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Discworld #12 - Witches Abroad
This book blog started life on Cohost, and it was purely because I decided that I was going to read all of the Discworld novels in order. I made a good start at them but felt a little burned out after not enjoying Eric and Moving Pictures, and shortly after I read them I was hired to write two adventures for the Modphius Discworld roleplaying game. The result is that I reached something of a saturation point with Pratchett, and I haven't touched a Discworld novel in over a year. I figured I should fix that and get back to reading them occasionally, so today I sat down with Witches Abroad.
This is among the longer novels in the series (or at least among the longest that I've read so far). It's marked on my spreadsheet as one that I've previously read, and I know that as a kid I had it in a three-volume anthology edition alongside Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters, but I established very early on that I haven't actually read this previously.
I don't tend to talk about numerical ratings on this blog (though I use them on Storygraph and Goodreads), but this feels like a good book to use to demonstrate my approach to ratings. I gave it a 2.5 out of 5 (or a 5 out of 10), which I think many people would see as a low rating but by which I mean "this was unremarkable but I enjoyed it". I didn't dislike Witches Abroad, but it's not one that I'll think about much now that I've finished it and it's difficult to point to any parts that I really loved. I would describe it as "aggressively okay", and I still feel like I'm waiting for Discworld to really hit its stride as a series (though it does feel like that moment is getting closer).
The idea that stories want to be told is one that's been touched on a few times already in this series, and I suspect it's likely something that we're going to come back to again in future books (we've already established in this read-through that Pratchett loved to revisit the same ideas and either try them again or else try them from a different angle). The fact that we've seen this theme before, combined with the fact that most of this novel is riffing on fairy tales we're expected to already be familiar with as readers, means that nothing in this book felt particularly new to me.
That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it. Nanny Ogg's letters home are fun, Greebo as a human is very entertaining, and seeing Granny Weatherwax exhibiting some actual power and manifesting herself as a force to be properly reckoned with felt like something we'd been building towards with this character for a couple of books. It was nice to see some new parts of the Disc, too, though I wish they felt a little more lived-in and real rather than a sort of generic fairy tale backdrop. Ankh-Morpork always feels thoroughly alive on the page, like it's a character in its own right, and as nice as it was to get away from the city for a book, I missed that sense of very real geography that's one of the biggest strengths of Pratchett's writing.
The upside is that, after a year and change away from the series, Witches Abroad made me want to read another Discworld book sooner rather than later, and we'll count that as a win.
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North Sun, or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther - Ethan Rutherford
Centre For Fiction First Novel Prize 2025 Longlist
This is one of those books that I started recommending to people before I'd finished it. By the time I reached the end I think I loved it a little less than I did at the beginning, but that's not to say that I don't still think this is really good and well worth picking up.
Rutherford's prose is sparse and dreamlike, presented to us in short chapters that are often little more than vignettes but which build into a mosaic of a story that always feels urgent even when the story is frozen in ice or languishing under a baking, eternal sun for months at a time.
This is a novel of mundane horror, of men chasing profit above all else, of pointless violence and cruelty away from any sort of consequence. It's also a novel of strange magic and surreal mythology that often reminded me tonally of the Fallen London games (particularly Sunless Sea). It's bleak and dark and deeply uncomfortable to read in places, and it leaves us with more questions than answers.
This lack of answers was part of why I liked it less at the end than at the beginning. The questions the book sets up in the opening sections are hugely compelling and it doesn't quite manage to walk the line of "satisfactory ambiguity". I wanted just a touch more explanation, a little more why or even what as things wrapped up. But that's a minor criticism, and it's one that can be abated by reflecting on the fact that we see much of this book from the viewpoint of two young boys who have no idea what's going on or why any of this is happening to them.
This is a very ethereal novel and I suspect it's one I'm going to be thinking about for a while.
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100 Horror Movies in 92 Days - Week 1
Every year for the past few years I've attempted the '100 Horror Movies in 92 Days' challenge. This was created by Spooky Sarah Says and has become one of my favourite parts of the year. The challenge is to watch 100 new-to-you horror films between the 1st of August and Halloween. Despite failing every time I've attempted it so far, it's still a lot of fun.
Sarah has just posted a blog of her week 1 highlights and so I thought it would be fun to do the same. As of writing this post I've watched 10 films out of the 100 (you can find my Letterboxd list for the challenge here). My loose plan this year is to watch as many Video Nasties as I can, and also to dig into some non-English-language horror.
I'm going to follow Sarah's lead here and pick 3 to 5 films each week from what I've watched that I think you should check out if you haven't already.
King Kong (1933) - This is one of those films that I've been aware of for a long time but never got around to seeing. I finally saw it this week at the Celluloid Screams Mystery 25mm Marathon, projected from 35mm, and what a treat that was. I was surprised by how well this held up considering it's nearly a century old. The stop motion still looks great, and some of the monster fights rival anything that's come since - especially that T-Rex fight, which is genuinely brutal. I loved this.
