witzelsucht

Firstly, the cover is gorgeous. Kudos to Elizabeth Wakou for her work. It's the best thing about this book and this star is for her. Secondly, I hated this book's guts. Feminist retelling this, female rage that – I need to get some female rage off my chest right now. A lot of it.

Feminist in marketing only, Lady Macbeth recoils from everything that made the original character powerful and interesting, offering up a defanged "reclamation" that contorts itself around into baffling misogyny. What is this feministly reclaiming, exactly? What was the author's thought process here? "Wouldn't it be subversive if literature's greatest female villain had no power, ambition, personality, or agency? Isn't that actually doing more feminism? What if she wasn't even a villain, because only men can be bad? What if she was a nubile teenager so beautiful it drove men mad to look at her? What if she really needed a handsome prince to save her? What if her biggest burden was being gorgeous?"

The astonishingly brass-necked blurb says this book "gives Lady Macbeth a voice". Christ. She didn't need one. I cannot imagine the dream-world in which this pablum is doing Lady Macbeth any favours. It's a rebuttal against a version of the character that doesn't exist, against a narrative the author has imagined, to glorify an otherwise nothing story. Reid takes a mature, dominant, challenging, driven woman and mushes her down into soft, bland Teletubby custard to make her palatable and #relatable. This corrective new "Lady" is a demure, gentle, beautiful, naïve, feminine, chaste, goody-two-shoes woman-child who can do no wrong, even though that's all she does.

As well as being a preternatural bombshell, our heroine Roscille is meant to be uncommonly observant and clever, which manifests as her jumping to contrived conclusions, BBC Sherlock-style, and getting dozens of people killed along the way. I started questioning this character's supposed resourcefulness when her first ✨ clever plan ✨ gets a castle full of people slaughtered. She thinks vaguely of this as a minor whoopsie, or even a net positive because the castle would've been full of evil rapist men anyway. No, really. She and the narrative are over it in a couple of chapters.

I feel bad for any Scottish people who read this book. Reid's contemptuous portrayal of Scotland would make a medieval propagandist proud: a godforsaken, barbaric place populated by brutish rapists who speak an animalistic language. The Scottish are essentially written as a subhuman fantasy race. Barely a page goes by without some observation of how they are primitive, uncivil, beast-like, cruel, crass, and loveless. If this was set in a fictional world peopled by monsters, such broad strokes might've been easier to swallow, but, as it stands, this "historical" setting just reads like an American author's lazy Celtophobic delusion. For good measure, Reid drops a jus primae noctis mention in the first chapter. Did her research into Scotland begin and end with Braveheart?

Through the miserable lens of Lady Macbeth, men are all predatory ogres and women exist to be brutalised. I say "exist" loosely, as the book sidelines every woman except our spineless heroine. The women unlucky enough to be described are still trolls next to dainty Roscille, with their big shoulders, small hips, and wrinkles. You could excuse some things as being limitations of Roscille's worldview but, seeing how the rest of the book is so ill-considered, I'm not moved to generosity.

I hoped the prose would at least be good, but it's not. I love lyrical, figurative writing but this just has the off-kilter whiff of an author overreaching for "mature and embellished". Just within the first chapter, the sky is "sickishly vast" and "epithet" is used three times in a couple of pages. Characters have quavering frowns and nickering heartbeats. "A dramatic ordeal of blood" appears, followed not long after by "a great ordeal of blood". The same character is described twice as being "miserly with his violence" – a good turn of phrase when seen once, but slipshod when seen again. The barbican grinds open. The barbican grinds open. The barbican grinds open again. The bloody barbican grinds open again. The barbican grinds op–Christ on a bike! The word you're looking for is "gate" and your editor is asleep on the job. I'm also certain Reid doesn't know what "posthumous" means, because her usage of it is repeatedly mystifying.

The word "canny" is overused, which is very funny for a book that disdains everything Scottish. "Canny as a weasel", "the canny mind of a weasel", "a canny animal", "canny as an ermine", "a canny ermine". Hello, editor? Hello? There are a few too many instances of "[noun] is an [adjective] thing", aiming for literary but giving Lightlark. There are endless yawnsome metaphors about slippery lampreys, bloody consummation, and tiles on a draughts board (pieces, surely) to make sure you get the Themes™ and Motifs™, as if you could've missed them.

