I seem to be on a Did Not Finish spree, hope it's not me. Am I getting too picky? Am I turning into a snob? Will I start explaining how to read James Joyce in my blog? Hope not.

  A Darkling Sea felt so puerile that I didn't get to 10% of it. The whole idea is that three alien races (of varying technological prowess) meet on a deep ocean planet. Nothing in the book indicates James L. Cambias knows what the challenges of deep sea (or space) exploration are, or how to create characters, how to build worlds or how to generate interest. It reminded me of how I was writing in high school: all grand ideas, but without anything backing them up.

  And it's strange, I must have heard some really good things about this guy, I've got two books from him. I doubt I will try to read the other one.

  Pivoting from the Lovecraftian to James Bond, The Jennifer Morgue, second installment in the Laundry Files series, was... boring. A lot of self absorbed interest in the bureaucratic minutiae of government agencies, a lot of technobabble that did not forward the plot, some weird interpersonal scenarios that humans would never go with. It felt like a Tolkien possessed computer programmer trying to reinvent Fleming.

  There is a gap between my general perception of Charles Stross and what I felt reading his stuff. Since Accelerando, which I've read a looong time ago and barely remember, I've always had the impression that Stross is a great writer with amazing ideas. However I've looked at my ratings and reviews for his books and the vast majority of them were average. The evidence forces me to downgrade him as an author.

  The problem with this book is that it's not as funny or intelligent as it seems to believe itself to be. The snarky protagonist being the dunce gets old fast and the obvious twists at the end are telegraphed chapters before. There are no real characters in the story, either, just roles, which makes some sense in the context, but it's also because the writing is mediocre. Most of the action and behavior of characters twist uncomfortably to fit the narrative that Stross forced upon the book. So, great job, it's not Saturn's Children - that starts one way and ends another, it's not Accelerando - a patchwork book made of separate stories blended together, yet it feels worse, it feels fake.

  And it's a long book, too. The decision to slap a short story on to this book plus a long dissertation on the history of Ian Fleming and James Bond did not help with that.

  Bottom line: clearly not my style of a book. I enjoyed the first one in the series, but I am sure I don't want to continue with The Laundry Files and perhaps not anything else from Charles Stross, as much as it pains me to admit it.

  Sangu Mandanna's amateurish writing style put me completely off, this book is like written by a child. I am not going to continue reading this. The story is as shallow as the characters, the worldbuilding is terrible, I couldn't care less about anything. How A Spark of White Fire got to a four star trilogy starter on Goodreads is beyond me.

  This is a Young Adult book, featuring a young servant girl, who is secretly also a queen and protected by a god in a science-fantasy world of space ship wars and galactic empires. Only the secret is out in about a chapter and then it's all just... talking and people acting in ridiculously implausible ways. But at least it didn't offend me in any way, it wasn't a bait and switch, it wasn't agenda driven much, it was just a regular book that sucked.

  I don't know how I got to have Smilla's Sense of Snow on my reading list, but Wow! is it a good book! The whole story revolves around a half Inuit half Danish woman who is trying to understand why a small child died. As we follow this Nordic Noir plot, we learn a lot about the Greenlander culture, its interaction with their Danish European colonizers, the way people live in the "true north". The writing and the characters are also delightful. I loved this book.

  Peter Høeg is writing a stoic, kind of psychologically stuck, woman, her icy heart - tempered by the teachings of her native Greenlander mother and the brilliantly intellectual but emotionally weak Danish father - gets softened by the arrival of an Inuit boy at her doorstep. She doesn't want to warm up to him, but he becomes almost a surrogate child to her. Then he dies. The rest of the book is Smilla making sense of his death through a labyrinth of government corruption and overreach, shady characters that almost all prove to be not what they seem and the hard science of ice.

