111 – The Historian
I ran hot and cold with this. On one hand, I fell pretty instantly in love with the premise. It’s a horror story told through the literary traces a monstrous entity (it’s Dracula) has woven through the historical record. It’s a book about books – an Indiana Jones story if, as he preached in one of the movies, he spent as much time in the library as he claimed was core to his profession. It’s dense, well observed, and well written.
The problem is it’s over seven hundred pages long and contains enough story for perhaps four hundred. Rather than capturing the spirit of long nights reading through ancient tomes for brief moments of insight, the book makes us live through them. And this it does through the medium of some incredibly vapid characters and a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to its historiography. It doesn’t so much fall apart as it goes on so much as it simply comes to a halt, dragging behind it the weight of hundreds of superfluous pages. It’s such a shame, because man I was digging every second of it for the first third until it became obvious that the book had run out of ideas and still had hundreds of pages to go. There’s a real, ‘Sorry, the princess is in another castle’ vibe to it – a story padded out to an anticipated length. The author is determined to write a tome of serious literature, and we’re going to grind this out until it gains the weight that only a hefty tome can bring to bear.
If a competent editor took a machete to the page count and cut it down to size, I’d be prepared to give it another go because a lot of it is excellent. But there’s a lot of the lot of what’s left that is a mediocre chore. Also, the ending sucks – and not in a thematic way. After the slog of the middle 300 pages, it was a massive let down.
112 – Royal Assassin
The Farseer trilogy, which began with Assassin’s Apprentice, continues strongly here. Life has not gone well for our poor Fitz, whose role in all of these books is to be continually ravaged by the forces around him – sometimes emotionally, but sometimes also just physically. His first brush with the realities of life as the king’s assassin has left him a shell of himself – physically bereft and robbed of purpose and meaning. However, he’s still a channel for forces beyond his control and he finds himself being once again recalled into the cloying embrace of royal politics. He gets better. He finds some degree of happiness. But nothing good ever lasts for Fitz.
Since this is the second in a trilogy I don’t want to do much recounting of the plot – spoilers and all – but Robin Hobb has once again put together a banger of a book. A common theme in my last few books of 2023 (yeah, that’s how far behind I am in talking about my reading) is that they tend towards the gargantuan. Perhaps reading Tome after Tome back to back made me a little critical of page counts, but on a similar theme to the Historian I don’t really feel over six hundred pages were needed here. The book is very readable throughout so I don’t resent the time I spent with it, but I do feel like it could have dispensed with some of its more meandering and repetitive sections to the overall positive effect on the book. I still give it 4.5 stars in my spreadsheet so it’s not as if it was a serious problem.
113 – Harrow the Ninth
Jesus Christ, these books. I reviewed Gideon the Ninth much earlier on in this project, and this is the second in the series. Not only is this as wilfully and joyfully impenetrable as the first it layers on an additional lamination of complexity that makes it as much a riddle as a novel. It’s an extended exploration of the concept of the unreliable narrator, and it doesn’t give a shit how much you’re following what’s going on.
That’s off-putting, even for someone who really enjoyed the book (and Gideon the Ninth). It’s a book that’s almost demanding you to stop reading. It’s not about you.
And yet, this is also an incredibly clever book. The reveals at the end were extraordinary – smart, sharp and clarifying much of what had happened in a way that makes you genuinely appreciate the trial you’ve just been through. The writing is irreverent and witty and moving. ‘*Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.’, bemoans one character at one point. The whole series of books is tightly wound into its bizarre context, the self-destructive relationships, the anguish of its own melodrama. It’s like all the high-emotion high-school relationships but simultaneously played for laughs while being deadly earnest in a context of incredibly high stakes.
These books, Jesus Christ. They are so god-damn weird. I don’t love them, mainly because I am mostly confused by them, but I suspect if I went through and read them again with the benefit of hindsight I’d be willing to increase the rating I gave them (four stars to both).
114 – Ninth House
I don’t have a lot to say about this one – I liked it, quite a lot, but also it feels like something where the plot was generated by an LLM designed around engineering TiKTok virality. It reminds me in a lot of ways of the Atlas Six, which is to say – according to my spreadsheet – I enjoyed massively at the time but with the detachment of time I have no idea why.
Here’s the quick summary – the secret societies of Yale all do real magic, and it is the job of the Ninth House to police their activities. Unsurprisingly, in a world where the most entitled douchebros on the planet are given access to mystical powers, things go wrong. Alex, newly recruited as a kind of apprentice spookologist, finds herself at the heart of a campus wide conspiracy that forces her to confront her past in ways that are uncomfortable and co-incidentally almost precisely micro-engineered for a sequel.
The thing is, the author is something of a sorcerer herself – she skilfully builds up a compelling story and an interesting world, weaving all its elements into something that is almost alchemically entrancing. But it’s a phantasm. When you’re not looking directly at it, all you can see is the blurring of its lines. Clever writing is a temporary mask that the book uses to obscure what is, in the end, a very workaday premise.
A bit of a timeslip here, but I did read the sequel and – again, exactly like the Atlas Six – revisiting the characters left me wondering what it was I’d seen in them at all.
115 – The End of Everything
I can’t really say much here – non-fiction books are, by their very nature, almost impossible to outline in synopsis form. It’s several stories about the end of all things – how the universe may come to its final conclusion – and the evidence for each of them. I liked it a lot. Katie Mack is an engaging writer, and she managed to blend a cheerful fatalism into a book that is an existential nightmare. The end of the universe is far enough away that you’d think it wouldn’t really bother me – and yet it does. The vast reservoirs of time in which you, me and everyone we know are swimming are deeper, colder and more indifferent than we can possibly fathom. This is a book about cosmic froth cogitating on its own impermanence. It doesn’t realise it’s a horror book, but it is.