This is very much not a book review. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still gonna tag it under “Reviews,” but the Epic of Gilgamesh is four thousand years old and the notion of putting a star rating on it is kind of ludicrous. Now, Stephen Mitchell’s new translation includes a decently long introduction and 80 or so pages of translation notes, so I could “review” that, but I did not pick this up to read his notes or his introduction; I picked it up because I realized I didn’t have a decent translation of the epic in the house anywhere and I got a wild hair up my ass about it.
Now, that said: Mitchell’s translation– well, his adaptation, and I’ll get to the distinction in a bit– is in fact a lovely read, and it combines being compulsively readable in English with a fine poetic feel that makes reading it out loud flow beautifully. I’m not an expert here by any means– I considered shifting my Master’s degree away from Hebrew Bible and more toward Babylonian studies in grad school before deciding to abandon the entire affair, but that’s as close as I get.
The problem is neither is Stephen Mitchell, who openly admits that he “doesn’t read cuneiform and has no knowledge of Akkadian.” Which makes the decision to publish a new translation, or adaptation, or version, which is his word … interesting? He basically sat down with a bunch of English versions (of, remember, fragmentary texts in one of the oldest languages that humanity can still understand) and some scholarly treatments of the work and pulled together his text from that, first doing a prose pass and then converting it to English verse.
(There’s a whole post or maybe a series of them in here about how one translates poetry from one language to another; needless to say it’s hellaciously complicated and requires a lot of expertise in both of the languages involved and in writing poetry. I could never.)
Fun fact: the Epic of Gilgamesh contains the oldest reference to blowjobs I’m aware of. From Book VI:
‘Sweet Ishullanu, let me suck your rod, touch my vagina, caress my jewel.‘
Except! In the translation notes at the end, Mitchell states that the literal translation is “eat your vigor,” which … okay, that sounds like a blowjob too, but since he doesn’t know any Akkadian it’s hard to say how reasonable that leap is, right? An actual scholar of the language and the culture might be able to provide some details there that led to that specific choice of words; for Mitchell it’s basically just vibes. This bothers the nearly-dead Bible scholar in me; it may not be especially relevant to other people.
There’s a bit where Enkidu tears the “thigh” off of a bull and throws it at Ishtar, and she takes it and puts it on an altar and makes it a centerpiece, and I’m thinking that maybe it wasn’t the thigh he actually tore off? Would love to see what a scholar had to say about that. But that’s not this version!
Anyway. I enjoyed reading this even if I had some issues with it, and maybe I’ll take a deep breath and find something more academic about the work and maybe a more traditional translation to compare the two. Or maybe not! It’s not like I don’t have a shitton of other stuff (including, remember, a whole other book called Gilgamesh) to read.
The tl;dr verdict: 7/10, but I think it’s my fault.
On paper, I should have absolutely loved this game. Nine Sols is a combination of a Metroidvania and a Soulslike– two of my favorite genres– with a combat system that is basically a 2D version of Sekiro bolted onto it. The level design is great (although the ability to leave markers on the map would have been greatly appreciated,) the enemy design and overall graphics are wonderful, and the bosses are basically perfect, the kind of boss design where you get utterly annihilated in the first five or six fights and then it slowly starts to click and by the time you win it’s because you can see into the future.
So how come I turned the difficulty down to “infant” 2/3 of the way through the game and rushed through the back part as quickly as I could?
The storytelling is interesting in this game, and I can easily imagine it being someone’s favorite part of the game. The story is deep and twisty-turns and has a fascinating fusion of future-inflected Taoism with high technology and weapons like spears and swords and bows, and the relationships between the main characters are awesome– I haven’t seen an exploration of fatherhood, albeit unintentional fatherhood, done this well in a game since The Last of Us, and the story motifs of revenge and regret and colonialism are all done really well.
