#bookreviewtag

[slowthinkingreader]

The Claw of The Conciliator - Gene Wolfe

(Started May 27th, 2024, finished June 6th)

Monkey men! Green men from the future! Huge alien men! Robot guys from the future, maybe! There is, above everything, no shortage of strange and multitudinous guys in these books. There is no ink spared on the matter! Every man Severian meets is cool as hell; the women...

I shouldn't have waited several weeks to write my review of this book, clearly, but frankly, the latter part of it left a sour taste in my mouth and I've been stewing over how I feel about it. I think there's something very skillful going on with regards to what's happening with Severian in this book with regards to his misogyny and his relationship to women, and I'm interested in seeing where it goes (even if my presentiment is that it's not going to be very interesting to me) but at the same time, I'm finding it hard to look past the misogyny as I read, and to enjoy thinking about what the book has to say about it. Mainly, because Severian as our narrator is so disinterested in the internal lives of women unless it revolves around him, the effect is that I just don't care! To me, that's boring! I'm bored of Jolenta and Dorcas being nothing-characters treated like nothing. But then, that's also what the book is about.

About men... I like the contrast between Severian as complemented by Jonas, and the Severian we're stuck with after he leaves the narrative. The book spends a lot of time showing how much they care about each other. They help each other. Severian looks up to him, clearly, and considers him a good friend, and some part of their relationship is also tinged by the fact that Jonas appears to be much older than Severian, who is still (implied to be? Explicitly? Unclear if I missed a detail) very young. There's a feeling to their relationship that is partly mentorly slash brotherly. Jonas doesn't quite bring out "a side" of Severian that is "better", if you will, but in the absence of women he appears kinder, and less tinged with so many complications regarding what he wants. It's clear that what he wants from men is community, regard, belonging, etc.; from women he expects other things, mostly the high of lording power over them. It's pleasant in a way these books haven't been since the earliest chapters of Shadow, where he's (notably) surrounded by other men of his guild. When we lose that sense again, it's frustrating, in a way that's both interesting (in the sense that it feels purposeful) and sad.

I am DEEPLY interested in the fact that he appears to share a mind with Thecla now. Possibly the most interesting thing to have happened so far. I don't know why I didn't expect this to happen when we learned about the corpse-eaters, but it's so good. It's so good. The moment where Thecla inhabits his body in the prison/waiting room, walking in the dark, and a child "mistakes" his steps for a woman's? Could talk about this for ages. I want to take a transgender hammer to this whole concept but I'll abstain for now; I don't know where this is really heading. Possibly nowhere. The book doesn't seem interested in questioning the border between what is Severian and what is Thecla, at least not purposefully enough, and maybe that's not where Gene Wolfe is taking things. I don't expect it, but it would be incredibly sick if they merged to the degree where they can't tell which thoughts belongs to whom; some real dissolution of personhood. Let Thecla eat HIM, in their beautiful mind palace, right back!

There's a lot of moving players now. Agia. The Pelerines. Jonas. Vodalus and his bitch wife, eating corpses. The autarch has appeared and he's up to something, whilst looking androgynous. The lovecraftian horrors are real and BRIEFLY ON LAND, trying to lure Severian down there with them, in what was (in my opinion) one of the better scenes of this book. Hethor appears everywhere; he's implied to be terrifying, because the things he says and does are terrifying, but I actually love him; his comedic timing is too good, I can't hate him for that. Agia tries to kill Severian for a third (?) time. The Claw of the Conciliator is very useful, even if it's very ominous to me.

What else. I don't care about the play in the middle of this book, unfortunately. Or the story about the giant. I can't follow it at all. I don't understand how it fits into the narrative so far. In all honesty, I'm getting a little fatigued from trying to figure out what's happening on any of these pages. Even though this might be intentional, I feel like I get faint hints at bigger pictures moving around and if I paid more attention I would enjoy them better, but I also don't care enough about them to do so. I have a certain disdain for works that demand your attention to the point where it takes you out of the actual work itself, just to entertain an idea which is not interesting enough to be explicit about in the first place. It's not rewarding to me. I'm not sure how else to put it. I get tired of these games!!

