but there were satisfying bits of intrigue and the world of the Imperium deepens (Face-dancers, ghola, foppish panegyrists, etc.).

Herbert's corrective to the Mahdi's True Believers, i.e. the people who read Paul's ascendancy and holy war as an unproblematic hero's journey. Dune Messiah is not as sprawling as the first novel (at less than half its length), ….

Sounds like he was there for one hot minute.

RIYL: Christian IV’s 1617 Sorcery Act, Rob Campbell’s haircut as Hale in The Crucible (1996), everybody dancing around the table in Practical Magic, eye of newt. @thebookerprizes.com @vikingbooks.bsky.social @olgaravn.bsky.social

Her characters are vivid and the narrative is propulsive, if not traditional or strictly linear. Here, she uses a similar carousel construction of micro chapters to “The Employees.” I also love how she (stylistically) handles reported speech and rumor.

Seventeenth-century Danish witch trials and surrounding social paranoia, narrated by the eponymous wax child, a creation of one of the accused. Ravn based her novel on extensive research into the lives of real women who were executed, but there is no stuffy archival feeling weighing it down.

@thebookerprizes.com @penguinbooksuk.bsky.social

were discovered on a new planet, and their power/influence/relationship to the employees is monitored by the corporation that owns everything. Under consideration: the nature of work, the boundaries of humanness, the likelihood the advances and technology will outpace our ability to control them.

The exact nature of their work remains unclear, as does their relationship with obscure objects of desire did they are placed in relation to. The objects (which are described obliquely but Ravn hints that she was inspired by the work of installation artist and sculptor Lea Guldditte Hestelund)…

Danes in space! A bizarre astrocapitalist oral history, “The Employees” unfolds through a series of interviews with the human and humanoid laborers on the Six Thousand Ship.

RIYL: Thick slices of irony; second families; crying to passages from the Iliad in the original Greek

Thank to @backlisted.bsky.social for passing the “prank” on to us. :) I had fun!

The novel overstuffed and a bit (as the title suggests) mechanistic; it’s is far from Murdoch’s best, but there are still so many memorable scenes, lines, and moral complications. If she’s not careful, as here, Murdoch tends to over-explain and fold back on points she’s made to retread the ground.

Brits behaving badly, wrestling with Ideas in the 70s. Monty and Harriet and Blaise and Emily and Edgar and Pinn and Kiki and David and Luca and over a half dozen dogs.

My favorite bits was the chapter from the perspective of an unnamed P.G. Wodehouse. RIYL: Barnes’s “The Noise of Time,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” and evil, embolden rustics. @thebookerprizes.com

Daniel Kehlmann reimagines the life of film director G.W. Pabst, from Hollywood humiliations to, more crucially, his complicity with the Third Reich’s propaganda machine. The book looks at coercive power, tainted legacies, and artistic self delusion.

but it the letters feel like they’re being delivered into the past. Matija does not regret who he is, but who he has lost. @thebookerprizes.com

a code that has survived the rise and fall of many legal systems (Ottoman, Soviet, etc.). Although drawing from real lives, Karabash’s novel feels unstuck from time. Matija (formerly Bekija) has a brother, who writes to him in 2017 from Sofia;

a social designation which entails her living as a man for the rest of her life. This sets off a blood feud, one of the many that are depopulating her village in the alps. Tradition can define and destroy; these actions are all proscribed in the Kanun…

Reading this reminded me of a conversation I had a decade ago with a friend studying ethnic nationalism in the Balkans. He said that the amount of senseless killing was staggering. In “She Who Remains,” 17-year old Bekija avoids an arranged marriage by becoming a “sworn virgin,”…

@thebookerprizes.com

…to the Holy Virgin to procure them oranges and sings them Genesis (of the Pentateuch, not Phil Collins et al.) A strange and beautiful book which will have you wondering why we don’t still have a thriving sanctuary racket! RIYL: Alexander von Humboldt, Lucretia Martel, reclaimed trans lives

He’s telling his life story—his confession—and is interrupted frequently by the two Indigenous girls he’s saving from the Spanish colonial outpost. (That outpost, with its pyres and plundering, is dealt with in alternating chapter.) He has sworn…

Cabezón Cámara’s novel builds on the 17th century memoir of Antonio de Erauso, who, as a young girl, lived in a convent before escaping and living as a man. “We Are Green…” finds him in a dense South American jungle writing a letter to his aunt with a seemingly endless supply of ink and paper.)

Between now and then, I've seen the DV (both parts) as well as the Lynch, and I was able to return to this with some familiarity, like having seen a map of a neighborhood before walking it myself. I've committed to reading the first three with two friends who're devotees.

A copy of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” on a tile floor.

Cocaine Orientalism. This is a rare instance where I feel like watching a movie first improved my reading of a book. I remember picking this up a few years ago, making it two chapters or so and thinking that the lore dump was too exhausting. I set it aside.

@petergs.bsky.social @zoeschlanger.bsky.social

@4thestatebooks.bsky.social copy from the Hong Kong Public Library. Reading along with @lrb.co.uk @meehancrist.bsky.social and Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Her writing is evocative and her curiosity is infectious. As we dart between so many species and concepts, I just wish that this book came with some illustrations—even if they were just botanical line drawings. After all, as Schlanger writes, “Beauty is almost always a form of communication.”

…after a discipline-wide freeze following the publication of “The Secret Life of Plants” in the 70s. In a series of thematic chapters, the book evaluates case studies and big questions that botanists are asking: can plants think? Can they remember? Can they hear, see, discern?

In “The Light Eaters,” Zoë Schlanger reports from the cutting edge of plant behavioral science—or at least synthesizing for a popular audience the fits and starts that have happened in that controversial field in the last several decades…