roach's reviews
269 reviews

 

Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana really isn't the kind of book I usually read. I only grabbed this classic travel memoir out of curiosity after I saw it mentioned in one of the other books about Afghanistan I read earlier this year. I didn't exactly know what to expect from it.

What I've gathered by now from other people's reviews and can agree with now that I've read the book myself is that Byron certainly has an eager eye and an overflowing passion for architecture but lacks a bit in empathy and awareness when it comes to the people. There are still plenty of interesting interactions with the locals or other travellers, which where also my favorite parts about this book, but those elements are often described with some negligence or disinterest. Not to say that there aren't people in here that he clearly respects but he often writes with dry and snarky wit about the people that is entertaining in its own right but also dehumanizes the people a bit sometimes. And that's even aside from the social sensibilities of a 1930s white guy, like the way he writes about Jews that really shows its time.
But Byron makes up for his snobbishness a bit by his reckless and fearless way of travelling through the Middle East which makes for quite a lot of neat story bits. Though there is also dragging repetition, especially if you're not into the lengthy descriptions of architecture that much. (Though reading his dismissive rant about the ancient Bamyian Buddha statues that were infamously destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, decades after Byron's untimely death, was quite unexpected and almost funny because of that. It was like "oh shit, he actually got to see them!" and then he just verbally pulverizes them like they're Dollar Store monuments.)
I was a lot more into his nature and landscape descriptions which made for some fantastic paragraphs like the opening quote. I also appreciated his bits of history and the references to other travel memoirs from people that wrote about the same locations before him.

Road to Oxiana was definitely an interesting read for me even if it wasn't entirely my cup of tea. But I can see why it is still regarded today as such a notable travel book. Byron is quite the character, has a strong way with words, and reading about the Middle East this candidly during this time is cool.

Also, the final paragraph of his final return to the UK might actually be one of my favorite ending lines to a book:

 

(Quote translated from German.)

F.E.A.R., that dark and grimy action-shooter full of gore, horror tropes, and bullet-time from 2005 was one of my favorite games as a teenager and definitely had an impact on my developing tastes in terms of genre fiction. Even on a revisit earlier this year, the game still mostly held up as a fun over-the-top shooter, even if the scary aspects showed its age.
But when I found out that some German guy wrote a novelization of this game, I had to hunt it down and see what that was all about. For a while I thought it might have been an official piece of merch too but now that I've made my way through it, I have some hard doubts about that. This really just seems like someone decided to write this soft fanfiction and sell it without any second thoughts about grammar or copyright infringement. But it's out there. It just got "re-released" on Amazon Kindle in March of 2023 and is still available now as I'm writing this review.

Anyway, this book roughly spins a plot about the story bits of the first game. Towards the end, it also briefly throws in at least one location from the second game.
It's not like the actual story of these games was ever very strong or sensical to begin with since it's the corny horror atmosphere and blazing shooter action that actually made those games popular. So, putting it down in text doesn't really do too much. To be fair, there are enough little bits and pieces of cold, bloody tech-horror in this franchise that I could totally see a skilled writer flesh them out and put them together as a genuinely captivating and effective written story. But Dominik Kristen isn't that.
His writing, for the most part, is very flat, riddled with corny clichés and, the further you make it into the book, with grammatical errors. Honestly, if it's the boring writing, it's the frequent typos and missing punctuation that made this book a slog to get through.
But the story also takes a good while to actually get to the core elements of the franchise that one probably expects. The first half of the book reads mostly like dull literary fiction of an ex-cop with a troubled background trying to get a new job and fixing his relationship with an ex-girlfriend. That subplot with the ex-girlfriend especially takes up so much time of this otherwise rather short book and is absolutely filled to the brim with dull romance tropes. When I decided to read a book based on a horror game where you spend most time blasting enemies into pieces of gore with a shotgun in slow-motion, I didn't expect to go through cheesy romance babble and a clunky 10-page sex scene.

