What I’ve Read

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer – As I wrote in more detail last week, this book is a really great overview of the Ottoman Empire, in the opinion of someone who knows very little about the Ottoman Empire. Baer’s style felt approachable and clear and made a point of grouping developments both thematically and in a clear timeline.

I will concede, I felt more positively about the book last week, but that’s not a writing failure. The latter half of the book is a downward slide from religious tolerance and multicultural assimilation into a larger Empire (good or bad, it did allow upward mobility!) to an ethnic and religious paranoia of the non-Turkish elements of the failing state. The book’s coverage of the Armenian Genocide was, in fact, both horribly clear and quite personal and made me very very sad.

I again recommend this book and if anyone has other books that look at the Ottoman Empire’s history, I would like to read them!

Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy Sayers (narrated by Ian Carmichaels, thank you again anon donor of audiobooks!) – Hilariously funny and also deeply goddamn bleak. It does a very compelling job of showing Wimsey’s doublemindedness while he’s undercover – at times, he truly thinks of himself as Mr Bredon, advertising copywriter in a quirky little office, and occupies that role with humor and warmth. Then he has to come back to being Lord Peter Wimsey, investigating the death of a young man at that same office, and knowing that he’s likely to do real damage to at least one person involved in a real and dangerous criminal ring at the advertising firm. The tension is well structured and given breaks of humor around the office, but has clear stakes for individual people we meet who are harmed by the crimes the scheme is covering up.

( Spoilery reflections on the ending of this book and on The Unfortunateness at the Bellona Club )


What I’m Reading

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove – I tried the audiobook – I really did! But the main narrator was much too annoying to continue. (I’d mention them by name but this appears to be an ensemble audiobook with several narrators and I can’t tell which one this was.) The book is unfortunately for a book club – I would have bailed by now, if it were up to me, just because the pacing is so glacial. It’s trying to do Murderbot and failing to make it fun.

A key failure is the description impedes the pacing. When you come across our Computer Main Character doing a normal thing in an unusual way because they are a computer, not a human, you get a description of how that action is completed in computer-y way. And the first time, that’s great. But. You get that same description over, and over, and over. As a result, instead of grabbing the reader swiftly and towing them excitingly thru realizing, gasp! your ship is full of CORPSES! Then the WEREWOLF attacks! - the text plods. Pauses. Observes. Describes. And then plods again.

This is rapidly proving to be the sort of book I would read ONLY via audiobook because the text is too irksome, but the audiobook sucked! The narrator is very very English and very very irksome. So on I plod, reading a book that doesn’t trust me to remember that computers are different than people.

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers – I almost mention this book in self defense against the accusation that I’m bored by Of Monsters and Mainframes because I only like sexier and dumber writing. (No one has made this accusation, other than the hobgoblins of my mind.) This is an English countryside murder mystery that doesn’t get to the discovery of the body until our main character has been introduced to the little town via their New Year’s Eve change ringing performance that involves 8 men ringing church bells for nine hours in precise mathematical permutations. It’s fascinating, and compelling, and I don’t actually care that I’m not able to perfectly understand everything that’s happening, because the book’s momentum is taking me forward at a satisfying clip. The people of the town are interesting, and there’s a blatant self-insert of Sayer’s childhood self in a precocious little teen who wants to be a writer. (I love her.)

What I’ll Read Next
Witness for the Dead Katherine Addison - for next week, I have read the first half, I should get on this!
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed
Next Earthsea book?