Summer reading 2026

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The last few weeks have been maddeningly hot and busy, so the descriptions in the fully assembled reading list below may be a bit more laconic than usual, but I had a very good summer of reading and am excited to share the best of it. I hope y’all will find something good here to read this fall or winter.

For the purposes of this post, “summer” begins with my summer in-service in early May and ends today, Labor Day. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Inklings Detective Agency, by John R Kelly—The Inklings, an informal club of Christian literary scholars at Oxford including, most famously, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and Owen Barfield but with many other, less appreciated members like Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Adam Fox, and Warren “Warnie” Lewis, are approached by a famous benefactor, a man long thought dead who asks them to solve a series of murders. A fun gothic mystery studded with literary stars like Dorothy Sayers and, in a cameo, GK Chesterton, the story is satisfying and the way Kelly evokes the world and personalities of the Inklings is wonderful. Full review on the blog here.

Watcher in the Shadows, by Geoffrey Household—An obscure zoologist living in rural England finds himself the target of an obsessive but careful murderer. Both have secrets. A gripping and surprising thriller, one of my favorites yet from Household. Full review here.

The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann, trans. Ross Benjamin—A fictionalized portrait of the great German film director GW Pabst who, after coming up in the early days of silent film and pioneering modern film editing, made acclaimed Weimar-era movies. When the novel begins, Pabst is working in Hollywood, misunderstood and frustrated. He ends up back in Germany just in time for the Second World War to begin, trapping him geographically. He also finds himself trapped artistically, convinced, through a combination of coaxing, flattery, and intimidation, to produce films under the Nazi aegis. Pabst, an anti-Nazi, tells himself is he not making propaganda for the regime, but his artistic singlemindedness rather than his ideology gradually compromises him. A brisk but rich novel with an incredibly dramatic climax—Pabst desperately shooting and cutting a movie in Prague as the Soviets take the city—and a complicated picture of a complicated situation. Likely my favorite novel this summer and one I had hoped to write a full review of here but, alas, I could not make time.

Bad Actors, by Mick Herron—Another solid entry in the Slough House series, with some nicely interwoven plots and good teamwork from a surprising pair of characters. The original protagonist, River Cartwright, is offstage for the entirety of this one but apparently returns in the most recent installment, which came out in paperback last month. Looking forward to it.

At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon—Portraits and incidents in the life of an aging smalltown priest. Not the kind of book I’d have ever picked up on my own, but when we finished our previous bedtime reading my wife asked me to read this: and it was wonderful. Fun, funny, peopled with charming and recognizable characters and set in a sharply observed Southern mountain town, it was also not infrequently moving. And in keeping with its main character’s vocation, the occasional meditations on Scripture and the faith were always surprisingly well-timed for me.

I, Ripper, by Stephen Hunter—A meticulously researched picture of late Victorian London and the events of the Whitechapel Murders, fused with an ably plotted and surprising thriller. Grim but engrossing. Full review on the blog here.

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway—A powerful novel, full of irony and pathos and regret, and a classic of modern literature. I hated A Farewell to Arms when I read it in high school but, over time, decided that I might have missed something. I finally revisited it this summer and found that, yes, the problem was me—namely seventeen-year old me. A reflection on revisiting the book after a quarter-century here.

Special mentions

Galahad and the Grail, by Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts—A birthday gift from my wife, who correctly intuited that it was right up my alley. This is the first (but chronologically third) volume in Merlin’s Isle, a four-book cycle of ballads based on King Arthur by Malcolm Guite. The story, which fuses and expands upon several medieval versions of the Grail quest, is epic-length but told in ballad stanzas that can be read silently or aloud to great effect, and the illustrations are magnificent. Guite follows more of the later Arthur traditions in reducing the role of Sir Perceval, in whose story the Grail first appeared, but the end result is still great. Beautiful through and through. Looking forward to the second book (chronologically the first), The Coming of Arthur, which is due out this fall and my wife preordered as part of my birthday.

The Odyssey, by Homer, a graphic novel adaptation by Gareth Hinds—Marvelous artwork and a respectful approach to Homer’s story distinguish Hinds’s adaptation from many other retellings. Even as a comic book, Homer’s power shows clearly.

Vita Nuova, by Dante, trans. Joseph Luzzi—A solid, readable new translation of Dante’s first book, beautifully designed and printed by Liveright. For whatever reason, despite loving the Comedy and reading and rereading it many times, I’ve always struggled with La Vita Nuova. I had no problem this time.

Favorite non-fiction

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan, designed by Quentin Fiore—Brisk, enjoyable, insightful, and prescient. McLuhan, extrapolating from his understanding of the mode of communication mattering more than what is communicated and from the history of such modes leading up to his time (1967), more or less predicts the re-barbarization of culture, the collapse of linear thinking and communication under the influence of interconnected information like the internet, and even self-publishing accessible to everyone. An important work that, given its loop-the-loop structure and sometimes jarring mid-century collage style (which, to be honest, hasn’t dated well), demands a reread soon.