Train To Busan (2016) - From a classic to a modern classic. Zombie films are a bit of a hard sell for me so I've put off seeing this despite constantly hearing how great it is. I absolutely wasn't expecting to be emotionally devastated by it.
Santa Sangre (1989) - Another one from the Celluloid Screams marathon. Jodorowsky is an acquired taste, and I think he's at his best when he leans fully into his surrealist, dreamlike bullshit, which is exactly what happens in the first hour of this film - and what a first hour it is. There aren't many films that I'd describe as genuinely nightmarish, and that was very much enhanced by seeing it on the big screen. I wasn't quite as in love with the final act where he attempts to somehow tie everything together, but I respect the effort. The first half of this is unlike anything I've ever seen and I adored it.
Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) - I will never, ever stop thinking about the shark scene in this film for as long as I live. What a ridiculous, incredible scene. I have no idea how you achieve that. There's so much to love in this film, and I was hugely surprised by how much I enjoyed it given my normal reaction to zombies as a genre.
This first week was a bit ropey and there wasn't a huge amount beyond these three that I genuinely loved, so I'm hoping for a better week 2!
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Reading the Booker Longlist - Audition, Katie Kitamura
Sometimes it's hard to know how to talk about a book, or even how to respond to it at all. For me, Audition is one of those books.
I'm usually a fan of books that play with ambiguity, and that leave you with more questions than answers, but in this case the questions it left me with were questions like, "what was the point of that?"
It's quite frustrating, because for the first half of the novel I was really enjoying things and interested to see where we were going. The narrator was interesting, I loved the prose, and the web of relationships that we were building up was fascinating. And then the break between parts occurs, and we enter the second half of the book, and it felt like we simply threw out everything from the first half.
Largely I think I just didn't understand what Kitamura was aiming for with this. On the surface the thesis is pretty plain - it's stated outright a number of times, after all. We're concerned here with duality of personhood, of how we play different roles depending on who we're performing for, and how it's in the gaps between those roles or between the acts or between phases of life or &c. in which we find out what's true and who we are. And there's a big, gaping hole in the middle of this book between parts 1 and 2, in which something happens that we can't possibly understand that changes everything we know to be true. But this isn't metaphorical, this is a real change; the characters we're reading about in part 1 may share names and occupations with the characters in part 2 but unless the narrator is entirely misleading us in one or both of those parts, they are not in fact the same characters. And so this then leaves us with two questions: if one of the narrators is lying to us, then to what end? And if they're actually different characters, then what point are we meant to glean from all of this?
And ultimately, I can't find a satisfactory answer to either of those questions. The shift between the two parts is so sudden and so jarring that I spent the back half of the book desperately looking for clues to make sense of it, and I found nothing. Perhaps I'm not looking hard enough, or perhaps I'm reading things too literally that aren't meant to be read literally. Whatever is happening, whatever the Booker committee saw in this, I simply don't get it.
That's not to say that I didn't like the book or enjoy reading it. I did. Which makes the fact that I didn't understand it more frustrating. And perhaps that's a me problem, which is fine. But it's definitely a problem.
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Katabasis - R.F. Kuang
After I read Babel I had quite a lot to say about it. That isn't the case for Katabasis.
This is aggressively fine. I definitely enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Babel, mainly because it doesn't have quite so many major flaws as that book does. And where that book completely falls apart in its final act, Katabasis is fairly consistent throughout (though much like Babel I think it's at its strongest in the opening sections as we learn about this world that we're inhabiting).
There are two problems with Katabasis that made it a bit of a slog to get through for me. The first is that much like Babel it often feels very derivative of other works. Where Babel often read like poorly-disguised Harry Potter fan-fiction, Katabasis wears a few influences very clearly on its sleeve, in parts feeling like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and at other times feeling like Garth Nix's Sabriel. I think there's also some His Dark Materials influence here, too, especially with regard to the lands of the dead that we see at the end of The Amber Spyglass.
The main problem, though, is that it's simply boring for large chunks of the book. We're on a journey through Hell, and very little happens. It's hugely anti-climactic, especially after how strong the promise of the opening section of the book is. The romance at the heart of the book, too, falls a little flat - these are two characters who literally go to hell and back for each other, and I never once believed that they actually cared about each other.
It's a shame, really. I desperately wanted to love both Babel and Katabasis - thematically they sound like exactly the sort of thing I'd be into, I love the settings that Kuang situates her stories in, I love her ideas, and I think her writing is often very good. Unfortunately it all just fails to come together for me, and that's disappointing.
