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Notes -
So for this week's "What Are You Reading" thread, we're coming to the end of the year and I just finished a few books, so I'm going to post my whole 2025:
Books 2025
Same rules as last year. These are the books I finished in the year 2025, meaning I read them, on paper or screen, all the way through. There are some other books I started but haven’t finished, I don’t give myself credit for those.
I aim for 26 books finished every year, so one every other week. Mostly because you hear about figures like Teddy Roosevelt reading a book a week, and I cut that in half for various reasons and try to stick to it. This is a totally arbitrary personal goal, and it is funny to me how IRL it’s almost impossible to discuss with anyone without it turning into a weird personal dick-measuring contest. There’s almost no one I talk about it with who doesn’t reply with some variation of: A) Insecure Excuses along the lines of I WISH I had TIME to read so much, and I wasn’t so BUSY all the time [with things presumably far more important than FHM’s leisurely reading]; B) Books are Dumb along the lines of I only read blog posts summarizing non-fiction self help books; C) Braggadocio, Actually I read THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE BOOKS this year, how did you ONLY read 26.
I don’t get why, to me, it’s only relevant to me personally, because only I can know how I read things. What I skim and what I comprehend every word of. The quality of the stuff I read. How much free time I have. I’m not really interested in comparing with people, but they can’t help themselves IRL, it touches a nerve. Which I guess it does for me to, but only to me, in that this is important to me in some way.
Anyway, recommendations if you want stuff a mottizen might like, or if you’ve read it and want to discuss it, feel free to comment.
I define a “book” by format, a bound codex front to back.
Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger — Might have been the most fun I had reading anything this year. It’s a great book in its own right, a gonzo creative writing exercise in half-invented rumor mongering gossip about people you might have heard of vaguely. Read it, afterward you’ll be able to confidently expound these anecdotes at parties, and when someone talks about modern celebrity culture, you can talk about how everything really went downhill after Fatty Arbuckle was fingered for raping a girl to death.
The Odyssey Emily Wilson — A lovely, crisp new translation. I try to read Homer at least once every year. There are a lot of things I got out of this version that I didn’t get out of other versions. Translation is its own art. Wilson’s work is right at the border of what I’d consider a useful translation. Read it if you have read the Odyssey before, but want another angle.
Where Men Win Glory Krakauer — A biography of Pat Tillman. I’ve always liked Krakauer ever since reading Into the Wild years ago, when I gift Tolstoy to anyone I inscribe it “Listen to Pierre.” The book is a real throwback to early GWOT times, how everyone felt right after 9/11, and just how bad the cover up was. The book is a bit of a hagiography, despite Krakauer’s best efforts, trying to portray Tillman as something other than a professionally violent guy who saw an opportunity to do some real violence for a good cause, but it leaks through in journalistic accounts of Tillman sucker punching other teenagers and hiding the assault charges from colleges to avoid the consequences of his actions. Read it if you feel like it, but it bogs down in the second half trying to figure out exactly what happened to Tillman when I don’t really care.
Rivals Jilly Cooper — This is such a fun romp, I read it with my wife. A Jeffrey Archer type 80s business heist forms the scaffolding of the story, but it’s all just window dressing for various characters to bounce off each other in various erotic combinations. It’s a shame bisexuality hadn’t been invented yet, Cooper could have done so much more if you have a few utility players on the team. Read this if you want something funny and light at the beach, she’s a good enough writer that some of the jokes make me laugh out loud.
Alperton Angels Janice Something or Other — A modern epistolary mystery novel told through text messages and notes apps. It starts off pretty good, and seems like it might really work, but ultimately it was one of the worst books I read this year. I read it with a friend, and when we were 3/4 of the way through, I posited a ridiculous twist ending as a bad joke, and that’s exactly what she did! The whole book is ruined in the last ten or twenty pages! Bails on everything that was interesting in the first part. No one can write a good ending to a scary book anymore! Do not read this one, and if you do stop 3/4 of the way through and just remember it that way.
The Sandman Omnibus Neil Gaiman — From a pile of recommendations for graphic novels that y’all gave me, I pulled this one. I don’t know if it counts as a book, it’s a comic. But if I had bought it in print, it would have been like seven books or something like that. I’ll just count it as one. Really strong work, very interesting, at first it’s a little bit too far into just being comic book slop, but it develops in interesting ways. Reading it around all the Neil Gaiman controversy, it made me think a lot about the way Gaiman projects himself into the work, and a particular kind of man. Gaiman wants to be a master who doesn’t want to be a master, a feminist patriarch who wants to uplift women who want to be his slaves. His behavior with women makes perfect sense reading his work, and it’s hard to see how fans of his expected anything different. Read this one if you want a long fantasy read without too much thinking.
Fewer Rules Better People Lam — It’s barely longer than a pamphlet, but makes a compelling argument for why removing laws and regulations is necessary to produce virtuous outcomes for everyone. Read it so that when you buy copies for all your local councilmen you can explain to them why they should read it.
Ask Not Callahan — A history of women destroyed by the philandering, and other crimes, of the men in the Kennedy clan. I have this bad habit of reading oppositionally: when I read a polemic against someone I make points for the, and when I read a polemic for them I make points against them. In this case, while I was blown away by the detailed research into all the terrible things that had been done, and the ridiculous horniness of JFK and brothers and fathers and children and cousins and nephews (seriously, it’s genetic) I didn’t necessarily buy all the harm they were supposed to have done. Read this if, like Mrs. FiveHour, you love Kennedy dirty laundry, but I’m still in search of a neutral historical group biography of the JFK-RFK-Teddy group; everything is either slander or hagiography and it nearly always focuses on just one brother and mentions the others when I want all three of them to the same detail.
The Story of a New Name Ferrante — Second book in the Neapolitan quartet. Exquisitely written, and worth reading for the art of it, but a whole lot of nothing happens for the most part, it’s a lot of work to get anywhere. Read it if you like the series, I’ll get to the third and fourth this upcoming year.
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace — My big project for the year. I’m not sure what to say about it. It’s brilliant. It feels like it one hundred percent predicted the modern world in many ways, but it’s also so long and so intricate and so weirdly plotted. Reminds me of and probably inspired Motte-Adjacent writer TLP’s and his hatred for his own reader, DFW is engaged in a meta conflict with his own reader. It’s brilliant but it is almost intentionally bad, disgusting at times for no reason, but the writing is so brilliant, I can’t make up my mind. I love DFW’s short stories, but this took me several tries to read, and in some ways I feel like at its best Infinite Jest is a collection of short stories that are connected into a madcap plot. I’m still processing this one. It appears in the list where I started it, but I finished it much later. Read this if you want to read something brilliant, and don’t mind that the author actively hates the audience, you probably owe it to yourself to read it once, it might be the last really great book ever written.
Moneyland Bullough — A pretty good nonfiction book of anecdotes about different ways that rich people use the tools of international law to hide, launder, secure, and otherwise use money. An ok and pretty informative book, but kind of lacks in a moral argument without fully committing to anticapitalist marxian analysis. If it’s their money, why can’t they use it how they want? Who cares about divorce laws for billionaire trophy wives who get traded up? Read it if you want a quick light read for information, I got it off the free pile at the bookstore.
Journey to the End of Night Celine — What a slog! Why do people like this one? I went in expecting some really interesting cynical WWI book, instead I got a half-assed Henry Miller, a book with no characters who ever felt either realistic or admirable, just an absolute slog of a book that never even hints at an interesting point. Don’t read this one unless you’re determined to finish some stupid list of books, like I was.
The Official Preppy Handbook Birnbach — Oh my God you need to read this. Don’t talk to me about “This is what they took from you” on twitter if you haven’t read this. WHAT A TIME! WHAT A PLACE! WHAT A FEELING! This book captures what it felt like to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of place at a certain time, and if you’re like me you’ll be deep diving eBay for vintage Lacoste and cashmere for a few weeks afterward. It’s a two day read at most, written as a how-to guide for being perfectly preppy, from cradle to grave. Read this if you love subcultural study and love Americana.
300 Miller — When the movie came out my Boy Scout troop could recite most of it from memory on a ten mile hike, I decided to finally get back to the original material. Wow, was it different. Where the movie felt very GWOT, about beautiful manly White Greeks fighting shifty turbaned Brown Persians. The comic art style makes the Greeks look vaguely like an anti-negroid attack ad from Harper’s in the 1870s. It was decent, but exactly the same as the movie for the best parts, without the inherent homoerotic ‘miring of Gerard Butler’s abs. Skip it.
