I found this in an old bookshop, cracked it open, and bought it immediately when I noticed the extensive commentary. I've been reading the weekly paraI found this in an old bookshop, cracked it open, and bought it immediately when I noticed the extensive commentary. I've been reading the weekly parashah for years but previously out of a full copy of Tanakh, so I never bothered looking up the haftorot and doing a bunch of flipping, and when I saw this was all nicely laid out I set that old Tanakh aside and have been using this for the last couple years.
Coming as I do from a more liberal branch of Judaism, it's a little refreshing to see Rabbi Hertz's full-throated cheerleading. I'm generally used to more "our tradition states that" or "if you feel it's meaningful" language. Rabbi Hertz does not mince words--he more or less says that you're all lucky that Judaism exists because if it weren't for us you'd be ignorant savages who were still sacrificing your children to Moloch. It's a little jarring, but it's also helpful to remember that the commentary was written in the 1930s amidst a background of rising antisemitism and claims that Judaism was basically everything that was wrong in the world. When strong claims are presented, strong counterclaims are warranted.
This does go a bit far occasionally, maybe because of the context. The commentary often outright states that the Children of Israel were the only moral people in the world and everyone around them were a sea of ignorant barbarians. Like:
G-d had suffered the heathens to worship the sun, moon, and stars as a stepping-stone to a higher stage of religious belief. That worship of the heathen nations thus forms part of G-d's guidance of humanity. But as for the Israelites, G-d had given them first-hand knowledge of Him through the medium of Revelation.
It's okay that you're still practicing your religion; you don't know any better! Someday your culture will grow up. This is normative Jewish belief--Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our G-d, the LORD is one--but it's probably my previously-mentioned liberal background that makes this sentiment grate a bit.
That isn't the entire point of the commentary, of course, there's a lot of explication of more esoteric or non-obvious points of the text. I would say that most non-Jews don't understand that the interpretation of various passages they deem barbaric, like stoning disobedient children, were such that the punishments were never carried out. This usually occurs when the Torah imposes the death penalty--if you read the Talmudic commentary, there are always so many stipulations placed on it that carrying out the execution is impossible in practice. Rabbi Hertz says:
The Rabbis tell us that this law was never once carried out; and, by the regulations with which the infliction of the death-penalty was in this case surrounded, it could not be carried out
For example, the passage says that "they shall say" that "our son," so it's only possible if both parents are agreed that their child deserves death. Also, they have to declare their child a "glutton and a drunkard," so it can only be applied if the child has stolen meat and alcohol, taken it outside the house, and eaten it all. And so on.
It reminded me of the parts of Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion which talked about how you as a singular individual cannot always be trusted to know what's best for you in religion. If you just rely on your own experience and understanding you'll be sure to miss things that the collective knowledge of those who came before you already determined. People do not always know what's best for them and that's as true in religious practice as in any other part of human life. Commentaries are necessary because if you just read Torah it won't give you an accurate view of how modern Judaism is practiced--for one, we're not still wandering in the desert and taking the Mishkan from place to place.
Simchat Torah is coming up, and after it does, I'll finish this book and then start it again for another year....more
One of the secrets of Shadowrun's success is that it recapitulates the generic setup of the fantasy D&D dungeon crawl. The adventuring party (shadowruOne of the secrets of Shadowrun's success is that it recapitulates the generic setup of the fantasy D&D dungeon crawl. The adventuring party (shadowrunner team), receives a quest (job from Mr. Johnson) to go to a dungeon (corporate facility) and find treasure (paydata/employee for extraction). Once there they fight intelligent monsters (corp guards) and unintelligent monsters (trained paranormal animals) on the way to their goal. The fighter (street samurai) holds the line, the mage (magic-user) casts spells, and the thief (decker) gets past the traps and locked doors. Renraku Arcology: Shutdown is a big old dungeon in a giant corporate facility, a location where you can set any number of runs from rescuing prisoners, finding corporate secrets, discovering what the AI in charge of the facility is up to, or even being manipulated by said AI into doing jobs for it.
