False Value Rivers of London Book 8 Ben Aaronovich B-
Gosh, another fantasy book. That said, I have been reading the Rivers of London series since it first came out, a decade ago or so. I did, however fall behind for a time, as there was a time when there were no mass market paperbacks to buy. I think that now I have read all the novels up to this point. I know that I have not read the short stories.
The highlights of these urban fantasy books set, you guessed it, mostly in London, is Aaronovich’s writing and first person point of view character, Peter Grant, a London policeman with magical powers. In addition there are a cast of strange and wonderful characters, including goddess tied to the rivers that converge on the Thames in London. The stories are set in our world, where magic exists, but is rare enough that most people are not aware of it.
This story is about a secretive high-tech company developing an artificial intelligence, that already seems dated in 2023, with the advent of AI chat and art bots. As usual, I won’t go into the plot, except to say that it is convulsed, and deliberately so. The first part of the story’s time line is sliced and diced, telling the story out of chronological order for no discernible reason that I can discover. Indeed, I have no idea how long the story spans. And Aaronovich throws in a lot of sub-plots, minor characters, and police procedural details that serve more to bump up the word count than advance the story. All of this accounts for the “-” behind the “B” rating, so you can see that they were minor annoyances, especially the out of chronological order telling of the story, and I still enjoyed the story despite them. It was a better story than the one the proceeded it.
My other general complaint is that the premise is that magic is so rare that it is unnoticed in our world, save for a small group of people. However, as the series continues, magic plays such a large role in large scale events in these books, that it is unrealistic to expect me, at least, to believe that this is our world. If magic exists in our world, it is rare and known to an actual few, not the entire London police department. I had the same complaint for the book I read last month, Fated. You can’t have it both ways; our familiar world with magic all but unknown, or a world were the existence of magic is widely know and as a result, the world would be very different. But that’s no doubt the writer in my outlook.
The Sunne in Splendour Sharon Kay Penman DNF 7% (page 71)
No doubt a perfectly fine book, but not for me. I was looking for some historical fiction, and this one sounded pretty good. It’s about Richard III and the War of the Roses. However, this book starts out with Richard as a child of seven, and to be perfectly honest, I am not interested in reading about children, unless I am reading to children. In this way it covers history leading up to when Richard steps onto the world’s stage, but with 1233 pages, it clearly was going to take a while to get there.
My other complaint is my usual one – hopping between point of view characters. In what I read of the story, we start with young Richard, move on to one of his older brothers, and after he is killed, on to Richard’s mother, at which point I called it a day.
My objection to jumping around in the heads of characters in general, is very simple: in my view, it makes them props rather than characters. Authors use them, and their thoughts, to tell what they want at any point in the story, and when whey don't need them, they are just ciphers, pawns to move around. In these types of stories, the author is the main character, as they are the ones who play every role, jumping form character to character, to speak every important line, think every important thought. I want to be told a story by a person, about people, not sock puppets. Readers can get to know characters from what the say and do, we don’t need to be in their head to know them. And not, when the author doesn’t want us to know what they are thinking for whatever reason.
The Eastern Front 1914 – 1920 By Michael S Neiberg & David Jordan B-
This is an overview of World War One and the Russian Revolution, part of a series: “The History of World War One.” As such is is a perfectly fine, well written book. It includes maps and lots of photos, with many sidebars on different aspects of the war on the Eastern Front and the personalities involved in it. As I mentioned in my Waterloo Book review, military history without easy access to maps, is less than ideal. Here the maps were pretty general, and not adjacent to the text, but that is the price you pay if you are too lazy to go out into the cold and drive to the library for a paper book. As well as World War One, it covers the battles of the White Russians against the Bolsheviks, and briefly, the war between Poland and Russia. These later conflicts were very confusing in reality, and they remain confusing in the book as well. Still, the book does the job it set out to do; give the reader an overview of World War One beyond the trenches of the Western Front.
Winter on the Hill by Michael Graeme C
Graeme writes introspective novels of literary fiction. All three of the novels I’ve read so far, are narrated by men of a certain age – of sixty, plus or minus a few years – who find themselves in retirement a stranger in a strange land. They are single, lonely, usually rather bitter, if not angry, about not only their lives, but what has happened to the world in their lifetime. They are looking for something worthwhile to do with their rather empty lives. Within this narrative of contemplation, Graeme introduces characters that change the lives of his narrator. In this novel, it is a set of mostly single women of a certain age who are members of a hiking club that he joins. Set in the Covid years in Britain, the story revolves around his relationships with several of those women, one of whom has taken a vow of silence, and thus is very intriguing. It is very much a slice of life story, not much of a romance, and in the end, not all that satisfying of a story, as the key character, the woman who doesn’t speak, doesn’t quite live up to her potential as a character, I think. We never quite get to know her, even as the narrator spends more time with her. Maybe it’s just me, I like romances, but unlike the first two Graeme books, Saving Grace, and the best of his that I’ve read, A Lone Tree Falls, have a strong genre mystery story that is wrapped within all the thoughts of his introspective narrator. That strong mystery/genre story is missing in this novel despite his attempts to suggest one. It is mostly introspective thoughts, and those get rather tedious.
Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy Ernest Hemingway’s Secret Adventures 1935-1961 by Nicolas Reynolds C
Non fiction. This covers Hemingway’s life from about 1936 to his death in 1961 and focuses on his ongoing fight against fascism, first in Spain and then in World War 2. And documents his contacts and general approval of the Russians who were the only ones who were fighting fascists. Though he was never a formal agent of the communists, he had files in both Moscow and Washington as a know lefty. It is a very detailed account of what he did and who he did it with reporting and occasionally fighting in both Spain during their civil war, and then in World War 2, where he used is fishing boat to patrol the waters off of Cuba in order to locate German submarines, and then, landing with the US Army’s Normandy invasion, and followed it on to the liberation of Paris. I found all of the details and characters a bit tedious, but that’s just me.
Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers C
My reading chair is alongside my wall of books. And the books most handy from the reading chair is my modest mystery story collection. This is a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. It has no doubt been on my bookshelves for half a century. I may’ve read it back in the day. Or not. I seem to remember that I grew rather weary of Lord Peter Wimsey bright banter. In any case, I had no recollection of it, nor did reading it stir up any. In this book, Wimsey’s older brother is charged with murder and Wimsey must discover who actually did it, despite the silence of his brother. Sayers writes an intricate mystery, but I found it rather slow going, and never got caught up in the story or the mystery. And there were several scenes that I though were a bit over the top. I have several more Wimsey books on the shelf, but I won’t be getting to them anytime soon.
The High Window by Raymond Chandler A
I reached over and picked up another mystery, and this was the one I picked up. Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse where the two authors that I discovered in my early 20’s that changed the way I looked on reading. After a decade of reading SF where stories, if not just far out ideas, were the focus, I discovered that with Chandler and Wodehouse, writing became the focus. Never mind the story, their writing alone was the entertainment. It still is. If you like clever, witty, gritty, and marvelously atmospheric writing, with deftly drawn characters and convoluted plots, Chandler is your guy.
The Last Passenger - A Charles Lerox Mystery by Charles Finch C-
This is more or less a cozy mystery set in London in 1855. It is the third prequel to a long running series of Charles Lenox mysteries. It recounts how he learned his trade and lost his love. I found it to be an annoy book. It is written by an American in a contemporary style for a contemporary audience, and as such has almost no authentic feel. A bunch of Victorian era tropes are thrown in but from such a remote, modern distance, that they add no atmosphere to the story. In this book Finch was either trying to showcase his Wikipedia skills, or educate his readers, since he tosses in all sorts of factoids into the narrative. Things like brief bios of a historical characters, the history of the anti-slave movement in Britain, why the tobacco plant was introduced in Europe, etc. None of which are necessary for the story. But what bugged me the most was that he didn’t get the facts right that he shoved into the story.
The story involves find a mutilated body on a London and North Western Railroad train carriage from Manchester in Paddington Station. He has his hero use horse drawn dog carts to search along the track from Paddington Station, explaining that “the width between railroad tracks all across England was exactly four feet eight and a half inches… because that was the width of a horse-drawn wagon.” and goes on to explain how that came to be, adding at no extra cost, that was also the exact width for the war chariots of ancient Rome. Finch then has us to believe that not only could a horse-drawn dog cart be pulled along the top of the two rails without the wheels slipping off at any speed, but that they could do so without making any special arrangements on two rail lines leading from Paddington Station – without being run over by approaching or departing trains. Even in 1855 a station like Paddinton would have trains arriving and departing on numerous tracks. However, leaving that impossibility aside, if Mr Finch had done his Wikipedia homework thoroughly, he would’ve discovered that in 1855 the width of railroad tracks was not uniform across England. The Great Western Railroad operated on it’s own wide gauge tracks, those being a seven foot and one quarter inch gauge (I looked it up on Wikipedia). He would have also discovered that the London terminal for the GWR was Paddington Station. If he had looked a little further into the Wikipedia entry for the London and North Western Railroad, the train arriving in London from Manchester, he would have discovered it would have arrived in London at Euston Station, the L.A.N.W.’s London terminus. So why Paddington Station rather than Euston? I’ve no clue. A minor point, yes, but if you are going to stuff your story with all sorts of extraneous “facts,” get them right.
I will not be continuing on with this series.
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