American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington, by HW Brands—A solid new biography making extensive use of primary source quotations. Perhaps too much—there were a few times I wished Brands would simply summarize and comment upon events. But getting the words of the participants themselves is always valuable, and Brands’s approach to his subjects is largely descriptive, allowing the reader to see the people of Washington’s world as they saw and talked about themselves—a charitable and all too rare approach. The one thing that has most consistently challenged my Tory attitude toward the Revolution is Washington’s personal character, which Brands allows to shine. I find I admire Washington most before his presidency, when he allowed the baleful influence of Hamilton to warp the entire forward trajectory of the country. Brands’s brief conclusion, in which he sums Washington up as a man of a lost age who, through his peculiar strength of character and old-world virtues, ushered in a new world, is surprising but certainly right. Washington, for better or worse, helped create a country that would eventually prove unable to create men like him.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, by Jim Corbett*—My favorite non-fiction of the summer. Corbett, a big game hunter and conservationist who lived most of his life in British India, retells the stories of man-eating tigers and leopards and what it took to stop them. Moving, dramatic, and exciting. Full review on the blog here.

Chaucer, by Peter Ackroyd*—One of a series of short biographies by Ackroyd (another is his Poe: A Life Cut Short, which is excellent), Chaucer offers a good portrait of the poet’s life and work. Ackroyd pays particular attention to Chaucer’s connections to London (including the detail, which I somehow didn’t know, that Wat Tyler’s rebels entered London through the gate above which Chaucer and his family were living in 1381) and the strengths and influence of his work. I listened to this on a long drive and would very much like to revisit it in print soon.

Thomas More: A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Marshall—A readable succinct overview of More’s life and work—as lawyer, philosopher, writer, and politician. Marshall is especially helpful on Utopia, a book whose meaning and seriousness I’ve never been able to settle on, and the more controversial episodes of More’s career. And as much as I love A Man for All Seasons, Marshall also quite rightly pushes back on Robert Bolt’s admirable but foreshortened version of More, aiming to present more of the man rather than the seasons. With Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, which I read back at the beginning of the year, that’s two excellent little books on principled but doomed lawyers this year.

Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece, by Adrian Goldsworthy—A sort of prequel to Goldsworthy’s Philip and Alexander, this book begins in the Mycenaean Era, tracing the development Athens and Sparta both as poleis with distinct cultures and institutions and as rivals in prestige and military power. Goldsworthy notes that most of what we know about Sparta comes from outsiders and is correspondingly careful in his analysis and judgments but without chucking all of the evidence as fiction the way some postmodern classicists do. The chapters on Athenian politics, the Persian Wars, and especially the two stages of the Peloponnesian War—which Goldsworthy, contra Thucydides, presents as the result of a two-way contest in status and prestige, all Greeks being keen to be seen as excellent—are clear, vivid, and appropriately dramatic. I especially appreciated Goldsworthy’s emphasis on contingency and the role of culture—nothing in this book was inevitable, and what finally drove Athens and Sparta into a destructive cycle of warring was not actually how different they were from each other but what they had in common.

Tame Your Thoughts: Three Tools to Transform Your Mind and Renew Your Life, by Max Lucado*—A simple book about worry, intrusive thoughts, and other problems. Lucado’s emphasis on rebutting untruth with truth and recognizing how the worrier gets caught up in false narratives of his own creation is especially helpful. The second half’s thematic chapters offer more more focused guidance on specific problems.

Nemesis: Medieval England’s Greatest Enemy, by Catherine Hanley—A biography of Philip II Augustus, King of France for forty-three years, as seen through his decades of conflict with four Plantagenet kings of England—Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, John, and Henry III. The focus is primarily political and strategic, though Hanley does a good job of bringing personality and culture into her pictures of all the major players. An extremely helpful book; though I have been long familiar with most of this story I had always learned and studied it from the Plantagenet perspective, and Hanley’s portrait of Philip as both a cunning and politically adept manipulator—a well-established image—and a king willing to master the hard work of siegecraft and take the field with the army was a revelation.

John Buchan June

With this fifth John Buchan June, I’ve finally exhausted the supply of Buchan novels and dipped a little further into his body of biography. A solid set of more obscure works. John Buchan June will return next year, but in what form I’m not yet sure. In the meantime, all reviews are linked below:

It’s hard to name overall favorites with such an eclectic batch. The Half-Hearted represents some good early Buchan adventuring and Buchan’s two children’s novels, The Magic Walking Stick and the unfinished, posthumously published The Long Traverse, were both imaginative and fun. Probably the best book—considered as a book—was Augustus, an excellent and insightful biography that’s still worthwhile almost ninety years later, but I think I enjoyed The Magic Walking Stick most. Check out the reviews above!

Favorite kids’ books

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame—I read this aloud to the kids before bed over several weeks. I may have read excerpts in high school Lit but, if so, I didn’t remember a thing. The hype is real. The Wind in the Willows is a pure delight: beautifully written, strange and surprising, and funny throughout. I hesitated to class this under “kids’ books” but if there’s a children’s literature canon this would certainly be an important part of it, and rightly so. Brief reflection on how Grahame uses his fun, well-realized characters to introduce what in a lesser book might be called a plot contrivance here.

The Cow in the Dark at Night, by Jess Hannigan—An oblivious cow decides to stay awake all night to see what all the fuss is about and meets some interesting “night people” on her adventure. I can’t give anything else away—go into this book as cold as you can. It’s a hoot. A fun read-aloud for both adults and kids; I read this first to my wife after I picked it up at the library, then to our two older boys, and finally to our daughter, and all of them laughed out loud more than once.

