Familiar Diversions

Heh. Tanya put out what she thought was the military equivalent of this job ad:

"Must work uncompensated overtime; no workers' comp; must be able to work weekends and holidays; low pay; no health insurance. Upon business success, employees are guaranteed a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. (Chances of success are extremely slim."

 

She was hoping she wouldn't get any applicants. Instead she somehow has a whole pile of them.

Holy crap, that's quite a time jump. This just skipped 40 or so years into the future. But, as far as I can tell, only for three pages.

"If I agree with this, what awaits us is a horrifying world where people will be numbers - disposable products. But this argument has a lot of parts that seem plausible. Still, when I think about what it would mean to accept it..."

Lergen again, one of maybe two characters in this book that I might be able to say I like. Zettour is the other one.

Right now Lergen and Zettour are struggling with the idea that Tanya accidentally put in their heads, that the situation is morphing into a "world war."

I'm going to try very hard to finish this today. So far I'm leaning towards 2 stars for this - there aren't enough good parts to make up for the boring parts, and the good parts could have been executed better.

You know, I still don't know why or how a cynical, cold, and supposedly average salaryman has somehow become a military genius.

My county just hit the threshold for closing back down again, due to 7 new cases today. We're at about 3-7 new cases each day for the past week, and 1-2 new cases per day during the week before that - currently 1 death, 3 in the hospital, and as far as I know we still have just 4 or 5 ventilators and 4 or 5 ICU beds.

So you'd think we'd be preparing for tightened restrictions again starting tonight. Well, you'd be wrong. They just redefined the threshold. When our current number of cases doubles, then we'll be back to further restrictions. Assuming the threshold hasn't been increased again by then.

I'm pretty sure I remember how this ends. Book LaGuerta is ambitious but not quite suspicious enough or smart enough, and

"The best thing is that with these clean results, I won't be put on trial for war crimes. Even after the war, it won't be a problem - how about that! In other words, killing one person is a crime, but killing a pile of them gets you a medal. Most people would find that inconsistent, but economic theory makes it acceptable."

The salaryman reminds us once again that he is an awful person, and also that the world is awful.

This book is occasional good bits stitched together with boring and difficult to follow bits. I'm currently slogging through one of the boring parts. Some sort of battle, with Tanya accompanied by a relatively new recruit who mistakenly thinks Tanya actually cares about her. I hope I hit one of the good bits soon.

"'Rejoice, Lieutenant. We'll be on the forward-most line.'

 

'What an honor.'

 

This is the worst."

Heh. Tanya deliberately spouts the most blindly patriotic things she can think of, while privately just wanting to end up in a marginally safer position. (Although at the same time also really enjoying battle? I don't know, it's confusing.) It's actually kind of fitting that she's also forced to pretend to be devoutly religious in battle. The main difference is that she's fine pretending to be patriotic but despises pretending to be religious.

This isn't quite a ghost story. A very lonely house tries to get someone to agree to buy it and thinks it has found that someone in a man and his young daughter.

I came across this story just now and enjoyed it.

This has morphed into a black comedy.

After the battle earlier in the book, Tanya was assigned to be lead tester for a literal mad scientist's invention. All previous testers died on the job - although Tanya has desperately been trying to get reassigned, she's the only one who's ever been able to complete any tests using the new orb prototype, so she's pretty much stuck. Whatever safety features the orb has were implemented only after much complaining on her part. As far as the mad scientist was concerned, "safety features lacked functional elegance" (83).

And now

Chohei Kambayashi's Yukikaze was military fiction that even I, a military fiction newbie, could follow along with. This, on the other hand, tosses you into the deep end with a map of Europe labeled with new country/empire names and a few footnotes. I suspect some of what's going on right now might have links to real European history around World War I and World War II, but I'm not following along well at all.

I really liked the bit from Major von Lergen's POV, as he struggled with the knowledge that he was going to have to give Tanya a highly regarded medal, even though he knew from her academy days that she's a dangerous monster who shouldn't be given any opportunities to rise in the ranks and potentially be put in charge of other human beings. We're back to nothing much happening, though, now that that battle is over. Tanya's testing an experimental orb. I really need to look up some screenshots of the anime, because I can't picture the flying scenes at all.

