2025 in books: fiction

Gartenterrasse (detail), by Caspar David Friedrich

Happy New Year! After realizing yesterday that my annual reading list was nearing 5,000 words and wasn’t even finished, I decided to break it up and went ahead and published the non-fiction section. You can read that here if you missed it. Here’s the rest: fiction, kids’ books, and a simple list of the books I revisited in 2025.

As always, I hope y’all will find something good here to read in the new year. That said, in no particular order, here are my

Favorite fiction reads

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A lean, tight, dialogue-heavy crime thriller about a washed up conman trying to make quick money by playing different criminal elements off each other, some gormless hoods trying to run guns, and the authorities who are closing in on them—if they can just figure out who’s up to what. Excellent, almost musical dialogue. When I noted this in my spring reading-in-review, I wrote that it “reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard.” This summer I read a biography of Leonard (see yesterday’s post) and learned that, in fact, Leonard’s crime fiction sounds like The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It was a huge and openly acknowledged influence on him. A great short read and one I hope to revisit soon.

The Sound of Waves, by Yukio Mishima—Here’s a strange thing: a novel by Mishima with a happy ending. The story of a young man and young woman on a remote Japanese fishing island, where life in the 1950s continues, season by season, much as it has for hundreds of years, of love at first sight, of jealousy and gossip, of the beauty and resilience of local custom, and of the triumph of steadfastness. I think I read this in two days. It’s as powerfully sensual and moving as any of Mishima’s other work, but with a deep love of the ordinary.

Baron Bagge and Count Luna, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—Two novellas from a great Austrian writer. Baron Bagge tells of ill-fated love born in the middle of WWI and Count Luna, a post-WWII story, concerns an aristocrat who believes a man killed in a concentration camp is haunting him. The former is a beautiful, ethereal vision; the latter is a fever dream. Full review of Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review here.

Game Without Rules, by Michael Gilbert—Two retirement-age spies in rural England fight the Cold War on their own terms, and with no diminishment of their skills or intelligence despite their age. A delightful collection of tightly-plotted, surprising, and thrilling short spy stories that run the gamut of the espionage genre while feeling fresh and exciting throughout. Full review on the blog here.

Payment Deferred, by CS Forester—Mr Marble is a impecunious banker with a dim, eager-to-please wife, two growing children, and a few habits—drinking, photography—that keep the family cash-strapped. When a long-lost relative unexpectedly arrives talking of his vast inheritance and lack of connections in Britain, Marble, a passive man all his life, acts impulsively and aggressively to get the money he needs. He poisons the man. (No spoilers: this is all in chapter one.) The rest of the novel is the tale of Marble’s slow descent into greater and greater paranoia and bolder and bolder sin. Based on my reading of The Good Shepherd, a later Forester novel, Forester was biblically literate, and while Payment Deferred rarely brings up religion, it is thematically suffused with Old Testament observations: “Be sure your sin will find you out” and “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” among others. (It also brought to mind an old Jordan Peterson adage: If you think strong men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.) A grim but utterly absorbing 1920s British noir with a brutally ironic ending.

The Labyrinth Makers, by Anthony Price—A brisk espionage thriller in which the reemergence of a crashed RAF cargo plane from a manmade lake more than two decades after the end of World War II reopens the question of what happened to the pilot and why the Russians have always been so keen to find the wreck. The first of a long-running series by Price. I’ll be reading more.

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A brilliant novella about an orphan boy adopted and raised by the Comanches. Absorbing and brutal, with a strong touch of the uncanny, and sharply, powerfully written for maximum effect in a tight form. I read it in less than two hours but felt like I had spent the same hard years on the plains as the main character. I mean to reread it soon.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Foster, a British playwright, travels to an unnamed Eastern European country after of World War II to report on the Stalinist show trial of “Papa” Deltchev, a former agrarian politician accused of collaboration with the capitalist Western powers. Foster senses that something isn’t right—about the trial, about Deltchev, about Deltchev’s family, about Deltchev’s accusers, and most especially about Pashik, Foster’s repulsive local press contact—and he determines to get to the bottom of it. A good anti-Stalin novel—one that lost Ambler friends—and a good thriller. Full review on the blog here.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker—I made it to the age of 41 having never read Dracula. All through high school and college the received wisdom was that it was boring and dumb. Nothing could be further from the truth. This was a gripping novel, and the best evidence for its greatness is that I already knew virtually every beat of the story but still couldn’t put it down. A classic for a reason.

The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers—I had heard that this was Powers’s most horrifying novel and so far that’s proven true. This is the story of Michael Crawford, an English doctor who unwittingly invites the conjugal attentions of a possessive female spirit. After a horrific wedding night incident results in Crawford being wanted for murder, he flees into the heady world of the great Romantic poets Shelley and Byron (with a small but important role for my man Keats along the way). It turns out that they not only lead the original high-flown and debauched “tortured poet” lifestyles, they do so at least in part because of the attentions of their own predatory, consuming otherworldly lovers. By turns eerie and horrifying, with a thrilling descent deeper into the mad worlds both of the poets and of the ancient vampirical entities—I don’t want to give away who they really are at the root of things—this is both powerfully imagined and believably oppressive. As in, I had a few restless nights of sleep until I was able to see Shelley and Byron buried and our heroes freed of their possessors. Reading this immediately after Dracula proved a knockout one-two punch. The Stress of Her Regard is brilliantly done, and I think I’m quite finished with vampires for a while.

Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, by William Boyd—A new historical spy series about Gabriel Dax, a British travel writer, who is slowly pulled into the paranoid world of Cold War espionage—dead drops, surveillance, “artifice” (tradecraft), “termites” (moles), double and triple agents, clandestine weapons training, and betrayal—as well as a strange, shapeless romance with his handler, Faith Green. I’ve enjoyed these first two entries, which are short and well paced. Gabriel reminds me of an Eric Ambler protagonist in starting off as a naive everyman and, though gradually learning how to cope with the dangers of espionage, is a bit dense and sometimes makes decisions out of frustration or spite—none of which ends well. Boyd nicely integrates Gabriel’s missions with some real-life events in the contested Third World. The second book veers into some conspiracy-mongering territory, which annoyed me but didn’t detract from what a good read it was. Hoping for more in this series soon. Full review of Gabriel’s Moon on the blog here.

John Burnet of Barns and The Path of the King, by John Buchan—A rambling, high-spirited historical adventure in the Scottish Borders and a novel-in-stories spanning everything from the Viking Age to the American Civil War. Two of my favorite reads for this year’s John Buchan June (for a full list, see the summer reading list). Full John Buchan June reviews on the blog here and here.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle, an undistinguished scholar of Romantic poetry is offered a strange gig by an eccentric businessman: accompany a tour group to London in 1810 to listen to a lecture by Coleridge. The businessman’s engineers have discovered a method that allows for some limited time-travel and he seems eager to use it—for reasons beyond meeting literary greats, as will become clear later. Complications arise when Doyle is left behind in Regency London and desperately fends for himself through begging, where he encounters increasingly strange and unsettling people like Horrabin, the disfigured street-performing clown to who commands an army of beggars from his underground lair, or Dog-Face Joe, a predatory body-hopping werewolf. Their inexplicable activities become more and more threatening and more and more obviously magical. Intricately plotted, totally engrossing, and with one of the most satisfying conclusions in my year of reading. Another excellent historical fantasy, and close to being my favorite of the year.

Runners up:

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—A solid short novel about the unique environment and frustrations of Allied commandos fighting the Nazis in Albania during World War II. Full review on the blog here.

• A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—“Salvage consultant” Travis McGee travels to Mexico to avenge the death of an old friend who had gotten mixed up in some business involving Aztec gold. An involving and suspenseful crime classic.

• Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig—An involving, moving novella about the passengers of an ocean liner competing at chess with two men: a machinelike prodigy and a mysterious tortured man who, we learn, gained his expertise at terrible cost. Short, absorbing, and powerful. I mean to reread it soon.

• Call for the Dead and The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—Two solid early spy novels involving, in a greater or lesser role, George Smiley before the magnum opus of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The second of these two is an ironic take on the public response to Le Carré’s Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

• The Watcher by the Threshold, by John Buchan—A great early collection of weird fiction and horror from John Buchan. Some especially eerie stories about relict forces—ancient people, restless spirits—beyond the ken of modern man. Full review for John Buchan June here.

• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—Jim Dixon, a young, feckless historian at an English university, is up for the review that could make his probationary lecturer position permanent. You know what they say about everything that can go wrong. Surely my worst case scenario as an academic, and hugely entertaining.

Best of the year: the year of man and machine

As with my non-fiction post yesterday, I’m cheating a bit by naming multiple “bests” thanks to a coincidental overlap across a few really good novels: war stories of men depending on their skills, training, and courage to survive combat in unforgiving environments aboard sophisticated and dangerous machines.

Bomber, by Len Deighton, tells the vast story of a single RAF bombing raid over Germany on a single day during World War II. Deighton gives us the civilian and military authorities in an ill-fated German town, the Luftwaffe defenders both in the air and at radar installations, the ground crews and command staff at a RAF base in England, and the bomber pilots and crewmen.

The characters’ personal lives, relationships, jealousies, misunderstandings, and preoccupations—a widowed German officer who has just begun an affair with his housekeeper, a bomber crew about to fly its last mission, an insomniac pilot and his anxious wife who works at the base, a squadron commander who mistakes one of his best pilots for a leftwing subversive—all develop alongside their assigned tasks, so that this sometimes technical novel always remains intimately personal.

But Deighton’s omniscient perspective also shows the reader things no character could be aware of as the story unfolds, especially the interplay of unwitting decisions, technical errors, and pure bad luck that direct the bombers over a small German town instead of their industrial target—and this is only the largest and most obvious of many such mistakes, some of which no one will ever know about. A harrowing account of all dimensions of a single raid, Bomber is also deeply, bitterly ironic. It’s gripping from start to finish and very moving.

The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat, is another British novel of World War II, but this time about the Royal Navy and of almost the exact opposite scope of Bomber, encompassing the whole war for a handful of men. (Not all war novels are the same, folks—you can do a lot with the genre.) Beginning with Commander Ericson’s assignment to a brand-new corvette, HMS Compass Rose, in Scotland in 1939, The Cruel Sea introduces as well junior officers Ferraby and Lockhart and other key officers and enlisted men. Compass Rose has been assigned convoy escort duties in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic between Greenland and Britain, and as the war escalates the German U-boat presence increases as well.

Monsarrat conveys the physical and mental strain—and occasional excitement—of protecting the convoys and hunting the U-boats brilliantly, and like Deighton’s later Bomber balances the dangers of the war with the vicissitudes, disappointments, and joys of the home front. A powerful novel and rightly regarded as a naval classic.

Finally, The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin, is a contemporary novel of the US Navy, Somali piracy, Iran, and ISIS, but as a loose, subtle retelling of the Odyssey it brilliantly and vividly evokes the spirit and pathos of Homer. Bookended with a court martial, the novel follows aging Captain Stephen Rensselaer, who loses a cushy Pentagon job after speaking too honestly with the president. He’s assigned a dead-end final command meant to finish his career as an embarrassment: overseeing the construction and finally taking to sea the last of the Navy’s smallest class of combat vessels, a patrol coastal or PC he christens Athena. While at the dockyards in New Orleans he meets another marooned soul, Katy Farrar, a lawyer whose husband abandoned her. Together these two well-matched, intelligent souls kindle a poignant mid-life romance. What they had thought were their lives and careers have passed them by; they can start over together.

Then war with Iran breaks out and Rensselaer must put to sea, where he does combat in the Indian Ocean and even on land—engaging superior Russian-built Iranian ships, rushing to the aid of a cruise ship attacked by ISIS pirates, chasing after them when they retreat into Somalia with hostages. It’s technically interesting, thrilling, and emotionally rich and moving. I found the first part of the novel, when Rensselaer and Katy are simply washed up and finding each other, achingly moving.

You’ve probably picked up at least some parallels with Homer. There are more. But this isn’t a simple retelling or slavish point-by-point modern adaptation; you could certainly read The Oceans and the Stars and never catch the allusions. But they do enrich the novel and create dramatic irony and suspense. After all, the prologue details the beginning of a court martial, and the war keeps Rensselaer and Katy separate and vulnerable. What will happen, and how will they be reunited?

Despite their differences in time period, subject, structure, and style, Bomber, The Cruel Sea, and The Oceans and the Stars all offer interesting, compelling characters in suspenseful and deadly circumstances, with the former—character, family, relationships—only enhancing the danger of the latter. All three of these are stellar, and while some might resist reading novels like them out of some kind of Tom Clancy impression that war novels are all technical specs, ballistics, and tough-talking, invulnerable men, these showcase the richness of war as a subject for literature. Homer is apropos here—remember that before the Odyssey came the Iliad, the great war story.

Two of these I reviewed in full on the blog this year: The Oceans and the Stars here and The Cruel Sea here. Any one of these three would be well worth your time. I hope y’all will check one out in 2026.

Favorite kids’ books

The Reluctant Dragon, by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Ernest Shepard—I loved the Disney cartoon as a kid and only learned as an adult that it was based on a story by the author of The Wind in the Willows. A lark, and lots of fun to read aloud—which I did twice, once to my kids while camping and once to my wife.

The Green Ember, by SD Smith, illustrated by Zach Franzen—A fun fantasy series about a kingdom of rabbits at war with wolves and predatory birds. When the novel begins, the rabbits are on the back foot, their king having fallen and the kingdom in disarray, with isolated bands longing for the coming of “the Mended Wood.” Main characters Picket and Heather have a believable brother-sister relationship, and Smith includes numerous fun side characters like warrior and preparedness obsessive Helmer. My daughter ate these up and demanded I read them. I’m glad I finally got to the first one.

The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King, by Lloyd Alexander—A classic fantasy series that is well worth reading in its entirety, as my wife and I did aloud over the first few months of the year.

Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim—Another good entry in this series about a group of boys in Diocletian’s Rome solving mysteries and gradually getting to know the persecuted Christians in their midst. Just got my daughter the fifth and sixth in the series and plan to read them aloud to the kids in the new year.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl—Fun and bizarre. I had never read any Roald Dahl before last year. His status as a classic children’s author is well-deserved.

The God Contest, by Carl Laferton, illustrated by Catalina Echeverri—A picture book based on one of my favorite Old Testament incidents: the mountaintop contest between the prophet Elijah and King Ahab’s prophets of Baal. Not the kind of story that gets a lot of traction in our modern therapeutically-oriented Christianity, so this book, with its clear explanation of the handy victory of God in a competition for divine authority, was refreshing. A good read-aloud with all five kids.

Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Gareth Hinds—A good, atmospheric comic book adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean tragedy. I’m a big fan of Hinds’s work. Check it out if you haven’t heard of him.

Rereads

Lots of good rereads this year, with my two favorites probably being Emma and The Prestige, a book I last read in college and barely remembered. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Emma, by Jane Austen

• The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• Athelstan: The Making of England, by Tom Holland

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Looking ahead

I’ve gradually realized that I’m pretty bad at predicting what I will or won’t be reading over the next year, so while I have some goals and ambitions I’m going to refrain from sharing those. Like the mass of people playing “cheat the prophet” in that line from Chesterton, I tend to listen politely to my own predictions and then go and do something else. So we’ll see what the next year brings. If it’s a crop of reading as good as this year’s, I’ll be satisfied.

In the meantime, I hope y’all have found something good here to read yourself in 2026. Thanks as always for reading—your attention to this blog means a lot to me—and happy New Year!

2025 in books: non-fiction

Die Lebestufen (The Stages of Life) (Detail), by Caspar David Friedrich

Though this has been a rough break with lots of sickness I’ve managed to find time here and there to make sure I at least get my annual reading list put together. But I realized this afternoon, as I was about to rouse a couple of recently sick kids from their naps and go check on the two people who are currently sick, that I wasn’t quite finished with the fiction section and the total post was already pushing 5,000 words. So I’ve done something I don’t think I’ve done since the heady reading days of 2020—split the post in half. This evening y’all will get my non-fiction and “special mentions.” Tomorrow I’ll follow up with fiction and a few other oddments.

After a couple years in which fiction has threatened to overwhelm my reading in history and other subjects, I deliberately tried to steer back to a slightly more balanced mix in the latter half of this year. And good thing, too, as 2025 turned out to be a good year for great big literary biographies and shorter works on a diverse variety of fun subjects. I hope y’all will find something good here for next year. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Favorite non-fiction reads

A Time to Keep Silence, by Patrick Leigh Fermor—Beautifully written, evocative, and meditative account of Leigh Fermor’s stays in several monasteries in northern France—twice with Benedictines and once with Trappists—and his visit to the abandoned rock monasteries used by medieval Christian anchorites in the rugged hills of central Asia Minor. A brisk but by no means light read.

