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A friend of mine has been running an online weekly history class since early in the pandemic, when I absolutely did not have the time to do any such thing. But I have much more time now, so I joined the most recent iteration of it when they wrapped up their last “unit” on 19th century Asian empires (which I regret missing) and turned instead to working their way through the Penguin History of the United States, beginning with Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America.

We did one chapter a week for 20 weeks, which means that I’ve already discussed a lot of my thoughts on this book, at least on a chapter by chapter basis. I’m trying to come up with more holistic thoughts for the last class. Here are a few as such:

The book does a very good job of not centering the British as the, like, main characters of what would later become the United States. The book also doesn’t limit itself to only discussing what would later become the United States, as the whole of both American continents were subjected to various overlapping imperial colonization projects that would only much, much later firm up to today’s national and state borders. So we got to learn a lot more about the Spanish in North America, the French, the English outside of the “thirteen colonies” that would later rebel, the Dutch, and even an interesting segment near the end on Russian Alaska, which I had not previously known anything about. The book also doesn’t shy away from talking about just how brutal colonization was and how delusional and self-serving these imperial “civilizing” missions were, nor does it reduce the native population to one-dimensional, helpless innocents.

The book’s discussion of native nations and their political, cultural, and military developments–both before and after European contact–is a real strength here, at least compared to most US history textbooks, and really makes me want to read more Native American history. Among non-native Americans, even among ones who intend to be pro-native rights and stuff, there is a tendency to see “Native Americans” as one group, which was uniformly one way from time immemorial until 1492 and then a second way (sad and poor) from 1492 onward. The main contribution towards Awareness that not all native nations are the same in even minimally mainstream discourse in the past 15 years or so has been telling people not to use the term “spirit animal,” partly due to concerns about cultural appropriation but also partly because Twitter discourse warriors are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of an umbrella term. American Colonies instead talks a lot about the various political maneuverings of different native nations and the alliances and enmities thereof, the differences in the ways they resisted, traded with, and sometimes allied with the Spanish, French, and British empires, and the ways they exploited intra-European enmities just as the European empires exploited various intra-Native American tensions. I’m not saying this book is predominantly or even largely about Native American history or viewpoints, but it makes an effort to not reduce them to picturesque little backdrops to the drama of grand European conquest, and as such it made me think about how little I really know about Native American civilizations and how unconscionable that is given that I have lived here my entire life.

This book also doesn’t pussyfoot around the almost total centrality of profit to the European colonial projects. While many of the people involved in these projects were motivated, in whole or in part, by genuine beliefs in other things–mainly religion, science, and nationalism–these colonies were often largely and sometimes wholly commercial projects. Many of the initial colonies were settled by corporations before coming under control of the associated European crown, and the most common motivation for settlers to rebel against the orders of their home countries was when the governments back in Europe tried to mess with their ability to make money. Murder, theft, enslavement, abduction, lying, cheating, smuggling, and every vice or crime you could possibly think of was transformed into an inalienable right on the part of colonizers to set themselves up with land and money. Despite a lot of high-minded rhetoric otherwise (which was also there from the beginning), we are all living with this legacy of hypercommercial violence to this day, as anyone who’s looked at the news lately can see.
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I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?
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Next up in my Vorkosigan Saga journey was Borders of Infinity, which is not so much a novel as three short stories/almost-novellas bundled together with a little frame story. The frame story is slight but it works–Miles is immobilized in the hospital after getting his arm bones replaced, and his boss, Simon Illyan, takes advantage of his temporary locational stability to corner him and demand he explain a bunch of cost overruns he’s racked up on behalf of the Dendarii Mercenaries. Thus, Miles must tell Illyan three stories in which things did not go quite according to plan and got very expensive.

The three stories are all very different. The first one, “The Mountains of Mourning,” is a murder mystery set in the backwater mountains of Vorkosigan territory on Barrayar, regarding the infanticide of a child with a birth defect. The mechanics of the murder mystery plot itself are fine; the real draw here is thematic–Miles, his father’s deformed son, is sent as Count Aral Vorkosigan’s Speaker to investigate the murder that the old country mores do not deem as murder. The result is a look into the painful psychology of shifting cultural expectations–even when the expectations are, by any rational measure, shifting for the better.

The second story, “Labyrinth,” is just weird. Miles is back in space as Captain Naismith in this one, doing a job out of the organized crime planet Jackson’s Whole. He gets involved in rescuing not one but two genetically engineered damsels in distress–a quaddie, meaning a person with four arms and no legs, and the last surviving member of a cohort of experimental supersoldiers, a sixteen-year-old girl who is basically a werewolf. This is where the Vorkosigan Saga turns into monsterfucker romance, basically. But it’s also a solid espionage caper.

The third story, the titular “Borders of Infinity,” involves springing 10,000 people from a Cetagandan POW camp that is supposed to be impossible to escape from. This camp is a masterclass in psychological warfare, leaving it to Miles to un-psychological-warfare its residents so they can prepare to escape/be rescued. The cost to this escape plan is high, hence Simon Illyan’s visit, but it is nevertheless a spectacular large-scale operation for the Dendarii Mercenaries, in pleasing contrast to the small-scale but still very chaotic operation of “Labyrinth.”