  I loved the writing, careful to detail, always full of hints about people's inner motivations or some cultural ideas or some scientific knowledge, but that never felt shoved down your throat; they are just there for the taking. A Danish buffet. Smilla's sense of ice is not really used much in the book, the entire concept is more of a metaphor for the many types of hardness inside her and their potential to melt. It's a long book and sometimes it meanders towards a destination or conclusion, but the journey is almost always interesting and bringing a little bit more insight into the Danish mindset.

  Also, it was kind of apropos to read about a Greenlander character right when a deranged American president had dreams of buying the territory from Denmark (or else...). It's immediately apparent that even for a culture of social democrats like the Danes, annexing a territory already occupied by native populations goes the same way as for any other conqueror before them. The forced education at the threat of military power and cultural erasure, the pillaging of the land, the brutal authoritarian control, the way people are being swept away before the tide of progress.

  I loved reading the book and I liked Smilla's character. Some things were pushed a little too far towards the end, but overall I almost couldn't put the book down. There is also a film adaption, featuring Julia Ormond of all people, from 1997, and I am going to watch it as soon as possible. Highly recommended.

  My Year of Rest and Relaxation features a young female New Yorker in a deep depression that she herself does not recognize as such. The reasons are not that important, instead it's the fact that she can't make herself care about anything and all she wants is just to sleep and be left alone while she heavily medicates herself. Her best friend and serious codependent person can't make herself to let her be.

  I really liked the Ottessa Moshfegh's writing and I was able to like even the protagonist, who should be in fact extremely unsympathetic, but I warmed up to her somehow. Think of Camus' The Stranger or No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai and you get kind of the same vibe. The main character is not so much a sociopath, as she is deeply depressed. She might have been and could yet turn out to be a normal person with normal feelings, but in the "year of relaxation" she is just ... down. Only being able to access her introspective thoughts makes her likeable.

  Bottom line: great writing, an interesting character, not much of a story. People seem to either hate or love this book. I liked it a lot.

  I will go ahead and say The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu is an abject failure at best and a complete fraud at worst. I have no problem with any writer creating and publishing something. They may be good, they may be bad, it's all about how what they write makes me feel. But in this case any such feelings were drowned by outrage because most, if not all of the stories in this book, have nothing to do with Lovecraft or the mythos developed by his writer followers.

  I feel I know what Lovecraftian means. People flaunt the term "cosmic horror", but most of H.P.'s stories were not about something truly cosmic, just incomprehensible - worse, unacceptable - by the protagonist. And then these young people come around and say "Oh, I know, I will take what's good from these stories: the monsters, the supernatural, the feeling of unease and mind breaking power of finding something truly alien and ignore the bad things: the entitlement, the racism, the feeling of dethronement" and they do achieve something, but it has nothing to do with Lovecraft.

  Lovecraft himself felt he was above the average man, yet felt incapable of accepting the changes the world was forcing on him. That's where the horror comes from. You can never take a regular person, add a supernatural element, drop a Chutlhu in there and then assume that's cosmic horror. No, that's just normal stuff, slightly elevated by the occult. You need to start from a sense of entitlement to achieve the fall required by what Lovecraft was describing. You take that away and it's the very opposite of Lovecraftian. It may be good fantasy or good horror, but nothing to do with the man.

  This book is worse. There were stories that were barely fantastic, not horror at all. Some had nothing to do with anything, but some cultists that believed in some member of Chtulhu's pantheon - and we know that because they use their name, once, out of context. It's not even that the stories were bad, it's just that they cannot in good conscience be called "New Lovecraftian". They don't add anything to Lovecraft's body of work and they are barely influenced by it, if at all.

  Bottom line: it's notoriously difficult to bring Lovecraft to modern audiences, but just slapping his name on random stuff is disgraceful. This doesn't even try. It's the book equivalent of corporate streaming TV series.

  Michael Mersault did a much better job in The Silent Hand that in the previous book of the series. Character development, world building, pacing, action, writing, everything is better. It's not perfect, but by the end of the book I despaired the third book is not available yet. Hopefully I will remember to read it when it does get published.

