mana worm

I’m back with more books I read in July. I’m happy to report that this is now a monthly bit. I didn’t read any game-adjacent stuff this month BUT at least one of these books mention mana and several of them, if I’m not mistaken, mention worms. It’s great to write a little bit about cool books I read. Support your local library. Read these books and come to opposite conclusions about them. Have fun.

I also recommend checking out the StoryGraph; it’s where I log my reading and also a great resource for content warnings for these books and a lot more books, too. If something in here piques your interest but you’re concerned it could be a bit much, check that out.

Mitch Caddo doesn’t feel like he belongs back in the Passage Rouge Nation. That’s despite the fact that, a couple years ago, he advised his childhood friend Mack Beck into a position as Tribal President. Now, a few years after his election, Beck’s presidency has turned tumultuous and a new challenger threatens their governance. Big Chief is a complicated novel. Mitch and Mack are terribly corrupted leaders but, maybe rightfully, have a sense that Passage Rouge is their home and they’re doing everything they can to help it. Mitch, for his part, has complicated feelings about his relationship to his community– does he belong, and what does he owe the people that he grew up with even if he doesn’t? Mack, power-hungry but sincere, will fight for the nation’s betterment even if it means disenrolling political rivals or, worse, petty troublemakers stretching their resources thin.

It can get a little bleak. Hickey’s portrayal of Mitch and his strained relationships are especially heartbreaking. The middle lags, especially when compared to a clever, smirk-inducing start and a thrilling finish. There were also a few moments I thought could’ve used another editing pass (who am I to talk?). I think there was a thirty page window at the start where Mack was described as “ursine” eight or nine times, but that eventually gets worked out. For a debut, I was impressed!

After I read The Long Goodbye last month, I wanted to dive into more crime novels from this era. Cotton Comes to Harlem is an absolutely ruthless and sex-filled noir that, almost despite itself, has a compelling mystery at its core. Reverend Deke O’Malley is running his newest scam: he’s offering a Back-to-Africa trip to anyone who pays up a thousand bucks. There’s a bloody shootout at Deke’s latest fundraising rally which ends with an armored truck making away with the money.

Enter Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, hardened detectives (and gun-slinging cops) who will do anything to get the swindled money back to its rightful owners. At the heart of the investigation is a bale of cotton, lost in the pursuant scuffle, which everyone wants to get their hands on. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are the undeniable stars of the show–and, frankly, they brutalize and batter anyone else that steals their shine. And yet, through the mist of borderline exploitative violence and sex, Himes has a lot to say. It’s a portrait of 60s Harlem, the good and the (very) bad. The detectives ultimately empathize with people they’re sworn to protect and have their finger on the pulse of the city.

Silas Marner is a slice of rural England in a time when people didn’t know much outside of their immediate surroundings. There’s gossip, the drama inherent to everyone knowing everyone else, power dynamics from exactly One Squire in town, and fragile, incomplete understandings of whatever has been sermonized in church. Silas Marner lived a monastic life in northern England but, after being accused of a theft he did not commit, is cast out from his life as he knows it.

He resurfaces in the novel’s primary locale, the rural Raveloe. Here, he lives a completely reclusive life weaving linen for money, which itself becomes his sole desire. When his gold hoard suddenly goes missing, Silas’s life is yet again thrown into complete disrepair.

This is a novel about redemption, adoption, and the beauty of familial love. There’s just a lot of wholesomeness here, alongside some truly breathtaking looks into the way humans act in adversity and in the rare opportunity to get a second chance. So much drama, so well-written, just a nice little classic.

The River Has Roots is a fairy tale about two sisters, connected by fate, who live in a fantasy-ish world held together by the power of words and grammar. There’s something meaningful here about the power of love (especially between sisters), fate, and the way men feel violently entitled to girls. It’s a love story, kind of, but I found the characters lacking, which is surprising given how magical and breathtaking they are otherwise described.

The world itself is described abstractly, being rooted in lyrics and poeticism and the power of the spoken word, but I wanted slightly more from it. It was just a bit too ethereal to me, too floaty. I don’t mind these more abstracted fantasy worlds, painted by themes and ideas rather than concrete detail, but neither the characters nor the world get their time to shine in this novella. I really enjoyed El-Mohtar’s work in This is How You Lose the Time War, itself an abstract-ish fantasy love story, but The Rivers has Roots felt shallow in comparison.