But, man, the main character is a dick, and after a while I really got tired of Yi. He’s a scientist in a religious culture, which is cool, and he’s kind of an irascible ass, which is cool– Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favorite characters, remember, and her main personality type is “impatient asshole”– but he’s got this weird dismissive, arrogant atheism about him that somehow managed to make him a turn-off to me, an arrogant atheist. Combine that with no voice acting at all, meaning that I was fast-forwarding through massive amounts of dialogue all the time, a very rare opportunity to choose a dialogue option that I almost always missed because I was hammering a button to get past the word bubbles (and which, 95% of the time, made no difference at all, and 5% of the time chose the ending for you) and a general predilection for pontificating and meandering philosophizing, and … ugh. I lost patience with it after a while, and again, I can absolutely see someone else really digging the story in this game, but I just wanted to be done with it after a while.
I spent 34 hours with this, picking up 30 of the 36 trophies along the way (a second play through is required to 100% if you’re not savescumming, and turning down the difficulty lost me one of the trophies as well) and I think if it had been a 25 hour game I’d have been singing its praises from the firmament. It just wore out its welcome after a while, and once it did even some of its strengths turned against it– if I’m getting tired of a game and just want to finish it and move on, the boss design that is one of the greatest things about it becomes a problem, because I don’t want to spend an hour or two (or more like four, looking at you, Lady Ethereal) learning a boss’s patterns. I want to turn my attack power through the ceiling and three-shot the final boss in the game. Which I did.
So, yeah, ultimately this was a game that I should have really enjoyed that I didn’t, but if you feel like this sounds like your type of thing, I’d follow that instinct anyway, and if you’re a story person, it’s definitely worth a look, especially at $30.
Really, the phrase “bisexual nun” was all I needed.
Here’s the thing about Gabriella Buba’s Saints of Storm and Sorrow: it’s one of those books where a lot of what I have to say about it is negative, but I’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, out this summer, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading it. I lost some sleep to reading this book, and several times I had to force myself to put it down at the end of the night to go to bed. There’s something compelling and propulsive about Buba’s writing that ended up outweighing some of the things about this book that didn’t make sense or didn’t quite work, and I guess I just need you to keep that in mind while you’re reading this, because I want to talk about the weird stuff. I ended up four-starring this, but in a different mood I could have been talked into a three, and for most of the first half it was going to be a five. So one way or another it’s kind of all over the place, but the tl;dr to this whole post is that the book is well worth the time to read it even if there are some issues.
So here’s the thing. The main character, Lunurin, is a nun. She is also a priestess, quite possibly against her will, of a storm goddess called Aman Sinaya. Now, when I first read this in whatever blurb or online review I saw that caused me to order this, along with the phrase “bisexual nun” and the phrase “Filipino-inspired,” I assumed that this meant that this book wasn’t set on Earth.
And … technically, it isn’t? But it totally is. Lunurin is a Catholic nun. The bad guys are the Spaniards. They speak Spanish. They’re in the Philippines. I’m pretty sure the word “Catholic” never shows up, but … there is no attempt to be subtle here. Lunurin and her female love interest are both Catholic nuns, biracial and despised for being so, in a colonial atmosphere that is more or less identical to the Spaniards colonizing the Philippines. (Do you know any Filipinos? Ever notice how they all have Hispanic-sounding last names? There’s a reason for that.) And the book wants to get into the syncretism that happened whenever Catholicism ran into indigenous religion, which is a fascinating and complex subject, but if the colonized people can literally call down typhoons while being literally possessed by their gods, and Jesus … doesn’t do any of that? It kind of wreaks havoc on your worldbuilding. Christianity toppled, say, Norse religion, sure. But you know who the Norse didn’t have? Actual fucking Thor. And Lunurin can call down lightning by letting her hair down. And everyone just acts like Christianity is a reasonable alternative to that, just because the priests say so?
Nah.
I would kind of love for a book where Christian missionaries run into a religion that literally grants powers to its priesthood, but this isn’t that book and that’s not the story that Buba is interested in telling. She wants to start a book that is already past the colonization phase and so that’s what she gives us, and it’s not exactly the book’s fault that it sent my brain down all sorts of other pathways once I realized what was going on. There’s something to be said about having trouble accepting the basic premise, of course, but I’m a lifelong fantasy/sci-fi reader and suspending disbelief is something I’m good at. But I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t an issue.
