into the dark
Dec. 31st, 2025 06:52 pmThat sure has been a year. Further retrospective to come, I suppose.
What are you reading now?
The Hobbit, nth reread. Over at LG&M Abigail Nussbaum is blogging a reread of Lord of the Rings, and that's inspired me to pick them up again. I've a nice anniversary edition of Hobbit with JRRT's illustrations to read, and Pop Shackelford's late-seventies hardbacks of the trilogy. Unsure what I'll do for a Silmarillion but that is a next-week problem at the earliest.
Usually I'm a little annoyed by The Hobbit: it's tonally dissonant from LotR, more of a bedtime story than Serious Fiction. This time through I'm finding it an absolute delight. It's very clearly written to be read aloud, and the prose is just musical. I am also hearing the voices of John 'Gandalf' Huston and Orson 'Bilbo' Bean in my head as I read. Presumably this will extend to Richard 'Smaug' Boone as well once I get that far.
What did you just finish reading?
A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name / The Thousand Eyes duology, which came highly recommended ages ago. Sigh. I wanted to like these, and did like the first third of the first book. Csorwe is an Orc girl who's due to be sacrificed to her god, the Unspoken Name; instead she gets kidnapped by someone who is quite probably the book's evil sorcerer and becomes quite a competent right hand for him. I quite enjoyed Csorwe's point-of-view and voice. I liked it less when she was forced to work with a particular obnoxious character who she had good reason to hate, even less when we started getting his viewpoint and were clearly intended to sympathise with him, and much less than that when her viewpoint disappears entirely a quarter through the second book.
These are doing very neat things with gods and immortality. I wish I'd been less annoyed and more able to appreciate those neat things. If you can get past Talasseres being insufferable, and don't mind character-stretching wisecracking, I'd recommend them.
Before that, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, best summed up by her: "I started off writing this like ha ha, academia is hell, and then it was oh no, academia IS Hell." Cambridge graduate student in magic descends to the Underworld to retrieve her advisor, who she thinks she killed; she's accompanied by a golden-boy grad student for (it turns out) similar reasons. This sneaks in under the wire as my favourite read of the year. It opens with a passage complaining about inaccuracies in depictions of the journey to the underworld:
I love this, but then I would. It's great. I am deeply annoyed that the publisher (and the author's agent) refuse to even talk to Subterranean about doing a fancy edition.
What do you think you'll read next?
LotR, naturellement. After that, anyone's guess. Lord knows there's plenty on the shelf to pick from.
What are you reading now?
The Hobbit, nth reread. Over at LG&M Abigail Nussbaum is blogging a reread of Lord of the Rings, and that's inspired me to pick them up again. I've a nice anniversary edition of Hobbit with JRRT's illustrations to read, and Pop Shackelford's late-seventies hardbacks of the trilogy. Unsure what I'll do for a Silmarillion but that is a next-week problem at the earliest.
Usually I'm a little annoyed by The Hobbit: it's tonally dissonant from LotR, more of a bedtime story than Serious Fiction. This time through I'm finding it an absolute delight. It's very clearly written to be read aloud, and the prose is just musical. I am also hearing the voices of John 'Gandalf' Huston and Orson 'Bilbo' Bean in my head as I read. Presumably this will extend to Richard 'Smaug' Boone as well once I get that far.
What did you just finish reading?
A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name / The Thousand Eyes duology, which came highly recommended ages ago. Sigh. I wanted to like these, and did like the first third of the first book. Csorwe is an Orc girl who's due to be sacrificed to her god, the Unspoken Name; instead she gets kidnapped by someone who is quite probably the book's evil sorcerer and becomes quite a competent right hand for him. I quite enjoyed Csorwe's point-of-view and voice. I liked it less when she was forced to work with a particular obnoxious character who she had good reason to hate, even less when we started getting his viewpoint and were clearly intended to sympathise with him, and much less than that when her viewpoint disappears entirely a quarter through the second book.
These are doing very neat things with gods and immortality. I wish I'd been less annoyed and more able to appreciate those neat things. If you can get past Talasseres being insufferable, and don't mind character-stretching wisecracking, I'd recommend them.
Before that, R.F. Kuang's Katabasis, best summed up by her: "I started off writing this like ha ha, academia is hell, and then it was oh no, academia IS Hell." Cambridge graduate student in magic descends to the Underworld to retrieve her advisor, who she thinks she killed; she's accompanied by a golden-boy grad student for (it turns out) similar reasons. This sneaks in under the wire as my favourite read of the year. It opens with a passage complaining about inaccuracies in depictions of the journey to the underworld:
Dante's account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T.S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner's account was under serious dispute. Orpheus's notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas-- well, that was all Roman propaganda.
I love this, but then I would. It's great. I am deeply annoyed that the publisher (and the author's agent) refuse to even talk to Subterranean about doing a fancy edition.
What do you think you'll read next?
LotR, naturellement. After that, anyone's guess. Lord knows there's plenty on the shelf to pick from.