Tag: book reviews

Two quick book reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

I am in a horrendous mood, as the world is continuing to go to shit and nothing seems to be able to stop it or even slow it down, but there are still books out there, so I may as well talk about them. I don’t have the energy to make a full post about either of these so let’s just do a couple quick paragraphs each and call it a day.

Samantha Downing’s Too Old For This is a book about a serial killer forced out of retirement when a documentarian comes calling who wants to make a series about her. She was never actually brought to trial for her crimes, but changed her name and moved across the country anyway, and she’s less than interested in someone dragging all of that back into the light again.

She’s in her seventies, by the way.

This book ended up being lightweight and quick and more fun than it probably had any right to be, as Lottie Jones’ life keeps getting upended more and more as she attempts to cover for her crimes– both the old ones before she moved away and the new ones she has to keep committing as she keeps making mistakes that wouldn’t have mattered when she was killing people decades ago but are a bit of a problem in an era of near-constant surveillance by our own possessions. I can imagine a reader who is bothered by the fact that the protagonist is an unrepentant serial killer who we’re more or less expected to like, or at least enjoy reading about, but I’m not that reader and I had fun with this. I may look into more of Samantha Downing’s work if I ever allow myself to buy books again.

So, yeah, okay, I finished it, and it’s a thousand pages long and I have a full-time job and I still finished it in less than a week, and because of that I can’t really call it bad, but … if you weren’t going to buy this anyway, don’t let anyone talk you into it. SenLinYu is a perfectly cromulent author and no one would ever read this book and figure out on their own that it was originally brought into the world as Harry Potter fanfiction, but it’s way overhyped, at least from my perspective. I keep seeing videos about people who were in tears for the last two hundred pages or whatever, and I feel like these people need pets or significant others or something, because in the end it’s just a book and it’s being treated like a life-altering event online. I said in my first post that I was buying this out of FOMO, and I’ve got to stop doing that. I’m never going to be missing out if I don’t read a book TikTok likes.

(I deleted the app again today; we’ll see how long it lasts this time.)

Again, it’s not awful, but it’s definitely romantasy despite all the people insisting that no, it’s dark fantasy— I’m pretty sure “dark fantasy” is just romantasy with at least one rape scene to these people– and I’m tired of romantasy as a genre. It’ll look good on my shelf, and I didn’t hate it like I figured I would, but those are the best things I have to say about it.

#REVIEW: Making Enemies: Monster Design Inspiration for Tabletop Roleplaying Games, by Keith Ammann

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

We’ll begin with my absolute favorite thing for book reviews: Disclaimers! First, that I got a copy of this book for free (it comes out on Tuesday) and second, that I’ve known the author for a vaguely shocking twenty-two years, and not in the usual parasocial Internet way that I know a fair number of authors but in a “he’s been in my apartment and we’ve worked on grad school projects together” sort of way. There’s a review of his book The Monsters Know What They’re Doing here; this is actually his fifth book, technically part of a series but, given that they’re all roleplaying sourcebooks dedicated to helping game masters for TTRPGs do their jobs better, there’s no reason to feel like you need to read them in order. I admit it; I have not read the books in between, although I intend to.

Here’s the thing about Keith, guys: Keith is one of the smartest motherfuckers guys I’ve ever met. He’s ludicrously well-read and he’s got a mind like a steel trap. If he had been born seven hundred years ago he would have been a monk and would have discovered something that we all take for granted by now; if he’d been born in the 1810s instead of the 1970s you would never have heard of Gregor Mendel. However, he was born in the 1970s, so instead of more or less inventing genetics as we know it, he writes about roleplaying games.

Making Enemies is, ostensibly, about creating home-brew monsters for your TTRPG campaign. He doesn’t limit himself to Dungeons & Dragons with this one; attention is paid to Pathfinder, Shadowdark and Call of Cthulhu, along with another system that I have to admit I’ve never heard of called the Cypher System. Each section of the book begins with a more generic introduction to/discussion of the aspect of monster design being discussed, such as morphology, abilities, size and number, quirks and weaknesses, etc; and then there will be sections afterward dedicated to the differences you’d see among each of the specific systems. I felt like Call of Cthulhu got a little shorted, as it doesn’t quite work the same way as the rest of the systems (You Are Fucking Doomed is more or less Call of Cthulhu’s entire thing, and this book is about making good enemies for your players, not killing them in seconds) and of course D&D gets a bit more attention than the others, but there’s good stuff here for everybody who plays TTRPGs.

