An Infinite Number of Monkeys

Painted Devils, Margaret Owen. Second of the Little Thieves trilogy, which I started last month and promptly fell in love with.

Most trilogies, having clearly established a romantic relationship in the first book, would immediately start the second book by finding some way to break up the pair or otherwise put them on the outs with each other, so as to maintain some kind of tension in that plotline. I found it striking how thoroughly Owens does not do that: yes, there are multiple factors pushing the two of them apart, but they talk to each other and work through those problems and then a new problem comes along and they keep doing what it takes to deal with each one in turn. Meanwhile the plot has a fresh premise -- instead of trying to con her way to a fortune, Vanja has inadvertently created a cult -- and the structure gives that plot occasion to roam more widely than the single-city setting of the first book. The ending was the good sort of frustrating, where I yelled AUGH and then immediately checked out the third installment in ebook so I could run a search for a certain character's name and reassure myself that they show up enough in the story that I could hope for them to eat dirt the way I really wanted them to do. The only reason I didn't read the third book right away was my usual policy of trying to space out volumes of a series to keep from overdosing.

Ancient Night, David Bowles, ill. David Alvarez. I knew this was an illustrated book, but I didn't realize just how short it is. Very much a picture book rather than a book with pictures, relating a Mexican myth about the sun and the moon.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen. This is the kind of oddball niche history I'm sometimes very much in a mood for. Allen does his best to approach the subject topically (rather than chronologically, which would be well-nigh useless), starting with things like the advent of accounting ledgers and ranging through how families, artists, musicians, naturalists, housewives, writers, and people dealing with traumatic experiences have used them for different purposes. He also touches on the effect of technology: the notebook itself is dependent on paper, but creating things like lined pages affected how people use them. And then in turn, of course, there's digital technology, which has reduced our use of notebooks -- reduced, but not eliminated. The final section delves briefly into the neuroscience of how devices like notebooks act as an accessory to the brain, effectively making part of it live outside our bodies.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, Mary Beard. As usual, Mary Beard is extremely readable -- even when, as is the case here, her topic is inherently fuzzy. This is not a chronological or biographical approach to individual Roman emperors, though those elements appear in passing; instead, it's an attempt to figure out what it meant to be the emperor of Rome.

This is harder than you might think to pin down, because there's a ton we simply do not and probably never will know, like how and where exactly the business of government was carried out. (We have vague outlines, but nothing resembling an org chart, or even a map of how the Palatine palace was used.) And when it comes to the emperors as people, Beard does a good job of outlining how the facts we know really add up more to an image of a "good emperor" or a "bad emperor" -- what they were expected to say and do and look like -- than the actual men behind those terms. I particularly liked her argument that the "good" or "bad" reputation had more to do with succession than the actual reign: if you were your predecessor's designated heir, you had a vested interest in depicting him as a benevolent ruler who made wise decisions, whereas if you came to the throne after a bloody civil war, it was much better for you to depict the previous guy as a corrupt and immoral bastard responsible for all that chaos. We have only shreds of contemporary sources to leaven the later hagiography or demonology, but Beard does the best she can to piece those shreds together into something like a more balanced image.

(Also, I got a poem out of this.)

Into the Riverlands, Nghi Vo. Third in the Singing Hills Cycle, though this is not a series that requires you to read them in order. I think this one might be my favorite so far, as Chih grapples with both violence and the fact that you can never know everything about a person. I do, however, continue to have the niggling feeling that I would like these novellas to be longer, so they can dig a little deeper into the tasty meat at hand. They don't need to be a hundred thousand words long -- that would probably overstay the welcome -- but the sort of short novel Tachyon publishes might be ideal.

A Lady Compromised, Darcie Wilde. Fourth in the Regency-set Rosalind Thorne mystery series, which is not the Useful Woman series about Rosalind Thorne. (I will probably at some point poke my nose into that one and see if it's a sequel series to this one or what.)

There's been enough of a gap since I read the previous ones that I can't say for sure if this packs an extra ten pounds of material into the sack, but that's definitely the impression I got. A duel that never happened because one combatant was murdered first, marital intrigues, ethnic tensions, land improvements, the possible rekindling of a romance, and a background strand of blackmail continued on from a previous book . . . it's a lot! I think the ending came together a touch too easily, but that's counterbalanced by characters being put through a brief physical and emotional wringer. Looks like there's one more after this, before I investigate that other series.

