#Python & SQL #developer at a healthcare startup in #WashingtonDC. Reader of #books; player of #BoardGames; information squirrel. Former core #Python developer.
Opinions are my own. Posts are deleted after one year.
| Pronouns | he/him |
| Web site | https://www.amk.ca |
| BoardGameGeek | https://boardgamegeek.com/user/akuchling |
Enjoyed my visit to the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts for the Roman sculpture exhibit.
In R.F. Kuang's KATABASIS, Two graduate students in magick at Cambridge, Alice and Peter, set out to travel into Hell to find their recently-dead graduate advisor Professor Jacob Grimes, with undefined plans to bring him back for the sake of their academic careers. Hell resembles Dante's, with nested circles of increasingly worse sins: Pride, Desire, Greed, rising to Cruelty and Tyranny. But because they're graduate students, Hell is patterned on a university: Pride is a campus library, Desire is a student center of small rooms in which people enact their desires, and so on.
I enjoyed the book overall: Hell is a distressing landscape that becomes increasingly brutal and disorienting. But I was expecting it to be *deeper*, too: the book presents various satires and critiques of academia, but they all felt like familiar, kind of first-order stuff to me, even though I'm only sort of academic-adjacent.
(3/3)
HE WHO DROWNED THE WORLD, by Shelley Parker-Chan, is book 2 of a duology about a rebellion against the Mongol rulers of ancient China, and this book follows the course of battles between Zhu Yuanzhang, "The Radiant King", the eunuch general Ouyang, and the rich salt-merchant family the Zhangs. Meanwhile, at the Great Khan's court at Dadu, Lord Wang Baoxiang takes a position as the assistant Minister of Finance and has complex plans of his own.
The storyline is just as elaborate and unrelenting as Martin's Game of Thrones series, but it's complete in two books that amount to slightly under a thousand pages. You'll definitely want to begin with the first book.
Gender threads through the book, as several characters have ambiguous or disguised genders and orientations. Zhu is the most sympathetic character, but he takes his own dark and cruel actions, and as the book continued I began to wonder if he was going to lose himself entirely to ambition. As in the first book, there are some sequences and twists that were wonderfully exciting. I'm going to read whatever Parker-Chan publishes next.
(2/3)
Three fantasy books I've read & enjoyed lately:
Katherine Addison's THE WITNESS FOR THE DEAD is set in the same fantasy kingdom as THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, but you don't need to have read the latter. Thara Celehar is a Witness for the Dead, able to access the memory of the recently deceased to resolve disputes and solve mysteries, and he has a number of such mysteries to solve. The foremost is the murder of a singer at one of the city's opera houses, found floating in a canal. There's also an inheritance case to untangle, and a forest town has a ghoul that needs to be handled.
I enjoyed this a lot. Celehar is a likeable character, duty-bound to fulfill his role but with regrets about his past and a possible new love interest. The setting is evocatively drawn: a sprawling and mazy city with dozens of religions, a Gothic environment where maintaining cemeteries is very important because the occupants of unmaintained graves can rise as ghouls.
(1/3)
Most played board games for March.
Ada's Dream is apparently the most complex game we own, according to its BGG weight rating. My spouse discusses it in this video: https://youtu.be/wFOo1mkD8KE
Reforest is from a Canadian designer and publisher. It's not like Wingspan mechanically, but the cards have a similarly attractive and clean design.
Board game plays for February. I was on my own visiting family in Canada, so I soloed Glass Road a bunch of times.
Both Ada's Dream and Reforest were waiting for me there, ordered during the height of US tariff uncertainty last year. Reforest was easily played solo, but the automa for Ada's Dream was complicated on top of an already complex game.
SETI, Arnak, and The Magnificent are all games from our 20x5 for the year.
In the introduction to UNSPEAKABLE ACTS: TRUE TALES OF CRIME, MURDER, DECEIT, AND OBSESSION, editor Sarah Weinman writes about wanting pieces that call out problems in "the true-crime industrial complex", and she wound up with an excellent collection of true-crime pieces from the 2010s. The selections are generally very good. A thread of the highlights: (1/7)