The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall, 1918-1933, by Frank McDonough—An exhaustive history, year by year, of the Weimar Republic from Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication, the German military collapse, and the armistice in the fall of 1918 to the first month of 1933, when Hitler’s rise culminated in his assumption of the role of chancellor. There are isolated passages on cultural trends (e.g. the “New Woman,” cabaret life, Bauhaus architecture, silent cinema like Metropolis, literature like All Quiet on the Western Front) but the emphasis is almost entirely on nitty-gritty party politics. Given the chaos and corruption of the Weimar Republic and the proliferation of parties (at least 41 in one election), McDonough does an admirable job keeping the narrative clear and understandable and emphasizes contingency throughout. A Hitler dictatorship was not a foregone conclusion. But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go. The pity is that when it went, it fell to Hitler, who only achieved electoral clout very late. This aside, The Weimer Years is a hefty expert introduction to an important period.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—A grim but necessary study of the outsized role of therapy and medication in the neuroticism, self-absorption, and worse among modern kids. Highly recommended if you’re skeptical of our therapeutic culture already or openminded enough to question the way therapy has become the panacea for everything we find disordered—or even out of the ordinary—about other people and ourselves.

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—A welcome biography of one of my favorite authors, a comprehensive volume that illuminates Leonard’s life, work, and craft in almost equal measure. Most interesting to me were the sections on Leonard’s childhood, education, World War II service, and early career—when he balanced a full-time white collar job, daily Mass, and raising a family with researching and writing the Western stories that put him on the map—as well as insight into his creative process, which changed in slow and subtle but significant ways over the years. Also entertaining: stories of his struggles against Hollywood, including the exasperating abortive collaboration with Dustin Hoffman that inspired Get Shorty. If the book lacks in any area, it’s in the personal as it approaches the present. Kushins gives good attention to Leonard’s religiosity early in the book, so what precisely turned him from a devout Catholic into a gentle agnostic in the 1970s? What was going on with his final marriage? We can only infer. That is, however, a minor problem in an otherwise thorough book. This was very close to being my favorite read of the year.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A study of the life and work of German artist Caspar David Friedrich, whose Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog you certainly know even if you don’t recognize his name. Strangely structured but full of surprises and insights. Full review on the blog here.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—Another of the big fat literary biographies I read this year. Not just thorough but exhaustive, Shakespeare having apparently tracked down everyone who had any connection whatsoever to Fleming and his family in order to get insight into the man. This is a brilliant portrait of Fleming, one that emphasizes the pressures and frustrations of his life—especially the domineering, manipulative mother, the wife who despised and mocked his work, and the onetime film producing partner who sued Fleming into an early grave. Fleming, in Shakespeare’s telling, was a gifted man who did great work in a variety of fields, not least in military intelligence, where he was one of a handful of people to know the whole secret of the Bletchley Park codebreaking program, but who lived a fundamentally unhappy life. Some of this was Fleming’s own doing, and the womanizing, drinking, and smoking eventually caught up with him. The Complete Man deepened my admiration of Fleming’s strengths and my appreciation of his work, but troubled me with his tony but self-destructive lifestyle. An absolutely worthwhile read if one can soldier through the genealogy and namedropping in the first chapters.

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King, by Dan Jones—A thorough, well-paced biography of Henry V that is both scholarly and approachable, though Jones’s decision to tell Henry’s story in present tense feels like an unnecessary gimmick. More importantly, however, Jones is evenhanded and fair to Henry and his time, avoiding some of the more popular modern misperceptions and false accusations (e.g. calling Henry a “war criminal”) and emphasizing his purposeful embrace of the divinely ordained duty of rule. A refreshing and worthwhile Late Medieval read.

The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History, by Robert Tracy McKenzie—A good brief study not only of the First Thanksgiving and the people who experienced it—Pilgrims, Strangers, and Indians—but of how history works and how and why people remember and celebrate the things they do. It also implicitly conveys a truth I realized long ago: the true story of just about anything is always more complicated and much more interesting than the simplified versions people fight about. If I taught at a Christian institution I’d certainly assign this for US History both to give students the straight story on the Pilgrims—and how little we know about the meal mythologized as the First Thanksgiving—and to give them the rudiments of historiography. An excellent little book. I gifted my dad a copy on Audible and he greatly enjoyed it.

The UFO Experience, by J Allen Hynek—An interesting account of some genuinely inexplicable sightings from an astronomer who worked for years, through much frustration, as an expert consultant on the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, and who sought to apply genuine scientific rigor to a phenomenon that was already evolving into folklore and crowdsourced mythology by the time he wrote this book. Also interesting as a window into a specific period of UFO history. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garrett Graff—Readable, wide-ranging, but flawed overview of the government and academia’s attempts—honest and otherwise—to research and understand the postwar flying saucer phenomenon. Full review on the blog here.

• Van Gogh has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being, by Russ Ramsey—Not quite as good as Ramsey’s first book on faith and art—which was easily my favorite non-fiction read last year—but a worthwhile read nonetheless, especially given its more specific focus on art and suffering.

• George Washington: The Founding Father, by Paul Johnson—A good short biography by one of the masters of the good short biography. Thorough (for its length) and, more importantly, evenhanded.

• Frederica: Colonial Fort and Town, by Trevor R Reese, illustrated by Peter Spier—A handy informative booklet about Fort Frederica on St Simons Island, with excellent drawings. Published in the late 1960s so some of the information may need updating from more recent research and archaeological work at the town, but still a solid introduction.

• Caspar David Friedrich: The Painter of Stillness, by Norbert Wolf—Good short overview of the life and work of Friedrich with many, many good color plates of his work. From a series by art publisher Taschen.

Best of the year: Poe vs Poe

This year I read a number of good biographies, several of which I’ve mentioned above, but two of the most enjoyable and with the greatest interest to me concerned Edgar Allan Poe. One book was older, one was brand new; one was shorter and one was long; but both were good. It was hard to select a favorite read this year—especially among a crop of good biographies of writers I love—so I’ve cheated and gone with both of these.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers, is a biography published in 1992. Meyers gives good attention to Poe’s life and work and is fair to this perplexing, exasperating, much-maligned man, especially in controversial personal episodes like his marriage to his first cousin Virginia, his spats with various literary celebrities, the controversy and mudslinging stirred up by the female literary elite of New York City in a strange episode concerning letters between Poe and an admirer, and most especially his tragic final year. Meyers also approaches Poe’s work with good critical sense, avoiding the autobiographical and especially Freudian readings that had been popular with Poe for quite some time. (Not long after Meyers’s book, Kenneth Silverman published Edgar A Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, which is famous for going whole-hog into autobiographical and psychological interpretation. That way lies madness.) Short, readable, and comprehensive without being overwhelming, Meyer’s insight and good judgement make this one of the best Poe biographies I’ve read.

But I read Meyers in the first place while awaiting the release of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley, which my wife graciously got me as a birthday gift. This is a massive new biography of the kind usually called “magisterial,” and lives up to the hype. Kopley is a well-established and accomplished Poe scholar and his mastery of every bit of material on Poe’s life and work is evident on every page. Like Meyers, he approaches Poe sympathetically but not uncritically, faulting him where appropriate—e.g. his self-sabotaging tendencies and his violent feuds with former friends—and defending him likewise. This is most evident in his treatment of Poe and race, which had not become the obsession that it is today when Meyers wrote. Kopley, despite some nods to present pieties, situates Poe in his time and place and in the landscape of opinion common at the time, rubbishing simplistic accusations of racism in Poe and his work. Kopley is primarily a scholar of literature and gives more detailed critical attention to Poe’s work than Meyers, including some new and helpful insight into Poe’s use of structure and poetic effects. This is a strong, weighty, exhaustive biography, but I did find Kopley relied heavily—perhaps too heavily—on some late sources for Poe’s friendships and personal character, things like the reminiscences of Poe’s best friend’s stepdaughter, which offered strangely detailed commentary on a man she had never met. Some explanation of the reliability of sources like this might have been helpful, but the book was already over 800 pages long and this is mostly a quibble.

So I got a two ten-gauge barrels of Poe to the face and loved every bit of it. While I appreciate and would recommend both biographies, I think for general purposes I prefer Meyers’s slightly older book as shorter, more approachable, less burdened with present-day anxieties, and with a bit more context and explanation for how Poe came to have the reputation he does today. But either could be a worthwhile read depending on what kind of emphasis you want in a study of Poe or just how much Poe you need.

Special mentions

Here are three favorite reads that don’t neatly slot into the fiction or non-fiction categories: all medieval, all poetic, all with some good scholarly apparatus and/or great artistic merit in translation.

The Divine Comedy, by Dante, translated by Michael Palma—The Divine Comedy is my favorite book, and since I have no Italian I have always read it in translation. That said, I have read enough about the original Italian, the perils of translation, and specific translators’ rationales for their approaches that I thought 1) I had seen everything and 2) that a translation of the Comedy that was both rhymed and faithful to Dante’s original tone and style was impossible. I’m glad to say I was wrong. Palma’s recent translation manages to capture Dante’s force, directness, and vividness while retaining his difficult rhyme scheme, brilliantly conveying not just the feel of the original but its most often neglected formal quality. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read the Comedy but this is the most I’ve enjoyed it in some years. I reflected in more detail on Palma’s achievement with this translation here.

Waltharius, translated by Brian Murdoch, ed. by Leonard Neidorf—A good English translation—with the original Latin on the facing page—of a lesser-known Early Medieval epic concerning Walthari (Walter of Aquitaine), his beloved Hildigunda, their flight from Attila, and their confrontation with Walthari’s old friend and comrade-in-arms Hagano. I wrote about some of the moral and cultural aspects of the story, especially the binding (and sometimes entangling) role of “unchosen obligations,” here.

Old High German Poetry: An Anthology, trans. and ed. by Brian Murdoch—If you’ve read any medieval German literature it is almost certainly something like Parzival or the Nibelungenlied, Middle High German epics or Arthurian romances. German poetry came into full flower in the High Medieval period, but of course it had much earlier antecedents. This book collects a huge variety of fragmentary poetry in Old High German—bits of epic, devotional verse, charms, prayers, and more—with informative commentary and recommended reading. A great volume, though it is sad and frustrating to look at these fragments, palimpsests, and marginalia and infer how much else was lost to time. Ach, Weh!

Stay tuned

I’m thankful for so much good reading this year and hope y’all will find something in this post to read, enjoy, and think about in 2026. In the meantime, be on the lookout for the second half of this post—fiction, children’s books, and rereads—tomorrow morning, and have a fun and happy New Year’s Eve!

2023 in books

This turned out to be big year for our family. We welcomed twins in the late summer and between that, some travel earlier in the year when my wife was still mobile, and a lot of extra work in the fall, things have only just begun to slow down. Despite it all, there was plenty of good reading to be had, so without further ado, here are my favorites of 2023 in my two usual broad categories:

Favorite fiction of the year

This was an unusually strong year for my fiction reading, especially in the latter half, when I had little time and my concentration was strained. I’d recommend most of the novels I read this year but here, in no particular order, are my dozen favorites, with one singled out—after great difficulty choosing—as my favorite of the year:

The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham—A genuinely creepy slow-burn thriller in which a small English village, not noteworthy for much of anything, plays host to a brood of strange, emotionless, hive-minded children who were all mysteriously conceived on the same night. As the children grow—at twice the rate of normal children, by the way—and they manifest powers of mind-control, the people of Midwich are forced to consider what kind of threat the children pose to the village and the rest of the world. Vividly imagined and populated with interesting characters, this is the kind of sci-fi I think I most enjoy. For more Wyndham, see below.

With a Mind to Kill, by Anthony Horowitz—The last and most Ian Fleming-like of Horowitz’s three James Bond novels, this novel picks up threads from Fleming’s final two, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, and develops them into a compelling new story. Having faked M’s assassination, Bond returns to the Soviet Union in a bid to infiltrate and destroy the Russian network that captured, tortured, and attempted to brainwash him. Briskly paced, atmospheric, and suspenseful, with the interesting twist of Bond having to pretend to be the thing he most hates.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima—A story of romance and disillusionment that is both hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. When an officer in Japan’s merchant marine service meets a young widow with an adolescent son, they fall for each other within a few days. The boy is smitten with the officer, too, admiring him as a man of action, adventure, and lofty independence—until the officer decides to give up a life at sea in favor of settling down and raising a family. When the boy relates his disappointment to the savage, cruel gang of schoolboys to which he belongs, they plot to bring the officer down. Briefly told in sensuously dreamlike prose, with a poignant love story and creepy parallel plot involving the boy, this novel totally absorbed me. I read it in a day, a rare feat for me these days.

The Inheritors, by William Golding—A richly written, moving, bleak, and wholly engrossing novel in which a small family group of Neanderthals have a disastrous run-in with a band of Homo sapiens. Full review from late spring here.

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household—A tense, relentlessly paced thriller set in interwar Europe. When an English hunter sets himself the challenge of stalking and lining up a shot on an unnamed central European dictator—just to see if he can—he is caught, tortured by the secret police, and left for dead. Despite his injuries he manages to escape, but must elude pursuit by a dogged agent of the (again, unnamed) fascist regime, who trails him all the way to southern England. Relentless pacing, a mood of palpable paranoia, the irony of a claustrophobic final standoff in the idyllic English countryside, and the resourcefulness and toughness of the hero keep this book moving from beginning to end. One of my favorite reads from the spring.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by GK Chesterton—An early Chesterton novel set in the near future, when England is ruled by a king selected at random. The current ruler, Auberon Quin, decides to make a joke of the institution by reintroducing heraldry, elaborate court etiquette, and the traditional subinfeudated privileges and freedoms of London’s separate neighborhoods. It’s all a lark to him until he meets a true believer, a young man named Adam Wayne, who determines to fight for his neighborhood and its people against the plans of the elite. A high-flying hoot, as much of Chesterton’s fiction tends to be, but deeply moving and meaningful.

Death Comes as the End, by Agatha Christie—One doesn’t often associate the name Agatha Christie with historical fiction, and yet here’s an excellent, evocative mystery set in the country house of an ancient Egyptian mortuary priest. Christie constructs a realistic family drama involving the remarriage of the patriarch to a haughty young concubine who threatens the priest’s grown children with disinheritance. When she winds up dead, there is talk of curses, vengeful ghosts, and murder. The priest’s young widowed daughter and his elderly mother, sensing something is amiss, work together to determine who may be responsible for the disasters visiting their home. I’d guess this is one of Christie’s lesser-known books, but it’s now one of my favorites of hers.

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger—An eerie and dreamlike fantasy of a peaceful seaside community thrust into bloodshed and destruction by the Head Forester, a violent warlord from the northern forests. Though Jünger insisted that On the Marble Cliffs, which was published as Germany invaded Poland in 1939, was not an allegory of Hitler and the Third Reich, it is certainly applicable to that situation—and to many others in which civilization declines into a scientistic and neopagan barbarism.

Declare, by Tim Powers—A genuinely one-of-a-kind novel: part espionage thriller in the mold of John le Carré, part cosmic horror, part straight historical fiction, part supernatural fantasy, this novel begins with Andrew Hale, an English sleeper agent, being unexpectedly reactivated as part of Operation Declare. He must flee immediately and seek instructions. As Hale returns to regions of the world he hasn’t seen in years and reflects on his career as a spy in Nazi-occupied Paris and the Berlin and the Middle East of the early Cold War, the reader gradually learns his mysterious history and that of the intelligence network of which he has been a part since childhood. The reader also gets to know Kim Philby, a real-life double agent who defected to the Soviets and who continuously and ominously reappears at crucial moments in Hale’s story. I read this on the strong recommendation of several trusted friends and loved it, though I made the fateful decision to begin reading shortly after the arrival of our twins in the late summer. The result was that it took me far longer to read Declare than it should have, and I do feel like I missed some of its cumulative effect. No problem, though—this is clearly worth a reread. It’s that rich.

The Twilight World, by Werner Herzog—An arresting short fictional portrait of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese officer who carried on a guerrilla campaign for nearly thirty years after the end of the Second World War. Full review from late summer here.

Berlin Game, by Len Deighton—A close contender for my favorite read of the year, this is the first novel in Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy, which follows British intelligence agent Bernard Samson as he tries both to help a valuable but endangered asset escape East Berlin and, when that is complicated by the discovery of a double agent in Samson’s own organization, to root out the traitor, whom he may be closer to than he’d like to think. Moody, atmospheric, suspenseful, and witty. Very much looking forward to Mexico Set and London Match.

Best of the year:

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

A man wakes up in a hospital to discover that the world has ended while he was unconscious. I’ve seen at least two zombie versions of this scene—both 28 Days Later and “The Walking Dead” begin this way—but this device originated in the early 1950s in John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic survival story The Day of the Triffids.

Two events give rise to the plot of this novel: first, a massive meteor shower, visible worldwide, that blinds everyone who looks at it and, years earlier, the accidental discovery of triffids, walking carnivorous plants apparently developed in a lab (ahem) in Soviet Russia. Having been dispersed all over the world, scientists find uses for the oils produced by triffids and factory farms arise to cultivate them. Others acquire triffids as exotic garden specimens and remove their lethal stingers for safety. Gradually, triffids become part of the landscape, and Bill Masen, a biologist and the novel’s narrator, is partly responsible for their proliferation. Then the meteor shower comes.