These stories all take place a few years apart from each other, and it is clear that, fortunately for the reader, Miles is growing up. He is still a horny weirdo with too much plot armor but the series continues to be a lot of fun and, while it certainly has ongoing themes, isn’t repetitive enough to get stale.
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For Christmas I bought my girlfriend a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, both because it is generally delightful and because I remembered specifically that the worldbuilding and use of dramatic irony was incredible and thought it might be appealing from a gamemaster/game designer perspective. Then my weightlifting Discord server decided to start a book club and it was chosen as the first book, so I had to borrow my own gift in order to reread it, since it has been a long time and I didn’t remember much except the general vibes and the mental image of the House.

The vibes are, as they say, immaculate; both the dreamy, old-fashioned tone of the writing and the images of the House it conjures up are beautiful, suffused with both childlike wonder and a melancholy loneliness. A few things are clear to the reader right off the bat–our narrator has forgotten his own backstory, though he is in denial that he has forgotten anything; the Other is clearly a douchebag, though the narrator insists they are good friends–but this doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the story comes together, the narrator finding bits and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together even as they upend everything he thought he knew about himself, the Other, and the World he has been so meticulously researching.

Even though this was, in theory, a reread (sometimes I am as forgetful as the narrator about books I have read), I found it just as unputdownable as I had the first time I read it. It is good that it is short because otherwise I would find myself canceling stuff left and right to finish it. As it is, I once again read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. I got into bed at 8:30 last night so I could be sure I had at least a good two hours of bedtime reading in which to get properly into it.

This really is just a wonderful little jewel of a book, even if Rafael is a police officer.
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For Christmas I got a beautiful set of hardback Jane Austen books. I intend to read them in publication order, and to that end first reread Sense and Sensibility. I had read this before but not for a very long time, I think in college or possibly even high school, and I know I’ve seen the movie but that was also many many years ago.

As her debut novel, this is not Austen at her peak, but it still hits all the classic Austen hallmarks–open talk about money, dryly witty but very mean descriptions of basically all the secondary characters, genteelly prospect-less heroines, problems that would be solved quicker if British people were ever allowed to talk about their feelings, general domestic shenanigans, and at least one person getting gravely ill or injured as a key plot point.

Our main heroine here is Elinor Dashwood, an extremely no-nonsense and scrupulously polite young woman with formidable emotional self-control, especially for a nineteen-year-old. She does most of the sense-having in the Dashwood household, as her mother and sisters are both much more emotionally expressive and inclined toward the romantic. The ne plus ultra of emotional sensitivity is the middle daughter, Marianne Dashwood, a seventeen-year-old who seems determined to embody every stereotype about over-emotional teenage girls that currently exists, although I don’t have much of an idea about how prevalent those stereotypes were in the 1810s or if it’s just Marianne.

The final romances in this one seem a little underdeveloped compared to her later works, but overall that’s OK, because the friendships–both real and the ones that are developed under polite duress and therefore sort of faked, like the one between Elinor and Lucy Steele–take center stage in a way I really enjoy. Colonel Brandon’s friendship with Elinor, which causes several people to think those two should get engaged, is a really lovely and rare example of a strong, selfless cross-sex friendship between two people who are both in love with other people and are able to become really good platonic friends without anything getting weird. The relationship between the girls and Mrs. Jennings, who is vulgar and frequently misreads situations but who does turn out to be a truly good-hearted and reliable person, is also great, and frequently very funny.

When Austen’s books were first published people were really scandalized about how economic they were, and while I think that is very funny because in a society where women weren’t allowed to have jobs, of course economics would be a critical consideration for marriage. But this upset people anyway. I love it, not just because it’s a more realistic way for the characters to talk–honestly, some of them are so blunt about it that I find myself thinking Austen may be laying it on a little thick–but it’s also very funny, because clearly some of these characters are telling themselves the same self-flattering but ludicrously un-self-aware things that the scandalized reviewers were.

Anyway, after many convoluted disappointments and scheming and general domestic shenanigans, Elinor and Marianne both end up happily and comfortably married, and then a movie was made about it with a truly excellent cast, which I should maybe rewatch.

Pride and Prejudice is next! I am much more familiar with that story, as it’s one of the only two Austen novels that I have read more than three times, so I don’t think I will be as surprised as I was in this one (I genuinely did find myself wondering what happened next, or how our heroines were going to get out of this one, because I couldn’t remember how the plot went), but it should be enjoyable all the same.
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For Black History Month, the politics book club decided to read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I had read this back in college as part of a survey course of early American literature, and while “enjoyed” seems maybe not quite the right word for the experience of reading a slavery narrative, I did think it was very good and–well, frankly, I did enjoy reading it, because it was a tense and dramatic story, and things that make good reading are different from things that I approve of.

Like all slave narratives of the time, this was an explicitly abolitionist text. It is bookended with a lot of testimonials vouching for its veracity, and its clearly stated purpose is to let people know about how bad slavery is so that they will be moved to oppose it. Only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

Jacobs is very clear to emphasize that, as far as slaves go, she didn’t even have it too bad. She was a house slave, not a field slave, and her grandmother was free, so she had some relatives who had some measure of rights, and who weren’t entirely under the power of her owner. This relative privilege is also part of how she learned to read well enough to be able to also eventually be able to write an entire book, and she is careful to stress the importance of education and the ways in which denying slaves literacy is a method of control.

Being in the house, however, puts Jacobs squarely in the line of fire for years of sexual harassment from her owner–or more specifically, her owner’s father, since she is owned by a small child. The father, therefore, is the one with power over her, although he very conveniently remembers that he’s not her actual owner only when one of Jacobs’ friends or family is attempting to buy her out of his household, at which point his hands are tied because she’s totally his daughter’s and is not his to sell, sorry guys.

