Josh

I've been into sf/f for a long while, so I knew a bit about the so-called progression or cultivation subgenre. It didn't seem like it'd be for me, but Cradle was immensely popular and was also in my Kindle library, so why not?

I can see the appeal now. There's a very enjoyable arc in certain video games - mostly RPGs, especially JRPGs and MMOs - where you begin struggling in the dirt and then eventually become so powerful you can (and do) kill God and all his angels in heaven.

Cradle distills that idea into literary form. Wei Shi Lindon is deemed an outcast from the moment of his birth, as he is ‘Unsouled' and thus prohibited from training down a path to get stronger. Like a video game, there are ranks and experience points, and Lindon is essentially level-capped at “Wood” rank, far below the next rank of Copper and beneath the notice of Iron or Jade.

Lindon ekes out a meager existence looking for ways to get ahead that the other, more honorable members of his culture look down on. He eventually discovers a type of exploit of sorts: the Empty Palm. This ability is less an attack and more of a debuff, but it's an ability that is uniquely tailored to his skills and finally gives him the edge he had been looking for.

Events quickly turn sideways and Lindon realizes to equal parts horror and delight that his home - the Sacred Valley - is essentially just a ‘starting zone'. Even the strongest people he knows and fears are nothing compared to the world outside. He soon realizes that it's both possible to leave Sacred Valley and necessary if he wants to gain power and avert future disaster.

I found Cradle to be a clever book, dealing with conflicts and themes in ways that you don't often see in most fantasy books. Lindon is an unusual protagonist in that he has zero interest (or indeed, ability) to do anything the ‘correct way'. Everything he accomplishes is via a trick, exploit, or an outright cheat. I'm reminded somewhat of Cugel from the Dying Earth series.

However, I found it difficult to sympathize or even root for him. He's not a starving street rat or humble farmer - he's from a noble family and is a mix of mage and martial artist. He may at the lowest rung on his particular ladder, but it's miles better than most heroes at the start of their journeys.

His isn't struggling to survive or trying to save his kidnapped love or getting revenge on the person to wrong him; his major obstacle in life is that he wants to get stronger but people won't let him because of the rules. I'm not a stranger to shonen protagonists, but while they are often simpleminded in their pursuits of increasing their power, there's usually some other hook to latch onto. I didn't find that to be the case with Lindon.

About the halfway mark the stakes are raised and his motivations shift, but it's a thin justification. It merely gives him a more noble reason to continue what he was already planning to do.

As a book, it often felt amateurish. There were awkward sentences, chapter transitions never felt right, and the metanarrative didn't quite work for me. I found the character writing to be the weakest part as almost every character had the same voice and extremely similar motivations and ideals.

Overall, I liked it and it exceeded my expectations, though they were already low to begin with. I'm unsure if I'll continue on, but I plan to at least read the sequel to see how the formula is shaken up.

Point Your Face at This is book of drawings and jokes. It's meant to look like the sketchbook of a joke maker; drawings are rough drafts, words are crossed out and corrected, notes are in the margins. Each joke is, ostensibly, meant to make you laugh. Some do.

There are no categories or chapters or anything, but each piece generally falls into one of a handful of buckets:

a) Play on words or visual puns. These are the best jokes in both cleverness and execution. He frequently makes uses graphs, charts, and meta elements - somewhat like a less ambitious XKCD. A side view of polka dots. A venn diagram comparing strippers, firefighters, and fishermen.

b) Dumb gag. These are like the type of Sunday comic your grandma pins up on the fridge. Bland, but inoffensive. A pear asks an apple if its butt looks fat. A snake charmer works his magic on some spaghetti.

c) Attempts at modern art or political cartoons. These are by far the worst. They're hacky, pretentious, and nauseatingly affected. They're the type of drawings you'd make if you were trying to mock modern art, but are presumably meant sincerely. A man stands with an angel on one shoulder and the icons for the Democrat and Republican party on another. A baby's crib with a mobile consisting of news and social media company logos. A dog poop surrounded by flies compared to a city surrounded by airplanes.

So, overall it's a very uneven and bland book. The lows are very low, and the highs aren't all that high. It's a milquetoast collection of gags, and I can see it appealing to a certain type of dad, or maybe a teen who doesn't know any better. There's little here for anyone else.