Let’s see, what else? This is something that’s going to get fleshed out better in the sequels, I’m sure, but I never quite understood the relationships between any of the main characters. Two of them end up married, and I’m not sure either of them wanted it except one of them kinda did and the other sort of shrugs and rolls with it, and the nun female love interest is an absolute mess of a character, which is yet another complaint that may or may not represent a problem with the book. Messy people exist! But holy shit is Catalina a mess. She’s inconsistent, jealous and a religious fanatic (nun, remember) and there’s also a healthy degree of self-loathing going on as well as some internalized racial hatred, and … she’s realistic, in a lot of ways, I think, maybe? But that doesn’t automatically make her fun to read about.
There are a couple of explicit sex scenes that tonally really do not match the rest of the book, too, so be aware of that. This is not a romantasy by any stretch of the imagination, and I let that fool me into thinking that at no point would glistening cocks be involved. Or, well, one cock that glistens at least once. And, again, I’m not convinced that the people fucking actually like each other, or whether they’re trying to play each other, and it’s okay for the characters to not know each other’s motivations, and it’s okay for the characters to be inconsistent in their motivations, but I definitely don’t get them and I’m not convinced the author did either. The problem is that in this particular scenario complicated characters come off exactly the same as characters with no actual arc and no planning, and I genuinely can’t tell which one this is.
So yeah. Again, I’ve bought the sequel. Lunurin’s relationship with her actual goddess– as opposed to Jesus, who doesn’t seem to be real and doesn’t occupy a lot of her time despite the nunnery going on– is fascinating, and again, she doesn’t appear to like her very much, and while I have my problems with the setting as it currently exists, it’s got its positives just out of sheer originality. It may be that I’ll read book two and tap out for what I’m presuming will be a third book in the future (this may be a duology, I’m not sure) or I might shift into full-throated approval. We’ll see. But I’m giving this one a thumbs-up regardless, now that you’ve read all the caveats and quid pro quos and such.
One good thing about being sick is that in between naps, coughing fits, randomly snotting all over my pillow and light hallucinations, I can get a fair amount of reading done. I was really hoping not to lose two more days this week but this is legitimately the sickest I’ve been since the last time I had COVID and right now I’m just hoping to be functional enough to go in on Monday.
Anyway, The God of the Woods is real real good, a missing persons story worthy of Tana French at her best, and you ought to read it. The story bounces around from the 1950s to the end of 1975, set mostly at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, a camp run by a multigenerational wealthy family that appears to own or employ most of the town it’s set in. The twist here is that while Barbara Van Laar has gone missing in 1975, her brother Peter Van Laar (the fourth, no less) also disappeared at the same camp fourteen years prior. The book bounces around several different timelines, giving a host of characters both inside and outside the family and inside and outside the investigation time as POV characters, and does a great job of both juggling multiple mysteries and character arcs and tying them all up in a satisfying fashion at the end. I have said this before; I am not the world’s most careful reader, unfortunately, and I’m further impaired by this bastard of a head cold I’ve got going on right now, so the fact that I was able to keep up with a mystery novel that was jumping around between three different timelines and half a dozen characters without completely losing track of what was going on is a testament to the author’s skill. I wasn’t aware of Liz Moore before this, and buying the book was a bit of a dice roll (to be honest, the title had me thinking there were going to be some spec fic/ horror elements, and … I admit, having finished the book, I’m not sure I get the title) but it’s one I’m glad I made and I’ll be checking out more books by her in the future.
Short and sweet, I know, but as I said, I’m kind of dying here, so just trust me on this one. You’ll like it.
My Illumicrate subscription has been kinda hit or miss, if I’m being honest, and I keep almost cancelling it. I think their version of this book is the best-looking of any of their books that I’ve yet received, but upon seeing what the cover of the paperback looks like, I may have to order that too. One way or another, though, the books are always pretty, but it’s only about 50/50 whether I’m going to like the book, and so far I think I’ve only gotten one book from them that I’d heard of prior to it showing up in my mailbox.