Very mixed feelings on this book. Needs more Jonas. 5/10

[slowthinkingreader]

The Shadow of The Torturer - Gene Wolfe

(Started May 14th, finished May 25th, 2024)

Takes a long drag of my cigarette. OKAY. I really didn't intend to start another long series of books this year. I've already started my read of Proust. How much have I read of Lost Time? Don't ask me that right now. This book, I'm coming to know, is basically like reading Proust, except instead of following along with the minutia of high-society France in the 20th century, we're somewhere in the far distant future, where the sun has dimmed in the sky and society is contrived in such a way that the ruling powers depend on a guild of Torturers to blindly carry out the punishment they're ordered. There's also fantasy medieval towns and fantasy logic; duels, mythology, time travel, JRPG characters... I could sooner fit what doesn't appear in this book rather than what doesn't.

Full disclosure, the ^ cover art above is not the actual art of the book I own, as I would otherwise put, because I don't own the book, I'm reading this series on my phone, and the cover art that Apple Books supplies to all their books are so ugly I couldn't in good conscience put that shit here for other people to fry their eyes with. Thank me.

Another disclosure; I'm listening to the Shelved by Genre podcast as a companion as I read along. It's really good! It's what got me interested in reading these books to begin with. I'd heard of the Book of the New Sun series before, in a "this series is a classic but the books look very intimidating on the sci fi shelves" sense, but never felt compelled to read them myself until now. I listened to the first episode and realized I would have a lot more fun if I read the chapters myself and then compared my observations as I went along.

In fact, this first book was not that long of a read, but it's very, very dense with information. Not in the sense that the worldbuilding or the plot is especially strange, though it is; the prose itself is so evasive in what it's describing that several times I've had to backtrack to make sure I'm understanding what's even transpiring on the page. You're frequently introduced to foreign expressions and concepts with no explanation as to what it means, and sometimes you're introduced to things that should be familiar, but that are mystified and made foreign.

It makes for a confusing review, but I don't know if I would have enjoyed this book without the podcast as a companion. And I'm not saying that as a complaint. Maybe this speaks more about my own patience and taste, but in a way I feel like the book presents itself so much as a game rather than a singular reading experience. Things of interest are obscured from you; the narrator obscures the truth from you; your ability to parse and identify patterns reveals different things every time you read something, depending on what you seek out. Any one interpretation is bound to be different. I'm trying to imagine myself reading this book alone and finding myself very bored at the prospect. I understand why New Sun has such an involved fanbase; you could hold infinite debate over every detail in this book. I'll keep myself more limited in this review than I could be.

Severian— I love Severian. Awesome, never lies, wise beyond his years, shredded and shirtless all the time, and his sword is huge. May or may not be embellishing his own biography.

Okay I actually don't have much to say about him yet. The book is such that it doesn't exactly resolve anything. I imagine by the end of the series I will be able to formulate something much more like an "opinion" about the "contents", which will hopefully make more sense by then. Until I finish, I have a few thoughts and predictions:

I love the way this book plays with scale. I love how unabashedly *huge* everything is. Can't get enough of massive women and mountains and galactic empires and ocean monsters. Not enough of this in any genre, I say!!!

I honestly have no idea where the book is going wrt misogyny and gender. It's certainly grappling with a lot of interesting thoughts on gender roles and bioessentialism... but to what end, I really can't predict. I wonder how Severian would react to somebody challenging him? If a woman did? If Vodalus did?

What memory could Vodalus possibly be trying to get out of eating corpses. Just any corpses, too? Nobody's crypt in specific you're trying to pilfer? Why is memory something you can extract from eating corpses too I... whatever. Whatever. I'm normal. It's fine.