Masen, heavily bandaged as he recovers from eye surgery, is one of a handful of people not to be blinded by the meteor shower, and he emerges from the hospital to find London almost silent and filled with the groping, helpless blind. But what begins merely as a grim survival story takes a turn into horror when the triffids appear, preying on the helpless people roaming the streets.

The rest of the novel follows Masen in his attempts to survive and to join others for greater protection. Different groups pursue different survival strategies—the blindness and the triffids offer many a chance to test out their ideal societies—and Masen bounces from one to the other. And all the while, the triffids are learning.

The Day of the Triffids is low-key sci-fi and its emphasis lies squarely on both the practical considerations of escaping and protecting oneself and one’s group from the triffids and on the ethical dilemmas such a catastrophe would produce. Masen witnesses the organization of many—one based on the guidance of academic experts, another based on charity and altruism, and another, the most menacing, based on autocratic paramilitary rule—as well as their failures. There’s an element of social commentary there, but it’s realistically done, not preachy, and also not the point. The point is the nightmare scenario created by the rapidly proliferating triffids and the question of how to survive, find love, and start over in a world ruled by sentient plants.

The Day of the Triffids totally absorbed me and I read it in just a few days. It’s a brilliantly written, vividly imagined, and engaging adventure that also manages to have satisfying depth.

After reading The Day of the Triffids I moved on quickly to Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (see above) and I have The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes on standby for this year. Wyndham’s fiction is my favorite discovery in quite some time and I look forward to reading these in 2024. If you check any of these out, make it The Day of the Triffids, but definitely seek some of Wyndham’s work out.

Favorite non-fiction

If 2023 was a good year for fiction my non-fiction and history reading flagged somewhat, especially after the twins were born (I read only three of the books below after that point). Nevertheless, there were some clear highlights, and what follows, in no particular order, are my thirteen favorites—a baker’s dozen this time, with one favorite of the year:

Beowulf: Translation and Commentary, trans. by Tom Shippey, Leonard Neidorf, Ed.—A readable new translation of Beowulf by a master scholar of early medieval Germanic literature with a detailed and insightful commentary on everything from word choice and textual problems to characterization and theme. An ideal text for students who want to dig deeper into this great poem.

Crassus: The First Tycoon, by Paul Stothard—A very good short biography from Yale UP’s new Ancient Lives series. Crassus is a difficult figure to understand because he is simultaneously involved in seemingly everything going on in the late Republic and is poorly attested in our surviving sources. Even Plutarch focuses primarily on Crassus’s failed campaign against Parthia. A full portrait is probably impossible to reconstruct, but Stothard does an excellent job of piecing together what we can know about him, his career, his wealth, how he used it, and his disastrous end in the Syrian desert.

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson—An excellent account of the First World War’s mostly forgotten Italian Front, where mountainous terrain, terrible weather, and the politics and mismanagement of the Italian army resulted in protracted and needlessly bloody campaigns. Focuses far more on the Italians than the Austro-Hungarians, but still offers a good overall picture.

The Wise Men Know What Wicked Things are Written on the Sky, by Russell Kirk—Trenchant observations on the American political, cultural, and educational scene from the early 1980s. Owing to its context, some of the examples Kirk uses are quaintly dated (e.g. complaints about the show “Dallas”) but the substance of his arguments is sound and quite prescient.

A Short History of Finland, by Jonathan Clements—Exactly what it says on the cover: a good brief history of a fascinating place and its people. Clements takes the reader from the Finns’ first mentions by the Romans—who were aware they were out there but probably never traveled to Finland—through conversion to Christianity, the Reformation, life under Swedish and Russian hegemony, and finally through both world wars to a hard-won independence and an important place in the modern world. A timely read considering the surprising Finnish decision to join NATO, and I recommend it in conjunction with Clements’s excellent biography of Marshal Mannerheim, which was my favorite non-fiction read of 2021.

The First Total War, by David A Bell—My closest runner-up for my favorite non-fiction read of the year, this is an excellent history of how European warfare changed in the 18th century. From wars fought by small professional armies for limited objectives, often ended through negotiation, and governed by an aristocratic code of honor, the French Revolution—which was partly rationalized, ironically, by the supposed pointless brutality of the old regime—ushered in an age of mass mobilization, unattainable ideological objectives, and an embrace of pragmatic and amoral brutality, especially against fellow citizens who have declined to join the new order. Bell’s chapters on the shockingly violent war in the Vendée and on Napoleon are especially good, and I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in how warfare and its conduct have evolved—or perhaps devolved—in the modern era.

The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H Stephens, by William C Davis—A dual biography of two Georgians whose friendship, despite sometimes major political differences, proved crucial to both their homestate and the Confederacy. Through his portrait of Stephens and Toombs Davis also offers a good glimpse of the inner workings of secession and the dysfunction of the Confederate government as well as the course of the Civil War mostly away from the frontlines.

Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History’s Least-Likely Self-Help Guru, by Catherine Baab-Muguira—A fun little book that works both as a paradoxical self-help guide focusing both on Poe’s strengths and his self-destructive weaknesses and as an approachable mini-biography of a great writer.

Napoleon, by Paul Johnson—I finally got around to reading this short biography from the Penguin Lives series following Johnson’s death in January. I’m glad I did. This is a bracingly unromantic look at the first great dictator of the modern world, a remedy to longer, more detailed, but worshipful accounts like that of Andrew Roberts. Johnson, a master of the character sketch, the elegant and razor-edged summary, and the telling detail, brings all his skills to bear on Bonaparte and crafts a convincing account of him as an ingenious brute. Not only did I like Johnson’s perspective on Old Boney, this little book was a joy to read. I strongly recommend it if Ridley Scott’s mess of a cinematic portrait got you interested in its subject at all. You can read a memorial post I wrote for Johnson last January here.

Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—Another in the Penguin Lives series, this one by an eminent Jacksonian era scholar. Remini does an excellent job not only narrating what we can know of Smith’s life, hedged about as it is by pious Mormon legend, but also contextualizing him in a world of fevered religious emotionalism, private revelations, and even mystical treasure hunting. I was most surprised by the chapters on Nauvoo, having had no idea that Smith had such a powerful private army at his disposal near the end of his life. An excellent read that I’ve already recommended to students.

The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson—The biggest surprise of my reading year, I looked at the first chapter of this book on a table at Barnes & Noble and was hooked. Part naturalist study of a familiar but strange animal, part history, part memoir, Svensson’s account of what we know—and, more intriguingly, all that we don’t know—about the European eel was informative and enjoyable.

Memory Hold-the-Door, by John Buchan—A posthumously published memoir by a great novelist and good man, this book is full of warm remembrances of places Buchan loved and elegies for the many, many men of his generation who were lost in the First World War. Expect a full review for this year’s John Buchan June. In the meantime, here are my extensive Kindle highlights and notes, courtesy of Goodreads.

Best of the year:

The Battle of Maldon: Together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, by JRR Tolkien, Peter Grybauskas, Ed.

This was a tough choice, but in the end I just enjoyed this new volume of Tolkien’s work more than any of the other excellent non-fiction I read this year. Since reading it and blogging about it a few times this summer, I’ve also continued to reflect on it.

The Battle of Maldon is a fragment of several hundred lines of an Old English epic composed to commemorate a disastrous fight against Vikings in the year 991. During the battle, the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, was killed when he allowed the Vikings to come ashore and form for battle, a decision the wisdom of which has been debated ever since. The poem relates the story with great drama and sympathy, and with moving vignettes of Beorhtnoth’s doomed hearth-companions as they commit themselves to avenging their lord or dying in the attempt.

This book collects a large miscellany of Tolkien’s writings on the poem, including his own translation in prose, an alliterative verse dialogue designed as a sequel called The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, multiple earlier drafts of the same showing how the poem evolved both formally and thematically as Tolkien considered and revised it, an essay on Beorhtnoth’s famous pride, and—best of all—extensive notes and commentary from Tolkien that provide a lot of insight into the poem, its context, and broader topics like history, legend, warfare, and human nature.

Anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon England or the literature of the period knows The Battle of Maldon, and it unsurprisingly occupied a large space in Tolkien’s thought and imagination. This book—given my own interest in the poem, the event it describes (which was one case study in my master’s thesis), and Tolkien himself—is a most welcome addition to my Tolkien shelf and my favorite non-fiction read of the year. I highly recommend it.

I posted about this book twice during the summer, first on the topic of tradition and the transmission of poetry and culture, and second on the false modern assumption that anything literary in history is necessarily fictitious.

Kids’ books

Here, in no particular order, are the ten best of the kids’ novels and picture books that we read this year, many of which were excellent family read-alouds:

• The Luck of Troy, by Roger Lancelyn Green—A novelistic adaptation of legends surrounding Odysseus’s theft of the Palladion, told from the perspective of a lesser-known character from Greek myth: Helen’s young son Nicostratus.

• The Broken Blade, by William Durbin—A fun historical kids’ adventure set among the trappers of French Canada and the Great Lakes.

• You Are Special, by Max Lucado—A beautifully illustrated and moving picture book about how it is our creator’s stamp, rather than any aspect of ourselves, that gives us worth.

• The Easter Storybook and The Go-and-Tell Storybook, by Laura Richie, illustrated by Ian Dale—Two nicely illustrated Bible picture books, one for the Lenten and Easter season and the other based on the Book of Acts.

• Little Pilgrim’s Progress, adapted by Helen Taylor, illustrated by Joe Sutphin—Probably my favorite kids’ read of the year, this is a charming simplified adaptation with illustrations showing the characters as anthropomorphic animals. Though simple and kid-friendly, it hit hard—I ended up crying several times while reading it to my kids.

• A Picture Book of Davy Crockett, by David A Adler, illustrated by John and Alexandra Wallner—A good short life of Crockett told accessibly but with commendable attention to the details and complexities of his life.

• The Phantom of the Colosseum and A Lion for the Emperor, by Sophie de Mullenheim—The first two volumes of a fun historical series about three young friends and their adventures in the Roman Empire. My kids adored these and I look forward to reading more.

• War Horse, by Michael Morpurgo—A simply written but powerfully moving look at the First World War from an unusual perspective.

Rereads

Everything I reread this year. My favorites were certainly my revisits with Charles Portis, especially Gringos, which I read for the third time while on a trip to Mexico in the spring. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Gringos, by Charles Portis

• Norwood, by Charles Portis

• Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

• The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz

• The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw, by Patrick F McManus*

• Never Sniff a Gift Fish, by Patrick F McManus*

• The Face of Battle, by John Keegan*

• The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe

• Beowulf, trans. Tom Shippey (see above)

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

One of my own

Of course, another big event for the year was the publication of a new book of my own, my World War II action novella The Snipers.

Set during the ferocious Battle of Aachen in the fall of 1944, months after D-day and the breakout from Normandy but still long months away from victory over Germany, The Snipers is the story of one bad day in the life of Sergeant JL Justus. A scout and sharpshooter in the 1st Infantry Division, Justus is tasked by his battalion commander with finding and eliminating a German sniper who has bedeviled the division’s advance into the city. Justus thinks finding the sniper will be tough enough, but the men he joins up with to enter the combat zone assure him that there is more than one. Discovering the truth and completing his mission will test Justus and his buddies severely, and give him a shock that will last years after the war’s end.

I wrote The Snipers in a three rapid weeks this spring and revised it in the early summer. The climactic action and its surprising revelation came to me first. After a vivid and disturbing dream of World War II combat, a dream the dark mood of which I couldn’t shake off, I decided to sit down and turn it into a short novel or novella. The rest came together very quickly.

I’ve been pleased with this book’s reception but, most of all, I’m pleased with the book itself. Every time I give a friend a copy I end up sitting down and rereading long sections of it. It’s always satisfying to find enjoyment not only in the work of writing but in the finished product, and The Snipers ranks with Griswoldville in those terms.

I’m grateful to those of y’all who’ve read it, either in draft form or since its publication, and I hope those of y’all who haven’t will check it out and let me know what you think.

Looking ahead

After a busy and chaotic fall things mercifully slowed down, albeit only briefly, for Christmas, and then revved right back up again with surgery and sickness in the family and prep for a new semester at work. But all is well, and I’m hoping for even more good reading in 2024. Right now I’m partway through an excellent study of Eastern Native American warfare and a short biography of Ramesses II, and there are so many novels jostling at the top of my to-read stack I don’t even know how to choose.

Whatever I end up reading, you can count on hearing about it here. And in the meantime, I hope y’all will find something good to read in this list, and that y’all have had a joyful Christmas and a happy New Year. Thanks for reading!

End-of-semester book recommendations

I just wrapped up my last class of this long, busy, exhausting fall semester. On my final exams for this course I asked a final “softball” question of each student: which new historical figure that you learned about most interested you, and why?

Despite the word “new” I got a lot of Abraham Lincolns and Ulysses Grants and Frederick Douglasses in response, but I didn’t mind so much because the students mostly offered good reasons for their piqued interest. I found myself offering a sentence or two of feedback to each with at least one book recommendation based on the figure of their choice.

In addition to several primary source texts—including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia, Brokenburn, the Civil War diary of a young Louisiana girl named Kate Stone, and The Vinland Sagas for the several students impressed with the pregnant Freydis Eiriksdottir’s ferocious response to Native American attack—I came back to several recommendations over and over again. These were books I mentioned to students who named Nat Turner, John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S Grant as their most interesting figures. Given that the final unit of the semester covered the secession crisis and the Civil War there’s some obvious recency bias in these answers, but again, that didn’t trouble me too much. If even a fraction of them take those recommendations I’ll be pleased, and I hope they will too.

I thought about these books enough as I wrote that feedback that I decided to offer them as recommendations on the blog as well. So here, in roughly chronological order by subject, are six good books I recommended to my US History I students this fall:

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates

A deeply researched and powerful short narrative of the life and rebellion of Nat Turner. Turner was a slave preacher in quiet, rural Southampton County, Virginia who believed he had received signs from God that it was his mission to rise up and slaughter his oppressors. In the uprising that he eventually led, Turner and his followers killed over sixty whites of all ages, including a dozen school children, a bedridden old woman, and a baby in a cradle. When he briefly eluded capture he became a boogeyman throughout the South, and paranoid fears that Turner might have a coordinated network of slave rebels prepared to rise caused widespread vigilantism.

Oates writes well and smoothly integrates his research with the broader historical context of Turner’s revolt, making this a good look at the overall state of slavery in American at the time of the Second Great Awakening. Oates also doesn’t soft-pedal, excuse, or celebrate Turner’s violence. Here’s a longer Amazon review I wrote when I first read this some years ago.

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz

John Brown, like Nat Turner, is an arresting and irresistibly forceful figure, but unlike Turner Brown was much better connected and his life is much more fully documented. This popular history by the late journalist Tony Horwitz, whose most famous book is probably Confederates in the Attic, gives a solid, readable overview of Brown’s life, work, and the evolution of his rigid, fanatical views not just on slavery but on a host of other activist causes. (A favorite example I offer in class: Brown, not only an abolitionist but a teetotaler, once discovered a man working with him on a construction project had brought a bottle of beer along for his lunch. Brown poured it out. Students see the point immediately.)

The bulk of the book covers Brown’s violence in Kansas, beginning with the coldblooded murders of five farmers at Pottawatomie Creek in 1856, and his magnum opus, the planned rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Brown and a small circle of close followers, including several of his sons and a handful of escaped slaves, plotted to steal stockpiled rifles from an armory at Harpers Ferry and start a local slave revolt that, with plenty of firepower behind it, would snowball into a brutal nationwide purge that would rid the United States of slavery. It didn’t work out that way. Like Turner, Brown was hanged and became a symbol of violent extremism.

I like to recommend Midnight Rising because it offers a short, readable, almost novelistic account without unduly lionizing or condemning Brown. It’s also packed full of good anecdotes and telling, well-chosen details, and its blow-by-blow reconstruction of the disastrous Harpers Ferry raid is excellent.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S Grant in War and Peace, by HW Brands

For students who expressed interest in Ulysses Grant I recommended Brands’s biography. This is a good, readable, cradle-to-the-grave biography that is neither as huge nor as worshipful as more recent Grant biographies like Ron Chernow’s. Brands not only narrates Grant’s life story and the campaigns of his career during the Civil War but also offers clear insight into Grant’s personal character, both for good and bad, as well as his relationships with superiors like Lincoln and Henry Halleck and subordinates like Sherman. Brands also doesn’t explain away or minimize the corruption of Grant’s presidential administration, as is often the habit of Grant fans. The result is admiring but not uncritical, highly readable and accessible, and detailed without being overwhelming.

The Crucible of Command: Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged, by William C Davis

One of the books I most often recommend in class, this is a dual biography of the two most important generals of the war, the protagonists of the final death struggle, and contested symbols of the aftermath. Davis—who has a lot of experience with this kind of work, having previously written multi-track narratives of the lives of Travis, Crockett and Bowie and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs—balances Lee and Grant’s life stories well, structuring them chronologically but still allowing interesting parallels and contrasts to emerge, especially as their careers weave past one another and occasionally overlap. Like the other good biographies in this list, he pays special attention to personal character, and is judicious and fair in his judgments of both men. The chapters bouncing back and forth between Lee and Grant and their dramatically changing fortunes over the course of the Civil War are the best of their kind, and radically reshaped by understanding of how the war unfolded as well as Lee and Grant’s places in the story.