Gates of Ivrel makes clear at the start that this is a fantasy world by way of post-post-apocalypse scifi. Long ago, a race called the qhal built a galactic empire by utilizing “gates”, technology which permitted instantaneous travel over distance and time. As is often the case, the qhal messed around with time too much and accidentally obliterated themselves in the process.

However, the gates still remain. It's never outright stated, but it seems enough time has passed that each world has developed its own post-qhal culture, with qhalian artifacts forgotten and shunned. You can see snippets of the qhal's influence in the language and history of the world (the specfic world in this book is called Andur-Kursh), but these descendants are strictly separate from them.

The danger of the gates - through malicious purpose, accident, or malfunction of the machinery itself - prompted the need for an organization (their origins never made clear) to send agents out to close the gates across the worlds.

The titular Morgaine is one such agent tasked with closing these gates. Who or what she is is not made clear in this book, and while her goal will ultimately help the world by closing the gates, that is of distant benefit to her. She is both an alien and legendary figure, treated more like a demon than a human. There's a mutual distance, distrust and fear between her and the inhabitants of the land.

Our protagonist, Vayne, is one such inhabitant. He is a royal bastard who is exiled at the start of the book and eventually becomes Morgaine's companion and servant via coincidence and fairly intricate contract law.

His story and character arc at first seem predictable: a skilled bastard who is ill-treated and eventually exiled when he becomes too much of an inconvenience, only to be swept up in a grand adventure where he's able to flourish and become the hero he was always meant to be.

But that is not Vayne. As the layers of the onion are peeled back, Vayne is revealed to be a sad and even pathetic character. He is a self-admitted coward, fearing death above all else, and apart from his code of honor he has little to call his own. He is loyal to Morgaine, for that is his greatest strength, but he is as often a burden and liability to her quest as an asset.

These wrinkles make Vayne into an extremely interesting character, particularly when contrasted against the stoic and driven Morgaine, who has weaknesses and a certain type of cowardice of her own. Exploring how their relationship evolves is one of the core threads throughout the book.

My greatest enjoyment came from the many character dynamics at play in Gates of Ivrel. Supporting characters might start as an ally only to turn foe and then back again depending on the situation. Andur-Kursh is politically complicated, and Morgaine herself is treated like a force of nature that can be coaxed in certain advantageous directions by opportunistic schemes.

Both Vayne and Morgaine are hanging by a thread for almost the entire book, just barely outrunning one plot only to stumble immediately into the next one. It makes for exciting writing, but at its worst it comes across like a Saturday morning cartoon where villains pop up with almost comical timing.

It's a quick read, but it would have been stronger for having a number of slower sections to give the plot a breather and to help convey the great distances being travelled. As it stands, the land of Andur-Kursh feels small, as characters are able to travel too quickly and set up confrontations and ambushes in ways that feel at odds with the geography she describes.

As far as genre goes, it's interesting to read a book in which the reader knows it's scifi but is treated in-world as a fantasy. You can intuit what the gates are and how the technology Morgaine wields works, but everything is strictly through the lens of Vayne who does not understand any of it. He'll describe events using his understanding and language, and all of a sudden it'll click what he's actually experiencing from “our” perspective. These are very satisfying moments in the book, so I won't spoil them here.

I know nothing of the Morgaine Cycle or Cherryh herself when I started this book, but I've quickly become a fan and I plan to read the next book (Well of Shiuan) in short order.

I was part of the same online community as Julia back when she was first starting out her webcomics. I immediately loved them, and backed this book when she put it up on Kickstarter. However, this is my first time actually sitting down and reading it cover to cover.

Of course, it rules. Julia has a very natural sense of humor that reminds me of the 2000s era of webcomics. The comedy comes from puns, subverted (often doubly so) expectations, and absurdist twists. No gag ever outstays its welcome, and most every idea feels fresh.

My only knock against it is that there were a few clunkers where I groaned at the punchline, and a few cases where I actually did not understand it. It was a bit like going to the performance of a journeyman comedian who is testing out some jokes that don't land right.

But they were few and far between, and as comic collections go this one is overall excellent. It'll forever remain on my shelves as a reminder of life, the universe, and everything.

It's not easy to write good comedy, and it's significantly harder to write good parody. So I can only imagine how difficult it must be to create satire that is not just meant as a one-off gag, but is in fact an entire fantasy series in its own right, with lore and worldbuilding and continuity that surpasses most of the things it's lampooning.