Maybe I'm too Lord of the Rings-brained, but when I read this, my immediate impression was that he was looking into an eye, with a sharp sclera surrounded by fire:

For the first book of the Book of the New Sun series, The Shadow of the Torturer was intriguing, and enjoyable if only to appreciate the prose, but it hasn't completely sold me yet. 6/10.

[slowthinkingreader]

Swordspoint - Ellen Kushner

What a fun book to start off this blog with. My first review! Wow. I'll try to keep these relatively structured. I will be-- mosty likely-- spoiling things as I write these reviews. I'm not especially interested in trying to convince people to read any of these books more than I want to write down my thoughts and maybe start a conversation. I'll try to keep my reviews limited mostly to personal observations, unless I find something that might be worth bringing up outside of the scope of the book I'm reading. Anyway I won't meander.

(Started April 21, finished May 12th, 2024)

Brief summary: Swordspoint is a book belonging to the 'fantasy of manners' subgenre. It centers around St Vier, a swordsman-- which is a profession similar to a hired assassin, only sicker-- and the nobles of a nameless capital city whose dirty politics he keeps getting pulled into. There's romance and betrayal and basically everything you can possibly expect getting out of the genre. There's also gay sex. A lot of it!

I have to note this, because I think it's very funny: I didn't expect this book to be so gay. I'm usually seeking gay books like this out on purpose; this snuck up on me. I have a habit of browsing bookstores without any real aim, and I picked this one out of the shelves on a random good impression. I hadn't heard of the book before. I read the first page and the blurb on the back and, as you may have seen by looking at the cover pictured above, noted that it was well received-- by George R. R. Martin? I like his tastes enough, and I have a running obsession with 80's fantasy novels, so I bought it. Now I'm deeply curious about how well received it was at the time. I'd love to know what George R. R. Martin liked about this book. Really.

I read through this one pretty quickly; if I hadn't put it down for such a long time in between I'd say I could've finished it in a weekend. The prose was easy and sometimes very sharp. It's fast-paced-- it's a Manners book, so of course there's a lot of dialogue-- and the drama does what it needs to. The romance works, it got to me, I loved the dynamic between St Vier and his rude-ass, scholarly, suicidal paramour. That's a romance that will stick in my brain for some time: Alec siccing his swordsman on people that are rude to him just because he finds it entertaining? That's real gay antics. That was good. I feel sometimes that the characters were a little detached from reality, in the sense that their reactions to things felt very out of place or disproportionate at times, but it manages just fine with the momentum of the rest of the book. I was able to roll with it.

The characters were fun. Aside from that... I have to be honest, the plot was OK. It carried itself forward on the premises that it sets out. I felt like I could see every machination in this book laid out perfectly from beginning to end, it didn't exactly try to deviate from its trajectory, so nothing was particularly surprising, but it worked. It did what it had to. It's far from the primary appeal of this book and I don't really care to get into it. It had nothing especially interesting to say about its own politics because they basically don't exist. I couldn't tell you what Halliday's or Ferris' politics were. In the end, I didn't really feel like I got anything especially interesting out of this book in terms of what it had to say about, for example, literature as a whole, or queerness, or rulership. It's just really good, trashy entertainment. Really good entertainment!

If I were to make one serious critique, it would be that Ellen Kushner decided to leave the short story "the swordsman whose name was not death" as a short story, rather than working it into the novel somehow. I don't care how she'd do it. It just frustrates me that it's a side thing. This is main course business. It brought some real depth to Alec that I would have liked to see in the novel, and some real depth that was honestly lacking in every character-- despair and regret that felt real and believable. And it also stopped pretending that women didn't exist. It was so good. Damn you!!!!

Wait actually one more serious critique. Why is everyone so pale in this book? I get that it's winter, whatever, but ghostly pale? Every single one? And bright-eyed?