This is partially a plot book and partially an adventure book, so big chunks are given over to setting the stage--a meeting of the megacorporations to talk about what happened in the arcology where Renraku refuses to give a straight answer about whether they have an AI in there (they do), a fight in the Matrix where the Shadowland BBS luminaries are trying to get the data on the arcology out into the wider Matrix, long narrative descriptions of the parts of the arcology, and no keyed graph paper maps. That's fine, I think, because most of the arcology is like "Floors 89-95: offices", you don't need a map of what low-level corporate office looks like, you've probably been in one. That does mean the book has a weird internal tension, because (for example) the stats for all of the AI's new creepy drones it made are interspersed among a story about a shadowrunner team breaking in to try to extract any prisoners, and the discussion among the corporate representatives is neat but doesn't have a nice list of jobs that each corporation could want to do. There's going to be a lot of flipping back and forth in the book if you're trying to stage a run out of it.
The concept is neat enough that I forgive that, however. The idea of a sealed off arcology turned into an experimental playground for an AI is just bursting with ideas. The book repeatedly emphasizes that the resistance are never sure if they're actually succeeding in their goals to thwart the AI or if the AI is just using them as pawns to accomplish some inscrutable goals of its own (spoiler: it is), and the fact that this is a giant building run by a non-metahuman intelligence means you can have your own Shadowrun version of the D&D funhouse dungeon. There's some weird torture dungeon where you have to run on unstable catwalks over a floor of spikes while being chased by drone bees that inject neurotoxins if they catch you. If that wouldn't fit in the Tomb of Horrors, nothing in Shadowrun would....more
Ah yes, a book starring the vampire hunter D. A book where D is hired to by a mysterious party, you say? Add in that he's traveling with a teenage girAh yes, a book starring the vampire hunter D. A book where D is hired to by a mysterious party, you say? Add in that he's traveling with a teenage girl, and that a band of misfits with idiosyncratic powers oppose him? You mean to tell me that D handily wins every single fight he's in without breaking a sweat, often by leaping into the air as his cloak spreads out behind him like the wings of a black bird and a white flash as he throws a wooden needle? I see you have also read another Vampire Hunter D book.
That said, Pale Fallen Angel (Parts I and II!) does start with an intriguing hook in that the mysterious party that hired D is themselves a vampire. Baron Byron Balazs (which I unfortunately kept reading as "balls") wants to travel to the village of Krauhausen to kill his father. His father is also trying to kill him. At least in this book, the reasons for this aren't explained, though it becomes increasingly obvious that it's because of the Sacred Ancestor's experiments, because the Nobility are completely incapable of anything but fighting amongst themselves and terrorizing humans. The Sacred Ancestor is the only one who actually produces anything of value, and even that is only by accident. Anyway, while the book says that most of the Nobility are slaves to their hungers and even the most gentlehearted, kind Noble will start drinking infants' blood the moment they get a bit peckish, the Baron is capable of restaining his hunger even in trying circumstances. For some reason this makes other Nobles contempuous of him. You know, I'm starting to see why humans don't like vampires very much.
The Baron hires D to protect him from the aforementioned band of misfits on the road to Krauhausen, and D's response is basically "What the hell is wrong with you?" except much more stoic and dreamy. The Baron says that he'll obey all of D's requests and that he absolutely will not drink any human blood and, if he does, D can instantly kill him, and this mollifies D enough that he takes the job. And with that setup, it...becomes a typical Vampire Hunter D story.
It's a fun read, don't get me wrong, but the thing having an actual Noble as a traveling companion finally made me realize is that the weird power scaling of the D books works against the narrative conceit that the Nobility are far above humans in some ways and far below them in others. The Nobility can move faster than thought, punch through solid steel walls, endure attacks that destroy the majority of their total body mass and regenerate completely back to full health, but they also burn to ash in sunlight, are totally incapable of resisting the urge to drink blood, are repelled by crosses, and cannot endure running water. I appreciate the lengths that these books go to justify standard vampire tropes--for example, the book states that the reason female Nobles always wear transparent flimsy nightdresses while slumbering in their coffins is to distract potential hunters long enough to be able to wake up and murder them--but the existance of X-men style superhero vampire hunters like Tunnel (able to use soundwaves to liquify the ground and pass through solid earth), Crimson Stitchwort (covered in symbiotic flowers whos pollen is a deadly weapon), or Vince (he's literally unkillable) who are capable of fighting and killing Nobles--theoretically, anyway--make me wonder what humanity was doing for ten thousand years of their oppression. Did humanity just not have any Marios the Puppeteer or Lords Johann, The Trail Magician?
