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Any series that runs over several decades, especially one written by an author as invested as LeGuin is bound to have inconcistencies, and Earthsea - for all its brilliance - certainly does. So Tales is essentially her trying to weld together the earlier Dragons & Sorcerers tales with how the later ones try to get under the skin of what makes this fail or work as a society, and for the most part succeeds brilliantly.

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

There's a coherence to these five tales, both patching and unravelling the problems of both the world and the worldbuilding. And there's ULG's beautiful writing that keeps finding new nooks and crannies to get into. Occasionally preachy, sure, but sometimes you have to spell it out. Pun intended.

"What is she, that you ask this for her?” “Who are we,” said the Doorkeeper, “that we refuse her without knowing what she is?”

Rip it up and stitch it back together again. It's the only way storytelling works. And not just that.

Snow White in the old west. As a mixed-race gunslinging miner. Sure, why not. I'll take anything Valente throws at me.

At least one of those stars up there is for the prose alone.

The ending is kind of a shrug. But then, so are all fairy tale endings once "happily ever after" starts looking like another glass coffin.

It's probably a good thing I didn't have a bottle of mescal at home when I finished this. It would have ended badly.

I'm left with a question that the fore- and afterwords can't agree on either: What is the motivation here? What can one man do - or not do? Why does he prefer not to? But it's also so sumptuously written, a text one can get lost in. Others have probably said much more interesting things about it than that. Fuck it. The horse will get you sooner or later.

I absolutely love the first half of this; the 1910s explosion of ideas, of modernism and technology and psychology leading both to boundary-pushing art and medicine and the madness of war, the supercharged ideas of the 20th century given terrible purpose. Which of course is very much part of the inspiration for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari too, and I really wish the novel had built on that more. Somewhere around the middle it abandons much of that in favour of a heist plot with some sub-Pynchon meta stuff, so by the time it circles around at the end it feels a bit like it suddenly remembered that the ending has to wrap up the ideas from the beginning as well. Fun, and not a bad companion to Miéville's The Last Days of New Paris, but could have been more.

Also, jfc, get a German proofreader for your Google Translated German.

Not a novel that looks to be liked; the virulent racism of the narrator, the chopped-up narrative, the characters that come and go with no apparent purpose... and yet there's something here that makes it more than just a tall tale of boats and blood. Hemingway's political fury and disillusionment (written mid-Spanish civil war) is one part, the other is what I choose to interpret as a nod to his old colleague Mr Joyce, with the disjointed nature, narrator-jumping and gradually increasing foul-mouthedness of the last two thirds reading like a rum-soaked, boxing-gloved take on Ulysses if Leopold Bloom had been a bootlegger who could be played by Humphrey Bogart. I don't know that it actually works, certainly not enough to warrant a place next to U, but it's an intriguing idea that wrings some real emotion out of the story by the end.

ETA: Have now watched all four adaptations. For better or worse, nobody tries to do a 100% faithful version. Ranking from best to worst:
1. Nakhoda Khorshid (Taghvai, 1987)
2. The Breaking Point (Curtiz, 1950)
3. To Have And Have Not (Hawks, 1944)
4. The Gun Runners (Siegel, 1958)

I think it's been at least 25 years since I read this. Since then I've first dismissed the Kubrick film, then learned to love the Kubrick film (King's story is about a good man (well, not THAT good, really) being corrupted despite his best efforts; Kubrick's story is about a young boy who knows for a fact what will happen), and it's kind of hard to not read this through that lens. (And think the roque club is a bit silly.)

That said, King's Shining is a different beast, and it wins me back. Mostly. Sure there are some things about early King that are hard to not notice; much like in The Stand, he tries a little too hard to get into non-white/non-male characters' heads by dragging out every stereotype he knows (a LOT of tits and n-words) and the omniscient narrator is at times a little too omniscient, until you start wondering if a 5-year-old, no matter how bright, would really notice all this.

But still, there's something really effective in the way he gradually shuts in his characters both in the hotel and in their own past trauma (which Kubrick had no use at all for). The concept of shining, and the way it pops up in unexpected places. The setpieces (the lawn creatures, the wasps, the ballroom...) still chill me. But nowhere near as much as Jack's (if at times slightly clumsy) turn from wanting to do anything to prove himself to do anything to justify himself.