  Anyway, I believe the author planned to place Inga front and center, while Saef was going to take a more minor role. However you can't do that when your lead is the right hand of the guy, so we got flashbacks. A lot of them. I wasn't bothered that much, because I wanted to know where Inga came from and to see more of the world that Mersault created. Still, all that backstory ate from the actual story, which made the book feel at the same time too long and too short. Just when things were getting fun, the book ended.

  Bottom line, I am curious how this will all turn out, yet at the rate at which things are being revealed, I don't know how Mersault will be able to tie it all up in just one more book.

  There is a type of sci-fi that I will probably never hate, even if it's corny as hell, and that's space opera. Spaceships, interesting yet cliché characters, military honor, strong men, sexy women, that kind of stuff. Yet, having just read another underwhelming military space opera, I was not happy to start reading The Deep Man, as I thought it would be more of the same. Maybe less. I mean, it started with a human space empire, nobility families bound by honor, space navies and so on, but focused so much on the various aristocratic rituals in the beginning that I thought it's going to be just as average, only more boring.

  But as I was reading the book I started to warm up to the it and the writing also improved, becoming more focused on action, story and character development. I enjoyed it enough that I immediately started looking for the sequel - which is not easy, because apparently no one heard of this. Let's face it, it's a fun book, nothing great, but it reminded me of David Feintuch and a little of Herbert by some of the ideas inside.

  What I didn't like was the title. It refers to a sort of psychic conditioning of nobles to find "the real man" inside them, kind of like the Gom Jabbar trial in Dune. So when I saw that, I was really looking forward to some form of exploration of the strength of will and identity. Only most of the book is not about that at all, so the title felt misleading. Also it started slowly enough that I almost didn't want to continue reading.

  Some interesting ideas in the book, though, barely touched upon yet. Already mentioned the Deep Man, but also the system of government divides the population into full citizens and demi-citizens. The full citizens have to pass some tests and fulfil some conditions to demonstrate they can take responsibility for their actions and shoulder the risks of true freedom. The demi-citizens are not slaves or anything, they are just protected by the state from themselves and others. For example two citizens can declare a duel and fight to the death for some perceived honor slight, yet a citizen cannot harm a demi-citizen. Same for drugs or anything that might be perceived as dangerous or risky.

  I found the idea fascinating. Basically what we now do with minors, only just passing a certain age is not the (only) requirement. Conversely, it is taken for granted that a citizen is fully responsible for their actions, but also more free to take them because of it. And it's not just empty elitism I am taking about, because the book also explores the abuses and decadent aristocratic corruption that comes from it. If you think about it, isn't the same with society now? Adults being complacent, corrupt and uncaring while holding all the power and kids ineffectual protesters against a world they don't yet fully understand?

  Michael Mersault is a competent writer and I felt I knew where his influences for this book came from - and I approve. This is one of those books that you read for fun, but it hides some unexpected depth from place to place and I enjoyed that.

  The Cruel Stars is a typical military space adventure, complete with reluctant military commanders, gruff retired Scottish admirals speaking with an accent, space pirates, space royalty and nobility, princesses, space Nazis, snarky AIs and criminals with hearts of gold. It's the first of a series, naturally, which means that even if you enjoy it, you will not feel you've reached the end of the story.

  John Birmingham's writing is competent, without being anything special. The plot is bit inconsistent technically, though, with technology that sounds futuristic, but is basically what we have now with whistles and bells, and which is used differently depending on what the story requires. The world building is minimal, with some hints on how the different human empires work, but no details.

  Also, no aliens, yet. The book starts with hints of an old and nebulous threat to humanity, that one assumes some exotic alien race, but it's quickly revealed to be an AI phobic and race purist republic of humans.