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Booker Prize Longlist 2025
I got out of my reading slump just in time for the Booker longlist to be announced, which is very exciting. It turns out that I've already read one of the books on the list (and for some reason hadn't posted about it on this blog, which I've just fixed) and I've had a few of the other titles sitting on my TBR for a while, so it seems like my efforts to be more clued-up about what's happening in literary fiction have been working.
Here's the longlist:
- Misinterpretation - Ledia Xhoga
- Seascraper - Benjamin Wood
- Flesh - David Szalay
- Endling - Maria Reva
- The Land In Winter - Andrew Miller
- The Rest of Our Lives - Ben Markovits
- Audition - Katie Mitamura
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny - Kiran Desai
- Flashlight - Susan Choi
- One Boat - Jonathan Buckley
- Universality - Natasha Brown
- The South - Tash Aw
- Love Forms - Claire Adam
I've already read Misinterpretation and enjoyed it, and I've been meaning to get around to Audition and Universality for a few months. Universality in particular I tried to get an ARC of a few times last year to no avail, so I'm really looking forward to actually reading that one.
Jonathan Buckley's Tell was listed for the Goldsmith's Prize last year and I never got around to reading it. Seeing him on the Booker longlist this year makes me regret not having read it, so I may prioritise that book and then pick up One Boat afterwards.
As for the other books on the longlist, I really like the sound of Flesh, Endling, The Land In Winter, and Flashlight. Interestingly there's no Irish fiction on the longlist this year, which is unusual, but it also seems to be a much more global list than in previous years. I'm looking forward ot digging in to these books!
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Misinterpretation - Ledia Xhoga
I read this book back in December of 2024 when it won the Center For Fiction First Novel Prize, and for some reason I never wrote about it on the blog. Since it's now been longlisted for the Booker Prize I figured I should write it up, so here are the notes I made in my reading journal.
This [the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize] is another award that I've only just learned about. This book won 2024's prize and I liked it enough taht I'm definitely going to keep an eye on the award this year.
This is an interesting one because it really feels like a thriller for the majority of the book but, as is often the way with literary fiction, it really dwells in ambiguity. In this case it's the ambiguity of translation - both of translating language and culture. It explores the way in which our language shapes the way we see the world, and how it's possible for someone to be an entirely different person when switching from one language/culture to another.
I really liked this and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Xhogga's work in future.
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Out of the reading slump
Since my last mini-review post back in June I basically haven't read anything. I'm not sure what happened, exactly, other than that I slipped into a reading slump for some reason and it's taken me 6 weeks to get out of it. Thankfully I'm now reading again.
I did read a few books on the rest of my holiday before my reading slump started, and I've just discovered a mostly-finished blog post about them in my drafts, so here it is. Looking at this post, I wonder if the reason I hit a slump was because so many of these books were DNF and I just got sick of starting books and not enjoying them? Or perhaps the reason I DNFd so many of these was instead because the slump was starting and I just didn't know it. Who can say?
Holiday Reads
Here are the rest of the books I read while away this week, most picked from the CWA Dagger shortlists again. There's quite a high number of DNFs here but I'm fine with that, and I feel like I gave everything a decent chance before giving up on them.
City Of Vengeance - D. V. Bishop
This one isn't actually on the CWA Daggers shortlists, since it's the first in the series and was published in 2021, but the latest book in the series (A Divine Fury) is shortlisted for both the KAA Gold Dagger and the Historical Dagger, so I thought I'd give this first one a go with a view to reading the rest of the series if I liked it.
Unfortunately I didn't like it, and I DNFd at around 20%. It's a shame because the pitch absolutely grabbed me and I went into it wanting to love it, but a fifth of the way through I wasn't connecting with any of the characters and simply didn't care about anything that was happening. And the setting, which I hoped to feel immersed in, felt really scant. At times I found myself wondering if this was actually the second book in the series and I was missing previous context, but no - it's just not for me.
A Song Of Legends Lost - M. H. Ayinde
How many times am I going to tell myself that I won't start a new fantasy series until it's actually been finished, and yet here I am reading book one in a trilogy as though I havenβt learned from the lesson of The Kingkiller Chronicles. It turns out I'm a sucker for βfantasy debut of the year!β-based marketing.
I'll be honest, this didn't start well for me. I'm always put off when the first few pages in a novel are given over to a Dramatis personae, because it signals to me that I'm not going to know who everybody is just by reading, and frankly I think that's a bad thing. Once I actually got into it I was briefly impressed; the summoning/invoking reminded me a lot of Final Fantasy X (the best one) and the science-fantasy world was interesting. But by the end of Part One - nearly a third of the way into the book - the sheen had worn off and I was, frankly, bored. I couldn't connect with anything that was happening, and simultaneously felt like the scope had grown too big too fast but also like nothing was really happening. This is a DNF at 28%.
