Reviews and Comments

This is a temporary DNF, and one of my big disappointments of the year. I read to approx. p220, giving up during an extended (and frankly inane) overstuffed dialog sequence.

I like the author. Palmer is intelligent, and passionate about her chosen subjects. I share a stack of the same interests, particularly censorship (she has a couple of great lectures on YouTube about the subject, explaining what censorship regimes really do, how they work, how universally slipshod they are, etc.)

I also like the book's key ideas. My social milieu DOES matter more to me than the country on my birth certificate, and that SHOULD count for something. But I couldn't grok her writing style. It's baroque. Too wordy, too 'mannered'. The framing device she employs is original (a history of events, about which extraneous details are included, like editorial decisions and commentary on people) but I can't help but feel it got in the way of the story. Pacing is weird: I read practically half the book and it felt like only a couple of things had happened.

The extensive cast doesn't help things either. Then add in alternate names for certain characters, used in the same paragraph. Then add unconvential punctuation. The book has an obsession with names and titles.

I might pick up the book and the series again later on and discover a favorite. But I know it didn't hold me on the maiden read. A pity.

Excellent overview of the subject. A highly readable, down to earth, unpretentious prose style. It avoids the trend in a lot of popular history writing of gradiose puffery of the topic (10 page forewords, hysterical framing, etc). I read it in about four sittings. Available from your shadow library of choice.

It covers the whole year of 1066 and starts from the perspective of the peasantry, describing key social institutions such as the villlage, the thanes, the forums for dispute resolution called 'hundreds' and so on. I didn't know that English monarchs were elected by a sort of proto-parliament, and that heredity was a secondary factor in determing kingship.

It illustrates the key figures involved. You get a keen sense of their psychological states and the political hands they were dealt: Edward the Confessor's frustration with his duties and never feeling truly at home with his own people, in part due to his sanctimonious faith; Harald Hardrada's Klingonlike thirst for violent skirmish and conquest (a shameless war tourist whose lifestyle could quite accurately be described as jihadist); William's blind self-confidence and almost lunatic trust in fate, regardless of how stacked against him the odds were of his campaign succeeding.

One of the key takeaways about the conquest itself: the unwitting use of psychological warfare (against the English monarch Harold) thanks to the indirect involvement of the Catholic church, and how effective it was in sowing FUD.

The sections on how ill-equipped the Normans were for seafaring were also fascinating. Indeed in the 11th century boats were about getting armies from one landmass to another and nothing else; the concept of a fighting maratime force such as a navy really wasn't a thing.

Marek a god-fearing shepherd's boy does his pious best to make sense of grim life circumstances until one day he makes an impulsive decision during an excursion with the landlord's son. The book reads like The Life of Brian crossed with Caligula or something directed by Branden Cronenburg.

It's a pithy study of resentment in all its flavors. Ludicrous and depraved yet readable. The characters are often preoccupied with wrongs, slights, past mistakes and post facto justifications of behaviour. Most of them are either idiots or scoundrels. Ina, a longlived wet-nurse, and Grigor, an elderly man turned Cynic (the original Diogenean sense of cynic) were my favorites.

The setting is never stated but my guess is circa 5th century Anatolia or Armenia. The early book refers 'fair northeners' who are 'amoral' and 'well suited to servile tasks', which I read as slavs of some description. A key scene indicates the place is mountainous, and nearby place names bear some resemblance to real locales such as Pripyat, Ukraine and Istria, Croatia.

A minor gripe from a non-American reader: on a few occasions I got taken out of the setting due to Moshfegh using Americanisms, such as 'moseying'. The author is American so it's kind of understandable, but it still struck me as a weird word choice given the subect matter.

A novel from the 1970s (unwittingly) about the 2010s. Our titular character attempts an escape from the camera of the TV show chronicling her life. Low plot and high concept. Took me several sittings go get through, not due to length or writing style, but rather how sparse the plot is. I love the way Compton doles out information to the reader; it never feels rushed or overbearing.

Compton alternates the perspective between Katherine and the show producer, Roddie. We get separate takes on a lot of the same events, in immediate succession, and it becomes a great device for Compton to explore the impact of events on the producer. It's no accident that Roddie has to undergo an irreversible, shocking change in order to properly 'see' his subject.

