Pretty sure this is the lightest the shelf has been in months (EDIT: It’s been a year.) I can make a significant dent in this next month if I’m disciplined about not spending a ton of money. LOL.
Tomorrow’s Monthly Reads is going to be insane.
Picking on church billboards is such low hanging fruit that it’s not even worth it most of the time, but I drove past this … message on my way home today, and I needed to preserve it. I may have the verbs slightly wrong (I was driving, after all) but the weird part is preserved correctly:
Trust in The Lord Delight in “ Commit to “
… with fucking quotation marks, just like that. The quotation marks were red, though.
I’ve been doing this thing over on BlueSky all month, and while, okay, there’s technically one more day left in Pride, I already know what I’m going to post for tomorrow. Since the last day of the month is reliably preprogrammed and I’m still feeling sickish, I figured I’d take all thirty posts (so you can get a sneak peek for tomorrow, if you’ve been paying attention) and put the books here for posterity. I’ve read all but two of these, and I may have one of them finished by the end of the month anyway. The 30th is on its way here. Check ’em out:
I just lost half an hour to scrolling through my own BlueSky feed looking for something instead of searching for it, and I want to finish this Goddamn WoT book before bed, so I guess I’m not posting tonight?
Well, that was a fun little rabbit hole to fall into at 10:00 in the morning.
I posted these beauties not long after buying them, and they make me happy each and every time I walk past them, which was how I justified the $Jesusdon’task cost. The problem: despite their status as one of the non-negotiable canon series of fantasy literature, I haven’t finished the damn series. I’ve read the first … five? Six? and tried to reread/finish them a few years ago and had to tap out after the second book.
I’m doing this, damn it. I’ve spent a lot of money on this damn series and I’m stuffing it into my brain whether I want it there or not. I’m not stupid enough to try and read them straight through, though; I’ll commit to one a month (still over a year!) and try to go at least a little faster than that in practice.
(I plan to start with New Spring, the prologue, which I haven’t actually read yet. If you have strong feelings about whether I should hold off until later, let me know, but do keep in mind that I’ve read the first two books twice each already. You have, like, an hour or two until I’ve started it and can’t be stopped.)
I recognize that “I started a book!” maybe isn’t the most compelling blog content ever, but I wanted to mark the first date in something less ephemeral than Bluesky. So.
Anyway, that rabbit hole: I thought that I had posted about these books when I got them, and I couldn’t find the post at first. It took me a minute to track the post down, because the words “Wheel of Time” didn’t actually show up in the post title. I went to Google and searched “infinitefreetime wheel of time” and this bullshit happened:
Other than the first half-sentence of the second paragraph, none of that is fucking true. Those quotes? Not real. The AI made the whole thing the fuck up. I hate this fucking useless-ass, destructive-ass technology with every fiber of my being and I cannot wait for it to die, hopefully taking a large chunk of the stupider element of our tech sector along with it.
So, yeah. I’m starting up on Wheel of Time again, and fuck GenAI straight to Hell.
You’ve got me, you bastards. I’m in. The last of your fucking movies I saw in a theater was I don’t even remember but it might have been Endgame, weeks after it came out. I also don’t remember which of your movies was the last I saw at all. Maybe Black Widow.
I am going to see Fantastic Four: First Steps in a theater. I am not back and I have no plans to see any other forthcoming Marvel movies. I’m gonna see Superman, but that’s not you. That’s two superhero movies in a month which will be more than I’ve seen in the last several years.
Please don’t fuck this up.
Anybody know anything about flies? We have a mystery infestation in about a room and a half in the house. Our dining room has a big glass sliding door leading to a screened-in back porch. I have killed, and I swear I’m not shitting you, well over a hundred house flies crawling around on that screen door in the last two days. Well over a hundred of them. I have absolutely no idea where they’re coming from. There is no obvious source of flies in my dining room. There is a vent right in front of the sliding door; I have pulled the grille out of it and vacuumed inside it extensively, and it’s not big enough to be hiding a dead animal or something, plus if there was something in there we’d be able to smell it. Plus, if they were coming from the vents, they’d be in every room in the house, not concentrated by the back porch.
They are not on the outside of the sliding doors. Plus, again, there’s no source of flies out there and it’s screened in. They have to be coming from inside the house and they also have to be coming from somewhere very close to that sliding door, and there just isn’t anything. Flies don’t just spontaneously generate! That would mean that there’s something in my dining room that is rotting and was covered in maggots and zero of the four humans and three cats in the house noticed it?
