We try pretty hard to review good books we think are worth reading. Sometimes we instead review bad books we would not recommend you read, but which we nevertheless have a lot to say about. But this is a post about a third kind of book: good books, books we heartily recommend, but which we
1) My local neighbourhood is currently converting a few stroads into streets, which I am hugely in favour of. In large, busy cities, fast speed limits don't even effectively increase the overall travel speed much, it just creates dangerous roads and stop start traffic (which in turn creates more accidents, noise, and pollution).
2) Robin Hobb's Assasin's Apprentice trilogy takes a complex and nuanced but ultimately fairly sympathetic view on duty, honor, and hierarchy. It's one of my favourites and broadly does a good job of not just being "modern people, but with swords". Perhaps not coincidentally, Hobb is one of the few fantasy writers who is clearly more of a dog person than a cat person.
"And yet despite all this frantic action the pacing is consistently, utterly perfect in a way that’s nearly impossible to pull off — as you can tell because Lynch doesn’t manage it in either of the sequels."
Man, I am with you on that. I read the first book and immediately bought the other two, and then a week later nearly didn't bother to finish the third one. It was a shame, because it made me wonder if the first was really any good. I can only assume its a good example of the author having one good book in them that they spent their life working on, and the follow ups are just a matter of "well, crap, people will pay me for this... gotta produce something..."
I think part of the problem is that Lies is really centered on how much the main characters are embedded in their city, and only works because they are natives with deep understandings of who people are and the relationships of power. Plucking them out and putting them in different contexts loses a lot of that, so there isn't as much background weave to show. To go to your Conan comparison, Conan is the ultimate outsider and drives the story by cutting against the grain of whatever society he's tip toes into. The particular web of intrigue doesn't matter as much because he is going to rip it apart and make enemies of just about everyone except for the few who love truth and justice the same way Conan does. Lamorra works by using that web to influence and get what he wants, which is super interesting but also hard to follow up with the same characters in different settings.
Or maybe the other two books were just rushed cash grabs. Who knows.
I think it’s just the economics of publishing, you typically have a lot more time to work on your first novel than on subsequent ones. That said I am absolutely going to buy the fourth one if it ever actually comes out, even though I’m sure I will be disappointed.
I think that is largely the case, all your previous life to play around with a story, then needing to crank out sequels on someone else's schedule.
I hope you do a blurb at least on the fourth one. I probably won't pay enough attention to pick it up when it comes out, but if it is pretty good I would like to read it. It's so hard to find good genre fiction.
Will there be a review of The End of History in the future? I might read a used copy sometime in the future, but I find Francis fans obnoxious and his commentary in general terrible, so I'm in no rush.
From the way his defenders frame his argument, I see two potential problems right away. One, it encourages a smug "lol nothing matters I'm so above everything" complacency, which would be reason enough to hate the book. Two, it seems to have a "to be sure, things could always get worse" escape hatch to make the book's thesis unfalsifiable.
I read Lies of Locke Lamora as a teenager and I've gradually evolved away from reading much fantasy. Glad to see my judgment vindicated that it really was a great book despite the missteps of the later volumes.
The moment that yanks me out of the Confessions is when Augustine speaks approvingly of the way his father whipped his slaves for fomenting discord between his wife and his mother.
What a great list! I'm adding all of them to my to-read pile except for The Lies of Locke Lamorra, which I've already read. I was also disappointed by the sequels. Do you have any other reccomendations for scifi and fantasy published after 2015 or so? It's hard to find anything that's any fun at all.
And I'll ask if you've read:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Paranoid Mage by Inadvisably Compelled
Somewhither by John C. Wright
Unsouled by Will Wight
Unsong by Scott Alexander
Or (the pre-2015) books of Lois McMaster Bujold, Kage Baker, or Gene Wolfe
I am a big Bujold and (earlier) Baker fan! And I've read a little bit of Gene Wolfe. One of these days I want to tackle Book of the New Sun but it's waiting for some more brain power. PIranesi wasn't quite my jam, Unsong was fun but needed an editor (same as Dickens and Dostoyevsky, and for the same reason -- publishing as you go is hard!), and I'll take a peek at the others.
