Summer Reading List 2025: Third

Under the wire once again. Today’s the last day, and I finished the last book last night. At last. I have reasons for my tardiness, and I hope to explain them in the near future. For now, let’s worry about reading.

Fantasy

Title: A Crucible of Souls
Author: Mitchell Hogan
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2013

I think I’m starting to experience fantasy burnout. I was very critical of Brandon Sanderson’s latest book a few months back, and he’s my favorite author. Mitchell Hogan might be a great writer, but this book ensures he’ll never get high up on my list.

A Crucible of Souls is a fantasy novel. Usually, I’ll be able to qualify "fantasy" with some other subgenre. Martin and Jordan wrote epic fantasy. Sanderson sometimes veers into science fantasy, if of a different bent than Star Wars. Brian McClellan? Riflepunk. Peter Brett? You could almost call his post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Here, I’m just calling a book a plain, vanilla fantasy novel without any further qualifiers. I feel comfortable doing that because it’s a very…generic story. There are few cases where I just never got interested in a book—The Waking Fire is one such—but I can’t remember the last time I was genuinely bored by fantasy.

And that’s because there’s just nothing here. A lot of words, almost no substance. A plot that barely goes anywhere. A cast of characters that sometimes seems like D&D pregens. (The orphan boy with hidden talents, the female fighter to show diversity, the necromancer anti-hero…) This really is the most generic novel I’ve read in probably 30 years. And the ones back then were Magic: the Gathering tie-ins!

Just so I don’t spend the whole post bashing the novel, let’s talk about the good points. First of all, the magic system Hogan describes is built around wards and runes inscribed into various materials. It’s similar to the wards of Brett’s Demon Cycle series, but they feel a lot more science-y. Although the descriptions were barebones, my imagination visualized them as something more akin to schematics than anything. And the narrative does reinforce that image in a few places. Very cool to my rational and geeky brain.

Another aspect of the magic of this created world is the perceived difference between destructive and creative sorcery. Many of the "craftings" (my ebook copy inexplicably had this word italicized in every occurrence) are made from wood or metal, and they have a constructive purpose. They’re lights or security systems, in effect, which only adds to the engineer-like flavor. On the other hand, "destructive" magics are banned, prohibited, verboten, and considered downright evil.

Here’s where the author had a chance to make a positive statement, but punted. The sorcerers of the major city that is the focus for the book’s action have a secret police dedicated to stamping out any embers of alleged destructive sorcery. Naturally, they have to use this same forbidden knowledge to fight against it, but what they consider destructive is…odd, to say the least. Elemental magic is prohibited, because someone could use magical fire to commit arson, for example.

It’s the typical progressive argument against gun ownership, merely transplanted into a fantasy world. At multiple points, in fact, Master Simmon, the teacher character who leads this covert ops team—that’s not even an exaggeration—states that destructive sorcery is banned despite its positive benefits, because some people might use it for ill. In other words, because a random thug decided to shoot someone, the rest of us can’t defend ourselves.

Indeed, the idea of disarming the populace extends beyond that, as denizens of the city of Anasoma, even including their cops, are barred from carrying a sword in public. Civilians can’t even carry a club. It’s a liberal paradise, really, but Hogan doesn’t do much to show why that’s a dystopia to anyone with any sense. Even those seeking to invade don’t care about the politics.

But that’s because he doesn’t do much to show anything. The city is depicted as a cesspool of crime and violence; the main protagonist, Caldan, is mugged in his first week there. It’s a place where everyone is out for himself, everything is bleak and depressing, and we’re somehow supposed to care about it. By the end of the book, I didn’t mind if it was razed to the ground, along with the rest of the empire.

If I sound harsh, it’s because I expected more. A Crucible of Souls got great reviews, and was recommended by people I usually trust. I figured it would be a titanic clash of sorcerers, an epic setting, and all those nice things. Instead, it’s a very generic story. The characters are cookie-cutter. There’s very little worldbuilding. The subplots don’t really go anywhere, yet somehow get bundled up at the end in a bit of deus ex machina.

There’s nothing bad about this book. (Well, maybe some of the prose, but I’ve become a terrible critic of that in recent years.) The problem is, there’s nothing really good about it, either. Except for the magic system, which is genuinely interesting and would give me enough material for an entire series of my own, very little actually stands out. At times, it feels like an RPG campaign that got carried away.

And that’s fine, if that’s what you’re after. I prefer distinctiveness. I prefer books, even fantasy novels, that make me think, that make me consider angles and aspects I may have dismissed before. Failing that, give me a story that’s a fun ride.

Maybe Mitchell Hogan can pull that off. From what I saw in A Crucible of Souls, however, I doubt it. This is a rare miss, and the only reason I finished it is because I didn’t have time to read a different book. So the Summer Reading List for 2025 ends on a down note, alas. Fortunately, the rest of my life makes up for it, as you’ll see soon enough.

Summer Reading List 2025: Second

I know I’m cutting it close. I have real-life things I’m dealing with right now that are just a little more important, so bear with me. And wait a week or so for the details on those.