The book's entire premise – Lady Macbeth being a helpless, reluctant pawn in her powerful husband's schemes – crumbles at the slightest scrutiny, all because Roscille has this pointless mind-control power. All she has to do is look Macbeth in the eye and it's curtains for him. But oh, woe is her, she just can't do it! I kept waiting for some clever reveal – that her hypnotic gaze was a misdirection, something symbolic rather than literal – but it never came. Nope, she just has actual Jedi mind-tricks that she never uses to help herself. Just, what? Calling it a plot hole seems unfair to plot holes.

And don't even get me started on how, the morning after Macbeth finally violently consummates their marriage, Roscille goes skinny-dipping in the woods to wash the blood off, and guilt-trips her handsome prince boyfriend into having amazingly pleasurable sex with her. What crusty old man from the 1980s wrote this?

Lady Macbeth is the slickly packaged definition of "go girl give us nothing". As a retelling, it bears so little resemblance to its source, it's not even a distant cousin. As a historical fantasy, it's as shallow as a Pinterest board and insultingly negligent. I don't know why Reid didn't just fully commit to the "waifish virgin bride meets magical dragon prince" story that this clearly wants to be instead. But then there'd be no "feminist retelling" hook to sell it, would there?

This is a compilation of pleasant, cheerleading platitudes to encourage writers, rather than a concrete "guide" to anything. It's very, very slight and the references to writing in COVID make it feel terribly dated already, but I liked that it featured input from many different, diverse authors, and the bite-sized sections made it easy to dip in and out of reading. It contains no secrets on how to actually write 1,000 words a day, just PMA stuff that you already know, really.

An underwhelming, annoying book. I love stylised prose with a wide vocabulary; I don't think a book having "windowpane" or "invisible" prose is praise. But this book ain't it. Lines like "the singsong timbre of his voice familiar, the sound of it like a coyote lying about where he’d left the sun" and "jaw sharp as a promise" are twaddle. Somewhere amid all the mixed metaphors is a fun ghost story starring an amusingly messed-up gaggle of exes, but Khaw fails to find it.

Some of this book's sentences are so nonsensical I wasn't sure if they actually contained typos or were just the author trying and failing to be clever. Shouldn't that "every one" be "everyone"? Shouldn't that "poured" be "pored"? Shouldn't "a loci for our celebrations" be "a locus..."? And what the hell is wrong with this first-person protagonist that has her thinking exclusively in tortured metaphors and similes, anyway?

For all the show-offy vocabulary, the author runs out of phrases and mannerisms pretty fast. Everything is sweet, ink, mildew, indigo, froth, rills, and breath. Everyone's mouths and lips are thinning, pinching, slimming, and pinning. Everyone's licking their lips and teeth and running their fingers through their hair. The amygdala, cerebrum, and medulla oblongata are namedropped, just so you know the author's looked at a diagram of the brain and was determined to shoehorn most of it in. The repetitions stick out all the more for how short the book is and how desperately the prose is contrived. A book that consists of around 22,000 words but still manages to make two of them "chiaroscuro" is trying way too hard.

I could forgive the prose's overreaching ambition if it felt earnest, but it's combined with characters who keep ironically lampshading the weakness of the plot. The result just feels like the reader is being held in contempt. If the plot's such a knowing hack job, maybe the author should've spent more time on it, and less consulting the thesaurus? Did they want anything in this story to be meaningful, or to evoke anything approaching real? Is it all supposed to be a big joke, and if so, on whom?

Ugh, whatever. It's short and the cover's cool.

A light and entertaining overview of toxic plants, their effects, and their relationships with humans throughout history. Nicely illustrated and informative for the curious layperson (me), if a little too cute in its “evil criminal plant” gimmick.