"It's truly insulting that my life and career are being endangered while I'm treated as nothing more than a side note. It's my right to look down on others; no one should be allowed to do that to me."

Yeesh. I mean, yes, Tanya's right to be angry - she's basically been ordered to do a pointless suicide mission - but still.

Her (his? I'm not sure what pronoun to use since the narrator also tends to use "she" when talking about Tanya in the third person) only goal is to rise up in the ranks as quickly as possible. According to the reviews I read, she wants a nice, safe desk job. I wouldn't be surprised if she also plans to make every person who gets in her way suffer at some point.

The POV is so weird. There are paragraphs where the narrator switches effortlessly between third person "Tanya" and first person, and when the battle started, suddenly he switched entirely to first person.

One example:

"Either there's electromagnetic interference or my equipment is simply acting up. Why couldn't it have happened at any time other than this critical moment? Just to play it safe, Tanya starts checking if the problem has to do with the equipment strapped to her back by trying to radio Control again when it picks up an unexpected signal." (41)

So that's "my equipment," but then it switches fully to third person "Tanya" by the end of the paragraph. Possibly because the paragraph talks about a part of her body, her back, which the salaryman doesn't consider his own?

I thought Urano/Myne was detached. She's got nothing on Tanya. I suppose Urano was lucky enough to at least be a woman reborn in a female body.

Although we never learn the name of the Japanese salaryman who died and was reborn in the body of an orphaned girl named Tanya, he very much considers his new body to be a separate thing from himself, to the point that he talks about it in the third person. We know that the book is written from his POV, but he constantly says "Tanya" is doing this or that rather than "I."

This is very dry, so far. Also a little hard to follow. It began with the salaryman waking up in Tanya's body, being fed by a nun at the orphanage. Then a flashback to the salaryman's original life as a human resources employee, accepting his lot as a cog in the system. He coldly fires (or demotes?) someone who later shoves him in front of a train. Then a scene with the salaryman talking to God, who is pissed to have to deal with yet another unbeliever and decides to put the salaryman in a position where he will be forced to become religious and believe in God. Now back to Tanya, but to some point further in the future, during her magical military training.

I think this is the first light novel I've ever read with footnotes. They explain things like Malthus's "An Essay on the Principle of Population," Rawls's theory of justice, and the Chicago school of economics. Even Log Horizon and Spice & Wolf didn't have (or need) footnotes like that, although both dealt with business and economic topics.

I went with The Saga of Tanya the Evil, which I know very little about, even after reading a couple reviews. The reviews did indicate that this is going to be a denser read than you'd normally expect from a "light novel."

Books read for the game so far:

Bank: $31

1st roll: 1 + 3 = 4 (Ascendance of a Bookworm, Part 1, Vol. 3, 428 pages, $5)

2nd roll: 4 + 3 = 7 (The Gamekeeper's Lady, 283 pages, $3

3rd roll: 5 + 6 = 11 (The Accidental Demon Slayer, 292 pages, $3)

4th roll: 1 + 4 = 5

I was on spot 20, so this puts me on spot 25, the Summer Blockbuster.

Read a book (or a book in a series) that has been adapted for film or television.

This game seems bound and determined not to let me read any of my Murderbot haul.

On the plus side, I have a lot of options for this one. A lot of the Japanese light novels I own have been turned into TV series, so it's just a matter of deciding which one I'm in the mood to read. Right now I'm thinking maybe The Saga of Tanya the Evil or The Rising of the Shield Hero. Or forcing myself to continue Log Horizon - the anime adaptation is good, but my experience with the first book was less than stellar. Rereading one of the Twelve Kingdoms books for the comfort factor is also really tempting right now. It's been a rough past few weeks, and I really, really hope that my doctor tells me something useful when I go in for my follow-up in a little over a week. My right elbow hasn't improved at all in the past month.