Sourcery is my first Discworld book, though of course I've heard of both the series and the author for decades. I knew that it - and he - had a great reputation, and after finishing the book I can say it is well earned if only for his ability to thread this particular needle.

The most important part of a comedy is that it's funny, and Sourcery is very funny. Jokes are delivered at a rate equivalent to a belt-fed mounted machine gun. Even if one joke fails to land, you barely need to wait for the next sentence before a new one is attempted. There's puns, irony, satire, poop jokes, deep references, obvious references, and tons of meta jokes that could really only be told in literary form.

It's remarkable, often brilliant, sometimes distracting, and other times... a little annoying.

Sourcery is firmly a fantasy novel, and it's trying to tell you a story like one, with worldbuilding and adventure and character arcs that one expects. Most of the time the humor adds to the tapestry being presented, but not always. It's a book that doesn't take itself seriously, yet it still makes the attempt to tell a real story, with real stakes and character motivations and tension. It's a difficult balancing act, and not an altogether successful one. The prose constantly undercuts itself, oscillating between Loony Toons logic and real (well, fantastical) logic without much of a breather in between.

It's a bit of a mishmash, and you can imagine a creative process in which the phrase “cut that, it doesn't fit” was rarely said.

Take Conina. She's a stealthy master thief, yet also an extremely violent barbarian, but really, she just wants to be a hairdresser. She's descended from Cohen, and like him her name is a pun. She is the love interest of 2 (maybe 3) men and a treasure chest. She's serious and smart except when she's dumb and naive. Of the 4(ish) members of the party, she's generally most competent, but I had no idea what her motivation was for remaining in the story, and I think you could have probably cut her after the first 50 pages without losing anything.

It's mostly obvious which parts of Conina are meant to be silly jokes and which are meant to be serious characterization. But when you smash all those traits into a single character, and the primary supporting role no less, it just doesn't gel right.

It's like eating a tasty meal that nevertheless feels off, as if the ingredients weren't measured in the right ratio, or didn't fully combine in the cooking process.

I liked Sourcery, and I think I'll read more Discworld books someday, but only when I'm in the mood for its particular brand of food.

This “book” began as a series of Reddit comments by user _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 in response to unrelated posts across the site. They were bizarre interconnected microfictions about LSD, flesh-interfaces, body horror, addiction, and summers in which your mother is not your mother.

It was very weird, but that was of course the point. Eventually a sub as created for the user who then focused all their posts there and made it into a proper story (albeit in a very untraditional medium) that is on Goodreads and everything. It's a fix-up by way of creepypasta.

Its first 2/3rds are captivating and sickening and insane and awesome. But at some point he realizes he has to payoff all the story threads he's been weaving, and it just... all falls apart.

What becomes clear is that the author was making it all up as he went along, and it results in this sort of “drift” happening to the story, so that the beginning of the book is absolutely nothing like the end. He loses everything that made it special and ends up down some very hacky roads instead. Really disappointing.

That said, it's such a unique experience that I can't bring myself to rate it less than 3 stars. I'm very glad I read it, and I would absolutely recommend it to people, but my advice? As soon as it stops being interesting, just drop it. It won't win you back.

This is one of the best books I've ever read. Unfortunately, nothing I could write here will properly capture why I think that. I'll try, though.

A Storm of Wings is ostensibly a follow-up to The Pastel City, a fantasy and vaguely swords-and-sorcery series that fits into the Dying Earth subgenre. But it'd be better described as an escalation; it takes everything about the the first book in the Viriconium series and cranks it up 1000x.

The stakes are higher, the scenes are denser, the characters have sharper personalities with more interesting traits and motivations. It's even more fantastical, more poetic, and much, much weirder.

This strangeness has been off-putting to some judging by the other reviews. After all, there's nothing about The Pastel City that suggests the author was holding something back: it was weird and free and fearless.

But apparently M. John Harrison was holding back a lot, and you'd almost think Pastel City was some overbearing prison by the way he bursts forth here. If you were expecting a more traditional sequel (and of course you would be) then it's going to take some adjusting.

You'll often feel like you're drowning in his prose, but there's nothing extraneous about it. Every insane moment, every bonkers conversation or bizarre imagery serves a purpose, and by the end you'll be able to piece it together (though you'll sound like a madman if you explain it to someone else).

