September–October Reads (2024)

Here’s what I read in September and October. Not as much as I’d like, but with school underway and translation work ongoing, it’s what I managed. 

The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber is the fifth book in the series collecting the tales of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. One major difference with this volume is that it’s a novel. I’ll be honest and say it took me a while to get into it, but I think that has a lot to do with me being distracted and busy, and not so much to do with the book. I do find myself puzzled about the appearance of a spacetime-traversing German monster-collector early on in the book, but I think it’s just supposed to be an amusing interlude. That said, it got me reflecting about how pacing affects characterization: the main characters all seem somehow just a little more cartoonish here, and I think that’s because we spend a lot more time in scenes (or parts of scenes) that would likely be skipped in a short story. 

The novel is more fun when it swings into action—with Fafhrd struggling his way back to Lankhmar and Gray Mouser shunken to the size of a rat and struggling to come to grips with everything he learns beneath the city—and is less fun when Leiber’s goofy “dirty old man”-isms cross the line into brutality, bestiality, and Mouser’s apparently pedophilic leanings. (I gather these kinds of things become even more prominent in the last collection of the series’ whereas Leiber had fun with the “dirty old man” humor earlier in the series, my feeling is that it’s starting to bubble up to the surface even in 1968’s Swords of Lankhmar: there are several off-putting things tucked into this story, even if they’re less prominent.) That said, I found it possible to look past this and appreciate especially the fever-pitch rising action as the rat plague overruns Lankhmar and Fafhrd and Gray Mouser struggle to save the city. 

I read this in The Second Book of Lankhmar collection. 

The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi is a book that was recommended on one of my Discord channels. It’s a book about a woman who stumbles onto the secret existence of a mysterious language training center that somehow manages to turn out people fluent in a new language in just a couple of weeks—for a price. The details of that price, and especially of how that somehow works, are the core mystery of the book, and I’m not going to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read the book, in part because a lot of how the book works hinges on that being a surprise. 

I thought it was a pretty good first novel, albeit one with a few tics and some authorial habits that I expected to pay off but which didn’t in the end—at least not as powerfully as they could have. Still, I’m more and more trying to accept books for being what they are, rather than what I imagine they could have been.

Flashbacks (Paranoia XP Adventure collection), edited by Beth Fischi and Allen Varney. I’ll be reviewing this elsewhere: I have a series of blog posts about Paranoia XP edition books in the works. I’ll just say that it’s a lot to read in one go, and that while the XP edition is the most complete and thorough version of the game so far, it’s also the most verbose. That probably works well for some, since that’s how they fit in the humor, callbacks to earlier editions, and so on, but for me it was a bit overwhelming.

[REDACTED] by [REDACTED]. I thought [REDACTED]. 

I only read this YA novel for a book club. I would not have picked up a book by this author otherwise, but I happened to have a copy on the shelf and figured I’d join the discussion. 

[REDACTED] can rot as far as I’m concerned, and doesn’t need my advertising here. 

Fritz Leiber‘s Swords and Ice Magic is the penultimate collection of of his Lankhmar stories, with stories from the 70s. They’re relatively late in his run of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, and not as great as some of the earlier ones. There’s a preoccupation with the duo’s ex-girlfriends in a number of the tales, and read in sequence it begins to feel like a bit of a thing. I don’t know if Leiber was processing his loss of his first wife—though it sure feels like it in parts—but lost love is definitely a theme in these stories, and so is the looming threat of death, and of lost lovers who now dwell in the land of death.  

The standouts here are the linked stories “The Frost Monstreme” and the much longer “Rime Isle,” which are much less about that and more tied to a mysterious summons to Salthaven, a town on Rime Isle where a Mingol invasion has been predicted (though much of the town council doesn’t seem to think so).  

I read this in The Second Book of Lankhmar collection. There’s one more “book” in the collection before I complete it. 

I read Judy Blume‘s Fudge-a-Maniato my son this month. It’s one of the Fudge books I never got around to, unsurprisingly since it was published when I was in high school. It was a fun read, though, and I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed seeing my son’s reactions to the twists and turns of the story.  

We also started on Superfudge, which technically comes earlier in the serires than Fudge-a-Mania, but somehow my son decided he wanted to check something else out instead. I’ll post about that in my November–December Reads post, in a couple of months.

Addendum: 

I forgot to mention this one: in preparation for my upcoming stab at running it, I’ve read Trophy Dark, by Jesse Ross. I didn’t get around to backing the Kickstarter but have picked up copies of all three of the books for this series after the fact, and have to say, they’re absolutely gorgeous. The “Incursion” structure looks promising. A friend of mine commented about his impression that the incursions in Trophy Dark are basically a railroad, and I think that’s right, but then, it’s a tragedy game, and tragedies often are railroads, plot-wise. However, reading through a bunch of incursions and listening to a few actual plays, I’ll say that the freedom players experience here is instead in the realm of texture: details of their ride along the inevitable track to their doom. It’s a dark, atmospheric, and weird game, and I look forward to trying to run it.