Fortunately this revelation came at the end, because the insane worldbuilding is once again the strength of the Vampire Hunter D books. I don't want to spoil everything but a chunk of the way through one of the characters casually drops mention of the "OSBs" (外宇宙生命体, gaiuchū seimeitai), or "Outer Space Beings," which is a weirdly dispassionate way to talk about alien invaders that the Nobility fought a thousand-year-war against across the length and breadth of the Solar System! Vampires vs aliens is an amazing bit of history to suddenly reveal eleven books into this series and I really hope there are at least a trilogy of books that go into that war.
It ends on a cliffhanger and the next book is on my shelf. I know the next one is going to have another band of misfits with idiosyncratic powers who oppose D...but you know, I'm here for it.
I read this with my book group and I could immediately understand why it won a Pulitzer. As is often the case with book groups, we usually spend the fI read this with my book group and I could immediately understand why it won a Pulitzer. As is often the case with book groups, we usually spend the first session just all catching up with each other's lives, talking about what we've been up to, etc. With The Sympathizer, we spent almost an hour and a half talking about the book. That's a real mark in its favor.
The language was the best part. I was repeatedly caught off-guard by a turn of phrase or a well-constructed sentence--the first one I remember from our book group discussion is when the Captain is talking to a professor at the college where he gets a job after escaping the fall of Saigon and coming to America, and the Captain notices that the professor has an Oriental rug hung up on the wall of his office
in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.
The kind of thing is the strength of the book, the outsider's perspective of America. American politics for most of my life was influenced by the psychic damage of losing the Vietnam War, and that is one of the major points of The Sympathizer--that America always thinks of itself as the protagonist of reality and filters all world events through that lens. The Captain works on a movie about the war (obviously based on Apocalypse Now) and his thoughts continually return to the fact that the movie is not about the war, and it's definitely not about the people of Vietnam, it's entirely about Americans' reaction to the war, American feelings, and American pain. The Captain can see this, because he is a man of two worlds. Born in Vietnam to a foreign father but native mother, educated in America but returning to Vietnam and, most importantly for the course of the book, actually a communist even though he works for the Republic of Vietnam's secret police. That's why he's the sympathizer, because he can always see both sides, and his insights about the situations he's in make the book worth reading by themselves. They're so good I gave it four stars based on that alone.
Unfortunately, the actual plot of the book was less gripping. The Captain--we never learn his name--starts in a communist prison, writing his confession, and we don't learn why for the majority of the book. We find follow him from Vietnam to America, follow him sending off secret notes to his handlers back in the Revolution, and we learn that he is a terrible spy. Seriously, every single time someone even remotely indicates that something suspicious is happening, even if they don't mention the Captain at all, the narrative mentions his heart going into overdrive and his mouth going dry and sweat pouring off him. Of course, this is his perspective of what happens, we don't know if it's true. That's the fun part of the novel--I mentioned how much of it is his observations, and that's true of the plot as well. There is no dialogue for most of the book because it's his confession, so he mostly writes what he remembers people saying rather than exact quotes. He commits crimes and does whatever he has to to maintain his cover, but in the end he disobeys orders, ends up in Vietnam, and gets caught by the communists and...
...well, it's not very exciting. History has shown us how well communist governments treat their own people--as the book states, they threw off all their other oppressors so they could finally oppress themselves--but the big spoiler about why he's in jail, why he keeps having to rewrite his confession even though he doesn't know why he's in jail and that as he keeps saying, he did nothing, is that (view spoiler)[he did nothing. His sin is inaction when some other secret police were torturing a communist agent (hide spoiler)] Alright, fine, it makes sense considering he's a terrible spy and has repeatedly shown how wishy-washy he is over the course of the entire book, and also considering both of his blood brothers (one republican and one communist, of course, with him split down the middle) suffered terribly for their convictions and the Captain has drifted through the book with no serious tragedy or comeuppance for any of his actions, I get it. But once the book becomes about The Captain's Epiphany there's none of those cultural observation that were the draw for me.
Also, there's apparently a sequel? Odd.
It kept my interest most of the time and my book group had the most actually-book-related discussion we've had in a long time, so it deserves those four stars. Still, the end left me feeling unsatisfied. I would gladly read another Viet Thanh Nguyen book, but I think I'll skip the sequel to this one. ...more
My ex was obsessed with the Hamilton musical. She spent most of a year listening to the songs on repeat and before she saw it she knew most of them byMy ex was obsessed with the Hamilton musical. She spent most of a year listening to the songs on repeat and before she saw it she knew most of them by heart. When I was going through my bookshelf recently looking for an unread nonfiction book, I saw this one and was surprised when I took it down that it was not the famous Alexander Hamilton, it was another book I hadn't heard of before. Maybe the Chernow biography was unavailable and this was all she could get.
