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"Cruelty dispensed, cruelty served."

This was a sad book about Vietnam. I guess I'm slowly making my way around the world and reading books about all the worst parts in history. I have a thing for stories that need to be heard.

This book uses the dual viewpoints of Trần Diệu Lan in 1920 and her grown granddaughter Hương during the Vietnam War to tell a family story of loss. Trần Diệu Lan had 5 young kids and owned a farm during the land reform period of Vietnam's history. She was ousted from her house, beaten, separated from one of her kids, and the only reason she survived was because of the intervention of a friendly neighbor. Her land and belongings were divided up amongst her village, and she fled with no money and 5 kids to look after. Meanwhile, Hương lives with her grandma, after her uncles, father, and mother left to go fight in the war. Her family slowly comes back, but the war has changed everyone and everything, even her family.

This was a very sad story, written beautifully by the author. Very descriptive, very lyrical, it was easy to get swept up in the descriptions and feelings evoked here. I didn't particularly care for the dual viewpoints, however, because the two voices felt the same in terms of story told. But everything else about the book was fantastic. I learned a lot about Vietnam, especially about the land reform period. Good book.

"The more I've studied history, the more I've maintained that great achievements aren't so much about aptitude as about timing."

This one never really came together for me. I had similar concerns going into Tress of the Emerald Sea, but I ended up finding it pretty charming in the end after I'd spent some time with it. This one lacked that charming part, and just felt a bit of a chore to get through. It just wasn't what I expect out of Sanderson, and even beyond that, it was just....fine. Even reading it blind without knowing who the author was, I probably wouldn't rate it much higher.

I'll keep this brief and un-spoilery. A man wakes up in a field, surrounded by burned grass, doesn't remember how he got there or what he was doing or even who he was. Around him in the burned grass are charred pages of some book; reading these he starts piecing small things together. Turns out he's bought a pocket dimension in medieval England, but now he's stranded and has to figure out what to do, how to get home, and how to help the local people that rescued him.

Right off the bat I'll say Johnny's tendency to mentally rate experiences (like a Yelp reviewer or something) really grated on my nerves. It always felt forced and shoehorned in, and even after it's directly addressed near the end it didn't help. The humor in this one, too, felt repetitive, with a lot of the same joke beats being hit each time. Lots of eyeroll jokes. I also wasn't really invested in Johnny as the main character, as he felt really bland and boring. He does get quite a bit of character development near the end, but it's basically dumped on you all at once and doesn't feel very authentic as a result. The side characters aren't really explored all that much either, which, I guess, is a product of the relatively short nature of the book.

I loved the artwork though! Most pages feature at least a doodle at the bottom, with several full color spreads throughout. The concept of buying your own dimension to live out your medieval fantasy in is interesting, but since this seems like a one-off novel I'm a bit disappointed it can't be explored more. The story itself is....fine. Serviceable, but not remarkable.

In summary, kind of a miss for me. An adequate book, but not really a Sanderson book.

"I'm not some cold, mechanical thing. I am alive!!!"

What a surprising delight! I picked this up at my local comic book store because of the art, and actually really liked the core story being told here as well!

Aster is an outcast of Pan, a village in what I'm assuming is a post-apocalyptic Earth given the names and such. She's allowed to trade with members of Pan, but isn't considered a member herself. They live a meager, poor existence, but when a larger nation rolls in and wants to take over their crops and food for essentially slave labor, she gets drafted into Celestial Mechanics--essentially, a post-apocalyptic dodgeball variant. Their hastily constructed team is squaring off against Fortuna's better funded and more practiced team to remain free of Fortuna's grasp.

Essentially, it's like Final Fantasy X (if you play video games) or Cool Runnings (if you remember your 90s movies like I do). This part of the story is really neat.

There's also a bit of other social issues that are touched on briefly but never really fully explored. Poverty issues, social class issues, some racial issues... but aside from mentioning it once or twice, they don't really go anywhere and actually detract a bit from the story because of it. It felt a bit like the author was trying to do too much at once in the middle, and then pulled back on a lot of it near the end for time reasons.

BUT THE ART. The art is something special. I don't know enough about art stuff to say why this art is better than other art, but it's something different, something unique, and looks fantastic. 5 stars for the art alone.

In summary, loved the dodgeball-for-the-fate-of-the-village sports, loved the artwork, took a star off for somewhat muddled storytelling in the middle. Still a really enjoyable read.

"She who sows vengeance must reap its bloody fruit."

I don’t read much Indian fiction. I think to date, I’ve only read two of this author’s previous works, The Forest of Enchantments and Independence. I mostly enjoyed both of those with some caveats, and I think this one was no exception. I can’t say I know the source material at all, and from a quick glance at the reviews, I can see the low reviews come from a place of not liking aspects of the retelling. I only mention this to say that I don’t know the retelling at all, and I thought this was an enjoyable, flawed story.

