Short Book Reviews #5

In Which I Fail To Understand War and Peace (The Graphic Novel)

Graphic Novels

The Coldest City

by Antony Johnston

(A monochromatic spy story set at the end of the Cold War. Features a lot of smoking while staring out into the middle distance.)

The movie Atomic Blonde with Charlize Theron is based on this graphic novel. It’s a movie I happen to very much enjoy, with thrilling action sequences and some great performances. I figured, having loved the movie, that I might as well check out the source material.

Well, I can officially say that the source material is worse.

Basically, the main character Lorraine is an MI6 agent sent to Berlin just before the fall of the Berlin Wall to recover a list of spies. She has to navigate the British, American, and Russian intelligence agencies already on the hunt for the list, unable to trust even her own agency’s agents, as anyone could be working for any side - or even themselves.

The Coldest City is a bleak, almost black-and-white graphic novel, with an art style that may be artistic but that I did not enjoy. Characters were sharply drawn in light and shadow, to the point that I actually had trouble telling them apart sometimes. The plot is winding and full of double-crosses, but given that I had a hard time telling characters apart it was kind of confusing. If I hadn’t seen the movie beforehand I would’ve been lost.

In other words, just see Atomic Blonde.

Contains: untranslated German, death, complicated Spy shit I wasn’t super interested in understanding, A List of Identities of Spies, stupid codenames.

Black Science

by Rick Remender and artist Matteo Scalera

(This one is hard to describe, ‘cause it gets real weird.)

Grant McKay is a genius, and like many fictional geniuses he’s arrogant and neglects his family. But it’s all worth it to him, because he’s created the Pillar: a device that will let him travel across all the dimensions of the Eververse, which in its infinity contains all the solutions to Earth’s ills.

The maiden voyage is sabotaged, however, and so begins a harrowing journey of fuck-ups and desperate gambits as Grant and his team - including his children, who were never supposed to be there - are tossed across dimensions with no reliable way home, lurching from one disaster to the next, bringing ruin wherever they land.

Black Science is well-written and gorgeously illustrated, exploring themes of intellect, jealousy, happiness, hubris, and the limits of human capacities. It features a cast of complex characters, centering on Grant himself, who must learn to be better than the embittered anarchist he begins as if he wants to save his family and himself.

That being said, Black Science depicts some really weird dimensions, to the point that I sometimes struggled to follow the story and what was happening. Add timeskips, some amnesia, a cast that gets dispersed across multiple dimensions, and, well… It gets confusing.

Contains: super weird aliens, long diatribes about the nature of genius and humanity, Grant McKay being mad at himself, SAVE THE CHILDREN, imperiling an onion.

The Night Eaters

by Marjorie M. Liu, Sana Takeda (Illustrator)

(This is actually really good, one of the few graphic novel series that I really wanted to finish.)

Milly and Billy, who sometimes call themselves the Wonder Tings in-story, are twin children of immigrants from Hong Kong, currently running a successful restaurant despite the challenges of COVID. They realize that their mother’s lack of visible emotion isn’t part of normal Chinese culture, however, when they stumble into a ritual gone wrong in the house across the street. Ghosts, possessed dolls, and eldritch horrors follow, and the Twins learn that their parents aren’t human in the slightest…

And neither are they.

The Night Eaters is a beautifully illustrated and clearly depicted cross between Lovecraftian horror and Chinese folklore, blending a story of immigrant children struggling for their parents’ approval with an engaging horror mystery. We also get flashbacks to how their parents met in Hong Kong along the way, deepening the worldbuilding as we go.

The grand narrative eventually comes into focus as the Ting family becomes embroiled in the plots of a powerful Warlock who wishes to unleash the Surreal upon the world, the conflict coming to a surprising conclusion at the end of the third volume.

The trilogy covers a lot of ground, and I wish the series had taken a little more time to explore the world along the way, but otherwise I enjoyed this one immensely.

Contains: A disapproving Chinese mother who’s technically a dragon or something, tentacles, COVID masks, a super creepy doll, and someone excited to find out they have super powers.

War and Peace, The Graphic Novel

by Tolstoy, Alexandr Poltorak (Adapted by), Dmitry Chukhrai (Illustrations)

(I thought I could get away with not having to read War and Peace if I just read the graphic novel. Boy was I wrong.)

I’m gonna be honest. This was a mistake. The illustrations were very good, if in a style I wasn’t very fond of, but other than that…

This is not a good graphic novel.

The plot, what little I could understand, anyway, was boring.

The characters seemed flat and uninteresting.