When it finally actually gets to the elements of the game, it becomes at least somewhat more interesting. The shootouts can be relatively fun, though that doesn't say much. I was more entertained by how the author attempted to implement some gaming elements into the story.
For example, the game is filled with optional pieces of lore by listening to answering machines in the office environments. The author stops to point out all the answering machines at several points in the book with the protagonist having the odd urge to listen to them without it ever being used for anything actually substantial. It's never an organic subject and it gave me a good chuckle when I realized what the author was referencing.
It was also an interesting experience to read the protagonist, for a while, take account of every single magazine and bullet he took from killed enemies as if one would be picking ammunition from the bodies in a shooter game.
And although the protagonist's path is quite different in this book than the player's in the game, there are some scenes here that are basically one-to-one retellings of previously existing pieces of F.E.A.R. media. For example, I immediately recognized when a chapter started to describe the scene from one of the bonus video that came with the Gold Edition of the game which scared the heck out of me when I was a kid. It was funny revisiting it this way.

All of that doesn't make up for how dull and rough the rest of the book is though. It took me a lot longer to get through this than I expected. And now that I'm done, I cannot believe the author didn't include the infamous shotgun or the iconic nail gun from these games. Two of the most essential objects in this franchise and arguably two of the most remembered weapons in the FPS genre.
This really wasn't very good and at this point, I wish I could ask the author about how this even became a thing. What drove them to write this? But I guess I'll never know. 

(Quote translated from German.)

I read this little childrens book while sitting at the waiting room at the dentist's office for my final appointment out of 10 in two months.
I always had a heavy phobia of dentistry and avoided it for years, so now I'm paying the price. But hey, at least I got to read this book and it's pretty cute. There isn't enough walrus xenofiction in literature.

 

I didn't exactly have any specific expectations when I decided to pick up this lengthy hard-scifi novel simply called Earth but I ended up being drawn in by the fantastic near-future world-building with a focus on the environmental impact based on real-life facts.

The original premise about an artificial tiny black hole accidentally falling into the planet's core, threatening to eat our collective home from the inside out, is only a piece of this massive story that ultimately is about humanity's treatment of Earth as a whole. Brin clearly did a lot of thorough research and made for a lot of interesting speculations to create this version of the year 2038 where our footprint on nature is showing its effects, which in turn influences the general zeitgeist and the way we live.
From a prediction of the internet that aged quite well, over the effects of geological transformations due to climate change, to the development of naturalist religions and edgy sun-worshippers that celebrate the declining ozone layer... Also the acknowledged concept of a debt a generation leaves to the next.
There are so many captivating ideas, some of which probably hit a bit differently reading it now, at a time that's closer to the book's future year of 2038 than the early 90s, when this was first published. It certainly manages to fill the 700 pages of this global story pretty well.
It's an accomplishment in itself to be able to string along a coherent story that spans locations all across the planet, including the inner core and outside orbit, with changing focus on a whole bunch of different characters, without losing itself in tedium or confusion.

There are a couple of elements in the later part of the story that I didn't really see coming, which were interesting in their own regard but I was secretly hoping for a bit of a different path myself. And, of course, this book could probably have been shortened a bit here and there without losing too much. This is why my real rating of this would be more like 4.5 out of 5.
Nevertheless, this was a great read and I recommend this to anyone who is looking for eco-scifi.

 

 

Convenience Store Woman is a good little novel about our places in society and society's expectations of an individual. The main character, who lives a simple, steady life dedicated to her job at a convenience store, makes for a pretty charming centerpiece for a dive into the strange phenomenon that other people often don't want someone to be happy, but "normal". Which is a subject that I thought was very relatable.
A couple of characters can be exhausting at times, but they ultimately serve their point as part of this little character study and the book makes a surprisingly refreshing point that growth doesn't necessarily mean change. 

As someone who spent quite a lot of time on 4chan in his younger years, I'm a bit impressed with how authentic the imageboard posts that fill a lot of these pages are. The hateful, edgy lingo is perfect. The homophobia, the misogyny, the nihilism, the racism, the aggression, the lack of empathy and stunted reactions to suffering... It's all there as this book really doesn't pull any punches. And it makes for a fascinating digital setting for this story about an American hikikomori, barely existing in this world while the glow of a computer screen and the gore videos on it fill his already deformed mind as he swings between his bed and desk all day and night.

