Goodreads Inferno

In a longish state-of-the-publishing-world essay on Substack, independent publisher Sam Jordison gives special consideration to the disappearance of the negative book review—the hatchet job—as a symptom of decline. He notes that author and critic DJ Taylor, whose excellent guide to Orwell I wrote about here last year, described the disappearance of “tough-minded” reviews, criticism that “often bordered on outright cruelty,” ten years ago. According to Jordison, the tepid positivity of book review pages has only worsened since then.

What caught my attention was Jordison’s second mention of Taylor’s phrase “outright cruelty,” which Jordison notes we shouldn’t want or need to come back: “We have Goodreads for that.” This observation is glossed with the following footnote:

Goodreads has risen just as professional book pages have declined. The nastiness and ignorance on display there is a reflection of internet culture, and the way everything Jeff Bezos touches is infected with his mean spirit. But I do also wonder if some people think they are restoring some kind of balance?

The nastiness on Goodreads is well known. Goodreads users mob and harrass authors over single lines, engage in character assassination, try to preemptively get books canceled before they’re even published, and even the authors who use Goodreads join in the bad behavior. Imagine the vitriol of Twitter, the politics of Tumblr, and the righteous self-assurance of a school librarian in a Subaru and you have the predominant tone of Goodreads today.

Thanks to the nastiness the profound ignorance on Goodreads is perhaps less visible. But as it happens, it was fresh on my mind because this morning, as I searched for a brand new one-volume edition of The Divine Comedy that I’m about to start reading, I made the mistake of looking at its top review.

According to the user responsible, Dante has written this “OG” “self-insert bible [sic] fanfiction” because he “thanks he is very special” (stated twice), “has a bit of a crush . . . on both Beatrice,” “his dead girlfriend,” and “his poetry man crush” Virgil, and wants “to brag about Italy and dunk on the current pope.” All of this is wrong, for what it’s worth, but here’s the closing paragraph:

TLDR: Do I think everyone should read this? No, it’s veryyyyy dense. But I think everyone should watch a recap video or something to understand a lot of famous literary tropes that become established here.

Read The Divine Comedy for the tropes. Or better yet, “watch a recap video.”

This is a five-star review, by the way.

I wish this were the exception on Goodreads, but it’s not. Here’s a person with the capacity and the patience—perhaps? the review is short on details of anything beyond Inferno—to read the Comedy but who is utterly unprepared to receive and understand it, presumably having lost the good of intellect. This review reads like those parody book review videos that were popular a decade ago, except Thug Notes actually offered legitimate insight as well as laughs.

I have a love-hate relationship with Goodreads. I signed up fourteen years ago and still use it every day. But I can only do so and maintain my sanity by sticking to my tiny corner of online acquaintances and people I actually know and avoiding the hellscape of popular fiction, where the fights that can break out in review comment sections resemble nothing so much as Dante’s damned striving against each other even in death. Finding a legitimate, thoughtful, accurate review is harder than ever. One must dig, sometimes through hundreds of reviews like the one above, to find something helpful. And it’s even harder if you’re interested in older books, for which the temptation toward glibness or snark—omg so outdated! so racist! so sexist!—is for many irresistible.

And, for authors whose books are on Goodreads, it’s hard not to let a latent anxiety build up. Sometimes it feels like, inevitably, it’ll be your turn in the crosshairs.

Jordison blames Jeff Bezos, who he correctly points out—as I just did in my Tech & Culture class last week—started selling books not because he loves them but because they’re easy to catalog and ship. I’m sure that’s a factor, but it’s not sufficient to explain the whole problem. His other culprit, “internet culture,” that broad and protean devil, plays a crucial role as well. Regardless, Jordison ends his essay on a note of hope:

But I don’t counsel despair. Because the truth is that there is still good work being done. There are a few decent book sections left. Writers are producing fine books. Publishers are bringing them into the world. People are reading them.

At least some of those books will endure.

Truly encouraging to remember. But that this must happen despite rather than because of the technologies we’ve created from an ostensible love of books is a judgment on our culture.

State of Siege

In reviewing Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev last year, I noted that Ambler’s postwar novels, while focusing on polyglot, cosmopolitan, but out-of-the-way worlds unsettled by global events like his early classics, are marked by a broader scope and more mature perspective. Deltchev, his first postwar thriller, takes place in an unnamed Eastern European state faced with imminent Stalinist takeover. His next, The Schirmer Inheritance, follows an American lawyer tasked with settling an old lady’s estate on a journey through postwar West Germany, its scarcely buried past, and the lingering dangers of guerrilla warfare in Greece. Passage of Arms sprawls across British-controlled Malaya, newly independent and unsettled Indonesia, arms trafficking, Communist insurgency, Chinese organized crime, and American tourists.

These are tense and well-plotted but slower, statelier, with seemingly more at stake than the fates of their characters. State of Siege, published in 1956 between The Schirmer Inheritance and Passage of Arms, comes as a bit of a surprise then.