American Sniper Kyle — Read it for Memorial Day weekend. A quick, interesting read. I have a notes app draft of an effort post about how the book feels more like an athlete memoir than a war memoir, Kyle feels more like Michael Jordan than he does like Carlos Hathcock. Ultimately to pad the book out they include a lot of his wife’s reminiscences about the period, which I really didn’t care about, and the editions released after his death include a bunch of eulogies about how great he was. It’s a quick read and influential so I’d recommend reading it.
Storm of Steel Junger — This was one of my favorite books I read this year. Excellent, brilliant, lovely, incredible, harrowing. Absolute masterpiece. Junger was a brilliant free spirit, who wound up in the most important places on the Western Front, and wrote about them as they happened. Made me want to read everything by Junger, which I plan to. You need to read this one.
Band of Brothers Ambrose — I have a personal connection to this unit, and I loved the HBO series, so for me this was one I should have read a long time ago, and finally got around to. It was the right moment for WWII historiography, and it’s such an interesting account of such an interesting journey for the Screaming Eagles and Easy Company in particular. There’s a lot of inherent depth to a work that has that much first hand interview to it. Read this one at least once.
Fat City Gardner — Recommended by Alex Perez as a great boxing book, it’s a fictional account of two struggling pro-boxers, one teenage almost-an-up-and-comer and one 30ish never-was. It’s a real nuts-and-bolts boxing book, and a vignette of the low end of life in mid century California. Short, punchy, a really solid book, read this if you like the fight game.
The Fight Mailer — A literary journalistic account of the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Ali and Foreman. I’m fascinated by Ali, a singular figure in world history. When our cousins from Austria visited by Great Aunt back in the 60s, the first thing they wanted to do was travel to Deer Lake to try to catch a glimpse of Ali. The best way I can describe in modern terms is maybe if Shohei Ohtani was also Kanye West, or if Tom Brady was also Bronze Age Pervert, if an athlete whose brilliance cannot be denied was also a controversial political and cultural figure. Mailer’s writing is good, and he had a LOT of access, but the book itself was ultimately mediocre. Read it if you feel like it, it’s short and easy, but it mostly just teased me, and made me want to read Eig’s Ali biography.
Original Sin Tapper — An interior history of the end of the Biden presidency. I read it with my wife to see what all the fuss was about and wrote a review on the motte. Mediocre and boring, an exercise in trying to do a directional autopsy. TLDR the Biden senility crisis was totally unpredictable and no one outside of Biden and his two best friends did anything wrong. Don’t bother reading it, just read my post about it.
All the Light We Cannot See Doerr — A well reviewed WWII book about a blind French girl and a German boy escaping allied bombing at the end of WWII. It started out well, but the ending was totally limp. And, to be honest, I’m not this guy normally, but one of the things I really liked about the book was that it kept the atrocities mostly off-screen, but then at the very end it goes into a very unnecessary explicit gang rape scene of the Red Army and German women. Which was just such a weird change in tone that it bothered me a lot. I thought it was good that he didn’t turn the WWII story into a Holocaust centered story, which too many authors can’t resist, but then to turn around and focus in on anti-German atrocities while avoiding German atrocities sets off my crypto-Nazi alarm bells for a book that isn’t that. Skip this one, not worth the effort.
On The Marble Cliffs Junger — Junger’s Animal Farm, his allegory mythology of the rise of Hitler. Junger was always a right winger, but Junger hated Hitler, Ernst Jr was killed by Nazis for involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler, and Junger himself was only spared because Hitler was a fan. I’m not sure I really got it, I keep meaning to take some time to go back and read interpretations of it to see if I can really get into Junger’s feelings and values within the work. Probably read it if you are a fan of Junger, but not otherwise.
JFK Jr An Oral Biography — I never really knew who JFK Jr. was, only knew him from references from others. This book was a fascinating dive into a very interesting person. How would you move through life if everyone wanted to make love to you? Everyone. The female speakers in the book that don’t want him are so up-her-own-ass about being just frineds that you can tell that not sleeping with him is a weird kind of active choice. The beautiful man that everyone wants, the son of a martyred president who in turn was famous for fucking starlets. Literally everyone wanted him. Women wanted him, men wanted to hang out with him to play the MAC system off his scraps. It’s fascinating. Among other anecdotes: JFK Jr. once had an intervention for a friend, and invited his cousin RFK Jr. to come to share stories from RFK Jr’s own addiction struggles, RFK Jr. proceeded to share stories so harrowing that JFK Jr.’s friend decided that he himself didn’t have a problem at all because he was nowhere near RFK’s. Read it if you like the Kennedys, like Mrs. FHM.
Coup d’Etat Luttwak — Luttwak’s original provocative how-to book on taking a government by Coup D’Etat. Not as good as I expected it to be, I liked all the Luttwak I’ve read, but when I finally tracked this one down, it kinda fell flat. It’s interesting, but all felt kind of obvious, like one of those self-defense manuals that say things like “don’t walk home alone.” Maybe if you want to read it, try to find the original, I had the updated reissue with modern interpolations which kinda ruined the flow. Gets a don’t bother from me.
The Sun Also Rises Hemingway — Maybe the best book I read this year. Hemingway is probably my favorite author of all time, the greatest to ever do it, numero uno, the best combination for my money of being a readable masculine author who is also a brilliant and important literary mind. The book itself is all about conflicting visions of masculinity, the big question is who is the cuck? The idiots who read Hemingway and see a simple view of masculinity have never read this book or understood it. Read it.
To Have and to Have Not Hemingway — And of course, as soon as I get on a kick of wanting to read Hemingway because I love him, I run into a terrible one, the worst of Hemingway. Commercial, racist, derivative, flat, unrealistic. A mediocre noir about a Key-West smuggler and his fat wife. I’ve got plenty of stomach for period-appropriate racism, but this one was a step too far for me, the main character seems to be willing to betray chinks just because they’re chinks, and Cubans just because they are Cubans, there’s no moral logic to justify his actions except his racism. I get an unlikeable protagonist but this guy is so annoying and bullshit-tough-guy-hard-times that I actively root against him and for the rich guys forcing him out of Key West and the Cuban revolutionary gangsters shooting at him. Skip it unless you’re a Hemingway completionism.
Ride the Tiger Evola — My first introduction to Evola’s thought. I’m fascinated by his self description at his trial after the war, when asked if he was a Fascist he replied “No, I’m a Super-Fascist.” His doctrine of internal resistance without external action is interesting, but ultimately it might be too esoteric for me to actually understand what’s going on. If we have any Evola-heads on here, feel free to DM me and explain it to me. I’d recommend it, but I don’t know that it’s for everyone anyway.
Cry Havoc Mann — A memoir supposedly written in an African prison by a British mercenary leader. A series of stories about overthrowing corrupt African regimes, written seemingly by a character from Cooper’s Rivals, an upper class Englishman of the Old-School, in a regimental tie and full of the old times. The last gasp of the colonialist. Read it because it’s fascinating, but don’t take anything he says too seriously.
Portnoy’s Complaint Roth — The first person account of a Jewish man to his therapist, describing his struggles with his sexual mania over his first thirty years. Oedipal doesn’t even begin to cover it. At times it seems uniquely Jewish, at times it uses the Jewish experience to universalize to the male experience, but when I identify with Portnoy it makes me nauseous. It makes me want to read more Roth. Also a good example of a book where it was widely recommended, but the anecdotes that people pull out of the story are all from the first 30 pages, so the idea you would get from the reviews of what the book is about is wrong, it’s not about a teenager it’s about a 35 year old man. Absolutely read this one, and DM me to discuss what you think of it.
Soul on Ice Cleaver — The letters and essays of a Black Panther in prison in the 60s. I picked it up because I’d seen it cited so often by Darryl Cooper, and everyone else on the alt-right internet citing Cooper or learning it from him, about Cleaver writing about rape and isn’t that terrible that leftists loved this guy. I quickly found that those quotes were taken pretty far out of context, as is typical for any gotcha meme like that, and there’s a much more interesting conversation to be had about what is going on in Cleaver’s writing, and Cleaver is kind of interesting in his own right. I’m thinking of diving into the leftists of the time a bit. Read it if you’re interested in an “of its time” period piece.