Rereads

  • La Vita Nuova, by Dante, trans. Joseph Luzzi

  • A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway

  • Vincent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky, by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary GrandPré—Brief personal reflection on what this book has meant to me after a terrible bout of insomnia earlier this year here.

  • The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan—Reread for the first time since the first John Buchan June for an interview on The Wade Show with Wade, available here.

  • Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury—Short reflection on the book’s most accurate and realistic “prediction” here.

Looking ahead

Having reread a couple books from high school—one I hated, one I loved—to see how they’ve held up, I’m doing the same with The Guns of Navarone, the basis of one of my favorite movies but a novel I found disappointing twenty-five years ago. After deliberately trying to read some of the good history I’ve had on standby near the end of the summer I plan to read more this fall, and hope to take a crack at a second Chestertober after a year without. And of course I will read fiction. I plan to leaven the last couple years’ steady diet of spy novels and classic thrillers with some bookish novels—literature about literature.

I have big plans. I hope y’all will be here for it. In the meantime, thanks as always for reading!

The nature of such work

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The opening paragraphs of The Unquiet Grave, a 1944 collection of aphorisms and pensées by Cyril Connolly:

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Quite the opening salvo even if “an artist should always strive for his best” is not going to be a revelation to most of us, but the challenge intensifies in the second paragraph—to me the most striking passage:

Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never be undertaken. Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes.

This brought me up short, and not because I disagreed with it.

I recently read this review of the great film historian David Thomson’s latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies. The reviewer notes Thomson’s fame as the author of the massive and authoritative Biographical Dictionary of Film—first published in 1975 and now in its sixth edition—as well as what seems to be Thomson’s steadily increasing dislike of movies: “He has come to think of cinema as the cave in the Republic. Unlike Plato’s prisoners, though, who have no real idea of what is going on in the world outside, we have willingly chained ourselves in order to avoid thinking about anything external to the self. We have let ‘the lifelike’, Thomson says, ‘distract us from life’.”

I have to agree with more than I’d like, and I’ve slowly recognized a dissatisfaction—a falling out of love, in the terms of that review—in myself with regard to the movies. I’m not sure anyone noticed, but I didn’t write a movie year-in-review for 2025. I doubt I’ll have one this year, either.

But I don’t think I’ve arrived at Thomson’s place, not least because I still love old movies. So what if the new stuff is mostly terrible?

Well, it’s the ephemerality Connolly notes that bothers me. If a cruddy movie nowadays seems like a waste of time, effort, money, and talent, how much more so when you think about what it will take to preserve that movie? Will anyone be watching movies in a thousand years? Will they be interested? Crucially, will they be able to?

The fragility and impermanence bother me, I think, because I spend so much time studying the Early Middle Ages. So little of ancient literature survived, and that thanks only to the enormous effort of anonymous copyists. Years ago in college I began to wonder just how well one of my own books would survive a similar chain of transmission. This was prompted by the unlikely duo of Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer. McCarthy, of course, was a textual and punctuation minimalist. His meaning comes from the words themselves, simpliciter. Foer’s books play all kinds of postmodern typographical games. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has a multi-page spree of a single unbroken stream-of-consciousness paragraph in which the lines slowly run together until the letters and words are indecipherable and, finally, a solid block of black ink.

Suppose a collapse comes, or simply a long downturn—not a bang, but a whimper. Which author will be easier to copy? Which is easier to read now? Everything I write now I write with a view to being understandable without accurate punctuation or things like the italics used for emphasis in the previous sentence.

Even one movie relies on so much technological infrastructure that I have to assume the entire medium will be lost someday. For those of us who love movies, are they worth the time? The effort? The mental energy? Digital versions will inevitably be lost, but will the physical films become just so much Linear A, or the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum? Assuming some future Canticle for Leibowitz society arises and is able to view them again, will even that be worthwhile?

This is worth thinking about, because Connolly betrays himself a bit in that final line. Potatoes may not last—you’ll have to grow them again, and you’ll have to eat again—but that doesn’t make them pointless. And isn’t even a masterpiece ultimately impermanent?

I have no answer to any of these things, but I’ve been more and more concerned with things that last. The digital age is the most ephemeral thing there is. Our culture is electricity. How long does a flash of lightning last? How much of it is left once it’s over? Look at YouTube, Tiktok, social media, and consider the nature of such work.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

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Jim Corbett was born and raised in colonial India and worked as an official for a British railway in the subcontinent for twenty years. He was a keen outdoorsman and hunter but not a professional. Despite this, in 1907, when he was in his early thirties, he was asked to travel to Kumaon in northern India to kill a man-eating tiger. The tiger had originally come from Nepal, where it learned to hunt humans, but its depredations had grown so severe that it was driven out of the area and into India by a mass “beat,” with hundreds of beaters walking in line abreast through the forests and fields to flush the tiger and run it out.

This, Corbett’s first man-eater, was the Champawat tiger, and by the time he arrived in northern India, stalked, and shot it, the tiger had killed and eaten over four hundred people.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon, published in 1944, tells this and several other hair-raising stories spanning almost thirty years, but Corbett, in a sign of his priorities and character, begins the book with an explanation of why tigers become man-eaters. Tigers and leopards do not normally eat people, Corbett tells the reader. They avoid humans. If a tiger begins eating people it has been driven to do so because of age, injury, or disability—something that turns it from hunting its usual prey in its usual style to softer targets. If your picture of the man-eater is Disney’s svelte and powerful Shere Khan, as mine at least partly was, remember that the Shere Khan of Kipling’s book is lame in one leg.