This is the first ‘how to write' book that's truly resonated with me. Klinkenborg proposes a sentence-first method, where syntactical rigour and accuracy of vocabulary are the keys to good writing, and together beget more and better ideas. I really liked that: that every sentence should have a reason for being the way that it is, and no other way, and that you should know why and consider every element fully. He eschews ideas of ‘flow' and ‘naturalness' in the writing process, arguing that ‘flow' is something the reader experiences, not the writer, and that writing isn't natural and should demand your effort.

Klinkenborg's method is a sort of discovery writing, though it's never called that in so many words, and it encourages patience and deliberation before you even put a word to the page. Knowing the right words and trusting your own powers of observation are more important here than outlining or drafting. If that all sounds very abstract and internal, it is, but the vigour and clarity of the author's argument are strong testimony.

You see some practical applications in the last section of the book, where Klinkenborg critiques example sentences from student writers. Some are just slightly off and others are barely intelligible, and he rewrites, restructures or discards them with a dry humour and easy efficiency that I enjoyed. Many other writing books wimp out of discussing sentences – even though to me, as a reader, they are the experience – so I appreciated reading one in which sentence-level confidence and craft are instrumental. A really motivating and thought-provoking read.

Davidson is one of the most hateable characters ever. This book is a blunt polemic, sure, but I never felt that the character writing or worldbuilding were neglected in favour of the message. They're vivid and detailed, wonderfully so for such a short page-count. It's a book with ideas to spare. Le Guin hasn't let me down yet.

This is my first Cadfael book and I already look forward to reading more in future. I really like Cadfael as our unflappable protagonist: a burly, down-to-earth, middle-aged monk, once a soldier, now a gardening enthusiast and amateur detective. He's cast as the fair, worldly, and open-minded everyman among his holy brethren of stuffed shirts and bumbling virgins – the perfect wise observer needed to solve a medieval murder.

The murder mystery itself is quite simple but satisfyingly written and paced. None of the book's brisk page count is wasted. Peters' prose has charming archaic flavour and a level of adverbial gusto that's sometimes a bit silly, like Cadfael's world of smarmy monks and plucky maidens is a bit silly – but it's page-turning fun that's elevated by a strong sense of setting. Peters strikes a pleasing balance of historicity with a warm-hearted lightness of touch that isn't totally Dung Ages. I enjoyed it a lot!

I haven't read Shadow and Bone, but I picked up Six of Crows as I'd seen numerous takes saying it's mature and complex for a YA book, written better, and can be enjoyed as a standalone. Not my usual bag, but I was keen to give it a try. Now I really wish I hadn't bothered. A fantasy heist pulled off by multiple POV characters is cool in theory, but its execution here is below pedestrian.

Everything about the book is undercooked. Bardugo can structure an inoffensive sentence, but there's little beauty or atmosphere to the writing. The worldbuilding is all vague aesthetics and no specifics – if you can call it “worldbuilding” to reskin some lazy cultural stereotypes and stick the letter “k” everywhere – not like a fully realised setting that's already three books' worth of lived-in. The ensemble cast is charmless, lacking depth beyond two or three traits each, all delivering the kind of dismal “banter” and artificial one-liners that make me want to grind my teeth to dust.

Flashbacks and POV-changes kill the pacing whenever the story threatens to get too exciting. So much of the book is long, navel-gazing flashbacks, the opposite of the urgency and suspense you'd want from a high-stakes criminal escapade. I started wishing the author had just told the damn thing in chronological order, because she was clearly more interested in backstories than she was in creating a coherent main storyline.

It's not a new observation, but I didn't buy the characters' ages and the total lack of age diversity among the main cast. One or two teen prodigies I could possibly suspend my disbelief for, but a whole squad of them? I see the issue is often glossed over with, “It's a tough world – they had to grow up fast! And it's fantasy, anyway!” but it's not the ages in themselves that are the issue. I easily believed that the teenagers in A Song of Ice and Fire were kids in a brutal world with trauma and burdens to which they had different, complicated responses. It can be done. I just didn't remotely believe it from the haphazard narration and characterisation choices in this book.

