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The Kite Runner is a novel about Amir, an Afghan man and ethnic Pashtun raised in Kabul, who fled the country in the 1980's with his father. The book revolves around his relationship with two people: his father Ali and a childhood friend and household servant named Hassan. The book focuses on the themes of ethnic violence, living with trauma, Afghani social expectations, and Amir's relationship with his religion. I think the book can be read as a political allegory, though it is clearly written for an American audience with little to no knowledge of Afghanistan or Islam. I have compliments and criticisms of this book. Its writing is clear and occasionally poetic, it communicates a desire for people of all kinds to be treated with kindness, and it paints a picture of Afghanistan and its ex-pat communities. I also found it to be emotionally manipulative and heavy handed.

Hassan and Amir were born born and raised in the same household, but as an ethnic Hazara, Hassan was raised as a household servant. They were essentially best friends despite this dynamic, though Hassan was treated with discrimination by other people in the community. Amir witnesses that discrimination but, at a pivotal moment in their lives, does not intervene on his behalf. It haunts Amir for the rest of his life. The Kite Runner is primarily concerned with this relationship, and Amir living with his guilt. The title of the book refers to a competition between kite flyers, who try to cut each other's strings and remain the last one still flying. Kite runners were those children who ran after the downed kites, to claim them as trophies. As children, Amir flew the kite and Hassan would be the runner.

The book has three clear segments: childhood in Kabul, life in America, and a return to Kabul. In the first segment we are initially shown Amir's childhood, in a well-to-do household in Kabul of the 1970's, introduced to the primary characters, and then explore the intimate relationship between Amir and Hassan. In the second one, Amir struggles to make sense of the world and find his direction in life, after he and his father Ali find themselves living in America in much less comfortable conditions. In the final segment Amir is confronted by the culmination of those childhood events, witnesses horrors on his return to Kabul under the Taliban rule, and attempts to atone for his past misdeeds.

That Amir and Hassan should be as brothers is the crux of the story, and it is both the best and worst aspect of the book. The book pleads that ethnicity should never have been such a barrier between them, but the book also goes overboard with melodramatic gestures and repeated urges to keep this in mind. I found it frustrating because I really enjoyed the overall story of Amir and Hassan's childhood and their relationship. but the book's incessant hammering of its themes was grating. I found the events of the third act were the worst for melodrama, and everything from earlier in the novel became forced into the finale in a way that did not feel genuine.

While the book depicts discrimination against Hassan, it also implies the only real violence against him ever came from the outside world. A bully named Assef assaults Hassan, but he is notably half-German and often references Hitler. Russians soldiers are briefly introduced as a generic, military antagonist, and later the Taliban are depicted as terrorizing the streets of Kabul, though the book takes pains to distance them from Islam and link them to the western world through the characters' interactions. Amir experiences guilt over his failure to accept Hassan like a brother, but he is also told repeatedly not to blame himself. There are a few ways to read into these events, though it is worth noting that I cannot offer an informed opinion on Afghan culture or history, or whether this book depicts these events accurately.

This could be read as a case against discrimination and for compassion towards oneself, which is not a bad message depending on the circumstances. It could also be read as a case that Afghan people are not violent, and whatever their crimes may be, they did not deserve what happened to them. I find this reading potentially troubling. No one deserves to be brutalized and terrorized the way people are in this book, but an insistence that violence only ever comes from "outside" strikes me as overly simplistic and disingenuous.

I read primarily science fiction and fantasy, and it colours how I approach fiction. I think about the setting of stories, with its potentially fictional worlds, physics, or species, almost like a character unto itself. The framework of these stories take on their own personality and implications, and there is an extended abstraction to everyone and everything that happens within those stories. The Kite Runner is not one of those stories, in fact it clearly attempts to communicate a lived and living world to the reader. I can't comment on the world of the story in the same way, but I did find myself potentially reading a political allegory into the events and characters, which ARE abstract. I am reminded that all fiction is, to some extent or other, fantasy, but we tend to categorize by degree.

This book painted a lovely picture of Kabul in the 70's, and then again an intimate portrait of the Afghan ex-pat community in American in the 1980's. It also painted a touching portrait of a boyhood friendship, which I found need needlessly complicated by much of the later events of the book. It oversimplified a number of events, for understandable reasons, as I think the beautiful and tragic childhood friendship became expanded into a needlessly larger story and world stage. I enjoyed reading it, for the most part, but ultimately I found it a mixed experience.