The Champawat tiger, he discovers, was an ageing tigress with two broken canine teeth. Another had lost an eye to a porcupine and had dozens of quills in the muscles and pad of one of its forelegs. Another was an old, slow tigress with a cub to feed.

Corbett begins with that long note on what causes tigers and leopards to eat humans and the book only gets more interesting from there. Though never laying out in point-by-point detail what signs he’s looking for as he stalks a tiger and examines its tracks, one picks up a lot from each story. In addition to the drama of the hunt—near misses, near-fatal surprises, and the suspense of searching, planning, and lying in wait—each story is an education. The age, sex, and size of the tigers matter as well as the local environment and what the local people do. Many victims are snatched from fields where they’re cutting grass or harvesting wheat. Others are taken while gathering firewood or cutting down trees. Each story is different and each, even if they have the same outcome, follow surprising trajectories.

But it’s almost certainly the drama that will lead one to pick up a book like this, and Corbett delivers. In perhaps the most thrilling hunt Corbett stumbles upon the man-eater he’s hunting on a rocky forested hillside, half-turned, with only one hand on his rifle and the tiger lying mere feet away. His coolness, experience, and skill are what save him, though I don’t want to give away how.

I’ve already mentioned Corbett’s character, and that’s an important part of the story and what it is like to read Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Corbett is no Hollywood stereotype of the big game hunter. From the start, hunting the Champawat tiger in his early thirties, Corbett seeks no reward and asks the government to cancel bounties placed on the man-eater. He respects the locals, knows their languages and customs, and singles many of them out for their bravery under the circumstances. One especially vivid example is a woman who, while cutting grass with her sister, saw a tiger attack and drag her sister away. Rather than run, she pursued the tiger and attacked it with her sickle. It was too late for her sister, but Corbett admired her guts and made it a point to speak to her when he arrived and to show her the tiger’s carcass before he left.

Corbett is also no braggart. Though exceptionally skilled he freely admits to mistakes—including at least one that, he owns with open regret, allowed a tiger to escape and kill more people—and tells plenty of stories about missed or botched shots and errors of judgment. Even when he records the dimensions of his quarry after a successful hunt he notes that the figures are worthless as they cannot be corroborated. His self-effacing manner also allows the book to be funny on occasion, as in one episode in which he takes multiple shots at a tiger that leaves and returns several times with no apparent effect, only to discover that he has shot at multiple tigers and killed two.

Another important aspect of Corbett’s character, and one that makes the book especially refreshing to read, is his dispassionate account of the animals he hunts. Whether tigers, leopards, or—in one outlier chapter—fish, Corbett describes them without anthropomorphism. This attitude conveys a respect for the animals and a sympathy that stops well short of sentimentality. Once a tiger has taken to man-eating, it must be killed, but Corbett does not approach his job as a game and the only satisfaction he takes in it is ridding the people of Kumaon of a deadly menace.

And Corbett never loses sight of that menace. He never ignores or downplays the human toll of the tigers’ attacks and narrates the killing and eating of dozens of people with neither coldness nor showy emotionalism. Sons, daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, husbands, and fathers are killed, and Corbett makes it clear that these are serious and painful losses. The story of one man, a veteran of an Indian regiment in the British army whose only son is killed just after enlisting, is especially powerful.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon mostly focuses on the stories of big cats Corbett was commissioned to kill, but one chapter concerns a trophy hunt for a huge, magnificent male tiger known as the Bachelor of Powalgarh, another—mentioned above—is about fishing, and the final short chapter is about Corbett’s late-life interest in photographing and filming tigers. (Here’s a sample of his footage.) Never concerned about glory or trophies, Corbett was a conservationist who wanted the best for both man and animal. While never blaming humanity, he points out that many man-eaters were made by careless hunting—taking a shot at a tiger and not finishing it off or overhunting a tiger’s normal prey. Fittingly, India’s first national park was named after him and, thanks to conservation efforts, now has the densest population of wild tigers in the world.

“[H]aving lived most of my life in the jungle,” Corbett writes near the end, “I have not the ability to paint word-pictures.” On the contrary. Corbett’s stories are a testimony both to simple, strong, unaffected writing and to a life well-lived. I’m not sure where I first heard of Man-Eaters of Kumaon, but I’m glad I did. While I expected it to be interesting, to my great surprise it is one of the most interesting and dramatic books I’ve come across in years. I highly recommend it if you need something to shake up your reading.

Goldsworthy on narrative and understanding

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Yesterday I started reading Adrian Goldsworthy’s latest, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry that Shaped Ancient Greece. Here are two good passages from the prologue and introduction on Goldsworthy’s approach and the purpose behind history:

First, on presenting history as a narrative:

This is a narrative history because this is the best way to understand a period and also because it is how all people live their lives, however confusing each person’s personal story may feel. Events occur and follow each other, and a thematic approach all too easily forgets this, turning people into bland groups or categories rather than lots of individuals.