You're meant not to understand everything, especially in the beginning, as M. John Harrison really embraces what it means to be a fantasy (or sci-fi, if you prefer) story. But stick with it, because figuring it out is incredibly rewarding.

I recommend strongly reading the first book to get an idea of the prose and world and characters, then go into this one knowing full well that it's bonkers. I think that'll give you the proper expectations to accept and enjoy it.

It's something really special.

I absolutely adored the previous three books in The Dying Earth, but I feared that the last book would not have the same magic as the previous three.

Unfortunately this was exactly the case. Rhialto is not a bad story - in truth a set of three short stories where the characters are the same but are otherwise independent of one another - but it lacks both the personality of the Cugel books and the soul of the 1st collection of stories.

As with the other books, it's a comedy of manners where the absolute worst people you could ever meet do monstrous things to one another and the world around them for the pettiest of reasons, but it's all couched in polite, understated observations and flowery language. Old men more powerful than gods bicker and prank one another like a college frat while decorum is staunchly upheld or carelessly discarded depending on the mood.

It remains funny and novel and very weird. The problem is that we've seen all this before, only with much more interesting characters with better stories and journeys. Rhialto himself - despite the flamboyant title - is boringly mundane. He's a straight man in a setting that does not need one.

This book falls into the same trap I see a lot of long-in-the-tooth stories get stuck in, which is that it tries to revive a tired setting by introducing some new idea never hinted at before and then immediately concluding it. These self-contained story arcs feel disconnected from both themselves and the previous books, and you're left with the feeling that they were completely unnecessary.

This is in fact the opposite feeling you want to have when finishing a series. The rest of the series is fantastic, but skip this one.

The Scholomance is a high school for mages, and our protagonist Galadriel “El” is a junior there. It quickly becomes clear that the Scholomance is not really a “school” in the traditional sense; it's more like a prison crossed with a military academy, a brutal crucible where only the strong or connected survive. It's unfair, deadly, cruel, just the worst, really. Still, it's better than the alternative: the world is full of evil things who find magically gifted kids an easy meal, and Scholomance was created to give them a fighting chance at survival.

If you've seen this book recommended before it's probably been followed by “It's like Harry Potter, but __”. That's an overused comparison, but in this case I think it's warranted. It's like Novik read Harry Potter and decided to do the exact opposite wherever she could.

It's not a bad idea, but it was taken too far in the other direction, and resulted in the proverbial baby being tossed out with the bathwater. All the genuinely good parts of Harry Potter, such as the whimsical nature of magic, the comfy social situations, the fairy tale feel of it all, are all swapped for much more unpleasant versions.

The wizarding world of the Scholomance really sucks. That could have been an interesting wrinkle in a different context, but this is a YA book, so our protagonist is legally obligated to respond to even horrific events with a resigned sigh and snide comment. It's a very scary and stressful setting, but one that is being filtered through the lens of a cynical YA high schooler. It's not a great juxtaposition.

Despite this, I actually liked El as a character; she was dealt a rough hand, vaguely similar to Frozen's Elsa (almost surely the author's inspiration), and she contrasts well with the rest of the characters. Her cynicism is warranted. I just very much wish I wasn't in her head the whole book. It's written in that pseudo-diary format every YA book loves, and close to 80% of the book is El's internal monologue reacting to both past and present with the same detached “yep, just another day in Magekiller High School” tone.

The worldbuilding is especially clumsy: she'll namedrop a common thing in her world, gives you maybe a few paragraphs to piece together what it is from context, only to then painstakingly explain the entire thing and its history and its related wikipedia entries in the middle of dialogue or an action scene.

There were many parts I liked. It had a lot of interesting things to say about privilege and education using magic as a metaphor. Its magic system was novel, an intriguing combination of language and intention and belief. But I won't be continuing the series, and it's hard to recommend this to anyone, even those with interests in magic school settings

There are obvious dangers serving on a colony ship headed for a potentially habitable planet. Will the crew manage the effects of isolation, zero g, and continuous existential crisis? What about the time dilation effects due to travelling at near light speed - can people cope with the fact that the planet they're leaving will experience decades of change in their 5 year journey? What if the planet can't actually sustain life - can you imagine having to go back? Even more practically: will you even survive the journey?

