Week 2
2021 has been…so much? Already? Somehow??
Anyway here’s some books
#3: THE LIBRARY OF THE UNWRITTEN by A.J. Hackwith
This book has maybe the best premise I’ve ever heard.
Library in hell full of the world’s unwritten books, and the librarian, a demon, and an escaped character have to track down a lost book and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.
That ROCKS. I am all the way here for that concept.
In execution, I think it lives up to the promise of the premise for the most part, but there’s something just missing for me to stop it from being truly excellent. I can’t quite put my finger on what, precisely, got in the way for me, but basically, I found this book to be consistently quite good, but never really tipping over into GREAT.
I liked the characters well enough, in particular Claire, the librarian, and Hero, the escaped character. Everything to do with the library and the concept of unwritten books, really, works perfectly for me. I like the meta-fictional aspect of it, as I usually do, and the idea of this library of unwritten books was fascinating.
In particular, I loved the idea of the “damsels” - characters (mostly female, but not all) who escaped from their books, where they were two-dimensional or otherwise mistreated by the narrative, and allowed to become more than they were in the library. I would’ve happily spent an entire book with the damsels.
And therein perhaps is where I drifted from the book - the external plot didn’t particularly interest me. It’s a very basic Macguffin-search plot. Which can be fine! But in this context I felt like it was a distraction from the things I actually wanted to be spending time reading about.
I’m interested enough in the concept and in the characters to read the next book in the series, and I’m sure that if the premise sounds interesting to you, you’ll probably enjoy the read.
#4: THE EMPRESS OF SALT AND FORTUNE by Nghi Vo
I went into this with absolutely zero knowledge of what I was about to read, and I was blown away.
“The Empress of Salt and Fortune” follows Chih, send to collect a history from an old woman explaining how the current political situation came to be. The narrative itself is split between Chih’s interactions with the old woman, Rabbit, and Rabbit’s recollection of her life and her involvement in an uprising.
This book is only like 65 pages long, and yet it somehow managed to give me all the feels. While part of me would love more, it also felt like a very perfect length for the story to be. I didn’t feel like I was missing anything from the short length.
I can’t really say much more without the potential for spoilers, so just: go pick this up, it’s a short read, you can thank me later.