But the really damning thing was that it was basically impossible to tell the characters apart. There’s a section in the beginning of the book where it details labeled portraits of the characters - there’s dozens of them - and then the characters are never labelled again. Which means that I was struggling, the whole book, to figure out who was who, because they all kind of looked alike except maybe the main one.

The minimum for a graphic novel with this many characters, all of whom looked alike save for their clothes, would be to label them in every scene they’re in.

As a result, I can say that War and Peace is about a guy named Pierre, with an inheritance, and some Napoleonic stuff happens.

Contains: Russia. I think.

Fiction

Murder on the Orient Express

by Agatha Christie

(I’ve seen the modern movie, but I was curious about the book.)

Hercule Poirot is one of the great fictional detectives, alongside Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew. Murder on the Orient Express might be his most famous outing, given the popularity of the movies.

The plot is straightforward: there are about twelve people on a coach on a train that gets stuck in the snow, when one of them is murdered. Thus we have an isolated mystery for a detective to solve, with no possibility of using outside resources (e.g. to validate that people are who they say they are).

The novel is organized in a very straightforward manner, with each chapter presenting a piece of evidence as Poirot guides us through the investigation. It was a relatively quick and mostly entertaining read, although given that I’ve already seen the movie I knew all the twists going in.

On the whole it was competently executed, although it was lacking something I was specifically looking for. In rationalist fiction (a rare genre, admittedly) there is a rule about mysteries: the author must present sufficient evidence to the reader for them to be capable of solving the mystery themselves by the time the characters do.

Murder on the Orient Express, like all the Sherlock Holmes stories, fails to meet this bar. When Hercule Poirot gathers everyone to present his solution to the case, he relies on facts and observations that have not been presented to the reader beforehand. It’s possible to follow M. Poirot, but never to match or lead him in his investigation.

All in all, not a bad read, but if you’ve seen the movie there’s no need to read the book.

Contains: references to the kidnap and death of a child, lots of characters, descriptions of a stabbing, so much racial profiling (like ‘English people are emotionally cold and so, as a rule, don’t stab people’), manners, and Poirot being a very decent human being.

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind

by Jackson Ford

(I saw this title in a bookstore and couldn’t help but grab it. It’s a good title.)

Teagan Frost can move shit with her mind.

Unfortunately for her, the government knows she can move shit with her mind, so she works as an agent under the protection of the CIA, well aware that any non-compliance on her part will lead her straight to the dissection table.

Even more unfortunately for her, someone was killed, in a way that only a telekinetic could kill, and she’s the only telekinetic around to blame.

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is a fast-paced action-mystery, taking a more grounded approach to superhuman abilities than classic Marvel or DC comic books. The powers, what few of them there are, are limited and not always useful; instead, things like planning ahead and problem solving are the real superpowers.

Teagan makes for a good protagonist, narrating at a pleasant clip without getting lost in details or diatribes. On the whole, I found it to be a pleasant novel, but not something that really grabbed me.

Contains: creative uses for rebar, heights, California being on fire, a romantic subplot that <spoilers>, sequel bait, and dreams of owning a restaurant.

Green Rider

by Kristen Britain

(I picked this up at a used bookstore. It looked interesting, kind of a classical fantasy adventure.)

Karigan, just after being expelled from her school for beating a rich kid’s son up in a duel, comes across one of the famous Green Riders - couriers who carry the King’s messages throughout the land.

Unfortunately, this one has two black arrows sticking out of his back.

He convinces Karigan to take his horse (subsequently named The Horse) and his message and deliver them to the King. Karigan accepts, taking both the mantle and the magic of a Green Rider as she navigates a multitude of dangers on her way to finish the dead Rider’s mission.

I found Green Rider to be a perfectly acceptable classic fantasy story, complete with a motivated but somewhat unwilling protagonist, a few prospective love interests, a soft magic system, and a variety of enemies to be overcome. The action scenes were solid (not amazing, but okay), and there were plenty of descriptions of pre-industrial towns and cities and nature.

I can’t recommend the book to everyone, but if you like straightforward and competently executed classic fantasy, you could do worse than this.

Contains: lots of horse stuff, Magic (tm), a chess analogue in a fantasy setting, The North, A Giant Wall That Keeps Evil Out, the strange but helpful people one runs into on an Adventure, and ghosts (like, a lot of ghosts).

Nonfiction

The Body Keeps the Score

by Bessel van der Kolk

(This has been described to me by several therapist friends as a decent introductory book to trauma. I got the impression they found it a bit basic and antiquated.)

What does trauma do to the human brain? What do we know about it, and how do we treat it?