Well, I've heard great reviews of that other book, but this one took me almost three months to read.
All biographies are an interpretation--even autobiographies are the writer interpreting their younger self through an older mind--but I got much of a direct sense of interpretation in this book than I have in some other biographies I've read. Brookhiser does not hide his opinions on Hamilton and his friends and enemies, and I got the sense that Brookhiser was speaking as much as Hamilton was for much of the book. He directly calls Aaron Burr a narcissist with no convictions, which was, or at least professed to be, the majority opinion among the fans of the musical that I knew, but the musical changed a lot of things for dramatic effect (Elizabeth Hamilton burned only a portion of their letters and in fact dedicated most of her life to preserving her husband's legacy). There are lines like:
"It is sobering to reflect that Hamilton was a better journalist than I am."
which is true, though perhaps nothing to be ashamed of when comparing oneself to such a towering historical figure.
Hamilton is controversial because he was one of the most strident proponents of a strong national government with broad powers through separate institutions like a national bank. Hamilton came down very strongly in favor of things like the government guaranteeing the debt of the states, he was in favor of a national debt because of the very modern idea of funding government expenditures through bonds rather than taxes, and he was so much in favor of these things that he was constantly accused of being a monarchist who wanted to turn America into a new kingdom to oppress the Americans the way that the king had in the old days. But these are all things I could learn by looking at the Wikipedia entry of Hamilton, I'm reading a biography because I want insight into his character and his personal opinion on things, and it always felt at least one step removed here. Brookhiser's opinion is that the source of most of these opinions was Hamilton's foreign birth--not being from any state, he did not care about the states as powers in their own right, and considered himself an American first and foremost rather than a Virginian or a New Yorker. Hence the title of the book, sure, but there were other founding fathers born in Ireland or England or elsewhere. What, specifically, made Hamilton so dedicated that people like Thomas Jefferson kept spreading rumors that he disliked the Constitution and wanted a new, American, king?
That seems odd, because "Queen of the Black Coast" is up there with "Red Nails" and "Beyond the Black River" as one of the best ConaThis book is fine.
That seems odd, because "Queen of the Black Coast" is up there with "Red Nails" and "Beyond the Black River" as one of the best Conan stories out there, but "Queen of the Black Coast" isn't about piracy. Conan makes his awesome entrance, leaping from horseback onto a departing ship, switches sides from the Argus to the Tigress, and then all the years of piracy that follow are brushed over in a paragraph and it's only when they find the cursed ruined city that the narrative zooms in again. At the end, Conan admits:
There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone.
And that's the big problem with Conan the Pirate--we have basically no examples of Conan actually pirating so it's hard to say what it should be like.
As such, most of the book is a gazetteer of various locations around the coastline of Hyboria. Most of this is mundane politics, like how Zingara is a nest of vipers where noble houses hold all the power and the king rules in name only, or how Stygia is so hostile that it's often illegal for foreigners to even be in the country outside of specific designated ports. Argos is the greatest trade power and knows it, so they put almost all of their naval power behind making sure that trade keeps flowing regardless of what the Barachan pirates have to say about it. This is interspersed with locations like Davu, the City of Forever, the remnant of a hidden lost hypertech civilization destroyed in the Cataclysm, or a city of intelligent spider crabs on the Pictish coast, or one of the Barachan Isles with a surviving colony of serpent men. The Barachan Isles are weird, because they get a map and almost every single island has some hidden occult secret. A ship frozen in time, the aforementioned serpent men, an island also frozen in time, a pyramid and so on. It gets so common that it wraps around to being a little silly. If everywhere has some weird occult secret, then what's the normal to contrast again? This is the problem with "Queen of the Black Coast" only showing the weird ruins with occult secrets and not the plundering of merchant vessels.
That's the first half of the book. The latter half is rules, including the standard set of enemies like sharks and ghost pirates. There's a series of random tables so when your crew plunders a merchant vessel you can roll up what they're carrying, including black lotus or mummies (good luck with the Stygian priests that are probably after you now). There's sea weather, pirate carousing tables, and a surprisingly detailed set of rules for running ship-to-ship combat. Though it seems a little odd, I can see why they did this. Your group of players presumably includes more than one person, so the rules have players take multiple roles like the captain and pilot and lookout, so everyone has something to do during tense scenes. This has the potential to be a lot of fun--there's a game out there called Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator where you need six people to man the captain's chair, helm, sensors, etc., and the fact that you have to communicate and work together is why it's fun. With the tendency to treat a ship as a single unit, at least until you pull alongside and then board, giving people separate roles helps avoid one person rolling all the dice.
