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78.The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty - Last night I saw a play at the Guthrie and apparently all publicly funded theaters must now include an announcement about how we are on first nations land and how we should acknowledge that, but that's it. Just let's mention it and we are doing our due diligence. I didn't hear the Guthrie announcer promote Heart of the Earth school or ask for donations to a legal defense fund or anything about Lakota people who are actually alive. But that's the way Western imperialism works. Mention the genocide but onward to Sondheim.
When I was finished with this book I thought of Israel and the conflicting narratives but I also thought about how almost every middle eastern country has a history of atrocity and it's not exactly complete genocide. There are conflicting narratives where everyone can point to the shitty things that the other side did and then hero worship the atrocity makers who worked for them. The two major characters more or less represent either side even as they are also audience surrogates to explain the world (Nehri is a Cairo thief who accidentally summons a djinn while Ali is an advocate for half-human, half-djinn shafit even as his father attempts to keep things together in the city no matter how many people have to die).
At a certain point, Nehri (ostensibly a half-human/half-djinn character) is seen as the savior of the Daevas who are the more religious who ran the city for centuries while Ali is the advocate for the Shafit and the heir to the ones that overthrew the Daevas. Dara, the djinn, that accompanies Nehri has been a slave to humans for centuries and also known as the scourge because he murdered an entire town of shafits. While the Daevas have their own atrocity narrative. They also love Dara as their hero.
Meanwhile the king of the city is doing some really shady shit to keep the peace. And with all the grievances and long memories of ancestors being murdered he's not wrong.
This is a complicated and fascinating read about complicated and fascinating people and when the Daevas are plotting to take over the town with Nehri at the end, it feels like a happy ending but of course it's more of a sinister ending. Like the ending of Game of Thrones season 1 where Rob Stark is declaring himself the king of the north and everyone is cheering him on - if you know what's coming next and aware of the implications of starting a war and not just reading it as a hero's narrative which is what Martin was going for (using the tropes against the reader).
I immediately ordered the next book. I seriously am tempted to read the synopses on Wikipedia and spoil it for myself.
79.Heller with a Gun by Louis Lamour - Heller means hellion. I was at Convergence and I had finished reading all the books I brought with me. So I needed something else for the plane ride home and the free book room was most decidedly uninspiring. I just think that this Con is winding down and there are just fewer people coming. And I sent my books to a friend who was too ADHD and frazzled to actually bring them to Con (sigh) but my books were up in the free book library. Either way, they brought in books from previous years and there were the standard 1990s science fiction section of a used bookstore - the Dave Eddings, the Jo Clayton (actually that one is a novelty but I don't like her as a writer) and Piers Anthony. Fucking Piers Anthony. I was also trying to find a book with the right size since I was going to take it on the plane with me and I didn't want to stuff my backpack any more than it was stuffed.
So this one would have to do (I also grabbed a Tess Gerritsen book which I'm wary of since I suspect that if I read too many of her books together I might get sick of her. I can see some of the tropes repeating themselves. She does have a talent for catching up the reader on past events without infodumping them) and it was...fine, I guess. It's also short and falling apart. I might not even put it on a local book shelf since it's almost gone.
It has Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn on the cover. Anyhow, King Mabry is one of those gun slingers who is just so damn good at everything (no wonder he gets shot in the head halfway through the book. Don't worry. He gets better. It was a scratch) and a theater troupe is passing through town and he feels like he has to follow them. His instincts are right since the people that they hired to protect them are more inclined to rob them and rape the women.
This is an old school western where the Indians show up speaking broken English and talking about squaws while the lonely men are lonely men and everyone has to tell you their opinion on guns. The first 50 pages are pretty tight and then the Lakota braves show up and they distract from the criminals and then it just gets into this long side plot about which actress is King going to end up with - the one that he fell for or the 17 (almost 18!) year old woman who was raised by a gunslinger. I mean, duh, we aren't exactly rooting for either because this is a boring love triangle.
Seriously, why do the Dystopian YA writers get so much shit for crowbarring in a love triangle when classic Western writers shove it in there and completely fuck up their plot with this shit. It was actually a pretty tight plot until L'Amour stuck in a love triangle. I wonder if that was a studio note? Because the copy I got was a movie so was the book written first or did L'Amour work with the studio in some marketing scheme where the book and the movie come out together?