Every time one of our children has been born, I’ve made it a point to read a book about Lee. That tradition started in the spring of 2015 with our first child and this book, and this is still my favorite of the ones I’ve read over the years.

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, by SC Gwynne

This is a brilliantly-written, detailed, insightful biography of Jackson focusing primarily on the war years but with good coverage of his early life, too. Gwynne is a gifted writer and he not only capably untangles and narrates the complex, lightning fast campaigns of maneuver that Jackson fought in the two years before his death but also explores the personality of this exceedingly strange man. (Gwynne busts a few myths along the way, too, such as the one about Jackson constantly sucking on lemons. He didn’t. He may have been strange, but not that strange.)

Jackson’s lower-class mountain background, his inflexible Calvinist Presbyterianism, his experiences as an artillery officer in Mexico, his stern and rigid character both as a professor of science at VMI before the war and as an infantry commander—Gwynne explains and integrates all of these aspects of Jackson’s character, giving the reader a solid, understandable portrait of an eccentric, tenacious, fatalistic, but energetic and ferocious soldier whose career was cut short at its height. He also does an excellent job explaining and showing Jackson’s relationship with Lee in action, with the result that this book illuminates not only Jackson but Lee as well.

A book I never hesitate to recommend, and that I wish there were more like.

Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, by James McPherson

Just one student, impressed with the tone of an excerpted speech that I assigned near the end of the semester, stated some interest in Jefferson Davis, which is not all that surprising—there are far more romantic, heroic figures on both sides of the Civil War than the president of the country that lost. Indeed, the deeper you look, the more inclined you might be to study someone else. Davis was fussy, vain, opinionated, played favorites, and unnecessarily inserted himself into his government’s military policy. James McPherson, an indisputably pro-Union historian of the Civil War era, brings all of this to his study of Davis but also has the intellectual honesty to admit that, after spending time studying the man, he came to admire some aspects of his character, not least the work ethic that kept him going despite the dysfunction of his government (compare his vice president, Alexander Stephens, who got fed up and left Richmond for much of the war) and through severe recurring illnesses. That honesty makes Embattled Rebel a good short study of Davis that, though not wholly sympathetic to its subject, is that rarest of all things nowadays—fair.

Others

Here are two other books I considered recommending but didn’t. Let me recommend them here. Both come from the Penguin Lives series of short biographies by well-known writers.

• Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Thomas Keneally—An engaging, readable, warts-and-all biography of Lincoln that does an excellent job condensing his complex life and personality into a little over one hundred pages without oversimplifying.

• Joseph Smith, by Robert V Remini—I read this book most recently of all the books on this list, and it was a revelation. Remini’s account of the life of the founder of Mormonism not only narrates his life as clearly as we can know it, but situates him firmly in his broader historical context, showing him and his movement to be very much of their time and place.

Conclusion

This semester has been a blur, but I’m thankful for the work I had, the students I had, and that we can now take a break and focus on more important and long-lasting things. If you’re looking for some American history to read over Christmas and New Year’s, I hope you’ll check one of these out. Thanks for reading!

2022 in movies

I almost named this year of movies The Year of Indifference. After struggling along for several years, I finally turned a corner in the spring and just stopped caring about most of the movies that came out.

I can remember the moment. It was April, the year barely begun. I was sitting in a theatre waiting to watch The Northman when the non-stop pre-trailer fluff turned toward the mandatory Disney agitprop. Two youthful people announced—as if any of us could have forgotten—that next month Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness would arrive in theatres. Fine. Whatever. But their second sentence was something like, “Here are all the movies and Disney+ shows you need to catch up on before the movie!”

I’m still not sure if I said it out loud, but I certainly thought, “Well, the hell with that.”

I had most looked forward to three movies in the spring of 2022. As it turns out, those were my three favorite movies of 2022. From the last of those in late spring right up to New Year’s Eve, I slid downhill into utter apathy. Movies came and went and I did not care. I did not see the new Dr Strange, or Jurassic World, or Thor, or Black Panther, or any edgy A24 stuff, or any prestige movies about movies like The Fabelmans or Empire of Light or Babylon, or anything that came out on any streaming service, and I probably will not in the future. Not that I felt any hostility toward these movies—the only one I bestowed hate upon was Avatar: The Way of Water, which I certainly will not see—I just did not care. Even the things I felt some flicker of interest in I could not be motivated to go pay money to watch. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.

But I hope so, because while the lows of 2022 were, for me, very low, the tiny handful of high points were most high indeed.

So having explained how I came to be even more pessimistic than usual about the state of filmmaking, let me focus for the rest of the post on the purely positive. Rather than The Year of Indifference, I’m taking a cue from a coincidental symmetry in the titles of my top three films and dubbing 2022:

The Year of The _____man (and Top Gun: Maverick)

Top Gun: Maverick

The hype is real.

I have little personal attachment to the original Top Gun, but grew more and more interested in Maverick as it kept getting delayed and as I learned more about it. By the time it arrived in theatres I had even allowed myself to get excited, and boy was that excitement rewarded. A carefully crafted, well-executed action movie with clear stakes, straightforward old-fashioned storytelling, solid if not deep characters, some resonant themes of guilt, mentorship, hard work, and courage, and genuinely awesome action, Top Gun: Maverick thrilled me.

What is more, the movie holds up. I saw it twice in theatres in the late spring. My wife gave me the Blu-ray for Christmas, and my dad set up a great family movie night in his office’s conference room over Christmas break—massive TV, loud, bassy speakers, and plenty of pizza. The movie was just as exciting as the first time I saw it on the big screen.

You can read my full review from May here.

The Batman

The Batman was my first big movie of the year, but one I had looked forward to with some trepidation. I intentionally avoided reviews and information about the movie because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I went in almost cold, with few expectations though admittedly some hopes that it would be good.

Those hopes were fulfilled. The Batman proved a legitimate crime movie, serial killer mystery, police procedural, action thriller, and detective story all at the same time, with a good script, excellent acting, a wonderfully detailed Gotham City—the best I’ve seen in a Batman movie, in my opinion—just oozing and dripping the gloomy atmosphere I’ve always imagined, and a subtle but effective coming-of-age story for Batman. Like Top Gun: Maverick, The Batman takes familiar material and elevates it not only through its surehanded and expert storytelling but through the mature, old-fashioned themes it dramatizes.

You can read my full review from March here, with some further notes, thoughts, and observations here.

The Northman

The Northman is the best Viking movie ever made, and perhaps the only thoroughly good one. (Though I do have a soft spot for one very old-fashioned one.)

Robert Eggers’s stated intention in The Northman was to make a film that felt and worked like an undiscovered saga, one of the many Old Norse stories of outlaws, heroes, revenge, and the supernatural recorded in Iceland a few centuries after the end of the Viking Age. He succeeded brilliantly. This film drops the viewer into an alien world, one utterly indifferent to our modern values or pieties and one in which strength, victory, and the ruthless fulfilment of personal obligations—most notably revenge—offered the only guiding morality. It is a bracing vision, simultaneously breathtaking in its boldness and courage and disturbing in its bleak callousness. Again—accurately capturing the spirit of this lost world.

The Northman is the movie I was most excited about going into the spring of 2022. And while I might have enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick more as rock-solid entertainment, The Northman satisfies my most niche historical and cinematic interests like no other film. It’s brilliantly executed and deserves a watch.

You can read my full review from April here.

Three runners-up

In addition to my three favorites, all of which came out in the late winter or spring, here are three good, solidly-made movies I saw that didn’t quite rise to the top. Like my top three, I happen to have already reviewed all three of these in greater detail here on the blog. Links are included with each short recap below.

Devotion—The story of two fighter pilots in the newly integrated US Navy, Devotion follows wingmen Lt Tom Hudner and Ens Jesse Brown—one white aviator, one black—as they get to know each other, testing and pushing one another until a deep bond of friendship grows between these two quite different men. All this plays out as the Cold War slowly escalates, culminating in Hudner and Brown’s deployment to an aircraft carrier providing close air support to Marines in the first terrible winter of the Korean War. It’s here that Hudner and Brown’s skill as aviators and their devotion to one another as wingmen and friends will be tested.

Glenn Powell, who plays Hudner here and another naval aviator, Hangman, in Top Gun: Maverick, was a producer on Devotion and clearly learned a lot of lessons about how to shoot aerial sequences with real aircraft from his experience on Top Gun. So it’s unfortunate that Devotion and Top Gun: Maverick ended up coming out the same year, as I’ve heard several unfavorable comparisons between the two. Devotion is a different kind of movie, with a statelier pace and a greater emphasis on character drama, but it is well-crafted, well-acted, and handsomely shot and both deserves and rewards viewing.

You can read my full review of Devotion—a dual review with Glass Onion—here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean play is a fast-moving but stately and intensely moody film. The acting is excellent, but the real draw is the film’s style, an atmospheric throwback to impressionistic black-and-white silent films complete with stagey sets and dramatic high-contrast lighting, all of which intensifies the drama of murder and deception and the pervasive eeriness of the story. This adaptation captures the mood of Shakespeare’s play better than any of the other film versions I’ve seen.

You can read my full review of The Tragedy of Macbeth from January here.

Glass Onion—This is the one exception to my statement above that I saw nothing released on any streaming service, but that’s only because Netflix gave this a short theatrical run ahead of its streaming release. This is apparently a trend, and I hope it continues. Glass Onion is a lot of fun (though I erred in my review when I wrote that it was probably the most fun I’d had at the movies that year, as that distinction obviously belongs to Top Gun: Maverick), with the same whimsical, trickster style of Knives Out but more outright comedy. Writer-director Rian Johnson deftly satirizes the fatuity and self-congratulation of modern day influencers—whether tech billionaires, do-gooder leftist politicians, celebrity fashionistas, or the rise-and-grind types hawking male-enhancement drugs—and the intricate overlapping construction creates genuine mystery, surprise, and humor. I have a few reservations and misgivings about Glass Onion, but as pure entertainment it was a rare treat.

You can read my full review of Glass Onion—a dual review with Devotion—here.

New to me

While most of the movie year was a bust for me, I did see some great old films for the first time. These were the best—or at least most entertaining—of the lot:

The Beast—This is a lesser-known 1988 film directed by Kevin Reynolds, who would go on to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a few years later. The Beast (aka The Beast of War) takes place during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and begins with a platoon of Russian T-55 tanks destroying an Afghan village. The tankers wantonly murder civilians and try to torture information out of a tribal elder by slowly rolling over him—from the feet up—with one tank. After the massacre one tank becomes separated, and its efforts to escape hostile territory as well as violent disagreement among the crew form one half of the film’s story. The other half follows Taj (Steven Bauer), now the Khan of the tribe attacked at the beginning of the film, as he and a band of mujahideen seek revenge. The two stories intertwine suspensefully, converging on the character of Koverchenko (Jason Patric), a Russian tanker tested both by his commander, the violent Daskal (George Dzundza) and the mujahideen. Both a harrowing small-scale war film and an intense, well-acted character drama, The Beast was the best surprise of my year and deserves to be much better remembered.

Dunkirk—Not to be confused with the more recent Christopher Nolan film, this 1958 Ealing Studios film starring John Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Bernard Lee retells the title story of collapse, retreat, desperation, and rescue in the traditional style one would expect from the late 1950s, and it’s excellent. Well-acted, told on a grand scale, and moving between multiple stories that converge in the evacuation, Dunkirk gives the real events well-rounded and unsentimental treatment and represents old-fashioned war movies at their best. Far from being superseded by Nolan’s more stripped-down modern action-thriller, this Dunkirk holds its own. The result is two movies about the same events in two dramatically different styles. The two complement each other well and would make a great double-feature for fans of film history, action, or war movies. Regardless, this Dunkirk is well worth seeing for its own sake.

The Mummy—I have a set of the classic Universal monster movies on Blu-ray and have been working through them for Halloween over the last few years. I had seen Frankenstein and Dracula before, but this year I finally got to the original 1932 version of The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. Slow, quiet, and straightforwardly told, The Mummy nevertheless achieves a wonderfully eerie atmosphere—helped in no small part by Karloff’s creepy and tightly controlled performance as Ardeth Bey—and steadily builds tension from beginning to end. This was one I didn’t expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did, and I look forward to revisiting it.

Grizzly—I’m not going to pretend that this movie is good, but it was highly entertaining. (See my carefully qualified introduction above.) Grizzly is an obvious, beat-for-beat knockoff of Jaws, but instead of a shark in the ocean the threat is a bear in the woods. The woods in question are those of Rabun County, Georgia, and part of the fun for me was spotting all the recognizable local places used in the film (e.g. the Rock House in downtown Clayton, an intersection on the Tallulah Gorge Scenic Loop used as the entrance to a fake national park, and the driveway and lab room of my childhood doctor’s office, a moment that gave me the willies because the perspective in the film was exactly that of a patient sitting down to get a finger prick). Also, my dad is in it as an extra. I gather that RiffTrax has done one of its commentaries on Grizzly, and that sounds like it’d be worthwhile. I’d recommend this as a potential Lousy Movie Night classic.

Special commendations—TV

I long ago gave up on most TV shows, not out of the indifference I plummeted into this spring but out of the inability to pick where to start. There’s so much TV out there. And a TV show takes up hours and hours and hours of time I’d rather spend on reading, or playing with my kids, or watching multiple movies. But, given the dearth of good stuff at the theatre, this year my wife and I did get into two excellent shows that provided some of the highlights of our 2022.

“Ghosts”—This is the original BBC series, though there is a recent American adaptation. “Ghosts” follows the centuries’ worth of dead people who have, for whatever reason, not departed the once-stately Button House in the English countryside. There’s a decapitated Tudor nobleman, an early 1990s Conservative MP who died in a compromising situation and so dwells in eternity with no pants, an infantile Georgian lady, a genteel Edwardian lady who falls screaming from an upstairs window every night, a Scoutmaster who died in an archery accident, a Romantic poet killed in a pistol duel, a stalwart British Army officer from the Second World War, a basement full of medieval plague victims from a mass gave under the foundation, and—reaching way, way back—perhaps my favorite character, a caveman.

As befits a show developed by and starring the “Horrible Histories” team, “Ghosts” is hilarious, packed with wit, slapstick, and lots of great historical humor. All these characters from many time periods, plus the two new owners of the house, make a wonderful ensemble, with a rich variety of personal foibles, conflicts, affections and rivalries, and running gags. The show also proves surprisingly moving at times, as in an episode in which the Scoutmaster’s now-elderly widow and son make their annual visit to the house.

My wife found “Ghosts” on DVD at our local library and we watched the entire first season in a few days, stopping ourselves after two episodes each night so that we didn’t stay up until the wee hours binging it. I can’t attest to the other seasons of the show, but season one was a great show that was funny without being mean-spirited, dirty, or insulting to your intelligence. We look forward to watching more.

“Bluey”—Let me repeat what I said about Top Gun above: the hype is real. “Bluey” is a pure delight—a kids’ show that isn’t insulting or annoying, that prizes playfulness and imagination, that showcases a loving, functioning family in which all the members love and respect each other, and that is beautifully animated. It’s also so well-crafted and -written that it works on multiple levels, so that in my family, all three kids—ranging in age from three to seven—as well as my wife and I can enjoy the show together and get different things out of it. (Favorite line: Bandit, the dad, while plunging the toilet: “What are these kids eating?” Based on a true story.)

And speaking as a father, I appreciate seeing a show in which the dad is fun but not an idiot, and has a relationship of mutual love, respect, and hard work with the kids’ mom. That’s vanishingly rare in modern entertainment, and one of the many, many things that make “Bluey” special.

What I missed in 2022

Movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons—including not wanting to pay for a half-dozen streaming subscriptions and finding Redbox a bit of a pain—I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to see these in the new year.

• Operation Mincemeat—Based on the excellent Ben MacIntyre book, a fascinating true story performed by a great cast.

• Munich: The Edge of War—Based on Robert Harris’s novel, a political thriller with personal stakes in a crucial historical setting. Jeremy Irons looks like an inspired choice to play Neville Chamberlain.

• See How They Run—Looks like a charming historical whodunnit. My wife and I actually made plans to see this but it was gone from cinemas before we could make the arrangements for a date night.

• Nope—I still haven’t seen any of Jordan Peele’s films, but this one involves—or at least appears to involve—UFOs, and is supposed to have smart and hard-edged satire.

• Amsterdam—An intriguing premise and kooky characters hooked into a fictionalized version of a fascinating true incident—the “Business Plot” to overthrow the US government.

• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story—I love Weird Al and, far from a straightforward musical biopic, this looks like an appropriately irreverent parody of what is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre in Hollywood.

• The Banshees of Inisherin—Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, two favorites who have previously starred in one of my favorite films, In Bruges, reunite with that film’s director for this dark comedy about a man from a small Irish village who inexplicably but very pointed ends his long friendship with another.

