Books read in 2022

Published by marco on

As I started doing in the previous year, I’ve included a partial, “teaser” review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes a full review with all notes, as well as citations and rough notes.

I only hit 20 titles this year, but some of them were pretty hefty tomes, though none in German and only one in French. A couple of public-policy books this year, with the accompanying analysis.

Project Hail Mary (2021): by Andy Weir

Andy Weir manages to comes up with consistently interesting science-fiction ideas and entertaining yarns (even if it’s rather obvious in some places where he’s almost writing a screenplay). I really wish he would find a co-author to help him smooth out some of the more YA aspects of his writing. Still, this was a fun book to read—after the first third.

As with The Martian, it took me about that long to either get used to the writing style or for Weir to settle in and write more reasonably. I do feel that the overuse of inner monologue when Grace first woke up at the beginning of the book was something I didn’t imagine. It was quite jarring and seemed a very forced way of introducing the character and background for the rest of the story. It got the job done, but I nearly gave up[1], which would have been a shame—because there are some intriguing concepts and ideas in the rest of the book.

This is not the hardest of hardcore science-fiction. There’s a lot of science in it, and a lot of engineering as well (Weir mentions all of the people he consulted), but he also elides a bunch of stuff in the “squishy sciences” to get to where he wants to go. That’s OK! Focus on what you’re interested in and make a rollicking tale! Still, it doesn’t matter. It’s a story. Lay back and enjoy the ride. I don’t think it’s in the same class as The Expanse, but neither does it get over-wordy like that series. It moves relatively quickly.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937): by Zora Neale Hurston

Janie Crawford returns to the village where she has a home, crossing past the hooting and hollering peanut gallery stationed outside the town store. She continues onward, ignoring them, to visit her friend Pheoby, who’d stood by her all the time she’d been gone and who was dying to know what had happened since she’d left.

The rest of the book is Janie recounting the story of her life that led to her, at about forty years old, sitting on that porch with her friend Pheoby.

This book is absolutely wonderfully written. The southern patois takes some getting used to, but after a while, it flows as if it were your own dialect. Although the author/narrator does not write in patois, she does have a way of expressing herself that you don’t read much anymore. For example, early in the book, she writes of the evening during which Janie regaled Pheoby with her tale,

“Time makes everything old so the kissing, young darkness became a monstropolous old thing while Janie talked.”
After Pheoby’s gone home and Janie is in her home, alone, she feels a hint of loneliness. She goes upstairs to her bedroom, a room still teeming with memories of her first days with Tea Cake,

“The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Persepolis Rising (2017): by James S. A. Corey

This is the seventh novel in The Expanse series. It picks up the story nearly three decades after the end of the last book. The Transport Union manages traffic between the Ring Colonies, led by Camina Drummer. She is comfortable in her role, but laments the hidebound nature of bureaucracy.

The Rocinante works for the Transport Union and are forced to do a prisoner transport, which Holden does, but isn’t happy about. This triggers a decision by Naomi and Holden to announce their retirement and hand off the Roci to Bobbie and the crew.

Naomi and Holden are on Medina Station for only a week before two Laconian ships enter the Ring System through their gate. No-one’s heard from them in almost thirty years. They’ve been busy building enormous battleships with protomolecule technology, generations ahead of what the rest of humanity is still using.

They announce that they’re there to take over the empire and for everyone to give up peacefully. Any violence will have been forced upon the Laconians, who are only interested in running the human empire better. That is, you have to do what they say all the time, but the Laconians are obviously so much better than everyone else that no-one who isn’t a complete idiot could possibly mind.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984): by Neil Postman

This book explores the thesis that printed material is the sweet spot for delivering information to human beings. The move in the mid-twentieth century to audiovisual presentation is a step in the wrong direction. The medium of television transforms everything it touches into entertainment. The book was written in 1985 and deals with the hole punched in culture by television.

Thirty-seven years later, the direness of the situation has been turned up several notches, with the advent of the kind of Internet that we of course ended up with, thanks to our mad form of capitalism that absorbs everything it touches. The state of information is more insane, incomprehensible, and superficial than ever.

It is a world where ignorance is bliss. The less you understand of the firehose of information and propaganda fired at you, the better.

