Sunday media roundup, week five

This week I finished two books and listened to a ton of podcasts. I also watched a movie, but it was shitty to the point that I don't even want to talk about it. Maybe next week.  

Real Tigers by Mick Herron: The third full novel in Mick Herron's Slow Horses series. The premise is straightforward: Slough House is where MI5's spies go when they fuck up but can't be fired. Hence the nickname Slow Horses. In Real Tigers, one of their own is kidnapped by a tiger team performing a penetration test at the behest of the series' Boris Johnston stand-in, Peter Judd.

Two things the Slow Horses books do well: keeping you guessing about where things are headed (Herron is one of the few people who can get away with occasionally lowering the stakes in a way that actually builds tension and keeps the premise intact), and capturing that feeling of what it's like to face workplace rejection. uhh not that I would know.

I love how the Horses really do live up to their reputations as fuckups. The book would've been over in thirty pages if River Cartwright had just picked up his cellphone after leaving the bridge. But Marcus Longridge is the real winner in this book, repeatedly ditching assignments to get ice cream or blow off steam at the gun range. Though I think Roddy Ho, the antisocial Chinese hacker, is my favourite of the Slow Horses.

Also there's a great recurring gag with Jackson Lamb and the scent of cheese.

Charlemagne's Courtier: The Complete Einhard, edited by Paul Edward Dutton: A collection of the surviving texts of Einhard, a Frankish scholar and courtier in the courts of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. His collected letters aren't as interesting as I'd hoped, with the exception of those where he gives directions for the running of the farms on his estates. His Life of Charlemagne is interesting, but the real standout was his Translation and Miracles of the Blessed Martyrs, Marcellinus and Peter.

What one might assume is a boring hagiography is actually a compelling account of how Einhard and several co-conspirators robbed the remains of a saint from the Roman catacombs and brought them back to the Frankish heartland. It reads almost like a medieval heist story, though the central mystery isn't if they'll get away with it, but rather how much they actually believe in the efficacy of saintly relics.

What really made this compelling though was the introduction by Paul Edward Dutton, who is a great guide on what to read into these texts. I also highly recommend checking out his collection of essays about the Carolingians, Charlemagne's Mustache And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age.

Podcasts: 

I listened to a ton of podcasts this week, so I'm just going to list those that stood out without comment:

Sandy & Nora Episode 146: NDP Convention and the Third Wave

Cushvlog: Tuesday Takes

The Bottlemen: Vicious politics ft. Felix Biederman

True Anon 150: And Then Something Strange Happened

Radio War Nerd episode 275: National Endowment for Democracy Part II

Habibti Please episode 27: The Battle of Algiers with Liv Agar and Will Menaker

Canadaland episode 365: An App for Landlords To Blacklist Tenants

Bottlemen: The Nygard Files featuring True Anon

The Forgotten Corner episode 35 with Naheed Nenshi

Mark and Carrie: A Cavalcade of Bummer