  The book was good for a palate cleanser, although it was a bit too long for my taste, and as fun as it was, I won't be continuing to read the series. It's space pulp, basically.

  Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a really good work of writing. Maybe sometimes inconsistent, like Marlon James wrote different parts of the story, then stitched them together, but it is a huge book with a lot of archetypal African tribal mythology, a lot of symbolism that probably flew over my head and complex world with interesting magic and creatures and vibrant characters.

  At first I was a little annoyed. The main character is this African boy who becomes a man. He's always boasting and challenging people in this strange literary kind of Black English and he's also sexually weird... I didn't know where it was going. But in my head I was imagining this annoying little kid from the Galvanize video Krumping around. I don't have anything about Black folk, but I am triggered by loud mouth assholes.

  And then it hit me. This is like an African Conan the Barbarian. Only it never bothered me when it was Arnold in a Dark Ages kind of setting and speaking Austrian English. Am I racist? I didn't think so. Anyway, the character never actually grew on me. I followed his journey with great interest, but he remained annoying through sheer will power :) 

  What I loved was the world. A lot of cities and tribes and witches and ways of looking at life. It felt like Iron John, but written by a Jamaican Lev Grossman, A lot of archetypes who make the hero grow. Sometimes the opposite. Not a typical hero's journey and always surprising, which makes me consider reading the whole series, but I also felt it took me a looong time to finish the book and I am not sure I want to invest that kind of time in the continuation of the trilogy.

  Bottom line: this takes some effort, but it's worth it. I feel it was the most different book I've read in quite a while. I don't know if I am going to read the next books, though.

  Metamorph is a fun little book that doesn't seem written in 2016 at all. It features what are basically fearless space pirates with a heart of gold, energetic young people living their lives to the fullest and even some romantic tension between a man and a woman who mutually appreciate each other. The technology is basic, the politics and the portrayal of alien contact are naive and overall it's all a hopeful lively adventure that throws back to the age of Star Trek Deep Space 9 or maybe Firefly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this book was a repurposed DS9 fan fiction draft.

  Chris Reher is a decent writer, I can't complain. The characters are quite basic, though, they only reveal themselves through their actions and occasional thoughts, so you either like them or ignore them. Luckily, no flashbacks in the book, which is a relief. Better to have cardboard characters than flesh them out with past histories no one cares about.

  The plot is classic space adventure: aliens, pew pew, clumsy plots in barely built worlds, a lot of action. I realize that when I write it like that it doesn't feel like I endorse it, but it was actually a pleasant read. It wasn't great, though, by any means. It's pulp: if you go in without expectations you're going to have a good time.

  Bottom line: when the book ended, I kind of wanted more, like a light sci-fi series that I am curious to continue watching, even if it's not great. I probably won't, I have too many books in my list, but maybe give it a try when you don't feel like a book that requires effort to read.

  I am not a big Friends fan. I mean, I know of the show, who doesn't, but I never got into it. Likewise with any Matthew Perry movies: maybe fun, but not memorable. You can then induce that I didn't know about his personal life or his addiction issues either and you would be right. Therefore when reading Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, I was just a guy reading what another guy had to say about his life. And it was brutal, I kid you not, but it wasn't that much fun.

  Coming from a self proclaimed funny guy, the book is very serious and direct. It focuses primarily on an honest depiction of his inner demons and the alcohol and drug addiction plaguing him. It goes through successful TV series, movies and celebrity relationships almost like they're afterthoughts in the big terrible story of his need for attention and drugs. I understand why one won't joke and jest about something so terrifying and personal, but it makes for a rather insipid reading.

  That's why I personally liked the book, appreciating Matthew's honesty and openness a lot, but I didn't love it.

  I guess not knowing anything about the guy also made me oblivious of the fact that he had died, of ketamine overdose, just a year after he published this book. One quote stuck with me: "I was never suicidal [...] But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept."

