This week involved– this is not a joke– both having a condom thrown at me and being inadvertently punched in the balls by a student, so, having survived it, I was in serious need of some retail therapy. I went to Barnes and Noble.
Do both of us a favor and don’t add up the cost of any of this.
I purchased Ron Chernow’s doorstop-sized, thousand page, recently-released biography of Mark Twain immediately, but not from Barnes and Noble. This one was expensive enough that I actually ordered it from Amazon, while still in the store, for 2/3 of the cost. It’ll be here tomorrow.
What I’ve started doing when I’m in bookstores is buying books I wasn’t previously familiar with, rather than grabbing things that are already on my wish list. I’ve learned that if I walk into my local B&N looking for something specific I am sure to be disappointed. It will not be there. (To wit: I have the absolutely gorgeous Broken Binding edition of Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, and was looking for the standard edition as a reading copy. Couldn’t find it. Unbelievable.)
Anyway, this caught my eye, and as a standalone and a debut novel it felt like the perfect kind of bookstore buy.
Then I decided to look around for a specific book that I’d seen the last time I was in the store, The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali. It wasn’t there! Again, any time I’m looking for a specific book, it is never there. But her debut novel was:
So, two or three purchases depending on how you’re counting, one by an established author that I’m certain to enjoy, two debut novels that I’m rolling dice on, no series fiction. So far so good! But then this one caught my eye:
I’m not even completely sure what drew me to this, and I picked it up and put it back down a couple of times, as the plot feels a little been-there-done-that in some ways, but by this point I was in full “fuck it” mode. Speaking of:
I did not buy any Dungeon Crawler Carl books, but these hardcover editions are appealing to my inner book-collector magpie; they’re big chonky bois in bright, appealing covers and I bet they’ll look great on the shelf. I also suspect they might be terrible? I dunno. Anyone read them?
My final purchase was this one:
This was actually the first book I physically touched after entering the store, as I saw it before the Twain book. I have not heard of the author, nor have I heard of his first book, and after flipping it over I realized that I have also not heard of any of the three authors with big pull quotes on the back, nor have I heard of any of the five books of theirs that were mentioned, and the quotes are genuinely wankstrous. Shit, this was probably a literature. I put it back.
Then, while looking for the Kamali book, I went back to the new fiction section to make sure it wasn’t still there, and … well, it turns out that Kamali and Larison are right next to each other on the shelf. So I picked it up again, leafed through it a bit, and put it back again.
Then, while deciding on The Outcast Mage, I decided that even though I’d had a vague plan to pick up three standalone books, and Outcast wasn’t one of those, I could still get it if I bought another standalone in addition to it, and somehow I ended up walking out of the store with The Ancients as well, figuring that this was a pretty precise example of how sometimes the books decide I’m buying them and not the other way around. I think this is the literary equivalent of being adopted by a cat. Hopefully I enjoy it.
I almost want to make this a separate post, but it is just my Barnes & Noble that is really hitting customer service and talking about books super hard, or is that a corporation-wide thing? Because the woman at the register was practically fucking interviewing the two people in front of me, making each transaction take so long that they had to call someone else to run a register because the line was building up. I was simultaneously stressing out about the conversation– what the hell is the name of the book I’m reading? Who is the author again?– and quietly scorning some of her choices, because I swear by God and sunny Jesus that if I walk up to you with a handful of fantasy books and you do what she did to the guy in front of me and ask if I’ve heard of Brandon fucking Sanderson, I may not be able to keep the look of disdain off of my face. She pivoted from “have you heard of the single most famous author in this genre in a generation” straight to recommending the Licanius trilogy by James Islington, making the second time in a row that I have been at that Barnes and Noble and someone has recommended those books, and I had the same reaction both times, which is that I usually don’t believe people when they tell me they’ve read them.
Also, there are like fifteen steps in fantasy book-reading between Brandon Sanderson and James Islington. It’s like finding out someone enjoys Goosebumps and recommending Lovecraft to them.
Anyway, the new register person ended up helping me, and did so without any unnecessary questions, which is good, because there was no way I was getting out of that conversation without some form of idiotic faux pas.
I have spent a couple of days trying to think of a time where I thought a story-within-a-story structure worked for me, and for the life of me I’ve been unable to come up with one. The main character in Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author is– get this– a Nigerian-American female author who lives in Chicago and is in a wheelchair due to a childhood injury, and at the beginning of the book she writes a science fiction novel that is a massive success. A massive, massive, massive success, propelling her to J.K. Rowling or Stephen King levels of fame. Portions of the book are given over to excerpts from her book, Rusted Robots.
The problem is Rusted Robots is terrible. It’s unreadable. By the end of the book I was skipping all of the Rusted Robots sections, and I generally don’t skip or skim parts of novels. And, man, it’s really damn hard to read a book that is all about how amazing and life-changing some other book is, especially when they keep giving you parts of that other book and you keep skipping them. The obvious self-insert doesn’t really make any sense (Okorafor doesn’t use a wheelchair, but had a surgery for scoliosis go bad as a young woman, and she needed crutches to walk for a long time) and Zelu as a character is generally unbearable. She’s selfish and impulsive and her family is terrible, so you’re confronted with a situation where you don’t like the main character and think her family treats her poorly and think they’re mostly right even though they’re terrible about the way that they’re right.