Panchaali was born with a destiny to change the course of history. The daughter of King Draupad, she struggles with impatience born from being forced into a female role she doesn’t want to play. Forced to marry five brothers (at once!) instead of her heart’s desire by her family and her friends, she struggles to please her new family while coming to terms with her new lot in life. But even after she (reluctantly) throws herself into married life, she must endure loss after heartbreak after grief as she gains things she loves with all her being and then loses them again.

Panchaali was an interesting character, though I preferred the first half of the book as she figures herself out while growing up more than the second half of the book. Character/ending spoilers: I didn’t much care for the bent-on-vengeance change to Panchaali for losing her house (I know that’s reductive), but because this is a retelling of some very old source material and somewhat key to her story, I understand it’s not really something that can be changed. I did think the author hit the foreshadowing button a bit too much; the ending twist regarding Karna was something I saw coming.

The writing style was fantastic though. The scenes are painted with care and detail, and I loved picturing the places the author takes us to. There’s also references to (what I’m assuming are) other stories within the source material concerning other characters, and I found myself falling down more than a few Wikipedia holes looking these references up. The action near the end does feel a little choppy as well, though. It seems like we fly past key events with just a mention of what happened in intervening years, but I’m not sure if that’s a source material thing or an author thing.

This was an enjoyable fiction read from a country I don’t read too much from. Highly recommend to anyone looking for something new in the historical fiction (fantasy?) genre.

TW: child abuse within the church, pedophilia

I don’t use trigger words lightly. My reading is never dictated by content warnings and the like, but this is one of the very few books I’ve read that I want to make very clear up front isn’t for everyone. It isn’t even for me, as you can tell from my rating.

Tom Kettle is a retired policeman who is visited by some of his former colleagues on the force about a death that had occurred when Tom was on the force. Evidently new evidence had come to light, and they wanted Tom’s opinion on the matter, as it had been a matter he was very involved in. The brief visit stirs memories loose, and Tom begins to spiral into confusing the past with the present. We’re present as he relives memories he had buried for years, and leaves you questioning throughout the book whether what’s happening is actually happening, a figment of Tom’s imagination, or some twisting of what actually occurred into something more.

The book is very dark, very bleak, and Tom’s story is told entirely from his point of view, stream of consciousness style. No punches are pulled, and every last dark crevice in Tom’s memory is revealed to us as the reader. Specifically related to the TWs mentioned above, no mystery is made of what happened, and the language used is incredibly hard to read and very graphic. Spoilers here: Throughout the book, Tom is very much an unreliable narrator. It’s clear he’s going through some form of dementia or trauma from having buried the matter so deep, and it shows in how he confuses reality with the past often. We dip back and forth between past and present so much, it becomes a question as to who really did the deed and killed the priest, which was my (only?) favorite part of the book.

I can’t rate this higher because of the stream of consciousness style of writing. Every thought and mental rabbit hole Tom has is on display for the reader, and I mentally checked out in more than one spot as he went on various mental wool gathering expeditions. Maybe that’s compelling to other people (clearly, based on the rating here), but it just isn’t for me. My brain serves up inane chatter all day, every day. I don’t need a book for that. It’s clear the writer is very good at his craft, but I couldn’t keep interest for very long when we started meandering away from the main thread of the story. I also don’t really know who I’d look in the face and recommend this book to. I work in a library and make a career out of recommending books I think patrons would like, and I can’t imagine I’d ever recommend a book circling around the abuse of a child laid this bare for the reader to experience.

So, I guess, give it a go if you like stream of consciousness writing, a single, unreliable point of view, and an incredibly dark, sad story about a man and his trauma.

"The first casualty of a civil war was justice."

Well, I finally did it. I finally knocked this one off my to-read list at the expense of my yearly goal (I’m two books behind now!), and I feel good about finally working my way through it. This is a weird book for me to rate, because I’m not very religious and I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it all the way through, but I’m still putting book two on my to-read list for….sometime in the future. Maybe next year.

This is a book about a man with a dream to build a church. Things start small, then quickly snowball as these things do, creating a real mess of church problems and state problems along the way. The lines between the two were, basically, nonexistent back then. Lots of political infighting, jockeying for position within the church/country, stuff like that. Amongst it all we get to know a few members of the village/town/city of Kingsbridge, and follow them as they experience the repercussions of these choices down at the personal level.

I definitely enjoyed some of the points of view more than others. Ailena was far and away my least favorite perspective in the beginning, had some redemption in the middle, and then returned to being my least favorite in the end. Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge, ended up being my favorite point of view, as we see his dreams of a new church building come to fruition. His internal struggles the entire way were interesting to read about, particularly when he struggles constantly with personal pride as a member of the church. I enjoyed the writing, the story was pretty great, I just felt like it dragged a bit in places. I guess in a book of almost 1000 pages it’s to be expected, though.