After many years of creatively attempting to avoid incessant sexual harassment from Dr. Flint, Jacobs–in the story, going by the pseudonym Linda Brent–decides to escape, and concocts a brilliantly counterintuitive, though very dangerous, plan to do so. This plan sees her living in a small, poorly insulated garret in the garden shed at her grandmother’s house for seven years, watching her two children grow up via a peephole the size of a coin, while Dr. Flint makes multiple trips to New York to try and hunt her down. There are a few close shaves where Linda/Harriet is almost found out, but her hiding-place holds, and eventually she is presented with an opportunity to take a boat to Philadelphia with another female runaway. She eventually does wind up in New York, where she navigates the different style of racism in the North and works to secure herself and her children away from their Southern owners. This eventually involves one of Linda’s abolitionist friends buying her, in New York, which is not really supposed to happen, but I guess the sale was legal on the part of the seller but not legal on the part of the buyer, thus leaving her un-owned? The legal details were not entirely clear to me.

Jacobs is careful to tell not just her own story, but also the stories of as many friends, family members, and acquaintances as she can, especially those of slaves who are illiterate and thus would never be in a place to publish their own experiences. There is an interesting style choice here, where the dialogue of Linda and her immediate family is written in standard English, but the speech of other slaves is written in eye-dialect, highlighting how nonstandard their speech is. I am sure someone somewhere has written an analysis of this but for right now I just think it is interesting and notable.

Moral degradation is a big theme here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Jacobs tackles head-on the moral charges levied against Black people and especially enslaved Black people, illustrating how the dire circumstances they are in force them to become cunning, dishonest towards their masters, and even–the biggest horror to her nineteenth-century readership–unchaste. She also illustrates, with some pity, the moral degradation of the mistresses of slave-holding households, and the way in which their husbands’ practices of sexually assaulting female slaves leads them to enact their rage and jealousy upon all the other people in the household that they do have power over, instead of upon their husbands, the one person they generally don’t. And of course, the self-centered, contradictory, always-having-it-both-ways moral reasoning of men like Dr. Flint is repeatedly put on display and carefully dissected for both its inconsistency and its general moral repugnance.

Overall this book is both must-read education about life under slavery, and a genuinely great memoir. Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself ever, under any circumstances, in a position where you are even thinking about opening your mouth about American slavery.
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Recently two of my dear friends got married, and gave away books as wedding favors at their wedding. They had quite a lot of copies so Sam and I ended up with five books collectively instead of the traditional one apiece. One of these books was Rachel Hawkins’ The Villa, a dual-timeline novel about two childhood best friends, now both writers in their thirties, who take a girls’ trip to a villa in Italy where a very famous murder happened in the 1970s among a bunch of drugged-up rock star types. The crew in the ‘70s timeline are based off of the Romantic poets from the infamous summer in Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were insufferable to everybody (or at least that’s what I’ve heard), and Claire Clairmont was also there. Except, in this version, the Percy character, up-and-coming musician Pierce Sheldon, gets brutally murdered, and in addition to Mari Godwin writing a genre-defining horror novel, the Claire Clairmont character also creates an artistic masterwork, in this case a sad folk album.

Apparently some of the book is also inspired by the Manson murders, but I don’t know anything about them, whereas I know a fair amount about the Romantic poets and the infamous Year Without a Summer ghost story writing contest. This book drew from it really well–changed things enough to keep me guessing and make it feel like I wasn’t just reading a reskin of the events I know already, but full of fun little Easter eggs for Romantic poetry dorks, like Percy Shelley’s inability to realize that babies aren’t interchangeable.

This book does a good job of having both a thoughtful feminist perspective and female characters who are kind of awful. Everybody in the ‘70s crew is awful and also they’re all babies; the fraught relationship between Mari and her stepsister Lara, particularly the way they keep letting all these charismatic, creative, captivating, but ultimately shitty men get between them, is sad but very believable for teenagers. In the modern-day timeline, the fraught relationship between Em–a writer of cozy mysteries who stayed in her hometown and got married, then got sick, and is now going through a phenomenally ugly divorce–and Chess–who fucked off outta town as soon as she could and has now become an Instagram-perfect self-help writer–has to do mostly with things besides men but boy howdy does Em’s shitty ex-husband manage to insert himself into it.

There are a lot of good layers and reveals on top of reveals, which I won’t talk about here because I cannot be bothered to remember how spoiler tags work, but the result is certainly very compelling–when the novel started really picking up steam I found it difficult to put down. The aesthetic tension between the bright, sunny, live-laugh-love-ass vibes of the villa in the summer (and of Chess’ career) and the increasingly dark and fucked-up things we learn as the story unfolds is drawn in beautifully atmospheric, cinematic terms; Em clearly has a not just an eye for that sort of thing but a somewhat cynical hyper-awareness of it.

Overall, this was a really fun little thriller that weaves in a number of things that are Relevant To My Interests to create a deliciously claustrophobic story about creativity, jealousy, fucked-up interpersonal dynamics in many flavors, and the strengths and limitations to the curative powers of fucking off to Italy. Also, it really made me want to fuck off to Italy for a writer’s retreat.
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I have had a copy of Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England sitting on ye olde TBR shelf for… probably ten years now? Anyway, I was chatting with one of the bartenders at East Reg who said he was reading it and was having a great time, so I bumped it up the priority list and started reading it last week. It’s about 500 pages long, so I wasn’t able to crank my way through it before I got un-sick enough that I had to start getting out of bed and doing things besides read, but it was very fun and fast-paced, so I did spend a few evenings last week staying up a little too late reading it.

