I had a bit of a strange reading year. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve started writing, and much of my reading was to support my writing. As a result, I read dozens of Kindle samples of interesting books, evaluating their first chapters like chess openings. And then, unless they were really interesting, dropping them. The internet has broken my attention span…

The golden age of piracy and colonial Boston

My first work of fiction was published this year, The Shanty Man. It’s set during the Golden Age of Piracy and features an intrepid young female heroine. I have thoughts of expanding it to a novel. Colonial Boston is a rich vein to mine, and I’ve been reading about the era, particularly relating to pirates and Cotton Mather, a fascinating, contradictory, conflicted figure of the era. He was perhaps best known for his role in the Salem Witch Trials, but he was very heavily involved in ministering to convicted pirates. Perhaps more on that someday in another post.

The Life and Times of Cotton Mather by Kenneth Silverman is the Pulitzer prize winning go-to biography, which I’m in the middle of. Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown is a fun modern take on piracy.
Two good historical books on pirates: The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodard, and Pirates of New England by Gail Selinger. I read a smattering of other books on pirates but not enough to take credit for them this year. Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison, is one of very few works of historical fiction I found about Colonial America that were not about the Salem witch trials, at least that looked interesting. I chipped away at Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, which I have been reading portions of on and off for a few years, not least because it contains interesting mentions of early Kanaka (native Hawaiian) sailors, a topic of interest to me as I live in Hawaii. Velvet Undercover by Teri Brown is a so-so spy novel with a 17-year-old heroine, the same age as the hero of my story The Shanty Man, which I read to see how other authors treat that age.

The medieval era

I’m putting the finishing touches on my novel of Richard the Lionheart, and so have been reading a good deal of medieval history over the last few years. These books are at the tail end of my deep dive into the medieval era. The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer is an invaluable dive into what real life was like for normal people in the medieval era. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme by Gillian Adler is an interesting exploration of time as perceived by those same people.

I’ve been reading Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100-1550 by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. That’s right, the author of the super-famous Sapiens was actually a medievalist before becoming a best-selling author of broad-based works on human history. His chapter on Conrad of Tyre’s assassination is highly informative, even though I’ve read a great deal about the incident before now. More here.

Also, did you know that T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on crusader castles? Crusader Castles. Really fun book. More here on my Richard the Lionheart substack

Robin Hood by Sean McGlynn is a romp through the history of, well, Robin Hood. Lastly, there’s thread of Macbeth running through my Richard novel, and I read it again this year.

Travel: Japan and Iceland

We also did a short trip to Iceland to see the northern lights, with some success. Along the way, I read Eyrbyggja Saga and the quirky Museum of Hidden Beings by Arngrimur Sigurdsson.

Historical fiction

I read a smattering of historical fiction this year. I re-read Ironfire by David Ball, a novel set during the 16th-century battle between Christians and Muslims over the island of Malta, and Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger, a novel set in Borgia Italy. The Bones of Paris by Laurie R. King is a jazz-age Paris mystery novel and good fun. The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood, is the story of Odysseus’s return home from Penelope’s perspective.

Book club, literary stuff

I only intermittently attended my book club this year, but some good reads came out of it. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare is a collection of short stories by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, who is from Kaneohe, the town next to where I live in Hawaii. Sea People by Christina Thompson is a new history of Polynesian migration, exploring how Hawaii and the greater Pacific region came to be settled. Raven Leilani’s Luster was almost a pick for the book club this year, but I read it anyway. It’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s about a young woman invited into an open marriage, it’s about…well, you can look it up. At the other end of the spectrum, if you want a sometimes-disturbing glimpse into the mind of an older man, read the brilliant Jim Harrison’s The Great Leader.

