Tag: books

In which I tempt fate

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I just went and looked, and it has been five years since I did not post about being horrendously sick sometime during the last week of August or the first week of September. Tomorrow is the last school day of August. I am, at the moment, healthy. Will I make it to work in the morning? We shall see.

Honestly, this year continues to be the best start to a school year I can remember; I’ve now made it through two and a half weeks of school without even threatening an office referral, although we did have a little drama blow-up between some of my girls today that threatened the peace and harmony of my little universe for a while. Everyone decided to be reasonable, though, so we’re all good over here in Silertown.

Anyway, I’m going to spend the rest of the night with my face buried in Katabasis, so y’all be good.

#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.

Monthly Reads: July 2025

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading2 Comments

Not as heavy as last month, but still. Damn.

And I just started London: The Biography, so even if we don’t take school starting into account, that’s gonna lighten next month considerably.

Book of the Month is His Face is the Sun, by Michelle Jabés Corpora.

Unread Shelf: July 31, 2025

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Did I rearrange this shelf hoping to hide the fact that there are more books on it than there were last month?

…maybe. I might have done that.

I’d have two nickels

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I spent part of the day adulting, part of the day working on a LEGO set, and the rest of it pushing through The Eye of the World. I’m under 200 pages from the end and am hoping I can finish it before I go to bed.

Also, somehow today God killed an elderly orange-skinned Florida man with shitty hair, genocidal politics and a massive racism problem, who had strong ties to reality TV and professional wrestling … and got the wrong one.

Anyway. Got a book to finish.

In which it happened again

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life3 Comments

Logically, I was last at work just a couple of months ago, so it has to be true that I know how to exist in a world where I do not have access to a three-hour afternoon nap every single day whether I want one or not. I just don’t remember how that’s supposed to work, and I spend what feels like a huge percentage of my mental effort every day avoiding taking a nap. I succumbed today– the boy had a few of his friends over to play D&D, and I positioned myself where I wasn’t in their way but I would potentially hear if there were issues that might benefit from fatherly intervention– and apparently staying awake for that was all I was capable of today.

I have what I refer to as the “danger spot” on the sectional in the living room, but my stationary chairs in the library rarely betray me. That was not the case today, unfortunately.

So 5:30 to 8:00 just sorta vanished, and now I’m sitting here trying to remember if I had anything I needed or wanted to do this evening, and I don’t think there was, but … damn.

Forgive me a piece of drive-by literary criticism, but I’m rereading The Eye of the World again, with the end goal of eventually finally fucking finishing The Wheel of Time, and I don’t think it’s ever quite hit me just how comprehensive a rip-off the first fifteen chapters or so are of the Hobbiton-to-Bree portion of The Fellowship of the Ring, to the point where I halfway feel like Jordan had a copy of the book sitting next to him while he was writing to make sure he hit all the important bits. I’m still half-asleep and don’t really want to go point-by-point, but Christ, the number of commonalities are nuts.

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

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

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.