Post by mdorman

I fell out of the habit of reading over the last few years; chalk it up to a creeping inability to focus, what with the world being on fire and having lots of distractions that demanded less of me, but were also, in the end, less rewarding. Consequently, I started 2026 off with an intention to read more.

Still, I took something of a training wheels approach: the last book in Charles Stross' Laundry Files came out, so I started at the beginning and read them all (except for A Conventional Boy, which came out last year, and was a little bit out of main continuity, so I skipped it). I mean, this isn't even the first post I've written about reading a bunch of them, though the last was more than ten years ago. Like I said: training wheels.

I'm not inclined to go into too much detail about the experience. I will say that I think this is the first time around that the original primary character, Bob Howard really got on my nerves. In the early books, he's a bit of an asshole (which is presumably intentional: his alleged full name is "Bob Oliver Francis Howard", or "BOFH", look it up if you don't know the acronym). In the later books...he's just a bit too much of a man-child for me: too feckless to be as powerful as he is.

Conversely, I found myself feeling a lot more sympathy for Mhari Murphy, who starts out as an annoying "bad girlfriend", but ends up being very important to the back half of the series, and is imbued with a lot more substance in the process---perhaps a bit of a try-hard, but the only character with an internal monologue that seems to belong to a reasonably complete human being.

Just to be clear: I think this is all largely intentional. Stross is on record saying that Bob is an unreliable narrator, so one might assume that part of that unreliability might involve describing the actual character of someone he had a problematic relationship with. And Bob does grow over the course of the series, as you would hope for someone who starts out in their late 20s and is the high side of 40 by the story's end (assuming he's actually alive, which is something even the character is uncertain about).

I enjoyed it all, but I don't seem myself picking them back up for a good while.