Tag: book-blog

#REVIEW: The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few, by James Islington

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments
The original cover
The new cover
The “are you fucking kidding me” cover of the sequel
The main cover of the sequel

I make bad decisions, guys, and it seems like James Islington’s books are just absolutely committed to proving that at their every opportunity.

Islington has written, to my knowledge, five books. I own six of his books. I have read three and a quarter of them. I have liked one of them. I bought and read The Shadow of What Was Lost, the first book of his Licanius trilogy, three years ago. I did not like it very much, but the book as a physical object was remarkable, and I bought the entire trilogy before finishing the first book. I made it, if I remember correctly, less than 25% of the way through the second book before deciding I was done and putting it away. Other than placing it on the shelf and perhaps moving it to a different shelf once or twice, I have barely touched the third book and have never opened it.

Somehow, this did not prevent me from buying The Will of the Many when it came out– and I bought the original cover, the one with the columns up there. I read it and quite liked it– the world building was a little shallow, and the plot not especially unique; every “brilliant young person goes to a Special School” book is gonna have some major similarities, but the Rome-inflected world was at least interesting if, again, not very deeply thought-out, but whatever.

Then I started seeing the book on shelves with a whole new cover. You know this about me; I like my shit to look nice and clean, and midseries changes to covers annoy me tremendously, and I didn’t want to buy a second copy of the first book just to match the second on the shelf.

And then they made an announcement that all copies of The Strength of the Few would have reversible covers, one to match each version of the original cover! My understanding is that Islington himself was behind that decision, which I both support and tremendously appreciate. My man knows his audience! Good on you.

The fucking word “Hierarchy,” the title of the series, was spelled wrong on the spine.

I swore– a lot– and then said “Fuck it, this is why I have a job” and bought a new copy of the first book so that it would match. I cannot display a fucking spelling error on my bookshelves. Unimaginable.

(Right about here is where I’m going to stop reviewing myself and start reviewing the books, btdubs.)

I decided that since I was getting a new copy of the book anyway, I’d reread Will before diving into Strength. This, I feel, was the right move. I read so much that most of the time I have read literally hundreds of books in between any given book and its sequel, which means that I frequently don’t enjoy sequels as much as I should because I simply don’t recall the first book as well as I should. And I’d already had one Islington series go sour on me, and I didn’t want it to happen again.

The Will of the Many was an excellent read the second time through as well. It’s a genuinely good book. I stand behind it.

The Strength of the Few … was not. I’ve got it three-starred on the various book services right now and I genuinely might move it down to two. And the most frustrating thing is that a lot of the problems with Licanius are showing themselves again in Hierarchy. It was okay that there wasn’t a whole lot of clarity about how the wider world worked in Will, because the main character was confined to this little school on a tiny island and wasn’t really interacting with the wider world, so when you’ve split the … government? into Religion, Governance and Military and not really defined what it means to be “in Religion”, or when you have a couple of characters who are in the Senate, because this world is based on Rome somehow so there has to be one of those, but haven’t actually really said what the Senate is for, you can get away with it. But you’ve got to broaden that scope out in any sequel, especially when you end Book One, which was mostly a hunt for What Really Happened to the MC’s adoptive father’s brother, by splitting the entire universe into three parallel planes. At that point, I would like to understand how all this works. The main character exists in all three worlds in book two, only at least two of the three versions of him don’t know that he’s in all three worlds, and one of them is Egypt-except-not, and one of them is, bewilderingly, Wales-except-not.(*)

It means that the world you’ve learned about in the first book is only a third of the second book, and the other two worlds genuinely aren’t very interesting (not-Egypt is better than not-Wales, but not by much) and that’s before he starts sidelining and/or killing every interesting female character in the first book, and it’s also before you hit the No One You Thought Was Dead Is Still Dead part of the book, which is just fucking annoying.

There’s also a form of magic called Will, and an interesting setup in not-Rome where society has organized itself into pyramids where everyone pledges part of their Will to the people above them, and Will does stuff but it’s not entirely clear that Islington has figured out the parameters of what it can do, nor is it clear to me why holding someone’s hand and saying “I cede you my Will,” or whatever the code phrase is, lets them take part of your life essence away from you. It’s rigorously codified without actually making a whole lot of sense, which is not a great combination. I feel like if you poked the whole system too hard it would collapse.

