Tag: crescent city

It’s okay when I do it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

I’ve been reading a lot of Sarah J. Maas lately– ACOTAR 6 comes out in a few days, and in the last month or so I’ve reread the first four books; I’ll finish A Court of Silver Flames next week sometime, then go into the new book, then in between ACOTAR 6 and 7 I’ll reread the Crescent City books. The Throne of Glass series is actually my favorite of her work, but it’s not as tied into the rest of them, so rereading that will have to wait until next year.

I don’t argue with people about books very often– it just doesn’t come up, to be honest– but I especially don’t argue with people about SJM. She has a couple of little quirks about her writing that drive some people up a wall, and while I don’t share them, I get it, more or less. The biggest one is her insistence on using “male” and “female” to refer to her fae and angelic characters and never, ever “man” or “woman.” Men and women are human. It’s a hard line. I noticed a moment in ACOWAF a couple of days ago where a character actually uses the wrong word, and she immediately corrects herself.

The other one is her use of “mate.” The mating bond in ACOTAR isn’t entirely voluntary and tends to make its own decisions, for lack of a better word– simply making eye contact with the person who is supposed to be your mate can trigger it, and once it snaps into place, it can be ignored, at some cost, but it can’t be reversed. The fun bit, also explored in ACOWAF, is that sometimes the mating bond makes shitty decisions? The main male (sigh) character’s parents were mated and weren’t good for each other at all.

You’re gonna see the word “mate” a lot in ACOTAR. A lot a lot. And if it gets on your nerves, you’re not gonna have a good time with the series.

Anyway, I read ACOWAF and ACOFAS back to back, and I picked up another book off my Unread Shelf as a sort of palate cleanser before going into the next book. This book has lizard people in it. Lizard people are nearly deaf and psychic, so they communicate via telepathy. Only the book never uses the word “telepathy.” The word the author has chosen– or, at least, the translator, as the book was originally written in Korean and it’s not entirely clear how one translates neologisms from one language to another– is nearm. Nearm is both a verb and a noun; one nearms a nearm. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, as I’m reading the book and not listening to it; the one TikTok video I found discussing the book pronounced it “neerm,” and I can’t shake “knee-arm” out of my head even though “neerm” is probably closer.

Nearm is a dumb word. It might sound less dumb in Korean, maybe; I don’t know a damn thing about Korean. It sounds really dumb in American English. I’m pretty sure it sounds equally dumb in all the other Englishes as well. And any time one of the lizard-people shows up on the page you’re gonna see the word as many times as you might see “said” for any other character. God help you if there are more than one of them and they’re talking– sorry, nearming— at each other.

It’s got me ready to put the book down, and I was really looking forward to this book, and damn, Maas-haters, if I didn’t get it before, I get it now.

Bookish braindump

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.

I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?

Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.

Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.

Christ.

#Review: House of Earth and Blood, by Sarah J. Maas

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s always interesting when an author whose previous work is all in the same series breaks away from it and writes something new. This isn’t quite true for Sarah J. Maas, whose eight-book Throne of Glass series I read in its entirety last year; she has a second series out there that I’ve not read any of, but ToG is something like seven thousand pages all by itself, so I’m pretty well acquainted with her style.

One way or another, though, when an author does something like that you get an idea pretty quickly of what sorts of things are just part of her books and what was just meant to be included in that previous series. Stephen King’s books tend to be set in Maine. John Irving’s books tend to include wrestling, bears and dismemberment. Stuff like that.

Well, Sarah J. Maas likes to write about the following things:

  • Beings of incredible power opposing one another;
  • Female main characters with hidden pasts;
  • Smartasses;
  • Explicit sex;
  • Nonhuman, long-lived races, particularly the Fae, which appear to be pretty similar in this book and in ToG;
  • The words “male” and “female” to refer to nonhuman races, used instead of “man” and “woman.”

The main thing that seems to make this an “adult” book and not an incorrectly-shelved YA series like ToG is the swearing. I’m not about to go back and look but I feel like the word fuck is used about three thousand times more in this book alone than in the entirety of ToG. Beyond that, though, the tone is basically the same.

When I talked about this book the other day, I was 200 pages into it, and the most interesting thing about it was the worldbuilding. The fact that so many ancient Earth cultures seemed to have representation in House of Earth and Blood, and that one of the main characters is literally an angel, was mostly passing without comment, and at the time that was what had me the most curious. Well, you don’t really get any resolution on that front, but a couple of interesting things do get dropped in later on– an explicit reference to the date, where the year is in the 15000s somewhere, and a reference to an angelic rebellion on Mount Hermon. The rebellion part was there from the beginning, but the idea that it happened at an actual place on Earth kinda erases any idea that there’s not something going on here, and not just the author reaching for names.

As far as the book itself: it does this amazing thing where the last three hundred pages or so are one long action scene, and I basically finished the last half of the (800-page) book at a sitting after taking longer than I’d expected to read the first half. It takes a while to get going– and if you balk at the idea of four hundred pages being “a while to get going,” I’m not going to blame you– but Jesus, once this book shifts into high gear it just never lets up, and it has one of the most memorable deaths I think I’ve ever read at about the 700-page mark.

I am, I admit, more interested in the stuff going on in the background than I was the A plot, which does end up being a nicely satisfying and twisty murder mystery, but as a guy with advanced degrees in Biblical studies that can’t really be helped; that’s more of a personal reaction than “the background is more interesting than the plot” would normally indicate. I think it’s pretty fair to say that if you enjoyed her previous work, you’ll enjoy this; it’s a little more tropey than I expected, honestly, but where it does right it does really right and I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, which hopefully will get out of the titular Crescent City and tell us more about the rest of the world.

12:44 PM, Sunday May 17: 1,474,127 confirmed cases and 88,836 Americans dead.