When the novel begins, British engineer Steve Fraser has finished a three-year assignment to build a dam on the island of Sunda, a former Dutch colony that has gained its independence from both the Dutch and Sukarno’s Indonesia. The dam is part of an international development scheme for southeast Asia. Fraser believes in the work but is happy to be leaving. Rampant local corruption and a succession of inept, unqualified native liaisons with the Sundanese government have left him disillusioned if not embittered. Only one local, Major Suparto, has proven tough, intelligent, competent, and genuinely involved with the project—suspiciously so.

Fraser flies to the capital, Selampang, and has only to wait a few days for the regularly scheduled cargo plane out. An Australian friend sets him up with female company, a half-Dutch, half-Sundanese girl named Rosalie van Linden, and his apartment on the town square by the radio station. Fraser is set for a pleasant few days before flying home but for one discordant note: while walking with Rosalie in the garden of a club, he overhears a voice he recognizes—Major Suparto.

The major has arrived by jeep from the dam, a strenuous daylong drive on seasonal roads through territory controlled by leftwing nationalist rebels under General Sanusi, who hopes to root out corruption and turn Sunda into an Islamic republic. That Suparto has arrived on the same day as Fraser, who flew, suggests that he is a part of the rebel movement, and his overheard conversation with “the general” seems to prove it.

Fraser puts it out of his mind. Whatever Suparto, the rebels, and local mobsters are up to, he’s leaving. He continues his preparations to return home, has a second date with Rosalie, and takes her back to his friend’s apartment.

That night, revolution breaks out.

The army having left Selampang on maneuvers, Sanusi’s rebels seize the opportunity to take over the capital and declare a regime change. His troops occupy the city and take over the radio station. Fraser and Rosalie, in their friend’s apartment nextdoor, find their building turned into the headquarters of Sanusi himself.

There they sit, trapped at the center of the revolution, watching and waiting through aerial and naval bombardment, street fighting, the revelation of competing loyalties and betrayal among the revolutionaries, and the growing pressure in Sanusi’s inner circle to eliminate any potential threat to the revolution, including Fraser and Rosalie: one a foreigner, the other a child of the former colonial oppressors.

I began by saying that State of Siege proved a bit of a surprise among Ambler’s postwar thrillers. Like the others I mentioned it has a sweeping, utterly realistic and plausible scope. Sunda is a fictitious island—one of several Ruritanias Ambler dreamed up for his stories, and likely the most vividly realized of them—but it feels of a piece with that part of the world at that time. Ambler never bludgeons the reader with explanation but allows the corruption and mismanagement of the national government, the idealism and brutality of the Islamic rebels, the broader political situation, the ethnic hodgepodge of Selampang, with its foreign engineers, Chinese business class and gangsters, and benighted native population, and even the geography of the conflict to emerge effortlessly, through Fraser simply telling his story.

That gives State of Siege a real-world believability and convinces the reader of the danger Fraser and Rosalie face, but Ambler combines this quality with the best of his pre-war thriller pacing. His typically skillful use of foreshadowing helps sets the story in motion from the first page and, once underway, the action and suspense build steadily right up to the end.

Fraser and Rosalie are also standouts among Ambler’s protagonists. His novels typically feature unadventurous, nose-to-the-grindstone types—often engineers, as Ambler had formal education in engineering—who find themselves embroiled in international intrigues not of their own making, and Steve Fraser seems at first to fit the standard Ambler type. But he proves unusually resourceful and plucky and, perhaps uniquely for Ambler’s put-upon main characters, keeps his cool in danger. A mid-story sequence in which Fraser is forced to work for the rebels in order to protect himself and Rosalie is arduous, tense, and makes his engineering an exciting and integral part of the plot.

And Rosalie may be Ambler’s best leading lady, not only working as a foil and romantic interest to Fraser but contributing, through her personal story growing up among the Dutch plantations in the back country, a strong sense of dread over the outcome of the revolution. Fraser is a tough, fundamentally honest man who wants to think well of people. Rosalie has no illusions whatsoever about what will happen to her if Sanusi’s side wins. Her perspective not only heightens the tension but adds to the realistic murk of Sunda. One’s sympathies may be pulled in one direction or the other—a tension maintained by the complicated and surprising rebel characters—but one cannot sensibly call either side in the revolution the “good guys.”

Finally, one of the unusual joys of State of Siege is watching Fraser and Rosalie’s casual, transactional relationship deepen through the danger they share. Ambler was not known for his romantic plots, but this works wonderfully, not least—without giving too much away—by adding a bittersweet note to the novel’s ending.

Short, briskly paced, but rich and surprising and centered on two of Ambler’s most sympathetic characters, State of Siege may well be my favorite of postwar Ambler. I hope to read it again soon.

A Rough Shoot

Geoffrey Household knew how to open a thriller. His most famous book, Rogue Male, published in 1939 and which I read just over three years ago, begins with its unnamed protagonist in the hands of an unnamed central European dictatorship’s unnamed secret police, who have tortured him nearly to death and are about to dispose of him using a convenient cliff. Believe it or not, the situation escalates from there.

