The Night Bulletin

This month was a bit of a lighter reading month (in fact, it was the lightest reading month of the year), but that’s okay. I went outside a lot this month, enjoying as much of the volatile summer weather as it is possible for me to enjoy. What I read this month ended up being really good, so no disappointments there.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (5✸)

I wasn’t quite sure what rating to give this book, because to me it was five stars, but I don’t like giving books perfect ratings. It makes it seem like the book is flawless, which is impossible. But Fredrik Backman may have done the impossible here. I can’t really find any fault with this book, other than some of the jokes didn’t land quite as well as others.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Anxious People is about a botched bank robbery turned hostage situation. In this novel, we start after the situation has already been resolved, with no deaths or even major injuries to any of the hostages. The police are left with a few questions though: where is the bank robber/hostage taker? And did the hostages have anything to do with it?

This story is set up like a thriller, but it is in fact a character study. We get backstories and motivations for every character involved, and we see how decisions made in desperation have reverberations across time. There are plenty of nice sentences about mental health, suicide, and relationships, and this book never feels dismissive nor does it make light of these issues. It treats them with a black humor that seems right at home. I think anyone who has ever felt anything even close to depression or anxiety should read this book, not because it has any answers, but because it’s pretty good at making you feel less alone, at least for a little while.

Objects of Power (Fate of Wizardoms #4) by Jeffrey L Kohanek (3.75✸)

Mild spoilers in paragraph 2

I listened to this book on audio this time around instead of reading it on my Kindle app. This month, I’ve been trying to reduce my screen time on all my devices (with very little measurable success), and staying away from ebooks was one way I thought I could give my eyeballs a break. I still have to use a laptop for work, so that’s 9 hours per day already taken up. I’ve taken most of the apps on my phone and moved them to my tablet, and that has had some measure of success (it’s harder to idly scroll on a tablet than on a phone).

But enough about my habits, let’s turn to book 4 of the Fate of Wizardoms. This installment was better than #3, which I believe I gave a similar rating to this one. There were things to love about this installment. We got a much more exciting plot, and a diverging narrative that helped the pace move along. A few negatives, however, were the tropey introduction of elves (believe me, you’ve read these characters before many, many times), which was disappointing considering Kohanek successfully twisted the nature of dwarves enough to make them unique. Goblins are purely evil hordes that no one should feel bad about killing, and the elves, who are in hiding and abhor humans, live in a dying land. Thankfully, these tropey parts of the narrative were short.

Another gripe I have is the same as book 3: there is a romance between two characters that is pretty much only about how much they have sex. Sure, it’s something that should be mentioned, but I feel that every interaction between these two characters is about sex, or ogling each other’s bodies. It’s as if the author himself doesn’t believe that these two belong together, and must tell the reader every few pages that, yes, they’re in love. There is another romance between two characters in the book that is far more believable because it’s written about in a more subtle way. The contrast between these two romances makes the first romance appear less believable.

Other than those small gripes, I like that the ending of this installment teases the final battle that our characters will have to win. There are two more installments of this series, and as of this writing, a sequel series of 6 books and a trilogy of short novels following one of the characters. If I end up liking how this series ends, I will likely continue. This author seems to pump out a series per year, so I’m sure there will be more to come in this world.

Babel by RF Kuang (5✸)

” ‘Then the expense is entirely invented?’ Robin asked.
This came out more sharply than he’d intended. But he was thinking, then, of the choleric plague that had swept through London; of how Mrs. Piper explained the poor simply could not be helped, for silver-work was so terribly costly.
‘Oh, yes.’ Professor Playfair seemed to find this all very funny. ‘We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else.’ “

The above quote is one of many that I highlighted and underlined in my copy of Babel. I haven’t marked up a book since college (which was over 10 years ago), but this book shattered every expectation I had of it.

We follow Robin Swift, a Chinese-born scholar who is brought to study at Babel, Oxford University’s translation institute. In the 1830s of Kuang’s invention, we are introduced to the concept of silver-work, a magic that uses the gaps in translation between words in different languages to create useful work. This silver-work is tied to the might of the British Empire, and it also requires the use of foreign languages, especially Chinese, to facilitate this empirical business. Robin enjoys his new position of privilege immensely, but starts to analyze how his privileged position inherently makes him a tool of the colonizers of his homeland.

Kuang’s Nebula Award-winning novel doesn’t really say anything new about colonialism. This is not a controversial statement, as many negative reviews of the novel have called it preachy and didactic, while also criticizing the characters’ motivations. I will give a slight nod to the preachiness of the book, and the fact that it is full of academic footnotes that bear little importance to the plot. To me, the characters’ motivations are entirely believable, as any immigrant (or child of immigrants) from a non-Western country will tell you. There is a push-and-pull between loving your adopted country and hating it for all the evil it has wrought on your own people.

Where Babel excels is in its high-stakes narrative and its non-subtle take down of colonialism, exploitative capitalism, racism, and class privilege. This non-subtlety can be a downside for some readers, but I found it refreshing. There is no misinterpreting RF Kuang’s intent, and in a book that criticizes all that it does, a lack of subtlety is a strength, not a weakness. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a speculative take on British colonialism and all the horrors it wrought on millions of people.

Rise of a Wizard Queen (Fate of Wizardoms #5) by Jeffrey L Kohanek (4✸)

There really isn’t much to say about this audiobook on the heels of the previous volume. It was much better, for one. The pace and the stakes of the plot both shot up, with the final battle for the world being set up in this volume’s epilogue. We got answers to a lot of lingering questions (with some of those answers only leading to more questions), and the implications of the characters’ actions are being put into a broader perspective now. I have the final audiobook queued up, and will be diving into it as soon as I can. I’ll likely do a full series review in addition to my review of the final volume. For now, let the story continue.

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I read 2 manga volumes this month as well, but didn’t really like the series, so I’m abandoning it (it was Witch Hat Atelier, for anyone who is curious). I will likely pick up an entirely different manga next month to try out.

Another reason I haven’t been reading that much this month is because I decided to start working on a novel project. I’ve written 35,000 words in the last two months. If this pace keeps up, I’m hoping to have this first draft done by February 2024. We’ll see how that goes.

Until next month!