But it opens up the question of what should the game be about? Obviously Conan the game has a broader scope than the Conan stories--you can actually play a sorcerer, for example--but the Conan stories explicitly exclude his piracy even though he got a well-known nickname out of it (Amra, the lion) and spent several years doing it. The sea is a hard place to do the slowly-rising sense of doom that the Momentum/Doom system demands, unless you're constantly chasing merchant vessels, and as I mentioned in my review of the Conan corebook, the system of Doom spends is a bit ambiguous. What kind of threats are going to show up in the middle of the ocean that aren't rapidly going to get repetitive? On land, there's far more possibilities than another "Oh, the merchant vessel was a trap and the cargo is actually armed soldiers!"
If you want to play pirates that's cool, but "Queen of the Black Coast" understood that a ship is a thing that gets you to where the adventure happens. ...more
I've seen elsewhere that The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth has been called the first sword and sorcery story, but I don't see it. It may hI've seen elsewhere that The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save For Sacnoth has been called the first sword and sorcery story, but I don't see it. It may have been a huge inspiration for sword and sorcery, but it's clearly a fairy tale.
The main character is Leothric, the son of a ruler who leaves the village to undertake a quest at the behest of an older and wiser mentor figure in response to a curse laid upon his land. The town magician assigns the "Prince" a quest, to slay the dragon-crocodile Tharagavverug and forge a sword out of its spine. Having done so (of course Leothric succeeds) and bearing the sword Sacnoth, he travels to the castle of the wizard Gaznak and fights through all the dangers in his path, eventually winning through. That's not a spoiler--the title literally says the fortress is unvanquishable save for Sacnoth, so once Leothric gets Sacnoth you know he's going to win.
There are two things that make this story so good--the first is the language. There's no one who writes like Dunsany, though many fantasy authors make the mistake of trying. Just look at this:
Outside he felt the night air on his face, and found that he stood upon a narrow way between two abysses. To left and right of him, as far as he could see, the walls of the fortress ended in a profound precipice, though the roof still stretched above him; and before him lay the two abysses full of stars, for they cut their way through the whole Earth and revealed the under sky; and threading its course between them went the way, and it sloped upward and its sides were sheer.
Or this:
Then Leothric smote upon the Porte Resonant with Sacnoth, and the echo of Sacnoth went ringing through the halls, and all the dragons in the fortress barked. And when the baying of the remotest dragon had faintly joined in the tumult, a window opened far up among the clouds below the twilit gables, and a woman screamed, and far away in Hell her father heard her and knew that her doom was come.
This is more like a prose poem--the point of passages like this are just to evoke a mood and an image. I can see in my head how this would be portrayed in a metal music video or in the animated short. Who is the woman? Who is her father? Doesn't matter, we're on to the hundreds of camel-rider guards who flee screaming when Leothric tells them he has Sacnoth.
And that's the second part of the story--the humor. Dunsany is obviously writing parts of the story with tongue firmly in cheek, from names like "Wong Bongerok" the dragon to how all the evil forces in the story are constantly praising Satan to the behavior of the enemies. When the camel riders show up, they say:
The Lord Gaznak has desired to see you die before him. Be pleased to come with us, and we can discourse by the way of the manner in which the Lord Gaznak has desired to see you die.
Later, there's a scene in a banquet with queens and princes and two hundred footmen that carry messages between Leothric and the nearest of the princes. After a short discussion, the prince tells the footmen to seize him, the message gets passed down the line, and when the two nearest get close, Leothric says, "This is Sacnoth" at which point the footmen say, "It is Sacnoth" and scream and run.
And then every pair of footmen in the line does this. Just:
"It is Sacnoth. AAAAAaaaₐₐₐₐₐ" "It is Sacnoth. AAAAAaaaₐₐₐₐₐ" "It is Sacnoth. AAAAAaaaₐₐₐₐₐ" x 98
until the message gets back to the queens and princes and they run too. There's no way I'm supposed to read this and not think it's a joke. The story does an excellent job of being both a good fantasy story and funny, the same way the Discworld books do. No wonder so many weird fiction authors in the first half of the 20th century loved Dunsany.
