What are you reading? Fourth Quarter 2022

[unJon]

How are people reading Children of Memory? My Amazon kindle says January 2023! Unfair. 

[williamjm]

7 minutes ago, unJon said:

How are people reading Children of Memory? My Amazon kindle says January 2023! Unfair. 

In the UK the hardback (which I am reading) and e-book came out last week.

[RhaenysBee]

I finished Jane Eyre. Took me only 4 months. It merged everything I loved about separate Austen novels in one beautiful heart wrenching and educational story. By far my absolute favorite of its genre. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

On 10/28/2022 at 5:10 AM, Chataya de Fleury said:

but would not recommend the book, unless you love zero plot, string theory, and incest.

Given those clues: Protagonist is science teacher in Alabama. 

[TheLastWolf]

Chaos, James Gleick

Fascinating

nonfic btw

[LongRider]

Opps, wrong thread

 

[A wilding]

Been reading the latest book by R F Kuang (author of The Poppy War): Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.

This is about the most autobiographic fantasy I have ever read. The author was obviously a driven first class linguistics student at Oxford with a serious love/hate attitude towards privileged Oxford academic life. They also appear to have faced racism, sexism and class snobbery (last time I noticed Oxford was indeed still infested with Boris Johnson's spiritual kin). And they apparently decided that most English are inarticulate, repressed, and unable to express their personal feelings.

All this is in the book, transposed to an alternative 19th century and dialled up to the max. (Ritual public humiliation of students who fail their exams!) It is also an evisceration of British colonialism. The characterisation and evocation of a milieu are impressive and hooked me in, but the plot was a little weak. It is all powerfully written but felt like a polemic to me - I started skimming towards the end of the book. So mixed good and bad, but I would recommend it as worth a try.

[Peadar]

I too am reading Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Strong start.

[Gaston de Foix]

7 hours ago, A wilding said:

Been reading the latest book by R F Kuang (author of The Poppy War): Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.

This is about the most autobiographic fantasy I have ever read. The author was obviously a driven first class linguistics student at Oxford with a serious love/hate attitude towards privileged Oxford academic life. They also appear to have faced racism, sexism and class snobbery (last time I noticed Oxford was indeed still infested with Boris Johnson's spiritual kin). And they apparently decided that most English are inarticulate, repressed, and unable to express their personal feelings.

All this is in the book, transposed to an alternative 19th century and dialled up to the max. (Ritual public humiliation of students who fail their exams!) It is also an evisceration of British colonialism. The characterisation and evocation of a milieu are impressive and hooked me in, but the plot was a little weak. It is all powerfully written but felt like a polemic to me - I started skimming towards the end of the book. So mixed good and bad, but I would recommend it as worth a try.

Interesting.  I just picked it up.  I abandoned the Poppy War halfway through because it was quite slow, and quite depressing. It was well-written though. 

You can accuse the English of many vices (and I do), but inarticulacy is not one of them.  So I'll read that charge with interest.  

[A wilding]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

Interesting.  I just picked it up.  I abandoned the Poppy War halfway through because it was quite slow, and quite depressing. It was well-written though. 

You can accuse the English of many vices (and I do), but inarticulacy is not one of them.  So I'll read that charge with interest.  

I am now going to be starting on the Poppy War soon, so I can report my impressions of that.

On the inarticulacy thing, I think it is probably just the American/English cultural divide. The old stereotype where the English think Americans incontinently express private emotions too much, and do so largely for effect rather than genuinely feeling them, while the Americans consider the English to be unemotional and repressed.

[Gaston de Foix]

20 hours ago, A wilding said:

I am now going to be starting on the Poppy War soon, so I can report my impressions of that.

On the inarticulacy thing, I think it is probably just the American/English cultural divide. The old stereotype where the English think Americans incontinently express private emotions too much, and do so largely for effect rather than genuinely feeling them, while the Americans consider the English to be unemotional and repressed.

Yeah.  I consider that to be a contrast of insincerity/oversharing rather than a lack of ability to express emotions.   

Actually, I looked at her profile for the first time and saw that (a) she's quite young and was even younger when she wrote the Poppy War; (b) she actually studied at Oxford.  I didn't realize the Poppy War was her first work given that I had seen some pretty glowing reviews.  

[Lord Patrek]

Just finished Africa Risen, the third anthology of speculative fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. Though good, there is too much filler for my taste in this one. The first two, Dominion and The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021), were much better reads.

You can read my full review here.

[Zorral]

On 12/2/2022 at 6:07 AM, A wilding said:

R F Kuang

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/937995479/in-the-poppy-war-series-r-f-kuang-asks-what-if-mao-was-a-teenage-girl

https://knpr.org/npr/2022-08/new-fantasy-novel-babel-explores-translation-tool-imperialism

I haven't gotten Babel yet, but in another couple of weeks, maybe.

