Books!: The Lie Tree

I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and it was really awesome.

The main character is the daughter of a minister, a famous archaeologist, shortly after Darwin published the Origin of the Species. He is taking his family to an island, I think a fictional one, but situated near the real channel islands, to help in some newly uncovered archaeological find.

She is fascinated by her father's work, and educates herself a lot, whilst resenting that she's judged against the standards of a dutiful, conforming daughter instead.

It was complete coincidence I was reading when I was on the channel islands.

The minister is an important character, but equally important is the main character's mother, tasked with running everything about the household, from one angle seeming remote and bossy, from another angle, excelling at the tasks life set to her. And the servants, native to the island, with varying degrees of unease at this new strange family they're supposed to be living with. And her uncle, easy-going, but jealous of his brother-in-law's success. And the various other people associated with the dig, the gentlemen officially sponsoring it, and the women who have one reason for another for being involved, all with their own weaknesses and own problems.

And the premise, which is spelled out on the back cover, that via her father's work she finds a tree reputed to feed off lies, and begins experimenting with it.

I really enjoyed it, mostly the pure people aspects, but also the potentially fantastic aspects. If anything, the one problem I had is that the potentially fantastic elements stand in contrast to the main characters' scientific dedication.

John Dies at the End

Oh gosh, this book is hard to describe. It started as a web serial, and was eventually published. By David Wong, who, if I got this right, is executive editor at Cracked.com. David Wong is a pen name he adopted for his online writing, and also wrote into these stories as the main character.

It's a riotous embracing of style over coherency. The main character and his friend, John, are two flaky drop-outs who've stumbled into a position as trouble-shooters of various sorts of occult problems.

I hear the film adaption stops there, with a "random slackers save the world" plot, with them blundering from one crisis to another endlessly well-meaning but endlessly screwed up.

The book does more although it's hard to describe what. The underlying reality isn't especially more coherent, there's various sorts of occult happenings that don't seem completely consistent with each other. But there's a lot more going on with the characters. As someone points out, you start by pegging David as the responsible one and John as the screw up. But in fact, David is better at holding a job, but John is better in almost every other way, nicer to people, better to his friends, less bitter, etc.

It's often funny. It's occasionally terrifying.

For a book called "John dies at the end", it kept me guessing all the way through whether, well, John would die at the end, which is a pretty impressive achievement.

I'd lost track, apparently I did read his unrelated novel Futuristic Violence and Men in Fancy Suits before, which likewise had a so-so plot but really great characters and intermittent but great humour.

Assorted reviews

Some Russian litrpg book

This reversed the premise of many litrpg books in that it imagined, what if someone found rpg mechanics applying in real life -- able to see people's stats, able to level up, etc.

It was pretty interesting reading about his random slice of life living in contemporary Russia, putting his life back together after his girlfriend left, befriending the guys who hang around his building, learning to see meaning in life again, getting a job as a sales rep.

I'd hoped to see more interesting levelling up, but although it does reasonably well, there's not that much there before the end of the book.

Disney's Atlantis

This is another of Disney's "we produced lots of really interesting animated movies lots of people just didn't notice" like Treasure Planet and Lilo and Stitch.

Loosely Jules Verne-y, the film is set in 1914. Milo Thatch is a young employee of a museum, frustrated that he mostly keeps the boiler running, when he really wants to search for the city of Atlantis. Eventually he gets his chance, there's a lot of adventure, things go wrong, etc, etc.

There's definitely things that could be improved, but a lot is really impressive. The plot is quite dramatic, without being obvious right from the start. There's quite a diversity of characters -- there's not an equal gender balance, but there's quite a lot of characters, and they manage 30-40% non-male, instead of exactly one love interest. And the characters are all varied and interesting in character and background. And a lot of the film is about what the Atlanteans want, not about them being passive recipients to the exploration expedition's decisions.

I didn't know this beforehand, but apparently lots of the cast were famous and the film pioneered various animation things.

Azul

Liv wanted this game for ages, and I thought I'd like it too even though I wasn't as sure, but it's really good. By a well-known designer, it's really beautiful, easy to play, but hard to win.

Based on Portuguese tiles, in turn inspired by Islamic Iberian art, all the pieces are gorgeous. Each round you have twenty tiles of five colours, distributed between five kilns, and you take it in turns to take all tiles of one colour/design from one kiln, moving the rest into an empty area in the middle of the table. Or, you can take all tiles of one colour/design from the centre.

The tiles you take go on in one of five rows in your staging area, with lengths from one to five. Any excess score negative. At the end of each turn, each complete row is discarded, with one tile being moved to the same row on your 5x5 wall. Each row of your wall can only have one tile of each colour, once that colour is present you can't put any more tiles of that colour into that row in your staging area.

And you get points for forming various lines on your wall.

But there's a lot of strategy in prioritising choosing the tiles that help you place on your wall where you'll get points, but not getting stuck with tiles you can't place.

And it's surprisingly quick to play even when you think.