The Naked and the Dead Mailer — My least favorite book I read this year, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of an island hopping WWII Pacific battle. This book was terrible. It somehow managed to be boring despite being a short book about WWII jungle warfare, it managed to be testosterone sapping in its maudlin vignettes of miserable American lives left behind despite being a war novel, despite following only a half-strength platoon of men the characters still managed to be repetitive and unnecessarily boring, despite its pretensions of grim realism it uses too many confusing literary narrative innovations to have any immediacy. Skip this one unless you want to read it to commiserate with me about how terrible it was.
Glorious Exploits Lennon — A fun Classical Historical novel, set in Syracuse after the failure of the Athenian invasion, two buddies set out to put on a prisoner-cast production of Euripides Medea to preserve the art in case Athens is destroyed and the work lost forever. It reminds me a lot of the vintage Chris Moore novels I loved in middle school, showing we can still do that kind of thing if we want to, even if I’ve been disappointed by Moore himself lately. Mostly funny, written in a modern Irish vernacular rather than trying to do the stately or pseudo-accurate Greek idiom thing, some moments that will make you feel or think. Does a really good job of writing about prisoners of war without caring about who was right or wrong in the war itself. Read it, it’s a fun little book and won’t cost you anything in time or effort.
Comment below with what you're reading this week, what you read this year, or any thoughts on any of these books. Feel free to DM me or get my TG if you want to discuss any of these in more depth than makes sense on a forum post.
A mishmash of books:
Tactical Barbell II (K. Black)- possibly the most useful and practical book on Conditioning. this is IMO a must read.
Burn Math Class (Jason Wilkes) - for learning maths. Starts with basic addition rule and takes you to calculus level in a fun, engaging manner with a maturity. It is not kiddish stuff. Great writing as well as great mathing. Unputdownable. I hope this guy churns out more such books.
One Rough Man (Brad Taylor): Pure spy-action thrillers. just like Vince Vaughn's (Mitch Rapp series), or the JRs (Jack Reacher, Jack Ryan, etc.). Currently, I am on number 9 in the series. (yeah, it isn't brainy stuff matching the main thrust of this forum, or intellectual stuff like in rest of this post and its replies; but i am loving it and recommend it with full force). Whenever there is dull point in my reading, kind of feel lost or too heavy or too disorented, I come back to something like this genre to get the full pleasure of reading for reading purpose, and not for some "improvement" or "great thinking" or "deep understanding". Pure Joy. it is similar in intent to A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, which I liked too, mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert: very limited cast, but very tense thriller. early work of Herbert (much before Dune). very enjoyable.
Spandrell's Blog: from first to last article. Including Bioleninism. Lot of interesting stories and a different, ?more realistic, worldview. Very engaging style. Highly recommend. Had read about him in this forum only, about his essays (don't remember the original post).
The Cicada and The Bird - a new translation of Chuang Tzu (Christopher Tricker): the only book which initiated me properly into the stories of Chuang Tzu (/Zhuangzi). It is a reorganized translation and explanation of the seven Inner Chapters of Chuang Tzu. Plus some other stories from later chapters. IMO, his take is the single best introduction to Chuang Tzu (who arguably is the greatest philosopher).
Whatever and Submission by Michel Houellebecq (English translations): former is a depressing read, and I didn't feel very good about it. but the writing is powerful and hooks you up. Latter is a very famous novel about a fictional story of how islam will take over France- it does have the feel of Whatever and the plot is very realistic, makes it very readable and definitely must-read in a CW context also.
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Didn't have time to do proper service to those books I read yet (surprisingly, the list is longer than I remembered), I decided in the meantime to do the list of fails - those books where I started reading, but got stuck and put them aside, either for a while or forever.
The Annihilation Score (Charles Stross, Laundry Files) - I used to enjoy Laundry Files series, but the quality has gone downhill, and by this one it became unbearable. Also the author himself is a completely un-sympathetic (to me) character, which I would be inclined to overlook if the work were good, but it isn't. To the discard pile it goes.
Use of weapons (Ian Banks) - I enjoyed Player of Games, but this one just didn't work for me. I feel nothing for it and it felt like wasting time. Undecided whether I want to continue with Banks in general (recommendations welcome) but likely done with this one.
Mercy of Gods (James SA Corey, of The Expanse fame). Actually an opposite reason - it's pretty good as a book, but way too dark for me right now. With all that's going on around me, I feel like I just can't stomach that much of physical and psychological torture, death and suffering. I am only a weak man. Maybe I'll return to it in happier times.
Unbearable lightness of being (Kundera, obviously) - this one is very famous and I totally don't get it. It's not bad, just, you know, meh, and I expected more. I set it aside and will return to it, probably, when I'm in more suitable mood for it or maybe just older.
A Tale of Two Cities (you know this one) - ever more famous and highly praised book than the former, true classic, same symptoms. I mean, I am not saying it out of contrarianism, I even actually like his style and wordsmithing abilities, but with some books (with much less technically capable writers too) it makes me care what happens and why, and this, for one reason or another, does not.
Burmese days (Orwell) - Orwell is most famous for the book everybody heard of, but he's a genuinely good writer overall (IMHO) and I enjoy his writing. But this one also was a bit too hopeless for me - I understand why one could write a book about "everything is shit and is going to shit" (especially when everybody else pretends it's actually going peachy) but reading it when everything had gone to shit, and goes to shit even deeper now, is taxing. I will likely return to it next year.
Barbarians at the Gate (Bryan Burrough and John Helyar) A very, very detailed book about how the big business is done, on the example of RJR Nabisco. Very interesting, but the amount of details is a bit overwhelming, so I had to take a break. Will likely finish it sometime next year.
I thoroughly enjoyed TULoB. Worth finishing.
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I love IJ as well. Apparently the footnotes are to simulate a tennis match. Talk about pissing off the reader. I wrote a large review of the book here, and would love to discuss with you.
https://deusexvita.substack.com/p/review-12-of-2024-infinite-jest
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Interesting recommendations, thank you. Favorites this year, hmm...
Book of the New Sun - lengthy, somewhat confusing, could have skipped the last book, did not care for the "grand" side of the narrative. Still, a wonderfully mysterious world, suffocatingly old and tired. I'm a sucker for well executed, organic "deep history" settings.
The Camp of the Saints - far beyond my expectations, must read, it's dreary and terrifying, but also fun, a rear-guard action. The invaders are beyond wretched, but (intentionally) barely register as threatening, it's all about the the endemic absence of conviction in the European natives, gleeful self-righteousness of the traitors, resentment of the "minorities". Hilariously crude at times but never malicious, uniformly even-handed, compassionate. Funny, for Russians to not open fire on the masses crossing the Amur so as not to prove the ork accusations right.
Schild's Ladder (Greg Egan) - perfectly good story, but more memorable for the depiction of transhuman societies. Entire planetary communities willing to wait centuries in stasis for a one member to make their lightspeed-limited field trip to another colony, just to not exclude them (or, to guilt them into coming back soon). Disliked how the author did the anachronauts dirty, though, not letting them make the obvious but reasonable complaints, stawmanning them as primitives with "XIX-century morality".
Embassytown (Mieville), Stoner (John Williams), The World of Yesterday (Zweig) I would also recommend.
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I kickstarted my year by re-reading Reverend Insanity. I won't bore anyone with a recap, all I'll say is that it took me 4 months to finish not because I was slow, but because the novel is both great and very, very long. About 5x the entire HP series.
But I digress. Reverend Insanity is peak fiction. Go read it.
Outside of that singular, four-month nostalgia trip, this was a bad year for books. It felt like walking through a library where all the ink had run, leaving behind only the faint smell of pretension and pulp.
The Golden Oecumene Trilogy (John C. Wright) I am sitting on a full review of this, much like a hen sits on an egg that refuses to hatch. The barrier is purely technological. I write in markdown, and Substack demands a rich text editor, and the activation energy required to convert the formatting is currently higher than the energy required to simply stare at the wall and sigh.
The story concerns Phaethon, a man in a post-human utopia who decides he would rather own a spaceship than be happy. It is solid hard sci-fi. Wright builds a world of remote-controlled bodies and dream-logic Internet architectures that feels surprisingly robust. It is the sort of future the effective accelerationists dream about, assuming they stop tweeting long enough to actually build anything.
The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson) I have already written about this. The premise is a banger: The Black Death kills 99% of Europe instead of 30%, leaving the world to be carved up by China and the Islamic Dar al-Islam. We follow a group of souls reincarnating through the centuries, trying to build a history that doesn't end in trench warfare.