When I explain my lecture approach on the first day of classes each semester, I make a similar argument, which I’ve explained here before (see the last link below): If I were to ask a student How did you get here this morning? or How’s your favorite football team doing? they would reply with a cause-and-effect narrative. It’s fundamental to us and our understanding.

Speaking of which, second, on seeking to understand the past as the basic historical act:

History must begin with the effort to understand societies that no longer exist and complex events that happened long ago. Only after this is done to the best of our ability can lessons be learned, let alone judgements passed; this book will do little of the first and none of the second, for the task of understanding is big and important enough in itself.

Hear hear. And having established understanding—not acceptance or endorsement—as the purpose, Goldsworthy tackles the question of relevance from a refreshing angle:

Our aim is to glimpse the lives of human beings living in these societies and see how they behaved as individuals and groups, for this helps us better understand ourselves. While much may appear alien to us at first, for instance the ready acceptance of slavery, the frequency of war, the open and unashamed celebration of victory, and the satisfaction of destroying enemies, the Greeks, Persians, and others in this world were not fundamentally different from us. Indeed, even where attitudes and assumptions seem very different, it is often more a matter of degree than anything more profound, and much that we take for granted may be more recent and less fixed in our own societies than we are inclined to think.

Per CS Lewis, we also live in a period. And as an example of the “matter of degree,” when teaching the Romans I often tell my students not to be too quick to condemn them for enjoying gladiatorial combat since so many professional athletes today die for our entertainment—just offstage, once we’ve used them up.

Athens and Sparta is very good so far. Goldsworthy has positioned it as a prequel of sorts to his Philip and Alexander and the two together should make an excellent history of ancient Greece up to the Hellenistic Age. I certainly recommend the latter and I’ll probably recommend this as well.

Goldsworthy’s remarks put succinctly some of my own priorities and jibe well with the quotations on historical philosophy I collected and posted here earlier this summer. Check that out if you haven’t, and check out this post on Goldsworthy’s interview with Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from May. And for another good meditation on the necessity of story in history, see this post quoting Wilfred McClay from several years ago.

Vincent Can’t Sleep

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I ran across VIncent Can’t Sleep: Van Gogh Paints the Night Sky at the library two years ago and checked it out to read to my kids. It simply but movingly tells the story of Van Gogh’s lifetime struggle with insomnia, hints at his broader problems with mental health, and suggests the role these played in his unique work. I enjoyed it, the kids enjoyed it, and we returned it to the library.

Two things have happened since then that have deepened my appreciation of the book, though. First, shortly after first reading Vincent Can’t Sleep to the kids I read Russ Ramsey’s Rembrandt is in the Wind, which includes a chapter on Van Gogh and his difficulties, and the followup, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, which is very specifically about pain and hardship in the making of art. Both made me think more seriously about Van Gogh’s life and work and especially his suffering.

Second, as I’ve mentioned before, early this year I got plumb worn out. I was tired and depressed and—the worst of my symptoms—I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had trouble sleeping before and even worked it into one of my novels, but this year I had real insomnia.

I’m thankful to say I’m much better—and perhaps I can tell the whole story of this bad winter and spring someday—but revisiting Vincent Can’t Sleep this week I had a much deeper understanding of the story it tells and, as moved as I was the first time, it meant even more to me.

The author, Barb Rosenstock, begins with Vincent’s childhood in Zundert, where, in the attic room he shares with his devoted younger brother Theo, he often struggles to sleep. He wanders at night, once going on a long midnight walk that inadvertently takes him across the border into Belgium. The night sky comforts him in ways daytime human company cannot. The story follows him to boarding school and his first job in his uncle’s art gallery. He is lonely, creative, and volatile. Because he scares his uncle’s customers he tries his hand at other work before settling into the life of a drifting artist.

Art helps him confront his sleeplessness. In a beautiful illustration of an adult Vincent staring into the sky above his Café Terrace at Night in Arles, Rosenstock tells us that “He discovers that darkness is not plain black.”

On the next page, Vincent lies in bed, “shut tight in a hospital,” the monastery asylum where he was confined for a year. This could be the darkest moment of the story, and yet it is here that Vincent, inspired by the view from his window and his lifetime of looking at the night sky, paints his most famous painting. Completing it, he can finally—in the book’s beautiful final image—rest, absorbed into and at one with the night sky.

The story is good but the glory of the book, what makes the story work so powerfully, is the art by Harry Potter illustrator Mary GrandPré. She successfully evokes Van Gogh’s style throughout, recreating some of his most famous landscapes as part of the storybook settings and giving cameos to other Van Gogh paintings in the background. It’s a beautiful book on every level.

But it’s that final image, the restless man at peace, having created something from his unrest, that moves me so much now. At the worst moment of this spring I couldn’t write—I could think of nothing to write and couldn’t muster the will to try. Then, slowly, writing became the best way to handle what I was feeling. Even dashing off a blog post here—“all this nothing,” in the words of You’ve Got Mail, another melancholy story, that has meant more than “so many somethings”—eased my mind. There were many nights through the spring when what made me sleep best was not meds or valerian root tea or the tight control I began exercising over caffeine and screentime, but simply having written.

I am no Van Gogh, but Vincent Can’t Sleep, in its simple way, has helped me understand him and my own life better, and to even more deeply appreciate God’s gift of creativity and how it can heal. Darkness is not plain black.