A Rough Shoot, published in 1951, continues this tradition. Roger Taine, a former British Army infantry colonel and now a salesman and family man, is walking the patch of Dorset farmland to which he’s purchased the hunting rights when he spots two men in the bushes. The sun is going down and he can’t see clearly what they’re doing, but they seem to be rigging up traps and he assumes them to be poachers. When one of them, backing through the hedge on hands and knees, presents his backside as a target, Taine decides to give the poachers a painful scare. He levels his shotgun and gives the man a load of birdshot.

The man collapses and his companion flees. Taine realizes that something has gone wrong. He approaches the man he shot where he lies unmoving on the ground and rolls him over. The men had been putting down big triangular stakes for some kind of device and, when Taine shot him, the man had fallen chest-first onto one of them.

None of this is a spoiler—it all happens in the first three pages. The rest of the novel is Taine’s attempt to deal with the consequences and discover who the two men were and what they were doing.

A Rough Shoot, like Rogue Male, has the Buchanesque qualities of vividly realized landscapes and the continuous chase. Taine’s predicament evolves as newer and greater dangers present themselves, keeping the ongoing action fresh and exciting. From Taine’s attempt to conceal the body and his realization that more and more suspicious men are poking around his shoot, asking questions of the tenant farmer and landowner and wanting to find out more about him, to his meeting with an former Polish commando whose story of exile, unofficial espionage, and a rising neo-fascism coordinating itself across Western Europe, A Rough Shoot escalates continuously in tension and stakes. What begins as a personal crisis for Taine—he is guilty, by his estimation, of manslaughter at least—turns into a tiny local battle in the ruins and upset of the postwar.

I can’t say much more without revealing too many specifics, but Taine’s business, wife, and children are inevitably drawn into a plot begun by Taine’s one impetuous, high-spirited act, and the first half’s smothering tension of concealment, silence, and stalking—the suspense of hunting—gives way in the final third to the chase: the prey flushed, the hunters pursuing.

I reflected a couple years ago on what it must have been like, in the 1940s and 50s, to visit the bookstalls and see a steady stream of novels like this—unpretentious gems of pure craft and enjoyment—flowing from publishers. Reading A Rough Shoot, a slender novel with no chapter divisions, just steadily building story, I could imagine myself traveling by train and needing a good page turner. A Rough Shoot would have fit the bill back then and, thanks to the strength of its simple but tense and Household’s exquisite craft, it still does. It’s inventive and exhilarating and was one of the joys of our recent time snowed in. This is only the second Household thriller I’ve read, but there will be more.

Mars in Aries

Last year I discovered the work of Alexander Lernet-Holenia, an Austrian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and soldier. He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War and as an Austrian reservist in the Wehrmacht, Austria having been consumed by the Third Reich in the Anschluß, in the Second. His work—at least what I’ve read so far, and I’m always looking for more—is atmospheric and uncanny, with his protagonists descending or arriving unexpectedly in worlds in which the invisible is made manifest and layered over the day-to-day.

Baron Bagge, the novella I reviewed for Miller’s Book Review last summer, does this with an Austrian cavalryman in the First World War. Count Luna, about an Austrian businessman convinced that a former rival who died in the concentration camps is haunting him, does this in the aftermath of the Second World War. Mars in Aries not only takes place during the Second World War, it was written and published—and banned—while it was yet ongoing.

Mars in Aries tells the story of Lieutenant Wallmoden who, we learn on the first page, is not the novel’s hero, simply its main character. The story takes place over a month or so in the late summer of 1939 as Wallmoden, an Austrian reservist, volunteers to join his unit rather than wait to be called up for mobilization by the Germans. He whiles away this peacetime service talking to his brother officers, conducting training exercises, and—occasionally—experiencing visions.

In an especially vivid one that occurs during training, Wallmoden is leading troops across a field near a village when he finds himself surrounded by ghosts. An army doctor assures him he is in good health, but it unsettles Wallmoden to have experienced this after conversations with another officer, a man of a mystical bent and with an interest in spiritualism, about whether or not one can tell if another person is an apparition.

Being of a well-off background and an officer, Wallmoden also makes social calls. It is during one of these that he meets Baroness Pistohlkors. She claims to have been born in the United States and briefly married there before being dumped—all the result of a misunderstanding—and remarrying a consumptive nobleman who moved her back to Europe and promptly died. Still young and breathtakingly beautiful, she is a titled and wealthy widow. An old man who is, strangely, often in her company, insinuates to Wallmoden that despite the two marriages the Baroness is still a virgin.

Wallmoden finds the old man offputting, the Baroness’s foreign friends strange, and her behavior stranger still—why, for instance, does she sometimes speak to only one other person at parties? or disappear before the parties end? and why do the handful of people who know her warn him of her bad reputation?—but he is smitten.