Comfort food

I call the mystery, thriller, and spy novel genre “comfort food,” though it’s often not comfortable. But it’s usually straightforward entertainment. I particularly liked The Secret Hours by Mick Herron, about which I will say nothing because almost anything is a spoiler. If you like the TV series Slow Horses, read this book. Damascus Station by David McCloskey is particularly topical given the fall of Syria & Assad. A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris was surprisingly good. The Charlemagne Pursuit by Steve Berry is exactly what you expect from a Steve Berry novel. Big Bear, Little Bear by David Brierley is a very good Le Carré cold war spy novel. Prince of Fire is a canonical Daniel Silva thriller with a lot of pointed commentary, implicit and explicit, about the Arab/Israeli conflict. I even read a spy romance: It Had to Be You by Eliza Jane Brazier.

Fantasy & Sci-Fi

I read less of this than I usually do. One of my favorite books of the year was Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs – it sucked me in from the first paragraphs and did not let go. The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan is an epic fantasy with judges and lawyers – seriously. Much better than it sounds. There is violence and magic 🙂

Foundry by Eliot Peper was a really fun and short novel that has chip manufacturing and our rather alarming dependence on Taiwan at its foundation. I paired it with a re-read of Count Zero by William Gibson, which I seem to re-read almost yearly. Mickey7 by Edward Ashton was fun and in the zone of Artemis or The Martian by Andy Weir.

Well, there you have it. I read a lot, but honestly, there were few super-standouts this year. I guess my standouts are Ink Blood Sister Scribe, My Effin’ Life, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, The Secret Hours, and The Great Leader.

Oh: Rush is probably my favorite band, and I read last year’s Christmas present, Geddy Lee’s biography My Effin’ Life. If you have the faintest interest in Rush, get it.

41 books by my count, vs. 47 last year…

Haven’t written here in awhile, been busy with Richard the Lionheart over on my medieval blog, here: https://medieval.substack.com. But I just finished reading Brave New World, the first time since high school, and thought I’d post a few thoughts.

As a dystopia, BNW provided plenty of food for thought. Drugs and sex and infinite distraction as the defining characteristics of how people are controlled. The echoes of today’s modern society are hard to miss. The presence of science as a driving force in society is pretty overpowering. The invention or Huxley’s near-invention of soma, helicopters, sex-hormone drugs, and other science seem ahead of their time. 

The erasure of mother, father, family seem to lead to a well-behaved, polite society. Which is, on reflection, a bit odd, as the last 50 years or so would suggest the breakdown of the family seems to trend to the reverse. I suppose with enough soma everyone becomes well-behaved.

I found the intensive Shakespeare quotations and allusions interesting for a time, although it seemed a bit much by the end. 

There is an old saw about civilized vs. savage people, that a savage man has a much easier time acting civilized, than a civilized man has in being savage. That might be from Tarzan, or perhaps Rousseau, or somewhere else, I can’t remember? Anyway, spoiler, that proves not to be the case here. And while I found John’s ending to be tragic, as an ending to a novel I wasn’t completely convinced. I could certainly imagine him remorseful; suicidal seems a stretch. 

Perhaps it is because of my own preoccupations with the negative influence of media on our lives, and the dual and troubling issues of media censorship (left and right both!) and surveillance capitalism, I find 1984 a far more compelling and frightening novel, as a novel, than BNW, and a more disturbing dystopia. I think I am in the minority compared to most public review/criticism, which seems to favor BNW as the better book. But to my mind, BNF suffers from having little narrative tension throughout most of the book (nothing bad happens to anyone for nearly 3/4 of the book), a weirdly-shifting view of who the protagonist is, and an over-focus on society itself, rather than the characters being impacted. 1984 was grim and ominous from the beginning and I turned almost every page waiting for something evil to happen, and was often not disappointed. In contrast BNW felt more like an amusement park ride, a bit light-hearted even, until the last few pages. Interestingly, while 1984 focused quite a bit on the control of information, BNW did not focus on equivalents of the media much at all, except to mention that books were forbidden and history not taught. 

Not to mention Huxley’s apparent fixation with the word “pneumatic”, which occurs no less than 15 times. 🙂 And the threat of getting sent to Iceland – I would take that punishment in a heartbeat!

Still I am glad I re-acquainted myself with it, had not read since high school. It’s good to be reminded not to drug ourselves, or let someone else do it to us!

By the way. There’s a TV show. Link.