It is a good book that fails to be great because Robinson treats Buddhism less like a religion and more like a narrative device he bought at a discount store. The theology is contrived. The characters feel less like reincarnated souls and more like KSR wearing different hats, lecturing the reader on the inevitability of scientific progress. It is Whig history with a side of curry.
Perdido Street Station (China Miéville) I tried. I really did. I read half of this brick before throwing it across the room, or I would have, had it not been on my phone, and had I not been worried about scratching the screen.
Miéville is a talented writer who has fallen in love with his own adjectives and the way his tongue tickles his taint. The setting is New Crobuzon, a city that is essentially London if London were made entirely of grime, cactus-people, and Marxian alienation. So basically just London, albeit with denizens who are more literal in their prickliness. The plot allegedly involves Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin trying to restore flight to a bird-man, which eventually unleashes psychic moths that eat minds. Oh, and he also fucks a cockroach woman. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that the cockroach bit is above the neck.
But getting to the moths is an ordeal. You have to wade through three hundred pages of atmospheric sludge. It is navel-gazey. It is the literary equivalent of a goth teenager showing you their collection of preserved insects for six hours. The pacing is nonexistent. Miéville seems to believe that if he describes the dirt on a windowpane with enough polysyllabic words, it constitutes a plot point. It does not. 6/10.
The Simoqin Prophecy (Samit Basu) This was a re-read of a teenage favorite, and unlike most things from my teenage years, it holds up.
It is Indian fantasy, a genre that is tragically underrepresented. Basu takes the standard "Farmboy Saves the World" trope and beats it to death with a cricket bat. The hero, Prince Asvin, is sent on a quest, the only sincere man in town, surrounded by people who know they are in a book or at least have a refreshing tendency to say fuck you to the plot and do sensible things. It is meta without being annoying, which is a rare feat. Tracking down the epub for the third novel required me to scour corners of the internet that haven't been visited since 2008, but it was worth it. Western readers might miss the puns, but good satire transcends cultural boundaries.
The Outside (Ada Hoffmann) There is a specific genre of modern sci-fi that I call "HR-punk." The Outside is the apotheosis of this genre.
The protagonist is an autistic scientist who accidentally invents a heresy that attracts eldritch gods. She is autistic. She is also a lesbian. The author is autistic. The author is possibly a lesbian. Did you get that? The book will remind you. It confronts the cosmic horror of AI gods who eat human souls, but the real horror is the prose.
It feels less like a story and more like a diversity statement written by a committee of Lovecraftian entities trying to avoid a lawsuit. It is absolute dross. The identity politics are not the subtext; they are the text, the cover, and the barcode. It is a book that demands you clap for it, not because it is good, but because it is brave. It is not brave. It is boring.
Theft of Fire (Devon Eriksen) This is more like it. A decent sci-fi page-turner. It’s about a roughneck space trucker and a genetically modified heiress trying to steal a superweapon. It’s The Expanse meets Firefly, but written by someone who really, really likes engineering schematics.
I am a Richard Morgan fan. I like Hard Men Busting Heads (In Space!). Eriksen delivers this. The physics are hard, and so am I : radiators, delta-v, the silence of the void. Unfortunately, the book suffers from the "ChatGPT Problem." It makes predictions about AI that became obsolete roughly three weeks before publication. I look forward to a sequel.
The "Mid" Pile: Footfall, Live Free or Die, Through Struggle, The Stars I group these together because they all suffer from the same pathology: The inability to write a human being who sounds like they have ever spoken to another human being.
Space Pirates of Andromeda (John C. Wright) Wright again. This is an odd duck. It feels like Wright watched Star Wars, got annoyed at the physics, and decided to rewrite A New Hope with accurate orbital mechanics.
We have a princess, a gallant Space Cop, and an evil empire with a Death Star. But in addition to the Force, we have very rigorous adherence to the laws of thermodynamics. The dialogue is baroque. The characters are larger than life in a way that feels operatic. It is a 7/10 novel that I finished on a long flight, sandwiched between a crying baby and a man who smelled like old cheese. It passed the time. I will not read the sequels. I have mountains to climb, and by mountains, I mean another four million words of Chinese cultivation novels.
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Talk about nominative determinism. But also what an ordeal.
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One I need to reread. It's been over a decade since I read it.
Always recommended as a boxing book, but the parts about the bleakness of life in Stockton on skid row for the working classes is what I took away from it.
How I felt after reading Eumeswil, but I still need to get around to Marble Cliffs. Glass Bees, by comparison, was direct and easy to follow for a tard like myself.
A fun read, but well over the line of how much Jewish neuroticism I find acceptable. It wasn't a surprise, I knew what I was getting into, but man. It's never-ending. I thought American Pastoral and Human Stain were better, especially the latter. Roth has amazing sentences on almost every page of his writing.
I was thinking I didn't break a dozen books this year, but apparently I broke 2 dozen, not even counting the re-reads. I don't think I'll finish Karamazov by the end of the year since I'm 2/3 done right now.
Serious and Less Serious Stuff
Barth – Sot Weed Factor
Franzen – the Corrections, Freedom
Kesey – Sometimes a Great Notion
Chabon – Wonder Boys, Yiddish Policeman's Union
Chuck Kinder – The Honeymooners
Buzzati – The Stronghold
Ellroy – LA Quartet, Underworld USA trilogy
Ellis – The Informers, Lunar Park, The Shards (got halfway, then quit--ridiculously padded and a good editor would cut half)
Malaparte – The Skin
Wodehouse – The Jeeves Omnibus 1-4
Tartt – The Secret History
Clavell – Shogun
Horror
Sarban – The Sound of his Horn, The Sacrifice and Other Stories
Nevill – The Ritual
Hurley - Starve Acre
Thomas Tryon – Harvest Home
Stoker – Dracula
Rereads
Vandermeer – 3 Ambergris books
Mieville – Kraken, The Scar
Laird Barron – first 3 short story collections
Bishop – The Etched City
Pynchon – Vineland
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While I have a few of Evola's books in my que, the only one I've worked through so far is 'The Mystery of the Grail: Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit'. It's definitely an... interesting read.
I'm not sure if his perspective actually influenced CS Lewis or was merely a reflection of the greater philosophical perspective of the time(early 20th century), however. I did enjoy reading it, though, as it's the first book that ever defined what 'Hyperborean' actually meant.
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My books of the year (read, not published) short list:
Wanderer, Sterling Hayden. Last days of the tall ships, Hollywood, OSS partisan shenanigans in Yugoslavia, sailing to Tahiti with the kids in a custody dispute.
We Will Never Be Here Again, Svein Tuft, yeah, it's a sports book, but Svein's a pretty interesting guy.
In Search of the Forty Days Road, Michael Asher. Burnt-out ex-SAS man retraces historic camel trading routes in Sudan. Scenes of buying his first camel and a sword straight out of D&D.
Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer. Sprawling and overlong but it gets going pretty good eventually. Supposedly very influential in the US officer corps.
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I haven't read this one, but I have read The Dark Knight Returns and a few Sin City comics.
There's a stock narrative in comic books, that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (gritty, confrontational deconstructions of American superhero comics) ushered in the dark age of superhero comics in the 90s and early 2000s, in which creators like Todd MacFarlane and Rob Liefeld were constantly pushing the boundaries of acceptability as far as sex, violence etc. go, but missing the subtlety and nuance that made Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns so effective.
I think this critique has merit when it comes to Watchmen, even though I no longer hold it in as high esteem as I once did (not because of its edgy content – in point of fact I think Moore's later From Hell is superior, in spite of being even more violent and raunchy – but because of its "look how clever I am" qualities). But to be quite honest, I don't think it's applicable to Miller. All of his works that I've read have seemed exactly as crass, one-dimensional and grimdark-for-the-sake-of-grimdark as MacFarlane and co.'s are made out to be. I will concede that Miller is a better artist than Liefeld (but then, who isn't?), but that's not the form the critique generally takes: it specifically holds that Miller is superior because of his greater sophistication and nuance in storytelling than his imitators. And nothing in his oeuvre that I've read has come close to justifying that claim.
Anyone who's tried to tell you that Miller knows anything about nuance is full of shit. Comic books aren't generally known for nuance period and Miller was considered a brick through the window even then. The problem is trying to isolate the work from the effect it had in the comics space. And Miller isn't just a writer, he's not a very good writer. As a comics artist he's actually more interesting despite his work getting arguably worse over time.