This is a disgusting book that can be hard to get through at points, but it's also very clever in its presentation and really engaging in its character study.
The author manages to capture this sort of hypnagogic state where the reader is confronted with the different layers of the protagonist's existence simultaneously, similar to how one might keep tabs on different threads on a message board at the same time. The chaotic digital conversations, the depressing real life, and the protagonist's dreams and memories all fill the pages at the same time, structured with some different formatting for easier distinction.
Aside from the general atmosphere, it also makes for some effective clashing of subjects. Like, for example, when the reader follows the users on the fictional 4chan-equivalent gather to organize a really cruel harassment campaign against a random person while also reading the chatlog of a camgirl stream where an overzealous viewer tries to clumsily express empathy towards the camgirl who shows signs of self-harm.
There is a lot in here about the two-faced, twisted moralities and values of (predominantly) men who lost their sense of reality and compassion after escaping into the unfiltered depths of the internet for too long, wasting away while celebrating the suffering of others.

The main character is an interesting extreme for that and while he is just as despicable as the other anonymous imageboard users, it is compelling to read how his life had developed to end in this dark place, how his world-view formed because of that, and how he deals with inevitable change when he is confronted with it.
This is a quick read but not necessarily an easy one given many of the fringe and transgressive subject matters that take part throughout this in one way or another. But I think if you are in the right headspace to take these things on and are interested in an exploration of this sort of lost soul, then this is a surefire recommendation. This specific online subculture has probably rarely been displayed this authentically and raw in fiction.
 

Moonzajer's translation of this novel by Khalilullah Khalili, one of the most important Afghan writers, is a bit rough when it comes to grammar and formatting, but I'm just really grateful that I am able to read this at all.
The thing with Afghan storytelling is that it comes from a culture where verbal exchange of stories and poetry is much more popular than written text and so while Afghanistan undoubtedly has a long history of poets and the kind, it's not something that was put on paper much, let alone taken across borders to the rest of the world. Reading the poetry collection An Assembly of Moths with a fantastic introduction by anthropologist Whitney Azoy parallel to this novel actually made the significance of Afghanistan's verbal culture even clearer to me and made for a perfect companion piece to this.
Anyway, given all of that, it's great to find a classic Afghan text in English at all and Khalili's A Nobleman from Khorasan definitely serves as an interesting window into the country's history.

This book is a sort-of biography of Habibullah Kalakani who was king of Afghanistan for 9 months in 1929 and is praised by many as a hero akin to Robin Hood with a rags-to-riches story as a common man on the throne.
It's even more interesting to me because Kalakani basically preceded Amanullah Khan who was probably one of the most interesting Afghan kings as he was the first one to actively attempt to modernize this very traditional country in a major way.
I actually went into this book expecting Khalili to completely villainize Amanullah not only because the story involves his exit from the throne after things didn't go too well, but also because Khalili's father was reportedly killed as a result of Amanullah's original rise to it. I was pleasantly surprised though to see that Amanullah wasn't just given all the blame for everything and, on the contrary, even was given some respect or empathy at points.

On the other side though, it's a bit hard to tell how much artistic freedom has been taken when it comes to the protagonist Habibullah Kalakani. From what I gathered, this biography has been somewhat controversial and I believe that might be because Kalakani is portrayed here as a completely fair and noble common man, intolerant to crime and injustice. But common sources claim that he has been involved in organized crime himself.
It's actually funny because when you read up on the real-life person, you can see that he was known for being part of bandit groups and eventually arrested for it. The book actually picks up on that but instead of being part of said bandit groups, in Khalili's novel he is actually stopping them, but is then framed by the feds and wrongfully imprisoned.
I'm not claiming to know which version is closer to the truth, but it's just interesting to see this discrepancy.

