Jesse > Recent Status Updates

I am dying at the guards coming together as a unit trying to even the odds to a million to one chance and Carrot getting in on it.

Carrot is a great, fun character but in reading this I get that this is more about Vimes’s character arc and really I think that’s why this story hits so much better than, say, Wyrd Sisters or Pyramids or… really, anything involving Rincewind, seeing as how his entire deal is “coward who eventually brings himself to do the brave thing” over and over again.

I think the fact that this book lacks the picaresque adventures of the previous ones and sticks more or less to Ankh-Morpork helps a lot in anchoring the setting, the character, and the plot.

The cast of characters in this one is just great. I can’t wait for Men at Arms when Angua and Littlebottom join in. The Night Watch books are probably my favorite sub-series of Discworld. The ones with Death come close (I love Death as a character, the stuff he gets up to, and my first Disc book was Soul Music; I think I crushed a bit on Susan Sto Helit)

I love the Discworld and it’s fine comedic fantasy but the first seven novels that I re-read were fine but Equal Rites and Mort were two GREAT ones. The intersection of Vetinari with Vimes and Carrot with the sort of magic noir plot is awesome. Maybe I just have a soft spot for it from the time I was working night shift security… but probably not. Carrot is a great take on Twoflower.

😬

Snicket is the master at giving you just enough explanatory details alongside new, questionable ones in order to keep you on the cusp of understanding everything… and I think the long speech by Ishmael and the one by Widdershins is a long prep toward the fact that there will be no satisfying, ultimate conclusion that reveals all.

Like, it was a given that the island was a holdout of the VFD, but the why of Ishmael and everything else… I kind of know how this story is going to end and however Snicket ties this all together, it’s going to be DENSE.

Halfway through and I don’t think that we will get some sort of huge series of revelations that blasts away the secrecy of the series… but I could be wrong.

Lots of dark academia type shipwreck jokes, here. The coconut cordial is not exactly a joke; I’m sure it’s a reference to the lotus-eaters from the Odyssey or something similar, just as an extended metaphor for people who isolate and refuse to do anything heroic OR villainous.

It thankfully didn’t take long to get on an island. I know that there is something very going on with this coastal shelf and Ishmael and the sole tree with the “bitter apple”. All of this wrapped up in a book literally called The End…

It sucks that Robin is following a similar tragic arc to Rin as this book nears its close. But that’s the whole spread, I think, as these characters demonstrate the myriad viewpoints in this extraordinary situation.

Why do I get the feeling that this story ends with an Our Violent Ends explosion

In a way I kind of wish we had a more cozy tale of this world but doing so would deny its purpose for existing, reminding me of Reid’s notes in the Wolf and the Woodsman of how the glut of Russian-inspired fantasy was depoliticizing the nation’s history. This is part of why Gabriel Garcia Márquez is so rewarding to read; he is not the least bit apolitical.

Umm, I didn’t think that would happen at this point in time the novel but given the scope of what Kuang is aiming for the idea of this ending with… one particular death… was not tenable.

Well the cat’s out of the bag now! I’m guessing that Anthony was the voice that Robin had recognized? It certainly wouldn’t have been Ramy or Victoire given how surprised they were. Anyway moving the setting to Canton post-fallout ought to be great at galvanizing Robin now that he is directly exposed to the horrific English interests and must represent them in the negotiations.

Third year over! Kuang is also tackling the Industrial Revolution in addition to everything else, making this novel even denser in everything that it is trying to shine a light on. It’s great, and Robin’s perspective—too complacent to want to threaten the status quo while he benefits from it—is eminently relatable.

I enjoy the backdrop of Robin’s classmates but I am mostly anticipating exactly how they will all fit together when all hell breaks loose, later in the book. The long passages on translation and etymology are great. Learning katakana opened my eyes to some degree insofar as seeing Japanese having an alphabet for loanwords and swiftly seeing that sone of them are obviously not English. But this goes a lot farther.

The saga of Robin balancing his love for what Oxford means to him and his friends with his knowledge of the underlying reality of the mechanics of Babel and what the British empire is up to, it’s heady. I am loving this book so far. I am as of yet baffled by the negative comments that I’ve heard. What’s the root, anti-intellectualism? There’s no shame in being out of your depth.

Okay; Babel moves at a pretty good pace. We have a much better idea of the powers at play. It’s also a select new class of translators. Remarkably so, as the internal characters note.
Two men, two women, lots of feet being inserted into mouths. I am loving Robin’s character so far, just a new guy trying to keep his head down but in the perfect position to sympathize with what the Hermes society is up to.

In a vague way I’m reminded of The Golden Compass but Kuang’s narrative has more teeth when it comes to questions about racism and colonialism and, well, child abuse. This world is a bit less idyllic than Lyra’s, too, especially since it opens with Robin surrounded in death, particularly that of his mother, his only known parent. The book doesn’t try to hide the nature of his relation to Lovell, though.

“The Land Beyond the Blow”

Okay, satire a la Gulliver’s Travels I can do. This dude gets knocked out and then visits a series of differing nations. One of them worships dogs, Bierce’s least favorite pet. Another lampoons the American election process. I think there was a bit of funning on England, too. There are a lot of nations visited but pretty much no adventure.

“Ashes of the Beacon”

Arrrrggggh

There is less insane fantasy here and more of the political-satire-through-independent-observer. Bierce takes shots at pretty much everyone and everything, here, from insurance to capitalism to trusts to… the treatment of women in America.

“Annals of the Future Historian”

The reuse of certain names and concepts within these future histories suggests that there is a kind of continuity between the stories. I wonder if anyone has tried to weave an overall picture? This has a varied number of subjects skewered, from Theodore Roosevelt the hunter to Carrie Nation, destroyer of saloons.

“The Great Strike of 1895”

Bierce’s fanciful account of a writer’s guild strike. As far as satire goes, it’s clear that Bierce loved writing but found the idea of the nation not being able to get along without authors ridiculous. One of his grotesques was also anti-union or at least anti-striking, whichever one had the animals striking and the entire town destroying itself.

“The Wizard of Bumbassa”

A bizarre story about an electric railway from New York to Chicago where a despot wishes to be able to have a train stop instantly. Bierce has a lot of ghoulish amusement in describing what happens to the people who happen to be riding the train when this happens.

“For the Ahkoond”

When I heard about future historians my first thoughts were to the Edgar Allan Poe satire where Poe wrote from the point of view of an archaeologist looking at New England from the far future. This is closer to the same feel but with high sci-fantasy details like electric rifles and dinosaurs and glacial catastrophes.

“John Smith, Liberator (From a Newspaper of the Far Future)”

Uhhh. The point of this one is someone looking back into the past from the very distant future and mangling all of the details of history together. It’s kind of hard to follow because it is literally just crowbarring disparate details together, of which there are billions throughout history, but a few of the mangled elements are recognizable by me.

“Across the Continent”

2,000 years into the future people travel by airship, slavery is legal in New England, and the situation among the Mormons has changed so that it is the women who have multiple husbands and the men fight to the death for the right to be married. Okay, so the first and third points actually sound like a really cool premise.

“A Scientific Dream”

A dream-bound fantasy spurred on by Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species where Bierce imagines humans in California with a host of crowbarred adaptations including gills and tails based on ecological changes. The narrator finds none of this horrifying; in fact, he is exultant in the apparent demonstration of the principles of evolution.