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So, what are you reading?
I'm trying to finish Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. This time around it is resonating, perhaps because the abstract desire for freedom is on my mind.
The Pilgrims of the Damned: The Assembly Book 3 by Steve McHugh. Book 1 never did get too political, and the writing is still pretty snappy, so we're going with it. MC is looking more and more like an expy of his previous MC as time goes by, but it's been long enough since I've read the Hellequin chronicles that this isn't an issue for me.
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About two-thirds of the way through A Canticle for Leibowitz. Story is starting to pick up now. Committing to reading at least 10% a day until I've finished it.
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Somewhat recently I finished the series A Practical Guide to Evil. Pretty fun. I wish I had time to put it into better detail, but the world and setup is interesting. It's a sort of fantasy-with-superpowers type world? I don't know if I've really seen a book do it quite this way, however. The core concept is that "character archetypes" called "Named" periodically form in the world and with powers to match. For example, there's a Black Knight that shows up every few decades in the Evil-aligned nations, and a Paladin or whatnot who will show up in a Good-aligned nation. Roles can and do evolve if you survive long enough and are successful (e.g. you might start as a Squire and later evolve to e.g. a Mirror Knight). They have 3 limited-use (recharging) powers that are partly personal partly role-based. Fights between them tend to loosely follow some meta-narrative type rules, like starting a 'Rule of Three' set of conflicts between two rivals, or how Parties of Five tend to naturally form and are more powerful. It's a typical fantasy world (magic, nonhuman races, vaguely medieval) but with better than average worldbuilding IMO. The Evil-aligned empire on the continent exploits Orcs and Goblins to fight in their armies. You get periodic crusades against them, and periodic bouts of world-conquering too.
The context for the books however is that the main character is born and orphan in a middle, traditionally Good-aligned kingdom that usually gets the worst end of the stick when the Good nation of city-states to their West and the Empire to their East rampage all over their land. She is recruited as an Evil Squire, at first, to the Black Knight. However, said Black Knight and the Empress have conspired to "break" the typical cycle of Good vs Evil. They carefully try to avoid narrative traps in their fighting, stamp out Good heroes before they can get enough experience to start winning, treat the conquered middle Good nation abnormally well with expanded autonomy and economic prosperity, and develop the Empire's army into a more egalitarian and deadly fighting force, with expanded rights for nonhumans. This means that the MC's home nation is slowly turning... Evil! Mostly. But "Evil" in a, well, "practical" way as the title suggests. The idea is to be juuuust not-Evil and competent enough to prevent Fate spawning too many Good heroes from ruining everything. In their eyes, Good are jerks who are overly rigid in their thinking, while Evil has the potential to be pragmatic and level-headed about the greater good, paired with a resentment that narrative usually blindly favors the Good. Throughout the series the main character slowly adopts more and more of this attitude, but also tries to look out for her home nation and eventually grows quite powerful both personally and politically.
There is some character stuff of course, starting a bit tropey but gaining depth as you go on, some inventive fights (the main character often has to resort to tricks and cunning to win against the often narratively stronger Good heroes), and a surprising amount of politics and political maneuvering. And yes, the meta-narrative impact on fights is pretty interesting to see, especially among the more-experienced Named. You might get a hero who deliberately sets up a noble sacrifice as a giant fake-out, or deliberately as part of their fight strategy sending someone to wander around and thus rely on divine providence to guide them to the exact right spot, or a villain who tries to avoid their monologuing tendencies which inevitable backfire, but sometimes leaning into As the series expands you do eventually visit most parts of the continent, other nations' politics and alliances often become highly relevant. You've got a surprisingly deep and fleshed-out history of the nations involved. Which I've always really appreciated in series, like for example Wheel of Time was great in part because you ended up actually using the map over the course of the series with a nice sense of scale. A fair amount of the series is mostly war-stuff, though, which you either love or hate.
And you've got some comedy too. There's a city-state to the south that is an exaggerated democracy, where everything is put to a vote and the bureaucracy is intense and they almost never agree to do anything, but also has secret police who are constantly trying to guard against Tyranny. We get periodic epigraphs from some of the Named former Emperors, from Emperor Irritant, the Oddly Successful (the best unexpected quotes), Emperor Traitorous (infamous for several quadruple-crosses and such), etc. that occasionally give Hitchhiker's Guide vibes. Anyways, it's originally a web serial and that shows at times but nonetheless was a very fun read if pulp fantasy is your jam.
