Les disparus de Clairdelune, part 2 of Le Passe-mirroir by Christelle Dabos continues Ophelia’s story. Now that the setting is firmly established and the characters are all introduced, the pace picks up. The depths of the political intrigue in the fractured world and the intricacies historical background and clan relations are explored in more detail.
Love the series!
Now I’m rereading The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt. An Indiana Croft style action-archaeologist heroine, a fascinating alchemy-and-clockpunk-and-sorcery setting, lots of fast-paced action, copious intertextual references (some subtle, others blatant) to other great speculative fiction works,…
This morning’s reading, the second in the Midsomer Murders gamebooks. Very happy with my investigation today, even if there was admittedly lots of fingers stuck in the book’s pages at various points! Much fun, captures the essence of the TV series. There is a 3rd Midsomer Murders gamebook planned.
The hardback copy of “Could you survive Midsomer? A Winter’s Murder” by Simon Brew. With taglines including “Can you catch the killer and survive England’s deadliest county?” The cover includes an idyllic snowy rural scene, complete with church, at the bottom.
I have also previously written up a detailed review of the earlier gamebook in the same series. If anything I thought the second instalment I read today was even stronger.
Non-fiction this time: The search for Nefertiti by Joann Fletcher, in which she explains and defends her claim that she identified the mummy of Nefertiti. This hypothesis was immediately controversial, and indeed later dismissed by DNA analysis, but there’s a lot more to the book to like.
Fletcher writes at length about her travels and other research in other parts of the world. The most interesting thing to me is that she specialises in the analysis of hairstyles and wigs, and by extension make-up, perfume, and body decoration. This line of research allows a quite distinct approach to ancient history than texts or artefacts, and I was fascinated by the descriptions of this research.
Two in-between fast reads before I dive back into some brick-sized historical epic:
Road of Bones by Christopher Golden: Fast-paced horror set on the Syberian Kolyma highway. The history of that road, built by gulag-prisoners to unlock the mineral mines during Stalin’s regime, dead workers’ bodies carelessly bulldozed under the highway surface, the harshness of the ever-frozen land with temperatures dozens of degrees below freezing, and the age-old sjamanistic view of the wilderness where the Kolyma road is but a feeble human intrusion combine to make a shiver-inducing setting for this shortish horror story.
Shadow of a Dark Queen by Raymond E. Feist, the first book in the Serpentwar Saga: Dime-a-dozen fantasy. Duke’s bastard son gets enlisted in a secret military operation to save the world from the bad guys. There’s magic and elves, and dwarves are mentioned. Most notable are the alien serpent-beings who want to conquer, enslave, and ultimately destroy all life on the planet. Ring a bell?
I enjoyed it while it lasted, but that’s about all.
After being recommended it over a year ago by the Holiday special of the Episodic Table of Elements, I recently started reading The Chemical History of a Candle, a series of lectures on the processes involved in the burning of candles. Lecture 4 of 7 is in the top handful of items on my short term to read list.
If interested, it can be found on Project Gutenburg at:
and is about 37k words including the footnotes.
I’m enough of a “I would re-enroll in college for the fun of it if I could afford it” type to find it interesting, both for its own content and as a historical example of extracurricular Lectures(as I understand, it was an early entry into the Royal Institute’s tradition of running a series of lectures around Christmas time), but it is the kind of thing where I’ve mostly been reading one lecture every other day or so instead of binge reading.
Oh man, I remember this one! I got into Feist in my teenage years on the strength of the Betrayal at Krondor CRPG, and as I recall his stuff was mostly pretty generic-level fantasy, but the book that comes next in this series is the real standout. It follows the roguish supporting character from the first book at he engages in early-modern trade speculation and amasses a bundle of capital via various amoral shenanigans. I haven’t reread it to see if it holds up, but given your sunk costs from having finished the initial installment it might be worth checking out - it’s called Rise of a Merchant Prince IIRC.
Eh, after the next book, you might want to skip further works by that author. They’re all very generic fantasy – nothing’s wrong with them as such, but they’re not very sophisticated and you can find better stuff fairly easily.
I probably will. Indeed, I didn’t find it sophisticated or challenging or surprising.
But…
Sometimes generic fantasy can be just what’s needed, just like a straightforward action flick or a mediocre episode of Star Trek. The predictability of the story, the familiar sequence of tropes, can be soothing.
Life is too short to waste reading mediocre books when there are more excellent books that could be read in a lifetime, in my opinion… but your time is your own to spend.
The past few days I blazed through Terry Hayes’ I Am Pilgrim. A counterterrorist spy thriller that had me fully engaged for the duration. It manages to avoid the good guy vs bad guy simplifications by spending a lot of time delving into both protagonist and antagonist characters’ life story, showing if not sympathy, then at least an attempt at understanding their motivations.
Most here probably know I’m an Apple II child. This book is no hagiography. It’s a thoroughly researched kind of anti-hagiography. The author never owned an Apple II. They picked it as the fulcrum based on its empirical scope (it won of the original 1977 Trinity of microcomputers, ultimately had the biggest and widest software library, and lasted the longest) and its researchability via archival material.
Instead of any mythologising of Apple PCs in general, this book illustrates all kinds of intersecting accidents of venture capitalism, hobbyism, business traditions, and markets created from the top down (remind you of the AI garbage being sold with everything right now that we never asked for?) from 1977-1984, that structured the conditions of the personal computer world for the mass market. It uses five case studies, including Visicalc (the first spreadsheet program) and Mystery House (the first graphic adventure game).
This book told me tons I didn’t know, and also added an entirely new outlook on both my Apple II-ing and my feel about how computing evolved.
I googled the author after and found this recent Youtube interview. The early stages of the interview tell you a lot about the book, and I find Nooney to be as compelling a speaker as a writer.
I certainly recommend this to anyone interested in microcomputer history as I’ve not read something like it before. The conclusion chapter was a bit odd (one reviewer described it as ‘depressing’) as it saved a kind of outright personal comment for last. I did find that a structurally odd or weak choice to make at that moment, but that hardly affects the journey.