He never quite gets around to addressing the corruptive influence of capitalism and market forces on information-dissemination to an informed public.

He also seems to be misled by the reporters who blame their lack of coverage on their listeners, when it is they who determine what people want, or at least their bosses. Cart before the horse. Maybe the NYT was different then, but this sounds suspiciously exactly like the same shit they pull today.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
No One Is Talking About This (2021): by Patricia Lockwood

Lockwood has a great feel for using a modern, hip vernacular to describe this world of ours. Her styles feels a bit like Gibson, with his similar penchant for emphasizing cultural relevance with product placement.

The first half of the book is about the “portal”, a kind of stream-of-consciousness brain-dump about what it’s like to live on the Internet and simultaneously in the modern world as a privileged first-worlder. It holds up relatively well, filled with interesting snatches and snippets from that stream. That’s not a dig: the first half of the book is very clearly an absolute pastiche of thoughts that are at most a single page. It’s better than a Twitter stream by far, but it has the same kind of staccato, fragmented feel.

This book reveals a glimpse into what it was like to mature online, in the portal, aware enough to note the inconsistency of information, the superficiality of supposed wisdom, but not to resist the wiles and subjugation, the seemingly inevitable dilution of experience to the minimum required for ensuring exchange of meager wealth for sustenance. The machine optimizes until no-one is happy, but no-one can leave.

Where the first part of the book is about the hyperactive superficiality and shallowness of online life, the second half of the book is autobiographical. It’s about her sister’s baby, who’s born with a debilitating disease that serious impacts her ability to interact with the world and also to stay in it. Her family rallies around the little life as if it were the most important thing in the world—because, to them, she is. In a way, the penchant for superficiality, for focusing on details, is the same, but this time it’s landed on protecting a little life’s ability to experience the world, even given the paucity of sensory equipment with which she was born.

This experience makes her less cynical, less world-weary, more likely to believe in people’s having reasons for being the way that they are. It leaves more room for empathy.

The first part is entertaining and full of delightful writing. The second is sweet and insightful and also full of delightful writing. I don’t know that I’ll read more of Lockwood, but I’m glad I read this one.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
The Internet is not what you think it is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning (2022): by Justin E.H. Smith

The meandering in my longer review linked below will perhaps give you a flavor of the distances that the author ranges in his treatment of the history, potential, and failings of the Internet. He is a fearless spelunker in the archives of the far past, seeking and finding analogous technologies and situations in decidedly less technologically advanced times—even in the natural world, outside of the species (whale songs were telecommunication long before the telegraph).

“The principal charges against the internet, deserving of our attention here, instead have to do with the ways in which it has limited our potential and our capacity for thriving, the ways in which it has distorted our nature and fettered us. Let us enumerate them.”
Page 9
Not all of the book is as purely esoteric as I’ve made it out to be. There are some very down-to-Earth bits with an examination of the—admittedly, thus far largely corrosive and not at all achieving its non-corrosive potential—influence that the Internet is having on human behavior, especially as it affects how we live and work and … be.

For example, we have clearly allowed the same drive to capitalize every facet of our existence take over the Internet as well. This one-size-fits-all solution has already proven quite detrimental and is largely to blame for the curve of potential we saw in the mid-90s begin to bend so quickly and precipitously back downward.

The profit motive has led to an optimization not for any societally beneficial purpose—to which the Internet would, in principle, be eminently suited—but to manipulate our amazing biology in the coarsest possible manner to elicit impressions from us that can be converted to digital Internet points, which eventually wander their way back to a currency that means something in the real world. Instead of teaching us how to be better, wiser, more empathetic, they have chosen to pick the lower-hanging fruit and farm our dopamine for profit. It’s a sad, sad local maximum in the vast landscape of potential that revealed itself at the beginning of this whole experiment.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Tiamat’s Wrath (2019): by James S. A. Corey

This is the eighth book of the The Expanse series. It’s four years after Laconia came in and took over everything in Persepolis Rising. Chrisjen Avasarala has finally died and been interred in the capitol city on Laconia. Holden, who is still being held prisoner there, attends the funeral. He attends a lot of state functions, keeping his ear to the ground. Duarte tolerates him because of his first-hand knowledge of the civilization that destroyed the protomolecule engineers and that has “attacked” humanity.

