![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
Sooo...long time no review. Quite a queue of books to get through.
First up The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz and translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. It's a sort of Middle East dystopia book. In an unnamed country, a revolution has failed and the authorities have set up The Gate, a building where people have to go in order to get various Byzantine paperwork filled out. But the gate to the Gate never opens and so a vast line of people are backed up along it. Among them is Yehia, a former student protester who needs some paperwork filled out so he can get surgery to have a bullet removed. Of course, officially, the government never used any bullets on the protesters so...
The book was intersting but I'm not sure if the writing style appeals or if the translation was a little off. The prose felt a bit stiff and the story circled a bit and never really went anywhere. Perhaps that's a deliberate stylistic choice or perhaps it's a more familiar narrative structure in the region. It could be a little hard to get into the characters as real people when the government's surreal activities kind of draws the eye. Still, there were some neat bits in the story. I particularly liked the idea that people had been in the line so long that social customs had grown up and if you made even a token effort to be nice to the people next to you in line, then you could leave the line and resume your place when you wanted. Standing in line became, in effect, a second job. So characters aren't locked to the queue even though they spend much of their time there. I'm not sure I'd recommend this, but I'm not unhappy I read it.
After that we have Los Nefilim by T. Frohock. This is a collected set of a trilogy of short stories in one convenient book. The novel is set in late 1930's Spain just prior to the Civil War. Diago is a Nephilim, the child of an angel and a demon and desperately trying to avoid getting sucked into their battles. Most Nephilim have an angelic or demonic parent and serve as proxy foot soldiers for them. Diago's lover Miquel works for the angels, but he tries to stay out of it.
That all changes when he discovers that he has a son and that he's being sacrificed to the demon Moloch in exchange for the concept of an atomic bomb. Things kinda escalate from there.
Despite the divine-level powers these guys work for, the magic stays strong but not overpowering. The Nephilim really do deal with most of the day-to-day "real world" stuff while the angels and demons are more abstarcted (though they do take forms on Earth).
By the way -- the title immediately brought to mind the old Nephilim role-playing game from the 90's and while I enjoyed it the back-story was so arcane (in reality the Nephilim are basically dinosaur energy farts or somesuch) that it was hard to formulate adventure plots. Now I'd be completely ready to run a game so long as I used this book's setting wholesale. Putting the PCs to work under an angel or demon and then layer on their own hopes and ideal would be a fun story soup to stir.
Back to the book. I liked it. The story moved along briskly, the characters were interesting and the plot was solid. It's cheap on the Kindle and worth picking up for some supernatural/historical fiction.
There was a bit of a gap until the next Kindle book I wanted so I decided to tackle some non-fiction I'd picked up in dead tree format back in May. You may remember me reading about the American Civil War last year and this year I wanted to focus on a particular campaign so I was pleased to see a nice used copy of Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign by Peter Cozzens. Basically in the spring of 1862, Jackson's small army tied up several larger units of Federal troopers in the Shenandoah Valley and scored decisive victories in several engagements. The book discusses the campaign and tries to show how and why Jackson succeeded.
The short answer is that while Jackson was a pretty competent (if fanatically secretive) commander, he won mostly because he had full discretion to give whatever orders he wanted whereas his opponents were often hobbled by order from up the chain of command (sometimes as high as the White House). Jackson also seemed to be ready to put up a fight at any time though he also knew when to pick that fight, while his opponents often lost their nerve.
The big takeaway from this book is that life as a Civil War soldier sucked hard. The men are constantly away from their baggage trains so they don't have tents or camping gear. They were often barefoot or without coats during late spring storms. Having enough beans and bullets was a real issue and whole battalions would quit battle simply because they didn't have any more bullets to shoot. There are plenty of letters, journals and diaries where each side gets to grouse about the conditions.
Clearly it's a bit of a specialist subject, but I did enjoy the book and it's a solid source of info on one of the more celebrated campaigns of the Civil War.
Finally, this morning I finished up White Elephants by Katie Haegele. It's mostly a memoir about a young woman going to various yard sales/garage aales over several summers with her mother and what the various objects mean to her. It was...charming but a bit flat. I suppose I'm old so a lot of her navel gazing doesn't seem particularly interesting to me, but it had it's moments.
later
Tom
Sooo...long time no review. Quite a queue of books to get through.