Fahrenheit 451’s most accurate prediction

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Having just read a book I hated in high school and found it, as an adult, a masterpiece, I decided to revisit a book I loved in high school but certainly haven’t read in more than twenty years: Fahrenheit 451. To be brief, it holds up.

Not to be brief, it is a commonplace of literary conversation to pit rival dystopias against each other. The two most frequent combatants are Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World. Questions of literary quality aside, people debate which of the two better predicted the present. Leaving aside as well that “the present” is a moving target and neither author really intended to predict anything, Orwell is usually praised for imagining the modern surveillance state and its dog-eat-dog culture of denunciation and ideological purity and Huxley for his vision of a technocratic, efficiency-obsessed state that placates the masses with entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and hedonism and—in starkest contrast to Orwell—for depicting the oppression of his dystopia as self-imposed, even embraced.

I happen to agree that Huxley’s insight into the willingness of the masses to be oppressed as long as they can enjoy themselves marks Brave New World as more likely than Nineteen Eighty-Four, if not a better novel. But I think even Huxley misses a piece of the dystopian picture that Bradbury nails in Fahrenheit 451.

First, note that Fahrenheit 451, per Bradbury himself, is “not about censorship” but “the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news and the proliferation of giant screens.”

Bradbury’s book aligns with Orwell’s in the mobilization of the masses as part of a program of surveillance—the scene in which a news program orders everyone in a neighborhood to look outside at the same time in an attempt to catch Montag and the people robotically obey is chilling, one of the most memorable in the novel—and with Huxley’s in the self-imposed nature of that surveillance. Rather than monitor everyone, all the time, the unseen, unnamed authorities who dispatch the firemen rely on informers. Why would people go along with that, especially as enthusiastically as the informants in the novel do?

Because they don’t want to be bothered, upset, or offended. Bradbury makes this point several times. Literature goes away because it’s too challenging, people are too likely to read things that upset them, and when they drift instead to easy, bland, mass-produced visual entertainment the government doesn’t even have to ban books, the people simply stop reading them—all except a few weirdos whom it is easy to crush as dangers to placid minds of the compliant.

But the most accurate, realistic detail of the entire Fahrenheit 451 scenario is not the surveillance or the ease with which the public can be offended or even how easily they can be manipulated, but just how embarrassingly tawdry the people’s entertainment is. Huxley imagines a world in which people have given up freedom—even the freedom to make their own families—for drugs and orgies. Bradbury correctly intuits that people will sell their freedom much more cheaply. The people of Fahrenheit 451 want interactive daytime TV, nonstop music piped directly into their ears, constant affirmation, and the biggest, brightest, most immersive screens possible. Then they sit there, existing.

If you want an eerily accurate prediction from one of these books, the zoned-out, enervated, and completely empty minds of Mildred and her friends—who even, based on the question “Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night?” enjoy short-form video content!—should meet all requirements.

Montag’s wife Mildred is pathetic not because she is unfree and infuriating not because she rats Montag out, but because she has bargained away her soul for a mess of pottage. Less than that, actually—pottage would at least be nourishing.

Toad ex machina

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For the last couple months I’ve been slowly reading The Wind in the Willows to the kids before bedtime. Last night we finished the penultimate chapter, in which Toad, having escaped from prison and reached Rat’s riverbank hole after a madcap cross-country chase in disguise, learns that Toad Hall has been taken over by the stoats and weasels who live in the woods. They’re living off the fat of Toad’s patrimony and wrecking his house, and, what is more, have guards posted and regular patrols around the perimeter of the property.

Rat and Badger rule out a direct attack. The stoats on guard duty will warn the weasels, who will be ready and waiting—provided Toad and company ever get past the guards. Despite Rat’s passion for weaponry of all kinds, they’re outnumbered and outgunned by opponents who have no scruples. How will they ever get in and reclaim Toad Hall?

Then we read this exchange and revelation:

“Then it’s all over,” sobbed the Toad, crying into the sofa cushions. “I shall go and enlist for a soldier, and never see my dear Toad Hall any more!”

“Come, cheer up, Toady!” said the Badger. “There are more ways of getting back a place than taking it by storm. I haven’t said my last word yet. Now I’m going to tell you a great secret.”

Toad sat up slowly and dried his eyes. Secrets had an immense attraction for him, because he never could keep one, and he enjoyed the sort of unhallowed thrill he experienced when he went and told another animal, after having faithfully promised not to.

“There—is—an—underground—passage,” said the Badger, impressively, “that leads from the river-bank, quite near here, right up into the middle of Toad Hall.”

“O, nonsense! Badger,” said Toad, rather airily. “You’ve been listening to some of the yarns they spin in the public-houses about here. I know every inch of Toad Hall, inside and out. Nothing of the sort, I do assure you!”

“My young friend,” said the Badger, with great severity, “your father, who was a worthy animal—a lot worthier than some others I know—was a particular friend of mine, and told me a great deal he wouldn’t have dreamt of telling you. He discovered that passage—he didn’t make it, of course; that was done hundreds of years before he ever came to live there—and he repaired it and cleaned it out, because he thought it might come in useful some day, in case of trouble or danger; and he showed it to me. ‘Don’t let my son know about it,’ he said. ‘He’s a good boy, but very light and volatile in character, and simply cannot hold his tongue. If he’s ever in a real fix, and it would be of use to him, you may tell him about the secret passage; but not before.’”