I don’t know, I’m glad to have finished it and have added the sequel to my to-read list, but I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. It comes with some religious baggage, so if that’s not your jam, I’d probably pass on it unless you can set your personal feelings aside to experience a good, realistic, medieval story.

"No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk."

This had all the makings of a great book for me, but it ended up feeling like the harder I tried putting the pieces together, the worse the book felt. Such a great story idea! Great writing! (Theoretically) interesting characters! But once you start putting any sort of thought into what was going on, the cracks start showing. Ultimately I rated this based on feel—I had a lot of fun reading it in the moment—but the ending turns the story into a big nothingburger of a letdown.

Because of the sheer scale of this book, it’s hard to summarize. A regular gathering (every 200,000 years) of the clones of Abigail, a brilliant scientist and founder of the Gentian Line, goes terribly wrong, and the investigation into why this all happened is the core plot of the book. We get to know a few of these clones (called Shatterlings) throughout the course of the investigation as they retreat to a desert planet to lick their wounds and regroup. Campion and Purslane, the two main characters of the book, rescued a member of the Machine People (a technology-based race of beings) on the way to the reunion, who ends up playing a critical role in how everything plays out.

I’m being very brief with this summary because it’s kind of hard to pin down. Heavy spoilers in this section.

The author throws lots of misdirection at the audience throughout the book, which I found a bit distracting. It seems like every character, Shatterling or not, gets the "oh, maybe this character did it" treatment at some point, which can be fun if done right, but I sort of found annoying in this book. Dribbles of information about the endgame plot are doled out throughout the investigation, but not a lot of it ends up being fleshed out to any satisfying degree in the end. The characters introduced never seem to come together for me either, as motives and actions seemed inconsistent from scene to scene, and several characters introduced are basically forgotten by the end. I also was somewhat annoyed with the Architect-like character at the end (remember him, from The Matrix?), where we get a lot of heavy, enigmatic plot reveal and then the book ends. It felt like I had to build my own fanfic ending in my head from the plot/revelations left hanging, as if the author didn’t really have a clear idea of how to end things himself.

I don’t know, clearly I’m missing something a lot of other people seemed to get. It looked like it was going to be a fun sci-fi ride, but the book missed the mark by lightyears somewhere along the way.

"I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face."

An interesting story about four women living in the same officetel (a style of housing in Korea with mixed purpose units available for rent). Each has their own different background and life story, but because of their living situation in the same building, all four know each other very well. We learn each woman’s story through their different chapters, each one taking a different woman’s point of view. Ara is a hair stylist who, because of a traumatic injury when she was in high school, cannot speak, and has a crush on the lead singer of a K-pop band. Kyuri is a “room salon girl”, like a high class prostitute, who works for a madam and wines and dines expensive clients. Miho is an artist who grew up poor, earned a scholarship to a prestigious art school in America, and returned to Korea with her boyfriend, an incredibly wealthy heir to a corporation. Finally, Wonna….exists. She’s pregnant with a child after a series of miscarriages, is in an unhappy relationship with a man she doesn’t love, and desperately wants to carry her current child to term despite not being able to afford to care for it.

This is definitely a character-driven story; we follow each girl’s story arc to a conclusion, satisfying or not. Kyuri’s story I think was the strongest here, and it’s from her that I learned a lot about Korean culture in the cracks of society. Ara potentially had a great point of view, but it felt like the author couldn’t decide in which direction to take her. She also (spoiler) snaps and beats up a co-worker after workplace toxicity gets the better of her in a pretty epic fight scene, but nothing ever comes of it. Miho’s point of view is the most sympathetic to me; she feels inadequate and like she doesn’t fit in because of her poor upbringing for a lot of the story. But I could never grasp if she loved her boyfriend or was annoyed by him. Wonna’s story basically doesn’t even need to exist for the rest of the book to happen. She also comes off as being weirdly crazy in the end scene with Ara, and I was sort of expecting a more tragic end, like a bathtub drowning or a murder/suicide or something.

So, kind of a mixed bag as most multiple POV, character-driven stories tend to be. I still really enjoyed the book though, as it gave me a look at Korean culture in a way I hadn’t read about before.

Hi. I don’t really like truffles. I’m not a fan of their smell, their taste, or their price tag. But this book made me wonder if maybe I just haven’t had an actual truffle. How would I know? I’m just some rube in the United States. I’ve never gone truffle hunting, steeped myself in truffle culture, or created an entire business empire based around it. I’m also not shady, underhanded, or an evil person who poisons other truffle hunters’ dogs, so maybe I just wouldn’t cut it anyway.

