Summer reading 2021
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Paramilitary infantry of the Freikorps gather around an armored car in Berlin, 1919
This was a great summer for reading. I got through 37 books before my more or less arbitrary cutoff date of Labor Day, including a lot of very good history, and almost all of the 37 were worthwhile. Here are my favorites, sorted broadly into non-fiction (all of which are history this time around), fiction, and some old favorites I revisited.
Favorite non-fiction
My ten favorite books of history from this summer, presented in no particular order:
The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell—An interesting short look at the tension between two different philosophies of technology, warfare, and bombing during World War II—and the horrible consequences of the debate—told in the distinctive Gladwell style. A good, brisk introduction to these topics for newcomers. I read it in two days and reviewed it in much more detail here.
Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England, by Michael Livingston—In the Venn diagram of famous battles and consequential battles, Brununburh falls in the consequential circle but far, far outside the overlap. Fought in 937 between the army of King Æthelstan of England and a coalition army of Vikings from Dublin, Scots, and the Britons of Strathclyde, Brunanburh was a resounding Anglo-Saxon victory and helped preserve Athelstan’s united kingdom, a fact celebrated in a short alliterative poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later remembered in chronicle and saga. (The battle plays a large role in the story of Egill Skallagrímsson, for instance.) But despite this, and because of the trickiness of interpreting those sources, we don’t know nearly as much about the battle as we’d like, with even the location being in dispute for a long time. In Never Greater Slaughter, Livingston, a professor of history at the Citadel, makes a compelling case not only for a specific location for where the battle took place, but for a lot of other disputed or uncertain aspects of the battle. His judicious use of an enormous variety of evidence, his care not to push too hard on tenuous or speculative evidence, his thorough investigation of the ground of the likeliest candidate for the battlefield, and his clear and vigorous writing make this not only an excellent narrative of an important battle, but a good case study in how to do this kind of difficult history.
Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Frontier, 1944-45, by Prit Buttar—Research for a future project. A long and well-researched narrative history of the battles for East Prussia and Pomerania, German territories brutally conquered by the Soviets, at the end of World War II. This is one of the handful of times and places in history, in my opinion, where people experienced literal hell on earth. A grim and brutal story but one Buttar presents well here, with many telling quotations from the memoirs of participants and survivors on both sides. If I have any criticism, it is of the inadequacy of the book’s maps—a minor quibble but a constant bother in trying to place what you’re reading about geographically. Otherwise an excellent book.
Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, by Earl J Hess—A finicky, difficult, brusque, and gloomy man who could dish out harsh criticism even of his benefactors, Braxton Bragg made enemies in the pre-Civil War US Army and continued his parade of unpopularity right through the war. His difficulties commanding subordinates and coordinating campaigns did not help his reputation either, and post-war writers of the so-called “Lost Cause” school found in him an easy scapegoat for the failure of Confederate armies in the Western Theatre. I’ve always been curious about Bragg, as I’ve always had my curiosity piqued by what are obviously whipping boys, and so I’ve looked forward to Earl Hess’s reassessment of Bragg for some time. It didn’t disappoint. While not airbrushing any of Bragg’s manifest failures and flaws, Hess demonstrates that Bragg was also the subject of unfair, politically motivated criticism and backbiting and was a capable organizer and planner. His untimely death after the war also contributed, as only his widow remained to defend him against an continuously mounting tide of criticism and blame. A very good analysis of a controversial figure.
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066, by Marc Morris—An excellent narrative of my favorite period of English history. Morris ably describes the years from the Roman abandonment of Britain to the Norman Conquest by focusing on several key figures—kings, abbesses, churchmen, and others—as windows into the cultural, political, religious, and military changes wrought in those roughly seven centuries. Like Livingston’s more narrowly focused study above, Morris has authoritative command of the sources and makes judicious, careful use of them. It’s also a pleasure to read—not something you can always count on in a book on this topic. Highly recommended.
A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, by William R Trotter—An excellent narrative history of the Winter War, the massive Soviet invasion of Finland that was thwarted by the Finns over the course of several months of desperate and costly fighting. Trotter capably describes both the big-picture strategic and diplomatic side of the war as well as the gritty, grunt’s-eye level, which saw some of the most brutal and wasteful combat in the Second World War. A highly readable testimony to Soviet duplicity and Finnish guts. For a good two-book combination, read this alongside Jonathan Clements’s Mannerheim, which I read back in the spring.
The Hitler of History, by John Lukacs—A deep dive into the historiography of Hitler as it stood in the late 1990s, I recognize this book is not for everyone, but Lukacs’s encyclopedic grasp of the literature surrounding his subject, his historical and moral judgment, and the oceans of footnotes and asides made this an endlessly intriguing and surprising read for me. I based two blog posts on it—one on the popular conception of Hitler as insane and another on what Hitler has in common with the spirit of Antichrist.
Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, by Mitchell Zuckoff—An amazing feat of research and organization, this is a comprehensive look at the events of September 11th through the experiences of several hundred individuals ranging from businessmen at the World Trade Center and Army staffers at the Pentagon to pilots, air traffic controllers, firefighters, paramedics, cops, priests, and ordinary people who either ran toward the danger to help, barely survived, or did not make it out of the day alive. A hard book to read at times, but powerfully moving. I highly recommend it.
Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, by Tom Shippey—A wide-ranging work on the Vikings—not early medieval Scandinavians generally, the majority of whom were farmers, but the seafaring warrior class specifically. Shippey, one of the great Tolkien scholars, displays encyclopedic and authoritative command of Old Norse literature and other sources to examine the Vikings on their own terms, from the inside. I read this immediately after another study of the Vikings, one that claimed to do what Shippey does here but that had constant recourse to the language of the modern sociology department and woke identity politics—an annoying trait that will also instantly date it. So reading Shippey, who treats his written sources seriously and examines them on their own terms, was a breath of fresh air. This is an engaging presentation of how the Vikings viewed the world and themselves.
America’s War for the Greater Middle East, by Andrew Bacevich—A sweeping and comprehensive look at forty years of American warfare, from Jimmy Carter’s botched Iranian hostage rescue through Lebanon, Somalia, the Balkans, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq (twice) to the very eve of the 2016 election. (A source of bitter historical irony: as Bacevich winds down the book he mentions the frontrunners for the Republican nomination as of late 2015, a who’s who of the critics of Obama’s waning days but with not a New York real estate mogul to be seen.) I read this immediately after Zuckoff’s book above and as our final withdrawal from Afghanistan was turning into an embarrassing catastrophe, and Bacevich’s narrative of multi-generation mishandling of resources, misapplication of force, and constant, total misunderstanding of the enemy, the region, and the purpose of these conflicts was damning. Of course Afghanistan would end the way it did—it was ever thus. A grim but important read, and one I’d be very interested to see updated with all that has happened in the last five years.
Honorable mentions:
After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, by Samuel Goldman—An excellent Conservative critique of three different varieties of American nationalism.
Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, by Jeffrey Bilbro—Right up my alley. An incisive and constructive critique of the dominant and largely negative role news media play in our lives.
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe—Elite promotion of radical political causes and the patterns of failure built into bureaucracies notionally designed to help the poor, acidly observed. Still relevant. Goodreads review here.
Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, by John Lukacs—Meditations on the inherent failings of democracy, populism, and nationalism by a learned and witty reactionary. Worth reading in our present state of confusion about… everything.
The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic, by Ross Douthat—An incisive and balanced look at our tired, cynical, and above all repetitious culture. I just wish Douthat had the killer instinct of someone like Helen Andrews to make this accurate critique really sting. Been thinking about this one a lot ever since I read it.
Favorite fiction
Like the works of history above, these are presented in no particular order, though I have to say the first one is almost certainly the best fiction I read this summer.
In the Valley, by Ron Rash—A very good collection of short stories, plus a novella that continues a few stories from Rash’s novel Serena. Among my favorites were “Neighbors,” a Civil War story pitting a widow against a North Carolina Home Guard commander; “Sad Man in the Sky,” a profoundly moving story about a unusual helicopter tour of the mountains; “L’homme Blesse,” a story about a family mystery involving an inexplicable reproduction of the Pech Merle cave paintings in a mountain cabin; “The Baptism,” a wonderfully ironic historical piece about a violent ne’er-do-well and the preacher who unwillingly agrees to baptize him; “The Belt,” in which an elderly Civil War veteran struggles to save his infant grandson from a flash flood; and “In the Valley,” the novella featuring many of the characters from Serena. The novella steadily builds in tension and in gothic grandeur until a final, fatal confrontation. I read the novella in one go, late at night—the best possible circumstances for this kind of story. I mean to revisit Serena soon.
Beowulf, Dragonslayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff—A very good novelistic adaptation of Beowulf for young readers which, like Sutcliff’s version of the Iliad I reviewed during the spring, does not soft-pedal its subject or condescend to its readers. Goodreads review here.
Peace, by Richard Bausch—A handful of American GIs on patrol in Italy, probing for the retreating Germans, during a harsh winter in completely unknown territory. A well-realized setting, steadily mounting tension, strongly drawn characters who, like real people, are at first easy to place and then surprise you, and a compelling series of moral questions make this very short novel worth reading.
The Dig, by John Preston—The basis of the Netflix film, which I still haven’t seen, The Dig is a fictionalization of the real-life archaeological dig at Sutton Hoo in Essex, a dig that uncovered one of the most important finds of the early Anglo-Saxon period. The novel is narrated in long chapters by a handful of important characters, and is told with apparent simplicity but great subtlety. It was only after I read it and explained some of what it was about to Sarah that I realized how carefully constructed and meaningful it was. I aim to reread it sometime in the future—it will definitely reward it.