History

Title: The Storm of Steel
Author: Ernst Jünger (tr. Basil Creighton)
Genre: Military History/Autobiography
Year: 1920 (tr. 1929, reprinted 2019)

War is one of the most pointless and wasteful endeavors humanity has ever invented. And World War I was quite possibly the most pointless and wasteful of them all. But the tens of millions of men fighting in the trenches of France, the mountains of Italy, or the dozen other fronts didn’t think so.

They believed they were fighting for a righteous cause, and that cause was, to put it simply, nationalism. The French fought for France, to throw back the invasion. The Germans fought for Germany, for the Kaiser’s honor and to right the wrongs of 1870. The Americans, latecomers as we were, fought to show that America belonged on the world stage.

Much has been written about the strategies of the war, of the machines and machinations it spawned. I could fill my room with accounts of the Central Powers and the Allies, of the 40 years of alliances and deals that led a simple assassination to set the whole world ablaze. (I even read one of these, The Guns of August, last summer.)

As well, reams of paper and gigabytes of now-digitized data can paint the tactical picture. Which divisions went where, which trenches were attacked when. What happened each time new technology entered the battlefield, whether tanks, airplanes, or gas attacks. There’s so much information out there that Indy Neidell could make a 10-minute video for each week of the war, and he almost never went into any more than the most cursory detail.

But so much media—and, therefore, so much public perception—focuses on these high-level accounts, these broad, sweeping depictions of trench warfare as a new variant of Risk, that we forget a very important truth. These were soldiers, not pawns. Men, not machines.

We know the Kaisar and the Tsar. We know Hindenburg and Ludendorf, Foch and Joffré. We know Winston Churchill before his later glory days. But we don’t know much about the millions upon millions who served under them, the unnumbered dead buried in unmarked graves throughout the French countryside, or the ones who made it home and got to see the world turn upside-down. Only a scant few heroes ever rise enough to make a dent in the public consciousness: Alvin York and the Red Baron are probably the only two the average American can even name.

Ernst Jünger tells the story of these forgotten masses through his own experiences of the war. He’s German, and that means two things. One, since he writes from his post-war home, his narrative is laced with the knowledge that his side lost. Two, his is a story not often heard in Allied countries. Some of that is through ignorance. Some comes from outright malevolence.

Jünger served through almost the whole war, showing up in early 1915 and taking his final action only a few weeks before the armistice. His tale winds through 18 chapters, but only a few actual battles. He was at the Somme, for instance, just as one of my favorite authors had been. He took part—indeed, showed heroism—at Cambrai and during the Germans’ last great offensive in 1918.

His is an account of the war from a small perspective. Never rising higher than lieutenant, he wasn’t invited to division-level strategic conferences. He didn’t know what the Kaiser was thinking. And that’s what makes The Storm of Steel so impactful. Here is the account of a soldier. This is a man who didn’t have the whole story. All he knew was that Germany was fighting, he was German, and he was honor-bound to defend his home. Even if they were the attackers.

It’s an almost too-simple belief system, we might think today. Our society has been conditioned over the past 80 years to reject nationalism. Indeed, national pride is outlawed in some of the same countries that were victorious over Jünger’s 73rd Fusiliers, and he would weep with the knowledge that his glorious Fatherland wants to ban the only political party that remembers what it used to be.

World War I marked a change in the way warfare itself was done. It marked the last true use of cavalry, and the first of a mechanized military. But it also illustrates how the culture of war changed in modern times. We know of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when hostilities paused for one night on the Western Front, and the soldiers of the respective sides greeted each other in No Man’s Land. Something similar happens to Jünger’s unit in 1915, and he recounts that he and the British commander finished the night by formally re-declaring war.

That might not make sense. They were already at war, weren’t they? And they didn’t have the power to stop it. But this is Ernst Jünger’s central theme: honor. The soldier, he believes, should have a sense of honor. As a good Prussian man, he felt he could best illustrate by doing, and his narrative accounts in the book are full of asides about which actions were honorable and which were the mark of a coward. He’s his own biggest critic, too, pointing out where he failed to live up to the standard he set for himself, even when it made no difference at worst, or saved his life at best.

Honor is dead, according to the Sanderson book I read last year. In the real world, we would probably consider it on life support. But World War I gives us our last good look at battlefield honor in action. Part of that is because of the parties involved. The English and German soldiers were cousins, in a sense, while the French were neighbors. Yes, they had names for each other (I actually didn’t know "Tommy" was the German nickname for British soldiers until I read this book!) and traded insults, but they did so in the knowledge that they were fighting…fellow men.

After WWI, that changed. Propaganda was able to reach the critical levels of today. Even by World War II, not even two full generations after Versailles changed the world, dehumanization through mass media had already begun its work, and the 80 years since have only made things worse. This has even altered perceptions of the Great War itself; The Storm of Steel is considered a dangerous book by leftists, precisely because it shows what a German patriot believes. And we all know that German patriots are evil, right?