In just a few weeks, heedless of whatever she has earned a reputation for, he develops a passion for her, but the Baroness plays hard to get. Only after Wallmoden’s dogged pursuit does she, one day, agree to meet him for a tryst. They set a date and time for their rendezvous and Wallmoden returns to his camp.

That night the army deploys.

Wallmoden’s unit drives from Vienna to the Slovakian border with Poland preparatory to the German invasion. Wallmoden is unaware of the geopolitical maneuvers by the higher powers, never named, who control world politics, and is preoccupied with letting Baroness Pistohlkors know why he missed their meeting and with scheduling a belated one. He also continues to have visions or waking dreams, like a crawfish migration across the road leading over the Polish border or a ghostly encounter with two bathing girls from some past time, an encounter invisible to everyone else and that leaves no sign behind except a pair of wet footprints.

I don’t want to reveal anything further. I’ve already worked to conceal a lot about the plot. Wallmoden eagerly awaits word from the Baroness, the invasion comes and his unit strikes into Poland, he gets some surprising bad news, and has a yet more surprising encounter after being wounded. The story ends with a stunning reversal, with Wallmoden content but—both literally and metaphorically—nowhere near where he wanted to be.

Mars in Aries may well be my favorite of Lernet-Holenia’s books so far. It has the atmosphere of Baron Bagge and the absorbing ambiguity of Count Luna, as well as a satisfying streak of mystery. It works as both a romance and a war novel. The first half, in which we follow Wallmoden on his desperate bid for Baroness Pistohlkors’s heart, should prove especially poignant to anyone who ever felt unrequited love, and the second half, covering the invasion of Poland, utterly swamps the first. Lernet-Holenia, basing the book on his own experiences in the Wehrmacht, makes the invasion viscerally real—hot, dusty, exhausting, a parade of destruction and casual violence. The harsh reality of these scenes—to which I’ll return momentarily—make the reversal at the end that much more surprising.

The title, an astrological sign, does not reflect any actual celestial alignments during the invasion but apparently does suggest passion and aggressive desire. This is thematically appropriate, but the novel’s original title, The Blue Hour (Die blaue Stunde), a slang term used within the story for brief romantic trysts, works well on several levels, too.

As an additional layer of interest, Mars in Aries was published in 1941 and immediately banned by the Nazis. Actually banned, as in: sale was legally prohibited and the print run put in storage and destroyed. Reading it now, its apparent inoffensiveness—a love story with some mystical elements—may obscure what the Propaganda Ministry objected to. While the novel portrays German victory in Poland, it shows soldiering as unromantic, unheroic, and laborious; some of Wallmoden’s fellow officers openly talk about annihilating civilian settlements; the Poles, though rarely seen by Wallmoden, accordingly have an tone of underdog heroism; and some of the strange social gatherings in the first half of the novel suggest criminal activity—as a few other characters point out to Wallmoden—including Resistance work.

Fortunately, Lernet-Holenia had kept his publisher’s proofs and used them to republish the book after the war. I’m glad he did, and that the combined might of real censorship and Allied bombing couldn’t erase Mars in Aries.

This is an unusual novel, with a unique combination of romance, the uncanny or even gothic, and realistic warfare, and its climax is a suspenseful and moving surprise. Mars in Aries is beautifully written, exceptionally well-crafted, and, at about 200 pages, compact and powerful. I look forward to rereading it soon.

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!

The Cruel Sea

Several years ago I read CS Forester’s 1955 World War II novel The Good Shepherd, a short, intense story about an American destroyer captain as he attempts to protect a convoy through the worst of the U-boats’ hunting grounds in the North Atlantic. Though told in the third person, it is intensely, claustrophobically internal, bringing the reader into intimate contact with both the calculating mind and physical punishment of its protagonist over the worst 72 hours of his career. It’s excellent, one of my favorite reads that year. The Cruel Sea, published in 1951 by Royal Navy veteran Nicholas Monsarrat, is even better.

Beginning in a Scottish shipyard in the fall of 1939, The Cruel Sea introduces the captain, Commander George Ericson, a dedicated but undistinguished officer who already has a long career behind him, as he takes command of a newly constructed corvette, the HMS Compass Rose. He also meets his three junior officers—the untried Lockhart and Ferraby, a journalist and bank clerk fresh out of officer training, and the experienced but boorish Australian Bennet.

As the Compass Rose is fitted for anti-submarine duty in the North Atlantic, the reader gets to know the ship, its crew, and these central characters. Ericson is well-trained, disciplined, and eager. Lockhart, an unattached former freelancer, begins the war single and with few connections to make him fearful of combat; he’s cool and a quick learner. Ferraby, only twenty, utterly inexperienced and with a new wife at home, is uncertain and often unmanned by his lack of skill. Bennet, cowardly and lazy, pounces on that. Testing the new ship and undertaking its first missions into the warzone strains and exposes weak points in Compass Rose’s leadership. New officers and crew, like the posh, university-educated Morell, who has a flighty actress wife back home in London, and Baker, a young man obsessed with women despite his lack of experience with them, further complicate matters.