I’ve sat and watched and waited to see if I could spot them crawling from somewhere, and of course, because they’re flies and flies have turning invisible as a class ability, I’ve had no luck on that. If I leave the room for half an hour there will be between five and seventeen (the current record) on the sliding door when I come back. I’ve been using the vacuum cleaner to kill them because it’s faster and more effective than a Goddamn flyswatter.
Somebody help me out, this is gross and I’m tired of it.
(Oh, and I made a flytrap with a Sprite bottle, some apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap because the Internet told me it was an effective cheap flytrap. Pff. It has not caught a single fucking fly. There’s an indoor zapper coming Friday.)
I actually got a fair amount of adulting done today, getting my car scheduled for some long-overdue recall repairs and putting 150 pounds of salt into the water softener, thus allowing it to, y’know, keep working. Read three books. That’s not quite the achievement it might sound like, since two of them were novellas, but still. And now I’m going to try and get Clair Obscur to click. It’s close, but I’m still bouncing off it a bit. Hopefully tonight’s the night.
I’ve been on a little nonfiction kick lately, and I want to talk about two of the books. One of them I can pretty much recommend without reservation, and the other … well, you’ll see.
Anyway, The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century is pretty Goddamned interesting. The book covers will take up more space than the words on this post, as this is very much a “you already know if you want to read this” book, but if reading a history book based on the journal of a Nuremberg executioner over the 45 years that he killed people for the state is interesting to you? Go forth. Right now.
Author Joel Harrington literally found this man’s journal in a bookstore, by the way, so this whole book came by almost by accident. The text was effectively lost; he was able eventually to track down an earlier (and thus, presumably, somewhat more reliable) version of it, but the whole book starts with this historian just literally stumbling upon a copy of this manuscript in a store. Meister Franz Schmidt executed people from 1573 to 1618, and kept records of varying detail of every execution or punishment he undertook on behalf of Nuremberg and several smaller towns in the area. At first the journal is more or less a dry record, but eventually Schmidt began recording the executions in greater and greater detail, eventually including his own feelings and opinions about the crimes committed by his … is victims the right word here? Clients? The poor bastards who got got at his hand. Those people.
I learned a lot from this book, and it feels like something I’ll be rereading in the future, which isn’t something I do very often with nonfiction. There’s lots of myths and nonsense attached to executioners, and this book does a great job of being a history of this one specific profession in this one specific place in time. Definitely check it out, if you think you can stomach it– the book isn’t gory, necessarily, but when beheadings are a big part of someone’s job, there’s no way to avoid some gross bits.
Notice how the lead quote on this book is from John Grisham, a novelist, and not from a historian? That’s kind of right on point. I’ve had this book on my Unread Shelf for way longer than it deserved, but having finished it, I’m kind of dissatisfied. Muller’s book follows three men who worked as “Project Attorneys” for the WRA– the War Relocation Authority– during World War II, acting as chief legal counsel at three of the concentration camps relocation centers that we herded Japanese Americans into. All three men are white, of course, and there’s a fourth who is himself “relocated” but is a trained and barred lawyer who works closely with the Project Attorney at his … uh … center.
Muller is a law professor, not a historian, and you can tell. The book is less pure history than historical fiction, as only one of the four men who are covered in the book was alive when Muller was writing, and it doesn’t look like he interviewed him intensively. The book repeatedly commits the cardinal sin of getting into the private, internal lives of these men with no particular documentation, and Muller freely admits that some of the events in the book are invented, but “consistent with his understanding” of the kinds of men these were. There’s an Author’s Note at the end that gets into what happened and what didn’t; the way he puts it is that nothing “of historical significance” was made up, so if he says a hearing took place, the dialogue is probably based on transcripts, but the bit where the white guy brings his Japanese colleague a pie is made up.
This isn’t a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like it’s a bit too generous to its subjects. I’m willing to believe that at least some of these guys took these jobs out of a sincere if misguided belief that they could make a bad situation better, but when half of one guy’s narrative is him trying to cut the legs out from underneath a Japanese attorney who he thinks is developing too much influence in the camp, y’know, I’m comfortable with saying these were not good people!
On top of that, centering the feelings and experiences of the white lawyers who had the option (which some of them took) of simply walking away from this bullshit just doesn’t feel right. I’d love to have known more about Thomas Masuda, the Japanese attorney who gets about half of one of the chapters, or Kiyoichi Doi, who gets treated like a bad guy in a book where he is unquestionably in the right. And Muller doesn’t seem to have spoken to any actual internees while writing this.
I dunno. I didn’t hate the book, but it’s misguided.
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