Finished re-reading the original Dragonlance Chronicles along with the Lost Chronicles trilogy. The first two books was pretty easy, as they took place in between Dragons of Summer Flame and Dragons of Winter Night respectively. But the third (Dragons of the Hourglass Mage) took place at the same time as Dragons of Spring Dawning, so there was a lot of back and forth between the two.
Now I'm on to something completely different: I'm reading several Agatha Christie books on my slate.
Awesome! I have three for this year: Paradise Lost (my favorite book, but can't seem to finish it...), LotR (movies were so good, I've put off reading the actual book), and Alien Clay (my first sci-fi book!).
A lot of pop culture needs to be audience tested less, but this is one where in addition to an editor, someone needed to sit down and ask Cervantes whether he wanted the audience to like Don Quixote or not, because Cervantes is all over the place on this. I think modern audiences would mostly be on Quixote's side, in the way that we like the well-meaning but at times delusional characters on Parks & Rec.
I liked that it was left up to the reader to decide if aimless heroism is admirable. For me, it certainly makes me pause and evaluate if I am "charging at windmills" whenever I go on a tear.
As I finished it, though, I realized there's probably enough stuff in the implied setting that Don Quixote believes in to add up to a slim Shadowdark zine, so I might do that. Obviously, it's a job better handled by a Castilian speaker, creating something similar to Brancalonia, but hopefully me cranking out six to eight pages of Quixote-inspired stuff won't offend the native speakers too badly.
I'm reading The Waves at Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema by Joan Mellen. My son found it at a used bookstore and got it for me as a Christmas gift, knowing I love samurai movies (and kaiju movies, but this book doesn't address those). So far it's a little dry, but I'll give it a chance - at worst, I'll just skim until I hit the samurai movie bits.
Alas, this is my first book on Japanese cinema as a whole. If you're into kaiju movies, last year my boys got me Godzilla FAQ by Brian Solomon - that was a pretty good read. And i can recommend The Official Godzilla Compendium by J. D. Lee and Marc Cerasini.
Just finished Tales from Earthsea, which only looks like an anthology. It's actually telling a pretty coherent story about how the School at Roke came to be and how wizard culture got so screwed up (it was screwed up almost from the start, but like the Jedi Council, everyone insisted all was fine until it was too late to pretend otherwise). It also absolutely tees up The Other Wind.
I've got no idea what LeGuin has in mind for the last novel of Earthsea (beyond the stuff set up in Tehanu and continued here), but I'm excited to finally read it in the new year.
I regret sleeping on the final three Earthsea books so long. These are as great as any fantasy novels ever.
Moderation by Elaine Castillo is a lovely book; I didn't think I would really like it, but I do, and not just because it's the book that pushed me across the 300 line for this year (I didn't think I'd make it). It starts with our protagonist Girlie, a hard-as-nails Filipina-American who's one of not-Facebook's best moderators who does a very tough job as well as possible to pay off her family's gigantic property-related debt after 2009. So far, so grim. But the story takes a sci-fi and romantic turn when she's headhunted to moderate not-Meta's newest venture, a VR theme park run by not-Le-Puy-du-Fou using software developed by William, a Chinese-English guy who's clever, hot, and anxious.
I learned a fair bit about various things from Moderation - Filipino-American culture, the scanty evidence that VR can have some neuroplasticity effects (the VR in the book is of course much more advanced than in our world and is much more effective in this regard, and it seems likely that not-Le-Puy-du-Fou is interested in the brainwashing applications), social media moderation, Goldilocks Bake Shop, and of course Le Puy du Fou - and it's clever and charming throughout. It does have a satisfyingly mushy ending, too. Highly recommended.
(For those who don't know - Le Puy du Fou is France's third most popular theme park and is focused on history and European nationalism. It's got a franchise in Spain and planning to have one in England built by 2029. The company has ties to Rassemblement National, of course.)
I just finished reading Django Wexler's 2024 novel Spelljammer: Memory's Wake, and my immediate impression is that it's...okay, but decidedly imperfect.
To be clear, nothing here is bad per se. The story's plot holds together well enough, the characterizations—while never deep—do an decent job of defining the dramatis personae, and while the prose isn't anything special it never devolves into a workmanlike slog. Everything about this story can be defined as "adequate," and I suppose it's just my nature that I see the things that kept this from being better than it is more than the things which kept it from being worse.
