Blitzed by Norman Ohler

 

I read this this evening after dinner. It's a short book--barely a hundred pages longer than the Scalzi I read in the coffee shop--but a dense one. It makes a convincing case that the Germany was the drug dealer to the world (at least to Europe) after World War I, and after a brief flirtation with anti-drug moralism turned that pharmaceutical expertise inward, making sure the soldiers and officers--and the high command--were suitably wired. Ohler seems to have found evidence (or be interpreting it) that indicates the Blitzkrieg, especially as applied to France, was fueled and possibly inspired by the amount of methamphetamine the Wehrmacht were consuming. He also seems at least led to believe (the record is intentionally and unintentionally sparse) that Hitler's gradual then sudden decline was fueled by the amount of drugs of all kinds that his personal physician was injecting him with; this is usually seen the other way around in histories of the Reich--that his physician was unable to prevent said decline--but Ohler seems convinced (and he is convincing) that the physician was causing it. Fortunately the nature of this kind of nonfiction book means the translator can focus more on meaning and clarity than on trying to capture some ineffable character of the prose, and the translator here did more than well enough. Interesting stuff that might long-term change some of how I think about the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht, well worth reading.

The God Engines by John Scalzi

 

I read this, this morning in a coffee shop. It's a good novella if more than a little grim, and easy to read as saying something about religion in the real world--and not really something nice. The prose is not Scalzi at his breeziest, which does fit the themes of the story. There are some interesting twists and turns in the novella, the reality of things reveals itself to the characters in the novel (at least the human ones) at roughly the same pace as it does to the reader--though I suppose some readers might twig to some things in it more quickly than I did. I've seen this around in the local libraries I spend time in, and reading it was worth the small effort to check it out and the short time it took me to read it.

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes

 

This is another very good novel by Ms. Labuskes, a story that gets kinda complicated but resolves nicely; her habit of writing three timelines that end up (at least mostly) coming together by the end is an effective technique, and she's always clear there are multiple timelines going on--it's not ever some lurking gotcha. The prose is solid and the characters are solid and well-complicated; the setting seems to have some basis in experience and research; the events going on around the story are gritty and real. Ms. Labuskes is clearly something of a romantic at heart, because she gives so many of the characters in her novels love-story-ish endings--that's not a complaint, it's often one of the primary tensions needing resolution. The mystery portions of the book feel pretty organic to the rest of the story, and the climax is suitably chaotic.

Blood Like Mine by Stuart Neville

 

Apparently I have read too many mediocre-at-best vampire novels lately, because this was like 350 pages of grinding on my nerves with its predictability. Someone in the blurbs mentions a twist in the middle of it that I think I saw coming at least 50 pages ahead--this is just predictable regurgitation of tropes, some vampire, some detective (there's a detective on his own downward spiral in the novel). None of the characters are particularly interesting as heroes or as villains (or as antiheros or as sympathetic villains, it's possible the novel considers itself above and/or beyond such considerations--fine, none of the characters are really interesting as characters). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, if kinda stolid and inert, which might be weirdness caused by the Irish author trying to write like an American; he mostly succeeds, the dialogue isn't horrible, the places feel as though he night have been to them a time or three. Even the twist in the epilogue is predictable. Not bad enough to force me to quit, not good enough that I don't resent that.

Foregone by Russel Banks

 

This turned out to be a stranger novel than I anticipated, not so much in any genre or genre-adjacent sense, just that it's told strangely, in a strange voice (those are not the same thing). The ... primary POV/narrator--though he's not exactly narrating in first-person--is dying imminently of cancer that is affecting his central nervous system, especially his brain (or the treatment for the cancer is doing so, the difference doesn't seem important) so his memories and thoughts and his ability to express them are all in doubt, though his sincerity and his rage at his struggle are not. The narrative starts out as a relatively straightforward and believable thing, but gradually then rapidly becomes wildly disjointed and harder to discern the truths of. The themes actually clarify, though--maybe even emerge--as the narrative fragments, and the novel has some pointed things to say about the ways people (mis)treat and (mis)use each other, and the lengths we will go to tell and hide our inner truths, and the way/s we see our lives and the duration of them and their inevitable end. It's not an easy novel, textually or thematically, but it's a strong one, and I found it well worth reading.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

 I know this is a classic of science fiction (you can tell because it's one of like thirty SF books you can still reliably find in your local public library) but It's a book that if people were reading it for just the story it tells, and not for the gender-related stuff it brings with it, I ... don't think people would really be clamoring about it. It's slow; and the primary narrator is unpleasant and hapless and staggeringly naive, for someone sent to make First Contact, there are few decisions he makes in the first three-quarters of the novel that are not obviously wrong; it has scattered within it interludes of folk stories of the world the novel's set on, which serve mostly to distract, and to show off that Le Guin can write stuff that makes just as little sense as myth tends to. The gender-related stuff--the people who functionally only have gender a few days a month (and while pregnant)--is clearly the point, here, and this isn't a subtle novel (though it shows its age here, as well). I kinda skittered along the surface, here, never really felt engaged by anything in the novel, though I can't really point at anything in the writing itself other than the age of it. The extra stuff--an introduction and an afterword--don't really add much value, here. I read this (and of course "Omelas") while I was in college and then read basically no other Le Guin ever, and after reading this I kinda think I know why.

A History of Fear by Luke Dumas

 

Yet another deeply unsurprising and uninspiring horror novel, one that goes to great lengths to put its subtexts in garish neon, refusing to trust the reader to figure some things out. Also one that mostly doesn't bother much with the whole interesting story thing. When you see the cliches in the first thirty pages, and spot the parallels between being pursued by the devil and being closed and LGBT+ in the first hundred, and then the novel unwinds just about the way you'd expect based on that ... it's hard to have much in the way of good and happy thoughts about the novel, it's a bit of a labor (in the Herculean sense--like cleaning out the Augean stables or something) finding kind things to say. The prose is, I guess, solid enough in its inertly stolid way, this vaguely epistolary novel that doesn't shift its authorial range by even a semitone. Gawds know the characters are pretty much all a muddle, and the way the characters in the novel persist in denying what seems to be the diagetically objective truth of the main character's experiences with the devil (at least, that he had experiences with the devil) is kinda baffling, considering some of the evidence they're ignoring. Oh, well, I probably should have stopped reading the when there was a cliche so bad I reread the passage to make sure I was understanding it correctly; I did not, and I own that choice.