• The Menu—This didn’t look like my kind of thing when I first read about it, but I’ve added it to the get-around-to-eventually list on the strength of favorable comments from friends.

• All Quiet on the Western Front—A new adaptation of one of my oldest favorite novels, and the first in the novel’s original language. I eagerly anticipated this when the first trailer finally dropped but, since then, have had a number of the film’s major departures from the book spoiled, so I’m somewhat more hesitant about it now. Still hoping to see it at least once in the days to come.

So, again, there may be several more great movies out there leftover from 2022 that I’ve simply missed, but I’m going to have to overcome quite a lot of weariness and inertia to seek some of these out.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

I’m afraid my superhero burnout and general apathy continues as I look ahead at 2023’s release schedules, but the few films I look forward to I really look forward two. In order of anticipation, from highest to lowest, they are:

• Mission: Impossible—Dead Recoking Part I—I don’t see how this could be terrible. Cruise, McQuarrie and company have been on a roll for the last several films in this series. I’ll be there opening weekend.

• Oppenheimer—It’s striking to me that Christopher Nolan, out of his twelve films, has made three superhero movies, three near-future sci-fi thrillers, three crime films, and three historical films. And out of this last category, two out of the three have centered on crucial events from World War II. I’m very curious to see how he approaches the seemingly uncinematic story of the Manhattan Project’s R&D of the atomic bomb and J Robert Oppenheimer’s role in it.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—Please don’t be terrible. At least be better than the CGI in the trailer.

• Dune: Part Two—Villeneuve’s Dune was one of the most pleasant surprises for me at the movies in the last several years, and as a result I am, to my continuing surprise, quite looking forward to Part Two.

• Napoleon—Ridley Scott has a shaky relationship with historical fact but his movies are always breathtaking to behold, and Joaquin Phoenix, who brings a nigh-insane sense of drive and intensity to every part he plays, should do something interesting with old Boney.

These are the ones I am actually excited for, but let’s hope that, as in any moviegoing year, there will also be some nice surprises along the way.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the top, despite my overall negative impression of film and the film industry in 2022, the good things I saw weren’t just good, but excellent. I gladly recommend any of the films praised above. Here’s hoping for much more like them in 2023!

Five years of blogging

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Five years—half a decade—does not amount to much in the end, but this website and blog began in a time that now feels utterly remote to me. I had just started a new job, my first full-time teaching position, and was getting used to a commute I could now do in my sleep. Sarah and I only had two kids, one only a few months old. We weren’t quite aware of it just yet, but we were outgrowing our apartment. And the year before, I had self-published my first novel and a novella I had whipped up in two weeks. There was kind enthusiasm among friends but few sales.

I created this website to coincide with and, hopefully, help promote the release of Dark Full of Enemies, a novel which had itself lain dormant for almost five years, from its completion just before Sarah and I got married until that winter of 2017. I had written but not yet finished revising Griswoldville, and I hoped a website would help with that project, too.

It may surprise y’all, now, but I almost deleted the blog option when I first started building this site. I had even scoffed when I saw it on the default version of the template. Thanks, but no thanks, had been my attitude. I don’t want to get fired for something I write there. And who reads blogs, anyway?

But I hesitated. I had run a blog in college, one of those free blogging sites that one now only encounters in the dirty alleys and out-of-the-way park benches of Google searches, and I had found it great fun. This remembrance also brought to mind the diary I had kept for four or five years, daily from January of 2008 through most of grad school, then sporadically, catching up when I missed days here and there, and finally sputtering out sometime in the years between grad school and marriage.

What that Blogspot page and the diary had in common, though, that made me hesitate to write off blogging on this new site, was practice—both in the sense of training and in the Alasdair MacIntyre sense of a life-shaping routine. A regularly maintained blog is good practice.

When I had kept that blog during and just after college, I had also produced one almost complete World War II novel as well as the manuscript that became No Snakes in Iceland. When I had kept that diary, I had also finished No Snakes in Iceland, put it through its first rounds of readers and revisions, and written the rough draft of Dark Full of Enemies. Habitually writing something, I decided, would prepare me for the day I need to write the important thing.

And so here I am.

I have no regular schedule and no real plan. I just know that I need to write here occasionally, often enough to keep limber, the same way I need exercise. (More than ever, in fact.) Five or six posts a month feels, to me, like I’m staying on track. And I have no set topic. This blog, to borrow a concept from Alan Jacobs, whose blog I regularly read, is a commonplace book, and so whatever catches my eye, interests me, irritates me, makes me stop to think, or that I enjoy and want to tell others about may wind up here.

So now, half a decade after launching this blog, my wife and I have three kids, we live in a house in a slightly more country part of a crowded county, I have published two more novels and yet another is going through the usual cycles of hibernation, reading, and revision—and I have hundreds of posts here. (I have the specific number written down in my office at school, and am now on Christmas break. Excellent foresight.) These have been fun to write—good practice, just as I’d hoped, as well as a place to ruminate and occasionally just vent—and have connected me to some good people whom I might never have “met” otherwise. I am deeply grateful.

A few statistical giblets for those of y’all who are interested:

Traffic to my site, most of which goes to the blog, has steadily increased every year since I started. In 2019, with two years to get established, the site got over 6,700 distinct visits. In 2020 that nearly doubled to over 12,500. In 2021 it doubled again: 25,390. And already this year, with a couple weeks to go, it’s received 36,000. Pageviews are even higher, though I am no web analytics expert and can’t tell you much of what this signifies. Now all I need to do is turn this traffic into book sales!

At any rate, the website and blog have served their purpose: I am getting practice, and people are reading and, occasionally, seeking out and buying my books. And I’m most thankful for that.

Again, I’m thankful for those of y’all who regularly read what I post here, especially considering what an idiosyncratic jumble of topics it must seem to be, and thanks most of all to those who have reached out over the years. Hearing from y’all has been an encouragement, a fun source of conversation, and it has made me a better writer. Just last week one of y’all caught a glaring error in my post about run-on sentences, which I was able to fix—or at least slap a Band-Aid on.

I’m looking forward, God willing, to five more years of writing practice here! Thank y’all for being here, and thanks, as always, for reading.

2021 in movies

Dang, the pickings are slim, aren’t they? 2021 was an even worse year for movies than 2020 if, like me, you’re completely burned out on Marvel, aren’t going to see a movie simply because it has an ideologically or politically correct message, and don’t pay for any subscription streaming services.

Nevertheless, I did get out to theatres a number of times and also caught some good films on home video afterward. But that was not nearly as often as I would have liked. So, rather than a top five, any movie I liked made it into the post this year.

Dune

Oscar isaac as Duke Leto Atreides in Dune

Certainly the best film I saw this year, Dune is an excellent movie in its own right as well as a skilled and well-crafted adaptation of Frank Herbert’s elephantine sci-fi novel. The cast, design, cinematography, special effects, music—all are excellent, and all contribute to an involving, exciting film of operatic scale and epic scope. I look forward to Part II.

I say all of this as someone who originally did not have much interest in either the book or the movie, as I explain in my full, much more detailed review, which you can read here.

No Time to Die

Rami Malek as Lyutsifer Safin in No Time to Die

Dune was certainly the best film as a film that I saw this year, but I think the one I enjoyed the most was Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, No Time to Die.

The longest and heaviest of the series so far, No Time to Die pits Bond against Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), an eerie supervillain with an interest in virology, nanotechnology, and poison who has plans both for his own old enemies—not only Bond, but Quantum and SPECTRE—and for the world. Safin’s plot places Bond’s last serious girlfriend, Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux) in harm’s way, and Bond is called out of retirement for a mission he may not be up to, either physically or emotionally.

No Time to Die, as I wrote after I saw it, “is a whole lot of movie.” It’s overlong, overcomplicated, and needlessly develops continuities with the previous Craig films, especially Spectre, and I feel like the impact of its big action finale and especially its surprising ending were diminished by some of these story choices. But it also features seriously good action, a good villain, great locations, an intriguing and all-too-real premise, and Craig in his best form as Bond since Skyfall.

A solid ending to Craig’s tenure. I rank it in the middle of the pack, below Skyfall and Casino Royale and above Spectre and Quantum of Solace. You can read my full review here.

The King’s Man

The Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) confronts Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) in The King’s Man

I saw and really enjoyed Kingsman: The Secret Service when it came out in 2015, but did not see its sequel. This was a franchise I’d enjoy if I ran across it—or whenever the mood to watch the first film’s “Freebird” sequence struck. Then, lo and behold, a trailer appeared for The King’s Man, a prequel set during World War I and starring Ralph Fiennes and looking like a jazzier, more masculine version of the Western Front hijinks in Wonder Woman. I was sold.

I’m glad to say I saw The King’s Man earlier this week, and it’s a hoot—a mostly light-hearted historical fantasy romp through some of the big names and a whole lot of the fashions and hardware of the 1910s. This is Pirates of the Caribbean for World War I.

The King’s Man centers on the Duke of Oxford (Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson). Following a prologue set in a Boer War concentration camp (the friend who saw it with me, who lived in South Africa for some years, remarked: “Didn’t see this coming”), in which Oxford and son lose their wife and mother to Boer snipers, we catch up with them in 1914 as tensions escalate throughout Europe. Oxford is a dedicated pacifist who refuses to allow Conrad to enlist; Conrad bridles at his father’s principles and the damage they do to their public reputation. But Oxford is adept at pulling strings and using connections, especially Lord Kitchener (Charles Dance), and this aptitude and the skills of some of his household staff (Djimon Hounsou and Gemma Arterton) create not only unofficial capacities in which Conrad can serve, but creates a network of intelligence and special operations that evolves, by the end of the war, into the Kingsman organization we know from the other films.

This organization becomes important as one of the only bulwarks against a mysterious group of international terrorists who meet, Blofeld and SPECTRE-style, in a faraway hideout to plot against the major powers, and the Kingsman’s contests with the mystery archvillain’s agents take up much of the runtime. Along the way there are some outlandish operations, a lot of Bond-style globetrotting, a ton of cameos from real historical figures from the era, and even a genuinely surprising tragedy that sets the finale in motion.

This movie is all over the place, with wink-wink broad comedy—as in a sequence in which our heroes, misled into thinking that Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) is homosexual, attempt to seduce him, a sequence that turns into a bizarre healing ritual for Oxford’s maimed leg and finally a swordfight/Cossack dance set to the 1812 Overture—interspersed with dark, realistic war scenes. A hand-to-hand fight in no-man’s-land between two groups of trench raider is particularly harrowing. There’s potential for mood whiplash here, but you know what? It worked for me. It was so outlandish, so outrageous, and so daring that I was glad to go along for the ride. I do not say this often, so take note—check your brain at the door. It’s worth it.

The King’s Man offers an additional layer of fun for anyone versed in World War I history. Though the history here is grossly oversimplified—you’d think, based on this, that the only countries involved in the war were Britain, Germany, and Russia—a ton of real events are worked into the fantastical conspiracy framework of the movie, and numerous historical figures appear, including Lord Kitchener, Rasputin, Erik Jan Hanussen, Mata Hari, Gavrilo Princip and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson (seduced and blackmailed by Mata Hari, making the retrieval and destruction of a Woodrow Wilson sex tape an important plot point), and—in my favorite bit of casting in a long time—Tom Hollander as King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II. None of it is very accurate, and it halfheartedly tries to work in an incoherent pacifist message, but it’s a hoot, and I and the buddy I watched it with enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Check out The King’s Man if you’re up for an outlandish historical action-adventure with a dash of the fantastical and a Monty Python-style grasp of history.

The Last Duel

Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and his wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer) in The Last Duel

I left my copy of the book this film is based on in my office over Christmas break, so I can’t attest to the film’s total accuracy (especially since I’m an Early Medieval guy, not a Hundred Years’ War guy), but I was really taken with The Last Duel.

Briefly, The Last Duel begins with the last judicial duel or trial by combat ever fought in France and backtracks to tell us how the two knights involved, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), got to this point. And it tells us three times—first from Jean de Carrouges’s simple, noble perspective as a loyal but often aggrieved retainer; second from Jacques Le Gris’s corrupt, self-aggrandizing, and considerably more carnal perspective; and finally from the perspective of Marguerite de Carrouges, Jean’s wife. Marguerite claimed to have been raped by Jacques, and as Jean pressed his suit and Jacques continued to deny the rape had ever occurred—variously stating that it either never happened or was a consensual affair—Jean asked for a trial by combat, a survival of ancient Frankish custom that put the judging of who was telling the truth in the hands of God. Survive, and you were exonerated. The stakes are not only high for the two knights involved, one of whom, according to the terms of the custom, must die for judgment to be rendered, but for Marguerite, who will be executed as a perjurer should Jean be killed.

I’ve made no secret of my distrust of Ridley Scott when it comes to handling historical material, and given the way the film was marketed and talked about—as if it were some kind of medieval #MeToo manifesto or damning indictment of medieval Christian patriarchy or whatever the bugbear of the day is—I was pleasantly surprised with how good The Last Duel was. The film, which is structured in three “chapters,” one for each major party’s perspective, presents each chapter straightforwardly, dropping the viewer into the complicated world these characters inhabit and letting us experience all of that well before the incident that leads to the dueling ground. Inheritance and dowry, the pressures of lordship and producing an heir, the difficulty of managing estates and fielding armies, the roles of law and custom, interfamily rivalries and dissension even within families, shifting alliances and damaged reputations—all factor in and influence the proceedings. It’s a remarkably evenhanded treatment of a complex alien world for a filmmaker who has previously had no problem manipulating the past to make it either more familiar or more useful for his purposes. I credit the writing, which Damon and Affleck had a hand in and which is better than some of Scott’s other historical films.

The Last Duel is, unsurprisingly given Scott’s strengths, a great-looking film. I have quibbles about costuming, combat, the way some of the characters talk, some of the inevitable Dark Ages stereotypes, and even breeds of dogs (a Boston terrier in the 14th century? really?), but overall the film is visually stunning and has a feeling of tactile reality to it that I wish more historical films could manage.

The performances are also excellent—crucially so, since the three different versions of events we get must have both striking and subtle contrasts. Jodie Comer as Marguerite has earned effusive praise, and while she was very good, I was honestly much more impressed with Damon and especially Driver. Both do a lot of subtle work differentiating their characters across the three versions of events, and do so in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself or require explicit explanation. Jean de Carrouges comes across as a relatively simple, shallow, but driven and honorable man; Jacque Le Gris, even in his own version of the story, as a dissipated but worldly and intelligent striver. The movie doesn’t uncomplicate these characters looking for easy bad guys, which I appreciated.

There are other things I could quibble with. An early line from Jean’s mother, that “There is no right, there is only the power of men” is shockingly un-medieval, and some of the legal talk, especially regarding the startlingly brutal punishments for crimes, is oversimplified and misleading (as is pointed out in this piece at Slate, of all places). But I think the film’s biggest misstep comes with the beginning of Marguerite’s perspective. On the title card for “Chapter III: The Truth According to Marguerite de Carrouges,” as the title fades out only “The Truth” remains for a moment. This choice wrecks a lot of the ambiguity the film has thrived on up to this point, and suggests that we can confidently know what happened to these real people in this real incident. (We can’t.) It also plays into the tired feminist trope of women being the only truth-tellers, especially since, in scenes of Marguerite sorting out her husband’s estates’ finances and managing the household and farms (as if this was somehow exceptional for medieval noblewomen, all of whom had vast domestic authority), it suggests Marguerite is the only intelligent and capable person in a world of brutish warriors. Again, a tired feminist trope.

But that aside, I found myself deeply involved in The Last Duel and admired its careful, largely hands-off storytelling approach. And the duel, when it arrived, proved powerfully cathartic.

The Last Duel is a worthwhile if flawed adaptation of a true story with great attention to the complex social world in which these events took place. It’s grim, especially considering the nature of the crime against Marguerite, which we’re presented in two different versions, and its conclusion is brutal, but it’s a worthwhile historical film of the kind they’re making less and less of.

Luca

Luca and best friend Alberto in Luca

Luca is Pixar at its finest—bright and inventive, with beautiful settings and animation, good music, and a fun story made fresh and meaningful by the characters and their relationships. I also appreciated, as with the next film I’ll talk about, the relatively low stakes. Three friends want to win a race so they can use the cash prize to buy a motor scooter. Refreshing.

Two adolescent boys testing boundaries, visiting parts of town they shouldn’t, making new friends, keeping secrets, and setting themselves magnificent goals—this could be Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn or another number of other literary friends, and Luca draws deep from the well of young male friendship.

While the friendship between young sea monster boys Luca and Alberto forms the core of the movie, alongside a deepening connection between Luca and the vivacious human tomboy Giulia, the relationship that most powerfully spoke to me was that between the homeless, parentless, aimless Alberto and Giulia’s father Massimo. The way the taciturn Massimo senses Alberto’s need for masculine guidance, discipline, and work—that is, for a father—and selflessly moves to meet that need brought to mind the multiple generations of aimless, fatherless boys and men our society produces now and left me wanting to be more like Massimo. It’s a quiet but moving subplot that really deepened the film, and parallels Luca’s own quest for education of the book-learning variety. Both boys end the film having been given tools to meet needs they didn’t even know they had, and both receive these things through relationships.

