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Very insightful

Revisado: 09-27-24

Very insightful and relatable human interactions. Very fun romp I loved the juxtaposition of the two sisters.

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Colonial fantasy done right

Revisado: 09-26-22

I have an MA in English, focusing on decolonization, from one of the better programs that focuses on such topics. I was recommended this book due to my interest in fantasy as a space for imagining solutions to impossible problems surrounding colonialism.

It starts out as rocky as fantasy usually does. I won't lie, I don't LOVE fantasy. I haven't even been a fan since a Robert Jordan phase in my mid-teens. But, past the gamey dialogue between Damien and Cianni, I was hooked -- excited, even. Gerald Tarrant was just so goddamn fascinating: A colonial lord, trading his heritage and family future in order to codify a religion that would solidify his colonial construct. Damien's struggle to grapple with this is especially intriguing, as I personally resonate with his plight -- I was raised Christian and have since been hit over the head with discovering that my church's founder was a monster.

I don't mean to say you need to relate, just that Damien's experiences are grounded in realism -- which is impressively rare in fantasy, which deals more often in shallow aesthetic than true thematic depth.

I finished the whole Trilogy and my review is that this is a fabulously dark, but enlightening conversation on what colonization looks like from the perspective of two men who have very different roles in the system. And that's a hard enough book to find that I recommend it whenever I find it.

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Great twists and turns, but stalls in act 3

Revisado: 09-26-22

The complexity that Friedman goes for here is substantially ante'd-up, with a largely unseen but very felt villain. The portrayal of religion is perhaps overly shallow, despite being complex, but it gets the point across. I'd read some reviews prior to listening, and this book is often criticized for forgetting characters like Cianni. Personally, I found her story to be complete in Book 1, with the cast here being much stronger and losses much more felt. The end kind of unspools in a couple of strange ways, but I try to avoid spoilers. I'll just say that, given the thematic underpinnings of colonialism, and Tarrant's own stated theories, the end seemed to too easily resolve certain problems that deserved more thought and gravity than the length of the book allows for. Book 3, which I've just finished, however, improves on this immensely.

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Great ending to trilogy

Revisado: 09-26-22

The interplay of religion and colonization, mingled with family drama and the moral dilemmas, was really great. Damien's tangle of responsibilities played out about as expected, but he still really carried the story and kept Gerald relevant to the end. As a vessel for my interest, I don't think pure focus on Gerald could have pulled that off. B-b-b-bromance!

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Lived in Nome. This is... interesting.

Revisado: 10-07-20

pretty standard "western in the north" fare. not bad, but the story is hilarious on accident...

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Reactionary Islamophobia 101

Revisado: 03-13-20

First, I'd like to commend the reader. Beautiful work by Ron Butler, who I've listened to before and was just as impressed.

VS Naipaul, however, is one of the most stunningly typical selections for so-called liberal awards committees to elevate. He weaves wondrous prose around his personal views, packages them in a basic, but meandering plot, and sends it at you with an accosting flair. That might sound like a great book. Because, on a technical level, it is skillful craft.

But the context and content cannot be ignored by a conscious audience. The atavism at the heart of the novel is this: Humans are animals, colonization is our nature, and certain races and ideologies are doomed to pursue the wrong methods to accomplish that nature. Blacks rape. Muslims murder. Women seek out violence upon themselves. Rejecting these self-evident truths is either the self-delusion of victor's remorse or the Munchausen's syndrome of the conquered. That is the world of VS Naipaul. That is the thematic propulsion of the novel and, while I'm sure plenty will say "You dont know that, its really about the evils of colonialism," I don't need to dredge up the ugly quotes and he-said/she-said's of Naipaul to prove my point. My good friend Google can do that for you.

Avoid except for dissection and study. But remember, reactionary writing doesn't deserve or need to be bought to be read. If you're looking for colonial writing that is actually good and not just award fodder that the award-giver is too afraid to either criticize or admit they agree, go with Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter by Vargas, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, A Sister to Scheherezade by Assia Djebar, or ESPECIALLY the very similar, but astoundingly better July's People by Nadine Gordimer. July's People is the book that a just world would have given Naipaul's awards.