I think this is an amazing book but it is not quite what's advertised on the cover.
Fuzz is primarily about how humans deal with having animals (and soI think this is an amazing book but it is not quite what's advertised on the cover.
Fuzz is primarily about how humans deal with having animals (and some plants) living nearby and behaving in ways that are inconvenient to humans but natural for animals. Each chapter covers a different subject and is full of interesting anecdotes sprinkled into the discussion. It's incredibly readable, often funny, and educational, which is why I gave it five stars. I had no idea that elephants loved getting drunk and would smash down houses to get at fermenting alcohol in Indian villages, or that vultures were most creeped out by fake vulture corpses hanging from nearby trees--though it does make sense, since as Roach states, if you wanted to move into a neighborhood but saw humans hanging upside down from all the nearby trees, you'd probably leave immediately too. It discusses human attempts at pest control and how many of them are ineffective or have backfired immensely (releasing stoats onto New Zealand to kill the rabbits that were also released onto New Zealand, islands with no previous native land predators). It's about how the most majestic, and most picturesque trees are also the most dangerous because they're the oldest, but also older trees are easier for animals to make homes in because there are more knots and holes in the wood, so it's a delicate balancing act. Mostly it's about how humans are not nearly as good at mastering nature as we like to believe and our supposed mastery often makes things worse.
The whole thing is written in a breezy style that's a joy to read and will leave you with plenty of fun things to mention at parties. Yes, it's lovely to meet you, did you know that like humans, a very small number of bears cause almost all of the bear problems?
But the one problem I really had with the book is that it's literally not what it says on the cover. The subtitle is "When Nature Breaks the Law" and the opening section tantalizes with mentions of animals being put on trial and sentenced, but that's the only discussion of that in the entire book. There's no discussion about law as it applies to animals, except for a brief bit about government policy in America vs. India (India is more lenient on killer animals than America is, though the people being attacked are equally vengeful in both countries). Obviously, animals have no ability to consistently follow the law and cannot be expected to uphold it, which is why the stories in the opening were so compelling. Like, did anyone try to put those New Zealand stoats on trial for attempted kiwi genocide? What about those drunk elephants?
Absolutely read this book, but just be aware that it is not a legal thriller. ...more
As they say, it's the journey, not the destination
but I forgot the part where most of this book was peOkay. So, I know I ended my previous review with
As they say, it's the journey, not the destination
but I forgot the part where most of this book was people going from place to place.
It took me a long time to finish this because I started running out of steam around 75% of the way through. While I finished The Dragonbone Chair in quicker time for me lately (my toddler takes up a lot of the time I once spent reading), The Stone of Farewell took months and months to read because once I got into The Journeys Section everything slowed down to a crawl. Josua and his crew travel from the ruins of Naglimund through Aldheorte, pursued by Norns, until they reach the Thrithings. Simon wanders through the woods. Binabik and Sludig wander through the woods. Miriamele goes south. Isgrimnur goes south. Eolair goes underground and then through the mountains. Everyone has somewhere to be and only gets there at the very end. It's an entire book of spinning wheels.
The debt this book owes to The Two Towers is obvious, because the last book ended with the seige of Naglimund, the death of Jarnauga--the closest equivalent to Gandalf because he's the first person who actually explains what was really going on--and the separation of most of what was previously "the party." Thus separated, the parties travel through hostile wilderness toward a place that is supposed to be their only hope except for the few who were separated and go their own way. It's only a loose parallel, of course, because Frodo has a clear mission and a destination that they know is the final goal, whereas all the heroes here know is that they have to collect the three swords as written in "Du Svardenvyrd" without even being sure where all the swords are and while knowing that their greatest enemy has one of the swords at his side. But in the first book they get their hands on Memory and here they don't do that much.
It even ends on multiple cliffhangers, including one where Simon is finally reunited with some of his companions and we get nothing more than a few sentences about how good it is to see him before the book ends!