  I've read Nature's Nether Regions, a book about penises, a while ago. It was funny, well documented and, most of all, entirely about male reproductive organs. So I thought I would read a book about butts and have just as much fun, right?

  Wrong. Butts, A Backstory is written by Heather Radke, a feminist writer using the idea of the butt, in her mind specifically the buttocks of the human female, as a pretext to explore the gender and racial context of history and her book has almost nothing to do with asses.

  Not only was I not interested in the subject, but the bait and switch angered me. How come all of these brilliant liberal writers who write just one book in their whole career need to trick readers to even start consuming their work? Is it maybe that their uncreative over serious surfing of the outrage zeitgeist is ultimately unfulfilling? That when the five minutes of "OMG, I can't believe they got away with that!" end, most people realize they either won't do anything about it, thus becoming part of the problem, or that their rage is just as impotent as any other of their emotions? Because I hate these overhyped books that say nothing and even when they do, they do it badly, yet no one seems to do anything about it, because how can you go against social agendas, regardless of how badly written?

  There, you've got my outrage! DNF!

  I finished Wind and Truth as quickly as I could... because I just didn't care. This book was something that I almost disliked, despite the great writing and smart ideas. Most of the many many characters I didn't care about or even remember that much and the ones that I did like were doing stuff that had little entertainment value. Even the big storylines make no literary sense if you think about it. What was that, Brandon Sanderson?

  From the reviews of the previous four books, I think the first and the third were the best. With such a disappointing fifth entry (in a series of ten!) I wonder if it makes any sense to invest in the story and characters for the next ten to twenty years.

  In this book, the worse symptoms of modern American writing rear their ugly heads. First, the all connected cinematic universe, just for the sake of it, the Cosmere, a concept that I hate with all my heart. How does a great writer like Sanderson not understand how limiting it will become? Second, the psychotherapy angle becoming part of a story. Listen, man, if I wanted to confront my inner drives and contemplate my emotions I wouldn't read fantasy stories, OK? And still, if I did and still read fantasy stories, I wouldn't want my main character go unto a pointless side quest doing therapy to other heroes. Any emotional trauma can be solved with a big big sword! Third, the noble family, where everybody is related to everybody, at least through adoption and alliance if not blood, and they all get special powers - as if high birth and implausible situations bestowing them with power were just a natural evolution of such special individuals. I am starting to get where Moash is coming from, now. And fourth, new magical mechanisms that no one knew about or cares much about, coming out exactly when the story needs them, like Dragonball level ups.

  As for the story I can't tell much about it without spoiling it. There is a deadline and everybody is doing their own thing until that deadline, some are ignoring it, some are actively influencing events, even if they shouldn't be allowed to and a lot of the stuff they are doing is just... pointless. Even in the eventuality they succeed, nothing much is changed. This is a book about McGuffins.

  And then there is the ending, which pretty much says "whatever you liked in the books so far, the next five books will be completely different". What's the point of announcing a ten book series, then, if you're going to split it into two five book series that have little in common?

  Bottom line: I waited four years for this. I am not happy. At this point I can't even say I am angry or anything, just severely disappointed. There is no bang, just whimpers.

  When I first stumbled upon this variation, I thought I would name it something simple, like the Kiselev variation or Butcher the Sicilian, because Miodrag Perunovic wrote a course covering it and GM Vitaliy Kiselev played a lot of it against the Sicilian. Even Gotham Chess and Will Graif recommended it in some videos. But then I realized that most people won't read the blog unless I have a beautiful woman as the thumbnail, so for the purposes of views and likes, I will call this variation The Beckinsale. I bet Big Mio wishes he'd have thought of it.

  Now, other than the poster, this is no joke. This reply to the Sicilian sidesteps most theory and is, statistically, the best weapon against the Sicilian on Lichess. And I mean it for ratings above 1800, games that are not bullet or even blitz and that were played in the last year. Serious stuff! While Mio would probably explain it better, I can tell you that following these lines leads to some really cool ideas, but also very simple ones. Yes, the Beckinsale is as easy on the moves as it is on the eyes.

