What Am I Reading Wednesday - January 8

We are now at the post-snowfall stage where freeze-thaw-freeze cycles have rendered unshoveled sidewalks perilous, and brisk winds are really playing havoc with windchill. I'll venture out later when cabin fever sets in, but ahead of that here's what I've been reading over the past week.

What I Finished Reading This Week

Death of a Witch – M.C. Beaton
Open ChatGPT or your generative AI platform of choice and enter the following prompt:

Write a 200-page murder mystery set in a stereotypical Scottish Highland village. Use fifth-grade reading level prose. Write the plot, dialogue, and character interactions in the style of the movie The Room, emphasizing stilted language, disjointed and incoherent action, and lack of internal consistency. Make the main character infallible and the secondary characters unlikeable. Include frequent prurient but prudish discussions of sex.

Congratulations. ChatGPT will have produced for you an output of slightly higher quality than M.C. Beaton’s Death of a Witch.

Guys, this book is bad. In fact, this book is the worst book I have read in recent memory. It is so bad I was convinced by page 20 that it was a parody send-up of the mystery genre. (It is not.) It is so bad that from page 23 on, the GC and I took turns reading it aloud to one another in the So You Want To Join Peace Corps voice until we had finished the entire thing, which, as it turns out, is the only way anyone is permitted under international law to read this book. Did I mention that this book is bad? Because it is tremendously bad.

I’ve never read anything like it.

The Silver Bough vol. 3 – F. Marian McNeill
McNeill’s books are both folkloric history and nostalgia porn in that their rosy, soft focus depictions of these seasonal traditions focus wholly on the outcome versus the effort required to get there (e.g., the descriptions of those delightful ten course Yule or New Years breakfasts completely beg the question of how delightful it was to be the person who stayed up all night preparing them…or even who precisely it was who had to stay up). But if you’re in the mood for some nostalgia porn alongside your folklore history, these books are hard to beat.

Lux the Poet – Martin Millar
Martin Millar is one of the greats. Lux the Poet is simultaneously a breezy fantasy romp and a biting satirical takedown of modern society and the foibles of the types of people who inhabit it. This novel was written in 1988, but it reads like he penned it last week and I absolutely recommend it.

How To Build Stonehenge – Mike Pitts
The audience for this book is probably pretty limited: it's focused not on who built Stonehenge and why, but rather, how the thing was carried off. If you're looking for an examination of, for instance, what astronomical events the structure may have been built to calculate, or what cultural practices occurred within it, this is not the book for you. But if you're interested in an examination of the logistics involved in locating, quarrying, transporting, and erecting the physical materials, across immense distances, with stone-age technology, this book very much is for you. Although I stumbled over Pitt's sentence structure here and there, his writing is by and large very easy to follow, especially given that the procedures he's describing (e.g., maneuvering 15' long, 10 ton boulders onto 20' tall supports in an enclosed space, and then dressing all of the above with neolithic tools) are not going to be familiar or intuitive to modern day readers. But he manages to make it both understandable and fascinating. I will definitely read this one again.

The Old Guard vol. 1 – Greg Rucka, Leandro Fernandez et al.
I enjoyed the screen adaptation but wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the source material, as Rucka’s Queen and Country left me pretty cold. I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed this graphic novel quite a lot, and I’ll be moving on to the second volume.

終点unknown 外伝 – 杉浦 志保 (Shuten Unknown Gaiden – Sugiura Shiho)
This isn’t so much a gaiden as a direct continuation of the previous volume. Although Sugiura explicitly stated she was writing a short series, she clearly wanted to make it so much longer. It is an absolutely satisfying conclusion, but omg, it is the conclusion both of this series and of Sugiura’s published output, and my heart is in mourning for that.


What I Am Currently Reading

The Myth of the Year – Helen Benigni, Barbara Carter, & Eadhmonn Ua Cuinn
For a book ostensibly about a calendrical system, The Myth of the Year is troublingly free of a basic explanation of how said system functioned.

Kindling the Celtic Spirit – Mara Freeman
Surprise, I read the chapter for January this week.

The Forgotten Kingdom – Signe Pike
This book is not by any means good, but at least it’s mindless and easy to read.

Ansuz – Malene Sølvsten
I am really enjoying this one. There have been some great twists, and a lot of excellently hidden foreshadowing has started to reveal itself as such. I’m allowing myself two chapters a day. I want to read much more than that. I have already acquired the second book.

I Am Morgan Le Fay – Nancy Springer
Although I’m not inhaling this novel at the same pace I did Springer’s I Am Mordred, I’m very much enjoying the ride thus far. Springer’s writing is so far even better than in that previous volume.


What I’m Reading Next

This week I acquired copies of Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland, Paraic O'Donnell's The Naming of the Birds (PS: IT'S HERE!!!), Anthony Louis’s Tarot: Beyond the Basics, and Roger Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber.

これで以上です。