The teenagers in Six of Crows reminisce gravely about their dark pasts and long careers like people two or three times their age, to a degree that's borderline comical. Then, just as you're starting to think you could ignore their ages and imagine them as adults, there'll be some cringeworthy relationship drama that feels too childish for such hardened characters. All six of them are set up to be in perfectly contrived, chemistry-free couples, because what better time for romance than on a life-or-death stealth mission? Give me a break.

I stuck with the book to see if the central heist was pulled off in some ingenious way that justified the buildup and made clever use of the multiple POVs. It wasn't. It's just a series of annoying bungles and forced conveniences. My last bit of patience evaporated when a character was revealed, in the eleventh hour, to have secret Grisha-ex-machina powers that were never previously mentioned even in their own POV chapters. Bardugo passing up something that could've given real depth and intrigue to an underdeveloped character, in favour of springing that lousy “twist”, cemented for me that the writing wasn't just boring but bad. It somehow just got worse from there, ending in a tryhard flurry of attempted shocks and callbacks.

I really wanted to be impressed by this book, but it was a poorly crafted bore that never missed an opportunity to disappoint. I think it might even be the least enjoyable book I've ever read, and I'd have DNFed if it wasn't a buddy-read with friends (who found it equally soul-sucking). If Six of Crows is widely considered better than Shadow and Bone, the bar for the Grishaverse must be beneath the floor.

It's difficult to rate a book that's an incomplete story. The “Volume 1” isn't just an aesthetic titling choice here – this is one half of a story that doesn't stand up as a piece on its own, cutting off on a cliffhanger with no resolution for any of its storylines or characters. If I'd read the book without that foreknowledge and without having Volume 2 to hand, I'd be hopping mad.

But Volume 1 is still a good book. Kaoru Takamura's attention to detail is meticulous and forensic in a way that is truly impressive, albeit not always bags of fun. Pretty much the first half of the book is slow-burning setup of the characters' lives, career histories, and financial circumstances; it's serious, intricate, and almost documentarian in its approach.

Once the downward criminal spiral begins in earnest, unfolding in equally rigorous detail almost minute by minute, the effect is satisfying and immersive. You feel the weight of all the socio-economic and psychological factors behind the characters' decisions like a rolling boulder. And then it stops! Thankfully I've got Volume 2 ready to go.

A pleasantly light and fluffy memoir. I listened to the audiobook, read (and occasionally sung) with enormous theatrical gusto by the man himself, which added a lot to it. I can see why some reviewers might feel that Ball's a bit full of himself, but to me, in audio especially, he comes across as funny and likeable. His occasional “the show must go on” attitude towards mental health is a bit old-fashioned, to put it charitably, but he's mostly a fun guy. As the title suggests, the book leans heavily on the recent Aspects of Love revival as a through-line, which was amusing but didn't totally win me over, as there are other, more substantial projects I would've preferred to hear more about.

An interesting but mixed bag. It's imaginative and unusual – I've not read anything quite like it – but it ultimately feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. The book is at its strongest in the first half, where, like the protagonist Corwin, we're fumbling to get to grips with the setting and stakes. Amber is an intriguing world and the magic is exciting, though it all feels a bit made up on the fly.

I struggled with the writing style the most. There are multiple layers of anachronism to contend with: the of-its-time voice of Corwin's narration, speaking of digging stuff and getting creamed; his relative antiquatedness when in the modern world; and his equally alien modernity when in the magical world. I'm sure there's a degree to which the use of slang and language is intended to be jarring, and sometimes it works in fun, pulpy way, but it often goes a few degrees beyond that, just leaving me a bit baffled as to the book's desired tone.

I admire Zelazny for gunning for an epic scale while briskly avoiding an epic page-count, but the snappy length comes at the expense of rounded characters and a defined world. I'm curious to read more Amber because I have so many unanswered questions, but if the writing style remains much the same, I'm not sure I'll be sold on the series.

I'm not sure if Mona Awad intended Bunny to embody exactly the kind of hollow, edgy, art-school garbage that she's supposedly skewering in it – maybe she's just too meta and clever for me! – but that was what I felt, and I wasn't a fan. I was fully on board at first, enjoying the writing and setup, but the shine started coming off a quarter of the way in, and continued coming off until I had no goodwill left.