Tau Zero explores all these types of questions before grinning mischievously and throwing one last monkey wrench into the equation: what if the ship is damaged en route - not in a life-threatening way - and now can no longer stop? In fact, it can no longer even slow down; its crew is able to survive indefinitely, but time is dilating further as minutes on board the ship become centuries outside. They can't land, call back to home, or even make repairs, and the stars and planets and galaxies they're able to see outside their windows are looking ever stranger and out of reach.

It's a really cool idea. Tau Zero is a hard science (well, for 1970) sci-fi book first and foremost, but at many points throughout it feels closer to a post-apocalypse story. After the aforementioned disaster strikes, the crew of the Leonora Christine become survivors of a very personal apocalypse. The world they knew is gone in every sense of the word, and they themselves have become ghosts without a home or purpose.

The book excels when it explores these ideas, or when it dips into the poetic to describe cosmic phenomena, or when dives into paragraphs of big, crunchy technical jargon for the all the science work being done. It's wonderful scifi writing.

The problem is everything else.

A book detailing a disaster really needs to get the human element right. People should respond to it believably, which might mean some acting irrationally, others rising to heroics, still others falling into depravity or doom or hysterics. The drama and tension naturally arise from people overcoming their weaknesses, making tough decisions, and so forth.

But Tau Zero's characters aren't really people; they're barely even 2D cardboard cutouts. They wander from scene to scene expositing dialogue at each other, or saying their internal monologues out loud to advance a thread, or suddenly acting out of character because it's convenient for the plot at the time. There's very little conflict (the most physical it gets is a single fistfight over cards) and drama is often resolved with a handwave.

The dialogue is especially embarrassing. There are some scenes early on where characters are literally just stating their backstories to one another intermixed with current world history that would surely be obvious to them. It's the type of thing that'd get you in trouble with your 9th grade English teacher.

The worst by far is the protagonist. He's a military man, a cop-esque figure on the ship. But also he knows everything about space and astrophysics and chemistry and planetary colonization and can stand toe-to-toe with experts in their field in any scientific discussion. His arguments are always correct, and those who doubt him eventually regret their words and deeds. He's a better captain than the captain. He's a master manipulator, with networks of deputies and secret deputies and spies. He can pilot star ships better than anyone. He's the best melee fighter, the best at navigating zero-g, and the only one with a gun. He's also naturally handsome, rugged, and is worshipped by at least two women.

He's absolutely ridiculous.

It's such a shame, because I love so much else about this book. Though the science never really rang true to me, I still suspended my disbelief because it's explained so well. The premise is excellent, equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, and the tension it weaves throughout the book left my palms sweaty.

All it needed was a handful of characters who behaved like humans. Instead, we get these weirdos. You get the sense that Anderson viewed humans as an unfortunate necessity to write about a cool spaceship flight. I wish he hadn't even bothered and made the Leonora Christine an unmanned expedition.

I went into Hyperion with few expectations and was pleasantly surprised by its tone and structure. It's a frame story clearly inspired by The Canterbury Tales, though I found the short stories themselves more akin to Star Trek episodes in their subject matter and varied genres. 

As far as scifi goes it's incredibly solid, with the right level of explanation and technological mystery as it examines one possible future path for humanity. I liked its take on FTL travel and the overall theme of time.

As if often the case, not all of the stories work and their quality is uneven. I enjoyed riding the wave of vibes, but in the end it felt like I missed some greater message. It ended abruptly, but I felt neither fulfilled or disappointed. My first reaction in fact was wondering if my epub was corrupted and the file terminated early.

The obsession with Keats was a courageous move that ultimately does not benefit author Dan Simmons by comparison.

The final book of the 2nd Earthsea trilogy, and last book overall.

Unfortunately, it was by far the least favorite of the series. I still adore LeGuin's prose and her style of worldbuilding, but this book felt so incredibly unnecessary.

Its basic premise asks “have you ever considered that this evocative and mysterious part of the world is actually a problem that needs explaining and solving???”, and for me the answer was a clear “no.”

I did appreciate the way the conflict was unraveled, especially when the solution reveals itself by getting a bunch of important people in the same room to talk and compare notes. But the rest of the book did nothing for me.

Overall it reminded me far too much of a TV series that should have stopped seasons ago. Disappointing, and if I do reread the series I'll surely stop at Tehanu.