TDKR is seminal. Not because of how good it is - it's okay, if some scenes and sequences are purely edgy twists on existing Batman lore - but it's essentially become so influential that large chunks of it ended up incorporated back into Batman canon. And the artwork and presentation fits it perfectly. I maintain that the animated adaption Part 2 probably drives home how well/not well it's aged, especially when compared to commonly accepted "modern" Batman, but the sequence of him confronting the Joker is probably the best we've ever gotten including the live action adaptions. Year One I consider basically bland cardboard in comparison, although the fetish Batman readers seem to have for grittier origin stories is well served.
His Daredevil stuff is generally good to excellent, but the Netflix TV adaption that steals liberally from Man Without Fear is arguably as good in its first couple seasons.
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I don't think you are completely wrong about Story of a New Name, which was mostly just a continuation of MBF. But I found book 3 and, especially, 4 to be existentially gripping and, the latter, devastating.
I look forward to them when I get out of town in the spring then!
They just feel like spring books for me. Maybe February if I drive south a few miles.
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Like you, my new year's resolution was to read at least 26 books this year from start to finish*. It's not quite the end of the year and I'm fairly confident I'll add Cryptonomicon to the list before January 1st, but seeing as we're all doing it, here's my list. At the time of writing I've read 28 books from start to finish this year (16 by male writers, 12 by female), in chronological order:
Rejection (#4 fiction) – in spite of certain reservations, I can't deny that this was one of the most entertaining books I read this year, primarily on the strength of its first three stories. It is a terminally online brainrot novel: it's also pretty good.
Katalin Street – a solid novel which offered me some insight into the experiences of Hungarian Jews during and after the second world war, which I'll never read again.
Boy Parts (#3 fiction) – wonderfully nasty. Wears its influences on its sleeve (it's basically "what if, instead of an American male stockbroker, Patrick Bateman was a female British fetish photographer?") but puts enough of a spin on it to carve out its own identity. Its protagonist (as a friend of mine put it, a "female fuckboy") is vicious and awful, but never to the point of feeling like a caricature, and it made me empathise with one of her victims a great deal. The only thing that will date this book to the early 2020s is the insincere woke window dressing: no one is fooled by the token trans man character. It doesn't matter what you "identify" as: the message of the book, to me, was that there are men and there are women, and sometimes men are awful to women but women can also be awful to men, and there's nothing remotely "empowering" about the latter.
The Trial – Dull as dishwater and a chore to get through. I loved Metamorphosis, so I don't know what kind of off-day Kafka was having when he wrote this. Numerous artistic works have induced the "Kafkaesque" sensation far better than the work widely credited with introducing it.
Montaillou – I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.
Orbán: Europe's New Strongman (#2 non-fiction) – I read this for research, but found it eminently readable and informative. Highly recommended if you're interested in the modern far-right and democratic backsliding.
Kiki de Montparnasse – a biography of some French woman who appeared in photos in the 1920s, in the form of a graphic novel. It was fine.
The Garden of Forking Paths – a short collection of several of Borges's stories, including the one of the same name. Thought-provoking and prescient.
The Door – also by Magda Szabo, author of Katalin Street above. Longer, slower-paced and not as good.
The Disaster Artist (#3 non-fiction) – OH HAI MARK. The most purely entertaining work of non-fiction I've read all year. I imagine even someone who's never seen The Room would find it interesting, particularly in its examination of life at the bottom of the Hollywood ladder. Virtually all Hollywood memoirs are by people who've succeeded there and hence chock-full of survivorship bias-laden advice about the importance of working hard and never giving up on your dreams: it's still refreshing (and quite sad) to be reminded that you can be strikingly handsome, a decent actor, have the relevant contacts, be hard-working, determined – and still not make it. Also vastly superior to its workmanlike film adaptation.
Mina's Matchbox – fine, but some of these modern Japanese novels feel a bit formulaic.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – pretty cool, I love anything Lovecraft-adjacent.
Spoilt Rotten (#5 non-fiction) – who doesn't like a phlegmatic, digressive rant about how England sucks because of woke?
The Man in the High Castle – interesting and provocative, but doesn't really work as a novel (unlike my beloved A Scanner Darkly). Constantly jumps between a diverse collection of characters whose plotlines barely intersect and few of which have any kind of escalation or payoff. A "slice of life" alternate history novel, if such a thing exists.
The Perfect Heresy – like Montaillou, I read this extremely dry academic work for research, and like Montaillou it was extremely difficult to get through but occasionally interesting.
Unsong – technically my second read, although Scott edited it quite significantly from the web serial version. As I said a few months ago, a mixed bag. Scott is nowhere near as good at writing fiction as he is at writing blog posts – but his blog posts are among the best in the world, so he shouldn't feel too bad about that.
It Starts with the Egg – I read (skimmed, really) this one for research. Very informative.
The Secret of our Success (#1 non-fiction) – fascinating, one of those tremendous works of pop science that makes you go "ohhhhh that makes so much sense" every other page.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (#5 fiction) – tore through it in three days. When Christie's on form, you can't beat her. Best if you go into it blind. Going to see The Mousetrap tomorrow night, can't wait.
Free – comparisons with Elena Ferrante are apt. An interesting and informative eyewitness memoir of Albania's difficult transition from socialism to a market economy.
Speaker for the Dead – I loved Ender's Game, but alas can't say the same about the sequel. Found it quite dull, honestly.
Stories of Your Life – I loved it almost as much as Chiang's other collection, Exhalation. Highly recommended.
The Year of Magical Thinking (#4 non-fiction) – the only work of non-fiction that made me tear up this year. Essential reading for anyone who's lost a spouse, and anyone who doesn't want to.
The Remains of the Day – I didn't like it as much as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but it was still really good. Further thoughts.
Doxology (worst book of the year) – I hated this book so much I ranted about it for several hundred words here. The most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book all year – indeed, perhaps for the last decade. I find it hard to imagine a person who would enjoy reading this book, even if (unlike me) they agreed with its politics or had a particular interest in the subject matter (New York's punk and indie rock scene in the 80s and 90s). Irredeemable trash. Please don't let Zink publish another book again. This isn't just a question of a plot development that didn't pass the smell test or a single unlikeable character: on a stylistic level, her writing is fundamentally, irretrievably bad.
The Outsiders – the best book I've ever read that was written by a 16-year-old, not that that's saying much.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (#1 fiction) – I had a feeling halfway through that this would top my list for the year's fiction. Granted that I've only read one book from start to finish since, but nothing is yet to dethrone it, even after reflecting on the other books I read this year. A lot of you disagreed with my gushing, but misgivings about its politics aside, I simply cannot deny the emotional impact this book had on me. Any novel that can make me feel like I know its characters personally and desperately want them to get what's best for them is doing something right. Heartbreaking and moving.
The Story of a New Name – as I said, I can really admire what Ferrante is doing on an intellectual level, and yet her novels for the most part leave me cold. The impact would have been heightened were her books not so frightfully slow.
Cryptonomicon (#2 fiction) – what can I say about this book that hasn't already been said? The silly parts (elaborate descriptions of the mechanics of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal; the process by which a family of mathematicians divvy up their mother's legacy; some hackers cracking into their partner's computer, only to find that he's using it tocompose a Penthouse letter about he and his wife's sexual fantasies ) are among the silliest of any book I've ever read. In the hands of a lesser writer (say, Stephen King) I'd say they're fluff which should be trimmed for pacing's sake – but it's hard to care that these narrative digressions have nothing really to do with any of the four main plot threads when I'm literally laughing out loud, which few books can make me do. On the other hand, the descriptions of the brutality of Imperial Japan's southeast Asian campaign are hauntingly gut-wrenching, and Stephenson succeeded in making me care about his characters to the point that I wanted the best for them by the end. It must be in the top five longest books I've ever read, but the page count felt entirely earned and at no point did I feel the pace dragging (which is more than can be said of Atlas Shrugged and Gone with the Wind – still good books, to be clear). A staggering achievement.
*Thereby excluding The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I started reading last December and which probably would have made my top 5 for fiction had it been included.
Interesting, in my accounting I put books in the year I finished them. Probably because the point of the exercise for me is actually finishing books, rather than being in the middle of so many books that Mrs. FiveHour yells at me because they're all over the place in our bedroom.
I really do need to read the Outsiders at some point.
The edition of The Outsiders I read was a mere 216 pages, you could comfortably read it in a few hours if you were so inclined.
I'll have to pick up a copy next time I take a weekend trip.
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Not a complete list, I don't remember all the fiction, and some of them are either so specialized in focus to be irrelevant, or I just read on a bet and a review is besides the point (eg, Minotaur Milking Farm after it became a short-lived twitter meme, which beyond its obvious problems was also just bizarrely normie).