The Body Keeps the Score is something of a survey course in trauma psychology. It moves at a brisk pace, weaving together individual stories of trauma (PTSD from war, car crashes, childhood abuse, etc.) with recent findings from neurological studies and an autobiographical journey of Bessel’s career as he learns about all this. The book covers neurology, psychology, and therapy, spending about the first two-thirds on the first two, and then devoting about a chapter apiece to various forms of therapies that have been found to be moderately effective.

Basically, we tend to treat trauma like many other mental disorders: with pharmaceuticals. But this approach only treats (and masks) symptoms. While drugs can be useful as triage, actually treating trauma inevitably involves diving into the memories in order to make meaning of them and integrate them into the whole of a person’s self-narrative. Bessel describes how EMDR, yoga, dance, and other modalities can be useful to do so.

The epilogue, where Bessel exhorts the reader to politically support a number of causes, left a bad taste in my mouth, much like the prologue. I don’t think Bessel was careful at all with his statistics, and I’m dubious that his policy recommendations would actually help solve the problems he’s identified. That being said, on the whole I think the book raised public awareness that trauma is distinct from other forms of mental illness and should be treated in a different way. That’s very useful, since we’re all likely to go through some form of it in our lives.

Overall, if you’re interested it’s a good place to start, but I’d think of it like taking a 101 course in college. It doesn’t make you an expert, merely more aware of the field as a whole.

The Body Keeps the Score came out in 2014, which I found strange, because it felt like it came out in the 90s.

Contains: dubious statistics about sexual assault, horrifyingly real cases of child abuse and the effects it has, anecdotes about academics being academic, and many, many (so many) complaints about the DSM.

Everything is Tuberculosis

by John Green

(John Green’s second venture into nonfiction, informed by his personal experiences and research into Tuberculosis. Great human stories, not as good as a nonfiction book.)

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the Great Diseases of mankind. It’s killed a ridiculous number of people, and a mere century ago was one of the leading causes of death worldwide. It’s since been virtually exterminated in rich countries while still ravaging poor ones.

Green takes us on a journey through human history, telling stories of how TB has shaped human culture and lifestyle, all while coming back again and again to the heartbreaking story of a particular boy with TB that Green met, Henry, and how the conditions in Sierra Leone contributed to Henry’s tragic life.

TB had a hand in the creation of the cowboy hat, the stereotype of the starving artist, modern beauty standards, and more; it’s difficult to underestimate just how pervasive its influence has been, and Green deserves credit for bringing this untold history to a popular audience.

All that being said, while the human parts of the book are great, especially Henry’s story, the nonfiction parts are not. Green will occasionally refer to a book or historian, but for the most part his assertions and arguments are entirely without citation or evidence. I found several factual errors, and more damningly he seems to attribute people’s actions to racism at the drop of a hat, without ever considering any other possible explanation. The book positively dripped with progressive self-righteousness, and Green seemed to lack a basic understanding of the economics or game theory involved in why people make the decisions they do.

Contains: heartbreaking depictions of poverty and illness, an inspiring human story, rants about racism and colonialism, a lack of basic economic understanding, complaints about the pharmaceutical industry, typical progressive explanations for things, a seething anger about the injustices of the world.

Progressive Myths

by Michael Huemer

(I got curious about the author, an academic philosopher, from Bryan Caplan’s many references to him. After reading this, I’m pretty likely to pick up his other books.)

Oh, how the times change.

Huemer published Progressive Myths all the way back in September 2024, before the Trump presidency and before the vibes shifted. It is an artifact from an age when woke was ascendent, marching through the institutions and blogosphere with an ineluctable momentum and annihilating everything that got in its way.

The book itself is a collection of rebuttals to specific progressive claims, ranging from “Climate Change is Apocalyptic” to “American Police are Racist Murderers”. For each claim, Huemer validates that the claim is real and was made by prominent people, then proceeds to calmly and carefully demolish it.

An example:

Claim: Women make much less money (30%?) than men for the same work.

Truth: When you control for specific job and hours worked, this disappears. What is true is that if you take the median man and median woman’s pay, the man appears to be earning more overall. This is because women seem to prioritize non-pay compensation, like time off and schedule flexibility, over more money, and are less willing to work long hours and dangerous jobs than men.

The lesson Huemer wants you to take from the book is that the claims of Progressivism in modern-day America are to be, at best, viewed with heavy suspicion. Many of them are outright false. This does not make the American Right-Wing correct; reversed stupidity is not intelligence. But the American Right-Wing is not what dominates its intellectual sphere, especially when Huemer wrote the book.

Contains: quotes from famous people and news organizations, statistics, facts, and pictures, a philosopher being very careful to say what he wants to say and telling you not to read anything else into his book.