Where Suleiman Can't Trust Anyone

Suleiman the Magnificent - Sultan of the East by Harold Lamb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Lamb's historical retellings/novels/life stories/biographies, but this one is a little less dazzling. It starts great, but it gets less and less compelling through to the end. Still pretty good, still pretty easy and pleasant to read, and worth the time, but not as fun as others.

Lamb writes hybrid books, ones that could be novels or biographies or something else, and I like the novel type most. This starts that way and then slowly turns into a biography. The last 30 pages are about developments after Suleiman's death, which was the hardest and densest part to get through. but for that part, I would have probably given this a 4.

Lamb does an amazing job popularizing the history of figures and places that are usually given too little coverage in American history classes and media, and I give him a ton of credit. His research and writing are excellent. I definitely learned a lot about Suleiman and the way the Ottoman Empire expanded and threatened Europe during his lifetime. It answers a lot of questions I had about that time period. And, as always, it's a pretty good read.

I just feel like this book, if he had novelized it a bit more, made it a little more like some other biographical novels of his I've enjoyed more, it would have worked better. As a biography, it's fine.

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Where Ryland Goes Way Out of His Way

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You've probably heard that this is a good book. Tons of Booktokers and Booktubers have all said so. They're so right. It's really good. I usually read a few pages a day from a book (well, 20--it's my normal chunk) but I read the whole thing in a couple days. It's the fastest I've read anything in ages, because it's too fun to set aside.

The world might be dying; a worldwide effort to crew a starship and find a solution sends our MC to one of the closer stars, where most of the story takes place. Like The Martian, this is both a hard science fiction book (with accurate physics and science in general) and very funny book (like a John Scalzi SF novel), but it's also about character and important themes and deep ideas.

And it's super fun.

No need for a synopsis with spoilers. You've probably either read the book or run across the spoilers already, but if not I'm not gonna mess with it. If you like reading books, especially science fiction, it's very unlikely you won't love this. Sweet, funny, tough, touching, exciting, terrifying--it's all in there. Too good a book not to give my highest recommendation.

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Where Fate Really Hates Randal

Fortune's Fool by Rafael Sabatini
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very entertaining and well-written historical adventure novel set in 17th century England. I enjoyed it.

[Spoilers about plot abound here. Skip ahead if you prefer.]

The story of a mercenary soldier with bad luck his whole life, it tells about a particularly tough period in the main character's life. Returning to England to try to find work, Randal Holles struggles to overcome forces arrayed against him. His father was a famous traitor, making his very name an enemy to luck. Old friends try to entice him to join their rebellion, and even though he doesn't take them up on it he becomes a known associate and at risk of arrest. One acquaintance with a title and pull tries to get him a position overseas, but a nobleman of higher rank forwards his own candidate instead, and he has almost no way forward. In addition to all this, the plague returns, gates are closed, and he has no way to get out of the city.

[Most critical spoiler. Jump down if you want to avoid it.] The biggest turn of bad luck is when another noble acquaintance--Lord Buckingham, a man who had been a boy when Holles saved him--offers him work, but it requires him to help kidnap an actress Buckingham has a fancy for. Holles refuses, but worsening circumstances eventually force him to do him this service, the worst thing he's ever done, over the objections of his pride and conscience. And the woman turns out to be his lost love, a girl from his youth, the woman he searched for and couldn't find.

[That's the end of the spoilers.]

The rest of the novel deals with Holles working through the consequences of his actions, and I feel like the author does a good job of showing us how he changes course, leading to a satisfying and reasonable ending.

Sabatini is, to me, like Sir Walter Scott translated to English a century nearer our own time, with a lot of the digressions and authorial intrusions cut out. I love Scott, but Sabatini writes something closer to the "good parts" version of Scott's historical adventure stories. This book is from 1923, but I feel like a new edition with a decent cover would get people in 2025 and beyond reading his books like they were new, because it reads very modern overall. IMO, obviously.

Good book. Lots of fun. I recommend it for people who enjoy historical adventure novels.

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Where the Good Guys Earn Their Wins

War Party by Louis L'Amour
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't often read Westerns, but my dad really liked Louie L'Amour, and I've enjoyed reading a couple of them. This was pretty good, too.