(Even the school the MC attends in the first book was … kinda sketchy, as far as the worldbuilding goes. It’s also organized into tiers, and the MC moves from seventh tier to third over the course of a single semester, but everybody seems to be the same age and it’s not at all clear how often or even whether anyone graduates, or how long they’re supposed to be there, or really even what they’re studying; dude mentions that his classes are getting harder a few times but never really says why, and nothing is ever difficult for him, really.)

I damn near DNFed the second James Islington Series Volume II in a row, is what I’m saying here. It’s just not nearly as good as the first book, and again, much like the first series, I feel like the central conflict is not well defined here. The first book was a pretty straightforward “find out what happened to this guy” thing, and it got more complicated than that but that was basically what was going on. Now there’s a Cataclysm every three hundred years (what happens during a Cataclysm? Bad stuff, but … don’t ask what kind! People die, alright?(**) It’s bad!) and apparently we’re going to stop it somehow, I guess, and something something worlds got split up, and …

<spits>

Blech.

Again, I’m an idiot, so I’ll probably pick up the third volume when it comes out (I hope there are only planned to be three, but who knows) just for completeness’ sake, because it would really piss me off to have two copies of the first book, one of the second, and not have the third) but I think I probably have to be done with this guy after that unless everything really turns around.

(*) This got me thinking about how Rome and Alexandria, two massively different cultures, are only 1200 miles apart. That’s about the distance from northern Indiana to Houston.)

(**) The phrase “all right,” which is two words, not one, and I will let you get away with “alright” in dialogue but not much else, is misspelled every single time it appears in both books. I hate it.

It was this or a bigger house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading6 Comments

I have all the books.

Wait.

I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”

I have all the books. Do you understand?

And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.

This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.

So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:

along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.

We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.

On YA, genre and litratcher

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I was originally going to write a review of this book and discuss this in the review, but I took a nap this afternoon and still have 60-some pages left. Why did I just say “this book” and not the name of the book? Well, I’m doing that thing where I don’t want this post necessarily showing up in search results for the book, especially since this post is going to be pretty critical and it’s important for you to know that I’m really enjoying the read. I’m going to be a little sneaky about which title I’m talking about, though. Let’s see if you can figure it out.

I am a lifelong genre reader, and for most of that time I’ve been fairly open about my disdain for what people call Literary Fiction. Feel free to blame it on me being too dumb for Literary Fiction. That’s fine. I have an ego but for some reason it doesn’t extend to being bothered by that particular allegation. I don’t get most of the examples of the genre I’ve read; I usually don’t understand why anyone bothered to write the book in the first place and I understand even less what anyone is talking about when they praise them. In particular, use of the word “comic” can be a red flag. One guarantee is that any time a book reviewer I’ve never heard of describes a book as “comic” is that it will not, in any way, be funny. In fact, for the most part, it won’t even be trying to be funny and failing. “Comic” means something else to Literature People. I don’t know what it means and I’m not going to bother finding out.

This particular book has a bunch of pull quotes by people I’ve never heard of who wrote books I’ve never heard of on the back. The sole exception is George Saunders; I’ve heard of him and I know he’s fancy but that’s all I can tell you. The blurbs aren’t as bad as they can get; none of them appear to be random collections of words, and none of them use words that should not be used to describe books (“deliciously turquoise and refreshing prose”– HARPER’S) in them. But this was on the New York Times’ 10 Best Books list, which usually means only ten people read it, and it was a National Book Award finalist. Here is the list of every National Book Award winner. I admit, I have read five of them– interestingly, all but one nonfiction winners– and I have never heard of considerably more than five.

Anyway, this book should have been YA and nothing, nothing will convince me otherwise.

If the exact same book had been written by a woman, it would be shelved with YA. It’s The Hunger Games with a more complicated vocabulary, more swearing, and footnotes about the American carceral system. The premise is the most YA-coded thing I’ve ever seen; the idea is that incarcerated criminals can get their sentences commuted if they agree to engage in gladiator combat to the death every so often; if they make it three years and are still alive, they get to go free. They earn something called, no shit, Blood Points as they work their way through the combats; Blood Points can be cashed in for food, weapons, armor, better accommodations, shit like that. There’s this weird color-coded & scientifically implausible technology built into their wrists so that their captors can torture them for talking.

And partway through the book the main character finds out that she’s going to have to fight her girlfriend in her final fight– the convicts are loosely organized into teams, and a rule change means people on the same team have to fight if they’re at the same rank– and predictable angst occurs.