I don’t want to give much away about the plot. The Cruel Sea is not plot-driven. Having established its characters and their task—a task they’ll labor at almost without pause for six years—the story hums along on two brilliantly combined storytelling elements.

The first is the day-to-day reality of convoy duty and actual combat, both of which Monsarrat describes unromantically and with startling clarity. The drudgery and physical misery come through palpably, as do the horrors Compass Rose’s crew confront on nearly every mission. Sailors incinerated by the burning oil leaking from a torpedoed tanker, survivors discovered floating in their lifejackets weeks too late, a man dying of third-degree burns as a hapless officer rubs ointment on his exposed muscles, men wounded, drowned, frozen, blown to pieces—Monsarrat never embellishes or wallows in his descriptions, and the simplicity and directness of his narration makes it all the more disturbing and moving.

The second key element is the character of the men themselves, especially leaders. War, The Cruel Sea impresses upon us firmly, depends as much on relationships and leadership as it does on technology. This is a character study spread across six years of danger, combat, and death, and the smooth functioning of superiors and subordinates, their mutual trust, and the judgements each is empowered to make are as crucial as sonar, signal lamps, or depth charges.

Personal character matters. More than one man is wrecked by a bad relationship with a woman. The book’s title emphasizes the cruelty of the sea, but the torture some characters are put through by unfaithful wives rivals the sea for unfeeling destructiveness. Other men lead dissipated lives ashore or lives otherwise marked by moral weakness. Compass Rose’s greatest trial—again, I don’t want to spoil any specific incidents—painfully exposes the strong and the bad.

One incident I will describe, one of the most famous in the book and one included in the trailer for the 1953 film adaptation, combines the stress and danger and technical demands of combat with the problem of personal character and responsibility. In Compass Rose’s worst mission, a convoy to Gibraltar that is almost annihilated by U-boats, Ericson steers the corvette toward a group of men who survived the sinking of their ship and are struggling in the water. As he approaches he learns that Compass Rose has picked up a strong sonar signal directly underneath the survivors. It is almost certainly a U-boat. Ericson must decide in an instant: pick up the survivors and let the U-boat get away—and possibly even torpedo Compass Rose—or drop depth charges into the middle of the struggling men. He orders the depth charges launched. He lives with the consequences for the rest of the book.

The novel’s six-year span, with characters coming and going and the scene occasionally shifting to the homefront, to the Arctic convoy route to Murmansk, or even to Brooklyn, gives the reader a sharp sense of the experience of the war, especially its long years of struggle before success and the escalation of the violence. The first two-thirds are a bleak grind. The harshness of the work, the unrelenting danger, and the horrors and personal stresses the characters are subjected to hardens or dulls them by turns. They feel they have not only been caught in a machine, but worry about becoming machinelike themselves. Ericson struggles with memories of a softer, more flexible earlier stage of the war; a young sailor who went AWOL to check on his wife might have been let off with a warning in 1939, though by 1944 the same man committing the same offense would be sent to prison, and Ericson feels he must shut down even good-natured joking among his offers in order to maintain discipline. Lockhart, self-protective, closes himself off to all but his captain, but finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Wren and must decide whether to commit with the war unfinished.

Only late in the book do the characters realize that there is an end in sight, a sense that brings its own anxieties with it. By the time two of the central surviving characters stand together on the bridge of a different ship, different men from those they began the novel as six years before, we feel their gratitude that the war is over but understand why it is a muted, subdued gratitude—exhaustion, and much more besides.

I don’t want to give the impression that The Cruel Sea is especially dour. It has frequent moments of wit and levity of the best British kind—wry, understated, often dark—and its characters are a pleasure to spend time with. But precisely because Monsarrat has peopled his novel with such lifelike, sympathetic characters, when they suffer and die it is as powerful and agonizing as their good times were enjoyable. By the end the story has reminded us, in case we forgot, that every life has shares of joy and loss. Monsarrat makes us feel both.

Despite overlap in subject matter, the comparison I began with is not entirely fair. Both are excellent novels. But where The Good Shepherd concerns one man, a captain, over three days, The Cruel Sea follows multiple members of a ship’s crew across the entire duration of the war. The Good Shepherd is a minutely focused portrait of a leader in his most acutely stressful moment. The Cruel Sea, on the other hand, vast, changeable, dangerous, and beautiful like the sea itself, is an epic.

The UFO Experience

In the late 1940s, the US Air Force approached Professor J Allen Hynek with a request for his services as a consultant. The original wave of flying saucer sightings was at its height, and the Air Force, in its defense role, was investigating this strange new phenomenon. How many reports of strange flying objects were simply misidentifications of planets and stars? They hoped Hynek, a respected astronomer, could help rule such cases out.