Nothing I’ve just said is sufficient to prepare you for just how deep this book gets, over and over and over again. The chapter called Weird Nature, about monster type and morphology, could be copied and pasted into a biology textbook with barely a sentence changed. The book interrogates the entire concept of “monster” over and over again in a way that is completely fascinating and yet in some ways entirely unnecessary to a book about TTRPGs, which are generally much more lowbrow than this. There are interviews scattered throughout the book with professional game designers, and it’s stunning how high-level, no pun intended, some of these discussions get. I would love to know how much actual research went into this book that had no direct relationship to TTRPGs. My guess is: lots.

(Memo to Keith: go whole-hog on your next book. I want four hundred pages on your theory of game design. Do it.)

But seriously. I feel like I should have been taking notes and adding Post-Its into the book while I was reading it, and the reader of this book should be prepared to see the occasional quotes from genuine academic works of philosophy and then less than a page later an anecdote about The Muppet Show. That’s not to say that this book doesn’t have a ton of good old-fashioned in-the-weeds nerd math, because it does. Witness:

I’ve talked about this before: I love enthusiasm. My favorite thing about TikTok is how great of a vehicle it is for people to share activities they love with other people. And the reason I feel so comfortable recommending what by rights ought to be a very niche book to literally everyone I know who reads is that Keith’s incredible enthusiasm for game design and TTRPGs shines through every page of this book. I enjoyed The Monsters Know What They’re Doing quite a bit and recommended it, but I was clear (and so was the book!) that it was a book for people who ran TTRPG games. I think there are people out there who would enjoy this regardless of what they’ve done in the TTRPG space; if you consider yourself an autodidact and an intellectual (dare I say “polymath”?) you may find yourself skipping the weedier sections here and there that get into specifics about the systems, but the interviews and the beginnings of every chapter and the relentless attention to careful thinking throughout are going to bring a smile to your face.

Making Enemies comes out October 7th. Check it out.

#REVIEW: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I three-starred this. But keep reading.

Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.

You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.

It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.

In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.

Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.

I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …

*shiver*

Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.

#REVIEW, sorta: The Enchanted Greenhouse, by Sarah Beth Durst

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

I’ve done not much but sleep this weekend, and at least one person in the house has Covid and at least two are sick, and I didn’t have a lot of grading to do today but what I had to do was immensely annoying.

So, please, forgive me, when I write a very short review, less than it deserves: that The Enchanted Greenhouse is delightful, and it’s a sort-of sequel (same world, different characters) to The Spellshop, which I didn’t review when it came out last year but was also delightful, and it was absolutely the antidote to having read a bunch of books lately that I didn’t like all that much. It is short (I finished it in less than three hours, easy), low stakes (sure, “cottage core” or “cozy,” either works) and has a romance angle without ever descending into smut, and there are talking plants and a cat with wings.

I loved it, but I’m too tired to say much more, so just go read it, and enjoy peeling the pages apart, because something about the way they stained the edges kinda locks them together a little bit, and I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that the physical feeling of splitting the pages as I was reading didn’t add to my enjoyment of the book, because it totally did.

Back to bed.

#REVIEW: The Art of Legend, by Wesley Chu

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

I take no pleasure in this.

I write negative reviews infrequently enough that almost every time I do I start with a disclaimer like this. Under any circumstances other than “The publisher sent me the entire trilogy because I asked for it,” I would simply not review this book. It feels ungrateful to make other people go to trouble to send me books for free and then say bad things about them. But while I really liked the first book in Wesley Chu’s War Arts Trilogy, I was mixed on the second and unfortunately I have to report that the series’ ending really ends up unsatisfying.

The problem is writing this without massive spoilers. I mean, in one sense I don’t really have to worry about that, I can just say “Hey, spoiler alert,” and then go about my day, but I don’t want to do that either. So we’re going to go the “mild spoilers” route; a lot of what you will see in the next few paragraphs could have been reasonably guessed going into the book, but I’m not going to completely reveal the story.