In the end, this was not the book I wanted to read this summer. I was sick all week, I saw it on my tablet, and I dove into it during my convalescence. And I’m glad I did, because it really is a great book about what, I must admit, has always been my favorite war from a historical perspective. Ignore the people claiming that it’s fascist, or that it promotes Nazism. Ernst Jünger doesn’t do any of that. All he does is tell it like it is. Soldiers fought for four years, killing each other by the millions, because they believed they were part of something greater than themselves. The reason that sounds crazy to us is simple: we just don’t believe that anymore.

Summer Reading List 2025: First

And here we go. The first of the three this year was a total slog, and…well, you’ll see why. It’s not only because the last five weeks have been downright hectic.

Philosophy

Title: Republic
Author: Plato (tr. Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee)
Genre: Philosophy/Political Science
Year: c. 360 BC

Consider essentially the founding document of political thought in general, Plato’s Republic has been considered a classic for centuries, and it is now the oldest book I’ve read. (I never actually finished anything of Homer, and even the Old Testament technically wasn’t written down until around the 2nd century BC.) Although it’s not on the official "Great Books" list, most people would probably assume it was. I did.

This is, in a way, the origin story of a lot of philosophy we simply see as background noise today. The allegory of the cave, which has become popularized in meme format the past few years, derives from Plato, and specifically Book VIII of this work. Many of the concepts of the Platonic ideal also find their genesis in Republic, or they are simply spelled out best here.

That’s really all there is to the work as a whole. It’s crafted as a conversation between Socrates and some of his pupils, patrons, and general audience members, with the idea that the master philosopher is, in effect, debating Thrasymachus, who serves as a kind of foil to get the action started. The subject of the debate? Who has the better life: a just man or an unjust one.

Simply looking at the world around us would lead us to assume that Thrasymachus has a point when he says that the unjust man is richer and more well-off. Name a billionaire whose money isn’t at least a little dirty.

Socrates, serving as the author’s insert—prose wasn’t as fully developed 2400 years ago—counters by saying that, while the unjust man may seem to have it all, he’s actually poorer in his spirit, and thus he will never truly be happy. From there commences a long and sometimes tedious dive into philosophy as Socrates converses with Adeimantus and Glaucon, two of his host’s sons; their purpose is sycophantic for the most part, offering little in the way of argument but much mumbled agreement with their illustrious guest.

You might be thinking, "Isn’t this book called the Republic? So where does the republic part come in?"

Well, I wondered the same thing. Part of the roundabout course Socrates takes to make his point is a digression into the forms of government, and a thought experiment of making a "perfect" state. His—rather, Plato’s—ideal is a monarchy run by a philosopher king. (You’ve probably heard that phrase bandied about lately, too.) In the Platonic ideal of State, everyone knows his place, no one is grasping or cheating, and it’s a very communal atmosphere.

It’s also joyless, as Plato explicitly ejects any worldly pleasures from his state, all the way down to the simple joy of familial love. In a way, Plato depicts a dystopia, then tries to sell it as a utopia.

That should be enough to disgust you, but bear with me. The part that people, including a lot of modern philosophers, don’t get is that it’s an allegory, the same as the cave. The ideal state represents the Platonic man. Not a system of government, but conceptualization of the perfect man. It’s at odds with the Aristotelian ideal of eudaemonia, and it’s very…call it proto-Stoic, because I see a lot of parallels from when I read Meditations a few years ago. There’s that same emphasis on eschewing the worldly for some nebulous "perfect" source of wisdom.

I can get behind that part a little bit, to be honest. But the language it’s couched in is opaque at best, and it shows how underdeveloped philosophy was in those early days. Plato has first-mover advantage, and that’s why his works are given a higher dose of respect than we would probably allow if they were more modern.

I’m not saying Republic isn’t worth reading. It is, if only because it’s a justifiable classic. You’ll learn from it, because you’ll see where so many concepts we almost take for granted originally came from. The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the ultimate source work of everything from the Gospel of Thomas to The Matrix. The Myth of Er, which rounds out the book, served as inspiration for Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, among many others.

Republic is not, however, political science. It doesn’t describe how to achieve a perfect state, but a state of perfection. While that’s as unattainable as any Platonic ideal, it won’t stop us from trying.

Summer Reading List 2025

Sometimes I forget things. As I grow older, that’s becoming more and more common, much to my dismay. Fortunately for all of us, I didn’t forget that today’s Memorial Day, the start of the Summer Reading List challenge!

I was talking about it over the weekend, and I commented that I started doing it "maybe around 2019". That’s the forgetting part, because I didn’t start it in 2019. No, the original post is dated 5/30/16. 2016. That means this is the 10th Annual Summer Reading List! Hard to believe I’ve been doing this for a decade.

In that time, I’ve read a lot of interesting books, and a few that were…not very interesting. I’ve enjoyed the experience most of all, however, whether I’m reading Jules Verne, Marcus Aurelius, or some random book I spotted on Libgen. My self-imposed rules (which I’ll recap below, as always) are great for pushing me to try new things, and my changing tastes are evident in the "safe" picks I use each time around.

Looking back on the last ten years has also shown how I’ve changed. Early on, you can see the excitement of finding new things, of discovery and exploration. During the dark years of the fake pandemic, my bitterness and despair showed in both what I read and how I talked about it. And the most recent entries paint me as a curious mix of romantic and cynic, which isn’t far from the truth, I’ll admit.

