ergative's reviews
1041 reviews

Don't get me wrong, this book was... not good. But it was not good in an incredibly earnest, childlike way that was kind of endearing. You know how they say dance like no one is watching? This book danced like no one was watching. It was not a good dancer. But it was unashamed, and I have to respect that.

This was not the strongest of the Amelia Peabody mysteries. The amnesia plotline had elements of humour to it, but the whole framing -- 'oh, remember how exciting things were when we were young?' -- wiith all its pining for the fun of thee earlier books, meant that the interactions between Amelia and Emerson when he doesn't remember her felt like Peters was attempting to recapture some of the bits that worked well in the first book. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a decade-plus married couple might remember wtih some yearning all the good times of the past, so it's not like the whole amnesia narrative was poorly motivated. But still: combining that theme with damn Sethos again (recurring villains are so tedious) was very risky, because it also reminds the reader, 'nope, nothing new here! Same old, same old.' 

I hope Sethos stays dead. It's too easy to have a villain who can disguise himself as anyone he wants, even old acquaintances who are personally known to the narrator. I can swallow the amnesia plotline with no problems, but I always found Sethos's disguises a bit unconvincing.

Ramses's letters were very funny. I always think Ramses is a hoot. It's very, very difficult to do a genius whiz-kid well, but this book has nailed it.

This had so many good elements to it that could have made a kick-ass book, but instead just fell limp and flat. Dark academia with anatomists and chemists developing secret magical uses of phlogisten and aether and sigils? Yes please! 18th century Glasgow vs. Edinburgh medical professors fighting Scottish enlightenment battles? Yes please! Secret societies engaging in hidden power plays of town vs. gown to determine who runs the universities? Private assassins who are risen from the dead in arcane rituals? Hidden libraries with magical portals? Yes yes yes please!

And yet none of it actually came together in any kind of meaningful plot. William Cullen and Joseph Black spend most of their time playing musical chairs between positions at Glasgow and Edinburgh. The secret societies and various aristocratic patrons engage in murderous battles to support Cullen and/or Black for one positoin or another, except when they go away for ten years for reasons that are never entirely clear. Really, a lot of the power structures and motivations that drive all of the plot of this book are murky. What do the dark chymists actually want besides power that makes them so anti-Cullen? How do the institutional politics of university governance, split apparently between town councils, aristocratic meddlers, funding bodies, and--I guess--secret evil dark societies---how does that all actually work? Department meetings and wars of public opinion would be a lot more interesting if I actually understood the stakes and mechanisms of decision making. It was a weird combination of too much telling and also not enough telling. I spent a lot of time being told about people's various alliances, but I still wanted more exposition. What were the stakes behind the rivalries? Some of the ultimate stakes are so secret that nobody can actually be basing their alliances on them, and others are so entirely secondary to the main power struggles (like, road repairs, or the logistics of translation in smallpox inoculation projects) that it's baffling that they can be behind the deadly power struggles at the universities. I saw a lot of ticking, but none of the mechanism behind it, and so the experience of reading the book was about as interesting as watching the second hand on a clock go around in circles.

I think the problem here is that all the people are real: William Cullen was a real dude; Joseph Black is so real that there's a campus building named after him at the University of Glasgow. So the seemingly aimless switchy swapping between Glasgow and Edinburgh and the weird 10-year delays between plot points are presumably constrained by actual historical records. I imagine the Cumbernauld Road repairs and Highland smallpox inoculation projects were likewise based on real history. But the result is that the pacing was lumpy and the plot dragged and clumped. Oh, and the attempt to include women in the very dude-heavy plot was so miserably contentless that I would prefer they'd been left out entirely. It felt almost insulting to have token female characters with pointless appendix plots assigned o them thrown in my face, as if that would be enough to mitigate the fact that this is a book entirely about men doing men things.

So: great conceit; lousy execution.