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline, Paul Cooper. Right at the outset, Cooper acknowledges that he's not trying to assemble a grand analytical theory of why civilizations collapse. (He defines that not as portions breaking away, a la decolonization, but as a full-on crash: population takes a nosedive, economy craters, cities are destroyed, etc.) I understand why not -- this is an outgrowth of his podcast, and goes into the box of "pop culture history underpinned by research" rather than a major academic work -- but it does mean that the component chapters are mostly just potted histories of the civilizations he's looking at, rather than anything deeper.

I don't mind the potted histories, though! Especially for the ones I'm not very familiar with. He divides the book into three sections: the ancient world (Sumerians, Late Bronze Age Collapse, Assyria, Carthage, Han China, Roman Britain), the middle age (Maya, Khmer, Byzantium, Vijayanagara), and "worlds collide" (Songhai, Aztecs, Inca, Easter Island). I should note, though, that where I am familiar with the material, I can see Cooper sometimes accepting a little too readily the standard line on a certain topic, only mentioning in passing -- or omitting entirely -- a more nuanced view. Having read Cline's After 1177 B.C. last fall, for example, I raised an eyebrow at Cooper crediting a "Dorian invasion" for the breakdown of Mycenean civilization during the Late Bronze Age Collapse -- despite Cline being one of the sources Cooper references here! And I read the Carthage chapter right after Bret Devereaux started his series of posts on Carthage, in which one of the first things he (I think convincingly) debunks is the notion, repeated here by Cooper, that Carthaginian citizens rarely fought as soldiers for their own land.

Which is to say, this is the kind of book that's a better starting point than a stopping point. But it's still an interesting starting point! I appreciate the breadth of its scope, and even if Cooper doesn't set out to do macro analysis, you can still see for yourself a number of patterns in the data. I did side-eye the ending a bit, though, where he first decries "doomerism" about our own situation . . . then proceeds to sketch out an extremely doomy scenario of what global civilizational collapse might look like.

(Got a poem out of this one, too. Though not that depressing last bit.)

The Iron Garden Sutra, A.D. Sui. I start a lot more SF novels than I finish, simply because a premise will sound interesting and then I remember that SF is not as much my cuppa as fantasy. Here, though, I was particularly interested in the monastic protagonist -- shocker, that's on my mind right now. Plus the scenario (investigating a derelict generation ship) lands squarely atop my interest in Big Dumb Object stories, so I was very much on board.

And I did enjoy it, though I think Vessel Iris was a little too dissociated from his own troubling emotions for me to be quite as gut-punched as I wanted to be about some of the developments. There's good in-story reason for it, but at times it started to feel like the narration was hiding information from me that the point of view knew for a little too long. Still, I will be keeping an eye out for the sequel -- which it does have, though this book wraps up fine if you don't mind ending on a bittersweet note.

The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. Third of the Dame Frevisse medieval mysteries. I know it's inevitable that sooner or later the story would move outside the convent, but I'm a little sad to see it happen so soon, as I enjoyed the exploration of what it was like to live under the Benedictine rule. Parts of that remain here -- Frevisse feels guilty when her investigation causes her to repeatedly miss scheduled prayers, and is extremely not okay with the prospect of being seen by a man while not dressed in her habit -- but it's not the same.

Frazer remains, however, interested in the textural details of life in that period, and in neither romanticizing them nor (to use a later SF/F term) being grimdark about them: things like how miserable it would be to live out in the woods when you can't even reliably keep the rain off your head. The premise here is that Frevisse's cousin, outlawed years ago for accidentally killing a man in a fight, wants her to leverage her connections to get him a pardon so he can stop being stuck with an outlaw's unromantic life.

I was a little startled to find how not sympathetic the cousin is. He's the kind of man who can turn on the charm for Frevisse (because he wants her help), but he's an asshole to everyone else. And so, when the murder inevitably happens -- something like halfway through the book! -- he's the natural suspect, which means (by the logic of murder mysteries) he's the second least likely culprit after Frevisse herself. I liked how that resolved in the end.