The main character, Samantha, is a real slog. She starts out a not-like-other-girls craven whinger, waxing misogynistic about how pink and air-headed she judges the women in her peer group to be; how they're creepy, borderline non-human bimbos, unlike her, a real person; and how, despite hardly knowing each other, she supposes they hate her for being so gritty and different. We get it, Samantha. You hate pink and collect vinyl. Whatever. She doesn't get any more compelling as the story goes on.

In general, I just couldn't buy into the characters' ages and environment. They're supposed to be post-graduate adults, but the melodrama and awkwardness that drive every character interaction feel acutely teenaged. Samantha, who can barely say hello without breaking into cold sweats, reads more like a 15-year-old than a 25-year-old with a degree and work experience. The limp character work didn't put me in the mood for the book's meandering flights of fancy, which make up most of it.

Bunny is littered with pop-culture references that I found cheap and grating. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland gets repeatedly referenced in a lazy attempt to make something intertextual happen. Characters are described as having Game of Thrones hair, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind smiles, and David Bowie eyes. (David Bowie didn't have different-coloured eyes, and it is so, so easy to Google this!)

The writing's otherwise mostly fine, but it's in service of a nonsense, nothing plot, and I don't know how rookie stinkers like “bearing” instead of “baring”, “break” instead of “brake”, and “unphased” instead of “unfazed” (twice) made it through the editorial net. The cumulative effect is of a book that isn't nearly as smart, cool or incisive as it thinks it is. It's got that Yellowface energy of a rich academic author trying to write something scathing but accidentally committing self-parody. It also reminded me of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, another monstrous-feminine horror-thriller that falls over itself trying to be clever, but I found Nightbitch much more credible and accomplished than this. Almost two stars, but I'm not feeling generous.

“My mother's hopes for me were that I would always be happy and thin. My hope for her was that she would never leave me.”

I like Katy Wix's TV work and enjoyed this memoir, insofar as you can enjoy a book that's sometimes very funny but mostly very sad. She writes with wit and articulacy about body image, disordered eating, depression and bereavement, through the framework of different significant cakes from her life. Chapters 11, 12 and 18 are tearjerkers. I listened to the audiobook, some sections of which don't work as well as they would on the page, but which is overall wonderfully read by the author.

An engaging look at the depiction of women's bodies in Western art, mythology, media, and advertising – from Venuses and Madonnas to witches and #sadgirls – and the accompanying censorship, racist stereotypes, gender essentialism, and glorification of sexual violence. It has a fairly light touch but is still thought-provoking. I listened to and enjoyed the audiobook, which was read well by the author.

I'd previously ripped the piss out of the The Poppy War for overusing the word “ensconced”, after the author obviously discovered it halfway through writing the book and couldn't stop showing it off. Imagine my joy at seeing it return a few pages into The Burning God, used completely incorrectly (“fire ensconcing everything she saw”), an ill omen that I should've heeded.

Anyway, I came at this with my expectations at rock bottom because The Dragon Republic was the worst book I'd read this year – badly written, badly characterised, pointless stodge – but I wanted to see how the story ends because I'm a sunk-cost fallacy girl. I didn't find it as grating to read as the previous two, as Kuang's grasp of prose has tangibly improved, but The Boring God drops the ball in almost every other way.

I'm not sure how a 600+ page book can achieve so little in terms of plot, worldbuilding, or developing a cast of characters. Kuang really must've mastered the art of bullshitting the word count on an essay. The pacing drags, too much is told through dry exposition, the magic system loses all internal logic, and Rin is still one of the most irritating protagonists ever written.

“She's actually Mao!” and “She's been through a lot!” aren't good enough justifications for how contrived and incoherent Rin's reactions and decisions are. She has no politics, no internal consistency. She'll believe something with 100% certainty one moment, then another character will tell her what to think and she'll change her mind instantly. She spends half the book having the same revelation almost every chapter (“Oh no, maybe the fantasy-Japanese are humans just like us!”), and then shrugging it off and setting people on fire. Any attempts to give her inner conflict and self-reflection just ring hollow after the umpteenth rehash.