This was exactly what I wanted, exactly when I wanted it. For some reason, ancient Mesopotamia has been suddenly fascinating to me again, and this history scratched an itch. It was quite dry in some places, largely focusing on conquest and political squabbles, but it also offered some fabulous letters. My favourites include the one from a boy to his mother, complaining that a peer of his at school, the son of his father's servant, has better new clothes than he does, and ends with the heartless chastisement that the other boy's mother, who only adopted him, evidently loves her son, while the letter writer's mother, who actually bore the letter writer from her body, evidently does not love him. There's also a plaintive letter from someone begging for his job back, which makes reference to three previous letters, and which was found UNOPENED 2500 years later.

I was very struck by the treatment of Ashurbanipal, who I was already familiar wtih somewhat from that magnificent exhibition at the British Museum back in 2019 or so. I had known that he was famous for creating this huge library of cuneiform texts--and he did do that!--but he was also kind of a Trumpean asshole, according to Ekhart Frahm, who loved to be seem as a mighty warrior, but actually arranged for oracles to tell him that it was okay to stay home rather than lead the troops; who wanted to be seen as a great hunter, but actually had to stage lion hunts in controlled circumstances to minimize the actual danger to himself; who wanted the reputation of being a great scholar, but whose own handwriting was pretty bad, and whose correspondants had to explain the difficult words to him in their letters. He was belligerant and prickly and totally sucked as a ruler, and it's rather satisfying to imagine him seeing his treatment in Frahm's book. 'Yes, yes, thanks for the library--those are great texts--but remember, dear reader, Ashurbanipal was not at all that cool.'

Frahm also offers perspectives on biblican characters that he claims are heavily influenced by Assyrian kings. Properties of the Jewish conception of a monotheistic God are in places directly lifted (he claims) from Assyrian proclamations sent around the conquered lands of Israel and Judah; as if, rather than accept the dictates of a mortal, secular ruler, the early Jews instead decided to attribute them to a God, as a kind of opposition literature. Christians, too, are interpreted in this way. I was very struck by Frahm's account of how the name Lucifer arose as a consequence of how Sennacherib was treated by his contemporaries at his downfall. They called him the bringer of light, a name he used for himself in his proclamations, but mockingly, rejoicing to see him brought low. Because he was so reviled by the people he conquered, the association between a conquering evildoer and the name 'lightbringer' was eventually applied to Satan. I don't know how accurate this is, because Frahm also tries to claim an Assyrian origin for the Bible story of Jonah and the whale that was not at all convincing, so maybe Frahm is just super keen on arguing that Everything Is Assyrian Actually. But this is a perfectly acceptable perspective from an Assyriologist.

What I really, really wanted more of, and what the book didn't give me, was more description of the linguistic situation of Assyria. There are occasional comments about things like, 'this name a western Semitic name, so this person was probably not ethnically Assyrian'; and we learn that Aramaic was the lingua franca of the empire, rather than the language the Assyrians spoke, but I never actually learnt what language the ethnic Assyrians spoke actually was! I had to go to Wikipedia to discover that it was also a Semitic language, but a type of Akkadian. And this linguistic sloppiness applies to names, as well. Sometimes names are given with the conventional transliteration of cuneiform spelling--e.g., Ashur-uballit; sometimes they're given their biblical spellings (e.g., Sharrum-ken is called Sargon after the first mention); and sometimes I don't know what's going on. Like, Ashurbanipal is clearly beginning wiht the Ashur- prefix that is so common in these king names, but why is it not hyphenated? And it was very, very late in the book before Frahm told us that Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon, was also called Ashur-aha-iddina--i.e., had the same Ashur-prefix as all the others! I guess we're getting the biblical spelling for that, too? I just wanted some linguistic consistency! Give us all the names in Assyrian and tell us their Biblical counterparts! The whole point of this book is to lay out the history as revealed through the Assyrian texts, so why is Frahm letting the bible tell us how these names were spelled? 

But those are small matters. I next have a book about the history of Babylon, and I can't wait to dig into that.

Perfectly solid, just about the same as the first. Didn't grip me, but it was lighter than the other book I've been reading at hte same time, so it's a good palate cleanser. I'm not going to seek out more of these books proactively, but if I'm at the library and one is prominently displayed I might pick it up.