Conventional Books -
A Market of Dreams and Destiny: Alternate universe London Underground Gaiman-esque fantasy where everything has a price. Serviceable prose, decently interesting universe, but it needed several editing passes or maybe even a serious rewrite. The author has too many viewpoint characters and too little meat to each tone, the politics go beyond overt to the point of hilarious inconsistency, there weren't any real big payoffs or conclusions, and the central questions just didn't hook me much. I was kinda hoping for a something akin to Fable Of The Swan, so might expectations might have just been too high for what's ultimately just angsty slash, but I just came away feeling meh.
Icarus Series: Scifi series rolling around spacers that operate somewhere between couriers and smugglers, with some twists to that. I'd actually read Icarus Hunt a couple decades ago, but I'd filed it away as a Zahn one-off; stumbled across the reset of the series in a B&N and splurged. I think I prefer the characters from Hunt, since for goofy publishing reasons, Plot and subsequent stories focus on a different set of main characters, but each story still works great and a not-absolute-best-tier Zahn character is still a great character. Not my single favorite Zahn series -- I think the Conqueror's Trilogy just had a better central gimmick -- but well-executed and consistently clever and easily beats Blackcollar.
Hugo Award Novels: yes, I still get the packet, though it's harder and harder to justify paying for it. Mostly a lot of meh. A Sorceress Comes To Call is well-executed prose and nothing else; The Ministry of Time has a great idea it does absolutely nothing with, Someone You Can Build A Nest In is about as shallow as xenofiction gets. Alien Clay's the only one I'd really put a vote into, and that's just workable rather than deeply memorable -- it's far from Tchaikovsky's best.
Humble Tech Book Bundle: Computer Science the Fun Way: a bunch of No Starch Press compsci books. I'm mostly self-taught (and worse, self-taught in weird focuses), so these were a kinda interesting read from a formal programming perspective. They're all pretty reasonable for their subjects, but what those subjects actually were and how closely they related to computer science versus computer engineering was rough at times. Computer Graphics From Scratch is literal 'how you'd do things without a graphics API, which you will never do', while on the other extreme Data Structures the Fun Way was a distillation of the various 'how do B-trees do and why would you actually use them'. Only real big complaint I have within the content was Code Craft, which felt both very opinionated on what coders should be doing and simultaneously fell prey to many of the same problems that mauled the old Clean Code movement. On the other side of things, The Book of I2C and Introduction to Computer Organization were the sort of writing that seem like great dives through layers of abstraction that I was looking for. Dunno that I could recommend any of these on their sticker price, but the shop regularly offers deep discounts.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Yudkowsky's AI safetyism to the masses. Takeaway: Not Great, Bob. There's few things more frustrating than a good writer making bad arguments for a position you think is worthwhile, and Yudkowsky's written single one-off jokes (eg, Moore's Law Of Science Fiction) that were more compelling than this book, while providing only the least-plausible defenses against his proposed horror stories. The first half of the book is telling us how People Won't Just in the face of a superintelligent system, and then the second half gives a list of things that would work if People Would Just. Few people are going to buy into the assumptions, here, and those that do won't trust the conclusions. I've long complained that post-golden era LessWrong erred by emphasizing pivotal moments and extreme runaway, but the book comes across as less grounded in its speculative fiction than Friendship is Optimal, and where a reread of FiO leaves people going oh fuck, I keep coming away from sections thinking they'll be dated in years, if not months. Maybe there's something valuable here I've missed because I've read Yudkowsky since the 00s, but I just don't see it.
The AI Con: Takeaway: Even Worse, somehow. Where Yudkowsky seems likely to be dated quickly, The AI Con seems like it was dated before it even started writer. Computers Make Mistakes, IQ Doesn't Exist, Stochastic Parrots, Water Consumption, yada yada. I don't know if the authors originated this stuff or just absorbed it from those around them, but they sure as hell didn't care whether anything was meaningful or correct. Even where it should have been strong, on the economics and social impact, it still couldn't bother: "bossware" is up there with eyetracking for something that could become a dystopian hellscape, and deepfake ransoms are already making the world cyberpunk in the worst ways, and the authors can't actually sell those stories. Finally, the policy proposals are a grab-bag of the impossible and/or useless.
((There was some "how to deal with AI for normies book", too, but the part where I can't remember the name tells you about how valuable it was: think three-hundred-plus pages of 'ah, but LLMs do X' that were marginal predictions for Llama.))
The Unplugged Workshop : woodworking handtool-focused crafting guides. Hard to review this because, outside of watching a few youtubers, I just don't know the topic that well, and it's impractical enough that few people I know do either. Worse still, it's definitely an intermediate-level work, with only occasional accommodations for beginners like myself. Still, highly readable, well-organized, functional, and good project layouts, and the stuff I've tried so far has... well, not always turned out well, because I'm used to chisels as a de-riveting tool, but at least been more limited by my skill than that of the writer. Even if you're really into woodworking, a marginal buy, decent borrow.
Complete Guide To Sewing: I was told this was The Standard Book on the topic, and I can see why. Where a lot of 'beginners to experts' books tend either, this covers the whole spectrum from before your first stitch all the way to deep project work I couldn't even begin to understand. Not an enjoyable read by any means, but a good reference. The projects are my only big complaint: not only were they clearly marketing to a specific demographic that had zero overlap, these felt more like they were trying to help guide people who were already working from a pattern, leaving you to really guess at sizes and shapes. If you're doing anything sewing-wise more serious than patching torn pants, worth a buy... but get a used copy.
Comics -
Promethea: another one I'd read before, but that was borrowing it from a library, and now the local comic book store had the full series in trade edition. It's an Alan Moore comic, with all the benefits and costs that involves : wildly metafictional, deeply detailed, uncomfortably sexual, not quite as clever or as dedicated to its principles as the writer wanted it to be, and with an unfulfilling conclusion. Still, if you like Common Grounds or Astro City, it's worth looking at, and far more approachable and optimistic than the typical Moore comic.
Black Summer: second verse, same as the first: read it in the Obama era, and now could find it in full TPB. It's a very late GWOT story, and intensely political about it. The first pages have a superhero with blood-drenched hands lecturing the White House Press Corps about how 9/11 was planned and the Wars In the Middle East were just filling for corporate greed and the last two Presidential Elections were stolen, but he's Taken Care Of The Problem. The only men and women who can challenge him are the five(ish) surviving self-enhanced members who once worked with him... if they want to, and can get past a government presuming they are his allies. It'd run into political disfavor before it had even finished, as by 2008 concerns about a President's legitimacy had become much more popular in the wrong side of the aisle. In 2025, a man surrounded by floating eyes talking about stolen elections has rather different political valiance (and Ellis would get cancelled for other reasons). But where Ellis's other works in the same time period were either pointless gore porn (No Hero) or have a couple interesting scenes trying to cover up threadbare plot and nihilism (Supergod), Black Summer remains interesting enough to keep on the shelves, even if (or because) it'd never get written again. Not quite good enough to recommend as a buy -- the conclusion just doesn't feel earned, to the surprise of no one familiar with Ellis -- but might be worth a borrow.
Online Published -
Contention I and II: average Joe gets isekai'd into an alien or post-human world without even the clothes on his back, and gets to do the Primitive Technology speedrun. There's some really good plot seeds here -- the main character's obviously flawed in relevant ways without being an absolute asshole, there's a big driving question about the local precursors that's escalated really well, the not!magic system is useful and compelling without overriding a lot of the discovery and exploration bits. But it's also only two novellas into a story that seems built to go on for another two or three books minimum, the author only started on Book III in the tail end of last year (currently patreon-only), and that makes it hard to recommend.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat: basically Rimworld - with one of the more sadistic storyteller options - meets cozy fiction, where an (accidentally) self-uplifted domestic cat pits herself against all the plural of several post-apocalypses. My gold standard for xenofiction is Book Of Night With Moon, and Argus doesn't quite get that high. The plot's a little too meandering, the payoffs need to be set up better, and it needs an editing pass. Still a fun rampage, happy to have paid for it.
Reaper's Lottery and Executioner's Gambit: furry scifi, with very heavy raygun gothic and gumshoe inspiration. It's intensely furry, like the rest of the Hayven Celestia works, enough to probably be offputting to anyone else, but like Skinchange (cw: featureless furry nudity, scifi violence) it's got a pretty strong core underneath it.