My favorite part was probably Simon's captivity in Jao é-Tinukai'i. Maybe this is because it's the one part of the book where people aren't going from place to place, after Jiriki's sister Aditu brings Simon there and rescues him from dying in the snow when he gets separated from his companions, but it's mostly because it's an up-close look into the way that the Sithi live, and it mostly seems to be "slowly." The benefit of being nearly immortal and being sure that you will never have to worry about random mortals stumbling into your last bastion means that the Sithi spend their days just kind of wandering around doing whatever. We never meet a single Sithi craftsman, or farmer, or anything that would keep their civilization running. Perhaps they don't need them. This culminates in Amerasu's speech about how the Sithi basically already have one foot in the grave, just passively existing until the end of their very long lives finally reaches them, and only the Storm King had an assertive personality. Think of the Sithi as that friend who keeps saying you should make plans and never follows through, for centuries at a time.
Though jokes aside, it has some of the dream-like quality of Simon's journey under the depths of the Hayholt, which was one of my favorite parts of The Dragonbone Chair.
I know that there had to be three books because there are three swords, but did we really need an entire book of people traveling and being in basically the same situation when they arrived as when they left?
I read a lot of fiction as a child that was clearly in the shadow of The Lord of the Rings, but Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is still my favorite.
The DraI read a lot of fiction as a child that was clearly in the shadow of The Lord of the Rings, but Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is still my favorite.
The Dragonbone Chair is a basic hero's journey story and specifically a Fellowship of the Ring-style one, with Simon Mooncalf an orphan whose home is destroyed (metaphorically, not literally) and who is forced to flee into the wild, assembles a series of companions and travels lost through the wilderness, overcomes a pursuing foe, reaches a place of safety before having to leave again, and so on. If you've read fantasy fiction written in the last sixty years, you know how this goes, though the book was written in 1988 so it's not as derivative as it appears. And when I first read this as a thirteen-year-old I certainly hadn't read a million hero's journey books and so it burned itself into my memory.
The major stylistic benefit I think is the book's dream-like quality. Simon doesn't really know what's going for most of the book--he's fifteen and given to exploring the Hayholt, the giant castle where he works as cleaning boy, and daydreaming instead of avoiding work, and even when he's made apprentices to Doctor Morgenes the wizard, the doctor doesn't teach him anything because he clearly understands that teaching any kind of magic to a fifteen-year-old boy would be insane. And since the prologue is from Simon's perspective, and Simon doesn't actually understand how magic works, it all feels more magical since strange things happen and he doubts his senses. Is Doctor Morgenes's house really bigger on the inside than the outside? What are those liquids he tinkers with for? Where did he ge those weird creatures? Well, part of the hero's journey is being separated from your mentor, so Simon never really finds out. He has a nightmarish trip through ancient tunnels underneath the Hayholt, in the portion of the castle remaining from when it was Asu'a, "Looking Eastward," the stronghold of the Sithi when they ruled Osten Ard and humans existed as their sufferance, where it's hard to tell what parts of the trip are him panicking and what is actually down there, what voices he hears are his subconscious and what are the ghosts of the past:
"We will have it back, manchild. We will have it all back."
I thought a lot about the balance of worldbuilding while reading. There's something lovely about a completely invented world, like The Mirror Empire, but the benefit of The Dragonbone Chair "pretty close" approach is that the audience can do all the work. Once you hear that the Rimmersgarders live in the north and came to Osten Ard on ships and used to worship gods called "Udun" and "Dror," you can figure out a lot of things about them without being explicitly told. I also apprecited that the Erkynlanders were explicitly Anglo-Saxon and not just generic fantasy medieval English (that's specifically the Warinstenese--Simon being the Warinstenian version of the Erkynlandish "Seoman"). Nabbanai are post-Roman Italians, Hernystiri are pagan Welsh, Thrithings-men are nomadic Turkic peoples, etc. I already know a lot of about they work just from this. And the Sithi, with names designed to evoke Japanese phonetics like Sa'onserei or Ineluki or Iyu'unigato--or sometimes literally Japanese, like An'nai (案内, "guide") and Jiriki (自力, "[By] my own power")--or the Trolls, who are clearly Inuit, stand out as much different than the range of human cultures.
That said, the limitations of the tale make the opportunities for worldbuilding slim. As I said, Simon doesn't know anything about anything. There's a moment late in the story where Jiriki sees a keepsake that Morgenes left for Simon and grabs him and says, "Are you one of the mortals who possesses the Secret?" and Simon has no idea what he's talking about. The story is generally hints and insinuations, with no explanation of what the main plot even is until more than 80% of the way through the book, and even after the end of the book we don't know why it's happening. Why would (view spoiler)[Elias ally with the Norns, who explicitly want to exterminate all humans? (hide spoiler)] None of the characters we follow know, so it's not explained.