I did not know a whole lot about the Plantagenets before going into this. I had heard the name, but my knowledge of pre-Tudor rulers of England is very spotty, and I had no sense of what order any of it went into. I knew there were way too many Henrys and I didn’t know anything about any of them except the seventh and eighth. I knew Richard the Lionheart was the king when the Robin Hood stories take place and that he was off on crusade sometimes. I knew Eleanor of Aquitaine was kind of a big deal but I couldn’t have told you how she was related to anybody.

As a result, this was a very good book for me! The blurbs on it frame it as basically a “primer” on the Plantagenet dynasty, and that was exactly what I needed. It walks us through the 300 or so years of history from the reign of Henry II through the deposition of Richard II and into the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses with the ascension of Henry IV. I have another book on the Wars of the Roses that I am now interested in reading quite soon, although it is not the one by this author, who seems to have written quite a number of popular medieval histories and also hosted a TV show I’m now watching on Netflix called The Secrets of Great British Castles, which is exactly what it sounds like and perfect edutainment content for me.

The main narrative throughline in this book in terms of trying to tie it all together into an argument for historical importance is the relationship between Plantagenet monarchs and the rest of the English political community. We all learned at least a little bit about the Magna Carta at school but other than that, US kids don’t get all that much in the way of lessons about UK civics; hell, in a lot of places we barely learn about US civics. Here, Jones walks us through the changing relationships between the Plantagenet kings and their barons, knights, and occasionally the commons, and the increasingly sophisticated system of charters, parliaments, courts, and other administrative apparatus that governed England as it chugged slowly and unknowingly toward the modern era. Disputes over the taxes to finance the endless wars with France, Scotland, Wales, the Holy Land, and occasionally Ireland and Spain bring together military and financial history in a way that’s fun and easy to follow even if you are the sort of person who usually likes the military history more than the financial history (I do like financial history but I can recognize that it’s sometimes dry. This is not dry).

There are probably more scholarly books on the Plantagenets you can read if you want to be really serious about it–Jones provides a pretty intriguing “further reading” list at the back. But if you are just like “I can name all six of Henry VIII’s wives and what happened to them, but I couldn’t tell you if Prince John from Robin Hood and King John from Shakespeare’s King John are the same person or not if you put a gun to my head,” then this is certainly the book for you (they are indeed the same person). A few years ago I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and when Merricat’s list of things she liked included “Richard Plantagenet” I was vaguely embarrassed that I wasn’t sure who that was other than that it probably wasn’t Richard III because nobody liked him. I am now no longer embarrassed because even though there are two Richard Plantagenets I now know enough about them to be pretty confident that it’s the first one because nobody liked Richard II, either. I am also very pleased to be confident that if I ever have to watch another adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV I will be able to at least sort of tell some of the Henrys in it apart.
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Sometimes when I am sick I like to read poetry, and sometimes in the winter I like to read Arthuriana. Last week I was both so I decided to read the ancient paperback copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s been sitting on my shelf for I don’t know how long. I can tell the copy is ancient because the price on the front cover is 95 cents. You can’t buy anything for 95 cents anymore.

I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of this a few years ago, but it was long enough ago that I was ready to give the poem a “reread,” although this translation is by one Brian Stone. Brian Stone may not have written The Lord of the Rings but he does seem to know what he is about as far as medieval poetry goes, as well as the art of translation. I found this version of the poem gripping, surreal, and full of lively, concrete detail. The story itself is fey and freaky, and also seasonal–Gawain’s deadline is the New Year, so most of it takes place during that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s when time comes unmoored and we are all confused and full of cheese.

The storyline is simple enough. One New Year’s, the Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court and demands to play a game–one of Arthur’s knights will cut his head off, and then in a year, the Knight will return the blow. Young Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, takes up the challenge and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and is like “See you in a year! Come find me” and rides out. Gawain procrastinates trying to find the Green Knight again until after Halloween, then goes riding around the countryside looking for the Green Knight’s chapel, to no avail. Around Christmas, he finds himself in a strange castle in an icy wood, and becomes the guest of the jovial castellan and his lady. The castellan tells him that he knows exactly where the Green Knight’s chapel is, and it’s less than two miles away, so Gawan should feel free to just hang out and celebrate Christmas week. This he does. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the castellan goes out hunting, and Gawain stays in and gets in a set of awkward politeness dances with the castellan’s lady, a sorceress who is trying to seduce him. In an interesting set of scenes, which read as very gender-swapped from a modern perspective, Gawain tries to defend his chastity without doing anything as impolite as overtly refusing the lady, caught between two opposing standards of honorable behavior. Gawain navigates this dilemma mostly cleanly but does find himself succumbing to the temptation of letting the lady give him her girdle as a favor, although this is less because he wants the lady’s favor than because it is a magical green girdle that is enchanted so the wearer of it can never be harmed. Gawain wears this convenient item to his appointment with the Green Knight, whose blow cuts through the skin of his neck but stops at the muscle, leaving Gawain with just a superficial cut, which will scar to remind him forever that he did do a tiny little sin in order to save his own life. Gawain is very penitent about this because a knight should face death fearlessly, but the Giant thinks it’s incredibly funny and that it’s very understandable to value your own life, and forgives him. In fact, the Green Knight, who unsurprisingly is also the castellan, knew all about his enchantress wife’s seduction attempts and thinks that Gawain is a jolly fellow who handled his tests pretty well, and considers them BFFs now. All the rest of Arthur’s knights are also pretty pleased that Gawain’s not dead once he gets back to Camelot.