The voice acting is good and the Italian scenery beautiful—not to mention all the pasta, which is the most delectably animated food since Ratatouille. But most of all it’s pure fun, poignantly evoking the joys of childhood friendship on the terrifying cusp of adulthood and speaking to the need we all have for both peers and parents.

Paw Patrol: The Movie

If you have kids, you don’t need me to name all these characters for you

You know what? I’m thirty-seven years old. I have three kids between the ages of two and six. So yes, I saw this. And I mostly liked it.

Paw Patrol: The Movie takes Ryder and his team of pups away from their usual jurisdiction of Adventure Bay to the much busier, more bustling Adventure City, where the nefarious Mayor Humdinger has just managed to be elected mayor on a technicality. Local pup Liberty calls the Paw Patrol about this emergency (about which more below) and the crew removes to Adventure City where they set up in a Stark Tower-style headquarters and work to ameliorate as much of Humdinger’s chaos as possible. There’s a strong taste of the superhero movie to these proceedings. Perhaps my favorite incident involves Humdinger’s unveiling of a new L-train with loops in it, a bit of infrastructure that goes spectacularly wrong very quickly.

You can probably tell that this is a lightweight movie, and to that I say: Please, sir, can I have some more? The story unfolds at precisely the kid-friendly nonsense level of the TV show—the only thing that matters is that there are emergencies to which the pups can respond with their infinite variety of vehicles. I found it refreshingly low-stakes.

Paw Patrol: The Movie is like a supersized episode of the TV show with a much bigger budget and, therefore, strikingly better animation. The pups in this movie have actual fur, and their environments are much more detailed and vibrant. There are even slow-motion action sequences for added drama, as when Chase, the police dog, risks a dangerous leap for a rescue, which elicited a “Whoa” from my kids.

There were only two flaws—for me, an adult viewer of Paw Patrol: The Movie. The first was the relative sidelining of much of the cast in order to develop a tragic backstory for Chase. We learn that he is hesitant about going to Adventure City because he was abandoned there as a (even younger?) pup. Standard stuff for fleshing out a ninety-minute movie, but part of the charm of the show has always been the variety of the characters. Here, Zuma (something like a Coast Guard dog) and Rocky (who drives a recycling truck but whom I always call a “garbage dog”) are virtually background characters.

The other flaw—again, for me, an adult viewer of Paw Patrol: The Movie—was the new character, Liberty. Liberty is the worst. In her first scene she physically threatens a man for littering, she breaks any rules she doesn’t agree with, and she calls the Paw Patrol—emergency services—because she doesn’t like the outcome of an election. Hmm. She then spends the rest of the movie insinuating herself into the Paw Patrol, claiming to be an “honorary member,” and is rewarded with her own membership and set of vehicles at the end. She’s constantly irritating, and the only redeeming factor is the way Ryder acts weirded out by her. Her sass and entitlement also throw into relief the idealistic way the normal cast are presented on the show: as good-natured and selfless public servants, something I never thought to admire in such a silly children’s entertainment before. Here’s hoping the show leaves Liberty in Adventure City.

If you have kids of the right age, this is a fun, charming, big-budget version of something they’re already sure to enjoy, and I’m happy to recommend it on those grounds.

New to me

Cliff Robertson in 633 Squadron (1964)

With the theatres a waterless wasteland in which the only movement to be seen is the lonely rolling of superhero tumbleweeds, this turned out to be a great year for movies I’ve been meaning to see for a long time. This was especially the case with war movies, as you’ll see below.

The Dam Busters (1955)—A classic of the war movie genre and an excellent dramatization of one of the most daring and dangerous missions of the Second World War. It’s well-acted and produced, featuring lots of great aircraft and aerial photography, and despite the limitations of the 1950s British film industry’s special effects, the miniatures, slow motion, rear projection, and optical effects like animated tracer rounds are still effective. And though the film doesn’t cover every loss on the night of the operation or give attention to civilian casualties as a result of the flooding caused by the raids, it still ends on a reverent downbeat note, a moving acknowledgment of just how much this technically accomplished and ingenious operation cost. An engaging and powerful true story well told.

633 Squadron (1964)—I was interested to check this film out because of its odd connection with The Dam Busters: both were inspirations for Star Wars, something that is blindingly obvious if you watch both films with that in mind. (See here and here.) As it turns out, 633 Squadron, though a fictional story, is by turns a fun and gripping evocation of the daring and skill required of the pilots of the British Mosquito fighter-bomber. Cliff Robertson, as an American volunteer leading the squadron, is very good in an understated role, though West Side Story’s George Chakiris is absurdly miscast as a Norwegian resistance leader—casting made yet more ridiculous in that this obviously Greek man is paired with the blond-haired, blue-eyed Austrian actress Maria Perschy as his sister. Regardless, this film is a good deal of fun, has a lot of excellent aerial photography using both models (not always convincing, but effective enough) and a fleet of real Mosquitos collected for the film. It also has a grim, heavy ending comparable to its much better cousin The Dam Busters.

13 Minutes (2015) and The 12th Man (2017)—Two excellent foreign films set in and around World War II. The first is a German film about Georg Elser, a lone-wolf assassin who attempted to kill Hitler with an elaborately engineered time bomb in the early days of the war. The second is a Norwegian film about the harrowing survival of Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor of a botched commando raid. Both are true stories, and both are excellent. I watched these during my quarantine back in the spring; you can read my thoughts on both of them here.

Max Manus: Man of War (2008)—An excellent action movie about Norwegian resistance fighter Max Manus, who had extraordinary guts, having volunteered to fight for Finland during the Winter War before undertaking resistance operations against the Nazis. In one incident, Manus was wounded and captured and escaped by flinging himself through a hospital window to the street several stories below. Brings home both the courage and ingenuity of the resistance as well as the cost and, all too often, the futility of these operations.

A Night to Remember (1958)—An unsentimental, well-acted, and well-produced film about the sinking of the Titanic that also manages to be more comprehensive than any other film version. Despite its disadvantages in terms of special effects, I’d recommend A Night to Remember over James Cameron’s bloated, cliched turkey of a movie any day. I was so moved by A Night to Remember when I watched it back in the spring that I made sure to review it; you can read that full review here.

Tremors (1990)—My first memory of Tremors is of one of my cousins telling me—nearly thirty years ago—about a scene in a movie where Reba McEntire runs from a monster into a room full of guns. That made an impression, as did the Jaws-ripoff poster at the video store nextdoor to the BBQ restaurant in Wiley. Long story short, I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to seeing this, but it’s a hoot, and a high-quality hoot—funny, well-written, well-cast, perfectly structured, and perfectly balancing comedy, horror, and action.

Near misses

Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd in News of the World

Here are three movies I’m calling “near misses,” because while I liked elements of them, they had enough flaws or I had enough misgivings about them that I couldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy or recommend them.

• The Lighthouse—A brilliantly acted, oppressively atmospheric, and beautifully produced movie that is nevertheless too in love with itself for its own good. Part of my quarantine viewing this spring.

• The Green Knight—See my remarks on The Lighthouse above. In addition to entirely too much regard for its own artfulness, The Green Knight also fails as an adaptation, as all of the changes made to what is rightly regarded as a masterpiece diminish the story and its themes. Read my full review here.

• News of the World—This is my favorite of the three films I’m lumping into this category, and I expect it will grow on me. But while it’s an accomplished movie, beautiful to look at and brilliantly acted by Tom Hanks and the young Helena Zengel, I found that, like The Green Knight, where it deviated from its source material it did so to its story’s detriment. In this case, that was a lot of socially aware posturing of the kind that clearly appeals to director Paul Greengrass—we get a lynching in the first five minutes, eliminating a black character who is an actual character in the novel rather than a literally faceless victim, and later there’s a whole sequence of labor relations drama that feels like something from the 1970s rather than the 1870s—but that distracts from the emotional core of Paulette Jiles’s straightforward but subtle and powerful novel. (Coincidentally, I reviewed and recommended the novel in the very first post on this blog four years ago today.)

What I missed in 2021

Three movies from this year that I wanted to see but, for various reasons, I have not gotten around to yet:

• The Little Things—A serial killer mystery from John Lee Hancock, director of The Blind Side, The Founder, and an underrated masterpiece that I seize every opportunity to stump for, The Alamo. Hope to catch this in the new year.

• Spider-Man: No Way Home—As much as I’ve criticized the unceasing flood of superhero movies, the only one that caught my interest this year was this third installment in the Marvel-affiliated Tom Holland Spider-Man series. Word from friends and family is that it’s a lot of fun, but I still haven’t seen it and have been content to catch the first two—Homecoming and Far From Home—on video later. That will probably be the case here.

• The Tragedy of Macbeth—Joel Coen’s solo project (rumor has it that brother Ethan is done making movies, which I dearly hope isn’t true), an artsy black-and-white adaptation of my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, apparently got a very limited arthouse release at Christmas but will only be available to us plebs in January. I’m looking forward to it.

What I’m looking forward to in 2022

Though I’ve bemoaned the state of movies and filmmaking a lot, especially this year, I do find there is much to look forward to—and if you look at what I was looking forward to a year ago, you’ll see that at least some of those turned out to be excellent! Hope springs eternal.

• The Northman—A Viking Age revenge drama that, to judge from the trailer, takes its historical setting and the alien worldview of its characters more seriously than usual. You can read my reactions to and observations based on the first trailer here.

• Munich: The Edge of War—An espionage drama, based on the novel Munich by Robert Harris, set against the backdrop of the 1938 Munich Conference. 1917’s George Mackay plays the lead, with Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain. Disappointed to learn that this will be released by Netflix in the US; hoping for a release on home media somewhere down the line.

• Operation Mincemeat—A true story, previously told in the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, when parts of the operation were still protected secrets, this film is based on the deeply researched and highly readable book by Ben Macintyre and should tell the whole story: how British intelligence mounted an ambitious but morally dubious disinformation campaign by fabricating a false identity for the corpse of a homeless man, planting documents on his person that would lead the Germans to move military resources away from the target of a coming Allied attack, and depositing the body off the coast of Spain where it was sure to be discovered. Great cast including Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen (or, as I am already calling them, the dueling Darcys) and Johnny Flynn as Ian Fleming. Another movie that the abominable Netflix has scooped up.

• Lightyear—Pixar gives us the movie that inspired the toy line from Toy Story—or something. Looks like it could be delightful.

• Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot returns in this big-budget, ensemble cast sequel to his Murder on the Orient Express. This film has already been delayed several times; hoping the studio will finally bring it out in the new year.

• Top Gun: Maverick—Ditto the above. Just release the thing already.

• Mission: Impossible 7—A dependably solid franchise, with excellent action and stunts. Hoping for more in the same tradition.

• Downton Abbey: A New Era—Guaranteed date night success.

Conclusion

Looking back at all I’ve written about, maybe 2021 was a better year for movies than I initially gave it credit for. At any rate, I watched a number of worthwhile, entertaining, enjoyable, or thought-provoking films this year, and I hope you’ll check some of these out, too.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes at the movies for 2022!

2020 in movies

It me. Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse in Autumn De Wilde’s ADAPTATION of Emma

I originally had an introduction here in which I surveyed theatre shutdowns and the unwelcome pivot to streaming, but that was windy, pessimistic, and irrelevant. So I scrapped it. Here instead, without further introduction, are are my favorites movies of 2020:

Tenet

The Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) in Tenet

Tenet is the biggest what-might-have-been of the year, Christopher Nolan having decided to make the most extreme form of the kind of convoluted brain-melting movie he is reputed to make, only to have the COVID epidemic keep people far, far away from the box office.

It’s a shame, because while Tenet is flawed—too loud, too complicated, and too visually confusing for its own good—it is very, very good, with some great action set pieces and excellent performances by the supporting cast, especially Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh. (How good is the cast? They make you believe all of this “temporal warfare” and “inverted entropy” makes sense. An overlooked accomplishment.) Tenet is also great to look at, with beautiful large-format film cinematography and some great locations. I was fortunate enough to see this, one time, in theatres. I was the only one in the whole place.

Read my full review of Tenet, in which I elaborate on all of these themes, on the blog here.

The Vast of Night

Sierra McCormick as switchboard operator Fay in The Vast of Night

I’m not sure when I first heard of The Vast of Night, but I decided to check it out thanks to RedLetterMedia, who reviewed it some months ago. This was my surprise hit of the year.

Set in a small New Mexico town in 1958, The Vast of Night follows two characters—high school electronics enthusiast and part-time switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) and smalltown radio DJ Everett (Jake Horovitz)—on the night of the local high school’s biggest game. Fay has received some strange calls at the switchboard and captured some odd radio signals, and with Everett, who plays a recording of the noise on the radio station, thus prompting calls that might provide leads, they set out of investigate the origin of the sounds. The military? The Russians? Something else? Something not of this world?

The Vast of Night entranced me from the beginning. The characters are fun and the dialogue snappy and humorous. And for a low budget independent film it is visually striking, with excellent cinematography (especially Steadicam work, with long shots swooping across the basketball court or down entire city streets), and sets and costumes that evoke the time and place wonderfully well.

But what makes The Vast of Night especially good, and makes it feel so accomplished, is its perfectly calibrated and controlled tone. It captures precisely the strange combination of suspense, tension, and eagerness that comes with listening to a scratchy, staticky radio signal waiting to hear… whatever is out there. The thrill of the encounter with the creepy. Anyone who has hunched over a computer speaker late at night trying to hear a sample of otherworldly audio knows this feeling. The best example comes in a one-shot scene that is a subtle, low-key masterpiece, in which Fay works the switchboard, talking, questioning, listening, trying to check her equipment for problems, trying to connect or reconnect with people, and always, always returning to the mysterious signal to listen—all while the camera, with glacial patience, pushes in to a closeup.

The Vast of Night keys up our anticipation from the beginning and plays it perfectly. It’s wonderfully done, and a lot of fun if you grew up on “Unsolved Mysteries” or “The Twilight Zone,” or if you just enjoy a trip into the uncanny.

Since I imagine fewer people have heard of The Vast of Night, check out the trailer here. For a taste of the film’s slick camerawork and beautiful sets, check out this four and a half minute shot from near the beginning of the film. And here’s an interesting video featuring the film’s director, in which he comments on that scene at Fay’s switchboard and how the film uses sound to build tension.

Greyhound

CDr Krause (Tom Hanks) on the deck of the KeelIng in Greyhound

This is a movie I’d been looking forward to for some years, ever since reading the novel it’s based on: The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester. You can read more about the book in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Greyhound takes place across about forty-eight hours of the life of Commander Ernest Krause, captain of the destroyer USS Keeling, as he strives to protect the merchant vessels of an Allied convoy from U-boat attack. This film offers a stripped down, mostly unromanticized glimpse of life during World War II without a lot of Hollywood exposition or stock characters or cliched plot elements to get in the way. That requires the viewer to pay attention and keep up, something I always appreciate in a movie. Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed us, but drops us into a situation as it happens and involves us first as witnesses, eventually as participants.

Tom Hanks wrote the script himself and his performance is the centerpiece of the movie. It’s excellent, and it’s a shame Greyhound didn’t get the big-screen release it deserved.

Read my full review of Greyhound on the blog here.

Emma

Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse and JohnnY Flynn as Mr Knightley in Emma

This most recent adaptation of Emma snuck into theatres right ahead of all the shutdowns, but my wife and I didn’t get to watch it until it arrived in Redbox in late Spring. It was worth the wait.

Like previous film adaptations of what is perhaps Jane Austen’s best novel, this Emma has beautiful costumes and cinematography, gorgeous locations in the English countryside, and a bright, energetic color palette, all of which make the film visually stunning from beginning to end. Like other adaptations, this Emma streamlines, condenses, and rearranges things to keep the film a manageable length. Unlike other adaptations—at least the ones I’ve seen—this Emma is an overt comedy, amplifying and exaggerating the comedic elements of the novel, especially the characters and all their foibles. It’s hilarious.

But it’s also quite moving and retains the strong moral core of Austen’s original, since it doesn’t shy away from exaggerating the weaknesses of Emma herself. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma as a spoiled but immensely self-assured rich girl, one with some fine qualities but a long way to go toward maturity. The zest with which Taylor-Joy plays Emma—matchmaking with the hapless Harriet (Mia Goth), flirting with Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), and trading zingers with Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn)—makes her negative qualities, her self-absorption, her obliviousness toward or outright disdain for others, and most famously her cruelty, all the more cutting. Which also makes Mr Knightley all the more attractive, given his earnestness, his sense of honor, and especially his charity toward others.

The litmus test for any adaptation of Emma has to be that scene. You know the one—Emma’s joke at Miss Bates’s expense, and Mr Knightley’s epic chewing out of Emma. This film’s version is perhaps the best I’ve seen. The painfully mixed emotions of everyone involved are expertly portrayed.

