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Recent reading
Nov. 22nd, 2023 08:49 pmWitch King by Martha Wells (2023)
For book club. This was page-turney and had interesting fantasy worldbuilding, and confirms my opinion from Murderbot that Wells is great at writing action scenes. It skips back and forth between two timelines, gradually revealing what's going on. I enjoyed it, while not having the feeling which another person in book club had that all my buttons were being mashed.
Ljuset i Rojava by Anton Nilsson (2023) [The Light in Rojava]
Non-fiction; an account from a Swedish guy who went to join the fight against IS in Rojava in 2015. He was in the Swedish military but was also engaged in the anti-fascist movement (an uncommon combination here), with a working-class background. The book manages to be both deeply felt and unsentimentally told, and I found it very gripping. It starts with a chapter about the author's background, then a survey of the Syrian war up to the point of when he joined, and then it's an account of his experiences: his first failed try, when he ended up in an Iraqi jail for two months, and then his second attempt, when he got into Syria, joined the YPG, trained for a month, and then joined the equivalent of a company. Later there's a day-to-day account of the taking of Manbij from the IS. He's so good about showing the details of daily life: the sixty people who were crammed in a cell with him in the Iraqi jail and the social dynamics there, the various attitudes of the other international volunteers, how pigeon-breeding was the favorite hobby in his company when it was not deployed, etc etc. And of course his comrades who died in battle. The last chapter is an update to the present day, among other things of the disgusting concessions that the Swedish government are making to Erdogan to get a NATO admission.
For book club. This was page-turney and had interesting fantasy worldbuilding, and confirms my opinion from Murderbot that Wells is great at writing action scenes. It skips back and forth between two timelines, gradually revealing what's going on. I enjoyed it, while not having the feeling which another person in book club had that all my buttons were being mashed.
Ljuset i Rojava by Anton Nilsson (2023) [The Light in Rojava]
Non-fiction; an account from a Swedish guy who went to join the fight against IS in Rojava in 2015. He was in the Swedish military but was also engaged in the anti-fascist movement (an uncommon combination here), with a working-class background. The book manages to be both deeply felt and unsentimentally told, and I found it very gripping. It starts with a chapter about the author's background, then a survey of the Syrian war up to the point of when he joined, and then it's an account of his experiences: his first failed try, when he ended up in an Iraqi jail for two months, and then his second attempt, when he got into Syria, joined the YPG, trained for a month, and then joined the equivalent of a company. Later there's a day-to-day account of the taking of Manbij from the IS. He's so good about showing the details of daily life: the sixty people who were crammed in a cell with him in the Iraqi jail and the social dynamics there, the various attitudes of the other international volunteers, how pigeon-breeding was the favorite hobby in his company when it was not deployed, etc etc. And of course his comrades who died in battle. The last chapter is an update to the present day, among other things of the disgusting concessions that the Swedish government are making to Erdogan to get a NATO admission.