I was surprised when I got into it that this was a book of short stories. I didn't even know L'Amour wrote short stories. I'm not actually an avid reader of short fiction--especially with so many that I've read lately in SF or fantasy being unsatisfying and strange. (YMMV.) These were not like that. These stories had a clear beginning, middle, and end, with exciting action and heroes to root for. That makes them easy to start and easy to finish, and not too long, just the right thing before bed.

The author favors stories of boys stepping into their father's shoes too young; of men left on their own to face dangers bigger than themselves; and of women learning to see the good in a rough man. The morality is pretty straightforward, with only a few small exceptions, and that's part of the charm of the stories. There's plenty of violence and loss here, lots of hardship and pain, but the stories focus on the kernel of hope that the survivors cling to, kinda like a little Western Chicken Soup for the Soul, and that's a pleasure to read now and again.

Recommended for Western readers, of course, but also those who think they might like the genre but want an easy intro. This fits the bill.

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Where Star Trek Fails to Dazzle

Star Trek: Titan #4: Sword of Damocles: Titan 4 Sword of Democle by Geoffrey Thorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was okay. I enjoyed parts, just enough to finish and give it a 3.

But I was leaning 2 or DNF for a lot of it.

This is the fourth book in a spin-off of Star Trek: the Next Generation, with Riker and Troi as familiar characters, and I hoped to enjoy it. It didn't really work for me. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I had read the first books, but this is the one I found in the used bookstore, so....

I found the action very slow, based almost entirely on characters talking about what they were doing or talking about how far along they were on doing it, with almost nothing heroic or exciting taking place. Most of the action was repairing broken technology or adapting technology, but in a very static way. Titan was trapped by strange waves similar to warp technology, and a shuttle sent to the planet surface was lost (actually split up across time, somehow) and Riker believes Troi has died. On the planet and on the ship, the crew members fight to get free of the phenomenon. Bad things happen. Good guys do their best. Not everybody makes it.

If more of the characters had been familiar to me, maybe I would have cared about them, and maybe it would have been more fun. I dunno. I might try others in the series, maybe hunt up the first ones. Not feeling it right now.

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Where Constantinople Falls

The Prince of India or Why Constantinople Fell by Lew Wallace
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was an amazing book. Two volumes--over 1000 pages--lots of characters and settings--and it was entertaining throughout. I loved it.

These are my thoughts--bit of a jumble:

There is a sort of quirk about the book. The main character, the so-called "Prince of India" is a figure from legend known usually as the Wandering Jew, a man condemned to long life for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. He's an interesting character, a brilliant man who wants to end religious strife, who travels the world, learns languages, makes himself wealthy so that he can have access to important people, and espouses a sort of unification of religion. Though he does some awful things before the end of the novel--causing a deadly fire before helping the Turks defeat the Greeks--most of the time I found myself very sympathetic to him, particularly as he tried to get the leaders of Islam and Christianity to recognize their connection, their mutual belief in a loving god. He reads like a sort of Gandalf figure, or some other wise man who is endowed with a little supernatural ability. (He's immortal, rich, intelligent, and a capable astrologer. He's not magic, exactly, but he can do some stuff.)

From time to time, the author's overt support for Christianity comes through, rather like you find in Quo Vadis or similar novels (which I also liked, actually), but it's generally no more overt than most Regency or Victorian literature, for example. (We don't get any readings from Fordyce's sermons, thankfully. And we don't get a Jane Eyre preparing to go preach Christianity in India.) It's mostly a romance like Sir Walter Scott or maybe Dumas, with action across Arabia and Syria and, especially, Constantinople, with hidden treasures, sailing ships, war, and abducted maidens who need to be rescued.

The sultan's best friend, Mirza, the best warrior in the story, is the heart of the second half of the novel. He is a loyal fighter who was stolen from his home in Italy as a baby. He is sent to the city as a spy where he is intended in part to gather information for the invasion, but he's tasked even more with the job of watching over and protecting Irene, the beautiful cousin of the emperor. (The sultan previously traveled to her home, disguised as a storyteller, and fell in love with her, intending to marry her.) Mirza falls in love with her too and starts to rethink his identity, taking back his name and title as Count Corti. When the friends meet again, both men pledge to protect Irene, no matter the outcome of the coming war. (They honor this pledge, and in the very end the sultan marries Irene while the count returns home to the mother who never stopped searching for him, where he discovers the sultan has long since paid to rebuild their home and restore their fortunes. But that's a spoiler, so shhh.)