The performances are excellent across the board. Taylor-Joy does an excellent job making such a difficult character sympathetic, and Mia Goth’s Harriet is adorably dense and vulnerable. The comedic standouts are Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse, who spends half the movie in a wonderful comic ballet of footmen and folding screens and imaginary drafts, and Josh O’Connor as a Nosferatu-like Mr Elton. I laughed every moment he was onscreen. But perhaps my favorite performance was Flynn as Mr Knightley. Flynn is striking in appearance but not classically handsome—in the way the excellent Jeremy Northam’s Knightley was, for instance—and so what attracts us to him is precisely his goodness.

I wondered, when I saw the trailer for this version of Emma, why we needed another one. The last couple years have been crowded with high-profile remakes, often with some faddish social agenda glommed on, usually disappearing fairly quickly. This one should last; it approaches the story respectfully but from a newer angle, making it fresh and fun—a reminder of why people love Jane Austen. I’m glad they made it, and especially glad I saw it. Check it out if and when you can.

The Outpost

Scott EastwooD as ClinTon RoMesha in The Outpost

Based on Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost tells the stories of Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Clinton Romesha (Scott Eastwood), two US Army soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor during the siege of Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

The army built COP Keating in a mountainous province of Afghanistan but sited it very badly, with virtually the entire interior of the outpost visible from the mountains above. Everyone who entered it became a target—fish in a barrel. We see numerous small Taliban assaults on the outpost early in the film, but when a large force of insurgents, having probed the outpost’s defenses for months, mounts a huge and well coordinated attack, the result is a bloody battle in which COP Keating’s garrison is badly outnumbered and vulnerable from every direction. Not only the heroic efforts of Romesha and Carter but the teamwork of all the men in the outpost and pilots who bring much-needed close air support save the day, though not before eight men have been killed and dozens wounded. The Outpost dramatizes all of this exceptionally well.

Director Rod Lurie stages much of the film in long, unbroken, naturalistic shots that follow the characters around the outpost, giving the viewer a good sense of the geography of the location—always important in this kind of story—as well as subtly involving us in what’s happening. When lulls or mealtime or the boring, routine work around the outpost turns in an instant into combat, the transition is startlingly immediate. Everything feels intensely real.

The performances also help sell what’s happening. Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones are good in the lead roles, as is Orlando Bloom is a small part near the beginning of the film. The supporting cast is also good, and we get a good sense of the camaraderie of the men in the outpost as they shoot the breeze, rag on each other, and switch—again, instantaneously—into combat mode.

The Outpost is a gritty, unromanticized look at modern combat and well worth checking out.

A Hidden Life

AugUst Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter in A Hidden Life

Though A Hidden Life was screened at some film festivals in 2019, I’m treating it as a 2020 movie since it was not widely available until last year. I’m insisting on this because it was by far the best film I saw in 2020, a movie that made me weep and that I’ve meditated upon ever since.

A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who, when called up for military service by the Third Reich during World War II, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. For this he was imprisoned and beaten, his wife and daughters were ostracized from their small, tightly knit rural community, and he was eventually executed for treason.

That’s the outline of the story. What Terence Malick’s film of this story does is bring us into Jägerstätter’s life, allowing us to feel the strength he draws from his relationship with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), the love he has for his home and his daughters, and the power of his faith in God. It also lets us experience how, once he has made up his mind to refuse the oath to Hitler, something he, a faithful Catholic, believes he cannot do, first local peer pressure attempts to accomplish what the omnipotent Reich seems too distant to do—force him into line—and then how the authorities themselves come down on him. The slowness with which the process plays out is painful to watch; even more so are the suspicious and finally angry glances that Jägerstätter’s neighbors direct toward him and his family. And then there is the prison, the trial, and the wait for the guillotine.

The film takes its title from a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The hiddenness of Jägerstätter’s life and sacrifice are what have stuck with me ever since. We all imagine ourselves, especially in this self-congratulatory age, taking heroic stands, changing minds, changing the world, even if it takes our deaths. But what if our deaths accomplish nothing? Multiple characters, even those sympathetic to Jägerstätter, remind him of this throughout the film. Would we really follow our faith all the way to the guillotine if there were no grand speeches or multitudes of people whose minds were changed? If no one ever knew our names? If it meant the ruin of our families and the orphaning of our children? If it meant losing?

A Hidden Life left me powerfully convicted.

The film is beautifully shot, with gorgeous Alpine scenery, and wonderfully well acted. But one recurring image, with or without actors in it, conveys Jägerstätter’s moral center: the faithfulness of work. The fields around Jägerstätter’s village are the site of constant labor. Agriculture demands constant care and attention no matter what you’re growing, and it is often thankless, those who receive the benefits forgetting immediately what it took to produce it. It is the same, Jägerstätter’s story shows us, with faith. We live in a pragmatic age, where even the faithful strive for purely earthly ends and equate righteousness with success. But we are not, after all, called to “accomplish” anything; we are called to be faithful, to do the work. A Hidden Life is a beautiful, powerful, and much needed reminder of that truth.

The ones that got away

Here’s a handful of movies from 2020 that I missed but still hope to see in the new year:

• Soul and Onward—I have zero interest in jazz, the most precious of all musical genres, and am heartily sick of 80s nostalgia, but I love and trust Pixar and really liked the looks of both of these, especially considering the talent involved.

• Mank—David Fincher’s telling of a (questionable) behind the scenes story of the writing of Citizen Kane, shot in glorious black and white and featuring a great cast.

• Hillbilly Elegy—Shot partly in my home county in Georgia and based on one of the best and most important memoirs I’ve read in the last ten years. Glenn Close looks amazing in this.

• I’m Thinking of Ending Things—This isn’t ordinarily my kind of movie, but I want to see this purely on the strength of its bizarre trailer.

• The Call of the Wild—Distracting CGI dog notwithstanding, this is based on an old favorite by Jack London and I’m up for anything with these kinds of desolately beautiful landscapes.

• Fatman—Mel Gibson as an ornery old Santa defending himself from a contract killer? Reviews were not good but I cannot not see this.

• Mulan—I’m generally against Disney’s live action versions of its animated classics, as the tendency is to make them slavishly faithful, shot-for-shot remakes. This approach loses the magic of the originals—which were conceived of and designed to be cartoons—in the translation from animation. The most successful so far have been the handful that have had enough confidence to depart from the cartoons and develop enough of their own personality, style, and tone to work as independent adaptations of the same stories. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella successfully did this. Mulan, based on the trailers, looked like it could. I’ll be interested to find out if it did.

Discoveries

These are films that came out before 2020—one of them over 90 years before—but that I watched for the first time last year. Presented in approximately ascending order, certainly with the best last:

The Hunley

The Hunley is one of the many TNT original movies through which Ted Turner worked out his Civil War obsession during the mid-90s. (Others: Ironclads, The Day Lincoln was Shot, Andersonville, and Gettysburg, which got a theatrical release.) Somehow the film slipped me by until years later. I’m glad to say I’ve finally seen it.

The Hunley tells the story of the Confederate submarine of the same name, famous as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. The movie does an excellent job conveying the hard work and claustrophobic conditions of manning the sub, and the viewer has to marvel at the effort put into mastering the use and maneuver of the craft by its doomed crew. Despite some tonal missteps in the final scene, some dodgy late-90s CGI, and an obviously lower budget than films like Gettysburg or Andersonville, The Hunley was well acted and gripping throughout, with enough narrative surprises to keep it interesting. Donald Sutherland has an especially good moment as Gen. PGT Beauregard in which he takes this effete Louisiana Frenchman and reveals, however briefly, the man’s hidden depths.

A historical note: The Hunley was produced just before the wreck was excavated and removed from the ocean for preservation, and so twenty years of subsequent research has revealed a lot of things not known at the time the film was made. So while much of what the filmmakers came up with out of necessity has been disproven, it’s still an entertaining imaginative dramatization of an important event in Civil War and naval history.

Last Stand at Saber River

Another late-90s TNT original, this is an adaptation of my favorite of Elmore Leonard’s Western novels. Wounded Confederate veteran Paul Cable (Tom Selleck) returns to Arizona territory with his family to find that unscrupulous Unionist ranchers (David and Keith Carradine) are squatting on his land. The showdown between these two sides is further complicated by a one-armed storekeeper (David Dukes) who is up to more than selling dry goods. The film departs in some regards from Leonard’s excellent short novel, primarily by introducing a lot of marital strife into Paul’s relationship with his wife (Suzy Amis), which shortchanges the strong and sustaining relationship in the book. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully shot Western with a lot of good tension and strong performances and successfully translates the dramatic plot developments of the novel’s final act onto the screen.

The Great Train Robbery

A light-hearted Victorian-flavored heist film starring the late great Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Lesley-Anne Down and written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on his own novel. Very loosely based on a real incident, The Great Train Robbery is the story of a plot hatched by career crooks to steal a shipment of gold bound for the Crimea. This gold being the army’s payroll, the shipment is heavily guarded before and after it’s put on a train for the coast, which means forming a multi-part scheme to get all the access and equipment necessary to steal it. And it will take no small amount of guts, too, as—even with all the other pieces in place—the only moment it is feasible to swipe the gold is on the train as it speeds through the countryside.

The Great Train Robbery is fun throughout, with interesting characters, humorous situations, and a generous helping of wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy thrown in—a cross between Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, and one of Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther movies. It’s also very suspenseful, and Connery’s stuntwork aboard the train at the climax was excellent. The Great Train Robbery is a well-crafted heist comedy set in a period one doesn’t often associate with plots of this kind—it’s worth checking out.

9. April

This excellent Danish war film follows a lieutenant (Pilou Asbæk) and his platoon of bicycle infantry through Denmark’s one-day war against the Nazis as they try to halt the German advance into their country. A well-produced and well acted grunt’s-eye-level film about an often forgotten part of the war. You can read my full review on the blog here.

Come and See

The story of a boy who, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, leaves his family to join Communist partisans and fight the Germans, Come and See is a hallucinatory living nightmare of a film, one I think everyone should watch at least once. You can read my full review on the blog here.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

The best of this batch of “discoveries,” this 1928 silent film depicts the trial and execution of St Joan of Arc (Falconetti). This hypnotic film is told through a series of agonized closeups and energetic tracking shots and follows St Joan through questioning by a kangaroo court, imprisonment and the threat of torture, and her final moments on the scaffold. It’s a haunting and powerfully moving depiction of martyrdom. Like A Hidden Life, I could think about nothing else for hours after I watched it. Highly recommended.

What I’m looking forward to

Daniel Craig as 007 in No Time to Die

To end things on a hopeful note, here are the movies I’m most looking forward to this year. Many of these are actually 2020 movies which have, owing to COVID, been bumped back to 2021. I’m hoping for some return to normalcy and for the survival and revival of theatre-going, and I hope a few good films like these will help.

• No Time to Die—Top of the list for me. Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, with Ralph Fiennes returning as M and some especially stunning visuals in the trailers that have been released so far. Also interested to see Remi Malek as the villain. With Craig stepping away, I hope they’ll hand the series off to Tom Hiddleston or Michael Fassbender while they’re young enough to take a good run at it.

• Top Gun: Maverick—I have almost no sentimental attachment to Top Gun, but I like a couple of Kosinski’s previous films and all the aerial stuff—apparently shot for real as much as possible—looks great.

• Dune—The okayest sci-fi/space fantasy epic in history gets a high-powered filmmaking team for this adaptation.

• Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery, starring himself as Hercule Poirot. I really liked the style of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and its lavish, old-fashioned sensibilities—especially its large format film cinematography—so I’m hopeful that this film will continue in the same vein.

• The King’s Man—I liked Kingsman: The Secret Service quite a bit, so I’m looking forward to this lush World War I-era prequel that makes full use of the elegant leather, canvas, and polished oak aesthetic of the period, not to mention cameos from major real life figures. Brilliant casting: Tom Hollander plays cousins King George V, Czar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’d pay just to see that.

• The Last Duel—Ridley Scott returns to the Middle Ages for a story of grievance-fueled judicial dueling. I’m sure it’ll be visually stunning and historically atrocious, as per usual with Scott, who never met a medieval stereotype he didn’t like, but I’m interested to see Adam Driver in one of the lead roles.

• Mission: Impossible—Libra—My favorite action series is set to return with two more films shot back-to-back and released in consecutive years.

• Sherlock Holmes 3—This film is still in pre-production, but I’m hopeful. I quite liked Robert Downey Jr’s take on Holmes, especially the chemistry of his friendship with Jude Law’s Watson. I could take or leave some elements of the earlier two movies but I enjoyed them throughout and have been wishing for a third. Here’s hoping.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check these movies out if you haven’t seen them, and that you’ll get as much enjoyment out of watching them as I did. And let’s hope we can start returning regularly to theatres soon. While I’m thankful for home media, watching a Blu-ray or streaming to a small screen can never replace the communal experience of old-fashioned filmgoing. Something else to look forward to with hope in the new year.

2020 in books: non-fiction

All other things being equal, this was an excellent year of reading. I read more books this year than I have in any other year since I started keeping track—so many books, in fact, and so many good books, that I’ve split my usual end of the year “best of” post into multiple chunks to keep it manageable. Today, let me present my favorite non-fiction reads of 2020. I’ll tell you a little more about what else I have planned at the end.

As usual, keep in mind that these are my favorites, which I have defined previously as “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.” I had a hard time narrowing it even to the ones you see in this post. You can see a list of everything I read in 2020 at my Goodreads challenge here.

Top ten non-fiction reads of 2020

First, my nine favorites, presented in no particular order. My favorite read of the year enjoys its own subsection further below. Suffice it to say that I’d recommend any of these:

The Making of Europe, by Christopher Dawson—In this classic study of the Early Middle Ages, Dawson argues that far from being a radical break with the classical past or a “dark age” that set Europe back, the period from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the 11th century was crucial to the emergence of a unified Western civilization, a civilization that synthesized the seemingly disparate elements of Greco-Roman antiquity, the king-led warrior culture of the Germanic tribes that had destroyed Rome, and, as both solvent and glue, Christianity. While The Making of Europe was originally published in 1932 and is therefore dated in some regards, the overall argument Dawson presents holds up well—as do the good writing and magisterial overview of the period.

Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, by Luke Daly-Groves—I mentioned this book in a special post commemorating the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s suicide back in April. This is a very good recent book that takes Hitler survival conspiracies seriously enough to subject their many varying claims to disciplined historical analysis. They don’t hold up well. Daly-Groves does an excellent job building upon and updating the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose Last Days of Hitler is in my “honorable mentions” below, and presenting a case sympathetic to those intrigued by the rumors of Hitler’s survival but uncompromising in its intellectual rigor. It’s also terrifically readable—an excellent introduction to this material and this kind of historical detective work.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray—This book illustrates the danger of the perfect epigraph. The GK Chesterton quotation that opens journalist Douglas Murray’s meditation on the controversies and cancel culture surrounding issues of race, feminism, homosexuality, and the transgender movement says everything: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” (And, in the first of many instances of Murray’s wry British humor, he follows this up with the chorus of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” which enjoins the listener to “look at her butt” no less than six times. From the sublime to the ridiculous indeed.) In all of the four areas Murray concentrates on, vocal minorities of activists have, in the last few decades—or even much more recently than that, in the case of the final issue—committed not only to believing in new, untested, highly theoretical ideologies of “social justice” but also to enforcing those programs, reshaping reality to align with their ideologies, and cowing all opponents into submission. We are living with the results, and—as he makes clear in a new foreword added to more recent post-summer-of-2020 printings of the book—what he describes here isn’t over yet. I don’t agree with all of his premises or all of his conclusions, but Murray examines these issues carefully and with uncompromising intellectual honesty, and that makes it well worth reading.

Labels, by Evelyn Waugh—I’ve read almost all of Waugh’s fiction in the last couple years but had as yet read none of his travel writing. I decided to fix that this summer. Labels, Waugh’s first travel book, is a record of his journey along the coasts of the Mediterranean—from the Riviera to Egypt, Crete, Istanbul, Greece, Italy, Spain, and more—in early 1929. Three things make Labels a great read. First, Waugh’s humor, which had me laughing out loud more than once. Second, Waugh’s absolute refusal to be impressed with the things that usually impress tourists, which offers many opportunities for acerbic commentary on tourism and makes his appreciation of a handful of things all the more meaningful. And third, the poignancy of knowing what would happen to the world in the fall of 1929, which not only made trips like this impossible for many people, but surely closed many of the hotels, restaurants, casinos, and other local establishments not long after Waugh had passed through to record them for us. Check this out if you want a wry and beautifully written window into a lost world. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, by Régine Pernoud—No period of our own history gets dumped on or dismissed as often or as readily as the Middle Ages. French archivist and historian Regine Pérnoud’s little book Those Terrible Middle Ages! offers a spirited counterattack, not only debunking the most common misinterpretations or outright lies about the Middle Ages (e.g. medieval people believed women didn’t have souls, or engaged in witchhunts, or had no understanding of science or art) but also offering positive examples of medieval life and culture as critiques of the supposedly more advanced and sophisticated modern world. Her writing is engaging, fun, and animated by a concern for the truth about the past that is sadly as lacking today as it was in Pernoud’s 1970s.