Anyway, on to the rules. They’re a familiar sort by now, with only minor changes as I’ve tweaked them over the years.

The goal is to read 3 new (to you) books between Memorial Day (May 26) and Labor Day (September 1) in the US, the traditional "unofficial" bounds of summer. Southern Hemisphere readers get a winter challenge, probably a better idea because of the long nights.
A "book", for the purposes of the challenge, is anything non-periodical, so no comics, serialized graphic novels, or manga. Anything else works, including standalone graphic novels and light novels. If you’re not sure, just use common sense. Also, audiobooks are acceptable as long as they’re books, not something like a podcast.
One of the books should be of a genre you don’t normally read. For example, I’m big on fantasy and sci-fi, so I might read a romance, or a thriller, or something like that. Nonfiction, by the way, also works as a "new" genre, unless you do read it all the time.
You can’t count books you wrote, because they obviously wouldn’t be new to you. Even if they’re still being edited. Before you ask, this rule exists solely to keep me from just rereading my books.

That’s really all there is to it. I’ll post my thoughts on my selected books here, as usual, and on whatever fediverse account is actually working this summer. (Seriously, I’ve gone through 5 of the things since I started this challenge!) Feel free to post on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you like, too. Use the hashtag "#SummerReadingList2025" to spread the word. Most of all, have fun. This isn’t an assignment.

Enjoy your summer, enjoy your books, and keep reading!

Summer Reading List 2024: Third

Finished with about a week to spare. Good thing, too. I know next week is going to be awful for reading, and the weekend won’t be any different. Anyway…

Fantasy

Title: In the Shadow of Lightning
Author: Brian McClellan
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2022

I got this one for Christmas two years ago. Never actually read it, mostly because so much in my life was turning upside-down around that time. So I promptly forgot about it and, when Christmas of last year rolled around, put it on my wishlist again. My brother, always willing to try for a laugh, swiped it out of the pile in my room, wrapped it back up, and gave it to me again. And I’ll admit that I was fooled.

The book itself, now that I’ve actually read it, is great. Brian McClellan is one of my favorite current authors, because he really seems to care about his worldbuilding, while also being able to tell a good story without getting bogged down in minutiae. Plus, he specializes in a style of fantasy that’s post-medieval, more 17th than 12th century, which is refreshing and fun. If anything, that’s how I feel reading his books: like I’m having fun.

With In the Shadow of Lightning, that trend continues. The pace is lively throughout the book, and there’s almost never any real downtime. Things happen, and then something else happens on the next page, and so on. No long monologues, very few digressions. The book is long, but tight. I could easily imagine it being another 200 pages if written by most other authors.

The story itself starts out almost typical, with the fantasy cliche of an imperial hero putting down the wicked rebels seeking a measure of autonomy. Things go wrong quite quickly, however, and the main story begins a decade later, with that same hero now living in exile. He gets drawn back into the political game, and there’s not a minute where things let up from there.

Along the way, there’s a lot of fighting. McClellan is definitely a military fantasy writer, and it shows here far more than it did in the Powder Mage series, which was about a war! Essentially the whole book has as its main event a war between the empire and a neighboring country that has retained its independence through trade. Kind of like Venice or the Netherlands, is how I see it.

The lead-up to the war is part of the plot, so I won’t get too into spoilers here. I will say that I guessed "false flag" about five pages into the first post-prologue chapter. Not because it’s telegraphed, but the details simply aligned with what I know of how false flag operations are pushed. 9/11, 1/6, 10/7…anyone who really digs into terrorist attacks and assassination attempts will see that some patterns emerge, and a lot of those patterns point to the supposedly "random" shootings and "unprovoked" attacks actually being started by other agents. Agents of chaos.

Brian McClellan clearly also knows this, as he throws in every single one of the elements we now know to be signs of a false flag operation: a killer who just happens to be of a specific nationality, economic chaos at just the right time, conflicting or outright forged orders, media propaganda to hide the truth. If he isn’t making a statement, then I can’t wait to read the book in which he does.

And that brings me to what I feel is the worst part of In the Shadow of Lightning: the Ossan Empire itself. Rather than your typical fantasy autocracy, possibly with a secret cabal of ministers who are the real power behind the throne, McClellan just jumps straight to the cabal. Ossa is an oligarchical empire where the powerful families vie for dominance.

It’s more of a Renaissance Florence than a High Middle Ages England, in that sense. In the social sense, however, it’s closer to the Weimar Republic…or modern America. The nature of magic in the setting requires body piercings and tattoos, and that’s fine. It’s an interesting twist. But the empire seems to be a place that has given in wholly to decadence and hedonism. Religion has become just another form of commerce. Gender roles are completely absent.

So are sexual roles; essentially every character whose preferences are mentioned has no preferences. At one point, I joked to my girlfriend, "Everybody in this book is bi!" And it’s true. Combined with the guild family dynamic that is ever-present, and I got the same feeling as I did with The Expanse: this whole place is rotten, and there’s nothing even worth redeeming.