Recommendations: I enjoyed the "Low Town" series by Daniel Polansky, which has the same "oh look we can have Good Guys if they are also simultaneously Bad Guys" thing as Lies but in a more "The Wire" and less "Ocean's Eleven" kind of way. I don't usually like Seanan McGuire but her "Alchemical Journeys" series was fun. Robert Jackson Bennett's "Divine Cities" series is also good (I liked the first one best). I'm also unexpectedly enjoying Tamsyn Muir's "Locked Tomb" series -- on paper it doesn't look like my thing, but something about it really grabbed me.
I am a huge BotNS fan, and have tried to get Jane to read it for years. Maybe when she finally does, we can write a joint review! Might be interesting to get contrasting reactions from somebody who just read it the first time and somebody who’s read it several times…
If it's an additional inducement, your review of Demons got me to finally read it (it's great!) and I'm sure a BotNS one would be what get me to finally do the fabled Wolfe reread.
I first listened to the audiobook of The Book of the New Sun and thought it was just okay. It's only now that I'm re-reading it that it's blowing me away. So that's one way to tackle it. I agree about Unsong needing an editor. I can say the same about Somewhither and Paranoid Mage. Unsouled is pretty tight, though.
And thanks even more for the *further* recommendations! Goodness! Middlegame is on kindle unlimited, so that's nice. I'm afraid I tried and failed to like Gideon the Ninth. Have you written a review of it? I'd love to read it.
Yes! I'm nearly at the end of my second reading and my wife has read books one and two for the first time. Talking about them ("what the hell did THAT mean?") has been a lot of fun. So I hope Jane reads it and you can discuss it with her :)
SFAH is definitely very educational on how to cook things that taste good. I read a review that kindly described maybe of its recipes as "so cheffy" and that seemed like a pretty good description to me.
David Chang's Cooking At Home was underwhelming to me. I think maybe it would be helpful to people who are more starting to cook without recipes? But mostly what I took away from it was that there are many ways to make boiling large cuts of meat delicious. I feel like I read about other people really learning a lot from it, though
I only checked it out briefly from the library but Sohla El-Waylly's Start Here seemed like it might be more directly practical for the home cook while still teaching a it of the principles. I loved her series of articles for Food52 from a couple years ago and make the pasta with sausage and braised greens at least once a month for my kids.
One of my "someday" projects is to do something with the idea of "Efficient Family Cooking." Like basically how to evaluate recipes for how you can break it apart into little kid life friendly steps, with prep spread out or done in bulk, and which shortcuts are fine to take without compromising too much on taste, how to assemble meals out of components that have flexibility for different family members with opposing preferences, stuff like that.
I would read that! Lots of recipes that can be composed at the table, because some people don't want beans and some people don't want any Green Stuff touching their food and and and... I always used to stress out over cooking multiple dishes at once and ended up with a lot of "one pot" meals but as I've become a more experienced cook (and added more kids who all have their own preferences) it's gotten easier. So much of this is just practice, practice, practice -- and the recognition that you're allowed to riff, you're allowed to simplify, it's okay if it comes out not quite right as long as it's still edible.
On the seven sketches tip, I was blown away by https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5460/Sheaf-Theory-through-Examples and by a book it refers to, by Reyes et. al., Generic Figures and Their Glueings: A Constructive Approach to Functor Categories (only available by search and finding a link [which is free]). The application of presheaves described by both books is a formalization of navigation via entity-relationship diagrams that can be applied to do db schema migration using Git branches for migration and rollback. The Generic Figures book is built on lots of repeated pedagogy for non-math people. Apologies for what will probably read like word salad to everyone ....