As an aside, in the original serialization, this world does apparently have a reason that the world is stuck at a certain technological level. Apparently there is a race of "gnomes" which are implied to be super-advanced, flying or space-faring or something, that will deliver a warning if an invention happens or line of research is pursued they don't want. If the warning is ignored they basically nuke the city from orbit. Is this elaborated on anywhere else in the novel aside from a few random mentions? No. They in no way affect the plot. I guess that's one way to set up a fantasy world's tech level... (IIRC in the published, edited novelization which is in progress, the second of ~6 currently about to come out, which I do recommend as an improvement over the original, this idea was dropped in favor of some kind of Fate hand-wavy thing, but IMO the gnomes are more funny)
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I’m curious to know if I’m truly the only person on TM who finds reading fiction to be extremely difficult…
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I inhaled Uketsu's latest story, Strange Maps, yesterday, and found it pretty fun. For those who don't know, it's a Japanese mystery/vibes youtuber who made the break as an author with stories that can essentially be compared to golden-age murder mystery fiction (contrived "figure the perp, motive and mode" puzzle tales that try to be fair, optimized for puzzle design and vibes rather than for realism and literary value).
His stories are refreshingly free from the last 60 years' worth of epicycles of ironic self-awareness, and while the premise in this installment (protag investigates an uncanny handdrawn map found on his grandmother's body when she committed suicide) feels less fresh than the ones that gave him his break (real estate listings for houses with weird floor plans, which turn out to be key to unravelling sprawling conspiracies involving murder, scams, mental illness and cults), he got much better at staying grounded and inviting suspension of disbelief until the end. It's also great weeaboo bait for the sheer Japaneseness of the set pieces (Corrupt WWII military-industrial dynasties! Isolated fishing villages with creepy idiosyncratic cults! Women on lifelong quests of revenge! Salarymen who get black-out drunk with their scumbag boss!).
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Trash
A Conneticut Yankee in king arthur's court: This trashy isekai light novel was written by mark twain in the 1880s but it follows most modern Trashy Isekai light novel tropes to a T.
MC is sent to a magical world via Isekaitis? Hammer kun is truck kun
MC is sent to a world where his modern knowledge makes him into a god? Check
World is effectively built around MC's ability? Check
MC gets a harem? Check (kinda)
and the big one you already knew it. The Title is also the premise.
Re:Zero: I have no clue why but I read 20 volumes of a time loop mystery. The thing that this story does is make our main character go through many different time loops in succession each "arc" is basically one time loop where our main character must both figure out the mystery and defeat the opponent. But our main character suffers a lot. Even though we have plot armor as an integral part of the story he suffers much more in interesting ways than most fantasy characters. This story is very well done with deep lore.
Stuff I read that is a waste of time but I can pretend to justify it better
The Chemical Formulary: A book of chemical recipies made in the 1930s has a lot of interesting ideas and also some of the worst ideas humanity has ever had.
One line you're reading an idea on how to prevent fog on your car then a little later you're reading about putting thallium in the ground to kill ants
The Geneva convention : I swear reading the Geneva convention has changed my opinion of fictional wars. Mainly I start to think the "good guys" are actually just fucking war criminals a lot.
The federalist papers: Some very interesting old papers where you get a great insight into the opinions of the founding fathers both how much foresight they had and how much they lacked. Really a great series of documents showing that these guys were absolutely insane. (in both a good and bad way)
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What I'm actually reading.
Finishing up the last book in The Warlord Chronicles, Excalibur, which I'm really enjoying. It's a gritty (although maybe not that historically accurate) Arthur retelling that I think thematically captures a lot of what the Arthur mythos is going for. Also reading After Virtue, which I am starting to enjoy more.
Warlord Chronicles is great. Always makes me crave playing a welsh ruler in crusader kings 2, 867 start, and forming prydain. Culture converting all vassals and provinces is mandatory, get bored afterwards.
Theres actually a CK2 mod for Warlord Chronicles, but it's not that good.
Makes me want to learn Welsh, especially since my ancestry is almost 100% British and Irish (with some Scandinavian blood). Would be practically useless but is very beautiful.
Do you know about the Winter King mod for CK2? You can just directly play as the book characters in the 480 start (edit: I see that you talked about this, guess the mod isn't that good)
Oh yes, I did. The mod is just not quite done and feels empty, but it's been 2 years+ since I last tried it so it may be better now.
I have 0% Welsh, Irish, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry but when I reread Warlord Chronicles I feel an insatiable urge to drive the Angles and Saxons back into the sea, just as Arthur would have wanted.
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I hated that book. Review below
First the plot. I think I could live with an unbelievable speculative world, and even with arrogant writing, if interesting stuff happens to interesting people. Very little happens in this book, and very little of what happens is due to the agency of the main character. I get that that's part of the point: women in this literary universe (and in the world in general) are so often oppressed and powerless, and its difficult to them to feel like they have any agency. But it doesn't make the main character very interesting, or even very feminist. Offered is kind of sniveling coward who goes along with pretty much every thing that's done to her, only taking matters into her own hands when she wants to have sex with the chauffeur (which I suppose could be read as empowering, but did not come off to me that way).