However, The Fall of Númenor arrived today, so I have that, along with the biography of Samuel Adams.

[Gaston de Foix]

On 12/2/2022 at 6:07 AM, A wilding said:

Been reading the latest book by R F Kuang (author of The Poppy War): Babel, or the Necessity of Violence.

This is about the most autobiographic fantasy I have ever read. The author was obviously a driven first class linguistics student at Oxford with a serious love/hate attitude towards privileged Oxford academic life. They also appear to have faced racism, sexism and class snobbery (last time I noticed Oxford was indeed still infested with Boris Johnson's spiritual kin). And they apparently decided that most English are inarticulate, repressed, and unable to express their personal feelings.

All this is in the book, transposed to an alternative 19th century and dialled up to the max. (Ritual public humiliation of students who fail their exams!) It is also an evisceration of British colonialism. The characterisation and evocation of a milieu are impressive and hooked me in, but the plot was a little weak. It is all powerfully written but felt like a polemic to me - I started skimming towards the end of the book. So mixed good and bad, but I would recommend it as worth a try.

Finished it.  This is a spot-on review.  A few additional thoughts: 

A.  It is unputdownable.  I started Friday night, finished Sunday night. 

B.  It is depressing, with a few streaks of light shot through the darkness.  

Spoiler

I'm probably like the lab-designed target demographic for this book, so I'm struggling to identify why I didn't like it.  Two reasons, I guess. 

First, the magic system lacks wonder.  If you design a magic system, you want there to be that mind-blowing application or extension.  The closest we came was Robin coming up with that pairing for understanding he shared with Chakravarti.  I kept thinking that would be the Chekhov's gun kept on the counter that, paired with the resonance tubes, would avert tragedy.  It didn't happen.  Robin lives and dies a mediocre magician at best.  All the signs that Robin may be special or specially gifted are irrelevant. 

Second, killing off a protagonist in a novel is a brave and bold decision.  You would expect any fan of GRRM's to approve.  But with Ned Stark there are good logical reasons why his death was inevitable.  Robert Baratheon was his protector in the Game of Thrones, and his death meant Stark's fall was absolutely a logical possibility.  With his moral scruples (I've always wondered whether "Ned" was a subconscious hint towards Ned Flanders), he was going to lose.   But he was only 1 POV character, and his death in retrospect made sense.  Same with Catelyn.  

Robin lives and dies having done nothing other than blow himself up in the hope of crippling (or maybe mildly inconveniencing) the British empire.  Even in his mind there's not really any better solution to the British empire than great power competition.  In that sense the subtitle is really true,  R  F Kuang is telling a story about "the necessity of violence" notwithstanding the brief mention of ahimsa.  The title is not ironic or provocative.  And she's wrong.  Completely and dangerously wrong.  Wrong on history, wrong on philosophy, wrong on the caricature that is Letty, and therefore the story doesn't work.  Reading this novel is like watching a video-montage of car crashes on loop.  

There's no doubt R F Kuang is brilliant.  Her love of language, of translation, of cultural difference, of Oxford, is infectious.  But there is a bleakness in her literary vision that I can't stomach.  It led me to abandon the Poppy War, and I won't be able to read a second installment in this series.  

[Gaston de Foix]

Spoiler

One more thought about Babel. 

It really bothered me that it goes to great pains to try to demonstrate that anti-imperialism amongst the British (or anyone else) could ever be driven by anything other than economic interest.   Letty is obviously the mouthpiece for the self-centered, treasonous, at best ineffectual British opponents of empire.  

But Kuang knows (and quotes) from subversive anti-imperialist ideas from Tacitus ("they make a desert and call it peace") and Adam Smith.  Too much of my teenage years were wasted explaining why actually Railways didn't justify the Raj.  But the opposite is true too. 

Anti-imperialism didn't justify allying with Hitler (as Subhas Chandra Bose did).  It didn't justify the use of force without exhausting all peaceful means.  And the reality is that the non-violence protest is a precious gift to mankind precisely because it operates on the conscience of the oppressor.  The fact that there were people whose consciences were already moved, inflamed even, and marched alongside made it clear this was not an ethnic or economic issue, but a moral one.  

[A wilding]

2 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

[Babel] really bothered me

That does sum it up! I agree with your conclusions. And while as a British person I didn't want to make a point of it, of course the apparent implication in the book that all British opposition to slavery was purely on economic grounds is not true.

I have now read The Poppy War. I thought it shallow in places and a bit rough round the edges, but again very powerfully written. However it is dark, and just gets darker. One of those books that make you wonder a bit about the author, though in this case they might be just getting catharsis after immersion in 20th century Chinese history. Though I understand that the sequels are even worse, I don't intend to read them.