  So how does a total noob find something new in what is probably the most theoretically examined defense for Black? Well, simple: use the wonderful Lichess database, maybe with my own LiChess Tools extension installed to help you out, and look not for the best Stockfish moves, but for the most winning moves, or maybe the sharpest. Yes, there is a huge difference. Positions where the evaluation of the most played move is terrible is what keeps YouTubers fed.

  Have you tried learning the Sicilian? With its many variations (uninspiringly) named after ugly male chess players, long theoretical lines which "win" because some extra pawn in the end game? Not only is it horrible, but it is boring as well. If you are a grandmaster, surely you don't care about what I have to say, but if you are not, you probably know that the most common form of the Sicilian is the so called Open Sicilian, consistently played six or seven times more often than the Closed Sicilian. Well, guess what we're going to play? Nc3! Bye-bye, OS!

  Black will play Nc6, the "Traditional, Closed" variation, because they are boring and uncreative, and we will play Bb5, threatening to capture the knight and double Black's pawns. Why are we even bothering threatening stuff that won't really matter at our level? Donno! But everybody is hung up on these pawns and their structure, so Black will reply by moving the knight away, attacking our bishop and threatening to take it and be the ones keeping the bishop pair. For some reason. So they will play Nd4. To which we will play The Beckinsale! Back when she was all dressed in leather and hunting werewolves: Nf3.

They will take. a6, d6 and g6 are also moves, but they won't play them. It makes little sense, they want the bishop pair. Even before, they didn't have to play Nc6, they could have played d6, e6 or g6, and they often do, sometimes it transposes, because where else is that knight going to go? And after Nxb5 and Nxb5 your moves, as White, are 90% of the time THE SAME! No theory, no complicated rules. Everything simple, like this:

They will probably kick your knight back Nc3, you will play d4, they will take and you will take with the queen Qxd4 - go Kate!, since there is no queenside knight on the board anymore, then castle short O-O. Four moves you don't have to think about, winning time that your opponent has to spend thinking. And there is more:

• on Nf6, you play Bg5
• on b5, you play Bf4 or a4
• on Qc7 or Bb7, you play a4.
• if they attack your queen, Qb4, even with the risk of a discovered attack on pawn push
• your knight will go Na4! How dim is that? But it will coordinate with the queen to attack the hole on b6, a perfect outpost.
• if the dark bishop is out, you can even castle queenside O-O-O
• if they don't kick your knight on b5 away, then the queen and the knight will be unstoppable on c7.

The ideas are very simple:

1. induce the only developed Black piece to exchange itself
2. capture the only forward pawn of Black
3. get your pieces out quick
4. attack the vulnerable queenside as fast as possible
5. block Black's attempts to develop

Meanwhile, Black has moved just pawns:

The situation is as follows: White has three pieces out, a centralized queen and a safe king. Black has... long term plans. Which one would you pick?

And I know I will get comments like "A Sicilian player would never..." or "Stockfish says the position is equal" or even "You went Nf3 and d4 anyway, how is this not an open Sicilian?".  You will probably not defeat Caruana with it, but most Lichess players will fall for it and Stockfish doesn't count here.

But even so. For all Lichess players for all time, this variation wins for White in 57% of the cases, to Black's 38%. Restrict the database to 1800+, Rapid+ and the last year and you get 51% over 39%. For 2200+ it's 47/41. For the Masters: 54/31 . Against the Sicilian! In the four games played at 2500+ level on Lichess in the last year in serious games, three games were won by White.

Enough teasing. I wrote a study about it, based on the most played moves on Lichess and what the best responses are. Then there are some really fun lines and games, for your entertainment.

How to handle the Sicilian as White

Let me know how you CRUSHED with it, or whatever is memeable now. And as always, have fun!