The Killing Spell, Shay Kauwe. I've been excited for this book ever since I met the author briefly at Worldcon! I knew from that conversation that it was about language-based magic, and specifically about the author's own experience with Hawaiian, which was enough to sell me on the premise; turns out that it delves into how different languages are suited to different kinds of magic, and furthermore that poetry is often integral to making spells work! So, yeah, sufficiently far up my alley that I might need to see a doctor about that . . .

This is a very post apocalyptic setting, but I appreciated that while the apocalypse clearly chimes with climate fiction, it's not straightforwardly mundane: an event called the Flood not only sank the Hawaiian Islands very rapidly, but brought magic back into the world. That was long enough ago that the U.S. has essentially collapsed, leaving city-states defending themselves against magical monsters; the Hawaiian survivors are clinging to semi-independent existence outside of an L.A. ruled by a council of magicians representing different approved languages.

Plot-wise, it's a murder mystery where the protagonist gets roped in because the victim seems to have been killed by a Hawaiian-language spell, but in a place very few people can access. It moves at the thriller/urban fantasy-type rapid clip where the characters don't get much breathing room between events -- which means there's not as much time as I would have liked spent on the art of smithing spells, whether that's Kea wrestling with a Russian-language spell sent awry by the lack of good rhymes for a crucial word, or attempting to create a new signature Hawaiian-language spell for her family so she can join the council of Hawaiian elders who rule their enclave. But then, I would quite happily have read entire chapters of that! So perhaps I am not the best judge. :-P It is still very much my kind of book, and I hope I'm right about the vibe I got from the ending, that this plot is done but there could be more in the future.

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, David Graeber, narr. Roger Davis. Probably I should not have listened to this one in ebook. I was lured in by its brief length (five hours; as Graeber says in the introduction, it's an overgrown chapter of another book split off on its own because "everybody hates a long chapter but loves a short book"), but given my complete lack of familiarity with Malagasy names, I might fared better in following the argument here if I could see names like Ratsimilaho and the Betsimisaraka.

Anyway, in the late seventeenth century there was supposedly a democratic pirate kingdom in Madagascar. Graeber's general thesis here is that while "Libertalia" as described never existed, the interaction of European pirate customs with local Malagasy culture -- in particular Malagasy women -- did lead to some interesting dynamics that he considers to be part of the global experiment in Enlightenment and democracy. But I am probably not doing the best job of summarizing that because, per the above, this was not an ideal thing for me to listen to rather than read on the page. What I followed of it, though, was interesting!

Holy Terrors, Margaret Owen. I decided enough of the month had passed for me to go ahead and read the third book. :-P

In this one the story goes full Holy Roman Empire, with an imperial election -- made more complicated by the fact that somebody is murdering the prince-electors. In tandem with that, Owen goes hard on the emotional front, complete with an interpersonal conflict not easily resolved because the problem at its foundation is not one that can be handwaved away. I very much liked how that got resolved in the end. And the metaphysical strand of the story also continues, with the fascinating problem that the Pfennigeist, the persona Vanja has been using for her less than legal activities, has earned enough fame that it's starting to exert its own force on her, whether she wants it to or not. So basically, allllllll the tasty things wrapped up in one excellent package! I highly recommend this to anybody who finds its subject matter appealing. (And the writing is good, too. There's so many good descriptions in here, and quips that heighten rather than kneecapping the emotional weight.)

Owen has another duology I will be eager to check out, once I've given myself another breather.

The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson. More ravens than I was expecting, less scholarship -- but that's okay, because the ravens are great. (Or rather I should say, magnificent.)

Certain things about the premise here have a YA whiff to them, with basically everybody choosing one of eight animal deities to be their patron, and a competition among warrior representatives of each one to see who will be the next emperor. (Also, murder of a candidate: I didn't mean to read two novels about that back to back, but . . . I did.) However, Neema is not at all a teenager, and the plot gets into a lot more political complexity than I normally see in YA-ish competition tales -- generations' worth of it, in fact. I see why some reviews I saw commented on the number of plot twists along the way, but I didn't particularly mind.

Not quite everything here worked for me. I see why there's such a long opening section taking place years before the main action -- it's important that the people and events there carry more weight than a mere summary would be likely to give -- but it did odd things to the story's momentum, and the approach to point of view was not entirely successful for me, either. Hodgson is doing enough that's interesting, though, for me not to get hung up on the stumbles. I'd rather an author swing for the fences and maybe miss a few balls than play it safe all the time.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/dCkKjj)