Dec. 17th, 2023

marlowe1: (Maggie)
234.The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty - I used to joke that this series is about groups of djinn who keep fighting each other and oppressing each other and no matter how many times they try to make peace, there's always someone there to ruin it. Oh yeah, they also hero worship the authors of each other's atrocities.

So some light reading to take one's mind off of current events.

This became even funnier/more horrific after October 7 when all the backburner oppression and murder was pushed to the forefront with Bluesky overnight turning into an orgy of victim blaming and bullshit about decolonization and resistance being applied to murder and rape. And mostly from hypocritical white people who lived on the bones of the murdered peoples whose genocide directly benefitted them (or Europeans who really need to just STFU about the Middle East forever, especially the British motherfuckers).

I digress.

But the real fantasy isn't so much the magic water spirits and Tiamat and slave genies and the like, but the fact that everyone does work things out. Like the main goal of our heroes is to either figure out how to make peace in Daevabad or invade Daevabad and set up a system that isn't a monarchy.

It's brilliant and beautiful and one caveat is that the villain is not quite as great as the first two books. In the first two books we had the king who pulled off some really nasty shit but at very least you understood that his motivation was to keep everything from collapsing into civil war. In this book we get Manizheh mustache twirling and monologuing and committing atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities until it become obvious that the only way to get rid of her is to kill her. It's a very satisfactory ending, but it's like if President Snow got replaced by Hitler (which is kind of what was implied at the end of the Hunger Games when Katniss shoots that woman instead).

Anyhow, it's brilliant and I feel like I shouldn't say too much more.

234.The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin - I don't think I've ever been quite as happy to not love a book as this one. I was thinking that there's a sequel book but never a trilogy as Nora went on to write the Broken Earth trilogy. Apparently the plan is or was to write more books in the same world but whenever she wants. And that low energy approach is obvious. I suspect that Jemisin was less enthusiastic about the ending of this book than she was in the beginning.

Basically, this is a book about dreams and Egyptian mythology with the main character being a Gatherer who comes to people, shares a dream with them and then takes their "dream blood" sending them off to the after world. From the perspective of these Gatherers, they are doing a great service and providing an ending to the people they are charged with "gathering". From the perspective of everyone else, they are freaky guys who walk into any house and kill people. So when the main character (and his apprentice) are charged with gathering a woman (supposedly corrupt) and finds out that it might be a politically motivated charge instead of a religiously motivated one, he's trying to figure things out. Also the Prince is really a bastard and there are "Reapers" or Gatherers who just kill without all the religous trapping.

Anyhow, it's a pretty solid story about politics and corruption with a fantasy element that is much more interesting than the average fantasy, but it's also pretty low stakes and I'm not chomping at the bit to read the next book. I might read it. I might enjoy it. But this is a complete story (of course, the Inheritance Trilogy was also three complete novels that ended. They just changed perspectives and made connected stories in the same world)
marlowe1: (PIGGY!!!!)
235.Inside Mari by Shuzo Oshimi - I actually spoiled the later volumes in this series for myself because it was a weird body switch book where this guy wakes up in the body of a high school girl but when she/he goes to the guy assuming that Mari is inside him, there is no indication that it was a full body switch like in "Your Name". Strangely enough, this one doesn't shy away from the aspects of intergender body switching that Your Name glossed over. But also it's very obvious that Mari, the girl, is not in the body of the guy because when he/she goes to his apartment, he's acting like a typical gross twenty something dude with garbage all over the place and masturbating like a wild monkey (granted, I would masturbate if I found myself in the body of a woman in a body switch way).

Also I am feeling weirder using "he" pronouns for the author since he AGAIN writes an afterword talking about how he would like to be in the body of a woman. Like everything about his work feels trans but he isn't embracing that designation ultimately.

Maybe he's like Poppy Z Brite who spent years claiming that he wasn't a "gay man in a woman's body" (even though he almost always wrote books from the perspective of gay guys and not in a Manga fetish way) and only in his 40s (maybe late 30s) did he come out as a transman (also Poppy is his pen name so I am ok using it. I was actually worried when I got him to blurb King David and the Spiders from Mars because I wanted that blurb to read Poppy and not Billy, like Billy is some guy. Poppy is the coolest goth writer of Generation X).

This series gets weirder and it does make sense later on, but not in the first book. And I doubt I will read any more volumes in the two weeks left in the year.

236.Welcome Back, Alice by Shuzo Oshimi - So this is a love triangle between teenagers that starts out with them around 13 or 14. Two guys and a girl. The one guy is in love with the girl. His friend Kei asks him if he masturbates. The girl wants Kei and Kei kisses her and that sours things but then Kei moves away.

Only then Kei comes back as a non-binary, but presenting as woman. And that throws an even bigger wrench into things and Kei wants the other boy and the girl still wants Kei but not like that. Boys who like girls who like girls who like boys who look like girls but don't necessarily want to be either boys or girls...

It's fine.
marlowe1: (Serenity)
237.On Violence by Hannah Arendt - I was reading this one and pleasantly surprised by how light it seemed in comparison to her other works. I mean, shit, this is Hannah Arendt we're talking about and I read On Revolution 3 or 4 times and I still don't know if I really get where all of her arguments were going. In this one, she's talking about the ways that violence is used and how Power and Violence are on a spectrum. With absolute power, there's no need for violence. When there's only violence, the power is not there. Violence is what the state and the actors do to grab or hold onto power. She also discusses the student protests and the ways that the state seemed weak when it reacted disproportionately harshly to protests.

And then Hannah Arendt gets super racist. Suddenly she goes from a dispassionate philosopher making observations and conclusions about society and turns into WHITE LADY ACADEMIC feeling insecure about the black studies department. She keeps saying that the Black Panthers offer nothing and that all the student riots to force administrators to seek out diversity will only lead to more "unqualified" black students (like she assumes that every black student who comes to college will be a stereotype from a hood movie, barely able to read) and they will study non-subjects like Swahili or African literature. Yeah, that bitch really said that African literature is non-existent. Things Fall Apart had been out for a decade. Maybe super existentialist lady was too busy coining terms like the banality of evil to actually read a fucking book by a black person, much less an African.

238.Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz - Later in this book after she tries to date a guy and gets her heart broken, Wertz blames him for many things including gas lighting her and being a snob and then says that he talked her into taking anti-anxiety meds in order to hide that something was wrong. She never modifies that viewpoint. This is a woman who is full of anxieties and angst (this IS a book about how she stopped drinking but also sometimes took uppers) and she thinks that she'd be better WITHOUT meds? Fuck that.

At this point that as much as I was entertained by her story telling ability and found the whole book fascinating, I don't think I would actually like Julia Wertz were we in the same social circles. In a previous work she admitted that she was part of the gentrification of Brooklyn by living in an illegal apartment in Greenpoint. In this one, she's starting to hate the fact that the rich boyfriend from a "different social class" ignores her issues as an upper middle class woman. Granted, $800/month for a one bedroom apartment is more money that I'm paying for my share of a two bedroom apartment (although it wasn't at the time. Fuck NYC landlords) and she is just taking off to Costa Rico because her boyfriend wants to go on vacation. Granted, this is a good story but I'm still annoyed by the whole "I'm so poor and so underclass when I'm living in my own apartment without roommates and going off on vacation on a moment's notice" aspect.

Still, this is an interesting book and Julia Wertz is a great story teller. And the horrible aspects of the protagonist make her an interesting main character. So I definitely recommend this one.

This is the end of the year and I'm getting kind of tired of writing these reviews. This is why I take a year between these projects.

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Tim Lieder

December 2023

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