Hammajang appears to be Hawaiian Pidgin for cattywampus, and if you’re not white enough to know that word then we’ll go with “messy” or “chaotic.” The book is sort of an outer space Hawaiian diaspora Ocean’s 11 mixed with cyberpunk and lesbians(*) and a dash of The Fast and the Furious. That sentence has either sold you the book or caused you to keep scrolling, and I would encourage you to follow that impulse either way. It’s directly up my alley, though, and it gave me everything I might want from such a book– a great, character-centered heist story with a whole bunch of personal betrayal and criss-crossing loyalties and an ending that genuinely took me by surprise. Let me just say that I’ve read a whole lot of heist books and there is a certain way that they never, ever end, and if you’ve also read enough heist books that that counts as a spoiler, trust me, you’ll enjoy the hell out of this book. It’s on the short side; 340 pages in the Illumicrate edition with big print, and I think it took me maybe 3-4 hours in two sittings to get through, but I’m absolutely in for more of this world and more of these characters. (I haven’t mentioned Edie, the MC, by name yet; there is no reason this book has to have a sequel and it’s written as a one-shot, but I want more Edie, and I want it soon.).
(*) I have also seen this book compared by official publicity people to Gideon the Ninth, and the presence of lesbians is the only similarity to Gideon. Do not go into this book thinking you’re getting Gideon beyond the very, very loose plot descriptor of “lesbians in space.”(**)
(**) Actually, okay, this is another similarity, as there isn’t a lot of space in either book. Hammajang doesn’t take place on Earth, and to be quite honest I can’t quite describe how Kepler works. I think it’s a space station somewhere Out There but the book doesn’t dwell on it much other than one part involving a less-than-optimal oxygen supply. This is, effectively, urban sci-fi, which is not a bad thing.)
I called this “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up” in my Goodreads review, and … really, isn’t that enough?
I am tempted to say it is, because it has been a long day, and I am tired, and I don’t have a ton of stamina at how the hell is it almost 8:00 already to write a complete review, so I’ll just say this: Monika Kim’s debut about a college-aged Korean-American girl named Ji-Won is equal parts horrifying and rage-inducing, which is an interesting combination. Ji-Won’s father leaves her mother at the very beginning of the book after an extramarital affair, leaving Ji-Won’s mother an emotional wreck and upending their family entirely. Ji-Won has to take on trying to keep her family stable while negotiating her first semester at college, and when her mom takes up with a white guy who is pretty clearly a narcissistic, womanizing scam artist and she catches the attention of a second white guy who is horrible for a whole different set of reasons, keeping her family stable starts to take a backseat to keeping herself stable.
Because she’s growing obsessed with eyes– eating them, specifically– and the more her mother’s beau pulls the wool over her eyes, the easier simply murdering him to get him out of their lives becomes to consider. And we’re off to the races, as Ji-Won both grows (descends?) into becoming a budding serial killer and definitely descends into some pretty interesting types of what I think is technically referred to as The Crazy. She has bad dreams and occasional hallucinations and for a minute at the end there you think the book is going to take the easy way out and then it doesn’t, and … yeah, I’m sticking with “deliciously, delightfully fucked-up,” here. Not for everybody, either, in case that’s not perfectly obvious, but I loved it.
A quick word on the white guys, as I feel like I just opened the book up to a certain set of accusations: the book is not anti-white so much as it is anti-a couple of specific kinds of white guys, and in particular it takes aim at Asian fetishization, which, at least as far as I’m familiar with it, pretty much is a white guy thing. The college guy is unbearable in a few other kinda white-specific ways too, but at least at first he pales(*) in comparison to the mother’s new boyfriend, who is immediately and clearly awful to everyone except her. Anyway, if you’re the type to get het up when you think white people are being criticized you’ve probably bailed on my blog years ago, so I doubt this will be a real problem for anyone who might take my recommendation seriously anyway. If not? We can take it, I promise.
One way or another, there’s a great build-up here, a brief moment where you might be worried that the end is about to get away from the author, and then she nails the landing anyway. I really liked this one, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for future work from Monika Kim in the future. (I also picked up a second copy from Illumicrate, because … my god, that cover!)
(*) I swear I didn’t do that on purpose, and I’m sorry, but not sorry enough to remove it.