The Art of Prophecy begins with Jian, the Prophesied Hero of the Tiandi and the Champion of the Five Under Heaven. Jian has been prophesied since birth to be the one who kills the Eternal Khan, ending his dominion over the Tiandi people. And then the Khan goes and gets killed on his own, leaving Jian with no more destiny and setting the events of the whole trilogy in motion. In the second book, elements of the Tiandi decide that Jian is actually their betrayer, and he spends the entire series either running from capture or escaping it one way or another.

So, we all know that in Book Three the Khan is coming back, right? Of course we do. And he does. And then he confirms something that I had been wondering about since the first book: he was going to come back anyway. It’s even straight-up stated that even if Jian kills him he’s going to return in a decade or so. Now, one of the POV characters spends the whole first book trying to find out where the Khan has been resurrected and the second book trying to get a chunk of his soul peeled out of her body, so it’s clear that he’s “Eternal” because he keeps getting resurrected. But I had the idea that Jian killing him would be permanent, and … not so much? He’d have come back anyway? Really? What the hell was the point of making such a big deal about Jian, then?

Jian is a problem, honestly, and he’s at the middle of what I didn’t like about the book. The series can’t really decide if if he’s powerful or not– even during the inevitable final battle with the Khan the text itself bounces back and forth between “he’s ready, and this is a real fight” and “the Khan is obviously toying with him and the four other people he brought to the fight” and while Taishi talks about how much he has grown over the years she has known him, I kind of feel like the book doesn’t realize how annoying he is?

A brief diversion: did you watch Smallville or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? You know how Lana was actually really fucking annoying and Xander was kind of a creep, or to use another example, Barney Stinson was a predator and Ted Mosby was a huge loser in How I Met Your Mother, but the TV shows didn’t seem to realize that? That’s Jian. He started off as a pampered, callow youth, and for me, at least, he never improved– he actually faints when he is told the Khan is back. And this is as close as I’m going to come to a huge spoiler, but for a whole series about a prophecy about a dude, that dude has much less to do with the ending of the series than you might expect.

Some of my other gripes are artifacts of having read the trilogy more or less back-to-back-to-back; the bit where Qisami talks like an overenthusiastic memelord and her speech doesn’t remotely match anyone else in the book, or the fact that every insult in the series is inexplicably egg-based, wouldn’t have annoyed me as much had I not devoured 1600 pages of it over a few weeks. Seeing “Let them cook” in dialogue would still have been distracting as hell, though, or the way people keep “eating” punches and kicks.

I dunno, guys. I still stand by enjoying Prophecy, but given where it ends up I can’t really recommend the whole trilogy. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it bad— I three-starred it on Goodreads and Storygraph, and I feel like that’s about right– but it’s not something I’d have talked about had I not been sent the books, and I’d likely have DNFed the final book. I feel bad about it, but there you have it.

#REVIEW: House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr., by Marion Orr

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

This book represents an interesting milestone for me in a couple of ways. First, I am rarely offered nonfiction ARCs for review, something I’d like to encourage more of. Second, I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography of someone I was less familiar with prior to reading the book than I was with Charles C. Diggs. While I don’t think I could claim to have never heard of him– I have read too much about the Civil Rights movement to have never encountered his name before– I couldn’t tell you much other than that he was a Black congressman. I certainly wouldn’t have recognized a picture of him. I was a little worried that this might hurt my enjoyment of the book; as it turns out I have more than enough context around his life that that wasn’t a problem.

The interesting thing here is that, sitting here, I’m struggling with the urge to make this piece a review of Diggs rather than a review of the book. At the same time, though, you weren’t sent a copy of this for free, so I kind of feel like if I’m going to convince you to read it you probably need to know a little bit about the fellow you’ll be spending a few hundred pages with. To wit: Charles C. Diggs Jr. was the son of one of Detroit’s most influential Black businessmen. His father was the founder of the slightly-oddly-named House of Diggs, a funeral home that at one point handled just over half of the deaths among Detroit’s Black citizenry. Charles Sr. had a short-lived political career as a Michigan state Senator but mostly kept his business empire running; Charles Jr. started his political career in his father’s seat in the Michigan Senate but was elected to Congress in 1954 and never looked back. He would remain in office until 1980, when a financial scandal led to him being censured by Congress, forced to resign, and briefly imprisoned. He holds the distinction of being the victim of one of Newt Gingrich’s first acts of assholery, as the future Speaker of the House and fellow resignee-in-disgrace began agitating for Congress to expel Diggs almost as soon as he took office.

