Currently Reading - 22-11-18

I succumbed and bought the Weber. It turns out I was wrong, for once there isn't a couple of hunded pages of dramatis personae, it's 900 pages of solid text.

Uncompromising Honor (Honor Harrington 19), David Weber

Content warning for the Kill off Your Gays and Kill off Your Crips tropes; and the blurb pretty explicitly gives away the climax and its drivers, so I'm not going to worry too much about spoilers here.  

 

( Here Be Spoilers )

 

ETA: I've just realised the Manticoran strategy for winning the peace is actually Donald Rumsfeld's strategy for running Iraq once we'd kicked Saddam out. And that worked so well.

 

Definitely not the book to start the series on!

The Lost Plot, Genevieve Cogman

Having killed off (or at least seriously singed) series bad guy Alberich in the last book, Library agent Irene Winters can be forgiven for hoping things will be a little quieter (at least once she's escaped the houseful of vampires with the lost book that is her latest assignment), but she's no sooner soggily vampire free than she's approached by Jin Zhi, a dragon in human form, who wants her to work for her. Four books in the audience knows the multiverse exists in an ongoing conflict between the Dragons as forces of order, and the Fae as forces of chaos, with the Invisible Library attempting to maintain a policy of strict neutrality within its own mission of saving the multiverse by saving lost books. So going to work for a dragon is strictly out of bounds (even if Irene's apprentice Kai is technically speaking a dragon), which makes the job offer even more worrying when Jin Zhi explains her rival in a challenge (retrieve a variant text of Journey to the West) set by their queen already has a librarian working for them. And as the loser won't survive the challenge, which has barely a week to run, stakes are high. Being a good little librarian (for once) Irene immediately reports the approach to the Library, and is assigned to chase down the other Librarian and protect the Library's reputation, at any cost.

Hunting him down takes Irene and Kai (regular series ally and great detective Vale doesn't really feature in this one) to a world stuck in the Prohibition Era, leading to all kinds of confusion as Irene is taken for a notorious British bootlegger (helped by no one in NYPD or the New York press actually checking sources to see if said notorious bootlegger actually exists), and swept up by variously the police, the mob, and the other faction. It's the usual rapid fire action of Cogman's series, and this time the bad guys quite literally have tommy guns. In the end it's it's up to Irene, Kai, the cops, the mobster, and the mobster's Fae moll/hitwoman to stop the two dragons from destroying the world in the pursuit of their goal.  The ending is effective, but it's a little too Orientalist for my liking. It doesn't quite dip into yellow peril, but the cliche quotient is higher than usual.

Up Next

Not sure fictionwise, I still haven't touched any of the possibilities I raised last time, most probably K B Spangler's Spanish Mission as I could do with something relatively light. I'm almost certainly about to buy several heavyweight military history texts, helped by the two volume Rikugun on the Japanese Army's organisation and equipment being available for £3+£7 as ebooks, which is a fraction of what I'd expect to pay for it.

Currently Playing

Ark Extinction is proving unexpectedly compelling. It's still having several post-release issues, though apparently they now have the giant beaver population explosion under control, and I want to take advantage of at least one of them before they nerf it back to what they probably meant it to be. I'm not quite at the point I can do that, though I might get there later this evening. Favourite moment so far, standing on the roof of my base, thinking "I should probably log off now -- holy shit that's an argentavis* outside!"

* Think giant eagle, an extremely useful mid-late game mount that isn't supposed to spawn anywhere near my base, but which is now mine**!

** Pity I can't make the saddle for it yet.