupt switch to modern-day prose somewhat undermines the overall experience. Hammers on Bone is fine as an entertaining, low investment read, but I don’t think I’ll pick up the next installment unless it's a full-length novel.
Riot Baby – Tochi Onyebuchi
This one was a mixed bag for me. As a pure revenge fantasy, it works perfectly. But as a story, it’s rushed and underdeveloped, particularly the jarring and unexplained jump from the modern day to “the modern day, but with futuristic dystopian technology.” Onyebuchi doesn’t show—or even try to handwave away—how society got from one to the other, a decision that weakens the impact of the actual racist horrors he describes so well.
Welcome to Indonesian - Stuart Robson
This short, incredibly well-written book was a pleasure to read. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the historical development of Malay and Indonesia, which filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of the subject. I wish Robson had included more examples in the chapters on Indonesian words and sentence structure, but can't fault him for not doing so: that wasn't the purpose of the book and there's a very good grammar (published by Rutledge) to scratch that itch. Welcome to Indonesian is well worth checking out if you're interested in the subject.
What I Finished at Some Point in the Past Four Months
The Wicked Cometh – Laura Carlin
This one was sold to me as a combination of The House on Vesper Sands and Sarah Waters. And, well. It starts promisingly, with vividly depicted settings, and a scrappy, intelligent protagonist in whose survival I was quickly invested. The first half of the novel is great: quirky, eccentric, and memorable characters; excellent descriptions of London slums and a foreboding country manor, a love interest as intriguing to readers as she is to the protagonist, and a real sense of urgency and danger as the noose begins to tighten and the protagonist—and readers—aren’t always sure who they can trust. The protagonist’s first country outing with the love interest is a masterful combination of sweetness and simmering sexual tension that just really did it for me.
While I enjoy well-written depictions of characters overcoming period-typical homophobia as they realize their feelings for each other, there was none of that here; all the protagonist’s emotional is focused on whether her feelings are reciprocated, and that was actually quite refreshing. Unfortunately, once said feelings were reciprocated the novel bifurcated, to its detriment. The subsequent whodunit developments were as suspenseful as ever, but the romance elements devolved into syrupy, moon-eyed pining, with an overly drawn-out denouement that was both wholly predictable and wildly out of keeping with the plot’s previous gritty realism. Worse yet was how Carlin chose to get the characters to their happily-ever-after: through the tortured deathbed confession of the novel’s lone Jewish character, who experiences parental and spousal abandonment, sex trafficking, the abduction and murder of her children, and breast cancer before her demise. Carlin almost certainly meant this to illustrate how antisemitism compounded the era’s existing social ills and prejudices for this population, but visiting all this on a single character who experiences said ills (one suspects so that Carlin can include them in the novel while having the protagonists escape them), and doesn't get a happy ending while serving as the amanuensis through which the protagonist get theirs, is ironically exploitative. Not even the “two wealthy lesbians set up in a country house to read books and pursue science together” conclusion was enough to compensate for this. There’s lots to like about this book, but it made enough major missteps that I probably won't read the whole thing again.
The Awakened Kingdom – N.K. Jemisin
This is the shortest of the six Jemisin titles I’ve read and the one I liked the best by far; maybe she just works better for me as a short(ish)-story author? The opening passages perfectly capture the scattered, breathless voice of an excited toddler trying to tell a story, and it’s great fun to follow Shill’s growing maturity through the character’s increasingly ordered and self-aware narration. The plot itself was less gripping, largely because I’ve seen the “misogyny, only the genders are reversed” concept done better elsewhere. But Shill’s reaction (Sexism sucks no matter which gender’s experiencing it, so maybe let’s not do it) was pretty great, because, yeah. And I love “I am born! Hello! / Many things happen. / The end!”
The Ten Thousand Kingdoms – N.K. Jemisin
I wanted to like this book so badly. Sieh is such a great character when readers are getting glimpses of him in the other novels! But oh, this was a slog. The disjointed plot meandered. The most interesting developments regularly happened offscreen while the main character was asleep, incapacitated, or moping around while others took action. As an absolute devotee of the slow burn romance, the instalove triangle left me cold. There are no through lines to any of the characters: their personalities, motivations, and reactions are whatever they need to be to move the plot from A to B. The prose is workmanlike and often relies on clunkily modern phrases, references, or analogies (at one point Sieh describes someone as a ‘teddy bear’) that jolt me right out of the novel’s high fantasy secondary world setting. It’s frustrating, because Jemisin’s premises and worldbuilding have uniformly been things I hear about and think, “Yes, that sounds awesome!” but the execution just does not click for me.
Monstress vol. 4 – Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Be it color palette, atmosphere, or attention to detail, Takeda’s art is surpassingly beautiful and this volume is no exception. I could stare at the conservatory scenes for hours. Liu’s worldbuilding is as epic (and epically confusing) as ever; I need to reread every previous volume prior to starting a new one to retain anything more than a basic grasp on what’s occurring. But again, I read this series not for the plot but for the gorgeous art and darling, delightful Kippa, and as this volume had plenty of both, I enjoyed it on those merits alone.
The Last Graduate – Naomi Novik
I thought The Last Graduate was the conclusion to the story of the Scholomance as set up in A Wicked Education, but nope! It’s the second of (at least) a trilogy. So aaagh, I spent the last quarter of the book upset that the ending was going to be hopelessly rushed, and aaagh, I was upset when I realized it was actually a cliffhanger. But in a good way: The Last Graduate is an even better book than the first, largely, I think, because Novik was setting up the world and the stakes in the preceding volume, and in this one she’s free to force the characters to confront it.