The slightly longer version: The Last Faith is a mix of my two favorite genres, as a Soulslike and a Metroidvania, of much the same ilk as Blasphemous and Blasphemous II, with which it also shares a weirdly religious background, a relatively incomprehensible story, and pixelated art design. And, to be completely honest, I could end this review right here by saying that if you liked Blasphemous II, you should pick this up, and expect a game that is about 85% as good. Which is a compliment! Both of those were good games. This is not quite as good– it’s easier, for starters, and it’s a little too fond of instadeath spikes in obnoxious locations (although part of that was my fault, for not figuring out a way across an obstacle in a really annoying place) and the graphics aren’t as good. Your inventory can be really rough, for example:
Okay, a few of those are obviously guns, but if I told you that the item that’s highlighted is a grenade launcher, more or less, would you have any idea? Can you tell that the item next to it is a bow? What about the one above that? Or the one to the left of what is pretty clearly a minigun?
The spell icons aren’t super clear either, and this isn’t the worst example of the inventory screen, but you get the idea. I don’t complain about graphics often, but even for something with retro graphics this game can be pretty muddy. Combat is excellent and the variety of weapons available is pretty good– superior to both Blasphemous games, so long as we’re making comparisons, although I never really got into the guns very much and I’m not convinced a gun build is really viable since bullets are limited. Control is snappy and sharp, though, especially on some of the later bosses where dodging a barrage of lightning bolts is going to depend on near-pixel-perfect positioning (say that four times fast) and without good controls that would have been hellaciously annoying and frankly a little unfair. Fair is a critical component of a good Soulslike, of course: if you can find lots of videos of people beating a boss without being hit when you can’t get a quarter of the way through its health bar without getting melted, chances are it’s a pretty good Soulslike. Soulslikes love bosses who are hard until you figure them out and then become trivial. This game does that quite well.
One slightly less fortunate aspect of Soulslikes that it brings with it is super obscure side quests, unfortunately, including one that I wasn’t able to finish because it just abruptly became unavailable on me. I was two achievements away from Platinum on this game; one of them was for that side quest and another was for fifty parries, a mechanic I never used, as this is very much a dodge-and-jump game and if I was standing still and close enough to parry something that was attacking me I was doing it wrong. I’m probably not going to do another playthrough just to collect those two trophies and the Platinum. I might, you never know, but probably not.
But yeah– we’ll call it an 8/10, easily, and at $24.99 for full price for about a 25-30 hour game depending on your skill level and willingness to do some farming (progression was pretty quick one way or another, although I don’t think I actually lost any … uh … nycrux, whatever that is, to deaths during the game, and if you’re dying a lot YMMV) you’re getting pretty good value for your money if you like these genres. I finished the game at 98% completion before hitting the final boss and I assume that last 2% is probably related to the quest I missed as I’m pretty damn sure I hit the whole map.
My wife genuinely suggested to me, half an hour ago, as I was telling her that I had to write this and that I was not looking forward to it, that I just make the entire post a single word:
“Don’t.”
And … well, no. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this series is how close to being remarkable it is. Most of the reviewers certainly seem to think it’s amazing; the lowest-ranked of the main Archives books is at 4.51 on Goodreads, which is hardly a failure.
And in many ways it really is remarkable. I stand by my repeated assertion that The Way of Kings is an amazing fucking book. But unfortunately the series follows what has become a sadly typical trajectory of the fantasy megaseries, that being that each book is worse than the book before it. And much like the best example of this phenomenon, A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book is so good that there’s plenty of room for the books to get worse before they even begin to approach being bad.
So let’s start off with some good stuff. The books are clearly carefully planned out. George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss are never releasing the next books in their series because they have written themselves into corners. I believe completely that Sanderson is going to deliver on books six through ten if he lives long enough, and I may even buy them if only to have them on the shelf. He’s going somewhere with this and he knows what he’s doing. And while I have some serious issues with his worldbuilding– more on that later– there is no doubt that it is both deliberate and meticulous. It’s not easy to write a five-book series in the first place! I certainly couldn’t do it! It’s even harder when each book is over a thousand pages long and all five of them come out in a fifteen-year period of time where you also write and release seven hundred other books.