Saba is on Medina Station, running the resistance with Naomi, who’s living in a shipping container, planning from the center of her spiderweb. Bobbie and Alex are still on the Gathering Storm, keeping the ship mostly out of sight in large transports, but occasionally jumping out for a raid. Amos disappeared while on a mission on Laconia. Camina Drummer is still working for the Transport Union, but no longer runs it. Elvi Okoye and Fayez are officially part of a science mission to investigate empty Ring systems to see if there is anything of interest there.

In this volume, Bobbie carries an antimatter bomb in her arms while diving straight at a cruiser in her battle armor. She goes out in a blaze of glory. Laconian soldiers following Teresa manage to kill Amos, who gives up his life charging them, taking out several of them, and making sure to shield Teresa from any possible harm.

Naomi, meanwhile, leads the attack on Laconia itself, with 400 ships drawing away the major force so that Naomi’s crushing blow on the orbiting, protomolecule shipyards can be delivered, destroying Laconia’s ability to produce any more Magnetar-class destroyers.

Amos rescues them all, having been turned into an unkillable machine by the strange dogs of Laconia. He has a connection to the protomolecule and a connection to the others who’ve been transformed in the same way—and he knows that the aliens from the beyond will never stop hunting humanity.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Johnny Got His Gun (1939): by Dalton Trumbo

This is the story of a young man named Joe Bonham who wakes up in darkness and silence. The last thing he remembers is that he was in Europe, serving in the army during WWI. He slowly learns that it is dark and silent because he is deaf and blind. He learns that he can’t speak because he no longer has a mouth to speak of: no tongue, no teeth, just a weird emptiness that he can sense, but not feel. He can’t feel because he can’t move his arms and legs. He can’t move any of his limbs because they’re no longer attached to his body.

Joe drifts in and out of long reveries. He goes mad. He has strong visions, revenge fantasies. Time passes too slowly. The wheels spin. Joe can’t sleep. He’s always rested. He has no idea what time it is. His circadian rhythm is completely broken. He is exhausted and bored and insomniac and trapped in his own body.

He spends a lot of time thinking about his curtailed youth—he’s so young, he doesn’t even have very much life to reflect back upon. He had one girl who sorta-kinda was into him, maybe. He had one good friend. He reminisces, he builds fantastic castles of fantasy. He fills in the details that led to his recruitment, to his deployment, to his diminution.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Leviathan Falls (2022): by James S.A. Corey

This is the ninth and final volume of The Expanse. Whereas the first books were set very firmly in hard sci-fi, with plenty of orbital mechanics, the second half of the series got much more into the quasi-religious, quasi-magical nature of truly advanced technology. The protomolecule technology and its inventors were so advanced that anything we have looks positively Newtonian in comparison. The other-dimensional, multiverse-hopping demons that destroyed them are even more powerful and ineffable.

Duarte is awake again, now in possession of faculties that make him something that could only be called a God. He can move his consciousness between the seams of reality to be anywhere he wants, to appear on any ship, in a frame of reference—nothing is beyond him anymore.

Do not get the impression that the books are not good, though! They may have jumped from hard sci-fi to fantasy, but they’ve done it elegantly and with quite a flair for the written word. The descriptions of otherworldly and unimaginable things are wonderful, evoking the “fill in the blanks with your own imagination” writing of the great sci-fi short stories of the 20th century. The descriptions of the unknowable technology and physics of these ancient and advanced and now long-gone alien civilizations provide just enough hooks to hang your own ideas, speculation, and extrapolations on.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
La Crise de l’homme (1946): by Albert Camus

This is a short lecture delivered by Albert Camus at Columbia University. He spoke of humanity’s moral decline—or more the obvious fact that it was less declining and more failing to rise to any occasion—and how we should continue to strive for peace, despite the hopelessness of the endeavor. He takes particular issue with the intrinsic hypocrisy that underlies every society we’ve known.[2]

It is our hypocrisy that prevents us from truly moving forward because we are congenitally incapable of accepting our mistakes, so that we cannot learn from them. Instead, we deny them.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Scoop (1938): by Evelyn Waugh

This is the story of the press in Great Britain in the 1930s. It paints a decidedly unflattering picture of the entire industry, one that, however hard we would try to claim to the contrary, fits extremely well in describing the media and journalistic culture in this, nearly the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. It is beautifully written, biting satire.