Thus is the story, in brief, but the point of epic poetry is not to tell it in brief, it is to tell it very dramatically and with lots of scene-setting about the shining and richly embroidered armor and clothes and stuff everyone is wearing, and the food they are eating, and the savage beauty of the northern English or maybe Welsh countryside in the middle of bitter winter. This the poem does beautifully. The introduction tells us that it also describes armor and hunting and other parts of medieval life very accurately, showing that the anonymous author of the poem was well acquainted with courtly life and generally knew what he was about. I don’t know much about hunting so it’s nice to know I am not being led astray.

Really good medieval poetry really is quite like nothing else; the atmospherics are great and the rhythms of alliterative poetry are very unlike that of the rhyming poetry that would come to dominate later eras of English literature. I am always very glad when I revisit one of these types of works when they are translated well.
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Sometimes when I am having a bad time I like to read about people having an even worse time, so it is fortunate for me that my hold on Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World came in right before I fell sick last week.

Dolin lets us know right off the bat that this is not a story of far-reaching historical importance; instead, it is merely a really wild tale that he wanted to rescue from oblivion because of how nuts it is.

There are a couple of main parties in this story, which takes place during the War of 1812. Party 1 is the crew of the Nanina, an American ship on a sealing voyage to the Falklands, which had sailed out of New York right before war officially broke out. They were hoping to spend a year or so sealing and then sail back when the war had blown over. This didn’t quite work out for them. It is important to note, however, that the Nanina was in the Falklands on purpose and was not shipwrecked. The Falklands were otherwise uninhabited at the time, the Spanish settlement having been abandoned a year or two earlier.

The second main party is the crew and passengers of the Isabella, a British ship inbound from Australia. The captain of the Isabella is not the greatest at his job and manages to wreck the ship on one of the outer islands in the Falklands. The resourceful Aussies are able to set up a little camp on their spit of land that keeps them all alive, although not quite in the style they are accustomed to. They send some guys out in a longboat on a hail Mary trip to South America to try to get help.

While the guys in the longboat are on their way to Rio, the American sealers discover the stranded British Australians. Though the two countries are at war, the Americans figure that’s not really the top priority here outside of what they would have considered civilization. The Americans agree to cut their sealing voyage short and give the stranded Brits a ride back to the mainland.

Unbeknownst to them, the hail Mary longboat trip works out! While the Nanina is preparing to house its own crew and the folks from the Isabella, the head of British naval operations in Buenos Aires sends out his subordinate, William D’Arada, out to rescue his fellow countrymen in a rickety tub called the Nancy. D’Arada, upon arriving in the Falklands, is delighted to find not only the folks he was sent to rescue, but also a bunch of Americans! He promptly, and somewhat illegally, takes the Nanina as a prize and its crew as prisoners. His fellow Brits find this pretty ungallant but don’t do much about it. D’Arada sends the Nanina off to England under his prize master and then sails the Nancy back to Buenos Aires with the rescues from the Isabella.

Unfortunately, while D’Arada was upsetting all their plans, a hunting party of five men–mixed American and British–had separated from the main group to get food. When they returned to the main camp, everyone else had departed. Again, some of the Isabella passengers thought this was pretty douchey of D’Arada, but nobody really had the standing to mess with him, nor did they try too hard.

Thus, in the second half of the book, our cast of characters is drastically reduced, from two or three ships’ worth of people to merely five, plus a dog. These five guys (and their dog) have an eventful but, fortunately, never fatal eighteen months of Robinson Crusoe-ing it up in the Falklands, having interpersonal falling-outs, at least one mutiny, numerous attempts at conflict resolution in different levels of success, trips to hunt seals, hogs, and penguin and albatross eggs, and other such shenanigans as they wonder if anyone will ever come to get them. Navigating around the Falklands in their little shallop is dangerous enough that sailing to Rio or wherever seems to be out of the question, although if I recall correctly they do try once and basically can’t get the little boat out of the Falklands in one piece. Meanwhile, back in Buenos Aires, and then New York, and then London, legal and press machinations are afoot, and eventually, the Americans who had made it back to America–after some time as British prisoners of war–are able to send a brig out to the Falklands to rescue the five men. It takes some of them a whole other relay race of shipping voyages to get their arses back home again, but at least in the meantime they got to see some other people. One of the stranded men, Captain Charles Barnard (the original captain of the Nanina), eventually writes a rather pompous memoir about his adventures, which sells moderately well for the time and then fades into obscurity, until apparently one day Eric Jay Dolin found it and was like “This is nuts; I gotta tell people about this” and wrote Left for Dead.