Really, The Dragonbone Chair is more about mood and language. If you want everything to be explained, you'll hate it. But if you want to run from pursuing huntsmen through the Aldheort Forest or the depths of a ruined castle built by the Fair Folk in the ages before there were any men, to travel to the frozen north in search of a sword forged from a falling star, to meet a prince of the Sithi beneath the forest eaves, then it's a fantastic book. As they say, it's the journey, not the destination.
If my problem with Dark Force Rising is that it was too much of a middle book, with a lot of passing time as various plots simmers and not a lot of acIf my problem with Dark Force Rising is that it was too much of a middle book, with a lot of passing time as various plots simmers and not a lot of action, then The Last Command goes too far in the other direction and tries to cram everything into a book too small to contain it.
Even when I first read this book all those years ago, I remember thinking that the ending was abrupt. All that, and then (view spoiler)[Thrawn dies because the Noghri kill him? (hide spoiler)] I mean, I can't say that it's not properly foreshadowed what with Leia's trip to Honoghr and revelation of Imperial treachery in the previous book, and it's poetic in that the master strategist cannot see the one thing that eventually leads to his downfall--his underestimation of his enemies after they have repeatedly fallen for his Just As Planned schemes leads to a dangerous weakness. But it's such a huge error and so different from Thrawn's usual behavior that it's always been a little unsatisfying to me. Especially with the counterexample of the Bilbringi/Tangrene feint, where Thrawn never once fell for the Republic's massive campaign trying to make him think they were going to attack Tangrene. He never even entertained the idea, since there's a conversation between him and Pellaeon where Thrawn is just like "No, it's all a feint, it's Bilbringi, move everyone to Bilbringi."
C'baoth also finally got to act after the previous book where he mostly just made threats and Thrawn said "He will have to be dealt with" while not dealing with him. Him mind-controlling the entire bridge crew into immobility and then brainjacking an Imperial general helped show both why Vader would say that the Force is more powerful than the ability to destroy a planet and why influencing minds was seen as a gray area by pre-Imperial Jedi. Sure, some of it is clone madness, but you can see why C'baoth has the idea that the Jedi should be the ruling aristocracy of a Force Empire with how easy it is for him to just make people do what he wants them to. The ysalamiri are thus necessary for the plot to occur at all, because without them C'baoth would be puppeting Thrawn around and would have already declared himself Emperor.
Most of the book that's not the run-up to Bilbringi is about the planning and execution of the assault on Wayland, and most of the assault on Wayland is traveling through the forest toward the mountain. In order to remain unnoticed, they have to set down out of sight of both the mountain and any detection software it has, so there's a lot of traveling through the woods, avoiding wildlife, dealing with the local inhabitants, and camping, and then a great action sequence at the end where part of the group tries to blow up the mountain while Luke and Mara go up to confront C'baoth. This is a point that has been mocked since then, when they go up and find (view spoiler)[the clone "Luuke" Skywalker (hide spoiler)], but I remember that when I read this as a 14-year-old, I thought this was a mind-blowing twist, like a more literal version of Vader's thoughts about turning Leia to the Dark Side. If Luke won't join C'baoth, well, maybe someone who will. A duel of equals, with no help from either side's allies. I tried to get into that headspace when I read it and ignore the (view spoiler)[Bigger Luke conspiracy theory or how I know that there's a "Luuuke" who shows up even later in the EU (hide spoiler)] and I mostly succeeded by thinking of it in cinematic terms. It's a little campy when read in a book, sure, but if I were watching The Last Command film and this scene happened, would I think it was great? Yes, I would.
That's what lifted this from three stars to four for me. There's too much packed into one book, and there are chapters with multiple action sequences that each could have comfortably been their own chapter (I haven't even mentioned the smugglers yet), but it would have a great flow as a Star Wars film. For decades before the Disney deal, that was the dream, that the Thrawn Trilogy would become the sequel films, and while obviously Lucas never would have limited himself to that--there's already statements about the Clone Wars in here that were totally ignored when the prequel trilogy was made--they would have made excellent movies. While I read, I tried to keep a cinematic viewpoint in mind, thinking of how the scenes would play out if I were watching it on a movie screen, and it would make an amazing movie.
As a friend said after finishing this book, am I going to keep going and read a bunch more EU books after reading this one? Well, maybe. I'm thinking about it.
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