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Andy Pressman

andypressman@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 10 months ago

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Andy Pressman's books

To Read (View all 7)

Erik Davis: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (Paperback, 2019, MIT)
Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom (2016)
C. S. E. Cooney, Gene Wolfe: Bone Swans (2015, Mythic Delirium Books)

Currently Reading

Norman Rufus Colin Cohn: The pursuit of the millennium (1970, Oxford University Press)

Read

Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth (Hardcover, 2019, Tordotcom)
Seth Dickinson: The Monster Baru Cormorant (2018, Tor Books)
Lou Downe: Good Services (2019, Bis B.V., Uitgeverij (BIS Publishers))

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reviewed Six four by Hideo Yokoyama

Hideo Yokoyama: Six four (2017, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 4 stars

"The nightmare no parent could endure. The case no detective could solve. The twist no …

Japanese police procedural

3 stars

Struggled to finish this one. I read that it was made into a couple of movies, which makes sense, because it's as much a police procedural as anything I've seen on the screen. Ups and downs with that, I think — the titular murder mystery is a vehicle for cultural and bureaucratic encounters, but it's a slow-moving beast. Back cover blurbs make it out to be a page-turner, but I struggled.

Lots to recommend here if you're interested Japanese (or maybe Tokyo-specific?) family and institutional hierarchies, less so if you're looking for a crime story that hooks with plot.

reviewed The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (The Masquerade, #2)

Seth Dickinson: The Monster Baru Cormorant (2018, Tor Books) 4 stars

Merciless

5 stars

A little sloppier in arc than its predecessor (something the title character comments upon towards the end of the book), but no less propulsive. It's also pulpier and more brutal, even as Baru's betrayals become more intimate and horrible. My ideal review of this would be a picture of me making a face as if to say "I can't take any more of this! Please, god, give me more!" My fingers curled around an invisible ball as if to suggest a total clench of the heart.

The only reason it works is that Dickinson is such a strong writer of character. It'd collapse under its own weight were the characters not so idiosyncratic and weird, with fully-formed personalities.

Thinking back now on something I wrote earlier about David Mitchell, a phenomenal character writer whose "all genres existing equally" principle is betrayed by his meager approach to the fantastic. Seth Dickinson …

reviewed The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

Kai Ashante Wilson: The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (2015, Tor.com) 3 stars

"Since leaving his homeland, the earthbound demigod Demane has been labeled a sorcerer. With his …

An excellent debut novella, still free on Tor's website

4 stars

A portrait of doomed lovers. I read this a while back, and my memories of it are ink-washed rather than photorealistic. Romance, tragedy, magic, and an alien world that first looks like sword-and-sorcery dustbowl but which upon deep reading opens into something much weirder. All written in a singular voice that flows between archaic and musical, as if the rap styling of 20th/21st C Earth were a foundational rhetoric for language in the far future.

reviewed Playing at the World by Jon Peterson

Jon Peterson: Playing at the World (2012, Unreason Press) 4 stars

On pretending to be other people doing other things, for fun

4 stars

An unparalleled history of roleplaying, from war simulations through modern ttrpgs. Plenty of digressions into topics like measuring fictional distances, the origin(s) and meaning(s) of the term 'orc,' hobby zine production and distribution, etc — overstuffed, if anything, but a delight for those who would enjoy opening every drawer in a cabinet of wonders.