By all rights, these books should be much, much crappier than they are. It’s amazing that they’re even readable, to be honest.
But about halfway through Oathbringer, a book that I abandoned early the first time I tried to read it, the books took a turn that I wasn’t expecting.
Unfortunately, that turn was directly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass.
The Cosmere has its fans, I am aware of this. I am very very much not one of them. For those of you unaware of the meaning of that term, all (perhaps most? Let’s go with most) of Brandon Sanderson’s books exist in the same universe. During the time where I was reading his work regularly, he hadn’t really revealed this little detail of his work, and any connections between different series either went unnoticed or were dismissed as Easter eggs of no particular real significance.
You can imagine my dismay when the fucking annoying talking sword from Warbreaker, by far my least favorite of Sanderson’s books, showed up in Oathbringer, and you will have to take my word for it that said dismay increased significantly when it became clear that not only was the sword not going away but it was far from the last intrusion his other books were going to make into Stormlight. It was never really explained why the sword was there. It just was. Other characters from his books showed up too, one with a pretty prominent role, others in cameos. Other planets were frequently discussed, and travel between them became a sub-theme. And after a while, every time I encountered a character I didn’t immediately recognize, I had to play this stupid game where I was wondering if it was just a minor character that after thousands and thousands of pages of narrative I simply didn’t remember, or if it was someone from another book and I was supposed to realize something about it.
Again, you may like the Cosmere. More power to you. Enjoy the wikis. It damn near destroyed the books for me.
I nearly started talking about his characters when discussing the positives of the series, and stopped; most of his characters are assassinated over the course of the series. Kaladin is amazing in The Way of Kings; he has the following exchange in Wind and Truth, which is treated like a mic drop:
“How?” Ishar repeated. “What are you?” He gestured toward Szeth. “Are you… are you his spren? His god?”
“No,” Kaladin said. “I’m his therapist.”
…
Shut up, Brandon Sanderson. Mental illness is a theme of at least three if not four of the books, but it’s handled so, so poorly that I don’t even want to talk about it. Everybody’s fucked up somehow, and it becomes annoying after a while. The final book, one thousand three hundred and twenty-nine pages long, is 70% flashbacks, and the other 30% is mostly self-affirmations.
Which. Yeah. Bloat. I’m not joking about Wind and Truth being 70% flashbacks. Nearly all of the book is presented in a series of visions. What happens in Book Four? At the beginning of the book the bad guys take over a place, and at the end of the book they are driven out of that place again. The actual changes to the status quo over Rhythm of War’s 1200 pages or so could be done and dusted in 250 pages. Whole subplots just never gelled with me at all. Shallan spent two books chasing around something called the … Dustbloods? Ghostbloods! It’s Ghostbloods. They’re from Mistborn, apparently? They’re completely irrelevant to anything, as far as I was able to tell, and the entire subplot could have been cut with no damage. And it takes her away from characters who her interactions with are actually interesting. I don’t think she has a single scene with Jasnah after the third book. It’s fucking ridiculous.
The books are so thoroughly up Brandon Sanderson’s ass that it may be better to stop comparing the series to A Song of Ice and Fire and compare them instead to another megaseries written by an author so famous that he could shit on a napkin and sell a million copies: The Dark Tower.
What I’m saying is that were I to discover that Brandon Sanderson self-inserts into Book Seven, I would not be the least bit surprised.
Gah. I could keep going; I don’t want to. Like I said, I’ll probably buy the rest of the books if only because having half of the series on my shelf will annoy the shit out of me. Will I read them? Okay, I’ll probably read Book Six, because it’ll be interesting to see where he goes with what he’s calling the “second major arc” of the series. I make no promises after that, and I am absolutely not dragging myself through another reread of this monstrosity.
They aren’t terrible. They really genuinely aren’t. But there is six and a half thousand pages of this, and “not terrible” is not good enough motivation to read six and a half thousand pages, and it certainly isn’t enough to get me to recommend them. I won’t stop you, but … God, go read twenty books by other people instead.