This is an anthology of the short science fiction stories which were adapted into the Netflix animated series of the same name; a fun name, that covers a pretty wide swath of possible subject matter, so the stories feel like a bit of a smorgasbord of the genre. I feel this may be the aim of this collection beyond their adaptations. They have a range of tone and subject matter. There is compassion, irreverence, despair, and wonder, across a few modes of what-if. It doesn't present any particular challenge, conceptual experiment, or problem space exploration; it feels like an introductory collection of short science fiction, easily digestible to a contemporary reader who perhaps doesn’t read a lot, with the inclusion of two original screenplays written for the animation series.

Stand out favourites for me were Good Hunting by Ken Liu, Beyond the Aquila Rift by , The Day the Yoghurt Took Over by John Scalzi, and The Secret War by . The only two I didn't care for much was Sucker of Souls by , which I found a bit flat and the characters annoying, and the screenplay Blind Spot by , which is an action-packed scene clearly written to be guiding points for visual art and cinematography - just doesn't feel like a story by itself.

Here is a rough ranking of the stories included:

Great Three Robots, by Scalzi, John Beyond the Aquila Rift, by Reynolds, Alastair Good Hunting, by Liu, Ken Zima Blue, by Reynolds, Alastair The Secret War, by Amendola, David W

Good Sonnie's Edge, by Hamilton, Peter F When the Yoghurt Took Over, by Scalzi, John The Dump, by Lansdale, Joe R On the Use of Shapeshifters in Warfare Chapbook, by Kloos, Marko Helping Hand, by Griggs, Claudine Fish Night, by Lansdale, Joe R Lukcy Thirteen, by Kloos, Marko

OK The Witness, by Mielgo, Alberto Suits, by Lewis, Steve Ice Age, by Swanwick, Michael Alternate Histories, by Scalzi, John

Meh Sucker of Souls, by Cross, Kirsten Blind Spot, by Shushko, Vitaliy

This is a messy collection. There is no introduction, no forwards, and absolutely no context for the stories it contains. The editors’ names are carefully buried in small text. The table of contents is grouped by author, in no particular order, and some of those authors are listed multiple times. The stories themselves are all written during the mid to late 1800’s, by mostly Irish authors, and are either stories about ghosts, faeries, vampires, saints, hell, or the devil. It’s basically a collection of Victorean-era, Ireland-related, spooky tales, but calling it a ghost story anthology is a stretch. An argument could be made that Irish folklore could be said to group those all together, but this collection makes no such attempt.

Some of the stories are great originals, like Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu or The Gollan by A.E. Coppard. Some of them feel like authentic folk tales, like the Legend of Bottle Hill by Thomas Crofton Croker or Teig O’Kane and The Corpse by Douglas Hyde, while others feel like original creative stories based on older ones, and I don’t have the context to sort them out. I did rather enjoy A Vision of Purgatory by William Maginn, which featured all the Irish catholic saints showing up together for a big feast, flying, and threatening to beat up a drunk guy.

There are a lot of less-than-flattering Irish caricatures to be found in here. Many of the stories make a point of the dangers of excessive drinking, paint Irish people as completely ignorant and socially inept country folk, or go out of their way to phonetically spell out “the bad English of the Irish” in painstaking detail, alongside actual Irish words. I don’t personally have the context to know who all these authors are, or what their relationship with their Irish-ness was, or how their intended audience was meant to respond. Intentional or not, there is a demeaning quality to a number of these stories.

This is clearly a collection of convenience, and surely better collections of Irish folk tales, spooky tales, or just straight-up weird short fiction exist. And a little context goes a long way. I picked this up at a used book fair on a whim, and while I’m frustrated with the collection itself (and some of its stories), I was also intrigued. It was an OK random find, but don’t bother looking for it.

For what it’s worth, here is a list of the short stories sorted by author: Curtin, Jeremiah - St Martin's Eve

Curtin, Jeremiah - The Blood-Drawing Ghost

Dublin University Magazine - The Witch Hare

Griffin, Gerald - The Brown Man - The Dilemma of Phadrig

Hyde, Douglas - Teig O'Kane and the Corpse

Jacobs, Joseph - The Field of Boliauns

Kavanagh, Herminie - Darby O'Gill and the Leprechaun

Kennedy, Patrick - Hairy Rouchy - The Ghosts and the Game of Football

Le Fanu, Sheridan - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family - An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street - Carmilla - Dickon the Devil - Ghost Stories of Chapelizod - Green Tea - Madam Crowl's Ghost - Mr Justice Harbottle - Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess - Sir Dominick's Bargain - Squire Toby's Will - Stories of Lough Guir - Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painrer - The Child that Went with the Fairies - The Dream - The Familiar - The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh - The Room in Le Dragon Volant - The Spectre Lovers - The Vision of Tom Chuff - The Watcher - The White Cat of Drumgunniol - Ultor de Lacy - Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling

Macardl, Dorothy - The Prisoner

Maclintock, Letitia - Far Darrig in Donegal - Jamie Freel and the Young Lady

Maginn, William - A Vision of Purgatory

McNally, DR Jr
- About the Fairies - How the Lakes were Made - Satan as a Sculptor - Taming the Pooka - The Defeat of Wisdom - the Henpecked Giant - The Leprechaun - The Sexton of Cashel

Moore, George - A Play-House in the Waste

Mulholland, Rosa - The Ghost at the Rath

Reid, Forrest - Courage

Riddell, Charlotte - Hertford O'Donnell's Warning - The Last of Squire Ennismore

Stoker, Bram - The Judge's House

Traditional Irish Story - Daniel Crowley and the Ghosts - Donald and His Neighbours - John Reardon and the Sister Ghosts

Wilde, Oscar - The Canterville Ghost

On a distant planet, and at great cost, a small group of human settlers come to call the island of Mospheira home. Lost in space with few options, they made landfall knowing the planet was already home to its own, isolated native species, the atevi; a humanoid, physically-imposing, black-skinned and yellow-eyed alien people with their own civilization, politics, and culture. After six generations, humans and atevi have learned to communicate but still struggle to actually understand each other, while human technology has had an important, pervasive effect on the atevi world. At a pivotal moment in their history, Mospheira’s official human interpreter, Bren Cameron, has to make quick sense of the nuanced, subtle, and dangerous relationships between atevi, whose lattices of loyalties are complex, who do not have a word for “trust,” and whose emotions run deep but remain conceptually elusive to humans. Most importantly, he must determine where he, and the rest of his tiny island of humanity, fits into those relationships as others test him, through violence and intrigue, to determine whether they fit at all.

Foreigner is the first installation in a series of novels about human-alien intrigue, politics, and sociological what-ifs with a specific emphasis as to what extent, exactly, can two very alien species understand each other. Told mostly from Bren Cameron’s point of view, the book explores both this world and these concepts in great detail, and as Bren finds himself in stranger environs and company, he reflects more, along with the readers, on the possible implications of the events around him. I joked to myself an alternate title for this book could be Bren Cameron Explains It All, in parody of the Nickelodeon show about a girl who tells us all about her life.

He also operates at high anxiety, with increasing paranoia, for basically the entire book. While understandable, he can often come across as petulant, but at least he’s self-aware about it.

Despite this minor complaint, the book is a cerebral exploration of a rich world of which readers only get to scratch the surface. It also explores questions of linguistics and epistemology. For example, is this planet Earth because they live there now, or is Earth a specific planet? Is an eight-legged bug an arachnid, or should an entirely new scientific taxonomy be developed to differentiate unique evolutionary branches and divergences of the two planets? Bren likes Bannichi and Jago, the atevi security agents assigned to him, but isn’t sure how to wrap his head around how they might feel about him.

The atevi have their own conceptual struggles. Human motivations do not align very well with any atevi words, and their penchant for displaying a constant deluge of emotions can be disturbing. Combined with how comparatively small, weak and fragile humans are in comparison, it’s easy for atevi to think of them like ignorant, or perhaps miscreant, children. The atevi also have a deep psychological inclination towards numbers, and various schools of numerology compete to define harmony and discord at the highest levels of power and the lowest gatherings of poor farmers. The implications of human computers, which convert everything to numbers with no regard for numerical harmony, is profound and potentially heresy.

Finally, the humans themselves are not exactly a united front. When the original colony ship stumbled its way into the solar system, there were disagreements about the course of action with long reaching consequences.

The book is a well-considered dive into a first-contact, space-colonization scenario, full of texture in a rich setting, which clearly sets the stage for the next couple books in this opening trilogy of the series: Invader, and Inheritor.

By the Sword, by Mercedes Lackey, is a fantasy novel about a woman named Kerowyn who turns away from the courtly roles reserved for her gender and instead pursues the life of a mercenary. The beginning of her story happens quite rapidly, drawing on events from other books in the series. She gains the use of a magic sword, called Need, which responds to women in danger, becomes trained as a military officer by family she never knew she had, and is quickly established as an expert mercenary and war horse specialist. It should be noted the setting has women soldiers as common practice, but they don't overlap with women of court. What follows are stories of her training years, her discovery of additional talents she didn't know she had, dealing with relationships, isolation, military campaigns, and survival against overwhelming odds.I didn't realize this book was part of a series, making it a tough jumping-in point, but I enjoyed it as a light fantasy novel, with tactical overtones, centered on an emotionally mature person dealing with gender pressures. I do have some criticisms.

