Phil in SF <p>started reading</p>
The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar by Maurice Leblanc
Arsene Lupin is one of the most unforgettable characters to emerge from the early heyday of detective fiction in the …
aka @kingrat@sfba.social formerly @kingrat@books.theunseen.city
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Arsene Lupin is one of the most unforgettable characters to emerge from the early heyday of detective fiction in the …
This starts off fairly well, but along the way gets messier and messier with more characters and confusing plots and motivation and in the end there's a big poorly described fight scene.
Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove her to live on an …
The premise is that Mallory Viridian solves murders, but mostly because wherever she goes people keep getting murdered. The receptionist while she's at her therapist. A parishioner while she's giving confession. etc.
This makes me think immediately of how cozy mysteries have outsized numbers of murders for small towns. or how major crime figures always seem to conduct major murderous operations that just happen around Jack Reacher.
is Lafferty satirizing those stories? imma bout to find out.
The first Emma Makepeace book was a race to safety across a night time London landscape. This one is a more standard over-the-top spy thriller. Emma is sent undercover to serve drinks on the yacht of a Russian oligarch suspected of selling weapons. She's to find out who the oligarchs partners are and what they are up to.
A mostly fun book, but I did grow a little tired of Emma Makepeace ignoring the Agency's many directives to get out or not engage, lest she put herself in too much danger. "But I'm the only one who can find out!" so she sneaks in the hotel where the oligarch is going to meet. Or she goes to an oligaarch party after some of them might recognize her. You can plot an agent going against the book once or twice, but after that it starts to feel like lazy writing.
Another very standard Reacher novel. Stranded in Bolton South Dakota, Reacher stumbles into a case against a biker gang that's been manufacturing meth in an abandoned military facility west of town. A witness has stepped forward willing to testify to seeing a biker hand over a brick of meth. The town has to keep her safe until the trial.
The complicating factor is that, like many rural towns in the western US, Bolton bid for and won the site of a massive prison complex. And if the prison has a riot or an escape, every single member of the Bolton police department is to drop whatever they are doing and assist the prison. Even if what they are doing is protecting a witness under threat. The cops can't protect her, but Reacher can. Or should be able to. Can he keep her alive the approximately 61 hours until she needs …
Another very standard Reacher novel. Stranded in Bolton South Dakota, Reacher stumbles into a case against a biker gang that's been manufacturing meth in an abandoned military facility west of town. A witness has stepped forward willing to testify to seeing a biker hand over a brick of meth. The town has to keep her safe until the trial.
The complicating factor is that, like many rural towns in the western US, Bolton bid for and won the site of a massive prison complex. And if the prison has a riot or an escape, every single member of the Bolton police department is to drop whatever they are doing and assist the prison. Even if what they are doing is protecting a witness under threat. The cops can't protect her, but Reacher can. Or should be able to. Can he keep her alive the approximately 61 hours until she needs to testify? In the dead of winter when it's 0 degrees outside? He'll do a better job than the local PD at least, because the biker's lawyer turns up dead and then a local cop does too. The cops can't protect everyone, especially if the prison siren goes off.
Child takes a lot of liberties with a fairly shitty but anodyne prison-industrial complex situation. Everything is turned up to 11 and the super-competent Reacher has to deal with obviously absurd situations.
But that's what Reacher does.
In the world of Babel, magic works by inscribing similar words onto bars of silver which manifests the difference between the words as spells. What works really great are words in translation, because few translated words have exactly the same meaning.
Babel is the story of Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan with a talent for languages who is brought to England by an professor of translation. China forbids the teaching of Chinese to foreigners, so the British Empire steals young Chinese boys to provide words in translation. It's incredibly exploitative, and Robin starts to learn just what his purpose is meant to be.
As the subtitle implies, Robin gets caught up in opposition to Oxford's use of translators powering of empire. But he also really likes the creature comforts that come with being one favored by the British Empire and would really like to keep those. Can an empire be …
In the world of Babel, magic works by inscribing similar words onto bars of silver which manifests the difference between the words as spells. What works really great are words in translation, because few translated words have exactly the same meaning.
Babel is the story of Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan with a talent for languages who is brought to England by an professor of translation. China forbids the teaching of Chinese to foreigners, so the British Empire steals young Chinese boys to provide words in translation. It's incredibly exploitative, and Robin starts to learn just what his purpose is meant to be.
As the subtitle implies, Robin gets caught up in opposition to Oxford's use of translators powering of empire. But he also really likes the creature comforts that come with being one favored by the British Empire and would really like to keep those. Can an empire be reformed from within, but someone who is a member of a colonized people no less? Or does changing empire require violent uprising?
The story starts off very engaging, but at the point the Robin has to choose whether to go in violent opposition, the text becomes quite bogged down with repetitive arguments and discussions between characters over the ethics involved. And as the climactic confrontation approaches, every character becomes merely a vehicle for plot and discourse, devoid of much in the way of personality.
I gave this 4 stars because of some really interesting ideas and a really great start. But I wish the second half of the book lived up to the promise of the first half.
British spy Emma Makepeace goes undercover on a Russian oligarch’s superyacht, where she’s one wrong move away from a watery …
An insider released a bunch of emails between American & Canadian members of the Hugo administration committee, showing that North Americans were integral to the censorship that occurred.
file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/
Like Mastering Genealogical Documentation, this is a useful but frustrating "textbook". As for helpful information, it's very useful explaining a reasonably exhaustive search, analysis & correlation, and resolving conflict. The information on citation isn't bad, but read his Mastering Genealogical Documentation book instead. The chapter on writing a solidly reasoned argument leaves a lot to be desired. Granted, that topic could & should be the subject of an entire book by itself. Jones writes in his usual pedantic, wordy style that made it a lot harder for me to slog my way through.
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to …