#REVIEW: The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, by Andrew Scott Cooper

On August 19, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.

I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.

The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:

The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)

Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.

I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.

One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.

A quick trilogy question

On August 18, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

It was another long day— I’m still having a great time with this new group of kids, mind you, but seven classes in a row is gonna take a toll– and I want to play video games. So I’m just going to throw a quick book question at everyone and take the night off.

If you pick up Book Three of a trilogy, and it’s significantly shorter– like, a couple hundred pages shorter– than Book One and Book Two, do you feel like that’s a sign that the author has lost interest in the story? Asking because that actually happened today and my reaction upon seeing the book was “Dude, are you serious?”

Bookish braindump

On August 17, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.

I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?

Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.

Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.

Christ.

#REVIEW: Innamorata, by Ava Reid

On August 10, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Warning, maybe: reading this will make you reread Gormenghast.

Innamorata, and in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t know why the title is misspelled, is the fourth of Ava Reid’s books I’ve read. I actually own five of them; the fifth is the sequel to one of the other ones, bought at roughly the same time, and I think I read the first one and didn’t like it very much so I never got around to reading Book Two. Typically, once I own five of an author’s books, I’ve graduated to big fan of that author, or at least fan, and Reid, frustratingly, still hasn’t quite written a book that completely hit for me. And to be honest, I only bought this one because there was a ton of stupid BookTok drama and backlash against it that I’m not going to get into, and it pissed me off so I bought the book, striking back with my hard-earned money against the opinions of people I will never meet who similarly do not know I exist or that I bought this book to spite them and their unreasonable ideas.

Anyway.

Have you read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books? If you have, knowing that Ava Reid begins this book with a quote from Gormenghast and that the castle that the main character lives in at the start of the book is called Castle Peake is probably enough to get you to pick this up. If you have not read any of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, you should go read them, then come back to this post.

The book begins with a funeral, the funeral for an old woman known as the Mistress of Teeth, and her funeral is attended by representatives for the Master of Blood, the Master of Eyes, the Master of Lungs, the Master of Bones, and the Master of Flesh, and the first several Masters take their parts from the corpse before the Master of Flesh stomps the flaccid, shredded sack of meat that remains into the mud, thus ensuring that the Mistress cannot rise from the dead. The former Mistress of Teeth’s teeth are made into a necklace for the new Mistress of Teeth, and I’m given to understand that the necklace contains teeth from several previous holders of that title. The book ends– this is technically a spoiler, but I think I can get away with it– with something “stirring” in a murdered woman’s womb, a murdered woman who was very much not pregnant when she was killed.

This is Gothic body horror, a lot of it, and it is deeply fucked up, and here I allude to the controversy in that you should completely ignore the marketing text that tries real hard to pretend this is a romantasy, because it is very much not a fucking romantasy, although I will admit it has some elements of same, including some, well, fucking. If you read books for atmosphere and mood and language, and the notion of reading something that is very much like a modern take on Peake appeals to you, jump at it. If you read books for other reasons … maybe not. The book is 532 pages long; I put it down, somewhat unwillingly, with about 80 pages left last night, having read all of the rest of it during my road trip. I got home from work today and read those last 80 pages, and I kind of feel like at some point the actual plot collapsed under its own weight. There is some interesting character development throughout, but that character development is going to involve someone completely abandoning every personality trait and motivation and goal that she had at the beginning of the book, and some of that stuff sounded pretty interesting! Lady Agnes wanted to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps– that’s grandma getting stomped into the mud in the first few pages– and restore necromancy to the creepy-ass island she lives on. That’s automatically cool!

She decides not to, basically because she gets distracted, and you’re going to have to be okay with that if you’re going to have a good time with this. And that was hellishly disappointing, even if a lot of the other stuff that happens was, again, cool and atmospheric and creepy and another part of the controversy was about trigger warnings, and I’m just going to tell you a lot of fucked up shit happens and has already happened, and there is so, so, so much blood in this book, and some spectacularly poor parenting, and I eventually turned that into four stars, but the sequel is going to get read right after it comes out, even if I’m kind of hoping it digs itself out of a bit of a hole.

Let’s call that a cautious and conditional recommendation for Innamorata, and you should definitely read Mervyn Peake.

Let’s talk about DAGGERMOUTH

On August 4, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s possible that you haven’t heard about this book yet, so let me set the stage here: H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is a dystopian romance that blew up as an indie title before getting a seven-figure traditional publishing deal, and it was just recently released in a pretty new physical hardcover. It has also been publicly accused of being written by AI.

(A quick side note: If you aren’t an Atlantic subscriber, you won’t be able to read the article at that link. Ironically, perhaps, there is at least one other website that has taken the entire article, stripped the author’s name off of it, and reposted it, with only an “originally published at the Atlantic” link at the bottom to indicate that they didn’t produce it. I’m not going to link to that article. You are welcome to find it, if you want.)

Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think I’d have picked this book up in the first place. I’ve read my share of romance novels/romantasies in the last couple of years but I’m growing tired of it as a genre, and what the kids call “spice” is starting to slowly slide toward being a reason not to pick up a book. But a good friend who has become The Person I Talk About Books To told me she’d read it and recommended it, and then told me about the AI controversy, which at the time I hadn’t heard about. She thought the accusation was ridiculous, having read the book, and pointed out that of course the author everyone was tossing accusations at was a young Black woman.(*)

For what it’s worth, Wolfe’s publisher, who gave her a whole lot of money, is standing behind her on this, and since AI-written text can’t be copyrighted, you’d think they’d have a significant interest in making sure she actually wrote the damn thing.

The book is on Kindle Unlimited, as it turns out. So I didn’t even have to pay for it. Fuck it, I thought, and downloaded it.

If this book was written by AI, we are all in really fucking big trouble, folks. Human-generated culture is dead if AI wrote this book.

That sounds like a strong recommendation. It’s not. Not quite. Daggermouth has a problem that for some reason seems very common to the indie-book-to-tradpub-success pipeline: Wolfe constantly either uses words that are just slightly not the right word or describes situations that sound good at first and don’t make sense upon second looks. The type of thing that sounds like nitpicking if you only provide one example, and I don’t plan to eviscerate the book at the moment, so let me nitpick: there is a bit early on where a character is drinking from a glass, and his many rings “clink” against the glass.

The glass in question is a wine glass– stemware, in other words– and if you’re holding stemware in such a fashion that your rings are clinking on it, you’re holding it wrong. At one point– hell, this might be the same conversation, I don’t remember– a character is sitting behind an executive-style desk having a conversation with a second character. He stands up and “in four long strides” (Wolfe is terribly fond of counting her characters’ strides) he walks to the other character to get all up in his space.

The problem is that this description both 1) forgets that he was sitting behind a desk and 2) puts the other character really far away from that desk. Seriously, take four “long strides” right now. Is that normal conversational distance?

The writing, in other words, in a mechanical and a craft sense, is mediocre. I’ve read a lot worse, mind you. But it’s definitely not good. And again, this is a weird indie-to-tradpub problem; I had the exact same issue with Ryan Cahill’s books, and I can think of three or four other authors I’ve had the same complaints about who I’m not going to bother to call out by name right now.(**)

The story hits its stride at about the 100-page mark and is off to the fucking races after that, and never lets up or slows down for the last 80% of the book. This is a good story, poorly written. And there’s enough genuinely good stuff in there– particularly the ending, which caught both me and my friend completely by surprise. There are bits that are ridiculous, too; the worst offense was a bit where the fated lovers of the piece surprise eight soldiers in his apartment, kill all eight of them, and then decide to stay the night in the apartment rather than, say, realize their cover is completely blown and go literally anywhere else. They don’t even clear the bodies out until the next morning.

I didn’t have any damn idea how to rate this, and had I not spent the first 100 pages debating every third word choice and mapping out locations in my head, this might have been a five-star read, because it needed to get good enough that I stopped paying attention to the flaws in the writing. The book managed to shut down the persnickety editor part of my brain, and usually, once that guy is unleashed on your book, you’re done. But I got caught up enough in the story that I finished the book basically overnight, and after that first 20% I was genuinely expecting to have to DNF or force myself through the rest of it. I put it at four and a half on Storygraph (follow me!) and four on Goodreads.

I would not have thought for a single second that this text was AI-generated had I not been told that it was controversial. And, to return to the article for a moment, I’m not convinced of their methodology, at least based on what the article tells me– there are, for example, two entire sentences that appear word-for-word in other books that they looked at, but they leave out the kind of important detail of which book came out first. Maybe the fucking AI ate the sentences for this book and spit them out for the other one? Plus, I’m sorry, if you’re comparing this book to a book from someone who “wrote” 400 books last year, and the sequel to this one isn’t coming out for another year, guess what? I know which author I think is writing AI. Hell, I know which author I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist. If this book comes out as a higher percentage chance of being AI than one of the other person’s 400 books, your methodology is crap and you should redo your study.

Is it possible? Sure. I’m not going to claim that my internal AI detector is top-tier or anything like that; in 8th grade the easiest way to see if a student cheated and had AI write a paper is to ask them to read it out loud, and as soon as they hit a word they can’t read, ask them what it means. It works every single fucking time. I generally don’t have to think about it a whole lot harder than that. But if it is? If a fucking genAI slop program wrote this book? It doesn’t have to be fucking Dostoyevsky for that to be a major fucking concern.

So, yeah. I’m pretty sure H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is not written by AI. It has issues but ultimately I enjoyed reading it. I’m in for the sequel. And I am absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to human culture if I’m wrong.

(*) I Googled “H.M. Wolfe age,” and the fucking AI assistant told me she was born on October 28, 2025, and then helpfully added “Age: 0” afterwards.

(**) In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the only indie-to-tradpub author who I haven’t had this problem with is Matt Dinniman, including his non-Dungeon Crawler Carl books.