1) My local neighbourhood is currently converting a few stroads into streets, which I am hugely in favour of. In large, busy cities, fast speed limits don't even effectively increase the overall travel speed much, it just creates dangerous roads and stop start traffic (which in turn creates more accidents, noise, and pollution).
2) Robin Hobb's Assasin's Apprentice trilogy takes a complex and nuanced but ultimately fairly sympathetic view on duty, honor, and hierarchy. It's one of my favourites and broadly does a good job of not just being "modern people, but with swords". Perhaps not coincidentally, Hobb is one of the few fantasy writers who is clearly more of a dog person than a cat person.
"And yet despite all this frantic action the pacing is consistently, utterly perfect in a way that’s nearly impossible to pull off — as you can tell because Lynch doesn’t manage it in either of the sequels."
Man, I am with you on that. I read the first book and immediately bought the other two, and then a week later nearly didn't bother to finish the third one. It was a shame, because it made me wonder if the first was really any good. I can only assume its a good example of the author having one good book in them that they spent their life working on, and the follow ups are just a matter of "well, crap, people will pay me for this... gotta produce something..."
I think part of the problem is that Lies is really centered on how much the main characters are embedded in their city, and only works because they are natives with deep understandings of who people are and the relationships of power. Plucking them out and putting them in different contexts loses a lot of that, so there isn't as much background weave to show. To go to your Conan comparison, Conan is the ultimate outsider and drives the story by cutting against the grain of whatever society he's tip toes into. The particular web of intrigue doesn't matter as much because he is going to rip it apart and make enemies of just about everyone except for the few who love truth and justice the same way Conan does. Lamorra works by using that web to influence and get what he wants, which is super interesting but also hard to follow up with the same characters in different settings.
Or maybe the other two books were just rushed cash grabs. Who knows.
I think it’s just the economics of publishing, you typically have a lot more time to work on your first novel than on subsequent ones. That said I am absolutely going to buy the fourth one if it ever actually comes out, even though I’m sure I will be disappointed.
I think that is largely the case, all your previous life to play around with a story, then needing to crank out sequels on someone else's schedule.
I hope you do a blurb at least on the fourth one. I probably won't pay enough attention to pick it up when it comes out, but if it is pretty good I would like to read it. It's so hard to find good genre fiction.
Will there be a review of The End of History in the future? I might read a used copy sometime in the future, but I find Francis fans obnoxious and his commentary in general terrible, so I'm in no rush.
From the way his defenders frame his argument, I see two potential problems right away. One, it encourages a smug "lol nothing matters I'm so above everything" complacency, which would be reason enough to hate the book. Two, it seems to have a "to be sure, things could always get worse" escape hatch to make the book's thesis unfalsifiable.
It’s not on my list, but anything is possible.
I read Lies of Locke Lamora as a teenager and I've gradually evolved away from reading much fantasy. Glad to see my judgment vindicated that it really was a great book despite the missteps of the later volumes.
Any recommendations on Gogol translations?
The moment that yanks me out of the Confessions is when Augustine speaks approvingly of the way his father whipped his slaves for fomenting discord between his wife and his mother.
What a great list! I'm adding all of them to my to-read pile except for The Lies of Locke Lamorra, which I've already read. I was also disappointed by the sequels. Do you have any other reccomendations for scifi and fantasy published after 2015 or so? It's hard to find anything that's any fun at all.
And I'll ask if you've read:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Paranoid Mage by Inadvisably Compelled
Somewhither by John C. Wright
Unsouled by Will Wight
Unsong by Scott Alexander
Or (the pre-2015) books of Lois McMaster Bujold, Kage Baker, or Gene Wolfe
I am a big Bujold and (earlier) Baker fan! And I've read a little bit of Gene Wolfe. One of these days I want to tackle Book of the New Sun but it's waiting for some more brain power. PIranesi wasn't quite my jam, Unsong was fun but needed an editor (same as Dickens and Dostoyevsky, and for the same reason -- publishing as you go is hard!), and I'll take a peek at the others.
