- Books Read 2025: January–February
- Books Read: March–April 2025
- Books Read: May–June 2025
Here’s everything (well, every book) that I read in March and April of this year!
Cugel’s Saga by Jack Vance is the third of the Dying Earth books. It picks up where Eyes of the Overworld left off, with Cugel having been dumped far in the north after having been outsmarted by the wizard Iucounu. Cugel’s still a scumbag angling to rip off anyone he can and to bed (usually under false pretenses) every woman he sees while making his way home, but the settings for this portion of his saga are different. While he’s just as much of a shitheel as in the previous book, Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel’s misadventures manage to have a happy ending of sorts, mostly because he manages to hang onto an object called the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, which is basically a magical demon scale that saves Cugel’s bacon multiple times.
It was fun seeing the bastard Cugel constantly get his comeuppance… well, until the happyish ending, which was only disappointing insofar as it meant I had only one Dying Earth book left to go.
Next, I continued straight through to the end of the series with Rhialto the Marvellous, the final book of the Dying Earth series, which is in some ways very familiarly Vancian, but is different in a few ways from the rest of the Dying Earth books. It’s a shortish novel, the main protagonist is an accomplished wizard, and he’s not a massive low-stakes douchebag like Cugel, though he does do some dastardly things on occasion. The story flits about between plotlines: in one, evil magic is turning a bunch of male wizards into female witches; then it concerns an adventure of sorts focused on the regaining of a blue magical crystal, and involves a significant amount of magical time travel; and then it’s a mission to save a wizard from Nothing. It’s hilarious in spots, because Vance has a way of working in the pitch-perfect ridiculousness of a lot of real-life human interaction—especially the ridiculousness of deeply nerdy interactions—but also manages to be quite evocative… and since it’s Vance, there’s also verbal fireworks all over the place.
I enjoyed it a lot, so much in fact that I was a bit bummed out to know that Vance wrote nothing else in this setting. (There is a tribute volume of short stories by other authors set in the same setting, but whether that interests me, I don’t know.) I may have to look into his Lyonesse books (which some describe as his finest work), or venture further out into the Gaean Reach books, beyond the Demon Princes series (which I read back in 2021-2022 and discussed elsewhere on this site).
Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic for a reason.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve read anything by Le Guin, and oddly, while I have read a few short story collections and short novels by her that I quite enjoyed, like Changing Planes and Unlocking the Air and The Telling, I hadn’t yet gotten around to her major novels, of which this is one. I’m happy to say I really enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and found it inspiring. The book is one that demands and expects attentiveness from its readers, and it’s also one that rewards it. I am not sure why I put off Le Guin’s major works—I had a copy of this novel for many years, but never read it—but going by this one, I’d say they seem like they’re totally worth digging into. (I know, I know, I’m decades late to the party.) The passage across the ice near the end is especially stunningly written, and the book has stuck with me since I finished it.
A funny side-note: am I the only one who feels a kind of affinity between the Gethenian concept of “shifgrethor” and what Koreans mean when they talk about “nunchi”? Not that shifgrethor is nunchi, but more like shifgrethor is the thing you’re trying not to impinge upon when you are, er, exercising your nunchi? The match isn’t 1:1—there’s more emphasis on a sense of personal pride and ego when it comes to shifgrethor—but it feels like it’s in the same ballpark somehow. Or maybe that’s just because both are what feel to me like vague terms tied to social etiquette, I dunno.
I should mention that I have the recent Earthsea omnibus (yes, the one with the Charles Vess illustrations) sitting on the shelf, and I’m hoping to dig into it sometime relatively soon… but I might try The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, or The Lathe of Heaven first… because I find the idea of reading another longish series a bit daunting at the moment.
Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry (selection and translation by Paul Blackburn, editing by George Economou) is a classic collection of troubadour verse in English translation. I’ve read a few over the years but the troubadours seem like a fount that rewards repeated returns. For whatever reason, I dipped into this book only occasionally, reading a Vida (the included short biography for each troubadour whose work was included) and then the songs by that individual. It seems like a sensible way to go about it, I guess, but it makes for slow progress, so in the end I finally read straight through to the end of the collection. In addition to the troubadours whose work I already knew about, I added a few more favorites to my list, including Peire Vidal, Bertran de Born (who, it must be said, was a bloodthirsty son of a bitch) and the Monk of Montaudon (who made me laugh out loud with his funny rants against hypocrisy—some of which feel shockingly timely today). Here’s one of the few recordings of a piece by the Monk of Montaudon that I could find online—watch it with English subtitles to see his wit:
I think I still rank Robert Kehew‘s much more recent Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours a little higher in terms of immediate enjoyability and accessibility, but the comparison is perhaps unfair: had I read the books in a different order, maybe I’d be saying the opposite. Under-represented in Proensa is the work of female troubadours: if you’re interested in that, I’d recommend The Woman Troubadours by Meg Bogin. This collection, however, offers a fuller picture of the range of things troubadours composed. For one thing, it makes clear that “rap beefs” are something that have a much longer tradition than most people realize. Bertran de Born was talking himself up (in terms of bellicose manliness) in his songs nearly a millennium ago, and many’s the troubadour who shit-talked a rival, often in a coded manner, in their tunes.