I'm very interested in seeing where the second book in the series could possibly go. I really have no idea. I hope it gets nastier. I deeply enjoyed the little noble drama in this, but it could've been a lot nastier. Trying to get someone killed is dramatic, but there needs to be more despair. More stakes!!!!

And finally-- my rating. 6/10. I like Swordspoint. It was a lot of fun. Not enough books out there that commit to their premise like this and do it well. Being trash and worth reading is an art.

[slowthinkingreader]

The Sword of the Lictor - Gene Wolfe

(Started June 7th, 2024, finished July 15th, 2024)

Wow I really took my time finishing this review. But I have my reasons!! ONE: my writing got deleted twice and I gave up for a bit, I was so sad, and TWO: these books get really fucking good a few chapters in, and honestly? I've struggled to put the books down. I've basically had to force myself to finish this review right now, much later, before I can already finish the fourth book. It gets good! It gets really good! In fact, I have to start by saying that this is by far the best these books have read so far. Without spoiling anything about my next review, I think Sword of the Lictor will already be the highest point in the series for me.

There's a part in the book, a little after Severian escapes from Thrax, where the story really picks up the pace, and then it never really seems to want to slow down. It stops feeling so much like a semi-distant recollection by the author of story, and we enter into a survival-horror scene. There's an immediacy and sense of detail—starting with the descriptions in the mountains— that hasn't been present in these books before. Several times between readings of this book, whilst I was cooking, or doing dishes, or driving, whatever, I found myself running back to certain phrases and impressions from these chapters that felt so vivid to me that I struggled to think about anything else. You know when you're just really into something and even when you're hanging with your best friends you just want to tell them to chill out for a bit so you can read? That's what I felt. The most excited I've been to turn pages in a loooong time.

Some key events that really stuck out, and I'm serious about spoilers now, starting with: LITTLE SEVERIAN!!!!!! I can't explain well enough how delighted I was with every single scene in which the two Severians were hanging out together. It's just so good. Getting to see (big) Severian, both socially inept and an asshole, genuinely try to take care of a little kid, is some of the most comedic shit I've ever read. And some of the cutest. When he's just carrying him around all the time like a little baby, because (big) Severian is so massive? When he's reading a little bedtime story to him? These sections were literally chemically engineered to have me giggling and kicking my feet the whole time. I was going to bed with a smile on my face. And you know what, when chapter 24 rolled around I genuinely don't know why I didn't expect That, it's truly so obvious, but I didn't expect That, and it made me scream out loud in real life like someone had killed my real life son. I swear to god. Everything before that makes it even more gut-wrenching. The like dilemma of whether or not to enter into a fight with the alzabo or the... weird lobotomized humanimals... ohhhhh... and AGIA?

So happy to have Agia back. She's the best. I love her. There's not enough of Agia honestly. I kind of wish she would appear with the same frequency of Team Rocket, she just improves every scene so much. And you know what, Severian SHOULD be shamed and mocked and threatened with knives by women more often. It's good for him and for me, who enjoys seeing him suffer. She's ALMOST as good of an antagonist as Typhon. He didn't have enough pages where I feel like I can reasonably talk about him too much, but man, I really wish he got more screentime. I'm imagining a beautiful alternate universe in which he and Agia return from time to time to try and kill Severian in increasingly cartoonish and violent ways.

What else. The standoff with Baldanders...... where do I start. Wait. I know. When Baldanders descends from the heavens with his anti-gravity belt, like a beautiful massive angel. I'm shaking my head and smiling as I recall the scene. Gene Wolfe you get me in ways nobody else does.

And then, when Terminus Est breaks— that's where I honestly felt these books were going to end. Because what an ending. I completely, briefly forgot that Severian is supposed to become the autarch at some point. By that scene I really could have let the series stop. It's that good!!! No marks!!

Honestly: 8/10. Favorite book in the series so far. I desperately want everyone to go read these books right now.