What I'm Reading: January 2025

Now that I’m once again employed, my reading has decreased. I’m still making room for books, but I’m trying to spend less time on the Internet - no “links” section this time.

Books

• The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman. Usually Arthurian legends end with the end of Arthur. That’s instead where this book picks up, perspective-hopping between our plucky young hero and the straggler knights of the round table. They engage in surreal adventures across an England ravaged by Arthur’s fall. Overall very enjoyable, well-written, and hard for me to describe. There’s more historical grit than you’d expect here, but also plenty of anachronism and fairy-tale logic? I found the presence of gay and trans characters in this kind of novel pleasantly surprising.
• The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson. There are infinite multiverses. You can travel between them, but only if you’re dead in that reality. Otherwise you die instantly on arrival. From there we discover that the super-future social democrat city needs to recruit impoverished dirt-farmers, because they’re more likely to be dead in nearby alternate realities. All of that speculative element… doesn’t really make sense or work for me. The characters do though, so I overall enjoyed the reading experience.
• Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. This is a short story collection that seems to be the origin point for the entire cyberpunk genre. “Johnny Mnemonic” is a particular standout. If you’ve been listening to Shelved By Genre you’ve heard this bit already, but take a gander the way this story starts:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.

Not only is everything from Shadowrun to Cyberpunk 2077 ripping directly from Gibson, he’s a better stylist than any of his imitators. If I had read this as a teen I would have been saying “I’m a very technical boy” obnoxiously often.

• The Wizard of Oz, by L Frank Baum. Mostly I wanted to read this because I was curious about how it compared to Wicked, and I heard that Ozma of Oz has some trans vibes. I was generally charmed but obviously there’s not much going on here.
• Son of a Witch, by Gregory Maguire. Sequel to Wicked, following Liir (a boy who maybe is, or maybe is not, the son of Elphaba). Mostly he drifts through life this way and that before a near-death experience that puts him on a new path. Ultimately I think I liked the scope and ambition of Wicked much better.
• The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was fun - a murder mystery in a setting based on bio-engineering. Something about the mystery-solving itself wasn’t very engaging to me; maybe it’s that we get very little access to the Holmes character? We’re very much following a Watson-type, but our Holmes mostly stays in her room and thinks. There’s a The Fuckup Protagonist is Actually a Very Special Boy plotline which ties into some “my disability is actually my superpower” bleh-ness. The setting is unique and the moment-to-moment plot was pretty propulsive. Ultimately a solid if not remarkable read.
• Nevada, by Imogen Binnie. Nevada is probably one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last year. It’s a very effective trans story that is either about a woman destroying her life, finding herself, or both. I’m now devastated that Jane Schoenbraun quit an adpatation of Nevada “due to creative differences with cis people”. (Image sent to me by my partner, original creator unknown)

Bonus: Baldur’s Gate 3

For the year after its release, I assumed I wouldn’t like Baldur’s Gate, because I don’t like D&D 5e. Then, when I was taking a break between jobs, I realized that was prime “playing big AAA games I never have time for” real estate. I didn’t really play games over the summer because I was outside, and had a back injury that made it hard to sit for extended periods. Once winter hit and I had a new job secured (but not started), the gaming set in.

First off: this game’s achievements in scale are incredible. It’s broad, it’s long, there’s full voice-acting and motion capture for freaking everybody. Sometimes quantity is a quality all its own, and this game has quantity.

Secondly: this is a good adaptation of D&D 5e. There’s a lot of flexibility, environmental interaction, and generally good crunchy systems stuff under the hood. Also, some basic action economy tweaks (like Shove as a bonus action) go a long way. I’m not enough of a D&D-head to know all the balance changes, but I noted that fireball has a less-ridiculous range which is cool.

The game is divided into three acts of very different structures.

1. The first is a pretty open-ended, D&D-ass sandbox. Some goblins want to kill some druids and steal their stuff, a bunch of tiefling refugees are hiding in the druid gove, and the druids want to kick the some tiefling refugees and seal themselves away from the world. There’s also lots of other little areas to explore, and an entire Underdark segment.
2. The second is a more-linear area with an environmental hazard twist. This is also the most dungeon-crawling portion of the game.
3. The last is a hyper-dense urban area filled with sidequests. There’s very little main narrative; you can track down the main villains really whenever you like. After that the finale sequence kicks off. I much preferred the first area. When I got to Act 3 I was excited about the open-endedness, but the pacing eventually slogged on for me.

The game’s main narrative is uh, fine? kinda bad? It’s “pretty good for a AAA video game”, which is to say kinda bad. Lots of race-war stuff inherited from D&D too. As is the case in lots of modern RPGs the real juice is in the companions, who range from “just okay” to “really well realized”.