Suffice it to say that absolutely no-one is in any way interested in what actually happened or what the truth of a particular situation or event might be. Lord Copper runs a large newspaper. He is friends with socialite Mrs. Stitch, who is beautiful and a force of chaos in London. She is friends with John Courtenay Boot, a handsome young man with pretensions of becoming a writer or a journalist or someone famous for writing, at any rate.

He represents that part of the press—which has since because a nearly exclusive majority—that comes from an elite background and finds that telling others what to think seems like a pretty good way to earn a living. To be fair, Boot seems like a reasonably nice guy, but it’s unavoidable that he feels entitled, due to his privileged background, to employment in something associated with letters and leisure.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars (2013): by Ann Jones

This is a wonderfully written and incredibly honest and sobering look at how America treats what it clearly considers to be detritus—the dead and the wounded from its wars. On the one hand, there is an incredible respect and attention to detail for the dead and wounded. The wounded are offered incredible levels of care—right up until they are no longer in danger of dying, but can no longer be of any conceivable use to the military, at which point they are dropped like hot rocks and treated like pariahs.

The dead are scooped into bags when they have been rendered into what are essentially unidentifiable pieces of flesh by bomb-blasts or rocket-attacks. When multiple people are blown to smithereens near each other, the giblets are split into the bags evenly and everyone involved pretends that it matters that they did this.

[…]

The actions of empire are indistinguishable from piracy. An empire only pays for that which it cannot steal. Although an empire’s own citizens are of (almost) no concern to it, it is those under the heel of the empire’s boot who suffer the most.

But this isn’t a book about them, not really. It isn’t that Jones doesn’t care—she’s written a lot about the rest of the world’s suffering, too, and she writes a bit here—but that the book is here to tell us that when war is afoot, when the military rides high, there are no winners. Everything is chewed up and spit out by an uncaring maw, hungry only for the next profit it can excrete in the direction of the tiny elite that always benefit from suffering.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Termination Shock (2021): by Neal Stephenson

As usual in a Neal Stephenson book, there’s a lot going on. As usual in a Stephenson book of late, every single last character is possessed of a unique and ostensibly fascinating background, is confident, self-sufficient and self-reliant, interesting, eloquent, funny, smart, skilled, and almost invariably independently wealthy. Does that take a wee bit of the tension out of the book? You betcha.

There is the constant undertone that people who are not like the characters are guilty of having personally failed to be that awesome through not trying hard enough. Stephenson likes guns, libertarianism, and using ten words where one would suffice—my guess would be that he likes them in that order.

We meet Rufus Grant, a part-Comanche, mostly black ex-Army soldier-turned-rancher/drone-expert who’d lost his wife and child to a giant wild boar whose species had gotten a massive upwind in the plains of Texas because of the horrific and ongoing effects of climate change. We learn a lot about guns, wild boars, and Texas geography with Rufus. It’s not uninteresting, but it is a pretty long prologue to the action that is coming.

The action is a confluence of Rufus finally getting a shot at his arch-nemesis—a nearly unbelievably and unprecedentedly large wild boar named Snout—and Saskia and co. attempting to land their plane onto the same airstrip where Snout’s herd is running for its life. Who is Saskia? She is the Queen of the Netherlands, flying her own plane on a secret mission to meet up with billionaire T.R. Schmidt, the Lord Mayor of London, a billionaire from Singapore, extremely old money from Venice, and all of their associated partners, who are all incredibly gifted, fabulously intelligent, and breathtakingly attractive.

They are there to witness T.R.‘s opening ceremony for his geoengineering gun called Pina2bo, which boosts drones full of sulfur into the upper stratosphere in a continuous loop, with the drones falling back to Earth, flying home, being refilled with sulfur, and, finally, going for another ride into the upper atmosphere. Basically, Stephenson loves guns so much that he wrote an entire book about the biggest one he could think of.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Agency (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 2) (2021): by William Gibson

This is a sequel to The Peripheral that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place before that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the “Jackpot”, which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we’re being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking technology, incredible AIs, and also a mysterious (supposedly Chinese) server through which you can access the pasts of alternate realities (stubs). They also have oligarchs who run pretty much everything.

An extremely powerful woman named Ainsley Lowbeer has made it her mission to prevent what happened in her reality from happening in those of others, regardless of the fact that the changes she manages to make to their future won’t affect her own in any way at all. However, she’s still opposed by the klepts (oligarchs) of her world. Because the klepts have their domino theory and they don’t even want people in completely unreachable alternate continua to be out of their reach. They can’t take those people’s money, but they can ensure that their ideology survives and allows the other continuum’s klepts to enrich themselves, as God intended.

This time, the mysterious server has provided Lowbeer and her crew with a connection to an alternate reality even earlier than the one explored in The Peripheral. As in that book, Lowbeer’s crew has a powerful presence in this alternate past, not only because they are so technologically advanced, but because their own pasts are similar enough that they know how to make a ton of money (à la Biff Tanner in Back to the Future II).

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
The Plot (2021): by Jean Hanff Korelitz

This is a kind of a meta-plot-twist book: it’s a book with multiple pretty inventive plot twists about an author who becomes famous for having written a book with a nearly shockingly inventive and unique plot twist.

Jacob Finch Bonner is an author who stormed out of the gate, more or less, with a highly critically acclaimed first novel that never landed on the NYT best-seller list, but garnered a few industry awards that left everyone waiting for his next book. He takes a swipe at it, but fails utterly, selling only a few hundred copies. His agent doesn’t give up, but it looks grim.

The next few years are tough, as he parlays his initial fame into a living of sorts, working at writer’s retreats. he kinda sorta genuinely tries to help, but he can barely hide his contempt for them, for his peers, and for himself. So it’s years later and he’s dragging around a laptop with the corpse of his never-published third book and the desperate scraps that make up what he would only the most desperate and hopeful person could even call something that might become his fourth book.

He’s a pretty sad dude until, at one of these writer’s retreats, he meets an arrogant young man whose confidence in his own completely unproven abilities rest upon his having thought of the most amazing plot for a book. He shares a few pages with Jacob, who deems the writing style surprisingly solid, though not stellar.

The young man spills the rest of his plot in order to prove to Jacob that he really will be unstoppable. After having heard the plot, Jacob can’t disagree, grinding his teeth in his mind at the absolute injustice of such a brilliant plot having found its way into the head of a hack like that young man when an author of more stature and talent like Jacob would have been a much more-deserving target.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
War is the Greatest Evil (2022): by Chris Hedges

This is an excellent book. Everyone should read it, but especially every American should read it. It’s not an easy read, but neither is it easy to confront the fact that you’re part of a monstrous machine that chews up poor people and spits out yachts.

This machine runs on war. It runs on conquest, pillage, and piracy and all that war entails. It not only doesn’t care about the overwhelming number of victims of all kinds—those directly killed, those grievously injured, those whose livelihoods are ruined by the shattered societies it leaves in its wake—it just completely fails to acknowledge that they even exist.

Chris Hedges is here to remind you. He is here to awaken you from the hypocritical slumber that engenders the complicity that serves as fuel for the war machine.

Chris Hedges is rarely a ray of sunshine. His writing is almost never funny. He is nearly relentlessly bleak because he writes truth. He does not swerve from his purpose. He wants people to stop fooling themselves and fight the right battles—the real enemy. He sacrifices an ignorant, beckoning bliss for us.

The entire book is a wealth of brilliant writing, expressing different facets of the same thought over and over. He’s like a dog gnawing a bone—but it’s understandable. The entire concept of war is so horrible that you just can’t stop searching for a formulation that will finally convince people to rise up and stop it. He is a much better writer than I—he is a poet in prose—so I use many citations plucked from the long list below to review and describe his book.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
The Last Wish: Introducing the Witcher (The Witcher Saga Book 1) (1993): by Andrzej Sapkowski

This is the first book featuring the Witcher, a magically gifted, preternaturally physically gifted, and potion-enhanced monster-hunter. He wields a silver sword, pulled quickly from a sheath on his back. His hair is long and silver, his eyes jet black. His eyes match his head-to-toe leather armor, studded with spikes along the shoulders. The ladies love him; his enemies fear him. He knows lore; he is good with animals. He is wise and bides his time. He is a bad-ass, an excellent fighter. He is a traveler of lands far and wide.

