Rúnar

An fresh take on the Iliad told in first person from the point of view of Patroclus. Takes a lot of creative license, which is good, but I feel she could have done more with it. It's a little horny for my taste in parts. The pacing really drags in the second half. They spend ten years in camp at Troy and I really felt like I spent ten years reading that part. The ending was beautiful.

Musashi is too long. It suffers a bit from being originally a serial, and I'm guessing the author got paid by the word.

The story in here is a great one: Two small-town boys set off to war and return to very different post-war paths. One becomes “Musashi”, the greatest samurai there ever was. The plot-theme of the work is: Musashi overcomes himself on his path to personal enlightenment through the art of war.

There are moments in here that I felt were absolutely worth the price of admission. Takuan hunting for Takezō on the mountain. The peony stem. The ambush at Hajima plain. The final showdown with Kojiro. Descriptions of the fighting are, unlike the rest of the book, swift and efficient like I'm sure these fights actually were.

The characters enter and leave the stage constantly, coming into contact with one another with preposterous serendipity. The whole book reads as a symphony, with different characters coming together in “chords” to tell us something.

For anyone reading this, I recommend paying close attention to character introductions. The author tells us what the purpose of each character is, what tone they'll represent in the chord, and how they fit into the story as a whole.

The voice standing out most is obviously the character of Musashi; his strict adherence to principles, and his simultaneous total disregard of “the rules”.

Another standout for me is Takuan. He comes off as a bumbling fool, but he's a long-range actor. It seems that everything goes according to Takuan's ineffable plan. I feel that he represents “god's plan”, and indeed the author casts him as the Buddha in an early chapter. Going back to read that chapter, where he asks for a “drying pole” sends shivers down my spine.

There's a cool thesis in here, and it's definitely illuminating on the inner workings of the German economy during the Nazi regime, but it's all rather let down by the fact that this book is relentlessly boring. There's too much detail, too many side quests, way too many passages like “in december of 1934 the industry producing aluminum tubing totalled 900,000 reichsmarks, but by June of 1935 this had increased to 1.2 million reichsmarks”. Could be overall improved by being maybe 80% shorter.

DNF half-way through chapter 3. There is little new for me here, and what little there is is not very interesting. The author's insistence on categorizing science and philosophy as “shared myths” is extremely grating, and the whole thing has a cynical condescending tone. Seems written for a pseudo-intellectual audience. Hard pass.

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