The Outlaws, by Ernst von Salomon—Ernst von Salomon was a 16-year old cadet in a Prussian military academy when World War I ended and he was almost immediately swept up in the post-war violence—pummeled by Reds on the day he learned of the armistice, joining the paramilitary Freikorps units and taking part in the suppression of the communist Spartacist uprising in Berlin, war against sundry enemies in the Baltic states, war against Polish nationalist forces in Silesia, and finally an abortive Putsch. From there he joined an organization called the OC that operated like the mafia and plotted the assassinations of members of the Weimar government whom the OC’s members viewed as traitors. Because of his minor role in the successful assassination of Walther Rathenau, von Salomon found himself tried, convicted, and imprisoned at 20. War, terrorism, prison—these are the three acts of his drama. By the time a despairing von Salomon was released, his world seemed gone forever, with figures like Hitler—whom von Salomon, a nationalist but not a Nazi, rejected—in the ascendant. Though von Salomon does not stop for the usual novelistic conventions like characterization and his more obscure references may fly over a modern reader’s head, the cumulative effect of this sort-of memoir, sort-of novel is staggering. One feels the weight of the disaster that has swallowed Germany, as well as the reasons someone like von Salomon—young, patriotic, angry and aimless, devoted to honor rather than to the imported liberal politics reshaping his country—would strike back against it. A gripping, chilling, and challenging book.
The Encircling Sea, by Adrian Goldsworthy—The second in Goldsworthy’s first trilogy (he’s just released the first book in another) about Flavius Ferox, a Briton in the Roman army. The plot is a bit more diffuse and harder to follow, and the writing isn’t quite as good as in Vindolanda, the first book, which I read last year, but it’s a gripping adventure nonetheless and I greatly enjoy Goldsworthy’s characters, not to mention the realistic look at a workaday polyglot army on a farflung and dangerous frontier.
A Most Dangerous Innocence, by Fiorella De Maria—A British boarding school drama about a young half-Jewish Catholic girl attending a school on the southern coast of England in the early days of World War II. She darkly suspects the headmistress of being a German spy; the woman is certainly an anti-Semite. The schoolyear starts badly and only gets worse—and more mysterious. Fast-paced and well-written, I really enjoyed this and intend to read some of De Maria’s crime mysteries in the future.
Honorable mentions
The Glass Bees, by Ernst Jünger, trans. by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer—An idiosyncratic work of science fiction in which a former soldier seeks out a job with a world-renowned manufacturer of robotics, including microscopic robots we would now call nanotechnology. An odd but eerily prescient novel. One observation based on a passage from this book on my blog here.
Touch, by Elmore Leonard—An intriguing departure for Leonard, a novel following a young man possessed of seemingly miraculous powers. I felt like the story lost its way somewhat in the final act, but until then it is a touching and often startling meditation on what miracles might look like in the modern world.
Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, trans. Stephen Dodd—Another idiosyncratic but incisive work, a darkly humorous story of a young Japanese man who, utterly stricken with ennui, offers himself for sale in a classified ad and goes on a series of sometimes funny, sometimes grim adventures as a result. Commodification, atomization, the false hopes of a liberal society—it’s all satirized here with hallucinogenic immediacy.
Rereads
Old favorites freshly revisited. Audiobook listens marked with an asterisk.
The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming*—The worst of the original Bond series, albeit not for lack of effort. Short Goodreads thoughts here.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by Ian Fleming*—Perhaps the last great book in the Fleming Bond canon, but certainly the most moving. Short Goodreads thoughts here.
Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh—Reread aloud to my wife a bit at a time before bed. Still hilarious. Short Goodreads review here.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis—Read for a second time to the kids for a bedtime story. One of the greats, and adored by both parents and children—something you shouldn’t take for granted.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—Reread for the umpteenth time ahead of the release of The Green Knight, which apparently impressed a lot of people who haven’t read the poem, but not me so much.
You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming*—The penultimate Bond adventure, and the last Fleming lived to see through the revision and publication process. Detailed Goodreads review here.
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway—Last read my freshman year of college, a time when I was utterly unimpressed with Hemingway. I now see that this is a work whose riches and meaning are utterly lost on young readers.
The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming*—The sad end to the Bond novels, a clearly unfinished novel that nevertheless has moments of the old Fleming pizzazz. Detailed Goodreads review here.
Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming*—A very good collection of Fleming’s Bond short stories. Goodreads review here.
Grendel, by John Gardner*—At least my third trip through. An old favorite. Short thoughts on Goodreads here.
Coming up this fall
Since my summer cutoff date I’ve already read the early medieval Welsh elegy Y Gododdin and I’m a good way into a couple of other books, both fiction and non. I’ve got more big histories ahead and I’m reading whatever fiction strikes my fancy at a given moment, though I do have one massive modern classic that’s been waiting in the wings the whole year. I hope to get to that before the year is out, and you’ll certainly hear about it here.
Hope y’all can find something good to read from among these. I’d recommend any of them. Enjoy, and thanks as always for reading!