When Diggs entered office, he was one of only three Black congressmen, joining William Dawson of Illinois and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of New York. He proved himself to be skilled at coalition-building and incrementalist approaches to civil rights– one of his first legislative accomplishments was desegregating airlines, for example– and eventually became one of Congress’s foremost experts on and advocates for Africa as well. Soon after taking office he traveled to Mississippi to sit in on the trial of Emmitt Till’s murderers, which made national headlines, particularly as Mississippi at the time had absolutely no idea how to handle a Black Member of Congress.

But let’s talk about the book. House of Diggs is a very strong political biography and a worthy addition to my library about the Civil Rights movement and is somewhat less successful as a biography of a person. Which, honestly, kind of fits with its subject anyway, as Diggs was quite successful as a politician and much less successful as a person. His children are barely mentioned, but his four wives, three of whom had children with him, would have described him as a poor father anyway, and you won’t find out about any of the three divorces until nearly 80% of the way through the book. He had a gambling problem and was absolutely terrible with money, which is part of what led to his own downfall and at least tangentially led to his father’s business empire slowly disintegrating after the senior Diggs died by suicide in 1967. The finance issues that led to his resignation and jail time are a bit too complicated to go into detail about here, but I felt Orr did a really good job of explaining the details of what happened, both in a literal factual sense and in how Diggs’ own personality flaws led to his eventual indictment. It also seems to be true that the practices that took Diggs down were quite common in Congress at the time, and Orr doesn’t neglect the role of racism in his prosecution while never losing sight of the fact that, no, “everybody else was doing it” isn’t really a top-10 legal defense.

All told, I’m really glad I was sent this, as it’s from a university press and I likely wouldn’t have even encountered it otherwise. If political biography is your thing or you have an interest in the Civil Rights movement, I highly recommend taking a look.

House of Diggs releases September 16.

#REVIEW: The Art of Destiny, by Wesley Chu

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Middle books in a trilogy can be so weird.

A quick recap: I got asked if I was interested in reviewing Book Three of Wesley Chu’s War Arts Saga, and replied that I’d love to, but I hadn’t read the first two books yet, and somehow that led to me getting sent review copies of the entire trilogy. My review of the first book, The Art of Prophecy, is here, and while I’m not going to go directly into Book Three like I thought, there’s only going to be one book in between, so I’ll probably have a review of that next week sometime.

But yeah. I enjoyed the book, but it definitely has a case of Middle Book Syndrome, where it sort of feels like they’re moving pieces around in preparation for finishing it off in Book Three. Destiny sticks with its same crew of players as the first book; Jian and Taishi are in training, Qisami spends most of the book on a job, and Sali spends the book trying to get the fragment of the Khan’s soul out of her body. Qisami feels like the main character of this one, which is a little odd, as I felt like she was the least important of the leads in the first book, to the point where I don’t think I mentioned her in the review. She has some interesting character development that is almost entirely tied up in spoilers, and Sali has a major status quo change and a clear direction going into the last book. The characters don’t interact as much in this one, either; they all end up in the same place for the last third of the book, but even then nobody really runs into each other; they’re all just doing their thing in the same city.

Jian and Taishi … feel kinda wheel-spinny. Taishi was easily my favorite character of the first book and she’s not got nearly as much time on-page in this book, and Jian gets captured again and it just sort of feels like a retread of a lot of what happened in the first book. There are some interesting developments in the religion around Jian; I was thinking as I was reading Prophecy that it’s super rare in the real world for a prophecy to be proven wrong and its supporters to just shrug and give up, and … well, turns out they didn’t, but I won’t say much more about it than that. But Jian still kind of feels like an immature kid for the majority of the book. There are some signs of maturation toward the very end of the book, so hopefully I won’t feel this way about him in the conclusion to the trilogy.

Don’t misunderstand me; even if I had bought these, this certainly wouldn’t put me off the third book, as a lot of my gripes are just part and parcel of the way middle books in trilogies tend to be messy. It’s not like there was much of a risk of anyone trying to read this as a standalone.