This was overall a very fun read. I’m not sure it quite reaches the “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction” level of something like The Wager but I’d still definitely recommend it for fans of The Wager because it tells a similar type of story, and is very fast-paced and readable. Dolin goes to great pains to avoid moralizing about things like the ethics of sealing or basically anything other than D’Aranda’s personal conduct, which pretty much everyone except D’Aranda agrees was shitty. The book has lots of pictures, which I thought was great, and lots of footnotes, which were informative but interrupted the flow a little. There is plenty of interesting historical context to flesh out what the world was like for the people involved, which I think is valuable even if there’s simply no case to be made that this event had any particular far-reaching impact on history writ large. It’s an excellent addition to the “putting dudes in Situations” canon of maritime literature. Those dudes were for sure in a Situation! In fact, the Situations kept compounding into new and worse Situations, for quite a while! None of these Situations devolved into cannibalism, which was frankly a lucky break for these guys, but there weren’t too many other people around to eat anyway, so instead we get interesting lessons in how to hunt all the weird fauna that was hanging out in the Falklands around 1813 or so, and several near-death experiences with elephant seals. Exciting!
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According to the reading guide I’m following, the next book up in my Vorkosigan Saga reading marathon was Brothers in Arms, which clearly chronologically takes place after Borders of Infinity, so I guess we’ll see what’s up with that next month.

In this one, Miles and his fleet of supposedly-independent mercenaries have to stop off at Earth to put themselves back together after a successful but very costly mission that has pissed off, unsurprisingly, the Cetagandans, who are now trying to assassinate Miles as Admiral Naismith. Miles also has to check in with the Barrayaran embassy–where, surprisingly to Miles but perhaps unsurprisingly for the reader–his himbo cousin Ivan is putting in some time as second military attache to get himself cultured. Miles Vorkosigan is promptly designated third military attache and ordered to start doing diplomatic duties by the ImpSec captain at the embassy, a somewhat dour Komarran fellow named Duv Galeni.

Miles has two very big problems starting off: one, he needs a big infusion of cash from ImpSec, pronto, and it keeps not coming; and two, his two identities are now hanging out on the same planet, which is not great given how physically distinctive he is. This is how the main shenanigans crop up: after, in desperation, telling a too-observant report that Admiral Naismith is a clone of Lord Vorkosigan–created by the Cetagandans, as far as they know–an ACTUAL CLONE of Miles shows up, as part of a Komarran rebel plot run by, of all people, Duv Galeni’s father. This is bad for Galeni in that he gets kidnapped although good for him in that his father is hesitant to execute him. It is also likely to be very, very bad for his career.

Miles has a lot of feelings about the clone, and the clone has also, clearly, has a lot of feelings about Miles, mostly very different ones. According to Betan law the clone would be Miles’ younger brother and as their mother is Betan, that makes it applicable, as far as Miles is concerned, and if the clone is Cordelia’s son and Miles’ brother then he’s also Aral Vorkosigan’s son, which means his name is Mark Pierre Vorkosigan and he is entitled by Barrayaran law to various things as the second son of Aral Vorkosigan. Mark–who has been going by Miles because his entire existence has been geared toward replacing Miles in a byzantine plot to destabilize the Barrayaran imperium–does not initially seem to like being dubbed Mark but he didn’t like being Miles either. Mark’s, uh, entire life seems to have done a number on him psychologically, which is very understandable.

The introduction of additional family members who are also enemies, for both Miles and our new character Galeni, adds a fun layer to the usual Vorkosigan Saga string of increasingly frantic shenanigans and plots within plots and faction fighting and general Situations with a capital S.

This was honestly perfect sick reading–I read it in a 24-hour span in which I was sick and, completely unrelatedly, had to go to the emergency room–as it both kept my problems in perspective and was also just a fun space romp that I didn’t have to think too deeply about. Nice easy reading; my biggest challenge was not bleeding on Beth’s nice hardback. (I succeeded and the hardback is unscathed.) Excited to see what Borders of Infinity has in store for me.
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In one of my book groups, we decided to kick off the year with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s classic of media studies, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. I voted for this but for some reason I was under the impression that it was a short book; I was extremely wrong about that. This is a 350-page book only because it is blithely printed with small, single-spaced text on fairly large pages–basically, standard hardback sized pages, but mass market paperback print.

It is pretty content-dense (the prose, while hardly magazine-like breezy, is pretty readable by scholarly standards), and also the subject matter is very depressing, so it took me a while to get through even though I am very interested in this sort of thing. One of the strengths of the book as a work of both scholarship and argumentation is a weakness in terms of its readability: It backs up its points with evidence, and lots of it. The beginning of the book lays out the “model” by which media spin and servility happen and the rest of the book mainly consists of very detailed case studies about mass-media fuckery that were relevant at the time this book was published in the 1980s–the Vietnam war, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, coverage of foreign elections, coverage of specifically murders of humanist activist clerics in foreign countries, and a fascinating chapter on an attempt to assassinate the Pope that I had somehow never heard of. All of it makes the New York Times’ role in lying us into the Iraq War in the early 2000s sound more like standard operating procedure than a rare and embarrassing lapse, which, personally, I think is because it was (the New York Times is a bloodthirsty rag and I will never, ever forgive it).

