I sometimes abuse ampersands

1) I'm listening to the audiobook of The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan, which, based on the description, should have been very enjoyable, but is not. The authors coming from other genres to self-proclaimedly revolutionize fantasy should be given a reading list of classical fantasy works, and only allowed to write if they pass a quiz on reading comprehension. Or something :)

So, The Steel Remains was supposed to be revolutionary, dark, gritty, and have a 2/3 queer cast, but it delivers only on the last part of the claim. It's as cliched as you would expect from that sort of self-representation (after all, when you don't know a genre, the first ideas to come to your mind are probably the most obvious tropes everybody already resorts to), but its definition of dark&gritty is just plain offensive to all the fantasy books that are genuinely that. My mental definition of dark fantasy was formed based on the works by Andrzej Sapkowski and, say, The New Crobuzon series by China Mieville: both take on "real world" issues and explore all the ways those could go wrong. Basically, both are, among other things, serious meditations on intolerance, fear of the Other, and the failure of the idea of a multi-cultural society. The Steel Remains, meanwhile, is, from the feel of it, an angry adolescent revenge fantasy which makes me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration and shout at Richard Morgan, "no, saying 'fuck' and 'slut' every other sentence doesn't make you look *dark*, whatever you might mean by that." Look, like many people who learned English from TV, I swear - often, at inopportune moments, and English swear words do not carry much connotations for me. So, if even *I* start noticing that there's too much swearing in the book, there is indeed a problem. Everybody swears, from religiously conservative older women to the Emperor, which leads us to another problem: all the characters' voices sound exactly the same. Beyond that (and all the cliches about prophesies and the unspeakable horror coming to get everybody), the first half of the book is just plain boring.

Judging by Amazon reviews, the book is considered revolutionary for having queer characters, and mortal enemies fucking. At that, I can just roll my eyes: I know of one literary niche where no reader would bat an eyelash at life-or-death situations getting resolved with angry sex, and, coincidentally, that niche is predominantly tolerant of shoddy world-building and cliched plots. That niche is called "slashy original fiction," and why would one pay money for it if there's plenty to be found online, often with better writing?

I have a quarter of the book left, so it might yet pick up somewhat, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that.

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2) My professor of one long-dead language is a very accomodating guy who always tries to help his students out. His reading handouts always come with helpful translations. It took us exactly a term to convince him that neither Latin nor Greek translations are helpful, for we speak neither of those. He dumbed the course down. Now the translations are all in French. \o/

The best years of my life: exorcisms in dead languages and Chinese takeout. My life is awesome beyond my powers of decription.