If I were to describe why I liked the series a lot, I'd say because of how it reminds me of Vlad Taltos "in space!" The smartass protagonist finds himself inside plots-within-plots and has to piece together what's going on and improvise a solution. A formula I'm yet to get tired of, as my father used to say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, unless you're paid by the hour.
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I think it deserves higher praise here than you're giving it(though I'll confess that I'm a shameless Warren Ellis fan) if only for the fact that it basically subverts the entire expectation of what a political assassination entails and why they're always bad('Lots of people hated John F Kennedy. He barely got elected. But Lee Harvey Oswald isn't remembered as an American hero. Just a prick with a gun who killed a president. That's you now, John.')
The last moment where all the surviving Heros were all girls and all that implies was still a little cringe, though.
Yeah, especially given the broader zeitgiest at the time, it was a genuinely surprising take, and the level and degree of conflict between the heroes and the government is a much more nuanced take than the "you people are young" summary he'd give in interviews. As an exploration of political philosophy or philosophy of war, it does a pretty good job, if limited by its time and its awareness.
My big complaint's just that it doesn't really feel great about its characters. It's a comic book, and a short-run series at that, so expectations are never high to begin with, but the ending is undermined not just because It's Woke, but because it doesn't really feel like a conclusion for the characters that got to it. Tom feels very Batman-inspired and Horus very Superman, and that's a classic for a reason. Do their perspectives actually say anything about Truth, Justice, and the American Way? About
assassinscriminals being a cowardly and superstitious lot? Or if they're working as alternative company counterparts to Captain America and Iron Man, anything about their political philosophy? Artemis pointedly compares the US government with the Nazis in one argument with Dominic: did he persuade her before his death, or was her violent persona and facing always an act?You don't need this sort of deeper layering. Black Summer benefits in the sense that not doing it means you can't do it poorly, like No Hero or The Boys and their utterly wretched X-Men parodies. But it's frustratingly noticeable given how little else there is to say about the characters.
That said, I do think it's one of, if not the best, Ellis short series. So part of it's probably me not clicking with him as a writer in general.
Black Summer(and Supergod, and No Hero) probably work alot better in the overall context of the time - not the political context, but that of comics overall.
Warren Ellis is one of those writers where he does something completely new and off the wall - sometimes it works, sometimes it stumbles - and then everyone around him scrambles to copy it because 'holy shit this is actually something new and innovative and exciting and' rather than doing anything new and exciting they just copy/paste until it's a bad parody(See: Extremis, Nextwave, Authority, probably a few others that I missed.)
Warren Ellis is pretty much a Comic Book Writer's Comic Book Writer. I have no idea if the stuff he wrote on his blog still exists in any sort of form nowadays, but several times he went all-in describing the creative process and history and what he has to do not only to write comic books but what it takes to get it published.
And he was very, very big on the concept of using comics as a medium to push out new ideas, and do them cheaply. He actually wrote a comic with this entire goal in mind - Fell - and I think it's worth checking out.
So, yeah. Warren Ellis doesn't really do characters. He does ideas, concepts, lobbing them out like hand grenades before moving on to something new - which, again, when the comic book environment is focused on reboots and milking the same characters for endless decades, makes for quite the refreshing change.
So, it's a fair criticism. I think he can do characters - stuff like Transmetropolitan, Doktor Sleepless, arguably Planetary with Elijah Snow - he just... doesn't. Most of the time.
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I guess I'll do the same even though nobody asked:
Less Than Zero by Ellis - Quite a read, really dark. I whipped through it though, it's kind of gripping. It felt very 80s so no surprise it was released in 1985. I would recommend this book to skinny women age 18-25 with an occasional coke habit.
Lucky Jim by Amis Kingsley - Pretty funny and possibly the most British thing I've ever read. It's about an early career English history professor in a provincial university and his struggles. It might have done lasting psychic damage to me when I was a freshman in college and a massive misanthrope with a superiority complex. I'd recommend it to grad students and adjunct professors who can't seem to get a tenure track.
The Case Against Education by Caplan - I was convinced by the arguments that education is mainly signaling. I also can get behind his proposal to massively increase spending on vocational schooling.
The Twilight of the American Enlightenment by Marsden - After WWII we looked to the liberal intellectual elites to help us forge a new national identity, and they failed which caused the rise of the Christian Right. I was more fascinated by how it was considered perfectly normal for everyone to call themselves a liberal at the time. I thought it was OK but kinda boring.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - I read the whole trilogy which has a name I forget. It's sci-fi about a spaceship's AI that gets trapped in a repurposed human body. I don't usually like female sci-fi/fantasy writers but this was decent enough. The treatment of gender is weird. The protagonist calls everyone "she" and acknowledges that some cultures get very offended if you call the wrong person "she". I figured a super smart AI ought to be able to tell the difference between a man and a woman but what do I know, I'm a chud after all.
Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen - This is his autobiography. A lot of the first part of the book reads like a string of standup comedy bits, which it probably was. If you watch Radio Days it could have been yanked right out of this book. Then it gets a bit boring where he talks about his failed first marriage and career ups and downs. But there's a significant part of this book that is him defending himself against the molestation allegations, attacking Mia Farrow, and defending his relationship with his now wife. I was happy to read his account of these things, since nobody seems to care about his say on the matter. Only read this if you're a fan of his, obviously.
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker - This was my only DNF this year. I wasn't learning anything I didn't already know and Pinker is very longwinded. I think in the future, I'm only going to read his books that are more recent than 30 years old, on subjects I know very little about. It felt like reading Ancient Greek philosophers trying to do science because of how dated the research was.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Adams - I figured I should have gotten around to this at some point and I'm glad I read it because I was missing a lot of nerd jokes on the internet for the past 25 years and I now know where it's from. I didn't particularly like it but it would have been 15 year old me's favorite book of all time. There's a reason it's in the YA section.
City by Simak - Having developed superior methods of transportation, humans all retreat into the countryside as cities are no longer necessary. Simak's version of the end of the world isn't destruction, it's isolation, which seems kind of relevant today. Very inventive book told from the perspective of a dog civilization in the far future that is somewhat skeptical that "humans" are a real thing and not something made-up.
Hyperion by Simmons - Awesome. Really appreciated all the different perspectives and stories. My favorite book this year.
The Fifth Season by Jemisin - I read all three of the Broken Earth trilogy. Very mediocre fantasy. I wrote about it in one of these threads before. I'd recommend it to women who still think the Hugo Award is a mark of quality.
On the Marble Cliffs by Junger - I also read this and loved it. Make sure to read the Stuart Hood translation. I took a page out of an the ACX review of it from last(?) year and made my wife read it to me while I was high. Had a similar experience to the reviewer in that I found the descriptions too intense at one point and made her stop. Second favorite book this year.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vinge - A bit of a slow starter but it was worth it. It's about a runaway AI trying to destroy the universe and the one weapon that can stop it exists on a planet of medieval-era dogs that operate as individual packs rather than solo beings using special organs to communicate. If you're into more male oriented sci-fi it will work for you.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow by Zevin - I was surprised by this one. A GenX woman writing a story about a video game company could have been a disaster for me, but it was great. A bit sentimental and melodramatic. It was probably my third favorite fiction book this year, as evidenced by the fact I read the 600-page tome in 2 days.
Looking back, I think I'm going to read more nonfiction next year. I've been hesitating to tackle Nixonland by Perlstein so maybe that's what's next.
Make sure you read the sequel - there are books past the sequel that seem to be more unevenly reviewed but I liked the sequel quite a bit.
First time I read Hyperion the sequels felt like a letdown, so I set them aside. Second time I read through them, it was all awesome. I plan to re-read the whole thing again sometime in the future.
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If you liked Lucky Jim, then I highly recommend The Old Devils by Amis, which is about the misadventures of some old drunks. Both pathetic and very funny.
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Absolute heater, this.
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I'm not sure if he ever surpassed the debut. Maybe his sophomore novel, The Rules of Attraction. Less Than Zero might be the only book of his which isn't way too long.
Glad I wasn't the only one here who loved it.
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I am at 85-95% credence that the AI probably could, but the point is that it (its creator) is a chauvinist who doesn't care. The Raadchai are culturally superior with their pristine gloves, tea, weird relationships, and calling everyone "she". Everyone else and their pronouns and other distinctions are uncivilized, disposable material to be assimilated in a process of ruthless colonization. It a shitty dystopian society.
I couldn't decipher was the author making a subtle meta level argument or (more probably) found herself making it while writing an internally consistent treatment a random feminist "let's subvert some expectations" idea she had, but I think it has subtler implications than she or majority of the Hugo crowd cheering for it realized.
