What books are you reading?

hotseatgames wrote: The Altered Carbon show, and the anime, were both good.

The second season of AC tanked so badly though, from the miscast Anthony Mackie to the decision to scrape all the dull bits of the other 2 books for a plot and then shy away from all the salaciousness that made the first season at least fun to watch.

dysjunct wrote: The Devils by Joe Abercrombie. I'm in for pretty much everything Abercrombie writes and this sure is some of it. If you've read Abercrombie, you know what to expect. It's not "dark fantasy" in the sense of Warhammer, but it is definitely not heroic in any sense. Mostly morally ambiguous characters, generally trying to do the right thing, or at least survive, but who are thrown into situations where they have to make pretty rotten choices. What sets Abercrombie apart for me is the wry humor that runs through the writing -- the books are very funny, which is a nice counterpoint to otherwise bleak or nailbiting plots.

This is not in the same setting as his main writing (The Blade Itself etc.) but in an alt-history Europe where the Church is gender-swapped: the pope, bishops, and most of the saints are women; the savior was a woman, and male priests have the same status as nuns in the real world -- respected but not really granted a lot of power in the hierarchy.

And there's a handful of sorcerers, werewolves, and vampires. Elves are vaguely analogous to Jews -- they occupy the holy land and are second-class citizens in pretty much every way. Jews don't seem to exist in the setting.

Anyway, I'm about halfway through. Great read, will happily revisit any other books in the setting.

I just finished this and OMG it's such a fun read. The dialogue is so witty. Really has it's Douglas Adams moments of outright silly but pitch perfect exchanges. Much lighter(?) than The Blade Itself. Love the whole split in the church over The Wheel verus The Circle, such a great satire of religious splitting hairs.

A colleague refers to Abercrombie as "scoundrel fiction" and says he likes it a lot.

Just finished reading The Adventures of Max Spitzkopf by Jonas Kreppel.

This was a collection of lost (ish) pulp fiction adventures from the early 1900s. Originally written in Yiddish and published in throwaway rags throughout the ashkenazi diaspora. The book reprints the covers; I don’t speak Yiddish but I have enough knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet and rudimentary German to suss them out: The King of the Detectives, The Viennese Sherlock Holmes.

They are interesting historical artifacts but not very good as stories, unfortunately. Spitzkopf is a daring investigator but no Holmes. Holmes gets a bit eye-rolly due to his random knowledge of mud of the British Isles and other convenient facts. Spitzkopf mostly just follows people and then pulls a gun on them. He is also very into disguise (old men, old women, occasionally young people) which helps him follow people. He also always has an “electric torch” (no doubt miraculous to the reader 100 years ago) and a “skeleton key” (ditto).

There’s a nice Jewish nationalism angle to many of the stories, reflecting the anxieties of the audience: a young Hasidic man is kidnapped by missionaries, or an observant girl is sold to a brothel in Italy and Spitzkopf must rescue them before it’s too late. Spitzkopf himself is thoroughly modern and secular.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a big fan as a young man. Kreppel himself was a prolific writer and journalist; he was a thorn in the side of the nazi regime and he was murdered in Buchenwald in 1940 at age 66. This collection has 15 stories but there might have been as many as 35 Spitzkopf stories total. It’s unlikely the true number will ever be known.

I am nearly finished reading Hanzai Japan, a collection of "fantastical, futuristic stories of crime from and about Japan." There are some very interesting tales enclosed, including one written from the viewpoint of a map. Yes, a map, which happens to be used by a serial killer who wants to keep track of where he is burying the bodies. Another story starts with a few dry paragraphs involving a man showing a power point presentation to a yakuza boss... but it turns out that the presentation involves planning a crime around a mathematical projection of Godzilla's next attack.

In the eye-opening introduction to the book, a writer mentions that every story in the collection violates at least one of the Knox Commandments of mystery writing, from the year 1928, which are:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

I just finished Legends and Lattes, a book about an Orc adventurer in a DnD style world who gives up her life to open a cafe.

It’s so pleasant and lovely, I couldn’t put it down.

My wife really likes that series.