Reviews and Comments

Nope, life is too short

It really sucks. I don’t know if I can finish it.

I liked the first person vampire stuff and the interactions with and depictions of the gods. It’s not in the same league as The Mere Wife or her Beowulf translation though.

Really enjoyed re-reading this. The Gospel According to Mark was my favorite story in here but I liked them all.

This is getting hard to read.

The book starts off with this quote: ““History which does not inform present-day concerns amounts to little more than self-indulgent antiquarianism”

Of course, what this really means is that the author is going to use his vanity pop history book to rant about something he doesn’t like from modern times.

It starts with a whole thing about Saddam Hussein. It chills out, spends many chapters actually being useful and informative about day-to-day life and mythology. Now he’s driving hard that Uruk 3 was like the Soviet Union and comparing ziggurats to some skyscrapers Stalin built after the war. Let’s see if I can squeeze a little more useful info out of this before I give up…

I loved Grendel by John Gardner but Mere Wife is something that has haunted me. One of the best books this year. The author’s translation of Beowulf is incredible too (in audio format).

One of the weirder detective novels I have read. It is published by an academic/scientific publisher because it is a scholarly translation of detective stories written in the 18th century about a historical figure from the 7th century.

Let’s just say that Judge Dee does a lot of unconventional things to solve the cases in relation to other detective stories. And then there is a very good essay at the end of the book explaining how the justice system worked in China at the time the stories are set, and then it at all kind of makes sense.

(anybody who likes weird detective fiction should send me their recommendations in the comments…)