Could have done so much more with what it had. I appreciate all the narrative opportunities that it set up, but I got perpetually annoyed by how many off them were missed, in favor of much more prosaic, clumsy, obvious decisions

Full review on Nerds of a Feather: http://www.nerds-feather.com/2024/09/review-shigidi-and-brass-head-of.html

This was . . . deeply perplexing. There were many literary devices in this book that didn’t seem to actually do anything. The broad plot is as follows: Nathalie, fresh out of fashion/costume-design school, gets a short-term job designing the costume for a circus act that is simultaneously obscure in the broader world (‘Russian bar’), and highly prestigious in its own little domain. So she goes to Vladivostok, lives and works on site with the performers in an out-of-season closed circus complex, and various things happen that seem intended to be symbolic, but in the end never actually pay off in any coherent way.

For example: there is a persistent theme of daddy issues. Nathalie’s father never travels abroad, so she rarely sees him. The three performers in the act used to be a father, Anton, a son, and a third guy, Nino. But the son got hurt and had to be replaced with a third performer, a woman named Anna and the shadow of the son’s fate lingers over a lot of the group’s psychology. Meanwhile, Nino is feeling a lot of family pressure (he comes from a circus family himself) to make good on this act. And at the end, Anna meets up with her father, who’s coming to see her compete in a big circus conference thing. So there’s lots of fathers and thoughts and so on that are present in the plot, but they don’t really do anything.

There’s also some odd timeline stuff happening. Nathalie’s previous project before coming to the circus was to do the costumes for someone who is absolutely not her boyfriend, who seemed a bit self-centred and not collaborative with her in the way that she wanted. But interspersed with the circus job we get some epistolary chapters taking place in the future, in which we learn that Nathalie seems to have gone back to the boyfriend guy and had a baby with him. Ok…? And…?

There’s a cat that the circus manager is fond of. It’s not well. A bird flies into the window and dies. The cat dies. Ok . . . ? And. . . ?

Then at the end, the sound system for the big circus conference thing doesn’t work with their act, so they don’t perform. They go their separate ways, keep in touch for a bit, then fall out of touch. The end.

What?

There was so much literary mechanical structure in here, but nothing was connected to anything else. You can’t write a book by showing me a heap of cogs and belts and screws and wheels scattered on the ground. You have to assemble them into something functional. And this book didn’t do it. Like the circus act, it had a vision, but never realized it.

Unless that was the point? In which case, I really don’t appreciate my time being wasted by meta-narrative games.

I really, really enjoyed this! It gave me vibes that I associate with being a teenager, curling up with a fat fantasy book from my father's collection on a Saturday afternoon, with all the innocent freedom of not needing to do my own taxes. Just a rollicking good fantasy book, with politics and intrigue and con jobs and so much punching and stabbing. Just a grand ride, all along.

Wow. This was so bad. This was so astonishingly bad. Anyone who wants to claim that people were better writers 75 years ago needs to read this book. Wow, it was bad. I could write more, about its weird inclusion of mystery reveals when no mystery was set up; about its entirely unconvincing and predictable romance; about its blythe conservatism that has upper class people merrily laughing about how the lower classes are like animals, really; about its wildly bizarre approach towards family values, in which a father is allowed to desert a daughter with absolutely no consequences--but, to be honest, that would require my spending more time thinking about this book, and I have rarely experienced such relief upon reaching the last page as I did with this ghastly excuse for a novel. My god, reader, it was so bad.

yeesh. This was a sad, grim, horrible book. I'd call it misanthropic, except it's not that other people are bad or hateful. It's that everyone is miserable and sad, and there's no joy to be had in one's life, only attempts to pretend at it on the surface. People who think they're happy are naive and foolish, and every attempt at which human a connection might be made, an honest truth exchanged, is either missed, or ends up being unsatisfying. It's a book about a fundamentally suicidal woman who doesn't realize that suicide is an option. It's a book in which clinical depression seems the obvious diagnosis, except that the problem is the entire world is depressed, not just the primary viewpoint character. It was an miserable book, written by a miserable author, and it made me miserable to have read it.