It’s also really weird to read about the various ways Rusted Robots affects Zelu’s life, because as an actual science fiction author Okorafor has to know that this isn’t how this shit works. Okay, granted, Nigerian women in wheelchairs aren’t terribly common sights, and Nigerian women with the experimental leg exoskeleton devices she acquires midway through the book are even less common, but Zelu gets recognized repeatedly every time she leaves the house, by people who a lot of time are reading her book right at that very second so they can shove it in her face to sign. Zelu’s relationship with her Internet fans makes more sense, especially as the wait for Book Two of her unplanned trilogy gets longer, but no debut author has ever gotten this famous this fast. It’s nutty.
I three-starred it on Goodreads because despite my complaints it’s still an Okorafor novel, and it was one of those books that despite not liking it very much I didn’t want to put it down, but a twist at the end very nearly made me knock it down to two, and I still might.
Sigh. I really like all three of the authors in this post! Scalzi, in particular, is someone who I have referred to as “one of my favorite authors” more than once, but When The Moon Hits Your Eye marks his second miss in a row after Starter Villain, which was mostly underwhelming.
The biggest problem is that When The Moon Hits Your Eye actually is the book that Scalzi’s online detractors want to tell you all of his books are– it’s slight (I read it in three hours or so, and not because it was so amazing I couldn’t put it down), all of the characters feel exactly the same, and all the dialogue is bantery and quippy in a way that’s okay for one or two characters in any given book but not for damn near everyone. The concept of the book is that the moon suddenly turns to cheese, and the book talks about the next thirty days after that. There’s no main character, although some people are revisited a few times, but Day Fourteen might talk about a character that you never see again, or you might jump back to the people from Day Three on Day Twenty-Two and it’ll take you half of the four-page chapter to realize you’ve seen them before.
Oh, and I knew a girl once whose nickname was Mooncheese, for reasons I no longer remember, and I spent the whole book thinking about her, which wasn’t entirely unwelcome but was kinda distracting.
I dunno. The whole concept of the book is kind of deliberately dumb, and you can take something like that and play it kind of straight if you want to, but the characters in the book keep talking about how fucking stupid it is (those exact words) that they have to take the idea of the moon turning to cheese seriously, and after a while it’s really wearying. It’s just … it’s blech. It’s not very good, and it pains me to say that about a Scalzi book.
This, on the other hand. Go buy this immediately, and if you haven’t read the first book in what are apparently called The Ana and Din Mysteries, go grab it right now; it’s called The Tainted Cup and it’s really damn good too. The series hails from one of my favorite subgenres, “Sherlock Holmes, but …”.
This time our crime-solving pair are representatives of an Empire on a fantasy world with lots of biopunk “grafting” tech and occasional attacks by what are basically kaiju but they call Leviathans. Jackson Bennett leans heavy into body horror here– the victim in the first book died when a literal tree suddenly grew out of his body– and the Holmes of the series, Ana Dolabra, is a drug-addicted and probably genetically modified ubergenius who wears a blindfold because she can’t handle the constant visual input of the world around her. Dinios Kol, the Watson, is an Engraver, possessed of perfect recall but with a neat little twist where he needs to anchor his memories with scents to be able to describe them in a way that makes sense to anyone else. Ana is delightfully nuts and the world itself is fascinating as hell, and the Macguffin of this book is Leviathan marrow, which is just a great thing for characters to be chasing around and trying to find. I love this series, and right now this book is on my shortlist for 2025.
This is a new one: I’ve started reviews before by pointing out that I know the author, but in this case, I really know the author, as in “he knows my real name, was in my ed school grad program, and he’s been to my apartment.” Keith and I essentially had the exact same day-to-day schedule for two solid years, and while we’ve fallen out of touch other than occasional social media interactions since graduating in 2005, it’s simply not possible for me to leave my relationship with him aside while talking about this book. The Monsters Know is, in a lot of ways, possibly the Keith Ammanniest thing Keith Ammann could possibly have written, and while that’s a compliment, it’s very likely not one that’s going to be salient to anyone other than me.
Here’s the tl;dr: If you play Dungeons & Dragons, and especially if you’re a DM, you’re highly likely to really enjoy this book. If you do any sort of fantasy roleplaying that isn’t exactly D&D but is D&D adjacent, it’s probably going to be useful anyway. The book– five hundred-plus pages– is filled with essays on what feels like the entire Monster Manual (it probably isn’t, but still) breaking down various fantasy monsters based on their provided stat blocks, and providing suggestions on how they might act, what tactics they might use, and how they might react to any number of possible actions by your player characters.
There is also math. I’ll get to that in a bit.