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I asked!
I was underwhelmed, I didn't really get much of a thesis out of it. There's better books on the same topic.
Wow you have no idea how much you just annoyed my wife in three weeks.
I'm adding both these to my tbr pile.
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I strongly disagree and much prefer the NYRB translation, but a sign of a strong novel that we can disagree on the translation but both love the book. Given the method, you may enjoy Junger's book on drugs, Approaches (not my favourite of his but has some interesting stuff).
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I'm currently at 20 books and I doubt I'll finish Le Morte d'Arthur in the next three weeks.
Aren't those the three most obvious responses?
It's cool you did this and I wish I did
It's dumb you did this and I'm glad I didn't
It's cool you did this and I did it too
My top books this year:
Two Years Before the Mast: an absolutely incredible story of seamanship, camaraderie, and the old west. Reading this book in the California summer was an unforgettable experience. It is on the very knife's edge of exponential growth taking root in California that has lasted through today. Be sure to read the author's postscript on his return visit 24 years after and his son's postscript 72 years after. An unspeakable sense of nostalgia and yet also a sense of what stays the same.
A Confederacy of Dunces: Absolutely the funniest thing I've ever read, period (and yes I've read all the Britbong funnymen). Even better if you've met a couple guys who reflect facets of the substantial and well-formed soul of Ignatius J. Reilly.
Anna Karenina: A book like this is hard to even review, but it's certainly worth your while. One small aspect: it's deeply amusing that Tolstoy seems to think that subsistence farming is basically the right and proper mode of agricultural activity for the Russian landowning class. Disregard mechanization. Leave behind optimization. RETVRN to mowing hay from dawn to dusk with a sickle, shoulder to shoulder with the illiterate peasants. If you're making any money, you're doing it wrong.
Tolstoy was born into a very aristocratic old money family. I am not sure what'd be the US equivalent of this, maybe like Kennedy? And he didn't like how things were going, so obviously the opposite of what he saw is correct - if my family has tons of money and relies on other's work to provide for us, the right thing is to have no surplus and dig the dirt with your hands and mow with the sickle.
It was a scythe actually, but directionally correct.
Doing the work yourself does not logically exclude the possibility of mechanization though.
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I'm going to have to beg to differ on this one, I really did not understand the hype. Most of the book I just felt sorry for this fucking loser's poor mother.
I hated Dunces so very much. I didn't even make it halfway before I started hoping for Ignatius' death.
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It's probably because you're almost a Britbong.
Did you like The Ginger Man? I hated that one, by the end I was hoping he and his buddies would get the lethal injection but apparently Irish people love it.
Huh, I've never even heard of The Ginger Man. Might have to check it out.
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I read it for the first time in high school, and barely understood it. I read it again a couple years back, and enjoyed it greatly and got a lot out of it, but felt like I got bored of it near the end. Then that same week I was reading some interview in the NYT Sunday Book Review, and the author said he didn't really get Anna Karenina until he turned 40, and I sat there like fuuuuuck I gotta wait another seven years?
Somehow I'm both not sure what this book is about, and sure I want to read it, from this little review.
I wasn't getting Anna Karenina for a long time, probably until about 40s too. Though I was a bit hampered by the fact that it had been taught in Soviet school, and that can give a bad taste to anything. Tolstoy himself was in his 40s when writing it, so that also may be a factor.
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Has been an uneven year in reading for me. Lots of half-read interesting finds in the open access sphere. The most interesting have been With and Without Galton, Red Dynamite and A People's History of the Classics. There's been a lot of personal reads, religious and national. Also, Umineko, if that counts, has been pretty good up to Episode 5.
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Serious reading! Found your take on Junger interesting (fyi, his son was sent to a penal battalion for making anti-Nazi remarks, and killed in Italy either by partisans or the SS). After the war, his anti-authoritarian writings become less allegorical and more straightforward, I think in part because he wished he could have taught his son better in the arts of subterfuge. I read Marble Cliffs after Forest Passage and Eumeswil, so perhaps it was easier for me to read his later works back into it - though the first time I read it I was too blown away by the prose to see anything but beauty. Likewise, my DMs are always open for questions/thoughts re: Junger, and my invitation to that reading group discord server continues to stand.
On Infinite Jest - I'm not sure it's that Wallace hates the reader, and more that he is desperate over the difficulty of genuine connection and communication in ironized postmodernity. He sees his role as somewhere between as JOI (literally, Himself) trying to communicate to Hal, and an AA sponsor trying to demonstrate to a Newcomer why the steps and slogans and meetings and so on are so meaningful. As such, he tries all kinds of crazy stuff to get the reader to really hear him; I think even the difficulty of the book is an attempt to get you sucked in and caring about it in a way that you wouldn't for a traditional narrative.
Highlights of my reading this year:
I just downloaded Forest Passage so maybe it will reveal more. I find Junger fascinating.
I'm definitely going to bug you about DFW more, I want to know this interpretation of things! I'm also kinda stuck on the masturbation of it all, is the entertainment just porn?
This might have been about when I read it, but a big thing I got out of Plutarch was how the paired characters (Greek and Roman) were a concentrated historical effort to invent Greco-Roman cultural history, tying every great Roman to a great Greek. Everything you said too, and Plutarch was a genius writer, but the underlying political project was one of the biggest things that stuck with me. Plutarch used his literary and philosophical genius to forward his goals and ideas.
If you had to recommend one novel to start, which would you recommend I begin with?
Forest Passage is the late Junger's most straightforward work (not to say it is straightforward!), and the closest thing to an anarch's manifesto. Hope you will enjoy and always happy to discuss.
So think about the Professional Conversationalist scene at the start, and then the conversation between the Wraith and Gately at the end - JOI is desperate to communicate, but he can't get past Hal's interior walls and really speak to him. The postmodern novelist is in the same predicament, nothing he writes can cross the walls of detachment within himself and the reader. He creates the Entertainment as a way to communicate, but it only produces all-consuming obsession (n.b. we never truly know if the Entertainment is absolute bliss, or if it's simply that withdrawal from it is immeasurably painful). I think the Entertainment is both the capacity of media/Substance consumption to consume human life, and also a sincere attempt from JOI to escape that. And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.
Yeah this is definitely a compelling reading. Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them. I'm not sure I buy that, but will be looking for that on the next read. The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.
I would say Stop All The Clocks is probably the most paradigmatic. It's set in New York, it's got questions about art and AI, it's got the conspiracy angle. It also tones down the annoying tics that other similar novels have (I read three that all did the same bit about iPad tips being set too high, and the cod-Pynchon maximalism of a lot of these books never lands with me). Alternatively, pick up a copy of The End and get a buffet - they are print-only (though I believe pdfs used to be on their website), but you can preorder the next issue in the link from their Instagram bio.
P.S. You may enjoy this cartoon
I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.
I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.
Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.
Well, the idea that Greeks are better than Romans might have raised some hackles, and Plutarch did have his political career to think about. But I don't know the exact situation in Greece under the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, it could have been that valorizing the Greeks under Hadrian was the classy thing to do. I suspect Strauss was reaching with that one, it was only a casual remark to students.
I tell my populist friends all the time that this is something to meditate on, that these things are long-term processes and we are definitely at the Gracchi stage rather than the Caesar one.
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Scrolling back through my Amazon and Royal Road accounts for highlights:
Thresholder ("rational" worldhopping; Royal Road, Amazon): 5 stars, very fun
The Stubborn Skill-Grinder in a Time Loop (Chunin Exam Day, but progressing into xianxia power levels rather than regressing into a Sasuke poop incident; Royal Road, Amazon): 5 stars
Tenebroum (evil genius loci happens to become a necromancer; Royal Road, Amazon): 4 stars, fun
The Systemic Lands (Earthlings are dumped into an extremely harsh "system" world at regular intervals and struggle to form a civilized society; Royal Road review, Amazon): 5 stars for books 1 and 2, 4 stars for books 3–9, 3 stars for book 10 (see details at the linked review)
Death After Death (Earthling is dumped into a world with multiple interlinked "levels" of history that must be "solved"): 5 stars, very fun
The Years of Apocalypse (magic student is dragged into a time loop and must use it to save the world): 5 stars, very fun
Also, the first half of the acclaimed Worth the Candle (books 1–6 of the original AO3 version, now apparently reorganized into books 1–4) has been made available for purchase on Amazon if you want to support the author.
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