William Grant

Bookshelf

Posted on May 14, 2024

Inspired by the likes of Collison, below are notes on books and internet writing I’ve enjoyed (or not enjoyed). I read way too many Substacks, and these short notes are as much for my organisation/mnemonic purposes as anything else.

Aside - I’ve noticed these online book trackers are often wall-to-wall Classics and vast works of non-fiction, but I’ll attempt to stay honest (I’ve read every discworld book again this year, in order, and I read a ton of bad scifi).

January 2025

Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf: - There was some recent controversy over the Wilson translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad, but I thought they were excellent. I’m sure the arguments that older, more epic/poetic translations are somehow capturing something, but these epics are supposed to be poems suitable for recitation, and I thought Wilson’s word choices and iambic pentameter were faithful to that idea. Headley consulted with Wilson on her Beowulf translation, and it’s almost as good, but for me it does a bit too much. Like the Wilson translations, it attempts to be faithful to the spirit of the original rhyming scheme, which is highly alliterative, and uses kennings well. But then Headley’ll throw in a ‘bro’ or a ‘#blessed’ or a drone strike in a way that seems to only exist to show how modern the translation is (with the precise slang used already feeling dated, four years on). Would recommend despite that, I’m now excited to read the Heaney version.

December 2024

Adrian Tchaikovsky, City of Last Chances, House of Open Wounds, Days of Shattered Faith: - It’s not Children of Time, and City of Last Chances suffers from the standard fantasy problem of 100 pages of constructing a dictionary before it starts to actually move, plus the ending is a little too tidy, but the pacing is good and if you’ll tolerate the aforementioned slow start and worldbuilding then he does make use of it all by the end. House of Open Wounds is better - it has an incredible opening, depicting life working in a field hospital. In part it can do this because the worldbuilding is mostly already done, but mostly it just seems like the narrower focus allows for better writing. The main character is strangely incoherent and poorly motivated, and the ending is even tidier than City of Last Chances. Days of Shattered Faith likewise has a tighter focus and more coherent new characters - halfway through it takes a turn into a bunch of detailed and clearly well-researched descriptions of military tactics, which is fun, and there’s a lot more emotional force to the big scenes. By this point it became clear that the super-tidied, extended epilogue ending is just how Tchaikovsky likes to finish his books. Overall its good genre fiction, its not in any way challenging and you can guess the plot points way in advance, so most of the joy is in watching how Tchaikovsky walks you through it (ideal December reading).

Links:

November 2024

Ann Leckie, Translation State: - Something lighter, to counteract Ferrante. Leckie is really good at writing non-human characters.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend: - Hard to go wrong with a book so universally acclaimed. It was beautiful, and evocative, and so incredibly sad that it took me two months to finish it.

Links:

October 2024

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend, contd.: (see above)

Links:

September 2024

qntm, Ra: - You can see the writing style that became Antimemetics, it’s a book with a strange lack of connective tissue. It’s interesting scene -> new interesting scene -> third scene suggesting scene 1 was a dream -> fourth scene suggesting the narrator in scene 3 is unreliable, etc. It also does the thing the Bourne movies do where you feel like you’re being hurried along so that you don’t notice the plot holes. But it’s got great ideas, the central two characters are really well portrayed, and if you survive to the end, the resolution is worthwhile. It’s also clearly a book written by a British physicist-turned-software-engineer, which is precisely what I am, so I’m probably the ideal target audience.

qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division (again): - Re-read in one go during a bad night with the newborn - still superb, and I’m looking forward to the new version now qntm has a publishing deal.

Links:

August 2024

Anne Leckie, The Raven Tower: - I don’t think I’ve ever read a second-person novel done successfully before. Conceit interesting, character-building great. Probably read Ancillary Justice first and if you like that, you’ll like this.

Links:

July 2024

John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy: - At some point midway through the Smiley novels I realised I wasn’t having a good time anymore, I can’t recommend reading them back-to-back. The pacing and the plot remain great, and the premise of ’exceptionally competent and deeply sad civil servants’ remains compelling, but it all gets a bit predictable, and Le Carré’s dated worldview gets harder and harder to ignore.

Links:

June 2024

John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (also Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and The Looking-Glass War): - TSWCIFTC is an incredibly immersive spy thriller, and deserves its laurels. Paints an extremely credible picture of poor decisionmaking. Also every scene description and piece of dialogue is a glimpse into a kind of UK society of which the barest traces remained when I was growing up, so it reminds me of my grandparents. TLGW, the sequel, is somehow incredibly similar but with a very different emotional effect - it’s much more brutal in its description of its characters’ cowardices and failings, and tragic.

Links:

May 2024

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This: - Almost incomprehensible and transcendently beautiful tale that is mostly about twitter. For a specific person who’s too online (me) it’s incredibly powerful and moving, for someone with a normal relationship to the internet it may be a struggle to get through the start.

Prev. 2024

Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun:

Cormac McCarthy, Passenger/Stella Maris

Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station & The Scar & Iron Council

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor

Emily St John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

Oedipus Trilogy (new translation by Bryan Doerries)

Blogs of note