There are about 10 really great characters in this novel, any one of whom should have their own book. Sergius, the idealistic Russian monk, might be my favorite. Irene, the iconoclastic and stoic noblewoman, unbowed after long imprisonment, and who refuses to wear a veil as honest women were expected to do, is admirable and captivating. Lael, the young Jewish woman adopted and educated by the Prince of India, is sweet, and the wealthy Demedes, the epicurean son of a courtier who abducts her and hides her in a cell floating built in the giant underground cistern of Constantinople, is a great villain. The African servant of the Prince of India who helps Sergius find her and free her is a a cool character, too.

The novel concludes with the siege and capture of the city. It's a great retelling, stretching over many packed chapters, all given from the POVs of characters we care about. Very affecting. Very informative.

I enjoyed this from beginning to end, and even though I don't align with the author's central religious belief, I applaud his ecumenical philosophy, the one he gives mostly to the Prince of India and, in some measure, to Queen Irene and the monk Sergius. It's surprising in a novel like this, published in 1893, and I give him some credit. Lew Wallace is better known for Ben Hur, and now that I've read this one I realize I need to read that one, too.

Very good writer. Highly recommended.

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Where Kriemhild Gets Her Revenge

The Nibelungenlied by Unknown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In part, I'm rating the translation and additional material, not just the original text. I didn't love the book itself--maybe 3 stars--but the appendices and other essays at the back are really good, and I thought the translation worked fine.

Curiosity drew me to the story and carried me through to the end more than the story. Some of the action and the overall plot is interesting enough on its own, but learning something about beliefs and norms and attitudes in Europe 700 or 1000 years ago is entertaining in a different way. Also, this story (or the Norse version) inspired the Ring Cycle of Wagner, and I always kinda wondered about the original. (It must be mentioned: Wagner was a racist dickhead and inspired a whole generation of racist nazi dickheads who looked to these stories as a source of ethnic and racial pride which they turned into war crimes, and they can all burn wherever dead racists burn--but I don't think we can blame the anonymous poet who wrote this 800 years ago for their antisemitism and bigotry.)

I wondered these things: what kind of story was it really? Was it mostly a kind of fantasy with River Maidens and magic weapons? Or was it mostly military, with lots of Arthurian jousts? Or was it romance? (The answer is yes to all of those, it seems to me.) Also, what were the characters like? What was the society like? What did they value?

Supposedly based on oral traditions going back to the 5th or 6th century, written about the 12th century, it does feel a lot like King Arthur stories. Knights have a strangely aggressive code where some killing, even murder, is just shrugged at, and other killing, when it seems very reasonable under the circumstances, is treated as heinous. It creates strange conflicts, like when Rudiger, a vassal of King Etzel, is sent to fight the Burgundians near the end of the book, and he can't figure out what to do. His daughter is pledged to marry one of the party he is sent to destroy, and he himself entertained them at his castle, so he can't honorably fight them. But he is pledged to his lord and can't honorably refuse. It's a strange scene when they're all crying about having to fight each other. In general, I found the points of honor confusing, since the knights were so dishonest and unscrupulous so much of the time that it was weird to think they still considered themselves honorable men.

I'd say the fighting dominates the story, but it started as a love story about two couples (Siegfried and Kriemhild, Gunther and Brunhild) each falling in love and getting married before they come into conflict. And there is a decent amount of fantasy stuff mixed in, including Brunhild's superhuman strength, though it's not treated as remarkable. As far as genre, it's an epic, but calling it a courtly romance (like the Arthurian stories) seems pretty apt, too.

Like in the Iliad, the named characters are all fantastic warriors who can kill dozens without getting a scratch. It's only when great knights face one other that someone has to die. The battles are very unrealistic as a result, and I find it super annoying that a hundred regular guys can die without upsetting anyone, but when one famous fighter dies, everyone cries. I guess that's the class system showing itself even in such old literature--only the noblemen matter. And the higher the rank, the more we're supposed to care about them.

There's a lot to notice here and a lot to take an interest in. I found this old work compelling enough that I want to find copies of the sagas related to it, and see if other cycles (like the story of Dietrich, also known as Theodoric) are available in English outside of crazy expensive textbooks. We'll see.

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