The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Still working through Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, not really vibing all that much with the book I’m reading, and hoping to see Superman sometime in the next 48 hours. I’m tired and weirdly feel like none of my clothes fit right and I’m jimmylegging for no clear reason. On the plus side, I had a blood draw yesterday and my A1C is the lowest it’s ever been since I’ve been measuring, so I’ve got that going for me.
Which is nice.
If my best friend Esquie can’t fly by the end of the night, I’m gonna cry, so I gotta go take care of that.
Finally.
I’ve read some really good books this year– 108 total, with 17 good enough that they’ve made my end-of-year shortlist. But the story this year has been the nonfiction— I have five nonfiction books on the list so far, and all of them have been tremendous. And there are three or four novels that have been really, really fun, but I’m pretty sure Michelle Jabès Corpora’s His Face Is The Sun is the first “#1 with a bullet” novel of the year. I mean, I just finished it twenty minutes ago (it’s 500 pages and I basically read it in one sitting) so standard disclaimers for early enthusiasm, but … yeah, this is real real good.
Oh, and this is also the second book in a row that I’ve bought mostly on vibes? I was wandering through B&N, having just given myself permission to buy another book on top of whatever else I was carrying around, and I picked it up because of the pretty edges. Then I saw the word “Egyptian” on the back and money flew out of my wallet.
The setting is second world Egypt– in other words, it’s Egypt, even keeping the names of the Egyptian gods, but they call it Khetara and the rest of the world hasn’t impacted upon anything. There are four rotating POV characters and one cat. I absolutely love the cat. The book starts with triplets being born to the Pharaoh, delivered by three goddesses when the expected nursemaid is held up in an unprecedented storm. One of the POV characters is Sitamun, the middle child of the triplets and the only daughter. The others are Raetawy, a farmer’s daughter and political revolutionary; Karim, a tomb robber (and his dog); and Nefermaat, the daughter of a spell merchant who sees visions and eventually becomes a priestess.
Throw in a prophecy or two, the living dead, a ton of political maneuvering and fate slowly drawing the four together over the course of the book and you have something I really, really liked. This is my second review in a row where I don’t really want to spoil anything, but the way these four end up interacting with each other and the way all of them have pieces of the larger story happening around them but no one can see the whole picture yet is fantastic, and Jabès Corpora does an excellent job of keeping all the plates spinning and revealing just enough in each chapter to make the book really hard to put down.
This is the first book of a planned trilogy, and Goodreads claims the sequel is coming out in May of 2026, which is too Goddamned far away and I want it right now. You should read it.
Are you familiar with Aardvark Book Club, by any chance? For $17.99 a month, assuming you’re in the US, you’ll have a choice of one of six different new (and sometimes unreleased) books across a bunch of genres. The books will be hardcover and are generally of solid quality, so you’re already getting a decent deal, because you can’t sneeze at a hardcover for $18 anymore. Then you can order up to two more from the current month or any previous month for $10 each. I’ve been a member since January, and I have yet to have a month where I didn’t order three books. Most of the time they’ve been from new-to-me authors and there have definitely been more hits than there have misses. I ordered Nicholas Binge’s Dissolution in June basically just because I could.
And … damn.
I’m going to let you know now: this is one of those “trust me” books, because it’s all about the mysteries and twists and turns, and I ain’t spoilin’ nothing. The main character is Maggie Webb, an 84-year-old woman whose husband of fifty years, Stanley, has been disappearing to Alzheimer’s over the past several years. Only one day a Mysterious Stranger (TM, pat. pending) shows up at her door, and, uh, it turns out that maybe it’s not Alzheimer’s. Someone is actively and deliberately removing Stanley’s memories.
And, uh, that person might be Stanley.
Like, you already know, right? You know if you want to read this or not, and if you’re somehow still on the ledge, maybe if I told you that this book was a bizarre combination of the modern-day parts of Assassin’s Creed, the “insane professor” bits of The Poppy War, the movie Memento, and a self-help book about the memory palace, would that help?
Yeah. I picked this up before bed last night, it kept me up until midnight, and I was reading again by 8:30 this morning. You should check it out.
Seven years ago, in 2018, this man’s debut novel jumped off a shelf at me at Barnes and Noble. It looked satisfyingly chunky and as a science fiction book that was obviously going to be Part One of a substantial series, it was something that was immediately Aligned with My Interests.
I opened it and flipped through it and looked at this author picture. And thought Jeez, that guy looks like a prick. I bet he’s a conservative.
And then I put the book down.
And, standing there in Barnes and Noble, I googled this man to see if I could find evidence of him being a prick. And, indeed, I couldn’t find any, and the closest I came was him claiming he “doesn’t talk about politics” on Twitter, which is something that only conservatives say.
And after a few minutes I started feeling bad about it! This is not how I usually work. My rule for politics in my reading has always been Don’t Want None Won’t Be None, and how it is supposed to work is you can believe whatever you want so long as you don’t go out of your way to make that information available to me, but as soon as you do I will judge you accordingly. And, to be completely clear, I’m perfectly fine with people applying that same line of reasoning to me. You can choose to not read a book– which, most of the time, costs you money— for literally any reason you want. Refuse to read a book with a blue cover. Spend a year reading only books with blue covers. I don’t care. There are way more books out there than anyone has time to read in an entire lifetime, with more coming out literally every day, so you use whatever filter you want. I don’t have anything to say about it.