When it comes to the prose, there is the occasional great choice of words, though it is hard to say how much of that is Khalili's phrasing and how much of Moonjazer's translation. There are typos and syntax errors, but it's clear enough to understand what's going on.
The story structure very much feels like a story one would tell rather than write, which would make sense given the aforementioned cultural emphasis of verbal storytelling in the country. Though it's fair to note that this novel was actually written down during its conception while Khalili was living in the USA.

I think in the end I appreciate this mostly for its cultural and historical significance; for being this almost immediate glimpse into the history of this country as perceived and retold by a prominent witness of the time. 

 I had been looking for this rare book of translated poems by one of the most important poets of Afghanistan for so long, so I was really excited when I finally found it on Rekhta, a digital library for Middle Eastern literature. I was even more excited when I realized that Whitney Azoy was attached to this project and wrote a lengthy introduction about Khalili's significance. I loved his book on the Afghan sport of Buzkashi which I read earlier this year.
Khalilullah's own son, Masood Khalili, translated the poems by his father together with Azoy, and Sohalia Khalili, Masood's wife, painted the beautiful illustrations to make this book visually impressive as well. It makes for a really cool whole.

Azoy's introduction gives more context to the culture around poetry in Afghanistan and explains the importance and popularity of verbal exchange over writing, which adds its own layer of meaning to the art of poetry because reciting it adds new life to the words as it changes and morphs through each person.
With this added perspective, it was actually interesting to recognize some of the poems in this from the other English-translated collection that I read before, The Quatrains of Khalilullah Khalili , and notice the slight differences in content.
This collection blows the other one out of the water though with the introduction by Azoy and the great art by Sohalia Khalili, both of which add so much to it.

There are a whole bunch of poems in here I genuinely liked a lot. I noticed that Khalili mentions different bugs a bunch, often with a certain respect towards them, which I personally love. Hell, the titular poem, and the longest one of the bunch, is centered completely around bugs.

I'm really grateful for having had the chance to read this and I recommend this wholeheartedly to anyone who is interested in the subject matter. This would probably make for a great first glimpse into Afghan literary culture too.
I just wish it wasn't so hard to come by. I hope at least Rekhta keeps hosting it for a long time. 

 

(Quote translated from German edition.)

I was very curious to see how Ito would wrap this story up. Up until now, this was mostly built up like an anthology with more or less disconnected chapters of creepy occurrences around this town. This ending pulls strings together though to work towards one big spiraling finale that actually aims to somewhat explain why the shape of the spiral began to curse this town.
Admittedly, this volume had me a bit impatient when it spent so much time with the tornados and weird wind physics wrecking the town. It wasn't that interesting of a concept for how prominent it ended up being. But the book makes up for it with a wonderful ending full of more top tier art by Junji Ito, making for an ultimately rather satisfying conclusion for this piece of horror manga. 

Andrea Barrica's Sextech Revolution is equal part educational exploration of the corporate side of sexual health and equal part call to action to found your own start-up in the space.
The author clearly has a lot of experience in this environment and writes in a very learned way, shaped by her own work. She has a lot of very interesting things to say about the discrepancy between funding of porn vs funding of sexual wellness, the hypocritical way sexuality is hidden in education all the while a cultural shame to discuss natural elements of the human body developed, and how the strict bias against anything sexual cripples innovation and development in professional circles.
It's a pretty thin book though and I would have wished it would dive even deeper into these things. What happens instead is that Barrica gives concrete advice for how to become proactive yourself and start building in this neglected industry. I respect that and I'm sure you can get good value out of that if that's what you're into, but it wasn't meant for me. Those parts still had some interesting stuff in it but I was definitely more in it for the other themes.

Nonetheless, I can't really give this a lower rating because this is a very informative and current book about a subject that doesn't have too much literature written about it and Barrica is clearly a top candidate for sharing that knowledge.
If the corporate side of sexual health (and pleasure) is something you're interested in and you want a modern look at it, this is definitely a worthwhile recommendation. Even more so if you're interested in becoming or already are an entrepreneur yourself.