Come the fuck on.

Now, I’m not done with the book, so I don’t know whether the two characters are actually going to fight or not, but this is one hundred percent a science fiction dystopia that would have been shelved with YA with a different author. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! I’m thoroughly enjoying the book, and I’ll finish it tonight, having burned through its 360 pages in less than a day. Unless it completely blows the ending, it’s gonna be a five-star review. But looking at these blurbs and a couple of other pieces about it, it’s hilariously obvious that most of the people reading it have never touched dystopian literature in their lives and haven’t read any YA at all, because … one thing this book is very much not is especially original. I could have sketched out a broad outline of the plot within ten pages of the start of the book. So could anyone who has read any YA in the last fifteen or so years. I’m not going to look up how long ago Hunger Games came out because I don’t feel like being old. But there are a ton of “blabla has to fight to the death, because Reasons, plus fascism” books out there and while this is an excellent example of one, that’s still exactly what it is.

I’ve got lesson planning to do and then I really do want to finish this book tonight, so I’m going to leave this here– I probably will do a second post once I’ve finished the book, though. But come on, guys. Somebody got chocolate in your peanut butter and peanut butter in your chocolate and you’re doing your level damn best to not admit that you’ve got a Reese Cup in front of you. It’s a Reese Cup. We love Reese Cups. Just admit what it is and eat the damn thing.

In which I KNEW IT

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading6 Comments

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:

@rhireadsitall

is there a way??? #booktok #bookstagram #booktube

♬ nanana x cola – ❤️‍🔥

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.

#REVIEW: Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

First things first: I’ve said this before, but if you’re not tapped into all the sci-fi and fantasy coming out of Nigerian and Nigerian-descended authors in the last five years or so, you are missing out, and you should fix that. This is going to be a somewhat mixed review of O.O. Sangoyomi’s debut novel, Masquerade, but the damned thing oozes with potential, and even if I had liked this less than I did I’d still be in for the sequel. Which sort of feels like “I like less than half of you half of what you deserve,” but I promise it’s a compliment.

The book jacket describes Masquerade as a “richly reimagined 15th century West Africa,” but I’ve got to be honest, despite what I just said about Nigerian fantasy this feels very much like historical fiction to me, and the speculative elements are minimal at best. I’m not precisely sure what’s being reimagined here. It falls under the fantasy genre because everyone is fighting with axes and machetes and spears, and when that happens we just call it fantasy regardless of how well it fits. It’s very low on the “low to high fantasy” axis, in other words.

Now, I’m not going to claim to have a lot of knowledge about West African history– I probably have more than your average American, but the average American knows nothing, so that’s not much of a brag. The book is set in Timbuktu, which was a real place, and the countries and city-states that show up as adversaries are all real, and the Yoruba are still around. If Sangoyomi has played around with history at all, it’s subtle enough that I can’t tell you about it. I can tell you that the main character, Òdòdó, is a blacksmith at the beginning of the book, and blacksmiths are consistently referred to as “witches,” but … I was never exactly clear why? Everybody’s still using smithed tools like it’s not a big deal, but they’re more or less the dregs of society for some reason.

A quick word on orthography: note all the accent marks in Òdòdó? They’re in nearly every word in the book of remotely African origin and there’s no pronunciation guide. The word I’ve rendered as “Yoruba” up there is Yorùbá in the text, for example. The city they live in is Ṣàngótẹ̀, and I don’t even know how to reproduce that S properly– I had to copy and paste it. I hope everyone will forgive me if other than the main characters’ names I don’t bother reproducing all the accents. If I knew how to pronounce them I might, but I don’t.

So anyway, Òdòdó is busy making herself a life as a blacksmith when she is abruptly kidnapped and brought to Sangote to be the wife of the Alaafin, who is basically the emperor. He’s picked her out while pretending to be a vagrant and having a brief conversation with her at her forge.

She is … surprisingly okay with this. I kind of need to rain some abuse down on the blurb-writers for this, who make the book feel like a revenge tale of sorts, and pay no attention to the “loosely inspired by the Persephone myth,” because once you get past the kidnapping there’s not a lot of there there. But no! Òdòdó is surprisingly cool with being kidnapped, she just wants her mom to be at the wedding, and her naïveté (goddammit!) at her fiancé’s (DAMMIT) insistence that he can’t find her mother to get her blessing is rather annoying. Òdòdó gets pulled into some political maneuvering, falls for a couple of truly amateurish stunts from the Alaafin’s mother, and accidentally helps touch off a revolution, and then somehow the book redeems itself entirely at the end, catching me by surprise in such a way that guaranteed the sequel was getting picked up.