Consider, for example, the level of violence and crime in a typical D&D game. One psychologist wrote, "There is hardly a game in which the players do not indulge in murder, arson, torture, rape, or highway robbery." And he likes the game!

The best thing you can say about it is that it doesn't go quite as hard on the scare propaganda as some people did back in the day - Leithart & Grant are deeply upset about the occult nature of roleplaying, but at least they don't actually claim (only hint) that it leads to actual spellcasting and ritual mass murder, for instance. But that only makes it seem more like their big fear is simply that the more people learn to play with mythology and narrative, the more they might think that Christianity is just mythology and narrative.

Note carefully the logic here: "It's just a game. The monsters aren't real. The magical powers aren't real. The gods aren't real. Jesus is one of the gods." Christ is reduced to the level of fantastic monsters, halflings, dwarves, and elves. We can give this no less a label than blasphemy.

It really shouldn't be possible to contradict yourself this many times in 22 pages, but damnit, they're going for it. Because of course, the "Our children will learn it's all just imagination!" comes just a couple of pages after warning that "Our children will think it's all real!"

One enthusiastic player admitted that D&D had made him a virtual schizophrenic. He said he would probably cry if the character he has been directing for three years were to die.

Oh no, not teaching our boys to CRY when they're sad! What else might they teach our children instead of what they should learn?

Thus, there seems to be every Scriptural reason for teaching through "role-playing" or "pretending." The value of this kind of training is seen most obviously in children. Our daughters learn something about motherhood by playing with their dolls. Our sons begin to learn courage by pretending to fight.

But wait, wasn't the violence of roleplaying (they treat D&D in particular and roleplaying in general as the exact same thing, of course) a big problem? Well, no. Teaching children to kill is just natural as long as it's the right enemies they kill.

By learning to play war, a child is not necessarily learning to do anything that God forbids. Indeed, such play can be helpful to instill in a child the reality of the Christian's life-long warfare against Satan and sin. (...) There's all the difference in the world between Hansel and a dwarf cleric who casts spells. Both may meet a witch, but they react differently. The dwarf covets the witch's power; Hansel just wants a chance to shove her into the oven.

They acknowledge that there is a problem of teenagers (ie CHILDREN!!1!) feeling bad in today's society. Their solution is simple: Just let them know that this is the role God has chosen for them! And stop them from doing anything that might help them deal with it!

This motive is apparent in many of the D&D enthusiasts quoted above. They hate their Godgiven role in the God-directed drama of history, and they play D&D in order to create their own identity and their own history.

It feels weird to bother writing this about a 30-year-old pamphlet. They lost that particular battle, after all. But the sheer panic in the tone, the wildly contradictory arguments even in a relatively tame (if still bizarre) critique, the blind fear of not being the only ones allowed to programme their children, don't feel entirely irrelevant. The kids are always doing something we need to stop them from if we want them to remain the perfect angels they would be if they weren't... y'know. Human. With gasp their own identity and their own history.

ETA: Turns out he was doing it for the money. A preacher just in it for cold hard cash? Whodathunkit!

My first Ito that I can recall. The title story is pretty disappointing; a rushed, one-dimensional read-through of the basics of Shelley's story, crammed with speech bubbles and sound effects that leave the story with no room to breathe, and towards the end Ito just seems bored with it and wraps up the last third in a couple of quick panels.

The Oshikiri cycle is a lot better - high school Lovecraftiana with a plot that slowly starts developing with each new iteration, and some pretty neat artwork - and leaves me curious to read more of Ito's stuff. But maybe his original works rather than his covers.

I'm... honestly not sure if I'm enjoying the narration anymore. Who is it talking to, exactly? The story is still intriguing, and piecing it out like this was probably a good idea, but... Yeah, I'm just not sure.

Link really likes her dream logic. It's a mixed bag. The best ones here have me transfixed, others seem just quirky for quirkiness' sake. I do want to read more of her.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Here's one to research the original myth for and come back to. Possibly several times.