To start with the obvious, this isn't really a Spelljammer novel. Which is to say, nothing about spelljammer is integral to this story. Yes, it utilizes various elements of that campaign setting—you have giff and neogi and scavvers, ships powered by magical helms, and everyone sails between asteroids and various other space-bases—but nothing that makes the story unique to this particular setting; with the possible exception of a few, and altogether minor, space-based maneuvers (e.g. manipulating the gravity plane of two ships as they come into contact), concerns (e.g. running out of breathable air), and affectations (e.g. asteroid settlements that are tidally-locked) and you could just as easily set this on a series of islands on a terrestrial sea somewhere.
Now, I make that critique with some hesitation; the more details you dispense with, the more that any overview will seem to resemble other stories of the same genre. Yet I can't help but compare this book with the Cloakmaster Cycle sextet, which were also Spelljammer novels and which made the particulars of that setting central to their overall plot (or at least, more so than anything here). Having an "ultimate helm" that can potentially grant control over the strongest ship for which the entire setting is named, for instance, makes the story one which leans more toward what makes Spelljammer what it is (all the more so since it passes through a couple of other campaign worlds, showcasing Spelljammer's serving as setting that connects other settings, as well as highlighting its own "home base" by way of the Rock of Bral, which only gets two or three name-drops here).
Memory's Wake, to reiterate a point, had none of that. It certainly puts forward plenty of minor aspects of the setting, as I noted before, but the result is something that's a mile-wide and an inch deep. If you told me that this novel had been written for another setting altogether, and had been rewritten to make it a Spelljammer story, I wouldn't find that hard to believe.
The other thing which stuck out at me is that while Wexler can write decent characters, in that we have a general sense of who they are (which is, ironically, rather fitting for how most D&D characters are typically presented, notwithstanding that one person who always seems to show up with twenty pages of backstory), he doesn't seem to write relationships between the characters very well at all.
For an example of this, take our introduction to supporting characters Nia (a tiefling warlock) and Kori (a half-elven cleric). When they make their debut, they know that Axia (the main character) is an amnesiac who is likely to be wary of them, they know that they need to get her on their side in order to secure a huge treasure, and they know that there are other people who are also looking for Axia and have hostile intent. You'd think that would necessitate that they be focused on trying to secure her cooperation via the promise of gold and adventure and the warning that she's in danger, likely fairly immediate danger. And Nia and Kori do do this...but also flirt with each other at the same time. ("What have I told you about your fatalistic nihilism, Nia?" "That it makes me intellectually unattractive? That's fine; I've already accepted that you just want me for my body.")
To me, that came across as Wexler wanting us to immediately know that these two are a couple. The problem is that, at least to me, that breaks what should be a fairly tense scene, with Axia trying to figure out if she can trust these two or not. That such tension is dispelled with their badinage comes across as rhetorical anticlimax, which seems like it's everywhere in media nowadays and which I've subsequently come to despise.
It's not like Wexler needed us to know that Kori and Nia are a couple in their very first scene, as he plays up their flirting virtually every time we see them, meaning that he could have withheld it from their introduction in favor of letting the scene's tension build. Particularly since the next scene is of them realizing that the people aiming for Axia's life have the barn where they first meet her surrounded, and that they'll need to fight their way out. Kori giving Nia a kiss for luck as the latter goes out alone to create a distraction would have been a much more organic way to highlight their relationship status rather than rubbing our noses in it right off the metaphorical bat.
By contrast, Axia herself is notable for her lack of relationship with Tsorik, the old man whom she's living with at the start of the novel. While he's irascible and a cheapskate, he's also the one who found her and gave her a place to live when it became clear that she had no memory of who she was. More than that, by the time the novel starts the two of them have been living together for three years in what seems like very close proximity (as it's implied that Tsorik's place is fairly small). To that end, you'd think that they'd have developed some kind of familial relationship by then; not necessarily a loving one but some sort of close bond. But no, all Axia seems to feel toward Tsorik is a vague sense of exasperation, as if she'd prefer to be away from him but can't figure out a way to extricate herself from his life.
Even when she finds out that Tsorik is engaged in underhanded dealings with the neogi, Axia doesn't seem to feel any sort of personal disillusionment or sense of personal betrayal (beyond a vague outrage at how Tsorik sputtered and gaped when the neogi leader offered to buy her from him, as though not realizing that he was trying to find a way to say no without offending a creature whom he was clearly terrified of). By the time she leaves Tsorik's place to start her adventure, she's more sad to leave behind her giant space hamster than the person whom she lived with for three years.
