Bruce

Another masterpiece

Reviewed: 06-19-25

This series just keeps getting better and better. There is some horrific suffering in this, individual and collective, but also great joy and wonder.

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Astonishingly good space opera

Reviewed: 06-15-25

Ruocchio shows how well he’s learned lessons from mentors as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien and Dan Simmons. The pace and density of ideas and events never flags - there’s no bloat here at all. Absolutely wonderful, and the reading lives up to the story.

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Great book, awful narration

Reviewed: 05-29-25

This is going to be the most schizoid set of comments I’ve reading about an audiobook.

The Reading: “This title uses virtual voice narration. Virtual voice is computer-generated narration for audiobooks. I’m impressed at how this works for general text, with a pleasant male voice and a fair amount of variation in tone. It’s come a long way but it’s completely inadequate for a book about people with Greek names. Is it “BA-si-LYD-es” or “ba-SIL-a-des”? Virtual Voice doesn’t know, and uses both, and some other pronunciations, apparently at random. Given a citation like “Ref. 7.26.8”, referring to a passage in The Refutation Of All Heresies, it says “Ref dot 26th of July dot 8”…usually, but quite always. It doesn’t know that “Matt.” is short for Matthew, or that “1 Peter” is First Peter, not “One Peter”. And on and on. I finished the book out of morbid curiosity, but can only say that this is not technology ready for use in this fashion. Maybe with extensive review and re-recording. Maybe not. But not like this.

The Book: Another fascinating book from Dr. Litwa, this one focusing on one of the earliest Christian philosophers, who flourished in the middle of the 2nd century AD. Less than two dozen passages of his work survive, all in books by people criticizing his doctrines. Litwa provides new translations of them, and a great deal of context to see what they add up to and suggest. Part of his outlook is similar to later thinkers often described as Gnostic, other parts pretty like what became mainstream doctrine. Some show a reliance on texts that aren’t quite from the New Testament as we have it - perhaps drawing on earlier versions from before their contents stabilized. If you’re interested in the Christian world before there was an orthodoxy, this is really worth your time.

Just…get it in print or as an ebook.

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Captivating look at people who’ve sought to become God, in some sense

Reviewed: 05-08-25

M. David Litwa is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers on by-ways of thought and practice in the early Christian era. He he studies examples of people who sought a union with God or to displace him, or whose enemies accused them of trying it, from Adam and Lucifer in accounts by the Jewish prophets to the Gnostic conception of Yaldabaoth the flawed creator to Jesus, Simon Magus, and Allogenes, the subject of later Gnostic tales.

Litwa has a remarkable gift for writing clearly. He doesn’t use a lot of jargon and explains it and set it in context when he does. He describes events and meanings as he subjects so them - including acknowledging where we can’t really know with confidence what they meant - without suspending his own judgments. So this book both instructs and comments, which is just how I like it. He concludes with observations about the many theological and cultural uses of these beliefs which gave me a whole heap of fresh thoughts.

I’m delighted and can hardly recommend Desiring Divinity to anyone interested in the matrix of ideas and practices from which Christianity as we know it emerged.

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An outstanding tour of philosophical pessimism

Reviewed: 05-01-25

Thomas Ligotti has written an astonishing body of horror fiction resting on the felt experience of living in a universe where all meaning is illusory and all illusions doomed to collapse. Here he steps out from behind the stories to explain that he means it and why he finds existence so. He lays out the ideas of philosophical and artistic predecessors from the famous to the very obscure, and writes plainly about the aspects of life most of us instinctively turn away from. Whether you end up agreeing or not, this book is engaging and thought-provoking.

Ligotti’s long-time friend and fellow horror author Jon Padgett narrates as Ligotti’s prose deserves. He ranges from calm exposition to impassioned misery and back. As with all his audiobook readings, he’s a delight to listen to.

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Elegant, distinctive horror & weird fiction

Reviewed: 02-16-25

First, the narration is excellent throughout, a real pleasure after several unsatisfying listens.

Second, these are superb stories, sometimes slicing through cliches from new angles, sometimes altogether fresh. Some are science fiction as well as horror, a combination I love. Several of the ghost-related stories have me genuine scared moments,, and that’s very rare for me these days.

I look forward to reading more of Evenson’s work soon.

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Outstanding introduction

Reviewed: 08-15-24

The authors do a superb job distilling an enormous and ever-growing mass of material into an enjoyable and useful guide to essentials. The references at the end including equally useful commentary on places to start doing further research, too. And the reading is equally excellent, getting the nuances of Mayan pronunciation right for Mayan names and words. Highly recommended.

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A wonderfully angry cosmic horror story

Reviewed: 06-25-24

I fell in love with this book almost immediately, and became more so as it went along. It’s set in 1990 New York and tells the story of a young woman seeking her lover, who disappeared without a trace months before. Monique’s search takes her both physically and conceptually into darkness and buried secrets. It culminates in one of those pure expressions of anger at human and cosmic injustice I can recall. And the narration makes it even better, catching the nuances of Monique’s exhaustion, the peculiar cheer of the world’s nicest doomsday cultists, and the hammering horrors that wait for her. Absolutely too-notch all around.

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An excellent, intense, disturbing story

Reviewed: 06-18-24

Like just about everything Kathe Koja writes, this is a difficult but rewarding story. The narrator and the people around him are losers, drifters, and wannabe artists who stumble into contact with a mystery that can’t be explained: a hole leading into black depths, where something incomprehensible waits and preys on whatever comes its way. Nothing good comes of its presence in their lives.

Koja writes in a style that really captures the flow of speech and thought, and narrator Joshua Saxon beings it to vivid life. He knows when to speed up and slow down, get louder and softer, pause and rush ahead. He makes a great story even better.

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1 person found this helpful

A fascinating, accessible Mayan epic

Reviewed: 04-13-24

This is an amazing book, with two very different parts, both excellent. In the first sixty pages, Joaquin De La Sierra provides a compact introduction to the Mayan peoples, their lands and cultures, their encounters with conquistadors, and their survival since then. In the next one hundred eighty pages, he provides a new translation of the Popol Vuh, a Mayan epic poem mostly about the exploits of the heroic twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

Both parts are lavishly illustrated with well-chosen pictures, presented either thorough captions that explain just why they belong where they are. I came away with a good feeling for what traditional Mayan lands are like, aspects of their ways of life, and how they told stories in art and text.

The Popol Vuh is a densely packed story full of mythic adventure. There’s an overview of cycles of creation and destruction leading up to the world and humanity as we know them and the lives, victories, and defeats of heroes before the hero twins. Some events explain why animals, aspects of the weather, etc are as they are; mostly, though, the story is just itself. The hero twins advance against increasingly powerful adversaries including the lords of the realm of the dead. They use trickery, loopholes in obligations, and superhuman derring-do - every tactic is fair against evil gods, apparently.

After the twins’ exploits, we learn about the ancestral tribes of the Maya and their leaders. They had a tough start, the god making them deliberately weak in various ways. They needed to seek out a divine patron and help from various powerful voices in the surrounding world. Flourishing took a long time.

The Audible edition, read by Jeffrey Schmidt, is a marvel of its own. He brings great pacing and dramatic flair to the text, along with meticulous pronunciation. I struggle a lot with various Mesoamerican words, and it’s such a pleasure to him them said by someone with many more clues than me. He made the story exciting even with its many repetitions and parallelisms.

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