Summer reading 2022

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Well, that went by fast. The summer of 2022 is gone and I’m well into my fall semester now, so the time has arrived much more quickly than anticipated to recap the best of my summer reading. I read a lot of good stuff this summer and hope y’all can find something here to enjoy for yourselves.

As always, for the purposes of this blog “summer” constitutes the time between some point in May between the end of my spring semester and the beginning of my college’s summer session and Labor Day, an arbitrary but convenient cutoff point.

Favorite non-fiction

This was a fiction-heavy summer for reasons I’ll discuss below, so the pickings in history and other non-fiction reading are pretty slim. But I did have favorites and, in no particular order, these were the five best non-fiction reads of my summer:

Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl Trueman—The discipline of history began 2400 years ago with one Greek’s inquiries, an examination of the past best summarized by the question “How did we get here?” This is the most fundamental and profitable question a historian can ask, especially in times of upheaval—whether militarily, as in the days of Herodotus, or on the scale of an entire civilization’s understanding of reality, as today. Strange New World is Carl Trueman’s short approach to answering this question for we 21st-century folk, when 300 years of skepticism, hostility to tradition, a hermeneutic of suspicion, individualism, and relativism are bearing their most poisonous fruit. Light and well-paced, this is an excellent popular introduction to some important intellectual history and I look forward to reading Trueman’s longer, more scholarly treatment of the same subject, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this fall.

The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, by Jason M Baxter—I read this on the strength of Baxter’s excellent previous book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. His new book examines how particular medieval authors—Boethius, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and many others—shaped Lewis’s thinking on a variety of topics. A good short guide not only to Lewis’s worldview but to a variety of important medieval writers.

The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria, by Max Adams—Caveat lector: the emphasis here is much more on the “times” than the “life.” Covering the century or so around the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, Adams’s history focuses on Northumbria, a kingdom often overlooked in the rush to study Mercia or especially Wessex, and makes a strong case for the importance and uniqueness of the Northumbrian achievement. But as the author is an archaeologist, the human narrative is sometimes hard to track (it’s borderline “pots not people,” the besetting sin of archaeological writing), the archaeological material is thoroughly but sometimes laboriously presented, and Adams is unduly skeptical of much of the written evidence. My views on such skepticism are well known. Nevertheless, this was an interesting and deeply researched read and I found it well worth my while.

A Brief History of Germany, by Jeremy Black—A handy short history focusing primarily on “Germany” since the late Middle Ages and especially the 19th century, when Napoleon demolished the Holy Roman Empire and the nation-state we think of when we hear the word Germany was formed through revolution, nationalist upheaval, and war. The publisher advertises this book as “indispensable for travellers” but you’d better be a traveler who remembers some of your college Western Civ, as Black assumes a certain level of familiarity with the subject on the part of the reader. Nevertheless, this is a solid, well-organized overview covering a lot in a little space, with especially good chapters on the World Wars, interwar politics, and postwar divided Germany, plus plenty of room left over for some fun and informative sidebars on all kinds of cultural topics.

General Lee, by Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley—A short, engaging biography of Lee, primarily focusing on Lee’s campaigns from 1862-5. Wolseley was a British soldier with vast experience across the British Empire and met Lee while in Virginia as an observer in late 1862. His personal anecdotes of Lee as well as his outsider’s insights into the peculiarities of the American military situation—not only in the material, strategic, and logistical domains but in broader political and social conditions—are especially interesting and make this very old book a worthwhile short read even today.

Honorable mentions:

The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, trans. Yair Mintzker—A good concise history of the latter half of the Empire’s existence primarily focused on its continuously mutating political and religious institutions and the way they adapted to numerous changes and pressures, both internal and external. Dry but well-structured, informative, and insightful.

Being Wagner, by Simon Callow—This was my first historical/biographical reading this summer and I greatly enjoyed it. Callow’s writing is elegant and witty and I came away with a solid grasp of Wagner’s terrible personality—which Callow represents honestly and without excuses—and the broad outline of his life story. However, in reading about the book afterward and trying to run down more information on a few interesting side topics myself, I found that the book has some problems with accuracy and interpretation. I don’t think these problems are severe enough to ruin the book, but if you decide to check it out—whether as a fan of art, music, German history, 19th century Europe, or just good writing—be aware.

Favorite fiction

I read a lot of fiction this summer, but most of it was for a special project—about which more below—and even though those were some of the best books I’ve read in a while, I’m excluding them from consideration here. That narrows the field considerably. So here, in no particular order, are my five other favorite fiction reads of this summer:

And the Whole Mountain Burned, by Ray McPadden—There are a few ways one can approach a war novel. One is to minutely and exactingly create an entire unit and study the whole through a few focal characters, as in The Naked and the Dead or Matterhorn. The other is to focus narrowly on a few key characters and study their interactions and the effects of the war upon them, as in All Quiet on the Western Front. This novel takes the latter approach and does it brilliantly, presenting the stories of two soldiers, the veteran Sergeant Burch and the raw Private Shane, and one local Afghan kid, Sadboy, over the course of a year’s deployment in the most remote mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan. The result is a taut, economically written, but absorbing character study that proves powerfully moving.

McPadden is a veteran of the US Army Rangers and this novel won the ALA’s WY Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction in 2019. Deservedly so.