Impostorhood is a huge motif - being one, the realization of such, and its rationalization. The leads adopt disguises to be mistaken for an underclass. They gatecrash a private gathering. There's an unholy alliance between the media apparatus and the state that's regularly implied throughout - in almost all cases in the novel, you cannot help but be aware that police business is effectively aligned with the interests of the TV network behind the program. Even the medical field winds up playing handmaiden to the network's interests.

It makes a great comparison work to The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir), and a good companion to Neil Postman's ideas on television.

This novel has no plot, virtually no dialogue and centers on a single character, Des Esseintes, an ailing French aristocrat who has exiled himself to a villa outside Paris in pursuit of a life of decadent fixation on his favourite possessions.

Whether it's the classics of antiquity, the merits of French Catholic authors or the supremacy of plainsong in sacred music, Esseintes' musings go on page after page. You needn't be familiar with the subject matter to get something out of the novel, but you must be curious by nature, otherwise it will quickly infuriate you. The labor of his musings is the point - the book revels in a kind of excruciating indulgence, portraying a listless mind which has made for itself a labyrinth from objets d'art. Three pages might be spent on the changes in Latin vernacular across a range of writers from classical antiquity (much of the book feels like heading down a Wikipedia rabbithole where all the articles are highly opinionated). To borrow from Kipling, Esseintes is someone who has made thoughts his aim.

So why read this at all? Because it's fiercely strange, incredibly silly its own way, and Huysman's prose is beautiful and routinely surprising. The Penguin translation comes packed with supplements including notes, intro, a retrospective essay on the novel by Huysmans, and contemporary receptions from Zola et al.

Well done Tor for kicking DRM to the gutter.

But this is two-and-a-half star affair. All the male characters are one-dimensionally unpleasant save for the love interest. The protagonist, while a bit a of girlboss, does have your sympathy for much of the story, but that goodwill gets drawn way down in the last 60-odd pages, once her background is further detailed. Some of the similes struck me as juvenile; there's a lot of things I'd call the Milky Way before calling it a cum stain.

I like the parallel Ashby draws between the abusive relationship between for-profit vendor and end user, and the abusiveness in relationships, but it doesn't get used to much effect. The company, Wuv, is such a vile vision I have no doubt capital will have it ready to inflict on people by the 2030s. So I enjoyed some of its themes but plot- and content-wise it felt somewhat thin. I would read another Ashby novel but it's going to have come with rave reviews.

This is a quasi-DNF, because I've got the last fifth of the novel to go but it's starting to drag, and the protagonist is worthless. It has the feeling of something quickly edited and put to market (perhaps the author needed to fufil a contractual requirement?). Who knows, it's ancient history now.

It's main point of interest is Vinge's take on the proliferation of augmented reality and mesh network technology, and sadly I find his observations pretty plausible - namely that the infrastructure becomes a theatre of war for state actors, which leads to network balkanization and the subordination of all private ownership of technology to the demands of state (the novel has a tinkerer character who has managed to assemble a PC whose CPU isn't 'in thrall' to the Department of Homeland Security). It's sobering to compare the world in the novel to our current-day situation of nation-states hoarding (and protecting) software vulnerabilities for exploitation, zero-click malware vendors like Pegasus, automated-decision defense systems, etc.

‘When I am taking a walk through the fields and get one of my feet deeper than usual into the mud, I always endeavour to bear it as well as I may before the eyes of those who meet me rather than make futile efforts to get rid of the dirt and look as though nothing had happened. The dirt, when it is rubbed and smudged and scraped, is more palpably dirt than the honest mud.’ ‘I will not admit that I am dirty at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘Nor do I, in the case which I describe. I admit nothing; but I let those who see me form their own opinion. If any one asks me about my boot I tell him that it is a matter of no consequence. I advise you to do the same. You will only make the smudges more palpable[...]'

My first Trollope. It's a focused narrative coming in at about 200 pages, concerning a scandal around the private life of Wortle's best employee. I loved the matter-of-fact Puddicombe, a fellow rector of the Doctor's who is used as a sounding board, and hope to see him again in another novel. Trollope's a good observer of contradition, namely stated preference versus revealed preference. The book isn't about the nature of the scandal, which involves bigamy - Trollope intentionally spoils it in the beginning - but rather how the characters deal with revelations, and pinpointing exactly what wider society really finds objectionable about it.