“During his life, the witcher had met thieves who looked like town councilors, councilors who looked like beggars, harlots who looked like princesses, princesses who looked like calving cows and kings who looked like thieves.”
Page 81
The framing story is that he is resting after having been injured in a monster battle. During his convalescence, he reminisces about seven recent events. These stories form the basis of what would be become the Witcher Saga. We meet Ciri’s grandmother Calanthe and her mother Pavetta. We meet Yennefer of Vengerberg. We meet Dandelion the troubadour. We meet Dennis Cranmer, the dwarf captain. They will all figure in the books that follow.

These stories correspond, more or less, to the first season of the Netflix series of the same name.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
The Rieter Manual of Spinning (2008): by Werner Klein

The first volume is the densest, with a detailed overview of all processes: opening, blowing, drawing, carding, combing, and spinning. Subsequent volumes cover carding and combing in detail, with volumes four, five, and six covering ring-spinning, rotor-spinning, and air-jet spinning (as well as other niche, or never-productive/no-longer-used techniques), respectively.

There is a wealth of detail and research and knowledge that goes into converting fibers—natural or artificial—into yarn and then fabric. The history of spinning and spinning technology is very old. The history of automation is centuries old.

The focus in these books is on cotton, which is collected from cotton plants with various techniques and varying levels of automation. With a higher level of automation comes a higher collection speed—which is more cost-effective and efficient—but it also engenders more contamination and with smaller particles, which increases the need for cleaning in latter stages.

As with everything else in the spinning world, which technology you use depends heavily on your raw material and the quality of the product you’re trying to produce. You balance the amount of piecing you need to do (does one process put a higher strain on the yarn?), the amount of hairiness you’re willing to accept, and so on. Some technologies are faster, or can be scaled up in speed more. Some technologies have setups that are quicker to clean or to load with material. Rotor-spinning is more automatable, which is attractive to those mills that can afford the capital investment.

All in all, this was a fascinating set of volumes about the world in which I’ve made my career over the last year.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Caged (2020): by New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative

This is a play about prison and prisoners. Chris Hedges worked on this play with his friend Boris Franklin. They met when Boris was one of Chris’s students in a writing course in prison in New Jersey. They are still friends today. There were 28 students in all, all of whom contributed to the story. Chris and Boris hammered a play out of their over two dozen stories, with the assistance of Chris’s wife, actress Eunice Wong.

This is a story about prison, and prisoners, but it’s mostly about the society that supports and promotes prison and sends certain people to prison. It is about wasted effort, lost chances, and dashed hopes. It is about Omar, who’s in prison because he took the fall for his younger brother Quan, his mother Chimene’s favorite. The justice system isn’t done with Omar. They’re squeezing him for more information on his associates. They’re trying to get him to talk. Omar’s in his father’s old cell. His father Jimmy is no longer in prison, but he’s a junkie, a constant disappointment to his family.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.
Blood of Elves (The Witcher Book 3 / The Witcher Saga Novels Book 1) (1994, pl; 2008, en): by Andrzej Sapkowski

This is the third Witcher book, but the first book in what is called the Witcher Saga. Geralt is still the same. The world is worse.

“[…] in his day the world was a better place. Duplicity was a character flaw to be ashamed of. Sincerity did not bring shame.”
Page 73
The kingdom of Cintra has fallen to Nilfgard. Queen Calanthe is dead, Ciri is on the run. Nilfgard seeks her with all of its power, bending its will to finding the heiress who could try to take back the throne (although some in the books point out that a woman can’t inherit the throne without a king anyway).

This novel gets very political very quickly, mapping our world’s problems onto that of the Witcher, but it’s exceedingly well-done and not ham-fisted at all. He’s no longer hunting so many monsters and is, instead, at the center of controversy. Some know that Geralt was promised Calanthe’s granddaughter Ciri as a surprise. They suspect strongly that he knows where she is; he does his best to convince the world that she’s really gone.

I’ve included notes, citations and errata in a separate post.