Novik also pulls off a very tricky feat. One thing that gave me pause about A Deadly Education was how unrealistically grim it was: an absolute Lord of the Flies-esque state of nature. But it turns out El is an extremely unreliable narrator, and The Last Graduate makes this abundantly clear without Novik explicitly spelling it out, or El even realizing it—no mean authorial feat. The Scholomance isn’t an unrelenting dog-eat-dog world, El just thought it was, and so that’s the situation in which she found herself. But as she unbends little by little, she starts to accrue first favors, and then allies, and oh my god am I a sucker for “good-aligned character rallies the masses to fight systemic injustice” when the author puts in the time to make it believable, which is what happens here.
My personal speculation remains unchanged: that the enclaves’ magic is powered (at least in part) by the malia generated by fucktons of Scholomance students dying each year, so I’m interested to see how wizard society reacts to the mass liberation/prison break El orchestrated in this volume, particularly given her newly minted mass movement organizer chops. I eagerly await the release of The Golden Enclaves.
Scythe – Neal Schusterman
Oh boy. I did not like this book.
Scythe is not a good book, primarily due to its sloppy worldbuilding. The novel’s premise in a nutshell: it’s the future. All of earth is governed by an omnipotent, all-seeing, infallible AI called the Thunderhead. Countries are no more. Governments are no more. Religion is no more. Disease is no more. The human lifespan is infinite; only complete incineration is beyond science’s ability to heal. Humans can reset their physical age to 21 at any time (and are working on decreasing that limit). Married couples have scores of children over hundreds of years. The Thunderhead has solved pollution, overcrowding, climate change, natural resource depletion, animal and plant extinction, and all the other natural and human-created negative aspects of existence.
But! It turns out some people still need to permadie every year to maintain optimal population balance. Enter the “Scythes,” a hyper-select group of humans whose job it is to decide who lives and who dies, and then permakill the people in the latter group, however efficiently—or painfully and gruesomely—as they like. They are beholden to no laws but those they write for themselves. Not even the omnipotent, all-seeing, infallible Thunderhead can interfere with them.
I was super psyched about this set-up because it creates all kinds of interesting questions. But Schusterman is too lazy to bother answering any of them. To whit:
Schusterman doesn't bother to answer any of this. And in the rare instances where he does try to handwave these contradictions away, it's beyond implausible. For instance:
I could give many more examples in this vein, which, combined with the obligatory, underdeveloped romance and generally two-dimensional characters, did not leave much to recommend the experience to me. TL;DR: holy crap this "worldbuilding" is bad and the plot and characters humdrum. I am unlikely to read anything else by this author.
When the Tiger Came Down from the Mountain – Nghi Vo
This was definitely one of the better Tor freebies. I enjoyed the Vietnam-inspired fantasy setting, and Vo’s descriptive language is beautiful. She does an excellent job of creating a sense of space and place, of a world that’s much larger than the glimpse readers see of it in this novella, and I loved that. The Rashomon-esque story, with its bickering tiger youkai and staunch scholar monk, was a little more predictable, but well done all the same. I have added the The Empress of Salt and Fortune to my reading list.
蟲師 7 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 7 – Urushihara Yuki)
The stories in this volume are darker in tone than those in previous collections—more Magnus Archives than Welcome to Night Vale—and that really worked for me here. I especially appreciated the final two chapters, “Road of Brambles,” which were a multipart story! That called back to a story in an earlier volume! And were deliciously creepy. (Plus, parts of it reminded me of one of my favorite settings from Silver Diamond, and yeah, anything that reminds me of Silver Diamond is going to win me over.) Mushishi is really well done for what it is, but I will always enjoy a multipart story with at least some overarching plot more than I will this series’ mushi-of-the-week format. And while this volume is still very much MoTW, it was just slightly less so than other volumes, which is why it worked for me more.
蟲師 8 – 漆原 友紀 (Mushishi vol. 8 – Urushihara Yuki)
Alas, we’re back to Mushi of the Week in this one. The tone is also pretty dark in this volume and the last chapter contains some very Magnus Archive-esque body horror (although it obviously predates said podcast). But then there’s also the “pregnant female bodies are scary” chapter that worked much less well for me, because Japan’s “female bodies are scary” trope is not my thing in general. All that said, “Hidden Streams” was probably my favorite chapter for the atmospheric beauty of the art, and the story’s sweetness and gentle f/f potential.
What I Am Currently Reading
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends – Nicole Pelroth
The first chapter is riveting. Unfortunately, Pelroth spends the next airing personal grudges, a la trump-lite, and I just do not care, Dear Author.
River Kings – Cat Jarman
So far, this is excellent.
Mencinta Hingga Terluka – Julianto Simanjuntak and Roswitha Ndraha
My current “30 minutes a day until it’s done” read.
What I’m Reading Next
This week I picked up River Kings by Cat Jarman, Kim Krans' The Wild Unknown Tarot deck in pocket format, and Living Language Italian. (Which, do I need to learn Italian? No. But there it was, factory sealed, in the Little Free Library, and I love the Living Language format and system. And after eight years of formal Latin instruction back in the day, I should have a bit of a leg up on Italian.)
これで以上です。
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