cimorene

Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Sidon (book 3 in the Latro trilogy following Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete). This book was written ~20 years later than the first two.

I noted in my review of Soldier of Arete that the impact of Soldier of the Mist was greater. I was curious and a bit cautious because this late entry was written so much later than the others... but I don't think that was necessary. It was just as gripping as them. I should have realized that the style of the novels - that is, they purport to be translated from ancient scrolls that are archaeological finds, and since the scrolls are essentially the diaries of an amnesiac... the upshot is that he never knows what's happened in the past unless he finds the time to read the scroll. He also doesn't know his own name, or where he's from, although he remembers things that were stored in the right way - like the languages he's learned, though he doesn't recognize the names of the languages. All his adventures make sense in this light because it's easy to get into trouble this way, and also they maintain a certain continuity. (His amnesia is the result of a curse, not natural, but it's still an interesting comparison with amnesia tropes in fiction and reality. I saw a post the other day talking about Severance in relation to amnesia tropes and it didn't even seem to remember that amnesia is also a real phenomenon in reality. You can't talk about amnesia in fiction without at least implicit reference to amnesia in reality! The way the 'innie' characters in Severance forget all the facts about their lives but retain some background knowledge is in fact a common way that retrograde amnesia works in reality!)

The other continuous element of the series is that because Latro/Lucius, the narrator, has been cursed with memory loss by the Great Mother goddess of the Hellenes (Demeter/Gaia), there's a spark of divinity attached to him and he can see the gods and their servants and messengers where other people can't. He doesn't know he can. The first book explored the Hellenic world; the second book took them across to present-day Turkey and interacted with the gods of the Thracians and the Amazons; the third book takes place in Ancient Egypt after its conquer by the Persian emperor, and down into Nubia and Kush. They're all historically fascinating in the same way, but my childhood hobby only really helped me in the first book - my knowledge of the other ancient societies and deities is extremely limited. Actually I think I enjoyed this third book more in some ways than the second; the primary plot/quest managed to work in some mysteries in a different way. I also learned a lot more from the much more alien setting, but there were also more references I couldn't figure out how to look up quickly. It was interesting to read this while watching Moon Knight, but there was no direct relevance (Thoth does show up a bit, though not as a main character, but Khonsu and Ammit don't).

Other books started:

Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making 32%

The reviews for this book intrigued me a lot. It seems to have been more universally applauded than her other work and also to be shorter. The comparisons to Alice in Wonderland were decisive. I see why those were made, and I do find it fairly readable in spite of the fact that it's written for children... but I'm still not sure if I'll be able to finish, because the intrusive authorial voice is... self-consciously quaint in a way that I find very offputting.

Pat Murphy's The Falling Woman, 21%

The story is narrated by an archaeologist working on a Maya site who sees ghosts, and by her estranged daughter who comes to visit. That sounds promising, but there's a lot less ghost and Maya than it seems to promise. Also it's all in first person, which I dislike. I'm gonna give up if it doesn't get more magical soon.

Dale Bailey's In the Night Wood - Discarded after a couple of chapters.

This is a book about a biographer writing about a Victorian fantasy novelist who wrote a weird book about a dark forest and coincidentally lived in a mansion in a dark forest, and the biographer goes to live in this mansion and becomes obsessed with the... the dude or the book or... whatever. But, anyway, the magic hasn't even made the faintest appearance at the point when the [perhaps soon-to-be] estranged wife thinks about all the Scary Antidepressant Pills She Keeps in Her Purse and pops two Xanaxes to cope with a twisted ankle. The narration is like, "She got all the antidepressants and different scary medication prescriptions she could from her doctors and she had loaded up on them so her purse was full of pills. There were (LIST). That was multiple kinds of benzos!" (And multiple kinds of benzos, yes, sure, I guess, because they're quick-acting and sort of on-the-spot by nature, but why would she have multiple types of SSRIs? That's not how ANY of this works, my guy! Anyway, I realized that it was That Kind of Story in several ways - the death of a child and the tragically drifting apart couple (low-budget Netflix horror movie standard crap), the wife's Dependence on Scary Drugs With Big Names (because that's all doctors know how to do anymore!!!! see daytime talkshows from the 90s), the... well... everything about the setup with the Americans in this British house suddenly having a hugely implausible amount of wealth and the way the house was presented... just... NOPE!

Elizabeth A. Lynn's Watchtower - read 2 chapters, gave up after skimming to just past the halfway point

This book is a standard medieval high fantasy setting but like, without the fantasy. Actually I think some fantasy is gonna show up eventually? But after two chapters I looked it up on Goodreads again last night and read enough reviews to encapsulate what's going on here. Okay first of all, this beat the third book in the Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy to the World Fantasy Award? Ludicrous. That's a JOKE. But now that I've gone through the list of WFA winners trying to find something to read in such detail, I can say with confidence that they are in fact a joke and that's why I never hear much about them and people um, with the same kinds of interests in reading that I have, tend to just focus on the Hugo and Nebula. By all means, if you like fantasy as a concept, but have pretentious literary genre values or preferences otherwise, and also a lack of taste and a general love of wackness and gimmicks, use the WFA list instead, but from now on I'm gonna just ignore it.

This book actually isn't BAD. It is a clearly-drawn, gray, depressing, floor-level look at the kind of fantasy later popularized by GRRM (the world, not the level of misogyny and explicitness), as some reviewers pointed out. The reason it was felt to be an important book for women's issues and by marginalized people in 1980 or whatever is that the central relationship is like a... mostly-subtextual, but not really, homosexual longing between the protagonist and the rightful ruler of this depressing, cold, mountaineous keep that he wants to put back in charge of it - one which ultimately goes nowhere and leaves a lot of the recent readers frustrated and even angry by its sudden cutoff. The other reason is there's some sort of (magic?) enclave with two gender-nonconforming characters ... one at least is apparently AFAB, possibly trans or nonbinary, possibly just gender-nonconforming and doing her independent thing in this shitty patriarchal society? But anyway, I started skipping forward by small and large chunks, trying to find any hint of fantasy, and I still haven't found any, so I'm not going to be finishing it.

Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon

This is the first in an epic high fantasy series that seems to have a cult following, and I actually have not even started the book. Last night I read the author's introductory note in fascinated horror, and the author's voice/style when being himself was so annoying that I almost threw the book across the room several times. I don't mean he sounded like an annoying person: he sounds like a nice person that I would probably enjoy meeting or talking to. His... tics... and just... the way he chooses to present himself in nonfiction... were just driving me absolutely up the wall. If I didn't know from so long in fandom that this type of style often has little or no correlation to what kind of style you find in an author's fiction writing I would definitely have been scared away.