This book is largely interesting as a Foundational Text of leftist media criticism and as a source of interesting information about stuff that happened during the Cold War, but it also does hold up fairly well as a way of explaining how media works. The media has changed quite a lot since this book was published in the ‘80s, and the rise of the Internet and of social media has really thrown a wrench in the way media works in many ways, but TV news still exists and millions of people still watch it, and the New York Times still exists and is still considered the flagship paper of the United States (because we are a fundamentally unserious country)–and, perhaps most importantly, the legacy media still portrays itself as a credible, resolute investigative watchdog against unchecked government power that works in the public’s interest and informs them about how the world works. This is a very important thing to have a realistic assessment of if one is evaluating or participating in conversations about how people these days are all stupid and don’t know how shit works because they get all their news from TikTok, which is indeed bad, but the solution proposed is usually to get these dumb-dumbs to “realize” that they should be consuming “real” news so that they can have a “realistic” and unified understanding of the world and consensus reality like the country did back when everybody watched Walter Cronkite every night. The conversation about the abandonment of legacy news in favor of whatever we’re flocking to now that Twitter’s unusable is incomplete if it does not address that people’s distrust of the mass media is correct because the mass media is indeed full of shit, it’s just that the correctness ends there and from there you can go in many, many different directions, most of which are dodgy. Anyway, I think the book provides enough explanation of the sorts of things that put pressure on media coverage that an intelligent person can extrapolate a bit when trying to factor in things like Facebook.
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The first book I finished this year (I started it a few days ago but it counts for 2025!) was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, one of the great works of nineteenth century medievalism, a time period I unabashedly love because it feels like the first real modern invention of fantasy nerds. Except it took itself with typical Victorian dead moral seriousness (the morals were sometimes bad, but they were for sure serious) and is even now taken with dead artistic seriousness.

The copy of the Idylls that I own was acquired for a mere $5 at Brimfield, probably because the spine and slipcover are so faded. Inside, it is a really very lovely edition, with thick linen paper and deeply stamped print, and fanciful full-page line drawings of what appear to be not just the characters but specifically statues of the characters, on pedestals in little alcoves like you’d find in an old cathedral. This is one of the factors that made it a good winter break book, since I didn’t need to take it anywhere and could just go full sitting-by-the-fire cozy and be generally picturesque about it. I feel like the kinds of people who did Victorian medievalism would appreciate that.

Anyway. The Idylls are several narrative poems about different characters in and around King Arthur and his Round Table, some of whom I was already familiar with and some of them, apparently, I was not. Some of the key moments of Arthuriana are in there, such as the Quest for the Holy Grail, and the Fall of Arthur, and the winning of Guenevere. There are also a number of tales of essentially random knights of the Table, which are fun. There are a few tales of basically the tragic glories of heterosexuality, some of which are better than others. The tale of Lancelot and Elaine is effective in presaging the ruin that Lancelot and Guenevere’s adulterous love for each other will wreak on Camelot, although I am probably not the right audience to be fully bought into a story about how noble it is for a teenage girl to die of heartbreak over a guy three times her age. (Snap out of it, Elaine!) The most painful poem was the one between the heathen sorceress Vivien and famous old guy Merlin, in which Vivien tries to seduce Merlin into telling her a charm that will let her essentially bury Merlin alive but magically. Because Merlin is supposed to be wise and old and not a complete fucking idiot man who will do any fool thing the instant a pretty girl asks him to, this poem is really fucking long, as it takes an interminable time for Vivien to wear Merlin down into doing the transparently idiotic thing, so we are treated to pages and pages of painfully gender essentialist pseudo-medieval-but-actually-Victorian moral speechifying. This is the one poem that I will denounce as just straight up bad. In the rest of them, the general Victorian gender nonsense is certainly there, but also they are good poems and good stories, full of evocative imagery and daring deeds and all that good stuff, and it would be silly to expect a Victorian story about early medieval times to be about exploring today’s moral dilemmas, anyway. So all the stuff about Christianity and bloodlines and whatever is just part of the worldbuilding, and I can roll with it, even up to and including basically blaming Guenevere personally for the entire realm falling apart. But the Vivien one is just too much.

While the first couple Idylls are fun and even lighthearted (“Gareth and Lynette” is very funny and cute), as the story progresses the sense of melancholy and foreboding grow, and Tennyson’s overall take on the glories of Arthur’s rule seems to be that it was ultimately a failure. This is done very well and further makes the book an excellent choice for gloomy midwinter reading. It’s all very tragic and sad, and Tennyson never once fucks up his scansion or any of that other stuff that’s important to the actual craft of lyrical poetry, which is very impressive. It definitely makes me want to immediately run and read more Arthuriana rather than feeling like I’ve had my fill of it for now.
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Winter to me always feels like a good time to revisit Tolkien, so yesterday while recovering from Christmas I picked up the copy of Beren and Lúthien that I had borrowed from my girlfriend over the summer. Like most of the books on Tolkien’s unfinished works, this was put together by his son, Christopher Tolkien, as part of the run of post-movie-series books that revisited tales told or explicated in works like The Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth series, but that rather than being compilations of many different tales, focused on one tale per volume and took us through their development and the various drafts.

The tale of Beren and Lúthien is one of the most important tales of the First Age, and it is referenced a lot in The Lord of the Rings, especially as concerns the romance between Aragorn and Arwen. This work compiles various versions, both finished and unfinished, in verse and in prose, to illustrate the development of the tale over the years as Tolkien fiddled with it, changing names and occurrences and how much detail to go into. The early versions of the tale are interesting particularly for how they differ from the version alluded to in The Lord of the Rings, which must be regarded as canon: in the very earliest draft Beren is not even a mortal man, but an Elf (or Gnome) from a rival group of Elves. In addition, one of the earlier version features Morgoth’s (or Melko, in this one) lieutenant Tevildo, the Prince of Cats, a rather comic character who occupies the space in the more serious later versions occupied by Sauron (who also goes through a bunch of names, spending some time as Thu the Necromancer). Tevildo is some sort of demon in cat form who holds all other cats in thrall and makes them big and scary, and his enemy is the hound Huan, who sticks around through all versions of the story even when the silly cat vs. dog rivalry is abandoned. Some of the cats have silly names like “Miaule.” I loved this version of the story but it definitely had a more The Hobbit sort of bedtime-stories-for-children vibe than this particular tragic romance seems to call for. Sometimes we forget that Tolkien could be a very funny man when he wanted to be.