[Knight Of Winter]

22 hours ago, A wilding said:

...but again very powerfully written. However it is dark, and just gets darker.

I read Poppy War last year, and I can only second this. It has this unique combination of utter evil being described, and powerful prose used to describe it. I mean - I've read or watched dozens of war stories before that. I've had my fictional share of war killings, mass slaughters, propaganda, enemy dehumanization, mutilation, torture and such - and after a while all of the lose a little bit of punch. If you've seen 20 anti-war movies depicting horrors of war, 21st just doesn't have the same effect - you've already seen everything it has to show.

And then there's the Poppy Way, the exception to that rule. I don't know what to pin this on - magnitude of wartime horrors being described, or precise prose, or something else - but this book shook me in a way I can't remember last time I've experienced.

[Wilbur]

Having recently read Harry Turtledove's Salamis, and having found it exactly as I expected as a book from Turtledove in the Rhodian Traders series, I found that I had an appetite to read something that had a harder, more realistic portrayal of the terrible Wars of the Diadochi.

So I picked up once again the Tyrant series by Christian Cameron, specifically Tyrant: The Destroyer of Cities.  Of all the books I have read in this series of academic exercises that Cameron wrote, this one does the best job of portraying the horror and incredibly sad wastage of the wars of the successors to Alexander the Great.

In general, the conquests of Alexander, and the sudden unification of Europe and Asia that resulted from this conquest, and the incredible opportunities for the growth of civilization were utterly wasted by the successors and their sons.  Furthermore, and even sadder to consider, the entire generation of Macedonian (and Greek allied) soldiers that had marched from victory to victory across the known world entered into a brutal series of internecine conflicts wherein these soldiers, formerly comrades in arms, faced off against and killed each other for the glory of the Diadochi.  Very, very few ever had the chance to settle down on a farm and raise a family, instead dying, killing each other in sieges and pitched battles on the ground they had conquered for Alexander.

In this book Cameron portrays the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius the Golden, the son of Antigonus One-eye.  The story tracks very nicely with the history as we know it today, and it puts very human characters in the sandals of those who did the attacking, defending, and dying.  Several passages in the books get beyond just the exhaustion of an individual in battle, and we get glimpses of the destruction of the generation of Alexander's Macedonian soldiery, who by the time of this story, have been at war for twenty years or more.  Particularly well written is the death of Amyntas, who was what we would consider a senior non-commissioned officer who had served Alexander his entire life, killed by men who recognized him and had marched through Persia to India with him, but were now swallowed by this bitter struggle for political power in the new, Hellenistic world.

So if you enjoy historical fiction, military fiction, Greek history, or any combination thereof, this book may be for you.  Some of the other books in the Tyrant series read like successful versions of what The Mongoliad was trying to be, particularly those set on the Euxine, with better characterization and clearer plotlines, but this one is much more Hellenistic-world, Mediterranean-based storytelling.

One deep flaw in this novel is that it includes a romance between the Hellenistic protagonist and a Jewish character.  This has been a trope since Ivanhoe, but in this story it is a strange and disjointed inclusion, including significant anachronistic attitudes and unbelievable plot points.  The book already has other Jewish characters with agency, and it has strong women characters in Scythia and in Rhodes and Alexandria, so this plot line doesn't add anything there.  Beyond the unlikely nature of the relationship, it bogs the story down several times with clunky comparisons of Jewish religion to the Olympic rites, but none of the other religions get any space for such a facile comparo.  It also ejects the reader from world of the story when it presents unbelievable social situations, plus usually a Jewish/Olympic religious discussion that no one asked for and does nothing to push the plot along.  I had read another book recently with such a romance shoe-horned into the plot, so maybe I was more sensitive to this flaw, but it is a real flat spot in an otherwise good book.

Otherwise, the characters are more than one-dimensional, and most of them are neither Completely Good nor Totally Evil, but pleasingly human in their moral struggles.  The plot twists sometimes include dramatic irony and at other times arrive as a surprise to the reader, so there is some good variety in terms of the dramatic beats.  Demetrius the Golden gets some particularly good scenes as he shows us the hubris and madness of emulating Alexander that will take place in the successors to The Successors such as made popular by the later Epiphanes.

This audiobook is read by Peter Noble, who does a fantastic job, putting regional accents to the characters to differentiate their ethnicities very effectively.  I particularly enjoyed the Macedonian foot soldiers as some kind of Yorkshiremen., while the Attic and Athens-educated hetairoi apparently all come from Hertfordshire and Middlesex.