First up The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz and translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. It's a sort of Middle East dystopia book. In an unnamed country, a revolution has failed and the authorities have set up The Gate, a building where people have to go in order to get various Byzantine paperwork filled out. But the gate to the Gate never opens and so a vast line of people are backed up along it. Among them is Yehia, a former student protester who needs some paperwork filled out so he can get surgery to have a bullet removed. Of course, officially, the government never used any bullets on the protesters so...
The book was intersting but I'm not sure if the writing style appeals or if the translation was a little off. The prose felt a bit stiff and the story circled a bit and never really went anywhere. Perhaps that's a deliberate stylistic choice or perhaps it's a more familiar narrative structure in the region. It could be a little hard to get into the characters as real people when the government's surreal activities kind of draws the eye. Still, there were some neat bits in the story. I particularly liked the idea that people had been in the line so long that social customs had grown up and if you made even a token effort to be nice to the people next to you in line, then you could leave the line and resume your place when you wanted. Standing in line became, in effect, a second job. So characters aren't locked to the queue even though they spend much of their time there. I'm not sure I'd recommend this, but I'm not unhappy I read it.
After that we have Los Nefilim by T. Frohock. This is a collected set of a trilogy of short stories in one convenient book. The novel is set in late 1930's Spain just prior to the Civil War. Diago is a Nephilim, the child of an angel and a demon and desperately trying to avoid getting sucked into their battles. Most Nephilim have an angelic or demonic parent and serve as proxy foot soldiers for them. Diago's lover Miquel works for the angels, but he tries to stay out of it.
That all changes when he discovers that he has a son and that he's being sacrificed to the demon Moloch in exchange for the concept of an atomic bomb. Things kinda escalate from there.
Despite the divine-level powers these guys work for, the magic stays strong but not overpowering. The Nephilim really do deal with most of the day-to-day "real world" stuff while the angels and demons are more abstarcted (though they do take forms on Earth).
By the way -- the title immediately brought to mind the old Nephilim role-playing game from the 90's and while I enjoyed it the back-story was so arcane (in reality the Nephilim are basically dinosaur energy farts or somesuch) that it was hard to formulate adventure plots. Now I'd be completely ready to run a game so long as I used this book's setting wholesale. Putting the PCs to work under an angel or demon and then layer on their own hopes and ideal would be a fun story soup to stir.
Back to the book. I liked it. The story moved along briskly, the characters were interesting and the plot was solid. It's cheap on the Kindle and worth picking up for some supernatural/historical fiction.
There was a bit of a gap until the next Kindle book I wanted so I decided to tackle some non-fiction I'd picked up in dead tree format back in May. You may remember me reading about the American Civil War last year and this year I wanted to focus on a particular campaign so I was pleased to see a nice used copy of Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign by Peter Cozzens. Basically in the spring of 1862, Jackson's small army tied up several larger units of Federal troopers in the Shenandoah Valley and scored decisive victories in several engagements. The book discusses the campaign and tries to show how and why Jackson succeeded.
The short answer is that while Jackson was a pretty competent (if fanatically secretive) commander, he won mostly because he had full discretion to give whatever orders he wanted whereas his opponents were often hobbled by order from up the chain of command (sometimes as high as the White House). Jackson also seemed to be ready to put up a fight at any time though he also knew when to pick that fight, while his opponents often lost their nerve.
The big takeaway from this book is that life as a Civil War soldier sucked hard. The men are constantly away from their baggage trains so they don't have tents or camping gear. They were often barefoot or without coats during late spring storms. Having enough beans and bullets was a real issue and whole battalions would quit battle simply because they didn't have any more bullets to shoot. There are plenty of letters, journals and diaries where each side gets to grouse about the conditions.
Clearly it's a bit of a specialist subject, but I did enjoy the book and it's a solid source of info on one of the more celebrated campaigns of the Civil War.
Finally, this morning I finished up White Elephants by Katie Haegele. It's mostly a memoir about a young woman going to various yard sales/garage aales over several summers with her mother and what the various objects mean to her. It was...charming but a bit flat. I suppose I'm old so a lot of her navel gazing doesn't seem particularly interesting to me, but it had it's moments.
later
Tom