I can't imagine how hard it is to write sequels. As a reader it's impossible not to compare a sequel with what came before it - is it better? is it too similar, or too different? do the characters sound the same? was it even necessary to write?

Paladin of Souls sidesteps many of these problems by reusing the setting of the previous book and promoting side characters to main characters, but bringing back little else. Ista, protagonist of this book, was an important side character in Curse of Chalion, but many parts of her history, personality and motivations were left untold.

The curse that once impacted Ista and so many others is broken, but her lot in life was not much improved. She is still considered weak minded and much too old for a life more complicated than tea times and knitting the days away.

So she plans an escape of sorts, and is soon once again swept up into the affairs of political leaders and heroes and the gods themselves. This time it's more in her control, and suited to her particular strengths and needs. It's not often a 40yo women is the hero of a fantasy novel, but Ista is well up to the task.

The magical elements of the setting are cranked up much more than in the previous book. Things that were myths, or only implied, or occurred off-screen are now much more literal and happen constantly. Too much, perhaps. By the end I found myself rather tired of all the rules and metaphors, and the miracles became somewhat mundane by their constant presence.

I did not like Paladin of Souls as much as Curse of Chalion. The story was smaller, its scope more humble, but there was too much spinning of wheels for my liking. Oftentimes you'd have multiple pages dedicated to someone recapping something that had already happened, they'd muse and think on it a bit, then conclude that maybe things will be clearer in the morning.

It is perhaps a more mature way of navigating conflicts and challenges, but in the end the solutions were almost always “let's hope something bails us out” or “let's try magic”, so my patience for these scenes drained quickly.

I really liked Ista in the first book, but I didn't quite like her as a protagonist. She was a bit too quippy, too detached from the events she experiences. We were often told the stakes were high, but Ista never quite acted like she feared failure, and neither did I.

As a final aside, I don't care for how Bujold writes romance, and this book did not change my mind.

I have a feeling I'll appreciate this one as time goes on and I think back to the differences that made it stand out and forget some of the things that rubbed me the wrong way. I think it's well worth reading after Chalion, but I don't think I'll return to the series for some time.

Lions of Al-Rassan is one of the best fantasy books I've ever read, and I say this even though I'm not entirely convinced it is fantasy.



Whatever its genre, it tells the tale of Moorish Spain and events leading to the Reconquista, but through the lens of the fantastical. The major powers and players are sufficiently mixed up and layered with new details to make it clear this is not earth (there are two moons in the sky!) and it's not a historical account , but things are also immediately recognizable, even as an American. Instead of Christians, Muslims and Jewish peoples, you have the Jaddites, Asharites, and the Kindath - with all the same customs, stereotypes, challenges, and desires. It's a little weird, to tell the truth, but more on that later.

Thankfully, it is much more than just a fantastical retelling of Cantar de mio Cid. At the heart of Lions of Al-Rassan are the lives and personal stories of impossibly powerful, emotional, and clever men and women. There's The Captain himself, Rodrigo Belmonte, a genius tactician and leader of the strongest band of Jaddites on the peninsula. Opposing, or allied, with him is Ammar ibn Khairan, an Asharite poet, advisor to kings, killer of kings, and lovable rogue. Finally there's the woman that stands between them, Jehane bet Ishak, a Kindath doctor whose life is defined equally by love, war, and medicine.

These three heroes are the pillars of the book, with themselves and the people that follow and love them serving as a metaphor for the mishmash of cultures and the inevitable conflict arising on the peninsula itself.

Al-Rassan is a ticking timebomb of external pressures and irreconcilable differences, but there is a compelling argument made by its characters that it doesn't have to be. There's a dream shared by many characters that conflict is not inevitable, that it is possible to blend disparate cultures (in some cases quite literally) to create something new, better, but fragile. This struggle is the source of its many emotional highs and lows.

I don't think I've ever read a more human book, especially in the fantasy genre. Characters frequently stop and appreciate beauty, celebrate companionship, weep at tragedy, and profess respect for their friends and rivals.

The key here is that, with few exceptions, there are no evil men. There are competing and incompatible cultures, religions, and political systems, but humans are human, and their shared likenesses are as important as their differences. These are crafty and intelligent men having crafty and intelligent conversations with each other, even in conflict. You end up sympathizing with everyone, even going so far as hoping, naively, that they somehow all get what they want.