 

 

[Fragile Bird]

@Wilbur that sounds very interesting, I had never spent any length of time wondering what happened after Alexander’s death, but I admit the question casually crossed my mind after reading some novels in the past. I think I actually assumed some of his structures carried on for a while before breaking down, but certainly not decades of war. Knowing humans for what they are, I should have realized that’s what happened.

I’m not sure if I’m in the mood for the sadness that might bring me.

[Leofric]

18 hours ago, Wilbur said:

Having recently read Harry Turtledove's Salamis, and having found it exactly as I expected as a book from Turtledove in the Rhodian Traders series, I found that I had an appetite to read something that had a harder, more realistic portrayal of the terrible Wars of the Diadochi.

So I picked up once again the Tyrant series by Christian Cameron, specifically Tyrant: The Destroyer of Cities.  Of all the books I have read in this series of academic exercises that Cameron wrote, this one does the best job of portraying the horror and incredibly sad wastage of the wars of the successors to Alexander the Great.

In general, the conquests of Alexander, and the sudden unification of Europe and Asia that resulted from this conquest, and the incredible opportunities for the growth of civilization were utterly wasted by the successors and their sons.  Furthermore, and even sadder to consider, the entire generation of Macedonian (and Greek allied) soldiers that had marched from victory to victory across the known world entered into a brutal series of internecine conflicts wherein these soldiers, formerly comrades in arms, faced off against and killed each other for the glory of the Diadochi.  Very, very few ever had the chance to settle down on a farm and raise a family, instead dying, killing each other in sieges and pitched battles on the ground they had conquered for Alexander.

In this book Cameron portrays the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius the Golden, the son of Antigonus One-eye.  The story tracks very nicely with the history as we know it today, and it puts very human characters in the sandals of those who did the attacking, defending, and dying.  Several passages in the books get beyond just the exhaustion of an individual in battle, and we get glimpses of the destruction of the generation of Alexander's Macedonian soldiery, who by the time of this story, have been at war for twenty years or more.  Particularly well written is the death of Amyntas, who was what we would consider a senior non-commissioned officer who had served Alexander his entire life, killed by men who recognized him and had marched through Persia to India with him, but were now swallowed by this bitter struggle for political power in the new, Hellenistic world.

So if you enjoy historical fiction, military fiction, Greek history, or any combination thereof, this book may be for you.  Some of the other books in the Tyrant series read like successful versions of what The Mongoliad was trying to be, particularly those set on the Euxine, with better characterization and clearer plotlines, but this one is much more Hellenistic-world, Mediterranean-based storytelling.

One deep flaw in this novel is that it includes a romance between the Hellenistic protagonist and a Jewish character.  This has been a trope since Ivanhoe, but in this story it is a strange and disjointed inclusion, including significant anachronistic attitudes and unbelievable plot points.  The book already has other Jewish characters with agency, and it has strong women characters in Scythia and in Rhodes and Alexandria, so this plot line doesn't add anything there.  Beyond the unlikely nature of the relationship, it bogs the story down several times with clunky comparisons of Jewish religion to the Olympic rites, but none of the other religions get any space for such a facile comparo.  It also ejects the reader from world of the story when it presents unbelievable social situations, plus usually a Jewish/Olympic religious discussion that no one asked for and does nothing to push the plot along.  I had read another book recently with such a romance shoe-horned into the plot, so maybe I was more sensitive to this flaw, but it is a real flat spot in an otherwise good book.

Otherwise, the characters are more than one-dimensional, and most of them are neither Completely Good nor Totally Evil, but pleasingly human in their moral struggles.  The plot twists sometimes include dramatic irony and at other times arrive as a surprise to the reader, so there is some good variety in terms of the dramatic beats.  Demetrius the Golden gets some particularly good scenes as he shows us the hubris and madness of emulating Alexander that will take place in the successors to The Successors such as made popular by the later Epiphanes.

This audiobook is read by Peter Noble, who does a fantastic job, putting regional accents to the characters to differentiate their ethnicities very effectively.  I particularly enjoyed the Macedonian foot soldiers as some kind of Yorkshiremen., while the Attic and Athens-educated hetairoi apparently all come from Hertfordshire and Middlesex.

 

 

I started the Tyrant series in November and just finished Funeral Games, the third book, with Ptolemy's defeat of Demetrius in the defense  of Egypt.    It does a good job of laying out many of the contenders who arose following Alexander's death and as you mentioned how they were all once fought side-by-side and are now turning on each other in hopes of claiming power.

The earlier books focused on Greeks and Scythians horsemen of the Steppe along the north coast of the Black Sea, and gave some scope to the extent of Alexander's reach.  This book focused on the new city of Alexandria and the politics of the eastern Mediterranean with some great naval battles and just life at sea during this period.

On to the next one, King of the Bosporus.