I’ve got another book I was sent for review to read next, as it’s out on the 16th, and then I’ll be diving into the conclusion. Stay tuned!

#REVIEW: Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang

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In retrospect, this is probably my fault.

Up there are four of the seemingly unlimited Special Editions of R.F. Kuang’s new book Katabasis. I own three of them; two are currently in my house and I believe one is on the way. The fourth is the UK edition and despite everything I’m about to say it is still a maybe. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest decision to order three expensive hardbacks of a book I hadn’t read yet, even if it was by one of my favorite authors! But as we’ve firmly established by now, I cannot be trusted with adult money.

Katabasis is the sixth book Kuang has written; I have read them all, and previously my least favorite of her books was one that was ranked third on my end of year Best Books list. My least favorite, mind you. Least. And part of me really thinks that I should sit with this for a minute and not write the review just yet, because part of the problem is that this book did not match the expectations I had set for it, and because I’ve enjoyed Kuang’s work so much in the past, I feel a need to be fair to it that I might maybe not feel with other authors. Then again, maybe not. Maybe, much like main character Alice Law about her mentor and Ph.D advisor Jacob Grimes, I’m making excuses so that I’m not disappointed.

Katabasis, somehow, has made Hell boring.

But let’s back up. Katabasis is the story of two graduate students (in theoretical Magick, of course) who travel to Hell to rescue the soul of their doctoral advisor, not because he doesn’t belong in Hell– he clearly does, and they’re both fully aware of this– but because their careers will be damaged by him being dead, and they need him for recommendation letters and such. I feel like this aspect of their motivation could perhaps have been explored a bit more; sadly, it was not. Katabasis (kuh-TAB-uh-sis, the word is Greek for “descent”) was supposed to be this dense, deeply literary work, heavily reliant on previous let’s-traipse-off-into-Hell books; there were pre-Katabasis reading lists floating around, and while I’m not actually completely certain Kuang was behind any of them, they were kinda intense!

And … well. Kuang is an academic writer; most of her books have at least partially involved schooling in some way and Babel was literally about a group of Oxford students who powered the world with magic based on translation, so this isn’t exactly a road untread for her. But this book is no more complicated than Babel was and no more academic; I was expecting a challenging read, and just didn’t get it. This is also the book that showed Kuang’s youth (she is still, somehow, not even 30) the most, I think; what she knows best is academia and grad school and I think that finally caught up to her with this book. And I get it! I’m not exactly a stranger to pretentious/prestigious graduate experiences; I hold an AM from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, after all, which probably left me better prepared for going to Hell than most people’s educations, and I “hold” an “AM” rather than “have” an “MA” or a pedestrian “Master’s Degree” because, well, University of Chicago gotta University of Chicago. Those letters being reversed mean something. To somebody. I don’t know what, but they do.

Anyway, Alice (and is that name an accident, no, it is not) and her friend/fellow genius/academic rival Peter Murdoch head off to Hell to drag Grimes back into the world with them, and the book spirals (I see what you did there) back and forth between the past and the present as they argue about the map of Hell and, for the sake of argument, descend down to the final level to find him. They go in without much of a plan, and “no plan” really never gets better; they have a couple of never-ending water bottles and a sackful of, this is really what it’s called, Lembas bread with them so that they don’t starve to death or have to drink anything in Hell, and they mostly just wander around for five hundred pages, occasionally interacting with some of Hell’s shockingly small number of denizens. Most of Hell is an empty wasteland. They eventually arrive at the city of Dis, and I feel like if we’re going to start with a pre-reading list, maybe one of the New Crobuzon books, or Gormenghast, or the Shadow of the Torturer, or something like that should have been on there, because I have definitely read better infernal cities before.

It’s not … bad? Or at least I’m not willing to admit it was bad yet? And if you are someone who reads books for character development, this probably is right up your alley, as Alice Law and Peter Murdoch really are two of Kuang’s more completely drawn characters. But I don’t really read for character; I read for story and setting, and the story and setting here are both far too thin for my tastes. I probably owe this book a reread in a year or two regardless, just to let the expectations clear and to go into it with a better idea of what I’m about to read. But right now I’m deeply disappointed in it. The extra copies are still going to look great on my shelf, and Kuang is still an insta-buy author, but this one really didn’t do it for me.