This book was incredibly interesting, even for someone who’s not a fan of truffles. I learned so much about this humble fungus that I never really would have guessed. For instance, we’re still not really sure how or why truffles form. I sort of figured everything consumable was already studied, broken down, and science’d into efficiency by now, but that was a thing I learned. There’s tons of other little factoids and history topics covered in this book about truffles, and handled in an interesting way. Each chapter covers another aspect of the shady culture surrounding truffles. Thanks to incredibly high profit margins, everyone from the truffle hunter to the company selling the truffles directly to restaurants has participated in underhanded dealings to get ahead of their competitors in the truffle market. Sneaking onto someone else’s land in the middle of the night, poisoning or stealing the dogs from other truffle hunters, accidental (or intentional) murders, and smash-and-grab style robberies are all on the table when it comes to getting a truffle to your plate. It’s really quite fascinating.

I loved how the author dovetails each chapter into the next, where we start out with truffle history, which then passes to truffle stealing, and on and on in escalation until we get to corporate espionage, deliberately misleading/incorrect product packaging, and overall profit greed. The author’s way of describing his experiences with the people he met and places he visited was also incredibly engaging for me. It seems you have to be a certain kind of obsessive, slightly off individual to be a truffle hunter.

Overall a very interesting book about a niche topic, my favorite kind of book.

People getting stranded in places they shouldn’t be seem to be a recurring theme in the books I’m picking up. Up to this point, it’s been disastrous arctic expeditions. This book was an “if you like those, you might like this” recommendation by Goodreads, and I thought it was really interesting! The stakes were a bit lower than what I’ve read before, but this was still a pretty good read about—not one—but two different shipwrecks on the same island! Two stories for the price of one!

We start out reading about Captain Musgrave’s ship the Grafton, marooned on Auckland Island after a series of bad calls and trusting in bad information. Him and his crew of four band together almost immediately and actually get themselves set up rather comfortably (given the circumstances). They built a sturdy structure, had a regular routine they followed, and when they realized the people they left behind didn’t lift a finger to see them rescued, took it upon themselves to get themselves rescued. Despite some squabbles about rank and deference and the like, they did as well as could be expected for themselves.

The second wreck happened several months after the first, and things don’t go nearly as well. The Invercauld runs aground, and a large number of her crew end up marooned as well. Instead of banding together, they find a derelict ruin of a building and spend all day wallowing in their own misery. One skilled crewmate did his level best to get people motivated, but you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. After the food runs out and nobody seems particularly motivated to even do anything about that, a few of the crew, including the skilled man split from the group—and at a good time too, because talk of cannibalism starts circulating amongst the dispirited crew. The small group isn’t without its own set of challenges though, as nobody wants to follow anyone’s directions. Nevertheless, they manage to hang on together, until a ship rescues them eighteen months later.

It’s an extensively researched event, taken from historical records and journals. There’s also quite a bit of what happened after all was said and done, which I appreciated. It was interesting to see how the crew of the Grafton all went their separate ways after the event, when they seemed to work well together during their time on the island. The author does a good job of contrasting the two shipwrecked groups, marooned at the same time, and weaving their stories together in time despite never meeting or realizing the other existed. One group banded together and (sort of) thrived, the other group refused to work together, and failed.

It’s a unique survival story read, different than the arctic books I’ve read, with lower stakes but no less engaging.

"Some people just want you to know what their reading habits are, and have no intention of buying anything."

I work at a library, and while we don’t sell books, I do see a lot of the same behaviors in library patrons as Shaun Bythell does in his bookshop in Wigtown. The patrons who want you to know what they’re interested in without actually checking anything out, the kids who shove perfectly faced books to the back of the shelves, the colorful regulars, the list goes on and on. To that end, I found a lot to identify with and find humor in in this book.As I said, Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, the world’s largest second-hand bookshop. He started keeping a diary in February of 2014 of all the notable interactions, observations, and events that happen in his bookshop, as well as some of the daily tasks that keep a second-hand bookshop running. It is a diary format, so it’s not so much a story as it is a day-by-day account of the shop, which I appreciated. You get to know the staff, the regulars, the sort of clientele he sees on a seasonal basis, and a sense of how the shop operates and the struggles he goes through keeping the doors open and the lights on. It’s not easy being in the book trade in the age of Amazon.He's a sarcastic man, and it’s clear that doesn’t rub everyone the right way. I appreciate his sense of humor and wry observations of people around him, but some people might find it mean spirited. It’s clear he enjoys what he does or he wouldn’t be doing it, and one can poke fun at the people around oneself while also being pleasant. It’s not all sunshine and roses in the retail industry, no matter the country.There’s evidently more in the series, presumably more diaries from proceeding years. I look forward to reading them all.