More books!
I read The Third Man And Other Stories, a book of short stories by Graham Greene: I'd never read or seen The Third Man despite it being one of the most famous works relating to the city I live in, so I thought I'd give it a go. And it's fine! It's a pretty good little murder story set in a grim part of post-war Viennese history, the core concept is clever and it's well executed. I don't think it's going to make a long term major impression on my brain by I'm glad I read it.
The other short stories are a mixed bag, mostly slice-of-life. Possibly my favourites were A Shocking Accident, about a man whose father died in an absurd accident and his need to have people see it the way he did, and Awful When You Think About It, which is about imagining who babies will grow up to be (albeit Greene, being himself, imagines the baby growing up to join his club as another chap). In general I think they interested me more as period pieces for anything they were directly trying to say: interesting little windows on a time when white middle class men could sit in southern France writing words professionally and somehow string that together along with some family money, in a way that I don't think the modern world allows for (both because the demands on writers are that much greater, and because now everyone has more writing access and the middle class men don't have the same total dominance of literature by virtue of having been born English). Perhaps the world is still more like that than I think, but it definitely feels an old fashioned sort of outlook on the world.
Then, yesterday, I read The Beautiful Decay, the second Tombtown book by vicorva. I liked it a lot! The core concept of necromancers threatened by fungi is excellent, and managed to make for an interesting from-another-place villain in the way that it was working out how to adapt to the world as it went, which is something that often isn't played with a lot. It's common in fiction to see e.g. humans adapting to a dangerous alien, but less common to see aliens adapting to the humans. If anything that would've been interesting to have leaned into more in places, as the creature's curiosity is pretty plot-essential to why a lot of characters don't just get flat-out murdered. This is also a really classy feature for dealing with something that's often a plot hole: with a more regular villain the fact that half the characters don't just get executed and can keep coming back and having a crack at the villain would make little sense, but I think having that element of the villain having a concept of world domination and rulership without necessarily having a concept of what the world is like or what strategy makes any sense is really interesting and I liked it a lot.
It's interesting looking at the differences to book one. TBD definitely has a different feel to it, partly because the characters are older and have been through more, but also because the setting feels like it's actually warmer at heart than in book one despite the higher levels of trauma some characters have been through. For one thing, it's much more explicit about its LGBT-ness and neurodiverse-ness than book one, and that also seems to come into the world-building more: we get the sense that this is a setting where being trans or indeed various other identities are much more common at least in Tombtown and possibly in the world more generally than in our own. Secondly, whilst there's a lot in the book about learning to trust people again, there aren't many enormous issues that turn up with them doing that, it just takes time. There's less of a sense of people being threats to each other, with Tombtown itself being, I guess, more subdued in this book and the threat feeling more external: the problems the characters face are ones about trust and powerlessness, and reflecting on their wider societies (and fungi), but the general viewpoints on human nature more directly are really quite cosy.
The new paladin characters are interesting in part because they absolutely 100 percent fit into the more general Tombtown LGBT characters block and are basically good folk who take their callings seriously and don't stab before asking questions. I'd be interested to see that tension explored more in some future stories between Persephone's paladin-as-wandering-helper attitude and the paladin-cop much feared by Tombtown denizens and chaotic aligned adventuring colleagues everywhere.
There are also a lot of intensely relatable moments: Usther fretting about not having her cat and her minion in sight so she could look after them really, really hit home somehow. I liked having Usther in there a lot as a main character alongside Ree. There's bits of lots of the major characters that I do or don't empathise with, and I like seeing Tombtown from more different perspectives. Anyway, it was a good sequel and I hope more of the series appears someday, I'd be interested to see some short stories giving some more regular views on the setting.
I've never read The Dispossessed, but really should do, I love le Guin though I should read more of her work. Also never read the Wheel of Time, though it is famously long and I don't know when my personal Wheel of Time will revolve to a point where I have that sort of space...