The second half of the book is a series of anticlimaxes, each less whelming than the last. The Trifecta, like the Cike, are an utter waste of time. Rin's constant disappointments might be thematically meaningful, but they don't make for an engaging narrative. Almost every single side character and potentially interesting challenge is wasted in Rin's pursuit of the lamest tactical bungles possible. She's a character with no skills or solutions to offer other than violence, who's seen and committed untold atrocities, yet who's still somehow a vapid chump. The height of her military genius is putting up a big tarp so that she can cast fire when it's raining. Why are we following her, of all people? Why is anyone following her?

It struck me in this book, more than the others, that the world feels so sparse and empty – and not in the intended way of a devastated, war-torn land. Every single character is just a chess piece. There are no incidental people in this world to add flavour, depth, and colour. Undeveloped new characters appear only to serve plot points later, which Kuang foreshadows with all the grace of a dump truck delivering concrete. It's all just so joylessly mechanical, like nothing exists outside the demands of shunting Rin from one disjointed objective to another. It's hard to care for the stakes of a setting and characters that feel like cursory window dressing.

It doesn't help that the prose, despite being more considered than the previous books, still falls short of the deep themes and seismic conflicts the author is trying to tackle. The number of times Kuang relies on this phrasing stuck out enough to irritate me:

“This wasn't about lust, this was about power.”

“It wasn't about the violence. It was about the power.”“

This wasn't about humiliation. This was about survival.”

“This wasn't about grief, this was about paying respects.”

“This wasn't about troops, this was about pride.”“

It's not about pride. It's about sacrifice.”

“It wasn't about surrender. It was about the long game. It was about survival.”

Lady, I know. I'm reading the damn story. It's already not subtle. Every author has their tics and tropes, but this one really epitomises Kuang's lack of trust in the reader, and her inability to convey theme and subtext outside of bludgeoning truisms. Having now read all her books, I think that's it for me and Kuang. Her ideas are good, but her execution is always bafflingly lacklustre. As she'd probably put it: it isn't about the ideas, it's about the execution. Her workings and research are so transparent in the text. When she discovers a cool new word (see “ensconced”), you know it. When she discovers a cool new phrase like “power asymmetry” or “conventional warfare”, Christ, don't you just know it. I don't like seeing the wheels of the author's craft spinning so nakedly when I read.

Overall, it's a poor trilogy for me, and not even consistently poor within itself. The Poppy War has the most memorable plot but the most juvenile writing. The Dragon Republic has slightly better prose but the worst plot and characterisation. The Burning God has the most polished wording but precious little else. I don't even mind the ending, but the journey there isn't worth it. In terms of characters, worldbuilding, theme, tone, dialogue, and general prose – everything, basically – these books are just a sorry mess.

Adorable poems with delightful turns of phrase (other than some racial language that sends you crashing back to the 1930s). Some of the greatest cat names ever imagined. If you're hoping for some additional context to help make sense of the musical, though, you won't find any.

I was on board for the first two thirds, but the book plays its hand way too early, and quickly goes from gritty and intriguing to aimless. The tension and threat evaporate and the story spends the third act petering out. I liked the writing and seedy atmosphere, but the violence and monologues didn't interest me as much as the suspense.

Where to begin? This book offers so much to complain about before the story's even started. In Forsyth's preface, he's labouring under the delusion that Gaston Leroux was an incompetent, forgotten hack who didn't know how to write his own story. He asserts that “the way poor Gaston tells it is a mess” and that the storyline should basically have been something else altogether. He talks like he's doing the sorry bastard a favour by taking a break from writing airport thrillers to make this sequel.

So, right from the outset, this “fanfic” isn't even the work of a fan, but a writer with total disdain for the original work. His criticisms are, to me, trifling and pedantic, like Leroux not giving the story an exact date and getting the technicalities of gas lamps wrong. Some of these are undoubted flubs by Leroux, but they're also beside the point of the story. I don't really care if The Phantom of the fucking Opera functions as a watertight forensic crime thriller because it isn't meant to be one. Who's reading that book and throwing it down in disgust when Leroux gets the weight of a chandelier wrong? This guy, it seems.

