Books I Read: April 2025
A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch's Dune, Max Evry
I know this isn't as hot a take as it used to be, but I like Lynch's Dune. Years ago I ran a grad student group centered on SF; we had basically a fancy book club, to start, though even then the faculty advisor always had one of us on the hook for researching the author and presenting at a fairly professional level. And we branched out to full roundtables and mock conference presentations. I tell you that to tell you this: the last year I was in town, though I'd graduated already, I had the opportunity to talk to the board of the local SF con. we'd just done a movie night, which had been open to the public, like the roundtables and such. We watched Lynch's Dune. They asked, when I said we'd watched Dune, which version. I said, "the only good one. David Lynch's." Friends. Every single person in that room shouted for a good solid 30 seconds. This was before the new ones, you understand; for a certain kind of nerd, the SF Channel miniseries was the "good one." (It's not.)
Anyway. Max Evry wrote a huge book about the production, reception, and legacy of Lynch's movie, even ending on a thesis that it's Lynch's "transcendental meditation movie." Lynch practiced TM most of his life, and credited it with a lot of things, but he never seemed to bring up any kind of related topics in his films. Given that Dune was Lynch's only real move into overt SF adaptation, Evry argues, well but thinly, that the themes of the novel gave Lynch a chance to try to get it in images, and sometimes words.
I said it's "thin" because Evry only really brings up the thesis right at the end, and they claim it's the whole book's thesis. It doesn't do that though.
Mostly, it's an enjoyable collection of interviews with hundreds of people about the careers of a few notable people and the making of a film.
The Wrench, Primo Levi
More Primo Levi. This is a novel masquerading as a short story collection. Most of the book is the narrator recounting retold versions of the tales a rigger tells him, of his life around the globe building bridges, cranes, and such. The stories are wonderful on their own, but in the end we learn the narrator is a thinly fictionalized Levi, trying to decide if he wants to go on with his career in chemistry or write full time. Levi's quoted at one point in the intro I think or maybe it's just a review, but there's a claim in there that this is one of the few books about work, instead of a book about romance or adventure or longing that happens to sometimes mention what the character does. It's a paean to work, as a good in and of itself, when it's not demoralizing or exploitative. Or too exploitative, perhaps.
Norito: A Translation of the Ancient Japanese Ritual Prayers, Donald L. Phillippi, trans.
This book was, if I read the front matter correctly, translated from the original pieces in the 1950s, and recompiled in the 1970s. The research shows its age, but the translations are pretty good.
"Norito" are Shinto prayers, recorded mostly in a book of ritual and court procedure, with a few odds and ends from other sources. They are... mostly the same. They're of course ritual texts first, and do mostly the same things: "we've built a palace, the emperor is divine, in the emperor's name accept these offerings, bless the crops, protect the emperor" and so on. There are some interesting bits and pieces of course, and it's always good to be reading something like this if one is working towards their own ritual text and structure.
The Female Man, Joanna Russ
Hey. Read this book.
No for fucking real, read it. You should read it the way I did, with no fucking clue what's about to happen.
Having said that, here are some things about it if you don't want to just go for it and scroll to the next entry.
The initial conceit is that a woman from the far future is transported back to the present day. In the future, all the men are dead and the women live in a utopia -- though as you go, it becomes weirder and weirder. Sometimes people decide they're the only person who really exists and the cops go out into the wilderness and kill them. This is a regular enough occurence that it's one of the main things cops *do*.You slowly figure out that the "present day" isn't our world either. WW2 never happened, so the great depression is still happening and cultural norms are in the 60s as they were in the 30s.
It's incredibly funny.
The back quarter of the book drastically changes what's happening again in a way I am not going to describe to you even now. Don't worry about it.
Delicious in Dungeon 13 & 14, Ryoko Kui
I finally decided to finish these, and as you can see, it led to me rereading a bunch of manga.
It's really hard to think of what to say about a long-running series in a post that's for people who probably haven't read it -- if you have, you don't need me reviewing it. And I don't have the space in a post like this to try to analyze it or anything.
I guess I can say the ending surprised me... without spoilering anything, I guess what I can say is that I'm impressed with how Kui actually balanced all the disparate bits and pieces she'd introduced throughout the series and tied them together in this way. It's impressive.
She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat 1, 2, 3, Sakaomi Yuzaki
I'll admit I was a little tepid on this series the first time through, with an exception I note below, but I enjoyed it more this time around. I think I had to get out of my expectations of what "yuri manga" means, even though I know damned well it isn't all high schoolers (or college students) being good friends. I'm kidding, but basically the plot of this manga is that typical yuri "wait I'm gay though?" but taken seriously. The protagonist isn't surprised by this because she's young and sheltered, but because she's an adult who's repressed things about herself and also might be like demisexual or something? So her lack of attraction to men never made her stop to think.
If you haven't seen it around, the hook of the story is that the protagonist loves cooking, but barely eats anything -- so she never gets to make the stuff she really wants to, because she feels bad about wasting food. Her neighbor is a big buff lady who eats a ton of food, for Reasons, Reasons that are related to, but not "caused by," trauma. So one meets two and they start hanging out, with the cook realizing she's forgetting to eat because she loves watching her "friend" eat.
The exception from above is that in volume 3 more characters appear, something the series needed, and they're even better. One's a very loud asexual lesbian and the other is a person who I suspect is not cisgender and also has that thing where they hate eating and have always caught shit from their family for it.
Note that there's a lot of possibly triggering stuff in this series, but the comic stops beforehand and notes it, and what it is, so you're ready for it.
Testament of Cyprian the Mage v2, Jake Stratton-Kent
I finally finished this whole series of books. This one tries to pull some threads together and kind of succeeds. There's more attention paid to how this could be useful, but it still doesn't get concrete enough for my liking. Stratton-Kent seems concerned that if he doesn't keep things really vague, he's instead just giving people cookie cutter instructions they would just follow by rote, and I think that's a missing middle problem, but that's how he thought of it.
Kase-San & Yamada v7, Hiromi Takashima
This is the last volume I have at the moment. This series also continues to be fine. I really liked it, and I reread the first 6 volumes last year. I like most of them just as much. I do think it's doing the same thing repeatedly now: Yamada gets jealous, Kase is oblivious, they never have time to spend together, they manage to get some time together and Yamada stops feeling jealous.
There's this one little spot in this volume where Yamada wonders if it's always going to be like this -- thinking about, really, Kase always being busy and surrounded by other hot popular girls... but I kind of wonder if the comic is going to go for it in the end, and have them break up, because, you know, they're high school sweethearts. That's what usually happens, really.
Be cool, don't spoil anything in the comments though.