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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9727441" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Random Catch-up Time! I’m at 31/100 for a read-what-you-own challenge and am enjoying it. Ronald Malfi: been meaning to get to him for years, and now I’ve read two of his, Black Mouth and Bone White. Both were superb. More of his work is in the queue. Wow. He’s got an amazing specificity in his descriptions that makes everything feel familiar even though it isn’t. I especially liked Bone White, in which a man comes from back. east to see if one of the victims of a self-confessing serial killer in Alaska might be his missing twin brother. Complications ensue, mostly ones I didn’t expect at all, and it’s hard to really surprise a hardcore horror junkie coming up on 60. Horus Heresy #1-5. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m having fun so far. I’ll stop, or rather skip very selectively, when I don’t. Rhetorics of Fantasy, by Farah Mendelssohn. I wanted so much to like this. But it leaves at least one major term undefined - “I’m using this in John Clute’s sense” isn’t enough. (And I know who Clute is and have read a bunch of his stuff, just not the relevant essay.) and it makes some distinctions I find hard to interpret as actually meaning anything that the author like these stories more than those. I’ve read enough of that from S.T. Joshi and others. So I stopped. The Rebel, by Albert Camus. I’ve read parts of this several times, but not all at once. Edoardo Ballerini reads the audio version, and he’s just amazing. Camus didn’t sound like this when reading his own material, but he could have. The voice is smooth and collected, yet capable of great passion when it’s called for. This is a book about rebellion in the face of human and cosmic injustice, and is really, really relevant. Fantastic stuff. Current reading:Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, by Peter H. Wilson. As advertised. It’s interesting to read about a path of social and political development that left basically no contemporary legacy. (Though there is some fascinating discussion of possible lessons from the Empire for the European Union.) it’s easy to take common features of a system as innate, but the Empire reminds me that relatively recently, people did something that was very different than nation-states for their politics, and that worked for quite a while. (And arguably fell for reasons nothing like fundamental to their political configuration.) Someday someone’s going to write a fantasy continent with its version of the Empire, and I’ll be glad. To Turn Back Time, by S.M. Stirling. This is practically perfect nerd-nip. Four American grad students and a professor, all specialists in Roman history, are zapped without preparation from a slightly alternate 2032 to the spot that will become Vienna but in AD 165 is Roman frontier. They also have a literal ton of supplies, but the local who recruited them died in transit - they left literally the same second a fusion bomb went off over Vienna as part of a global thermonuclear war breaking out. So here they are. What’s great is that they are all nerds. They read Lest Darkness Falls when younger; they’ve seen Gladiator and Conan movies from a 2029 adaptation of Stirling’s Blood of the Serpent back to Arnie’s movie take. They have good values and make sensible plans, and run into interesting complications and failures. They find the past in accordance with a bunch of cool scholarship, and fun differences between the realities and the best guesses. This is a book about my people and I am glad. It’s the first of a trilogy and I expect to enjoy them all.</blockquote>

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