Mikhail Bulgakov‘s The Heart of a
Dog was the most recent selection for my book club, though, interestingly, a specific translation was not specified. Personally, I read the translation by Mirra Ginsburg, from 1994. This one is more a novella than a novel, and a really quick read. Though it’s a brief diversion, it’s an interesting one: a doctor finds a dog on the street, fattens it up, and then transplants a dead man’s testicles and pituitary gland into it. The dog undergoes a bizarre transformation and, well, then comes the chaos. I probably missed some of the satirical resonances because I don’t know enough about Soviet life and culture, but it’s clearly a satire exploring human nature in the light of the politics of “human improvement” and “human perfectibility” of that sort that was a cornerstone of the prevalent ideology in the USSR.
I write these summaries as I finish each book, and so as I write this, we haven’t had the discussion about it yet—but I’m curious to see what others thought of it. For me, it was just an okay read, and yet somehow it does make me feel the urge to grab the copy of The Master and Margarita that I’ve had for years (but never yet read) off the shelf and dive into it, just to see how it compares to this book.
Next, I read Bae Myung-hoon‘s The Proposal (2004), translated by Stella Kim. I quite enjoyed it, and have a review forthcoming soon in Korean Literature Now. Since that review will be pretty comprehensive about my thoughts on the book, I won’t say as much here except that I enjoyed the book, which is the story of a soldier in a space war trying to balance his professional pressures with the pressures of maintaining a relationship with a woman back on earth, as mysteries and weirdness as the war unfolds and the mysteries of the enemy are slowly uncovered.
That said, a few things I’ll mention: one is that the story is genuinely funny in parts, which surprised me considering it’s a war story (well, as much as anything else). I was also impressed by the way Bae played with mirroring effects in the story—resonating parallels between different plotlines, I mean. It’s a fun little book. I think the translation might be just a little too faithful to the sentence structure of the original for my taste, but I think Stella Kim gets away with it because when rendered in English these structures give to the protagonist’s account a sort of spoken/talky quality (rather than the impression of a written account).
I also read Bae Myung-hoon‘s Tower, translated by Sung Ryu and published by the same publisher as The Proposal, Honford Star, both because I’ve been curious about it for a while, and because I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have read a bit more by Bae before writing a review of the newest translation of his work. I’ve had an ebook of this for a year or two now, but had not gotten around to it. When I picked up a print edition of the book, I dived straight in.
Tower is what was for a while being referred to as a “mosaic novel”—a collection of linked short stories tied together by its setting. That setting is a massively tall highrise called Beanstalk, which comprises its own nation-state, complete with its own army, culture, national enemy (the Cosmomafia), and more. The stories explore various points of view within and outside of Beanstalk, examining things ranging from the political economics of transportation in a beanstalk tower, to the power networks within, to crowd control, and more. The book reminds me at times of Bruce Sterling, I think because of Bae’s oddball sense of humor and heartfelt earnestness intertwined with a fair bit of deep SFnal weirdness.
Among the stories, my favorites were:
- “Three Wise Recruits (The Version Including the Dog)” where some scholars explore the power networks within the Beanstalk and discover what seems to be a dog occupying an inexplicably odd position within the network.
- “Taklamakan Misdelivery,” a story that explores crowdsourced labour in multiple ways, some inspiring, others odd, and even one that is a little creepy.
- “Buddha of the Square,” which is an epistolary story involving a riot security guard in the Beanstalk and the elephant of which he’s charged with taking care, and how it might or might not have achieved enlightenment.
The Appendix also had some good stuff, albeit briefer. I felt more comfortable with Sung Ryu’s approach to translating and really though they did a good job of it. All in all, Tower was an odd, fun book. I’ll have to check out Bae’s other translated work, Launch Something!, sometime soon.
That’s it for books I read in March and April of this year. I’ll post again in July about what I’ve read in May and June, I guess!