I have two main criticisms of the book: opportunism and over-reliance on karma. First, Kerowyn has a bounty of opportunity, special skills, and supernatural advantages, making her in another league from anyone else grappling with the same problems and pressures she endured. This gets balanced a fair bit by her character and emotional vulnerability, so it feels easy to root for her, but no one but Kerowyn would have persevered as consistently and completely as her, over and over again, and it diminishes the impact when she does overcome. Second, there is a pattern of good things happening around Kerowyn because she is a good person. I don't mind the notion of karma as a narrative device, but as with my first point, the good things that happen to her are exceptionally good, and nearly impossible odds happen with her with regularity. Again, this is mitigated by Lackey connecting the reader with her, and sharing her doubts and fears with the reader, but at some point it becomes a barrage of The Most Awesome Person Who Ever Womaned On A Horse And Deserves Everything All The Time.

My last criticism is more circumstantial; there are nations I don't know, magic I don't understand, and other psychic stuff which I guess is different from magic. The book does a decent job introducing them quickly, but there is a lot of missing context. As this is from a long series I can't really fault it for that, but it was annoying.

Even with the criticism I enjoyed reading it, though the primary takeaway I got from the narrative is that karma is real but... it's mostly reserved for people born with instinctual moral fiber of the correct variety, and you'd better be fortunate enough to have enough resources to deal with the repercussions of moral decisions or you're gonna get the shaft. Not a great message, but it was a fun ride.

Alias Grace (1996)

Alias Grace is a historical fiction novel by Margaret Atwood based on Grace Marks, a woman found guilty of murder in the 1840’s as a teenager, who then spent 29 years in prison in Ontario before being pardoned. In this novel, set when Grace had been in prison for around twenty-six years, a church community in Kingston petitioning the Canadian government for her pardon brings in a young physician, Dr Simon Jordan, who wishes to make a case study of her. The novel alternates between Grace and Simon’s points of view as it explores an intimate, vulnerable, and unflinching fictionalization of her life rooted in what we know about the historical woman. Simon struggles to maintain his professionalism as he becomes too drawn into her story, endures the provincial nature of Kingston in the 1840’s, and becomes entangled in some of his own choices. The novel is punctuated by reports concerning the historical Grace Marks, some real and fictional letters from people around them, and excerpts from Susannah Moodie’s famously embellished interviews with her. It deserves high praise for its depth of historical accuracy and it’s a compelling read. It offers compassionate and uncomfortable insights into society, especially concerning the life of women in the 1840’s, while offering no easy answers about right and wrong. It’s an excellent book.

Storytelling and narratives are at the core of Alias Grace - how stories are told, and how people receive them. Grace tells segments of her life to Simon while sewing or doing needlepoint in the house of the prison warden, where she is sometimes permitted to work as a domestic. During these sessions, Grace tells Simon about the narrative nature of quilt patterns; how each has a name, associations, and life events they should ideally accompany. The book itself is divided into sections, each named after a real quilt pattern, and the book sections feel like they align with the implications of each one. It really reinforces both the storytelling nature of this particular book and firmly embeds the book’s perspective in that of an 1840’s woman.

This storytelling focus leads smoothly into the sociological aspects of the book as Grace and Simon both find themselves navigating hedge mazes of social expectation, while the other people around them have their own complicated paths or serve as barriers in the paths of others. While the pressures of being a doctor, prisoner, public spectacle, domestic servant, or immigrant get explored, amongst other things, I found the motivations of the characters felt rooted in who they are. Those puzzle pieces fit together with nuance as parts of a greater whole, and those same elements fit differently into different people, the decisions they make, and their outlooks towards each other (and themselves).

Storytelling and sociology go rather hand in hand when it comes to another aspect of this book - the effect an audience has directly on the story they are being told. Grace talks about the media circus that surrounded her trial, but Grace is also telling Simon a story herself, and the historical Grace was recorded as giving conflicting accounts of the events of the murder. Suzannah Moodie told a story about Grace, painting a particular kind of picture, and Margaret Atwood is also telling a story about Grace, and about Simon as well. It’s masterfully done. Grace herself is, unsurprisingly, very defined by an awareness of the impact those around her have on anything she might have to say, and this book’s narrative is defined by this awareness as well.