If that is another way of representing an empire in decline, then I’m okay with it. It’s a pattern that has recurred throughout history. The failure of the family unit, and the transfer of the nurturing role to government or society at large has happened before. It’s happening now. And the backlash from those who understand human nature has invariably been disastrous.

But this book is anything but a disaster. Read it for what it is: a fun, fast-paced ride through a dying empire, in a world where magic is flashy and deadly. You get some great battles, a lot of political intrigue, and even some Lovecraftian horror near the end. Just remember that the secret cabal of people who masquerade as normal humans to sow dissent and chaos, using degeneracy to bring an empire to its knees while controlling its government and economy from the shadows, is the least fantastic element of the story.

Summer Reading List 2024: Second

The world’s a mess, my life’s a mess, but at least I’m reading. Right?

Military History

Title: The Guns of August
Author: Barbara Tuchman
Genre: Military History
Year: 1962

World War I has always fascinated me. Ever since I was in the 6th grade, when I had a to choose a topic for a social studies project (that year was world history, and I had reached the early 20th century), I was hooked by the stories and the sheer scope of the Great War. My grade on that project was terrible—I almost failed, simply because there was just so much to learn that I couldn’t narrow it down enough, and didn’t have time to rehearse—but the memory remained.

Over the past decade, the war that had languished in relative obscurity all my life finally started to get back into the public eye. Mostly, that’s because of the centennial, the 100th anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in June 1914. That milestone brought about the desire to make new media, whether movies (1917), video games (Verdun and its sequels, Tannenberg and Isonzo), web series (Indy Neidell’s The Great War), or music (Sabaton’s…er, The Great War). Many of these are excellent, and I’ve spent the past ten years basking in the knowledge that I finally got to be a history hipster.

But I haven’t read a book about WWI in decades. And I hadn’t planned on doing so this summer, either, until Elon Musk shared a list of his must-listen audiobooks. Since I don’t really care for audiobooks—I’m a visual learner—I downloaded them in written form, and I picked the first interesting one I saw that wasn’t 11 volumes. Sorry, Will Durant.

The Guns of August is a fairly detailed narrative, drawn from diaries, newspapers, the occasional eyewitness report, and other primary or good secondary sources. Its topic is, broadly speaking, the first month of the war. In practice, it starts somewhat before that, with the death of Edward VII, King of England. His death, and his succession by George V, created a power vacuum in a geopolitical landscape that was already growing increasingly tense. Europe had four years until war finally broke out (ignore the Balkan Wars for a moment), but the buildup had already begun. Edward’s death, as Tuchman argues in a roundabout way, set Europe on the path to war.

Most of us know the broad strokes of the summer of 1914. Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. Austria demanded reparations from Serbia; recall that this was before Yugoslavia existed, much less Bosnia. Favors were called in on both sides, drawing in first Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain, then seemingly every other country in the world. Four years and many millions of dead young men later, the original belligerents peaced out one by one, ending with Germany signing the Treaty of Versailles.

As not enough of us know, that treaty was designed to be so ruinous that the German Empire would cease to be a nation able to project power abroad. Indeed, it was the end of the empire as a whole. Instead, the Kaiser’s rule was replaced with the decadent debauchery of the Weimar Republic, which served to suck out the marrow of the German economy while leaving its society fractured, fragmented. Exactly as we’re seeing in modern America, but I digress.

Anyway, Tuchman’s book isn’t about that part of the war. In fact, it leaves off as the Battle of the Marne begins, ending with a series of what-ifs that are tantalizing to the worldbuilder in me. What if the German armies hadn’t tried to do a forced march just to stick to their predetermined schedule of battles? What if Britain’s Field Marshal French hadn’t been swayed by a rare emotional outpouring from the normally stoic General Joffre? (Now I really want to write that alt-history!)

No matter what might have happened if things had gone differently in August 1914, the author makes it clear that what occurred in the weeks immediately prior to the German advance to the outskirts of Paris were pretty much set in stone. Before Franz Ferdinand was so much as cold, Europe was going to war. It was only a matter of when.

As far as the book goes, it’s a good read. It’s nothing brilliant, and certainly not worth a Pulitzer, in my opinion. The writing can be almost too highbrow at times, as if Tuchman is trying to capture the last gasp of the Victorian Era in words. To be fair, that’s how most of the major players talked and wrote, but readers even in the 1960s wouldn’t have been exposed to it except in literature classes. Certainly not when discussing military history. There are also scores of untranslated sentences in French and German, an oddity in a book written for English speakers.

The pacing is also very uneven. The Russians get a couple of fairly long chapters, but are otherwise forgotten; Tannenberg is practically a footnote compared to Liege. Conditions on a forced march get page after page of narration, including diary excerpts from soldiers, while the battles themselves are mostly reduced to the traditional "date and body count" sort of exposition.

If there’s any real critique of The Guns of August, it has to come from its very obvious and very intentional Allied bias. While the happenings in Germany and among the Kaiser’s generals are well-represented, they’re often cast in a negative light. When the Germans demolish a village in retaliation for partisan attacks, it’s a war crime and an international outrage. When the French demolish a village because they think they might need to put up defenses, it’s a heroic effort to save their country.