Now for an odd comparison:

One of the great weaknesses of Ready Player One is that every time narrator Wade Watts meets some hitherto unprecedented challenge, something that should pose a problem and complicate his quest, he waves dismissively to the reader and lets us know he actually mastered whatever skill is required to complete it—playing an obscure arcade game, watching every episode of some trash 80s sitcom multiple times, memorizing every line of Monty Python and the Holy Grail—ages ago. No biggie. Very convenient.

Wade has a stash of knowledge and skills he only mentions once it becomes relevant. Ordinarily something like this should be set up or at least mentioned beforehand, as in a fair-play mystery. (Contrast this with the best Harry Potter novel, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Rowling performs dazzling sleight-of-plot with all but a few key elements plainly visible from the beginning.) What Ready Player One does is not exactly deus ex machina, but it feels both contrived and lazy and it’s all too common in bad fiction.

Badger’s revelation in Wind in the Willows, on the other hand, which similarly introduces a solution to a thorny problem just as it seems impossible, works. It works because the way the information is revealed is rooted in the characters. We know Toad all too well by this chapter—of course if there were a secret passage no one would tell him. And we know Badger both through his actions and his reputation among the other animals—of course if there were a secret passage he would be the best person to trust with the secret. It feels natural and therefore credible not because the secret passage was set up beforehand, but because of what we have seen of the characters all the way through.

The other animals looked hard at Toad to see how he would take it. Toad was inclined to be sulky at first; but he brightened up immediately, like the good fellow he was.

“Well, well,” he said; “perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am—my friends get round me—we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories—and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be. Never mind. Go on, Badger. How’s this passage of yours going to help us?”

That Kenneth Grahame is able to get some laughs—again, rooted in character—out of this plot point is just the icing on the cake.

A weird, unique, brilliant, funny, and fun little novel, and so much better written and plotted than a lot of fiction today. (This climactic section is also quite consciously modeled on the Odyssey, something even my kids picked up on. Perhaps material for a future post.) I’m glad I’m finally reading it and hope to finish it tonight.

Bird dreams

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Falconry in the Codex Manesse

Last night I took Catherine Hanley’s recent book about Philip Augustus and the Plantagenets Nemesis: Medieval England’s Greatest Enemy down from the shelf for (possibly) my next read. While leafing through it again, I paused over the epigraph Hanley chose, a passage from Gerald of Wales:

A certain monk, lying in his bed, was thinking a great deal about the sons of King Henry, three such outstanding knights and the fourth and younger likewise, and how there was no ruler on earth who enjoyed such offspring, and what would be their future. Eventually he slept, and it seemed to him that he saw on the bank of the river four birds sitting, namely males of the ducks who the common people call mallards. And although those birds are by nature very beautiful, a voice said to him: ‘Do you see those birds? They are the sons of King Henry, whom you were thinking about. And do you want to see their future? Look up for a moment.’

When he did this, he saw the bird called the falcon above in the sky flying on swift wings, and immediately those four birds, one after the other, suddenly submerged themselves in the water of the river as if in fear of that bird, and afterwards appeared no more. And at once the voice added: ‘Do you wish to know who is that bird flying overhead? Assuredly, it is Philip, son of the king of France.’

Dreams are, of course, a constant in my life and a preoccupation of mine, so I found this an interesting choice to open the book. The nature of the dream also struck me. Likely thanks to Donald and Daffy ducks don’t seem portentous animals to us, but they feature quite dramatically as prey here. A further curiosity: in modern stories dreams are often left uninterpreted for maximum mystery and foreboding. Here the dreamer gets an interpretation before he’s even woken up.

Compare the Nibelungenlied, stanzas 13-14 in the opening “Adventure” or canto, which works as a kind of prologue introducing the beautiful Krimhild and foreshadowing her tragic life, here translated by Burton Raffel:

Living surrounded by splendor Krimhild dreamed a dream:
she had trained a falcon, glorious, strong-winged, fierce, and wild,
and a pair of eagles tore it apart in front of her eyes.
No pain, no sorrow in all the world could be worse than what she’d seen.

She went to Lady Otta and told her mother the dream.
Otta could only find a single truthful meaning:
“The falcon you train must be some noble heroic man,
but if God will not protect him, you will be sure to lose him soon.”

Here you get raptor-on-raptor violence and again, even if it is not in-dream like Gerald’s story, an immediate interpretation.

An interesting parallel, and I’m sure I know at least one other dream about birds that I can’t recall now (likely in Dante). Their largely vanished cultural significance—falconry being a favorite pastime for medieval nobility—also strikes me. Birds as both predator and prey crop up in medieval poetry a lot, but I can’t think of the last time I had a dream about birds.

How the crazies get away with more

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My paternal grandfather, who died just before I started this blog almost nine years ago, had a vast store of proverbs. Two I remember and have tried to live by: “Never underestimate the value of being the only sober person in the room” and “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” (I may have even dropped the latter in a department meeting this week.)