Recommendations: I enjoyed the "Low Town" series by Daniel Polansky, which has the same "oh look we can have Good Guys if they are also simultaneously Bad Guys" thing as Lies but in a more "The Wire" and less "Ocean's Eleven" kind of way. I don't usually like Seanan McGuire but her "Alchemical Journeys" series was fun. Robert Jackson Bennett's "Divine Cities" series is also good (I liked the first one best). I'm also unexpectedly enjoying Tamsyn Muir's "Locked Tomb" series -- on paper it doesn't look like my thing, but something about it really grabbed me.
1. You should ABSOLUTELY read Book of the New Sun.
2. When you do, PLEASE write a review of it.
3. While we're at it, have John read Soldier in the Mist and then review that.
I am a huge BotNS fan, and have tried to get Jane to read it for years. Maybe when she finally does, we can write a joint review! Might be interesting to get contrasting reactions from somebody who just read it the first time and somebody who’s read it several times…
If it's an additional inducement, your review of Demons got me to finally read it (it's great!) and I'm sure a BotNS one would be what get me to finally do the fabled Wolfe reread.
Yes, yes, yes!
I first listened to the audiobook of The Book of the New Sun and thought it was just okay. It's only now that I'm re-reading it that it's blowing me away. So that's one way to tackle it. I agree about Unsong needing an editor. I can say the same about Somewhither and Paranoid Mage. Unsouled is pretty tight, though.
And thanks even more for the *further* recommendations! Goodness! Middlegame is on kindle unlimited, so that's nice. I'm afraid I tried and failed to like Gideon the Ninth. Have you written a review of it? I'd love to read it.
I agree. BotNS is great the first time, but *transcendent* the second time.
Last night I read the line "this whole Urth is a relic." Beautiful!
Yes! I'm nearly at the end of my second reading and my wife has read books one and two for the first time. Talking about them ("what the hell did THAT mean?") has been a lot of fun. So I hope Jane reads it and you can discuss it with her :)
SFAH is definitely very educational on how to cook things that taste good. I read a review that kindly described maybe of its recipes as "so cheffy" and that seemed like a pretty good description to me.
David Chang's Cooking At Home was underwhelming to me. I think maybe it would be helpful to people who are more starting to cook without recipes? But mostly what I took away from it was that there are many ways to make boiling large cuts of meat delicious. I feel like I read about other people really learning a lot from it, though
I only checked it out briefly from the library but Sohla El-Waylly's Start Here seemed like it might be more directly practical for the home cook while still teaching a it of the principles. I loved her series of articles for Food52 from a couple years ago and make the pasta with sausage and braised greens at least once a month for my kids.
One of my "someday" projects is to do something with the idea of "Efficient Family Cooking." Like basically how to evaluate recipes for how you can break it apart into little kid life friendly steps, with prep spread out or done in bulk, and which shortcuts are fine to take without compromising too much on taste, how to assemble meals out of components that have flexibility for different family members with opposing preferences, stuff like that.
I would read that! Lots of recipes that can be composed at the table, because some people don't want beans and some people don't want any Green Stuff touching their food and and and... I always used to stress out over cooking multiple dishes at once and ended up with a lot of "one pot" meals but as I've become a more experienced cook (and added more kids who all have their own preferences) it's gotten easier. So much of this is just practice, practice, practice -- and the recognition that you're allowed to riff, you're allowed to simplify, it's okay if it comes out not quite right as long as it's still edible.
On the seven sketches tip, I was blown away by https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5460/Sheaf-Theory-through-Examples and by a book it refers to, by Reyes et. al., Generic Figures and Their Glueings: A Constructive Approach to Functor Categories (only available by search and finding a link [which is free]). The application of presheaves described by both books is a formalization of navigation via entity-relationship diagrams that can be applied to do db schema migration using Git branches for migration and rollback. The Generic Figures book is built on lots of repeated pedagogy for non-math people. Apologies for what will probably read like word salad to everyone ....