This is, of course, the same kind of thinking that still permeates the discussion about the Great War’s sequel. The "bad guys" aren’t allowed to take pride in their country. Their nationalism is evil; ours is sacred. (This line of reasoning also leads otherwise sensible people to praise Communists.) The simple fact is, the Weimar Republic was far worse than it’s portrayed, and the governments to either side of it on the timeline, whether Empire or Reich, were not as bad as they’re portrayed. Barbara Tuchman, being a student of her generation, can’t get past that. Even if she tried, I imagine her publishers wouldn’t let her.

Otherwise, The Guns of August is a worthwhile read for its subject matter. It’s a good look at the backdrop to World War I, something that occasionally gets lost among the trenches. Personally, I find it a bit overrated, but I’m glad I read it.

Summer Reading List 2024: First

It’s been about a month, and I finally made time to read something. Thanks to my brother’s timely discovery of a Youtube channel called "In Deep Geek", I got a little inspired for this one. Man, I hope that guy starts posting on a site that respects its users soon.

Biography

Title: The Nature of Middle-Earth
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien (ed. Carl Hostetter)
Genre: Biography/History?
Year: 2021

I don’t really know how to classify this book. It’s basically a collection of notes and scraps that Tolkien left behind. Much like his son Christopher’s History of Middle-Earth series, a ton of editing had to be done to make something readable. And…well, that didn’t quite work. The book as a whole is very disjointed, full of footnotes and editor comments and just a mess overall.

That makes perfect sense, though. Tolkien was probably the first great worldbuilder. He worked in an era without computers, without the internet. He had to write out his notes longhand. And there were a ton of those notes, because his constructed world began all the way back in the days before World War I. 1909, or thereabouts, was when he first started sketching out the conlang that would become Quenya. By his death, those earliest notes were senior citizens. There was a lot of cruft.

This book, then, is about organizing a lot of that cruft. In that, Hostetter does a good job. His is the job of an archaeologist, in a sense, as well as a forensic scientist. Oh, and a linguist, because Tolkien’s languages were ever the most important part of his creation.

The Nature of Middle-Earth, as its name suggests, gives us notes and drafts related to some of the fundamental questions and thorny problems Tolkien had to solve to give his invented world verisimilitude while also keeping it true to his long-standing ideas and ideals. After all, Middle-Earth is intended to be our world, just a few thousand years in the past. How many, exactly? It’s never stated anywhere in his published books, but this book tells us that Tolkien saw his present day—well, in 1960—as being about 6000 years after the end of LOTR. Convenient, that number, since it’s basically the same as what creationists claim.

And that brings me to the point I want to make. Our editor here repeats his own note a couple of times, emphasizing that Tolkien saw his world as a "fundamentally Catholic" creation. He was a Catholic, so that makes sense in some regard.

Much of the book—much of Tolkien’s corpus of personal notes—is thus about harmonizing a high fantasy world at the cusp of the Dominion of Man with the low, anti-human dogma of the Catholic Church. So Tolkien writes at length, and sometimes in multiple revisions, that his Elves were strictly monogamous, and that they didn’t reincarnate into different bodies. The men of Numenor were the same (except that he didn’t have to worry about reincarnation for them) because they had grown more godly.

In a few cases, Tolkien shows glimpses of a modern scientific worldview that was probably heretical in the churches of his youth. Sure, it’s all in an explicitly theistic framework, but he even accepts evolution for the most part; he can’t quite make the logical leap that humans are subject to it, too, but he meets science halfway, which is more than most would dare.

There is also a glimpse of what I’ve previous called "hardcore" worldbuilding. Tolkien was, of course, a master of that, but The Nature of Middle-Earth shows the extremes he was willing to go to for the sake of his creation. Multiple chapters are taken up with his attempts at giving believable dates for some of the events that were considered prehistorical even in the tales of The Silmarillion. In each, he went into excruciating detail, only to discard it all when he reached a point where the numbers just wouldn’t work. I’ve been there, and now I don’t feel so bad about that. Knowing that the undisputed master of my craft had the same troubles I do is refreshing.

All in all, most of the chapters of the book are short, showing the text of Tolkien’s notes on a subject, plus the occasional editorial comment, and the copious footnotes from both authors. We get to see how the sausage is made, and it’s sometimes just as disgusting as we’d expect. Not one reader of LOTR or The Silmarillion cares about the exact population of each tribe of Elves, or what the etymology of Galadriel’s name indicates about her travels, but Tolkien isn’t writing these things for us.
When worldbuilding, we authors do so much work not because we expect to show every bit of it to our audience, but so that the parts we do show are as good as they can be.

If this book has any lesson, then, it’s that. Worldbuilding is hard work. Worse, it’s work that accomplishes almost nothing in itself. Its sole value is in being a tool to better convey a story. Perfectionist and obsessive that Tolkien was, he wanted an answer to any plausible question a reader might ask. But he also wanted to create for the sake of creating. Remember that the intended goal of Middle-Earth was to become a new mythology, mostly for the British peoples. When you set your sights on something that sweeping, you’re always going to find something to do.