Over twenty years and three Air Force projects later, flying saucer flaps had evolved into UFO mania, the reports had evolved from sightings to encounters to abductions, and Hynek had been there for all of it. The Air Force, however, having determined early on that, whatever UFOs really were, they weren’t Russian and apparently weren’t a threat, had lost interest. But public fascination with UFOs, thousands of sightings and rumored sightings, and the multiple competing mythologies growing up around the phenomenon only intensified. Due to Hynek’s high public profile thanks to the Air Force (he is the man who gave us “swamp gas” as a feature of UFO investigation), the curious often asked Hynek to recommend “a good book” on UFOs. The UFO Experience, published in 1972, was Hynek’s attempt to provide it.

This is an interesting book for two major reasons. The first is Hynek’s perspective, which is genuinely openminded and scientific. Hynek approached the problem of UFOs as a field researcher, requiring solid, extensive data and basing interpretations on the data rather than forcing data into preconceived explanations. This would prove one of his ultimate frustrations with the Air Force, a topic we’ll come back to.

But data by itself isn’t of much use—it must be organized before it can be interpreted. And so approximately the first half of The UFO Experience is a taxonomy of UFO sightings with ample reference to cases Hynek (mostly) personally investigated. This is certainly the most famous part of the book. Even if you haven’t heard of Hynek, you’ve almost certainly heard the phrase “close encounter.”

Hynek’s taxonomy falls into two major categories with three subcategories apiece. The first are mere sightings: of nighttime lights; of “daylight discs,” the iconic 1950s flying saucer; and strange objects picked up on radar, possibly offering a hard empirical record of something seen by human witnesses. The second category, the close encounters, sightings of UFOs within 500 feet, a distance theoretically precluding misidentification of stars or aircraft, are of the first kind (sighting of an object in the air), the second kind (sighting of an object on the ground or otherwise physically affecting the environment), and the third kind (sighting of an object with the additional presence of some kind of living occupant).

Not only is this the most famous part of the book, it also has the best stories—the Levelland, Texas UFOs, the Lonnie Zamora sighting, and more. It also illustrates the other crucial scientific aspect of Hynek’s approach, which is his rigorously applied standards of evidence.

Hynek excluded from his study single-witness reports as too easily faked (or at least impossible to corroborate) as well as the testimonials of “contactee” types, flying saucer cultists who claimed to receive regular visits from extraterrestrials who offered touchy-feely advice on disarmament, among other things. In addition to prioritizing up-close sightings with multiple witnesses—preferably independent witnesses of good character or reputation—he factored in the subjective strangeness of reported sightings, an often overlooked data point. Contactee stories, with their feelgood peace-and-love vibes, were too obviously wishful thinking; more compelling were stories of inexplicable close encounters by honest people in professions requiring steadiness and sobriety—cops, doctors, farmers, engineers, military and commercial pilots, radar technicians, air traffic controllers. That many witnesses had been previously uninterested in UFOs was another important factor.

And Hynek, interestingly, found a lot of these, enough to convince him that, having eliminated out huge numbers of hoaxes and misidentifications, something strange was still going on. But understanding or explaining it would require a systematic approach through observation and testing and conclusions that did not exceed the possibilities suggested by the evidence. Hynek is, for example, notably skeptical of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction story, repeating but by no means endorsing their “recovered memories” of boarding the UFOs and enduring medical exams, and never endorses the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Hynek’s primary concern is always to discover what we can say, scientifically and certainly, about what people have seen, and no more. But this careful, judicious approach was not apparently to the taste of the military, the public, or fellow scientists. He would be repeatedly disappointed.

That leads into the second half of the book, in which Hynek reflects on his twenty years doing the Air Force’s shoe leather work and examines some of the ways UFO investigations had gone wrong. I picked up The UFO Experience specifically to read about Hynek’s methodology, standards of evidence, and taxonomy—with all the good stories, being a non-believing, mostly aesthetic appreciator of the UFO phenomenon—but was surprised to find this half as interesting as the first. That’s because Hynek, though a thoughtful, judicious man, had scores to settle.

The first and most extensive is with the US Air Force. UFO lore of the Roswell coverup and Men in Black ilk posits Project Blue Book and its agents as omnipresent suppressors of information. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hynek criticizes Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book as underfunded, understaffed, and headed by junior officers more keen to get promoted out of the position than to gather and assess evidence. Apathy was the rule, information-gathering was slapdash at best, and conclusions, in those instances when they were actually provided, were flippant and unconvincing. This only worsened once the projects had fulfilled their original purpose of determining whether the Russians were behind the UFOs.

Hynek also had harsh words for the scientific establishment, which refused to question its own paradigms in light of new evidence—the opposite of true science—and resorted to ridicule, blackballing, and naked appeals to its own authority to answer criticism and shut down public questions. They were also too eager to lump the curious in with the kooks. Hynek, in a prescient passage, predicts that these attitudes and browbeating the public with what one might now call, say, “settled science” will undermine science itself.

Hynek ends the book with a call for genuine curiosity, a willingness to investigate and incorporate knew knowledge, and a continued commitment to scientific rigor. I suspect he’d be still be disappointed.