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Imagine a Nazi reading this.

Revisado: 04-26-19

First off, Appelman is a singular reader. His range is up there with some of my favorites. So no complaint there, other than maybe he is not the best choice if you can consider Marie the main character.

The problem with that consideration, moving on to story, is that she clearly isn't. The Nazi is. And what this book does is take a moderate approach to what it means to be a Nazi. What I'm sure was intended as a window into the madness of the ideology just ends platforming its views. Imagine, briefly, a real neo-Nazi reading this and they will feel that their views are being explained quite well, and that the fact is the original practitioners of those ideas made mistakes. Mistakes that, with a little effort and correction and purity, could be resolved without the overall project.

As evidence for this, google what blind people thought of this book. You will find that the ableism and caricaturization of the disease is more similar to views in the 30's than today. It is an unacceptable trove of James Bond stereotypes. Marie's uncle is endeared to us by having shell-shock. The villain seeks a magic stone to cure his cancer. The Nazi's failed sidekick suffers brain damage as his blessed escape from the Nazi school, where his moral disquiet was coupled with... myopia. The Nazi's sister is raped and also one of the only people trying to talk sense into him. Werner is pseudo-albino, defining his worth to the party. And our damsel in distress is a near-mystically beautiful blind girl -- seriously, Werner's first sighting of her could be made into a blazon, deconstructing her physical image into objectified nature cliches -- who has a fascination for children's stories as a substitute for a personality. She is obsessive-compulsive, counting things in her environment because apparently that's what blind people do (spoiler: it isn't), and her father bathes her when she is 12 years old, as if she cannot do this herself and needs her father to rather than the grown adult woman nanny downstairs. Her total lack of a character arc in favor of being a prepackaged sympathy magnet is nowhere more exemplified than in the fact that Werner is the only character with an arc. Her existence serves as the functioning object of his redemption story, like a princess to the huntsman in Snow White, ultimately allowing him to take up her quest of destroying the magic rock that is -- I am not joking -- causing the war.

Plenty of stories rewrite the Nazi story with their fascination with the occult at the forefront. Superhero comic books almost invariably do this. What is harmless there is here right at the heart of why this story should have been rejected at an editor's table. The MacGuffin IS the Nazi ideology. The Nazi project -- as they reported it -- was to secure the permanent future of the Aryan race. The stone grants immortality. The Nazis, in order to do this, chose to cause monumental suffering. The rock causes the loved ones of the possessor to suffer and die. This rock, then, is the source the Allies choosing to bomb the city and of the Nazis to enact horrors on the innocent. Think about that for a second. From the perspective of the Nazis, things might not have gone so wrong and they could have perfected the human race. It's disgustingly and ironically short-sighted and is just another wasted Pullitzer on a dime-a-dozen WWII romanticized Nazi power fantasy.

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Fantasy Genre Needs This Book

Revisado: 07-24-16

As for the book itself, it cannot be beaten as a series about the archetype fantasy character of the bard; a rogue, a mystic, a madman, irreverent, tensely sexual, hilarious, and always, always, always arrogant in a way that either delights or annoys, depending on your mileage laws. The only reasons it is not a 5 are due to a few seemingly rushed areas, but mostly because the end may meander into wish fulfillment territory at times - as this is fantasy, that would be the standard, but because it is so out of this world better than most stock fantasy, I found it jarring.

As an audiobook, however, I found the book irksome at times. His voices for foreign, accented characters is a bit tiresome. I find most reading of such characters to be the same, but Rothfuss seemed to manage a happy balance in his accents that made them kind of fun. The narrator could not keep up, but he is consistent in this respect, to his credit. A much easier task, that in which he failed, is pronunciation, changing for instance [Deh-vee] to [Day-vee]. Minor annoyance that you notice if you're really into it. My biggest problem is his oversimplification of scale in his tonality, making epic, desperate, funny, melancholy, and just plain normal all sound the same; monotone is the right word, but it's not a droll -- it's just always the same. The college humor comedy is hobbled at times because the narrator is reading it as if it is sad, or something (the exception is Elodin's antics... spot on). Could be personal, but I'm not the only one to notice.

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