I also disliked his scorn for the Persian and his dismissal of everything that happens in the Persian-centric sections of the original book. So, between the physics pedantry and the Daroga slander, Forsyth's preface didn't warm me to his take on the story, and I came at it with distrust.

But after all that, there's not enough substance in The Phantom of Manhattan to warrant the author's grandstanding. The writing and presentation of the story are decent and quite intriguing. I liked the idea of switching narrator for each chapter, telling the story through the monologues, dialogues and reports of major and minor characters. However, there's very little depth on offer here. The original book's characters barely get a look in, for all Forsyth's insistence that he could write them better than Leroux. Christine's viewpoint is conspicuous by its absence, which says it all really.

The pacing is brisk, which I did enjoy, but just when the story seems to be building up to something, it's rushing to be over. It's as if the book is missing a third of its plot. The half-baked, hasty conclusion feels like the author, too, wanted this nonsense over and done with. I was left wondering what the point was, and how Forsyth, after all his righteous complaining, had managed to do so little with the source material.

Still, it's better than the truly dogshit Love Never Dies, and I assume the physics and measurements are unimpeachable, as we all want from a romance novel.

As a massive, life-long fan of Watership Down, I probably should've read this sooner. Without doing down Horwood's originality, it's another story in which the British countryside becomes the setting for a sweeping epic, in which unassuming little animals have a complex social hierarchy, factions, customs, folklore, spirituality, and propensity for brutal violence.

I wish I liked the result more, though. For me, it doesn't reconcile its mythic ambitions with its cast of humble animals as successfully as Watership Down. While that book is my paragon of talking-animal texts, prophecies and deus ex machina and all, I wasn't a big fan of Duncton Wood's use of those devices. Characters wander into each other's lives led by vibes and mystical coincidences, without much connective tissue otherwise. The text tells us that their loves and loyalties are deep and profound, but these are preordained rather than earned through the interactions we see. The result does have an otherworldly appeal, but I'd have liked some more grounded motivations and relationships for the moles. This fatalism sucks the urgency and agency out of an already slow-paced story.

Duncton Wood sometimes gets mistaken for a children's book, and it's very much not. The characters are moles and that's where the cuteness ends. The moles are animalistic enough to be preoccupied with mating and producing litters, but anthropomorphic enough that this incurs a pretty strong degree of sexual violence, incest and infanticide. It's an adult fantasy book that just happens to star talking moles, and is more A Song of Ice and Fire than The Lord of the Rings, to which it's commonly compared. The writing can also be dense and abstract, and there's a lot of evocative but long-winded talk about landscapes, tunnels and weather. By halfway through I found myself skipping over paragraphs of these beautiful, bloated descriptions, which I never like to do.

Overall, it's not a perfect book, outstaying its welcome by a couple of hundred pages, but it's a vivid and memorable entry in the small niche of talking-animal xenofiction for adults. I gather that the later books are less rapey, but even longer and more religious, so I'm not sure I'll continue.

This has been on my to-read list since 2011, so I thought I'd better knock it off. I was surprised at how slow and put-downable a 99-page book could be, but it got its (fish) hooks into me in last third.

This was a re-read for the first time as an adult, to see how a childhood favourite held up. The Redwall books were a vital formative influence in my life, introducing me to good-versus-evil fantasy full of perilous journeys, ancient prophecies, and heroic battles, at an age when I wasn't quite ready to tackle The Lord of the Rings (and perhaps didn't have a full grasp on what fantasy was). I absolutely devoured and lived in these books, to a degree that I haven't really experienced with any series since.

It took a couple of years for the flatness of the books' worldview to wear on me. Why were mice always good and rats always bad? If otters and badgers were good, why were weasels and ferrets, their cousins, always evil? Where would mink (surely equidistant between an otter and a ferret) fit into this world? These were big thematic questions for me as a tween! The few books that dipped a toe into moral greyness never did enough to satisfy me. Though this black-and-whiteness was the author's intention, it bothered me, and pushed me towards books like Garry Kilworth's Welkin Weasels, which allowed for characters with more interesting ambiguity. But it's to Brian Jacques' credit that he got me thinking about that kind of thing at all.