Again, I say this with some reservations, simply because when it comes to various characters' state(s) of mind, it's easy for readers to color inside the proverbial lines without realizing this. I've mentioned before that I've read Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, and I can't help but consider it again here. We use theory of mind with literary characters to fill in the metaphorical blanks about what characters are thinking/feeling in a given situation, which is all well and good, but in my experience there's a notable contingent of readers who inadvertently use this to excuse bad writing. Lacking character motivations, or characters taking actions that don't make sense, or virtually any other instance of characters being presented poorly become excusable because the reader can invent a plausible reason for why things would happen the way they do. The end result is that critique and criticism are (largely) eschewed as readers seem to ignore the difference between what's on the page and what's in their heads, apparently to the point of being unable to tell the difference anymore. It's things like that which have soured me on "fan theories" in various franchises.
You'd think I'd be done with my complaints at this point, but no, there are still things in this novel which rubbed me the wrong way, such as the plot threads which are rather frustratingly left dangling. I'll put these in spoilers because they answer some of the book's central mysteries:
Why does Marya, the assassin hired by Shard to kill Axia, keep coming back to life? Unless I missed something, it's never explained. Again, we could presume that someone's resurrecting her, but I don't recall that or any other explanation ever being offered.
How, exactly, did Blacktongue have a clone prepared of her? She wasn't a spellcaster, so presumably she found one who could do it for her, but there's no mention of any such thing; it's presented as being fait accompli.
For that matter, so is how Blacktongue's clone ended up in a broken pile of junk on an out-of-the-way asteroid. Did it crash there? Did she stow it there on purpose because it seemed like the best place to hide it? And how is it that Blacktongue's soul seems to have periodic instances of being able to reach out to guide said clone when it's later explicitly confirmed to have been trapped in a warded temple and unable to leave? Shouldn't that prevent it from making even limited contact?
Stuff like this almost makes me wonder if there's going to be some sort of sequel where at least some of this would be answered, but leaving aside whether or not there will be, this book is still at fault for not resolving the aforementioned issues, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I've read worse novels, to be sure, but I've also read better ones, so while I wish I could say that I enjoyed this book, its flaws stood out more than its virtues. On their own, none of these were deal-breakers, but together they made this into a mediocre reading experience. It wasn't bad, but I can't say that it was good either.
I just finished this, and my biggest beef is that the entire story builds up a hunt to uncover the ancient secret of the Worldbreaker... but they find absolutely nothing, and in fact the characters have completely lost interest in the entire matter by the end of the story. The book then has the nerve to conclude by suggesting we follow these characters on their future riveting adventures. If even your characters are unable maintain interest in the very thing they've spent all their time chasing, how are we supposed to?
My wife gave me this book for Christmas (Circe, by Madaline Miller). It's a really interesting take on the Greek Circe, her background and life outside of the Odyssey, with a bit of a feminist twist. So far I enjoy it. I typically enjoy stories like this, however. For example, I've long held that Medusa got a bad rap all this time, so seeing a rewrite of inherently misogynistic mythology is something I like reading.
My wife gave me this book for Christmas (Circe, by Madaline Miller). It's a really interesting take on the Greek Circe, her background and life outside of the Odyssey, with a bit of a feminist twist. So far I enjoy it. I typically enjoy stories like this, however. For example, I've long held that Medusa got a bad rap all this time, so seeing a rewrite of inherently misogynistic mythology is something I like reading.
I read Miranda in Milan a few years ago, which was a similar take about Prospero's daughter from The Tempest. That book wasn't quite what I was hoping -- I felt it victimized Miranda more than I was comfortable with -- but there's a whole genre of looking at these figures through a feminist lens, which is great.
I’ll start us off with a copy of Drs. Morris Weiss and W. Paul McKinney’s folio from the year 2000 that I very recently polished off, The Traveler’s Vest Pocket Medical Guide.
I picked this up a while back for a family member who was contemplating doing some traveling, but when their plans fell through, I ended up keeping it. I came across it the other day and, on a whim, put it into my reading pile. I figured that, while I’m not planning on visiting any foreign countries in the near future, it was still good to peruse just to know the information...