A strange coincidental parallel from this week that brought those to mind:

First, on Substack, cartoonist Owen Cyclops, whose work has inspired ramblings here before, published a short essay on the 1970s Illuminatus! trilogy. I am mostly familiar with these books for first presenting a kind of grand theory-of-everything conspiracy narrative, a major node the present-day conspiracist worldview has grown out of, but Owen notes three interesting but overlooked “freak concepts.”

The first—and I’m not sure how it fits into Illuminatus! since I haven’t read it—concerns one of my favorite historical weirdos, Emperor Norton I. Emperor Norton was a failed businessman turned eccentric who declared himself Emperor of the United States (and later Protector of Mexico) and benevolently “ruled” San Francisco for a few decades. He published imperial proclamations through a local black newspaper (once banning the use of “Frisco” as a nickname for the city) and issued his own currency. He was so odd and beloved that the locals played along and his money was honored in a lot of establishments.

Owen compares Norton and his Norton bucks to a group of contemporary anarchists in Boston who tried the same thing. They were, after the manner of so many 19th-century radicals, utterly serious people, and were arrested the moment they started trying to use their own currency. Owen:

The point of this dichotomy is that Emperor Norton actually did the exact plan that anarchists on the other side of the country also attempted and failed—but he got away with it, specifically because no one took him seriously.

The anarchists presented themselves as serious, and thus were treated seriously. Emperor Norton was viewed as non-serious, and therefore was able to accomplish far more than his serious counterparts.

Second, YouTuber Feral Historian, in the second part of a new series on Planet of the Apes—Pierre Boulle’s novel and various adaptations—notes the tension in the first movie between the apes’ consensus dogma and the challenge Charlton Heston’s Taylor poses to it: a challenge that provokes suppression by the authorities. In a wry aside, referring to the charges brought against ape scientists Zira and Cornelius, he says they are

nonsensical, but state accusations against dissidents often are. . . . All that is required is a story that lets it be wrapped up and disposed of. At least when it comes to polite company. The crazies can say whatever they want, that’s why they’re positioned as crazies. Sometimes it’s why we self-position as crazies. You can get away with more that way.

Lear’s fool comes to mind. Perhaps there is still a place for such—or, better, as long as there is a place, there is hope. A comfort to those of us who have always used humor as a shield, and encouragement to those of us not taken seriously. Never underestimate the value of being the only person in the room with a sense of humor.

And to conclude with another proverb: “The truth is often spoken in jest.”

“Disproving” Lord of the Flies

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I’m not sure how many people would say William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is one of their “favorite” novels, but its persistence on school reading lists and its resulting popular familiarity has given it a lot of influence. It has also attracted criticism, especially from those who, in our sentimental age, find it too “depressing” or “pessimistic.” The deeper critics will sometimes invoke a Rousseauian image of man as “basically good” and condemn Golding for his refusal to acknowledge this. I don’t have much to say in response to this; whether you believe in original sin or not, if you can’t see the potential in yourself to succumb to Lord of the Flies-like pressures, Golding’s book is the medicine you need.

A popular recent line of critique I’ve seen—especially on social media—is that a real-life incident from shortly after the book’s publication “disproves” or shows it to be unrealistic. In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys ran away from their boarding school in a stolen boat and, after being stranded on a desert island, lived fifteen months. They cooperated in finding food and shelter, established orderly routines, and, when finally discovered by a passing Australian fisherman, were in good health and high spirits.

I first recall seeing this argument around the time this Guardian piece came out in May 2020 (rough timing for someone flogging a “hopeful” history of mankind), but it comes up in cycles on Substack. It is usually presented as decisive, a gotcha for Golding and all the doomers who like his novel or at least found it compelling food for thought.

This is a weak argument and a poor comparison. The situation of the Tongan castaways is only superficially similar to Golding’s scenario—basically the only parallels are the school-age boys on an uninhabited Pacific island. The scale and circumstances are fundamentally different.

Consider: in the real-life incident, six teenage boys from similar backgrounds who were already friends planned and voluntarily ran away from their school. They brought preexisting community and shared goals to the island with them. Both collaboration and negotiation occurred at the level of intimate friendship.

In Lord of the Flies, dozens of boys, only some of whom actually know each other, are thrown together by happenstance when their plane is brought down in an apparent nuclear war. Their ages vary much more, they come from different backgrounds—the class and regional difference evinced by Piggy’s pronunciation of asthma is a significant repeated joke—and the only bonds they share are either created deliberately after the crash, as in the friendship of Ralph and Piggy or the entire community itself, or small preexisting cliques, like Jack and his crew of choirboys. Loyalty to these groups has to be subordinated to the whole, competing interests debated and judged, and peace maintained between strangers and enemies.

Golding is quite clearly concerned with the artificiality of society, which, to rise above the level of a mere organic group of friends, must combine and coordinate multiple such groups. The island setting is both a spoof of Victorian Robinsonades, novels in which decent chaps effortlessly remake civilization on remote islands, and a jab at the Enlightenment “state of nature” idea that undergirded them—and modern optimistic critics of the novel.

There may be legitimate lines of criticism to explore regarding Lord of the Flies—although not regarding its craft or magnificent science-fiction atmosphere—or the philosophical assumptions and worldview Golding expresses in it, but this isn’t one. The real-life Tongan boys’ adventure, as fascinating and dramatic as it is, bears more similarity to Huckleberry Finn than Lord of the Flies.