This brings me to the second major reason I found The UFO Experience interesting, the purely historical—its place in the history of this phenomenon. Hynek wrote and published his “good book” on UFOs after they had become a secure feature of the American imagination but before some of the aspects we most commonly associate with it today had become mainstream. Abduction stories like the Hills’ were a relatively recent addition to the legendarium. The Pascagoula incident the year after Hynek published this book, the Travis Walton story two years after that, and Whitley Strieber’s Communion in the mid 80s—which also popularized the almond-eyed greys so often read back into the previous history—made abduction the central pillar of UFO myth and inextricably associated them with aliens.

Hynek also published The UFO Experience just four years after Chariots of the Gods, the original “ancient astronauts” book. Hynek, for whom many of the close encounters of the third kind he relates are, by his own standards, suspiciously “woo-woo,” makes absolutely no mention of this variety of UFO enthusiasm, which was genuinely fringe. It would require decades to grow and metastasize. But alongside the Roswell incident, which was resurrected and backfilled with UFO lore after Hynek’s time, ancient astronauts theories seemingly provide historical validation beyond the sudden appearance of flying saucers in 1947 and are responsible for much popular enthusiasm for UFOs now, from the History Channel (so-called) to Joe Rogan.

This book, then, arrived at a historical sweet spot, a moment of huge potential poised between how the original UFO legend began, how Hynek, newly free of the burden of government apathy, hoped it could develop, and what it would actually become. And that was certainly not more scientific.

The UFO Experience is a fascinating attempt by a principled, hard-working, thoughtful man to wrest some degree of scientific sense out of a phenomenon already buried under speculation, lunacy, and mockery. His standards of evidence and organized, taxonomical mind make for a fascinating presentation of the subject, and the cases he recaps and examines prove all the more compelling as a result. Not only has Hynek’s example shown me, personally, a way out of pure contempt for the believers, it’s a reminder of how rigorous, systematic thought and high standards could still salvage something useful out of a field that has only grown more bizarre since Hynek first applied his mind to understanding it.

Game Without Rules

I can’t remember where I first saw Game Without Rules recommended, though I think it was John Wilson recommending it, but I’m glad I sought it out. I’ve read a lot of great espionage fiction over the last several years—Buchan, Ambler, Fleming, Le Carré, Deighton—and this collection of stories by Michael Gilbert offers some of the most intricately constructed, surprising, suspenseful, and plain enjoyable spy stories I’ve come across.

Published in 1967, Game Without Rules collects eleven short stories about Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, agents for a British intelligence service during the early-1960s height of the Cold War. Now retirement-age, they live near each other in a quaint Kentish village where Mr Behrens lives with his aunt and keeps bees and Mr Calder spends quiet days with Rasselas, his Persian deerhound. They have pints in the village and drop in on each other once a week to play backgammon. And just occasionally their handler, Mr Fortescue, a seemingly unremarkable bank manager, calls them up to London on a mission only their organization can complete.

The missions are classic spy stuff. In the first story they discover a corpse left over from World War II that hints at a deep-cover mole they must identify. Later, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens bring down a ring of drug and pornography smugglers. In another, they track the progress of a young agent along a Soviet exfiltration route through Europe, hoping to uncover its operations but risking detection and death. In another, the two take part in an urgent Christmas Eve assignment in Bonn—recovering equipment, helping a defector escape—with a snowstorm threatening from the sky and East German operatives moving in on the ground. In yet another, they provide security for the young boarding school student who has unexpectedly inherited the throne of his father’s unnamed Middle Eastern kingdom and who must be shielded from kidnappers and enemy agents seeking kompromat. In the final story, they confront a German agent with a decades-old grudge and no remaining reasons to hold back from revenge.

Double agents, enemy tech, infiltration, exfiltration, and assassination may seem familiar, but these stories are intricately plotted and written with effortless economy—some are rich enough for novels but run a tight twenty pages—and always surprising. They’re also witty. Humor—wordplay, wry observations, and frustrated sarcasm between the two—works throughout to dissolve tension and reveal character, not least that of Gilbert’s two aging operatives.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens are now some of my favorite spy characters. Gilbert characterizes them minimally. One is short and bald, the other barrel-chested. It’s sometimes hard to remember which is which, but they have distinct personalities that make their missions together fun to read. Both are in their late 50s at at the youngest (a dossier at the beginning lists them as born in 1910 and 1913, but there is an ambiguous allusion in one story to Mr Calder having served in World War I) and have both spent decades in espionage, being recruited in the 1930s and serving in important intelligence and special operations roles during World War II, so they’re in their early 60s at least. They’re experienced, capable, skilled—in multiple languages, marksmanship, and practical tradecraft—and utterly dependable. Their friendship is revealed through their professionalism with each other rather than in spite of it.

Imagine the cozy bonhomie of Frog and Toad combined with the ruthlessness of Fleming’s Bond and the most hard-bitten pragmatism of Le Carré. “In this job,” Mr Behrens tells another agent after a high-stakes assignment that was nearly botched, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” One senses this is bluff, as this expressed coldbloodedness is belied by his dedication to fighting Communism—the Soviets are, refreshingly, always presented as evil—and by his actions in other stories, especially when it comes to saving Mr Calder.