Strengths: the worldbuilding, other than the weird witchery of blacksmiths, was really interesting, and the basic novelty of the setting was great. Sangoyomi’s prose is excellent, and the book managed to include some romantic elements without descending into full-blown romantasy. The weaknesses are the characters, particularly Òdòdó herself, who careens back and forth between being a silly little girl and a seasoned political operative. It’s also unclear how much of a time frame the book takes place over, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just a few months at best, which is not enough time for her to learn some of the things she learns how to do. She’s really good at anything she needs to be good at for the plot to move forward, including occasionally outsmarting actual generals (and coming up with war tactics they haven’t thought of) and defeating grown men in combat, and then she’ll turn around and drink from a cup that the mother-in-law has handed her that may as well have this on the side:

If this hadn’t landed the dismount, I’d probably have just put it on the shelf and moved on, but the ending really was well-done, if perhaps again a bit out of character, maybe? Who knows! But I’d have kept an eye out for this author’s next series. As it is, I’m in for the next book. This isn’t the best thing I’ve read this year or anything like that, but it’s solid and it’s a fast enough read, at about 330 pages, to be able to forgive its flaws.

2024 in Books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

Well, this is just ludicrous.

According to Goodreads, I read 185 books in 2024, comprising a grand total of 81,191 pages, or 221.83 pages per day. That’s assuming I finish Katherine Addison’s The Grief of Stones tonight, which I’m going to, because I have to start reading The Way of Kings tomorrow and I want to be halfway through that big bastard by the end of the day.

(It’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow and we will have family in town. That’s not gonna happen. I’m going to shoot for it regardless.)

With the exception of video games, I went full hermit this year, abandoning nearly all of my hobbies or media consumption except for reading. I have read for half an hour before going to bed at the end of the night for my entire life, and I think I stretched that to an hour this year, and I started reading with my morning coffee on Saturday and Sundays, meaning that my “morning coffee” would regularly last from whenever I got up to lunchtime. So yes, I read a lot faster than most people, but I also spend a whole damn lot of time with a book in my hand. Estimating an eleven-hour-a-week minimum would not be unreasonable at all, and I strongly suspect if I were to ever calculate any such thing it would be more than that.

My average book, by the way, was 439 pages. I actually did hit 200 books one year because I decided to; this year I genuinely wasn’t aiming at any particular number. I bet I could have done 250 if I had selected for shorter books, but I didn’t want to. Only 13 of those 185 books were nonfiction, which is shockingly low even knowing how hard I focused on series fiction this year– I’m shooting for 20% of my books next year being nonfiction, if you didn’t see the update to my reading goals in my previous post.

I read books by 124 authors this year, of which 86 were new to me, which is surprisingly high, especially once we get to how many books by each author I read. Without even looking, I’ll tell you right now that the author I read the most books by is Adrian Tchaikovsky, totaling …

… (looks at Goodreads list) …

Jesus, ten books. Other authors showing up more than once:

Six books: Pierce Brown

Five books: J.R.R. Tolkien, James Tynion IV

Four books: John Gwynne, TJ Klune

Three books: Thiago Abdalla, R.J. Barker, David Dalglish, J.S. Dewes, Robin Hobb, Jay Kristoff, Josh Malerman, Andrea Stewart, Richard Swan

Two books: Susan Abulhawa, Josiah Bancroft, Carissa Broadbent, Shannon Chakraborty, Rin Chupeco, Piper CJ, Rachel Gillig, John Keay, Judy Lin, Vaishnavi Patel, Ava Reid, Samantha Shannon, M.L. Wang

I thought about doing a gender breakdown, but it broke my brain. I have a bunch of authors with initials for first names, and a lot of the time I don’t immediately know those folks’ gender, and then you throw in the enbies and that’s more research than I really want to do. I’m about to show you the whole list anyway, so you can look for yourself if you want. :-). Of the 29 authors I read more than one book by, I’m certain 14 are men and 13 are women and yes, I know that doesn’t add up to 29 and I still might be wrong on a couple of them. For whatever that might be worth.

Pretty covers time? Pretty covers time. Click on ’em for gallery view: