I’ve read pretty much all of Brandon Sanderson’s works… yet somehow I’ve managed to completely miss Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians. Let’s remedy that.

Short version: Alcatraz reminds me a decent bit of Frugal Wizard–which was actually my least favorite of the Year of Sanderson secret projects. But so far at least, I’m enjoying this series quite a bit more.

Slightly longer version:

In the Hushlands—those Librarian-controlled nations such as the United States, Canada, and England—this book will be published as a work of fantasy. Do not be fooled! This is no work of fiction, nor is my name really Brandon Sanderson. Both are guises to hide the book from Librarian agents. Unfortunately, even with these precautions, I suspect that the Librarians will discover the book and ban it. In that case, our Free Kingdom Agents will have to sneak into libraries and bookstores to put it on shelves. Count yourself lucky if you’ve found one of these secret copies.

This is a (non-Cosmere) YA novel ‘written by’ our titular Alcatraz as he learns that the world he’s always known is full of lies (perpetrated by a cabal of EVIL LIBRARIANS) who are now, of course, out to capture and/or kill him.

As one does.

It’s impressively meta, with almost constant comments from Alcatraz as narrator, talking about writers, writing, fiction, and just about anything else.

Authors also create lovable, friendly characters, then proceed to do terrible things to them, like throw them in unsightly librarian-controlled dungeons. This makes readers feel hurt and worried for the characters. The simple truth is that authors like making people squirm. If this weren’t the case, all novels would be filled completely with cute bunnies having birthday parties.

Which, from my perspective as both a reader and writer myself, is amusing, but feels like it might be a bit weirder / too meta for a much younger reader?

If you don’t believe what I’m telling you, then ask yourself this: would any decent, kind-hearted individual become a writer? Of course not.

Well, so far my children are enjoying it!

I suppose we’ll see where we go from here.

Worldbuildingwise, we haven’t learned that much about how ‘magic’ works in this world (we already have technology based almost entirely on glass along with ‘Talents’, which seem somewhat chaotic). That’s kind of Sanderson’s thing, so I expect a lot more there. The world is chaotic and strains believability when it comes to ‘could you actually have a hidden world like this’ but… suspend disbelief and GO WITH IT.

Characterwise… I’m not actually sure how much I like Alcatraz. So far, I like supporting cast Grandpa Smedry and Bastille quite a bit more. I expect that’s kind of the point.

Overall, enjoyed.

Onward!

Be yourself!
…No, not like that!
— SOCIETY

Brains are weird yo. The older I get/the more I learn, the more true I find this.

Reading books like this (or alternatively this or Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's or Born on a Blue Day) helps. Discovering that there are other weird brains out there (I do love McCabe’s ‘hello brains’) is wonderful. Seeing both how they see the world the same–and perhaps even more so, the differences even within these groups–is like a lightbulb going off.

Specifically for this one, the idea that just because you are (/ appear to be) succeeding at life… doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not coming at a cost.

The fact that I could sometimes exceed expectations made it even more frustrating for me—and everyone around me—when I failed to meet the basic ones.

I think that if you have ADHD–or have someone close to you that does… and chances are really good that you do, even if you don’t know it–I think this book is worth a read.

ADHD is a terrible name for the condition, because ‘attention deficit’ implies a lack of attention. However, our brains can focus quite well sometimes–particularly on things we find engaging, such as our hobbies, crushes, video games, and so on. The trouble is, we can’t control the intensity of our focus or what we focus on. . . . This big misconception makes people less likely to seek a diagnosis because they are able to focus sometimes.

Explanations, tools to deal / adapt to a world that isn’t necessarily built for you, and a ton of quotes from a ton of people.

Over the years, we’ve shared long, deep discussions about what it means to have ADHD. About how being “normal” isn’t a realistic goal but being functional is. About how sometimes, paradoxically, being functional means behaving in less (neuro)typical ways, so we can be more mentally healthy, happy, and generous humans for ourselves and for those we love.

Well worth the read.

Onward!

Whenever I come across a “I’ve read all of The Dresden Files, now what?” discussion, one of the series that always seems to come up is Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London. They’re not entirely the same, but I get why people cross recommend them.

Basically, we have a London cop who stumbles upon a mysterious killing, questions a ghost, gets recruited by the ‘magical’ side of the London police, ends up meeting and befriending several rivers (see, the title! Also, it ends up making more sense in the story), and saves the day.

“Are they really gods?"

“I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace - that makes them a police matter.”

More or less.

I think my favorite part of the series (so far) is the humor, most especially the sheer Britishness of it (not being British, I have no idea how accurate it all is, but it’s good enough for me!).

He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he’d moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.

Oh, and also picking fun at it’s own genre of course.

“You put a spell on the dog,” I said as we left the house.
“Just a small one,” said Nightingale.
“So magic is real,” I said. “Which makes you a…what?”
“A wizard.”
“Like Harry Potter?”
Nightingale sighed. “No,” he said. “Not like Harry Potter.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not a fictional character,” said Nightingale.”

Second up, the introductions of magic. Any world where the characters try to treat magic as a science and figure out how in the world it really works is a great one in my book.

There’s an awful lot of hinted at worldbuilding there. I hope and expect to see a lot more of that in future books. We’ll just have to see which way all that goes.

Also also, having recently decided that learning Latin was just a great idea as our main character (although for (un)fortunately different reasons I suppose):

Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?

😄

Spoilers, I guess. 😄

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this book. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here!

Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.

Octopuses¹ are perhaps the best known example of what might be a truly alien intelligence on Earth. They’re far further from humanity than primates or dolphins or even birds. And man. They’re weird.

This book digs into the history of life itself, the beginning of what would eventually become brains, and how life eventually split and branched into all the myriad forms we have today.

In the Ediacaran, other animals might be there around you, without being especially relevant. In the Cambrian, each animal becomes an important part of the environment of others. This entanglement of one life in another, and its evolutionary consequences, is due to behavior and the mechanisms controlling it. From this point on, the mind evolved in response to other minds.

This part? Very interesting.

We also get some fascinating discussions about some of the weirder things octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish do. Color changing, shape shifting, and independently acting arms. They have it all.

Suppose some light-sensitive cells sit below a layer of many chromatophores. As chromatophores of different colors expanded and contracted, the light passing through them would be affected in different ways. If the animal kept track of which chromatophores were expanded, as well as how much light was reaching its sensors, it could know something about the color of incoming light.

Also cool.

Octopus society. A surprisingly short lived and solitary species, and yet still in one case, they’ve actually built something of a city in the ocean off Australia.

A marine research unit at Monterey Bay, California (MBARI), explores deep-sea environments with remote-controlled submarines that carry video cameras. In 2007 they were inspecting a rocky outcrop nearly a mile underwater, off the coast of central California. They saw a deep-sea octopus (Graneledone boreopacifica) moving around. Returning a month or so later, they found the same octopus guarding a clutch of eggs. They kept returning to the site to watch the progress of this clutch of eggs, and always found the octopus there. In the end they watched this one octopus for four and a half years. This octopus brooded her eggs for longer than any other known octopus is thought to live in total, and the fifty-three months it spent there is the longest egg-brooding period reported for any animal species.

Fascinating.

And then also a dive into consciousness. Which… we can barely explain or define what consciousness means for people, let alone verify it’s presence in any other species.

It’s entirely philosophical and not really my domain. Philosophy is weird and malleable and hard (at best) to actually put to scientific scrutiny. We can certainly measure some aspects of intelligence and communication and tool using among non-human species… but how in the world to you ask an octopus what it thinks about thinking? How in the world do you tell if they’re actually aware of their self and surroundings?

The second thing Hume missed is more conspicuous. When we look inside, most people find a flow of inner speech², a monologue that accompanies much of our conscious life. Sentences and phrases, exclamations, rambling commentaries, speeches we would like to give, or wish we’d given. Maybe Hume did not find this in his own case? Some people have a more prominent inner monologue than others. Perhaps Hume was one of those for whom inner speech is weak? It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that Hume did encounter inner speech, but regarded it as one part of the wash of sensations, not as anything special. There are colors and shapes and emotions in there, and echoes of speech as well.

This whole part was a bit weird–which, being in the title, is kind of weird. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but somehow… more?

And then… it ends. A lot of appendices and references meant the book ended rather before I expected.

A decent book with a delightful cover and a number of fun octopus facts I’d never heard before. Worth reading just for that.

Onward!

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Dragons!

…are actually probably the weakest part of the book. We’ll get back to that.

They watch us kneel, they see the back of our heads, and they think we’ve given in. They don’t realize you can think from your knees just as well as from your feet.

What we have here is an epic fantasy world, full of the aforementioned dragons and strife and war… but for a change, this world is set in the near aftermath of the collapse of the old regime and the rise of the good guys. In theory.

Everyone gets a chance at education. Even commoners–even orphans of the revolution–can apply to be trained as dragon riders.

From there, we get the first half of the book–a straight up magic school style training montage. It feels awfully YA, in the genre of The Hunger Games / Divergent / Harry Potter, up to and including a school tournament to decide the ‘best dragonrider’.

What really makes the book shine to me is that initial setting–the idea that we’re shortly after a revolution, building something new. And the entirely too real chance that the anything new… might be just as bad as what came before.

Now… the dragons. Despite the fact that all of our main characters have a dragon and they’re present throughout the series–they never seem to really have any personality or presence of their own.

Even now, I don’t think I could honestly tell you more than the subspecies of each dragon, and even then only barely. I like intelligent dragons (a la Temeraire) and love books with more alien dragons (The Rage of Dragons shines here). These are almost more like cars or fighter jets than anything.

And that’s really a bummer.

Overall, I enjoyed the series. And the way things go towards the latter part of the book + the ending really make me curious where in the world it’s going from here.

Onward!

Because a lost little girl from Cairo thought she was living in some sort of fairy tale. And because for all her supposed cleverness, she couldn’t see that the dashing hero who saved her was its monster.

If The City of Brass set us off on an adventure; The Kingdom of Copper vastly expands the world–and the stakes.

The city of Daevabad is a mess. Nahri’s life is a mess. Ali’s exile is a mess. Dara is dead–but what else is new?–and also a mess.

This is a book about war and violence and family squabbles writ kingdom large. We’re truly in the magical world now, and oh there’s far more depths to that world that we knew.

Of all the middle books of a trilogy out there, few do quite so well as this one. It’s still got some middle book issues–it doesn’t really stand alone–but for what it is, I’m quite impressed.

I’m so looking forward to finishing this one. I fully expect even more and worse messes before (if) everything is wrapped up.

Onward!

“No, I wasn’t afraid. I was tired." Ali’s voice broke on the word. “I’m tired of everyone in this city feeding on vengeance. I’m tired of teaching our children to hate and fear other children because their parents are our enemies. And I’m sick and tired of acting like the only way to save our people is to cut down all who might oppose us, as if our enemies won’t return the favor the instant power shifts.

I’ve got a theory… it could be bunnies.

“We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.”

Man, that is quite a book.

It’s part college experience–and not just any college experience, but one at a super small liberal arts school, focusing on writing and poetry and all that… to a degree that I (engineering school) couldn’t even tell you for sure if it’s satire or just how that works.

It’s part a story about loneliness and fitting in–which ties in well with the college experience. About seeing the ‘popular girls’, first from the outside, and then all too intimately.

And of course (not that I knew this going into it; figured it out pretty quick though), it’s part horror story. It’s a slow burning thrilling, but there’s more than a bit of the surreal and body horror bits of the genre.

All together, it’s an intense sort of read, sort of like a car crash, but in a good way. (Yeah. I know.)

It takes a while to get going, slowly getting more and more… off. And then everything skids hard to one side. You just can’t look away. You have to see what happens next.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience.

I think.

Certainly not a book for everyone, but there are more than a few that I expect would get a (bunny?) kick out of it.

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Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Any time you ask about modern ‘weird fiction’ / weird ecologies / weird cities. China Miéville and Perdido Street Station almost always come up. Turns out… that’s for a good reason. Why in the world did I take so long to read this book?

Overall, this book really shines when it comes to weird¹ worldbuilding. Half-bird, half-human creature? Not that weird. Half-bug creatures? Where the women have a scarab beetle instead of ahead and the males are non-sapient grubs? Weird. Frog people? Re-animates and constructs? Plant people? All living together in a grimy steam-powered, airship and tech and magic driven mess of a metropolis?

Weird¹.

And wonderful.

Overall, this was exactly the sort of book that I love and I’m glad to see there are other books in the same world, if not with the same characters. I want more!

Conversely, if you’re not into weird fiction, more than a touch of body horror, or a book where everyone necessarily get a happy ending (or even survive the story)… maybe skip this one. It’s dark. And that’s sort of the point.

Side note: I listened to this on audiobook and I loved the narration. Perhaps my favorite thing? Whenever the narrator said Issac’s full name. Grimnebulin! 😄

Art is something you choose to make… it’s a bringing together of… of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

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Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others give rise to steady states or oscillating ones. Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them.

Chaos is the study of non-linear systems. Of fractals. Of … chaos. It takes the world we know it and proves that, at some level, we don’t know anything. We can simulate the world to ever increasing levels of accuracy and at some point, things just blow up.

It’s a neat idea, not nearly as weird as it was 40 years ago when this was written (and even then, three years before Jurassic Park made it really cool). I’ve messed with fractals more than a bit and studied quite a bit of higher level math in school, so little of this is particularly new to me–so I’m probably ont the target audience.

Overall, this book is really more about the history and discovery of chaos, rather than necessarily digging into the math and how it really works (when we even know). It’s interesting, but not what I was expecting.

So… I’m glad enough that I read it, but probably wouldn’t strongly recommended it. So it goes.

As someone quickly approaching 40 with a penchant for urban fantasy, this book should have been right up my alley. Except… the plot is weak, the world building is lazy, and the romance doesn’t really make sense.

I think the book sums itself up well.

“Oh God, Daisy,” ***** said, letting her head fall to her chest. “You have it all wrong.”

“Have what wrong?” I asked as a feeling of dread washed over me.

“Every good story has a major plot twist,” she said slowly, growing more agitated with each word.

This is on page 155 of 164. Daisy (our MC) is finally finally learning… and still got it wrong. And it’s not even (in my opinion) that sensible a plot twist. And then the book ends. It’s very much set up for a sequel; without which, it doesn’t really stand alone.

So… despite this being an oddly well reviewed book in general, it’s just really not my cup of tea. Perhaps you’d like it more. Perhaps it gets better.

Onward.

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