House of Day, House of Night is a sad, beautiful magical realist gem. This novel nonlinearly focuses on Nowa Ruda, a small Polish border town which has been part of three different countries over the course of its existence. Bits and pieces of Nowa Ruda’s folklore are revealed in short stories which then continue to unravel and intertwine in the hundred-odd years House of Day, House of Night covers.

What we are left with is a vivid, dreamlike tapestry that connects the past to the present. Nowa Ruda is a strange place out of time– sort of– but so is every place. Its current self is cobbled together from the saint who lived there (and the gender nonconforming monk inspired to write of her existence), the dragon who lived a pond, the soldiers who came and left, the dead left on doorsteps or forgotten out along the border. In the present, there’s an ageless lady whose stories leave the listener forgetful, a hopeless drunk with a bird trapped in his ribcage, and a seemingly-normal protagonist who bears witness to it all but is rarely frightened or very concerned. Tokarczuk writes a lot about mortality and dreams in a way that feels honest and real. It’s an incredible novel.

I will admit: this book was, at times, a bit too much for me. Earthlings follows Natsuki, a young girl who believes that her toy hedgehog Piyyut is an alien sent from outer space to give her magic powers. In reality, Natsuki is a tragic kid who uses her “magic powers” to dissociate or otherwise try to negate the effects of the horrible treatment she faces from the adults in her life.

Natsuki believes that the “earthlings” are trying to convert her into a loyal worker for the baby-making factory and, in fact, wishes they would brainwash her so that she could do just that. But she cannot shake the feeling that she doesn’t belong on this planet, that she has magical powers that can save her, and that the way adults treat her is irrational and can’t be right.

This is a borderline horror novel, by the way. It’s disturbing. It’s heavy-handed. The ending is completely over-the-top and gets further and further from reality. It’s pretty good though. Just, y’know, beware the content warnings before you head in.

I love sports, specifically basketball, but it’s a weird time to be a basketball fan. Anyone that loves and watches a lot of American sports today is completely bombarded with gambling ads, gambling endorsements, and public recommendations on what bets to place. Betting was always a part of these sports, but a part that was forced to the margins and roundly rejected by the sports institutions themselves.

Now, though, those same institutions have undergone a complete reversal. Everybody Loses documents how sports gambling went from fringe overseas bookies to an app on seemingly every sports fan’s phone; how this gambling has implicated and infected the integrity of players; and just how sad it is to earn the title of “FanDuel VIP.” There’s a lot of pathos here, and my heart aches for the people robbed and preyed upon by daily fantasy and sports betting apps. It’s just so lame. Some great journalism done here by Danny Funt, though.

Full transparency: I am too much of a baby to have seen most of the movies discussed here. Aside from The Shining and maybe bits and pieces of Rosemary’s Baby, I have no firsthand experience with any of these movies. But, being that these essays are about some of the most talked-about movies ever, I did have some preconceptions about their themes, ideas, and place in culture. This essay collection challenges some of those ideas, reinforces others, and overall makes some incredibly compelling arguments in favor of the feminism present in domestic horror.

Johnson highlights the familiar horror of being a woman, or even a man (in relation to Creep), trapped in domestic environments with violent, controlling men. Some of these men are physically imposing and powerful, while others are self-serving and quietly allow patriarchal, sexual violence against their victims. Still others are literalized as demons and ghosts and Satanists– it’s horror movies we are talking about here, after all. Demons aren’t exactly the most subtle beings in the world, which Johnson calls into sharp relief: how do these blunt themes go unremarked upon?

If I could go back in time and introduce tween me to any book, or any book series, it’d be Discworld. I wanted to write stories that were simultaneously about Cool characters who felt Real but also Jokes that make my friends Laugh— and man, our boy Pratchett was doing just that, wasn’t he? Feet of Clay is nothing short of a joy to read. It introduces a cool new type of guy to the Discworld, golems. Golems are one of the most underrated fantasy guys, and, no surprise here, Pratchett’s interpretation of them is clever and meaningful. I’d love to hang out with Dorfl, the new golem character.

This novel is another in the City Watch series, a series that I reckon I’ll finish by the end of the year, even as I originally intended to meander through it. This is another one that’s ostensibly a murder mystery but the swingy plot is just a vehicle for alternating character moments and actiony detective scenes. There’s a trans dwarf now! And she’s awesome and the werewolf lady takes care of her! It’s cool.