Feeling guilty and kind of stupid, I bought his book. And brought it home, and read it, and really didn’t like it all that much. And it sat on the shelf for five or six years while four sequels came out, and sometime in the last couple of years I looked at it again and thought oh, what the hell, and for whatever reason the second time around I liked it a lot more, and the sequels quickly followed, along with the sixth book, on release day. The series wasn’t world-changing or anything, but it was solid and interesting, and it was also clear that barring some sort of car accident or something it was going to be finished soon.
So how do I feel about the fact that a 2018 interview has come to light recently where not only does he piss and moan about how every YA book nowadays is about a girl who “wants to be an assassin for some reason” and there aren’t any books for boys, and about his affection for Jordan Peterson?
I am, to be clear, almost certainly going to buy the last book of his series when it comes out, which should be this year or early next year. This isn’t JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman territory, where the books are forever consigned to the pit. He’s just a conservative Catholic, and frankly the fact that the interview lurked in the depths for years before exploding onto TikTok in the last couple of weeks for whatever reason means that he actually does seem to be following my DWNWBN rule. But I likely won’t bother with whatever he does next, and next time I’m gonna trust my gut when I take a look at an author and get a vibe. Because, again, there’s lots of books out there, and I don’t need a good reason not to buy one.
This is kind of awkwardly stapling two posts together (and there will be an addendum at the end featuring even more stapling) but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how weirdly gendered reading seems to be getting. I have never believed that there was any such thing as “girls’ books” or “boys’ books”– I’ve told the story here a few times before about my aunt catching me with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when I was ten or so, a book I picked up and read because it was there and I was bored, and her being vocally horrified, and me being completely baffled about what the problem was. But just because I don’t believe there’s any such thing as gendered books doesn’t mean that society doesn’t think so, and it feels like in the last couple of years reading has taken this weird slide into being Something Men Don’t Do, which is entirely fucking unacceptable. This is particularly clear in retail establishments that sell books but aren’t bookstores– go look at the books in Target sometime, for example, and I’ve seen pictures of Wal-Mart’s book selection and it seems to be the same thing. Target clearly doesn’t think men read.
(Do more women read than men? Sure. But that’s not the same thing as “men don’t read.”)
I think this is probably mostly BookTok’s fault, which is dominated by women, and whatever, I’m not attached enough to my own gender to be bothered if something is addressed to “my book girlies” and happens to overlap with my interests.
But did I kinda want to fight when I saw this? A little:
Anyway, one way or another, I’m not going anywhere. If that makes me a book girlie, I’ve been called worse.
You may remember a couple of weeks ago when my family attempted to go to a specific local Italian restaurant and, in a comedy of errors, managed to end up at the wrong restaurant, eating a meal there because we are cowards, and resulting in me not getting carrot cake, which was the entire reason I wanted to eat at that place in the first place.
Well. My birthday was yesterday, but my birthday dinner was tonight:
I could only finish half of that gorgeous sonofabitch. I don’t even want to know what my blood sugar is right now. I’m getting my A1C checked later this week in advance of a regular doctor visit next week, and I may just show the doctor a picture of this cake when she jumps down my throat about how I’m so diabetic I’m legally already dead.
… eh, I’ve looked worse.
My God, that was an incredible show.
Al Yankovic is 65 years old. It was literally 90 degrees in the shade in Indianapolis yesterday evening. I have no idea how anyone on stage even survived the experience in the first place, and they put on a two-hour-plus show featuring at least a dozen costume changes (everyone in the band, not just Al himself) and startlingly impressive dancing. If my foot ever ends up above my head, it is not going to be on purpose, and it is likely that I have either just died or am about to. Al did a high-kick like five or six times during the show. And when I talk about costume changes, I don’t mean, like, wearing a different shirt. I mean getting into a full-blown fat suit complete with facial prosthetics in three minutes and then doing an entire song in that getup, or doing the last fifteen minutes of the show in Jedi robes.
The man’s voice is still on point, too. The set list was ridiculous; some of the songs were done medley-style where he’d do a verse or two and then move on, but he’s been doing albums since the early eighties and while there probably wasn’t literally a track or two from every single album, the show absolutely spanned his entire career. I discovered that there are Weird Al songs that I probably haven’t heard in thirty years that I still have memorized. I was singing along with songs and mentally trying to jump ahead to the chorus to figure out what the hell I was singing.
The polka was new, and there were at least a couple of songs that were unreleased. He covered the costume changes with video vignettes featuring every single time anyone on a TV show has ever mentioned him, random little clips of weirdness, and a bunch of junket-style interviews with celebrities where I’m pretty sure some were him being inserted into other interviews, some were him interviewing people who had no idea who he was, and some were piss-takes where everybody was in on the joke.
(I’m going through my MP3s right now. Nothing was played from Poodle Hat. No, that’s wrong, he did Ebay. Still looking.)
(Okay, I’m pretty sure the only album he didn’t do a song from was 1993’s Alapalooza. That’s it.)
Anyway, yeah. Best birthday ever, y’all.
Kinda meh! But we’re here.
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