Summer Reading List Challenge 2024

Is it already that time of the year? 2024 seems like it’s just flying by, or maybe that’s because I’m old now. Whatever the case, it’s Memorial Day, and that means time to start a new Summer Reading List challenge! Take a look at the original post if you want to see how this all started. If you don’t really care that this is the 9th straight year I’m doing this challenge, then read on.

The rules are the same as always, because they just fit the challenge perfectly. As always, remember that the "rules" presented here are intended to be guidelines rather than strictures. This is all in fun. You won’t be graded, so all you have to do is be honest with yourself.

The goal is to read 3 new (to you) books between Memorial Day (May 27) and Labor Day (September 2) in the US, the traditional "unofficial" bounds of summer. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere reading this, it’s a winter reading list. If you’re in the tropics…I don’t know what to tell you.
A book is anything non-periodical, so no comics, graphic novels, or manga. Anything else works. If you’re not sure, just use common sense. Audiobooks are acceptable, but only if they’re books, not something like a podcast.
One of the books should be of a genre you don’t normally read. For example, I’m big on fantasy and sci-fi, so I might read a romance, or a thriller, or something like that. Nonfiction, by the way, also works as a "new" genre, unless you do read it all the time.
You can’t count books you wrote, because they obviously wouldn’t be new to you. (Yes, this rule exists solely to keep me from just rereading my books.)

Social media is an awful place these days, and even my usual fediverse haunt is in flux at the moment. I’ll try to post on my alt @nocturne@bae.st, but don’t hold your breath. Instead, just wait for me to write something here. Of course, you can post wherever you like, even if that’s to Facebook, Twitter (I’m not calling it anything else), or something weird like Threads.

Have fun, and keep reading!

Summer Reading List 2023: Final

Coming in under the wire yet again this year. I have my reasons, though. The woman I love had a lot of…misfortune this summer. A man I’m beginning to despise has denied me a fortune of my own. And then we have all those other trifling things happening in the world, but I digress.

Fantasy

Title: Dawnshard
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2020

Before I start talking about the book itself, I need to tell the story of how I got it. This was not just something I picked up on Amazon, you see. In fact, I thought it was an ebook-only release, since I’d only ever seen it listed with electronic versions. That, to me, meant that I’d have to give it a miss.

I prefer physical copies for multiple reasons. One is simple texture: I love the feeling of a real book in my hands. That’s why I was so excited to be able to get real paperbacks of Nocturne, Before I Wake, and my other novels. The pleasure of reading real words on real paper is something no screen can match.

Beyond that, I avoid purchasing ebooks because I know that I wouldn’t really be purchasing them. Because of DRM and other nastiness, electronic media sidesteps the traditional first sale doctrine, which basically states that once you buy something, you own it. Publishers, greedy leeches on society that they are, hate this, so they long ago introduced artificial scarcity into online shopping. (It’s not only in books. Steam turned gamers into a culture of renters. TV and movies are now primarily streamed, where their very existence is ephemeral and fluid in a way no physical copy could ever be.)

So I thought I’d never have a chance to read Dawnshard by "legal" means. But then my partner and I went on vacation.

We went to Gatlinburg in April. If you don’t know Tennessee, Gatlinburg is the closest thing we have to a mountain resort. Definitely not an Aspen or Lake Tahoe, but maybe a very slimmed-down Vail or Snowshoe. It’s a beautiful place for a mountain-lover like me, and it’s only about a three-hour drive from where I live. Ahem. Where we live.

In this little hideaway, far from the ski lifts that were closed for the season, the nature park with its four-hour line (and 60 dollars I’ll never get back…), and the bustling town next door, there’s a back road that leads through the Gatlinburg Arts & Crafts Community. We went there searching for fudge on the one rainy day of our trip, but there was something even better across the street from the mediocre fudge shop.

Indie bookstores are a dying breed everywhere, but this one seemed almost perfectly placed in our journey. I’d seen it on the map, so I knew I wanted to check it out, but I thought it’d be a quick little peek and nothing more. Instead, my partner found no fewer than six books that interested her, plus the self-guided journal I talked her into getting.

As my tastes are more eccentric, I doubted I’d find anything worth buying. Indeed, the fiction section was mostly full of woke nonsense, as is common throughout the industry now. What was left after I ignored all that didn’t leave me enthused: multiple copies of A Song of Ice and Fire books, way too much Stephen King, and a handful of oddities. And Dawnshard, in a pocket hardback format. I was so surprised that I showed it to both my partner and the bookshop’s sole employee—he seemed almost as amazed by its presence. And now I had something to remember The Next Chapter besides the freebie bookmarks.

That’s the story behind my copy of this book. What about the story itself, though? Well, it’s a typical Sanderson tale, really, just in a much condensed format. This is the first time I’ve read one of his shorter works—Dawnshard is basically an oversized novella, about the same length as one of my mainline Otherworld stories—and I have to say that the pacing is dramatically different.