Now, to be clear, I did not read this entire book. Why? Because it’s more of a sourcebook than something you sit down and read straight through, and if I have a criticism of it it’s not of the writing or the subject matter but the physical format of the book, which looks like a novel or, like, a “regular” book, when I really feel like it ought to be formatted more like a roleplaying sourcebook of some sort. I probably read … half of the entire thing, skipping around to different monsters I was interested in and occasionally occasionally passing over sections that were a little more power gamey than I’m interested in. Ordinarily I wouldn’t review something if I hadn’t read all of it, unless it was an actual DNF, but again: that’s not what this book is. The section on the kuo-toa will be there whenever you actually decide to include kuo-toa in your game; you don’t really need to read every word of that to appreciate what the book is doing. I am fairly certain that if I told Keith, word for word, “I liked your book but I didn’t read all of it,” he would not be a bit surprised, nor should he be.
Let’s be a touch more specific, though: based on, for example, the description of a species as being high Dexterity but low Strength and medium Intelligence, and the different combat abilities that a species or monster might have, The Monsters Know might suggest that this species prefers to attack from ambush, using sniping tactics and a high likelihood of retreat once injured. From there the section might move more specifically into D&D language, suggesting that Dash and Disengage actions might be used frequently in combat, and sometimes it’ll go so far as to map out a model encounter of sorts. A lot of the time it’ll then get into the actual mathematics behind various attacks, spells, etc, using those numbers to suggest which abilities a monster might prefer to use and which would provide a bit more utility and a higher reward to risk ratio. A lot of the time it’ll suggest a hit point threshold at which point a monster might retreat, too. I haven’t DMed much at all, really, but this was still fascinating to read and to think about, and I may suggest my son look through it, as he’s starting his first homebrew campaign soon. The book loses me a bit when it gets super granular about the numbers behind the abilities, but that’s the beauty of a sourcebook; you can ignore the stuff you aren’t as interested in. I was never a power gamer, and was always more interested in the abilities that felt fun or cool than whatever might be strictly the most effective move at any given time, so that stuff isn’t for me as much.
So yeah. My buddy wrote a book. If you’re into the same kind of nerdery we are, you should definitely check it out, and you can also go to Keith’s blog (the source of a lot of this material) at themonstersknow.com. If you’re in, he’s on his … fourth or fifth book by now, I think, so there’s a lot more where this came from.
I got a second copy of Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar on the day I started reading it. And it wasn’t quite on purpose– the copy on top there showed up on release day, since I’d preordered it after it caught my attention somewhere at some point in the last few months, and then Illumicrate sent me another copy as part of their monthly box. This is the first time that’s happened; the unofficial rule for Illumicrate books seems to be that they only send me books I’ve never heard of, and this is the first time they’ve sent me one I already owned, although I have bought a couple after reading them so that the series were sure to match. One way or another, though, the Illumicrate edition is fucking gorgeous, one of the prettiest books they’ve sent me, so I’m not pressed about it.
… and suddenly I want to change the title of this post and take the word “review” out of it, because the more I think about it the less interested I am in writing even a traditional-by-my-standards book review. This book is weird; I enjoyed reading it, and I’ll pick up the sequel– which may be, in and of itself, enough of a review for anyone who cares at all about my opinion– but there’s a lot about it that makes me reluctant to star-rate it. For one, it’s a Magical Tournament book, and I am tired of books that can be boiled down to the name of a trope. On top of that it’s a People Are Sorted Into Categories book, although it’s not the entire society, at least, but nearly all of the main characters in this book represent the devotees of one of the eight animal gods (creatively named “the Eight,” although it’s fun seeing the word “eight” used as a swear word) and some of the ones who don’t used to. Which leads me into another gripe, which is that every character effectively has three names, since sometimes they’re referred to by their first names, sometimes by their last names, and sometimes just by their faction, so you might see someone talking about “the Hound” and you have to remember who that is. Spread that out over the eight people involved in the tournament (which is how they pick their emperor, who appears to be a king, and I wish people would learn the difference) and keeping track of everyone can be a little more complicated than maybe it should be.
But! There’s a murder mystery at the heart of this book, and the murder mystery is wrapped around the succession tournament and the eight-faction worldbuilding thoroughly enough that it’s hard to extricate from it– this story only works in this world– and main character Neema, the titular Raven Scholar, is tasked with untangling the mystery as well as trying to become emperor on the side, a job she’s not even interested in, because the outgoing Emperor has ordered her to try to become his successor, which makes more sense in context than it might sound. Only Neema’s not much of a scholar– she’s more of an autistic nerd, which isn’t quite the same thing– and occasionally she gets really good at physical combat because she has to.
Oh, and there’s a Shoehorned Enemies-To-Lovers Romance, because everything has a name nowadays.
I dunno. I liked this book, as I said, but every ten pages or so something jumped out and kind of annoyed me? But not enough that I didn’t five-star it, although right now I’m not sure why? Because maybe I don’t know what a five-star is, and of course I’m writing this, when I could have just not talked about the book.
Quite a bit of good stuff this month, but we’re giving Book of the Month to Capitana, by Cassandra James, which — what the hell — I never reviewed? It’s great, read it– along with The Silverblood Promise and Advocate.
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