Monthly Reads: July 2026

On August 1, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading3 Comments

Book of the Month is … damn. There is no Antimemetics Division? Sublimation? Challenger? The Empire of the Vampire series as a whole? Angel Down? Seriously, throw a dart. July was ridiculous.

#REVIEW: Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim

On July 31, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

In my review of Angel Down a couple of days ago, I talked about how I generally don’t like it very much when authors try to screw around with structure in novels. I was forced to eat my words with Angel Down’s unorthodox single-sentence structure, and now I’m about to review a book where a good half of it is written in second person.

Yes, second person. As in everything is “you did this” and “you did that,” like an old Choose Your Own Adventure book. And again, when I realized what I was looking at, I very nearly sighed and put the book down. And again, if I had done that, it would have been a huge mistake, as this is one of the more original science fiction books I’ve read … well, okay, since There Is No Antimemetics Division, which wasn’t even two weeks ago, but before that? It was a while.

Sublimation is more or less set in the real world, with only one real change to how the world works, but man, that one change is a doozy. Sometimes, when a person crosses a border, a person will leave a copy of themselves behind in the original country. Those people are entirely separate human beings, referred to as instances of the original person. Sometimes they adopt different names, sometimes they simply move on with their lives and keep their original names and identities. If instances physically touch each other, they recombine into one person, but keeping the memories and experiences of both people, who may theoretically have had many years to diverge from one another. Different cultures over human history have dealt with instantiation in different ways; sometimes it’s regarded as good luck, sometimes … not so much, but the book is clear that this has been with humanity forever. Odysseus comes up repeatedly; Adam and Eve left instances behind when they left Paradise, and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are referred to as instances of God.

This is, in case it’s not clear, one of those books that has Big Questions to ask, and if you are an immigrant this is going to hit you hard, and while instancing doesn’t necessarily happen based on major life decisions, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to meet a version of myself who had turned left in places in my past where I chose to turn right. And, again, this is a huge thing– different countries treat citizenship of instances differently, especially since it happens when people are crossing borders anyway. And it’s not a situation where one person is the “original” and one is the instance– they are both instances, and there is no original person. There is technology that has recently been developed that does allow instances to touch each other, and when both of them are using it there’s a 95% success rate in preventing recombination when they touch. But up until recently, this was permanent if you didn’t have a way to get back to the person you instanced from.

The main characters are all instances; one a young woman named Soyoung/Rose whose mother took her to America when she was a child and she grew up there; “Rose” is the American version, and Soyoung remained in South Korea. The other is a friend of hers, Yujin/YJ, who moved to America for college. While Soyoung’s instantiation wasn’t intentional, Yujin actually hoped to split, and plans to recombine after both the South Korean and American sides of him have gotten their educations and their careers started. Soyoung and Rose haven’t talked in years. Yujin and YJ talk nearly every day. Soyoung’s mom instanced also, so there are versions of “mom” in both countries.

The story begins when Soyoung/Rose’s grandfather in South Korea dies, and Rose returns for the funeral, seeing her instance for the first time in nearly two decades. And Soyoung, who has gotten engaged in the meantime, forcibly integrates them without Rose’s permission. Meanwhile, YJ works for the company that makes the anti-reintegration technology, and it turns out they’re about to debut a new product that can re-split a pair after they have reintegrated, back into their separate instances, with their original memories intact. Yujin and Soyoung are old friends; Rose did not know YJ.

And … well, we’re off to the races, with corporate espionage, familial betrayal, generational guilt, emotional manipulation and a cat hilariously named Mr. Crouton all in the mix.

(Right, I forgot to mention it: when the subject of a chapter is an instance, the chapter is written in second person. When Soyoung and Rose integrate, the narration shifts to third person. It’s a good example of how playing with structure can work.)

I loved this book. I love the premise, the execution was great, and Isabel J. Kim is absolutely on my list of authors I’m going to continue to keep my eyes on in the future. This was a really remarkable piece of work. If you like smart books written by smart people you absolutely want to read this one.

Now, that said: two caveats, to close this out: first, this is getting seriously mixed reviews– it’s at 3.65 on Goodreads right now, which is normally not a great sign. Usually, that means that a book isn’t great; other times it can just mean it was written by a Black person or has a gay relationship in it. Now, I can see the second-person aspect causing some people to put it down immediately– again, I almost did– so that’s going to account for some of it, but I looked through some of the reviews and didn’t immediately feel like the people who weren’t big fans of the book were stupid, so maybe if you’re on the fence look at some other reviews and see what folks had to say.

Second, I do not understand the title. The physics definition of “sublimation” is something that moves from a solid state directly to a gas, much like “melt” means to move from a solid to a liquid. That does not seem to apply here at all. The psychological definition, and I’m pulling straight from Merriam-Webster here, is “to divert the expression of (an instinctual desire or impulse) from its unacceptable form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.” And that almost feels like it should fit, but … not really. If you’ve read this and you can explain the title, I’d love to hear it. I mean, Instance or Instantiation were both right there.