Tag: book reviews

#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.

#REVIEW: The Art of Prophecy, by Wesley Chu

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

You know this; I have somehow acquired enough pull as an Important Book Reviewer that sometimes publicists contact me to see if I want review copies of things. I almost always say yes; the only time I can think of that I declined a read was when the publicist made it clear that she was offering me a pure romance novel. I don’t mind romance, but I need it mixed with something, and I didn’t want to accept a book that I was already probably not going to enjoy.

At any rate, I got an email a few weeks ago about Wesley Chu’s new book, The Art of Legend, out today at finer retail establishments across the globe. Would I like a review copy? Absolutely, I said, except there’s one problem. It’s book 3 of 3, and I haven’t read the first two. I’ve enjoyed Chu’s work in the past but reading book 3 on its own kinda feels like a heavy lift.

No problem, the publicist said … and sent me the entire trilogy. Not even ARCs! Actual official copies! So I finished Book One today, and my intent is to read Katabasis and then read the next two back-to-back. I plan to review all three of them.

This plan would backfire quickly if I hadn’t liked the first book! So it’s lucky that I didn’t; The Art of Prophecy shares the strengths of the two Chu books I’ve read in the past, with great action, interesting characters, and a quick-moving plot that would have had the book read overnight if school hadn’t just started.

The premise, as you might have guessed, involves a prophecy: a young man named Jian, the Champion of the Five Under Heaven, has been groomed since birth to be the one who defeats the Eternal Khan, saving his kingdom from the forces of evil in the process. Jian has been trained by the finest teachers in the martial arts, but is still young; only fifteen or so, if I remember correctly.

A master named Taishi arrives to evaluate Jian and his training, and she finds both severely lacking. Jian is indolent and callow, his trainers little more than grifters, and his training has been more for show. The boy is more of a professional wrestler than a prophesied warrior.

So we already have a problem.

And then the Khan goes and gets himself killed in a drunken stupor, without Jian’s help in any way, and … all hell kinda breaks loose.

This was a lot of fun, y’all, and I apparently have a thing for impatient, irascible old one-armed women, because Taishi is one of the best characters I’ve encountered in quite a while. The fact that she’s a supreme badass who more or less melts her way through damn near any adversary she encounters for the entire book doesn’t hurt at all, and her complete lack of patience with Jian’s crap is breathtaking. I loved it. As I said, the wuxia-flavored action is great, and Chu avoids the trap of only describing battles using complicated names of moves. Sure, sometimes he’ll let you know that someone has deflected a Monkey Saves the Circus by using Monkey Ruins Christmas Dinner, but he’ll also describe what that means, which is my problem with the handful of wuxia books I’ve read. You’re also going to see this world from more than one perspective, as at least a couple of the POV characters are out to get both Jian and Taishi, and one of them carries a fragment of the Great Khan’s soul with her. Surprisingly, she doesn’t think her people are the evil empire.

I’m not going to spoil a whole lot of details about what happens next, but there are a lot of assassins, and Jian has to go into hiding in a martial arts school and masquerade as a novice and an orphan … which after years of wealth and pampering, doesn’t go quite as well as everyone might have hoped. Not everything gets wrapped up, as this was clearly written with a trilogy in mind from the start, but since Book Three is already out, the only thing making you wait is how fast you can read. I’m particularly interested in finding out more about a particular side character who starts having panic attacks during battles partway through the book; we’ll see how much of him we see in Book Two.

Definitely check it out. I’ve got a three-day weekend coming, so hopefully I can have my review of The Art of Destiny up within a week or so.

#REVIEW: London: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I’m going to review this book by writing a bunch of sentences that will all, individually, be true. “But wait,” you might be thinking to yourself. “Isn’t that how reviewing things usually works? You don’t often tell lies in reviews.”

True! However, in this case, what you need to understand is that some of those sentences are going to contradict other sentences. As it works out, this is quite appropriate for this very, very odd book. You are simply going to have to live with the fact that while each individual sentence of this review is true, the entire review may, somehow, not be.

Roll with it, is what I’m saying.

So, the following are true:

  • I gave this book five stars on Goodreads and Storygraph. (Follow me on Storygraph!)
  • This book is not currently on my Best Books of 2025 shortlist.
  • I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up on the list anyway.
  • It is nearly eight hundred pages long, and I did not finish reading it. I put it down with about 75 pages left and I have no real intention of going back to those 75 pages anytime soon.
  • Insofar as such a thing is possible in the first place, this book is not a biography of London, much less The biography of London.
  • It is only barely a history of London.
  • London is 2,000 years old and that’s only if you don’t count the even older civilizations that lived there, deep into prehistory. Writing a single book about all of this is ludicrous.
  • This book is divided into multiple themed sections. The themes will be broken down into some variable number of chapters. Some chapters are only a couple of pages long, some are much longer.
  • The themes may sound like they’re historical, or they might be things like “Night” and “Day,” where the author is more or less just riffing. There are sections on prostitutes and violence and war and walls and food and prostitutes and noise and commerce and clothes and jail and medicine and asylums and kings and prostitutes and children and the Great London Fire of 1666, which is distinct from the other dozen or so times the city has burned down over the years.
  • So, so many prostitutes.
  • Any given chapter might quote anyone, from any time period, in any language. If that author was writing in French the quote is going to be in French. If he was writing in Medieval English, you might be in some trouble. If he was writing in Old English, Þu scealt hopian þæt þu miht witan hwæt hi secgað.
  • This means that occasionally you’ll see things like Dickens and some Roman historian you’ve never heard of or some English writer from the 13th century quoted together within a few paragraphs.
  • Peter Ackroyd is an engaging, immensely erudite author.
  • There is very much such a thing as “too much of a good thing.”
  • It took me a week to read seven hundred pages after spending the whole summer devouring 700-page books in a day or two. This book must be approached in bite-size pieces.
  • I am, almost certainly because of the style in which the book was written, genuinely not sure that I learned much of anything. The author’s intent was not to present you with carefully organized information about London. It was to spend hundreds of pages coasting on vibes.
  • If you want to read this, go ahead, but I’m never just going to casually recommend that anyone read it. Like, if you told me “I want to learn more about London’s history,” I would never give you this book.
  • English nouns sound dumb to Americans in a way that I’m never able to clearly elucidate, and I wonder what they think of our place names. I can’t take locations called Cheapside or Marylebone or, I am not fucking with you, Gropecunt (prostitutes!) seriously.
  • So many prostitutes.

So yeah. Maybe you’ll read this. I’m glad I did. I think.

#REVIEW: His Face is The Sun, by Michelle Jabès Corpora

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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.

#REVIEW: Dissolution, by Nicholas Binge

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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.