One realizes just how much one has come to feel for the pair in the penultimate story, in which Mr Fortescue worries that Mr Calder, who has started plotting the genealogy of Prometheus on a giant paper chart, is going mad—an unsurprising turn for someone who has lived so much of his life under cover. Dispatched to London to look for him, Mr Behrens takes Rasselas with him. Their genuine distress over Mr Calder is moving, and makes the revelation at the end of the story all the more surprising and satisfying.

I’ve looked back through Game Without Rules and, of the eleven stories, can’t select any of them as in any way weak or unsatisfying. This has been some of my most purely enjoyable reading in a while, especially in the spy genre. I read it aloud to my wife before bed over the last four weeks, and we both loved it. If you’re looking for some strong, well-crafted stories that combine mystery, thriller, and espionage with some subtle character work, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Merrill’s Marauders

Jeff Chandler as Gen Frank Merrill inspects his exhausted men before the final assault In Merrill’s Marauders (1962)

There’s a scene in Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead in which the recon squad at the center of the story are ordered to drag an artillery piece into position in the jungle. They must first get it across a river and then up a muddy, deeply rutted track to the top of a hill with no mechanical assistance. It takes all day. And it’s agonizing. Mailer makes the reader feel—for pages and pages—the messy, clumsy, impossible effort as well as the inevitable frustration when the gun finally slips loose and slides right back down the hill into the river. The reader ends the chapter as exhausted as Mailer’s soldiers.

Precisely that note of weariness and exhaustion is the salient mood of Merrill’s Marauders, an unusual 1962 World War II movie I recently rewatched with my sons after an interval of many years.

I don’t intend this post as a proper review—if you’ve found your way here you probably already know something about the movie—but I do want to draw attention to this aspect of exhaustion. Few of the classic 1950s and 60s World War II films approach their subject with the attention to labor, repetitiveness, and sheer tiredness that Merrill’s Marauders does.

Briefly, Merrill’s Marauders tells the true story of a special US Army unit deployed to Burma in support of British efforts there. Burma is a neglected corner of the war anyway, and the unfamiliarity of the story as well as its realistic, serious depiction of the wastage and attrition of the campaign make it worthwhile viewing.

This is despite the movie being quite rough around the edges. Wikipedia diplomatically calls it an “economical historical epic,” which being translated is “low budget movie.” It shows in different ways, most obviously and jarringly in a sequence incorporating stock footage from Battle Cry, a film about Marines in the Pacific, into a film about the US Army in Burma.

That Merrill’s Marauders works at all can be credited to its director. Sam Fuller was himself a veteran of the war and would go on to write and direct The Big Red One based yet more directly on his experiences. Presented with this story and a small budget, Fuller mostly dealt with his constraints artfully and used his funding where it could make the most difference. The film begins in medias res, with the Marauders already worn out and their numbers depleted after weeks on the march in the jungle, and it ends not with the final great battle to take their objective but on a character-centered moment just before the action—a daring move that works perfectly. That’s the writing. Technically, a pair of mid-film assault sequences are staggeringly well executed, as is a climactic defense against a banzai attack.

Action punctuates the separate acts of the story but the subject is really the men themselves, their leader, General Merrill, and their exhaustion. At several points in the film they are declared used up by the unit surgeon, utterly incapable of more, and yet when they receive new orders they pick up and carry on. There is heroism in the combat scenes but a no less extraordinary heroism in the long marches through jungle and over mountains in between. One senses that Fuller, a combat infantryman himself, understood well the drain of boredom and endless work and wanted the audience to feel it in their bones.

Where Merrill’s Marauders differs most starkly from the scene I opened with from The Naked and the Dead is in its earnestness. Mailer’s novel is a bitter, cynical story in which endurance and courage are rewarded with yet more pointless hardship. Merrill’s Marauders believes in its men and their work. The war is terrible and wastes good men, but their unromantic, plodding tenacity is something to be admired.

The film’s best moment, for me, and one that illustrates beautifully the place Merrill’s Marauders reserves for sincerity and goodness, is not General Merrill’s final scene—a calvary-like passion complete with pietà—but a quiet one near the middle. The Marauders, despite their weary, malnourished, disease- and leech-ridden condition, have liberated a strategically important rail junction from the Japanese. While Merrill considers the situation, his men sack out anywhere they can sit or lie down. The Burmese natives appear—they’re all women and children, a fact with dark implications that the film wisely leaves us to intuit. An old woman approaches one of the toughest sergeants in the unit and gratefully offers him rice. He breaks down weeping before he can finish eating it.

If few of the classic war movies portray the weariness and sheer effort of the war as little more than a discomfort or inconvenience, fewer still offer us moments like that.

Merrill’s Marauders is a unique little movie, telling a unique story with the sharp perspective of a veteran spiritually unwearied by cynicism. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it, or revisiting if you have.