Grace’s story, as told to Simon, begins with her life as a child in Ireland, her problematic father, and her harrowing voyage to Canada. We get to know Grace as an impoverished, immigrant child trying to take care of her irresponsible father and even younger siblings, eventually getting work as a maid where we get to know the kind of young teenager she became, before coming to work at the country house where the murders would occur at 16 years old. The Grace telling the stories, who spent 26 years in prison, reflects on how she looks back on it all now. Simon’s story, told directly to the reader, begins with him arriving in Kingston, finding less than ideal lodgings after his recent tour across Europe, and thinking about his future prospects. He finds himself in uncomfortable lodgings, pursuing his exploration of Grace Marks, but getting continuously nagged by his mother, through passive-aggressive letters, to get married and settle down already. His story follows a decidedly different path as he reflects on the rising and falling fortunes of his family, his own attractions to women, and the ramifications of his current entanglements. It’s two very different stories.

Alias Grace was insightful and engaging read, and an intimate window into a very specific time and place in Canadian history. I highly recommend it.

The Book of the New Sun is a tetralogy of books written by its fictional narrator, Severian, detailing his forced journey into the world outside the halls of the Torturer's Guild where he grew up. Through him, we are introduced to a faded, anachronistic world under the thin light of a pale, dying sun. He has triumphs, adventures, and sorrows, and his strange encounters bring him into a unique understanding of the New Sun, a sort of religious concept and prophecy of his world. The series is full of both references to mythology and western antiquities as well as alien-sounding wonders. It's also a book that seems to move under your hands while you read it, such that passages you reread may not feel the same. It's a spectacular read, wildly imaginative, and written in a way that conjures the readers' full force of imagination. Not gonna lie, this is an instant new favorite of mine.

It's hard to talk about the plot without taking away from the experience of reading the book, as the limited-keyhole-view of the narrative is part of that experience. Severian travels to a distant city to become the chief torturer there, armed with little more than the signature dark cloak of his guild and a masterwork executioner's sword with the evocative name Terminus Est. On the way he makes the acquaintance of various unlikely companions; not because they are oddly paired, but because his acquaintances are increasingly unlikely people. Later in the series we are introduced to inter-or-multi dimensional beasts, angelic entities, riddles within reflections, mysterious and potentially miraculous forces of healing, a entire mountain sculpted to look like a man, old witches, devastating energy lances, fishermen-warriors armed with flint spears, an entire people who speak only in quotes, and the question of what, exactly, is actually so special about the gemstone known as the Claw of the Conciliator.

The series consists of four books: 1. The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) 2. The Claw of the Conciliator (1981) 3. The Sword of the Lictor (1982) 4. The Citadel of the Autarch (1983) There is a fifth book, The Urth of the New Sun (1987), written as an afterward years after the last book, which I haven't read, so I won't be including that in this review.

The language of the book is sometimes difficult but well-considered. The words Severian uses often feels archaic, or rooted in social norms of European and middle eastern antiquities. This isn't incidental, as one of the afterwards clarifies it's used to evoke the reader's associations of what is ancient with Severian's own associations, though those ancient things continue to exist in his own time. I find the language also has the effect of reinforcing the strange, alien feeling of this world, as well as makes effective use of Severian as a narrator of very limited scope. Everything he writes reflects his paradoxical breadth of knowledge and the limitations of his point of view, having been raised within the cloistered walls of his guild.

The world Severian inhabits is one of high technology fallen into disrepair and ruin. Many elements of the world have long histories, of both higher and lower technological application than they may serve in Severian's own time, and one of the ways the book changes as it is read lies in how details become revealed that change the implications of previous passages. Additionally, there are creatures and materials that do not originate on this world at all, entirely alien to its long histories, and it's not always clear which of these camps anything, or anyone, might belong. The book is delightfully wrapped in mysteries and ambiguities, which I found engaging as I would unconsciously fill in blanks with my own associations.

There are a lot of references in this book, many of which I suspect went over my own head. There is a lot of Latin, which gets used for most official government positions or military purposes, but there is also a lot of Greek as well as Judeo-Christian mythology and European folklore. Due to the ambiguities of the narrative it's not always clear if the things being described are like those mythological entities or situations or if he actually considers them to be the same thing. Or maybe they resurfaced through time and space. Or maybe those things were alien all along. Or maybe it's something even stranger of which only a small piece is actually perceived. It's really hard to tell. There are likely a few ways in which these books can be read, but nothing feels accidentally placed or mentioned off-hand without some purpose (by the time you get to the end, that is).

This isn't a casual read - I did a fair bit of google-searching unfamiliar words but I found it vastly rewarding. Through Severian, Gene Wolfe contemplates faith, obedience, authority, individualism, cruelty, miracles, illusions, and compassion across extreme paradigm shifts of consciousness, time, space, and dimension. And it's a great story.