Either way, it seems fine until it gets padded out with a love triangle, and a useless love triangle at that.
When I was finished with this book I thought of Israel and the conflicting narratives but I also thought about how almost every middle eastern country has a history of atrocity and it's not exactly complete genocide. There are conflicting narratives where everyone can point to the shitty things that the other side did and then hero worship the atrocity makers who worked for them. The two major characters more or less represent either side even as they are also audience surrogates to explain the world (Nehri is a Cairo thief who accidentally summons a djinn while Ali is an advocate for half-human, half-djinn shafit even as his father attempts to keep things together in the city no matter how many people have to die).
At a certain point, Nehri (ostensibly a half-human/half-djinn character) is seen as the savior of the Daevas who are the more religious who ran the city for centuries while Ali is the advocate for the Shafit and the heir to the ones that overthrew the Daevas. Dara, the djinn, that accompanies Nehri has been a slave to humans for centuries and also known as the scourge because he murdered an entire town of shafits. While the Daevas have their own atrocity narrative. They also love Dara as their hero.
Meanwhile the king of the city is doing some really shady shit to keep the peace. And with all the grievances and long memories of ancestors being murdered he's not wrong.
This is a complicated and fascinating read about complicated and fascinating people and when the Daevas are plotting to take over the town with Nehri at the end, it feels like a happy ending but of course it's more of a sinister ending. Like the ending of Game of Thrones season 1 where Rob Stark is declaring himself the king of the north and everyone is cheering him on - if you know what's coming next and aware of the implications of starting a war and not just reading it as a hero's narrative which is what Martin was going for (using the tropes against the reader).
I immediately ordered the next book. I seriously am tempted to read the synopses on Wikipedia and spoil it for myself.
79.Heller with a Gun by Louis Lamour - Heller means hellion. I was at Convergence and I had finished reading all the books I brought with me. So I needed something else for the plane ride home and the free book room was most decidedly uninspiring. I just think that this Con is winding down and there are just fewer people coming. And I sent my books to a friend who was too ADHD and frazzled to actually bring them to Con (sigh) but my books were up in the free book library. Either way, they brought in books from previous years and there were the standard 1990s science fiction section of a used bookstore - the Dave Eddings, the Jo Clayton (actually that one is a novelty but I don't like her as a writer) and Piers Anthony. Fucking Piers Anthony. I was also trying to find a book with the right size since I was going to take it on the plane with me and I didn't want to stuff my backpack any more than it was stuffed.
So this one would have to do (I also grabbed a Tess Gerritsen book which I'm wary of since I suspect that if I read too many of her books together I might get sick of her. I can see some of the tropes repeating themselves. She does have a talent for catching up the reader on past events without infodumping them) and it was...fine, I guess. It's also short and falling apart. I might not even put it on a local book shelf since it's almost gone.
It has Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn on the cover. Anyhow, King Mabry is one of those gun slingers who is just so damn good at everything (no wonder he gets shot in the head halfway through the book. Don't worry. He gets better. It was a scratch) and a theater troupe is passing through town and he feels like he has to follow them. His instincts are right since the people that they hired to protect them are more inclined to rob them and rape the women.
This is an old school western where the Indians show up speaking broken English and talking about squaws while the lonely men are lonely men and everyone has to tell you their opinion on guns. The first 50 pages are pretty tight and then the Lakota braves show up and they distract from the criminals and then it just gets into this long side plot about which actress is King going to end up with - the one that he fell for or the 17 (almost 18!) year old woman who was raised by a gunslinger. I mean, duh, we aren't exactly rooting for either because this is a boring love triangle.
Seriously, why do the Dystopian YA writers get so much shit for crowbarring in a love triangle when classic Western writers shove it in there and completely fuck up their plot with this shit. It was actually a pretty tight plot until L'Amour stuck in a love triangle. I wonder if that was a studio note? Because the copy I got was a movie so was the book written first or did L'Amour work with the studio in some marketing scheme where the book and the movie come out together?
Either way, it seems fine until it gets padded out with a love triangle, and a useless love triangle at that.
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