They won't, of course. One of the greatest themes running throughout the book is that these men would be great and lifelong friends if not for just one small problem - the tragedy being that these “small” problems are often the most defining parts of their lives.

It is a nearly flawless book, though there are a few problems I couldn't get past.

I've read plenty of books that straddle the line between fantasy and historical fiction, but this is the first time it's been a source of distraction. Events and characters are so close to their real world counterparts - often with comically referential names, titles, or descriptions - yet at the same time are very clearly not.

I kept wishing that the book fully committed to fantasy or history.

Take the three major religions as example. Going by their descriptions, you'd likely say they are sufficiently fantastical: the Jaddites worship the sun as god, the Kindath worship the two moons, twin sisters of the sun god, and the Asharites worship not the gods but the stars and the human prophet who preached their glory.

And yet when you read of their cultures, practices, and so on, you'll quickly find they are literally Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Kindath (Jews) are called the Wanderers, valued for their skills and trades when times are good, but immediately blamed, persecuted, segregated, expelled, and labeled as sorcerers and baby eaters when times are bad. It's not subtle!

It's also not a bad thing, necessarily, because the fantastical framing is as good of a teacher as any historical drama would be. And yet... it remains distracting, taking me away from its world and putting me back in my own.

More distracting are the names of its characters: Rodrigo “The Captain” Belmonte is of course El Cid himself, Rodrigo “The Lord” Diaz. The character of Ammar ibn Khairan is based on a man named Muhammad ibn Ammar. A major city in the book is named Silveness (Seville), ruled by the khalifate (caliphate), which eventually falls and is replaced by the Almalik (Almoravid) dynasty.

Both book and reality contain a Sancho the Fat, yet they are different people... sorta?

On more mundane annoyances, there are a number of writing ‘tricks' that Guy Gavriel Kay goes back to a few too many times.

Often - too often - there will be a scene in which an important event is viewed through the perspective of one of the characters. It will then end on a cliffhanger - like a character's death, not yet named - and then the perspective shifts. Sometimes the cliffhanger is resolved, but more often than not this trick happens a 2nd or even 3rd time, or the time frame jumps suddenly and you're left to infer what happened before the book eventually just tells you.

The writing is very clearly aware that it's dangling the reveal in front of you, and it'll purposefully lead you down false conclusions to stretch out the tension even more. Once you notice the trick it's hard not to get impatient or even frustrated by it.

There are also a number of repetitive words and phrases that grate after a time - people can only talk about “dissembling” or “diverting” so many times before it becomes irksome - but they're minor.

Indeed, all of its problems and distractions are minor when compared with the work as a whole. They are primarily noted only because the rest of the work is so phenomenal that even the smallest error stands out of place.

It's a remarkable book, one that should be on the shelves of every fantasy fan, and it's made me a Guy Gavriel Kay for life. Just don't read it too close to taking a test or quiz on the history of Spain, because it will cause you to fail spectacularly.

I was first exposed to Beowulf: A New Translation via someone quoting a part that contained the phrase, “hashtag: blessed.” It's hard to imagine a worse first impression.

But I love Beowulf, and there's a somewhat common phrase about not judging books by your surface level knowledge of them. So I grabbed a copy from the library, and I'm really glad I did.

This is a superb translation. Headley's poetry is wonderfully playful, weaving together the epic with delightful verse, sublime alliteration, clever compound expressions, and sudden hard turns into modernity. Swearing, contemporary phrasing and dialogue, and even memes are peppered throughout the book.

Thankfully, it avoids overcommitting to the bit - if that's the right word - of being a story for and by 20XX dudebros. It is far too beautiful and inventive for anyone to make that mistake. The anachronisms are rarer than you'd expect (or fear); they punctuate the poem with precision timing for moments of humor or metaphor. When it's ridiculous, it's clearly with a purpose.

It's a very quotable book, which is not something that can be said of most Beowulf translations.

It has a few clunkers here and there, moments where the swerve to modern temperament ends up crashing into a brick wall. Hashtag: Blessed did not land any better in context. Some repeated words throughout the book - bro, daddy, bling - never felt right no matter how many times I read them. At times the more modern phrases (“Meanwhile, Beowulf gave zero shits.”) felt too cute, too distracting.

But these blemishes were rare, leaving a book that felt fresh and clever and brilliant.