The plot is kind of a side quest for the Stormlight Archive series. It follows a couple of random B-team characters (Lopen, the one-armed guy whose dialogue has a lot of made-up words that make me imagine him as Hispanic; Rysn, who was so forgettable that I can’t even remember which book she’s from) as they search for…various things. It’s a Pirates of the Caribbean bit of swashbuckling, in a way. Almost the entire story takes place at sea, far enough from the main series’ action that it isn’t necessary to read it.

Of course, knowing Sanderson, he’ll find a way to tie it into everything else. And I don’t just mean the Stormlight Archive, either. This is a part of his own little cinematic universe, after all, and there are vague references to the Mistborn books and probably others that I missed because I haven’t read them. These don’t overpower the story, because there just isn’t room for much more than name-dropping.

What I like best about Sanderson’s works is the worldbuilding. Even in its meager 280 pint-sized pages, Dawnshard delivers on that. As always, the world of Roshar baffles with its sheer alien nature. Now that it’s canon that this world is being affected by beings from other worlds in his shared universe, though, that takes things up a notch. Now we get to see his take on the old "ancient guardians protecting something too mysterious for mere mortals" trope.

As you may expect, I utterly detest that trope, and that’s because I reject its very premise. There is nothing in this world (or any other) that is too dangerous to be known. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is also humanity’s birthright. So you’ll never catch me rooting for the guardians, even if their intentions are shown to be completely honorable. In this case, they aren’t—that would make for a boring story, to be honest—and they’re thus the bringers of conflict.

All told, Sanderson handles that conflict well. He doesn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of battle (as he did in Rhythm of War) or lose himself in intricate plots. The pacing is swift, and the action flows in a way that even Mistborn couldn’t manage. Either he’s grown as a writer over the last 20 years, or this format suits him better than thousand-page doorstops. Of course, the prose is still a little clunky, but even that is improving. (On a side note, can somebody out there teach him how to make a proper conlang? From the names and the few words he tosses in, I assume Rysn and her people are supposed to be some kind of Slavic analogue, but the sheer lack of vowels hurts my head.)

Dawnshard is a good read, and a good way to wrap up an eventful summer. It’s nothing special or spectacular, because it just isn’t big enough for that. Instead, it’s…cozy. And yes, that opinion is very much colored by the circumstances by which it came into my life. For a book where supposed fate is a major plot point, that makes sense.

Summer Reading List 2023: Second / Great Books 05

Here’s a nice little bit of synchronicity or kismet or whatever you call it. The second entry in my Summer Reading List challenge for this year also gets to cover one of the slots in my Great Books challenge!

Literature/Theater

Title: Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite
Author: Molière (Jean-Baptiste Porquelin)
Genre: Theatrical Comedy
Year: 1664

Yep. I read a play. First time I’ve done that since high school, and the first time ever that I’ve done it willingly. Since I neither understand nor like French, I used the modernized English translation available from Project Gutenberg. I’m sure there are a lot of translation errors and cases where the original meaning of the text is lost, but…whatever.

Anyway, Tartuffe is basically the French Enlightenment equivalent of a sitcom. It’s a five-act play about an aristocrat of the time who has been swayed by the words of a so-called holy man (the titular Tartuffe) to the point where he’s willing to give this charlatan his estate and even his daughter. The patriarch, Orgon, spends the first three acts defending Tartuffe as his family and servants call out the man’s hypocrisy. Only his mother has his back, seemingly for her own ends—her intentions are never made clear.

As the story progresses, Orgon’s son hides in a closet to overhear Tartuffe attempting to seduce the lady of the house, Elmire. The young man then confronts his father with evidence of the hypocrite’s ill will, only to be cast out of the house and, in effect, disinherited. Elmire (who is actually Orgon’s second wife, and thus the boy’s stepmother) then goes as far as possible in letting the impostor seduce her while her husband is watching from under a table. That finally gets Orgon to see reason, but by then it’s too late: Tartuffe already has the deed to the house.

The final act is all about this bit of trickery, and it ends with one of the most blatant uses of deus ex machina imaginable: a royal officer (this is pre-Revolution France, remember) stops the eviction of Orgon’s family, saying that the king himself saw through Tartuffe’s lies. Then follows a classic "no, you’re the one being arrested" scene and a bit of moralizing about moderation from Orgon’s son.

All in all, it’s a very modern tale for being 350 years old. The scenario of a hypocrite or just a stranger with ulterior motives enthralling someone beyond reason with his words is commonplace in modern books and movies. (The first example off the top of my head is the character of Gríma Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, but others abound.) And the fact that Tartuffe is supposed to be a man of God only brings to mind the actual hypocrisy of so many evangelists.

But the comedic elements are what make the play shine even in written form. There’s this tension between wanting to be serious about the situation and wanting to tell it in a humorous way that just works and makes the whole thing a delightful read. It’s also pretty short—170 double-spaced screen pages on my ebook version—without a lot of digressions. Imagine it as a two-hour comedy movie, but one of those British-style comedies. While it goes for low blows on occasion, there’s a cerebral quality to it. Well worth checking out, if you ask me.