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"Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."

• Shooting An Elephant, George Orwell

I get a lot of reading done when I'm visiting family. It's not that I don't want to spend time with them exactly, sometimes I get a little tired though. So I pick a book to take with me and read during the downtime, and that was "The Traitor Baru Cormorant". Unfortunately, it was a bad choice because it was entertaining enough that I read the entire thing in two days, and had to find something new after. I'm looking forward to getting the two sequels.

The weakest part of the book was definitely the beginning. It should have been really interesting, as it's an account of the protagonist growing up as her homeland gets colonized by the fantasy-British Empire (the Masquerade). Also, it's supposed to serve the function of setting up the motive for the epic revenge story, but I didn't really feel it.

Luckily, things pick up as soon as Baru leaves her home. There rest of the plot has two different parts. The first part involves Baru getting used to her role as Masquerade accountant and introducing her new home, a sort of fantasy-medieval Eastern Europe place. The second part is an epic Game of Thrones-ish account of war and politics.

These were both pretty good. The accountant stuff was unique, without getting too technical. As long as you can understand the concept of inflation, you can follow it. The politics stuff was really good as well. There's a ton of different characters at this point in the story, all of whom have unpronounceable fantasy names, but they were written well enough that I could keep track of them all. Some were very memorable.

There's two interesting aspects of the story to write about. The first is the Masquerade. Lots of fantasy stories have evil empires or malicious tyrants, but they usually don't focus 19th century colonialism. The Masquerade is literally just the British empire with some colorful fantasy details. A particular aspect of their evil is that they forcibly introduce their social morality onto colonized peoples. This morality has a lot in common with real British race "science", but also an overwhelming obsession with preventing homosexuality and polyamory. It's a little over the top, but works well to add drama in a story with a lesbian protagonist. In spite of the homopgobia, the empire have an interesting take on gender: they're essentialists in that they believe in biologically defined gender roles, but those roles include a lot more stuff for the women to do. For instance, they think women are naturally better sailors, so the navy is mostly female.

My biggest problem with The Masquerade is that they just aren't mean and stupid enough. Every real world empire has times where the clever plans are too much work, and they fall back on ugly violence for no good reason (the point of my Orwell quote above). On the other hand, The Masquerade is incredibly efficient and strategic at all times. Where are the corrupt officials who torture the local populace just because they don't know any better? When does the Masquerade fight a pointless war just because those in charge can't admit they were wrong?

The other thing about this book is that it's very gay. That's good, too much modern speculative fiction includes queer characters just because the author thinks it's a good vibe. (how would you know it's a cyberpunk dystopia if there weren't a few trans people hanging around?). I though the way in which Baru is slowly more and more honest with herself about her sexuality as she gets older was pretty realistic. Also her relationship with Tain Hu was very cute... for the most part.

This book wasn't that, but it was interesting. I've literally never read a book by a Japanese author before, so maybe I don't have a good background to describe this. I guess it's like the The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath was an edgy thriller about four women in 90s Japan. The characters have been ground down by globalized capitalism and other systems of exploitation until they are willing to do literally anything to escape their current lives. Eventually, they do escape in different ways, but the price is pretty high. Unlike those other two books, here's no socialist moralizing, but that kind of fits with the setting (I wonder what happened to Japanese Leftism in the 1950s...).

The start of this book hooked me with a vividly depressing account of lower middle class life, and the middle part was very exciting. I didn't like the ending very much, it managed to be unexpected, disturbing, and cliche all at the same time. At least things worked out for my favorite character.

What was really special about this book was the exploration of the experience of doing something horrific, but necessary. How would it actually feel, moment-to-moment, to have participated in incredibly gruesome violence? How would you cope? When, if ever, will it catch up with you, emotionally? I assume Natsuo Kirino has never chopped anybody into little pieces herself, but she is very, very good at imagining it.

There are three different things going on with this book, and it's been hard for me to figure out which one is most important.

First of all, you have the actual plot. A hyper-competent military commander in fantasy Republican France is assigned to the quiet and backwards province of fantasy Scotland, seemingly as a way to help him recover from a difficult command in his recent past. All is well, until the three strongest units in the whole army randomly show up and tell him that they're now under his command. From there, his battalion manages a series of brave and death defying exploits against a bizarre threat from the fantasy Neo-Assyrian Empire. When the survivors make it home, they find that everything has changed forever in their absence.

This isn't the most original premise, but it's engaging enough. Most of the page-to-page action has to do with the work of running a military unit, which was surprisingly interesting because it ranged from making sure everyone has a nice tasty breakfast to using magic to communicate with the land-as-a-living-organism as a way of traveling faster. However, the issue for me here was the incredibly sparse characterization. I like to get to know the people in my books, and I think this style didn't really work for me. There's only really two individuals who I felt had an interesting arc from the start to the end of the book. We spend very little time actually hearing from the characters and seeing how they interact. In fact, after reading the entire book I know the gender of maybe three characters, the personal backstory of a single character, and the birth name of literally nobody.

In any other book, that lack of detail wouldn't make sense, but in The March North it's a result of the writing style. The book takes the principles of "show, don't tell" and "information dumps are boring" to their extreme conclusions, and has almost no background or extra detail about literally anything. For instance, there are no gendered pronouns anywhere, which is linguistically possible because everything is a kind of stream of consciousness narration by the protagonist, who likes to refer to people by their nicknames. The only things that regularly get adjectives are ones which the narrator is personally fascinated by, like the sorcerers and their various weird horses. I appreciate the attempt to do something different, but also it's annoying sometimes. Major plot twists are delivered in a single terse sentence, which you have to read three times because it's worded in a bizarre way.

Ironically, the setting is actually really cool. The premise is that a world where some people can do lots of powerful magic and most people can't would be hellish, because at least some of the magicians would spend their time taking over and fighting each other for power. Even though most can't do magic, the effects of the magic are still present throughout society in a logical way. One of my favorite details was that the hardest part of farming in this world is dealing with a weed made of magical eels, which I think was originally created as a biological weapon in a war between dark lords. Also, the origins of the republic and its military are epic, though you don't really learn about this until the very end.

This book was unique and fun to read. It's one of those things where I feel a slightly different approach would have created a masterpiece: keep the same terse world building but tell us a little more about the characters. How do they, like, feel about things? Anyway, the people of Goodreads seem to think that the Commonweal series gets better with every book, so I'm looking forward to the rest.