Anyway, about this specific book. I love how uncertain and odd (perhaps even “bad”) the worldbuilding is compared to the rest of the series. In this iteration of the setting, we have horses and cows, French cuisine, and the implied existence of Portugal and Virginia. It makes no sense and the scale of the world is impossible to reconcile, which will bother some, but I really enjoy the almost fairytale-like ambiguity. It's like a bedtime story that the teller is working out as he goes along, fully committed to the drama but a bit hazy on the details.

All the hallmarks of a Redwall book are here: a sadistic villain, a stalwart hero, exquisite banquets, strange riddles, acts of derring-do, strong West Country accents, violent deaths, and a big climactic duel. The plot is straightforward and the characters don't hold up to much scrutiny, but I like that Jacques' formula hadn't yet calcified. In terms of prose, he was no slouch and didn't patronise his young audience – Redwall is written with a more ambitious vocabulary than some current fantasy for older readers.

The tone is all over the shop, and surprisingly dark in places, with death and violence described in unequivocal language. You go from cosy scenes of mice lunching on wholesome food to enemies lying in “a red mist of death”, getting slowly strangled, or being killed with boiling water. As a kid these deaths sometimes disturbed me. Reading them as an adult, I'm surprised and sort of impressed that Jacques would go there. It may be a cute little mouse's world, but the stakes are life or death and the body count is sky high.

Even though this entry isn't perfect and hasn't all aged well, I can totally see how the series sowed in me a love for books with rich descriptive language and a degree of darkness, even (or especially) when aimed at younger readers. It encapsulates so much of what I still look for in books and in my own attempts at writing. I'm thankful to Jacques for having me reading grisly deaths and looking up words like “legerdemain” and “alacrity” as a child. I never read his last few books, but maybe I'll finally get around to it now.

A disorganised but gripping memoir by a man so singularly strange, tenacious, and unkillable, he almost borders on supernatural. Your mileage for it will depend on how much Herzog™ you can take (for me, a lot). He's possibly one of the most interesting people alive – the misadventures and idiosyncratic tangents of his life are remarkable before he's even out of his teens. I listened to the audiobook because I could happily listen to him talk about volcanoes, ants, and Michael Shannon all day. I recommend it for the maximum Herzog experience.

Sillier than expected, for better or worse. Is this really the grimdark guy? I wanted it to be more “Delightfully twisted and evil - The Guardian” than it is – the contagion of exclamation marks is the grimmest thing about it. The prose is sometimes good and sometimes amateurish. I found the catchphrasiness and spelling out of every “Argh” and “Ugh” to be cheesy contrivances, for an author I'd heard praised so much for his gritty economy of language. Along with a dozen instances of the phrase “empty gums”, the vocabulary just felt lacking at times. Repetitious wording is a pet peeve for me, whether by design or otherwise, and something I don't like noticing so plainly.

All that said, I enjoyed the characters (especially Logen and Glokta, empty gums and all) and the slow-building intrigue between them. From the series and author's reputation, I expected more than some bang-average fluff, though I gather this is his worst book even among fans. It felt very much like an extended prologue to something better. I didn't love it like I hoped, but it ended well and was good enough to have me looking forward to more. I would really like to see a fuller world and sharper writing for these characters.

From the first chapter, I was sure I wouldn't want this book to end. Some 800+ pages later, I would still happily have read a few hundred pages more. McMurtry's omniscient narration is a wonder; the warmth and skill with which he explores his huge ensemble's flaws and foibles are a joy to behold. I loved this book.

An assortment of interesting essays about subjects useful for fantasy writers: jobs for women in medieval Europe, fatal chest wounds, standing armies, cultural exchange between nations throughout history, the origins of chocolate, archery being hard work, realistic hikes, Hollywood horse myths, and much more. Lots to enjoy and mull over, even among the subjects not relevant to my own projects. I listened to the audiobook, which was engagingly read.