A Good Place To Hide A Body - Laura Marshall
CWA Whodunnit Dagger Shortlist 2025
Another DNF, unfortunately. This one was a victim of poor categorisation and just not being what I wanted to read. With this being on the Whodunnit Dagger list I went into it expecting a classic murder mystery, and that's not what it is. 25% into it I'm not sure exactly what the mystery is other than that one of the characters isn't what he seems. Unfortunately it just wasn't holding my interest, so I called it a day.
Deadly Animals - Marie Tierney
CWA First Novel Dagger Shortlist 2025
This is an interesting one, because I often really disliked the writing style - it's so sparse at times as to feel rushed and empty, stating events and internal thoughts of characters incredibly plainly when I'd much rather spend some time actually experiencing these things rather than being bluntly told about them - and every time the police solicited the help of a 13 year old girl I had a moment of intense disbelief. Similarly the characters regularly speak in a way that's so artificial as to be jarring. But the story itself, and the characters of Ava and Delahaye, are so compelling that I wanted to keep reading despite that.
In the end I enjoyed it but didn't love it. There's nothing like a twist in here; everything is telegraphed early and regularly, and the story progresses linearly from one event to another until it's over, with nothing surprising happening at any point. It's not a bad book, it's just fine.
Dragons Of Autumn Twilight - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
I can't explain the reasons why I decide to read things. What made me suddenly want to read a 1980s fantasy trilogy that I last read as a child and that I know, objectively, is bad? I have no idea.
I thought maybe nostalgia would carry me through this, but no. I got about 20% of the way through and realised that I simply wasn't enjoying what is very clearly fanfic of a home D&D game. I don't think it helps that I decided to reread this while partway through a Wheel Of Time reread - contemporary books that are, at least to begin with, actually good. I DNFd this and decided to read something else instead.
The Thursday Murder Club - Richard Osman
I was enjoying this a lot, but my reading slump hit right when I was halfway through it and the thought of starting it again didn't really appeal to me, so unfortuantely this is also a DNF. Because it's so long since I read it and I didn't make any notes while reading it I unfortuantely don't have anything to say about it, really. It was good but not great, and I probably would have enjoyed finding out how it ended, but at the time of writing this post I can't remember a single thing about it.
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Tellytubby Generator
I don't know why I did this either.
Roll once on each table, starting with the Name Structure Table, to build your character.
Name Tables
First, roll 1d100 on the Name Structure Table to determine if the Teletubby has a one-part or two-part name. Then roll on the First Name Table, and the Second Name Table if needed.
Name Structure (1d100)
Roll Result 01β40 One-part name 41β00 Two-part name First Name (1d100)
Roll First Name 01β05 Lali 06β10 Toti 11β15 Wumbee 16β20 Popi 21β25 Lolo 26β30 Tafu 31β35 Wala 36β40 Pepi 41β45 Lulu 46β50 Didi 51β55 Bobo 56β60 Zizi 61β65 Fufu 66β70 Mimi 71β75 Gigi 76β80 Nunu 81β85 Kiki 86β90 Yuyu 91β95 Riri 96β00 Chacha Second Name (1d100) (If Two-Part Name)
Roll Second Name 01β05 Winky 06β10 Tumble 11β15 Doodle 16β20 Whirly 21β25 Bop 26β30 Blinky 31β35 Puff 36β40 Doo 41β45 Noodle 46β50 Snug 51β55 Pip 56β60 Zing 61β65 Wiggle 66β70 Poppy 71β75 Binky 76β80 Tizzy 81β85 Bumble 86β90 Pogo 91β95 Rattle 96β00 Fluffy Colour (1d100)
Roll Colour 01β10 Red 11β20 Yellow 21β30 Lime Green 31β40 Sky Blue 41β50 Purple 51β60 Orange 61β70 Magenta 71β80 Indigo 81β90 Teal 91β00 Pale Pink Antenna Shape (1d100)
Roll Antenna Shape 01β05 Triangle 06β10 Circle 11β15 Straight Rod 16β20 Spiral 21β25 Lightning Bolt 26β30 Crescent 31β35 Star 36β40 Heart 41β45 Zig-Zag 46β50 Question Mark 51β55 Squiggle 56β60 Forked Horns 61β65 Corkscrew 66β70 Loop-de-Loop 71β75 Antlers 76β80 Halo Ring 81β85 Infinity Symbol 86β90 Spiral Cone 91β95 Diamond Spike 96β00 Flower Stem Personality Trait (1d100)
Roll Trait 01β10 Playful 11β20 Shy 21β30 Curious 31β40 Loud 41β50 Dreamy 51β60 Grumpy 61β70 Mischievous 71β80 Gentle 81β90 Anxious 91β00 Heroic -
A Black Mile To The Surface
I'm very happy to say that my short story "A Black Mile To The Surface" was published in this month's issue of Swords And Sorcery Magazine. This is the first piece of short fiction I've sold in a little over a decade and I'm very excited to be dipping my toe back into these waters again.