Breaking Bread with the Dead, by Alan Jacobs—Jacobs’s wonderfully titled book is a plea for narrowminded modern people to broaden their “temporal bandwidth,” to reach out to and learn from past people rather than dismissing, ignoring, or—as we’ve seen a lot this year—condemning them. Jacobs argues that doing so is a remedy to the anxiety and distemper of our times. It’s excellent—a short, readable, and well-argued little book. I intend to reread it soon.

Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors, by Adrian Goldsworthy—One of my favorite historians for years, with this dual biography Adrian Goldsworthy looks beyond the Roman world to ancient Greece. Goldsworthy argues persuasively that the career of Alexander the Great was made possible by his father Philip, and so to study the former requires understanding the latter. It’s an excellent look not only at two charismatic, aggressive, and driven men but at their entire world and the world their strivings created. Goldsworthy writes lucidly, making complex subjects like Greek city life, domestic arrangements, political alliances, and especially military campaigns from the operational level to the battlefield understandable and even exciting. He also shows admirable restraint and circumspection when it comes to the many controversial topics surrounding this period and these men—for instance, the fates of various rivals or members of Alexander’s family, Alexander’s or his mother’s involvement in Philip’s assassination, the exact cause of Alexander’s death, or, perhaps most famously in our sex-obsessed times, Alexander’s purported bisexuality. Goldsworthy refuses to argue dogmatically for conclusions where the evidence is garbled, contradictory, or simply nonexistent, explaining the possibilities but always making it clear what can and, most critically, cannot be known. This is a balanced, readable, and engaging book and I’ve already eagerly recommended it to friends and students.

From Bauhaus to Our House, by Tom Wolfe—Discovering a remaindered copy of Wolfe’s final book (see below) at a discount bookstore got me on a Wolfe kick for the first time since college. This was the best of the batch of short, barbed journalistic works I read. A spirited attack on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House chronicles the way ideology took over the architectural profession, its crown of victory being the cityscapes of ugly, unsustainable glass boxes which we now enjoy in every crowded and inhuman urban environment in the world. This is Wolfe at his finest, writing with infectious energy and withering irony. I read this shortly after rewatching—and blogging about—the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary Why Beauty Matters and the two, different as they are in tone, dovetail nicely. Short Goodreads review here.

Digging Deeper: How Archaeology Works, by Eric H Cline—Eric Cline is a biblical archaeologist who has done field work all over the Near East and published a number of books, including the excellent 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which I mentioned here earlier this month. A modestly sized handbook, Digging Deeper collects sections from Cline’s longer book Three Stones Make a Wall and expands upon them, answering the questions most commonly asked of archaeologists. Cline’s writing is engaging and winsome, and he makes the hard, complicated, and very, very slow work of archaeology comprehensible. I highly recommend this if you have any interest in archaeology at all. Short Goodreads review here.

Honorable mentions

Before I get to my favorite read of the year, let me mention a few other books. I read so much good stuff this year that the above “best of” list proved very hard to narrow down. This handful of honorable mentions or runners up began as a list of three, then expanded to five, and finally ten. I present these in alphabetical order, as they were all good and I don’t want to imply any kind of ranking beyond that of “honorable mention”:

Becoming CS Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898-1918), by Harry Lee Poe—A well-researched look at the years of CS Lewis’s life most commonly neglected by biographers, his childhood and adolescence. Goodreads review here.

Cannae: Rome’s Greatest Defeat, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Excellent short account of one of the most famous and consequential battles of the ancient world. Short Goodreads review here.

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed, by Larry J Daniel—Part campaign history, part examination of leadership, part topical and sociological analysis, this is a very good history of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from its beginnings to its destruction. I found the chapters on logistics, food, medicine and surgery, and the soldiering life particularly good. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, by John Cleese—A fun little gift book by my favorite Python. Cleese seeks to find a place for both head and heart in the creative process and offers a number of helpful tips, all of which is buoyed by his fun, lighthearted approach.

Dead Mountain, by Donnie Eichar—A really intriguing and briskly written examination of a bizarre unsolved mystery from Khrushchev-era Russia: the disappearance of a team of hikers in the Urals, their frozen bodies eventually being discovered in strange circumstances. Fascinating. Much more detailed Goodreads review here.

The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, by Frank McDonough—A good short history of the rise, organization, and functioning of Nazi Germany’s secret police. McDonough cuts through the legendary image of the all-powerful, all-knowing Gestapo to the reality—understaffed, spread too thin, originally made up of more or less disinterested beat cops but gradually taken over by younger political fanatics, and heavily reliant on tipoffs from narcs who, more often than not, gave them bad leads. An informative and carefully researched read.

John: An Evil King? by Nicholas Vincent—A great entry in the Penguin Monarchs series. Nicholas Vincent’s 100-page capsule biography of the worst King of England wears its deep research lightly and conveys not only the particulars of John’s life but the political and cultural landscape in which he lived and reigned. It’s excellent. Gooodreads review here.

The Kingdom of Speech, by Tom Wolfe—Wolfe’s final book, a waspish attack on the Darwinism through speech, a uniquely human phenomenon that has never been adequately accounted for by Darwinian theory. This and From Bauhaus to Our House above are the books that made me realize that what Wolfe most relished was to deflate the pretentions of cliques—in this case, the 19th century clique of aristocratic Darwinists and the 20th and 21st century clique of Chomskyites, both of whom have worked from their titled sinecures to destroy or coopt the work of field researchers.

The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper—A historic examination of a historic event. Trevor-Roper was an Oxford historian who worked for British intelligence during World War II. Immediately after the end of the war with Germany, Trevor-Roper was assigned to ascertain what, precisely, had happened to Hitler. The first edition of this book was the result. The edition I read was the seventh, and includes several forewords and introductions from across the fifty years following Trevor-Roper’s investigation in which he updates the information he had originally collected. The result is a great piece of historical detective work and an inside look at how an historian acquires, assesses, and weaves evidence into a coherent narrative. Worth your while. Longish Goodreads review here.

Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective, Ron Dart, Ed.—A good set of essays responding to different aspects of Jordan Peterson’s thought and teaching from a variety of angles and perspectives. Worth your while if you’ve been looking for a thoughtful and religiously orthodox engagement with this latter day virtuous pagan.

Favorite of the year

I’m going to cheat a bit now, and recommend my two favorites of the year, making this top ten a top eleven. Consider it a bonus.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

One of the best books I read in grad school was David Bentley Hart’s badly titled Atheist Delusions, in which Hart argued that, “[w]e live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution—social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual—the immensity of which we often only barely grasp,” and that this revolution is “perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West.” That revolution is Christianity, which remade the Western world from top to bottom.

Tom Holland’s vaguely titled Dominion is built upon the same thesis—indeed, Atheist Delusions is cited in the bibliography—but where Hart’s book is dense, tightly argued in sometimes highly technical language, and narrowly focused on the early centuries of that transformation, not moving much beyond late antiquity in its coverage, Holland’s is dynamic, epic in scope, and ranges from the origins of Hebrew religion to the present day. It is also, as is typical for Holland, engaging from beginning to end and utterly readable. I have often recommended Atheist Delusions, but Dominion possesses a sweep and accessibility that make it a valuable successor to that book.

Beginning with Judaism and the emergence of Christianity, Holland follows this new faith as it slowly transforms and reshaps the world in which it arrived. He capably contrasts Christianity with the Greco-Roman paganisms we think we know (they’re about a lot more than mythology) and shows how radical a departure Jesus’s message was. Christianity made slavery impossible and made elites accountable to more than their own lusts. It raised doubts about war and gave a new meaning to heroism, elevating the humble and weak and casting down the mighty. Along the way he offers striking and vividly written vignettes of major events and personalities from over two thousand years of Western history, ranging from kings and emperors to martyrs, poets, monks and nuns, philosophers and scientists, and ordinary people.

Holland argues that Christianity laid the groundwork for life as we know it today. Even non-Christians—and Holland is not a Christian—who are concerned with “justice” and “equality” root their notions of those concepts in Christian teaching, which offers the only successful means of making those concepts coherent. Without Christianity, there is no notion of human equality of any kind, much less that espoused by the UN Declaration of Human Rights or modern day Woke activists.

What the moderns don’t understand, Holland shows, is that we abandon Christianity at our own peril. Because of the high ideals of its teaching, Christianity comes with built-in tensions—between equality and poverty and maintaining some kind of order, for instance—that require constant reform and rejiggering. Strip out the Christianity and these tensions dissipate, leaving us with something veering toward brutality in one direction or the other, a point one of the characters profiled by Holland late in the book, Friedrich Nietzsche, understood better than anyone since.

I don’t agree with all of Holland’s conclusions, and I think he sometimes overstates the importance of particular parts of these tensions—especially where the primitive and voluntary socialism of the early Church is concerned—but the book is a brilliant tour of select currents in the Christian tradition and is well worth reading. It’s also beautifully written and structured, using a nesting series of threes and sevens (three parts, each with seven chapters, each with three subsections) to give a Christian shape even to the organization of the book, and with the vignettes and profiles leading from one to another in a series of setups and callbacks that give intimacy to the sweep of his narrative.

It’s an accomplishment, and I hope to reread it soon.

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, by Wilfred M McClay

This is the best one-volume history of the United States I’ve read in some time. McClay’s Land of Hope offers a balanced and carefully crafted history that moderates the worst tendencies of a lot of other such recent histories—jingoistic, uncritical admiration for everything America has ever done on the right, self-loathing denunciation and scolding on the left. Striking that balance is especially important nowadays, as the two sides I just mentioned have both sought to make history a weapon, simplifying and exaggerating—if not outright making stuff up—in order to have politically helpful narratives to which they can appeal.

McClay begins with pre-history and an in medias res leap into late medieval Europe, arguing that the histories of America and Europe, especially in the early going, are inextricably intertwined. From there he follows European exploration and the establishment and growth of the various British colonies, and does a good job exploring the diversity of who came to these colonies and why—aristocratic Anglican adventures and planters (Virginia and Carolina), religious autocrats seeking to remake the world (Massachusetts), persecuted religious minorities (the Quakers and Catholics of Pennsylvania and Maryland), and humanitarians (Georgia). These first chapters are especially strong, as are McClay’s carefully balanced examination and explanation of the crisis born with Independence from Britain, the political, cultural, economic differences embedded in these quite different but now united colonies that would grow and bloom and bear fruit as the Civil War.

Land of Hope continues right up to the present—that is, the present of 2019, when the book was published. One wonders what the last three pages or so of this book would look like if McClay could update it for this year. But in addition to the measured, balanced approach he takes throughout, McClay also takes pains to explain that the closer we get to the present, the harder it is to maintain or even to have a proper perspective on events. Everything is too recent.

This is perhaps why the last chapter or two are the weakest of the book. Putting together a survey of all of American history is difficult, and so one has to be selective. Mostly I think McClay selects well, though in the first half I wish the many Indian Wars, which varied immensely in scale and ferocity but played out over decades and consumed a great deal of the United States’ resources and imagination, to say nothing of blood, got more time than they do. But in the last few chapters the history becomes almost entirely political and economic, focusing on who won elections and what policies they tried to enact. This is hard not to do (speaking from classroom experience), but a history of the recent past that moves from stagflation to Donald Trump without mentioning the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, or the radical transformations that have been worked on American culture and society is going to be incomplete.

But again, that’s a niggle. Ideally, Land of Hope will be a starting point—it is an “invitation” after all. A properly curious reader or student will not stop with this book, and its warm, engaging style, careful structure, and evenhanded treatment of even the most controversial moments in American history make it an excellent introduction indeed. McClay ends the book with a brief meditation on what a rightly ordered American patriotism—a patriotism that takes account of America’s flaws as well as its ideals—should look like, a good sendoff for a very good book. The highest praise I can give this book is that I wish I could teach from it.

For more, and for a sample of McClay’s excellent writing, see my blog post about McClay’s use of narrative, an approach I wholeheartedly endorse, here.

I’d recommend both of these for sweeping, elegantly written accounts of important ideas and events, and to help make sense of where we are now—which is the whole reason we study the past in the first place.

Classics

These are great books from the ancient and medieval worlds that don’t feel like standard “non-fiction” to me, but which I want to acknowledge as part of what made this year’s reading good. There’s a reason these have stuck around—they’re all great.

• The Life of St Francis, by St Bonaventure, trans. Ewert H Cousins

• How to Run a Country, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Short Goodreads review here. Election day blog post about this here.

• The Secret History, by Procopius, trans. GA Williamson

• Strategikon, by Maurice, trans. George T Dennis. Short Goodreads review here.

• Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, trans. Lewis Thorpe. Goodreads review here.

• The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by Bede, trans. Goodreads review here. A semi-humorous blog post inspired by a story Bede tells in his history here.

• On the Ruin of Britain, by Gildas, trans. John Allen Giles.

• How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. See rereads below.

• How to Think About God, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Goodreads review here.

Many of these medieval texts I revisited—or read in their entirety for the first time—for a podcast series I’m involved in. Looking forward to telling you more about that in the future.

Rereads

Per CS Lewis, “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” This is a habit I’ve been trying intentionally to develop more in the last couple of years, and this year, in addition to favorite novels, I revisited a lot of old non-fiction favorites. I say revisited because several of these were audiobooks, which feels like cheating to me. I’ve marked the books I listened to—via Hoopla, a wonderful service—with an asterisk.

• How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. One of my favorites by Cicero. Full review on my blog here.

• The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer.* Short Goodreads review here.

• Saint Francis of Assisi, by GK Chesterton*

• Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by GK Chesterton.* Short Goodreads review here.

• Eugenics and Other Evils, by GK Chesterton.* Goodreads review here.

• On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner. Short Goodreads review here.

• The Defendant, by GK Chesterton. Short Goodreads review here.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ve found at least one book here that sparked your interest and that you’ll seek out in 2021. Coming up in the next couple of days I’ll go through my favorite fiction of 2020, as well as, for a special post, all the books by the late Roger Scruton I read over the last twelve months, an act of piety on my part for a great mind gone too soon.

Thanks again, and happy New Year!

Chesterton on fools

In honor of April Fools’ Day, here’s a quick batch of thoughts on fools and foolishness from GK Chesterton, a man who knew a thing or two about the topic—and also how to enjoy what he often called the “topsy turvy,” which is the essence of the holiday.

Alas, not everyone is a fan of April Fools’ Day. I’ve already seen warnings on social media regarding the precisely proper ways to celebrate it this year, admonitions so stern and moralistic I started checking the posters’ profile pictures for ruffs and broadcloth. I’ve also seen some deeply wise people suggesting we not fool around at all, reminding us that we have apparently evolved beyond the examples of those who survived the plague and religious persecution and the death camps and the gulag and can—and should—now hang up our humor and adopt a properly modern attitude of lugubrious, sorrowful navel-gazing. Which brings me to this line, from “The Neglect of Christmas,” 1906:

“There are those who dislike playing the fool, preferring to act the same part in a more serious spirit.”

Let the reader understand. And there’s this, from “A Defence of Heraldry,” collected in The Defendant, 1901:

“We shall never make anything of democracy until we make fools of ourselves. For if a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.”

Being foolish is not a choice. There is, indeed, no other option.

Chesterton will begin to make a lot more sense to you once you’ve reckoned with his thoughts on two categories of people: madmen and fools. Madmen, those afflicted with any number of the insanities that have created the modern world, are the tragic endpoint, and much of his writing was concerned with outlining, arguing against, and rescuing people from madness. We are susceptible to madness because we do not begin as a tabula rasa of sanity and then fall away into madness, but begin predisposed to it because we are all, in fact, fools.

This is not the kind of everyone-is-an-idiot cynicism of some modern thinkers and most middle school malcontents. It is not even necessarily a bad thing. That’s because it stems from Chesterton’s beliefs about mankind as informed by Christian doctrine. From Heretics, 1905:

The weak point in the whole of Carlyle’s case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men.

Chesterton saw the Socratic truth that wisdom must begin from a recognition of one’s own foolishness, a foolishness shared with all of mankind and therefore not just the basis of any real equality but also of any real wisdom. From his 1910 book What’s Wrong With the World, in a passage on the ever-relevant topic of modern education:

“We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy.”

This fundamental fact—that we are all fools, disguise it as we may—is also the basis of our one true hope, since only Christianity can acknowledge this universal human defect and not just offer a solution to it but make it one of the instruments of our redemption. From his great 1908 book Orthodoxy:

Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go—as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, quâ man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

No one is too big a fool to be saved. As Chesterton knew, it is the engine of redemption and the acknowledgement that we are fools is a step toward sainthood. Indeed, the foolishness of holiday and ritual are part of the making of saints. Again from Heretics:

“A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.”

A good reminder in this self-serious age. Don’t listen to the scolds. Be foolish, and even more importantly, be willing to be fooled. The more that we can do this, the more that we can take ourselves lightly—which, according to Chesterton, is why angels can fly—the more of us that can take that one small step called humility, the closer we fools will draw each other toward salvation.