Secondly, the world building. Margaret Atwood markets herself as an author of "Speculative Fiction" rather than "Science Fiction" or "Fantasy" because she prefers to think of herself as someone who writes about things that could happen. The thing is, The Handmaid's Tale could never happen in this country, especially not on the timescale suggested. Polyamory is not something acceptable for the Christian right (although not so on the left), and the reduction of Women to sex objects is not something that Christianity preaches (the most revered women in the faith is A VIRGIN). Even if some kind of twisted version of the faith was to appear, there's no way it would be able to seize power in the country, and have such widespread support on the timescale suggested. And that's not to mention the whole issue of political conflict in a society with a declining birth rate. Atwood does this kind of okay in some aspects: most everyone in the Handmaid's tale just seems tired: no one actually believes in all the crap that the regime puts on, which I think fits with the general narrative of declining population. That, however, does not fit with the brainwashing or the force of belief required for Gilead to overthrow the US government. Again, I think this speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of Atwood's about fundamentalists. A lot of fundamentalists actually really deeply believe what they say they do. What Atwood presents here is yet another caricature of religious extremism: hypocrites who don't actually practice what they preach.
Given some historical context in which this was written (aftermath of Reagan's election and Iranian Revolution), the world of this book makes a little more sense. However, Atwood's concerns about the rights of women have, at least in my opinion, aged badly. Although the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022, many states, including Massachusetts, still have the right to abortion enshrined by their constitutions. The religious right is increasingly irrelevant: their champion is a hedonistic old man who fails to even make lip service to any kind of religious morals. Threats to women rights rather have come from capital, and the insidious reduction of everything, from bodies, to free time, to meaningful relationships, to the grasping hand of the market. Atwood so poignantly critiqued this system in her MaddAddam trilogy, and it was frustrating to not see that same level of analysis here.
Finally, I found the writing to be unnecessarily convoluted and confusing. Frequent, un-signalled flashbacks, and lack of quotation marks were the worst offenders. I get that this was supposed to be due to the framing device of these being audio transcripts, but it still grinds my gears. Atwood is not unique in this regard (looking at you Cormac Mccarthy). I also found that the framing device didn't really do it for me: somehow this being a university lecture ~100 years after the fall of Gilead made the whole speculative world even more unbelievable for me.
The main issue with the book is that she understands the aesthetics of certain religious groups but has no real understanding of the mechanics of it.
In real life young attractive and fertile women were treated exceptionally well. The young women pharaohs had children with lived in luxury. Young women married to princes lived in luxury. In no culture do elite level men keep the mothers of their kids in basements.
On the flip side elite level men generally have had an easy time finding women and don't have to resort to capturing women. Taking slave wives that live in poverty is something low class men who would engage in.
Atwood really fails at evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Her books confirms my belief that many of the worst ideas in modern politics comes from people literature background who don't really understand the underlying mechanisms.
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A few comments
•The Sons of Jacob definitely aren’t supposed to be a mainline Christian denomination. The name “Jesus” is pointedly never mentioned by anyone in Gilead, ever, nor is anything from the New Testament. The SoJ have difficulty controlling the Deep South due to Baptist insurgents, which would imply that many hardline denominations are not on board. Additionally, book Gilead has a strong racial apartheid element, with the “Sons of Ham” being confined to South Africa style Zanzibar-stans. This would seem to imply the SoJ are a strain of Dominionist weirdos and not mainline Christians. This was changed in the tv show to make the SoJ racially egalitarian, which honestly probably tracks better with radical Christian groups today. Many of the lower level political commissars of Gilead are former rad-fems, which also doesn’t really track with any 80s right wing or religious movement (though it seems oddly prescient today).
•It seems to be implied the fertility crisis caused massive social pressure which allowed the SoJ to seize power, and that the handmaids and the rest of the social structure are more of a semi-pragmatic measure to deal with that, and not just some stupid LARP. It annoys me that in the show Canada seems to be able to just be a normal liberal brunchtopia in the face of an existential demographic crisis.
•I think post-script seemingly taking place after the fall of the regime is an homage to Orwell’s 1984 with the Newspeak dictionary at the end.
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I have only read two novels by Atwood, but the thing that seems to run through both of them is that she combines the subtlety of a pulp writer with the pretentions of a literary fiction author. It's a bizarre combination.
For parallelism, perhaps it should be "the subtlety of a pulp writer with the humility of a literary fiction author".
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