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie—I somehow made it to the age of 38 having only ever read one Agatha Christie mystery, Murder on the Orient Express. After watching Kenneth Branagh’s blah adaptation of Death on the Nile, I decided it was time to read more of Christie herself. I started here, and was not disappointed. Intricately plotted but briskly paced, I read this in a day—a rewarding read.

Spook Street, by Mick Herron—The fourth entry in Herron’s Slough House novels, Spook Street is perhaps the best of them yet. Like the previous volumes, it has a meticulously plotted story that unfolds in complicated layers over the course of a day or two. Like the others, it takes Slough House’s familiar cast of characters and puts them through challenging arcs as they variously cope with grief, addiction, failure, lack of recognition, or Slough House chief Jackson Lamb’s flatulence. But Spook Street also has some major twists and revelations that complicate not only this novel’s plot, but the stories and backgrounds of major characters as well. All four of the novels I’ve read have been good or great so far, but this one is worth beginning the whole series just to get to.

Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams—A brilliant slow-burn survivalist tale set in western Kansas and the Rockies about a decade after the Civil War. Will Andrews, a Bostonian reared on the high-minded nature- and self-worship of Emerson and Thoreau, heads west to find himself and falls in with a team of buffalo hunters whose expedition into a remote mountain valley he agrees to fund—if they let him tag along. Part Moby-Dick, part Deliverance, but with all the best traits of the Western, Butcher’s Crossing is engagingly written from the first page and slowly draws the reader into a hypnotic and absorbing quest for more, with a story and conclusion that feels both inevitable and surprising. I’ve been meaning to read this since I read Williams’s Augustus six years ago and am glad I finally got around to it. A genuine classic.

Last month I blogged about Williams’s use of sensory detail to create a “vivid and continuous fictive dream” in the mind of the reader. You can read that here.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith—The first in McCall Smith’s series of Prof Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld “entertainments,” this is a collection of short stories that form a loose biography of the good professor’s life before the Institute of Romance Philology. Light, humorous, with lots of good cultural and academic gags and some well-crafted cringe comedy, but often with a touch of heart, too.

John Buchan June

This was my special project, an intensive thirty days meant to do a few things for me: first, reclaim my birth month from tedious activism; second, give me a huge booster shot of good classic fiction in genres I love; and third, force me into a discipline to write about all of what I read before the month was out, with no room for slacking. It was a great success for me, being both good practice and a daily pleasure, and I hope y’all enjoyed reading along.

Here are the eight novels I read by John Buchan (the first technically being a spring read), with a link to the reviews I wrote for each.

Among these eight my favorite reread was Greenmantle, only barely edging out the first Richard Hannay adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and I have to admit a tie for my favorite new read between two Sir Edward Leithen novels: the thrilling John Macnab and the reflective and moving Sick Heart River.

I greatly enjoyed this inaugural John Buchan June and am already planning ahead for next year. In the meantime, y’all should certainly check out some of his work if you haven’t before.

Children’s books

I read a lot of books with my kids, but these three were fresh new standouts among this summer’s bedtime stories:

Basil of Baker Street, by Eve Titus—I stumbled across a nice hardback copy of this little children’s novel at Bin Time and picked it up. It was a fun, short, easy bedtime read for my two older kids, who greatly enjoyed it and Basil’s investigation of the central mystery (while also noting how different it was from Disney’s very loose adaptation The Great Mouse Detective). The Sherlock Holmes-related stuff was fun for adults and could prove an effective gateway to Conan Doyle for kids. We’ll certainly be seeking out others in the series.

James Oglethorpe: Not for Self, But for Others, by Torrey Maloof—A kids’ picture book about one of my heroes, the founder of my home state? I bought this on impulse when I ran across it on Amazon and wasn’t disappointed. This is a good child-friendly introduction to the life of an overlooked hero in American history and the story of the founding of the last of the thirteen colonies.

(And let me note in passing that one of the many pleasures of John Buchan June was Oglethorpe’s appearance in a small but important role in the novel Midwinter.)

Myths of the Norsemen, by Roger Lancelyn Green—I first read this children’s adaptation of some Norse myths and legends for my own enjoyment several years ago. This summer I reread it aloud for my seven- and five-year olds’ bedtime. Green very effectively melds the sprawling but fragmentary stuff of Norse poetry into a loose but coherent narrative that incorporates a lot of the best stories of the Æsir from both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson. My kids greatly enjoyed it, and I enjoyed revisiting it. If you’re looking for a briskly written introduction to Norse mythology written at a kid-friendly level that nevertheless does not soft-peddle the Norse gods and is deeply rooted in the original sources, forget Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and read this instead.

Rereads

What I revisited this summer (excluding a few from John Buchan June), all part of my ongoing project of making myself return to good books I’ve enjoyed before:

  • How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic, by Sallust, trans. Josiah Osgood

  • Deliverance, by James Dickey

  • Gisli Sursson’s Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, trans. Martin Regal and Judy Quinn

  • Das Nibelungenlied, trans. Burton Raffel

Looking ahead

I’m three weeks into my fall semester and a week into my fall reading, and all is going well on both fronts. I’ve already finished a couple of interesting books and look forward to more. I hope y’all enjoyed some good books this summer and that this list has given you a few options for the fall and winter ahead. Thanks for reading!