This book also has a bunch of gorgeous illustrations by Alan Lee, apparently the only person to do correct Middle-Earth illustrations, going by some of the nonsense I’ve seen. It really is just a gorgeous book, gorgeous story, gorgeous poetry. (And much easier to read than the HoME series.) Highly recommended for Tolkien fans.
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The last book in my Ben MacIntyre mini-marathon for 2024 was Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. This one brings us back to the ‘40s and World War II espionage stories, aka the good stuff. It is the story of Eddie Chapman, a career criminal turned spy turned double agent, and the general chaos he wreaked.

Eddie Chapman grew up at loose ends, was in the Coldstream Guards for a hot minute that he spent mostly being disciplined, started hanging out in Soho doing check forgery and other petty thievery, joined a gang of cat burglars called the Jelly Gang (so called because they used gelignite to break safes), and was eventually imprisoned in Jersey in the Channel Islands. During his imprisonment, Jersey was occupied by the Germans. Eddie and his buddy Tony Faramus, a hairdresser and petty criminal from Jersey, both ended up in a German prison in occupied France, where they offered to spy for the Germans as a means of getting out. The Germans took Eddie up on the offer, but not Tony, who disappeared deeper into the German concentration camp system over the years and was eventually liberated from Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.

Eddie Chapman was then trained in spy stuff by a rogue’s gallery of Abwehr officials, the least monstrous of whom were old-fashioned German aristocratic snobs who thought Hitler was uncouth, and some of the rest of whom were fanatical Nazis. None of these people had the goddamn moral courage to actually resist Hitler’s regime, of course, no matter how much they seemed to want credit for finding it tacky. At any rate, Eddie developed what seems to have been a genuine friendship with his immediate spymaster, a highborn broke layabout named von Groning, although Chapman knew him only as Dr. Graumann. This friendship did not even a little bit prevent Eddie from spying on his spymaster as best he knew how, and running immediately to MI5 the second he was parachuted into England. From there he was carefully coached in transmitting all sorts of interesting disinformation mixed with harmless real information to the Abwehr. He had predominantly been tasked with blowing up a factory that manufactured Mosquito bomber planes, and with MI5’s help, was able to stage a fake explosion that successfully tricked the German reconnaissance planes into thinking the factory was toast and the Brits would start running short on Mosquitos any day now. Eventually he took an adventure-filled route back to Axis territory, spent some time in occupied Norway, got parachuted back to England, and fed his German masters more interesting disinformation. Unfortunately for Eddie, he eventually ran into that one thing that almost no person with a job is able to indefinitely withstand: a manager that really has it out for you. When Ronnie Reed was sent to liaise with the Americans, Chapman’s new casemaster had it out for him from Day 1. It took a while to maneuver Eddie into a situation where the rest of MI5 would go along with closing the case, but the little prig did, eventually, get Eddie sacked, at which point the war was nearly over and Chapman promptly returned to a life of crime and general shady business.

While this is certainly one of those books in which everyone seems sort of insufferable, it is no doubt grade A spy shenanigans.
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For reasons related to my current maritime disasters kick I vowed that this December I would finally read the copy of The Great Halifax Explosion that has been sitting on my shelf since January 2019. I first learned about the event when I visited Nova Scotia in 2017 and everybody was doing centenary stuff about it, and I am reminded of it every year when Boston gets its Christmas tree, which the Haligonians send us in thanks for our relief efforts. So I know the short version of the story pretty well but I wanted to read the book-length version, which is why I bought this book when I saw it in an airport, a place I almost never buy books.

The short version of the story is that at 9 o’clock in the morning on December 6, 1917, two ships accidentally bonked into each other in Halifax Harbor. This was not a very fierce crash and it would not have been a huge deal except that, Halifax Harbor being a major port in the World War One supply line, one of the ships was carrying six million pounds of explosives. The resulting blowup was the largest man-made explosion in history at the time and would retain that record for another almost thirty years until the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. This short version is very exciting but doesn’t contain any important lessons, other than maybe that it was very heroic for Boston to send so many doctors and nurses and blankets and hits of cocaine afterward.

The long version is a whole different story! In addition to the added human interest element, of which there is quite a lot–eyewitness accounts by survivors, photographs, a lot of historical context of the different neighborhoods in Halifax and Dartmouth–John U. Bacon spends a good amount of time giving a play-by-play account of every single safety regulation, norm, and best practice that was disregarded over the course of both ships’ journeys, starting with the Mont-Blanc’s unsuitability for the job it was doing and going through the inadvertent packaging of the Mont-Blanc into a perfect floating bomb, Halifax Harbor’s decision to rescind safety protocols like requiring munitions boats to fly a red flag, and the Imo’s Captain From’s impatient decision to blow out of Halifax Harbor at top speed in the wrong lane and play chicken with anyone coming the other direction. This book has lots of things it wants us to learn about the importance of safety regulations, which I agree is very important. It’s also genuinely thrilling reading–well paced, and you can see the disaster inching nearer with every corner cut. I also learned a lot about Halifax and the people who lived here, which as an idiot American I am in sore need of education on.

The explosion itself occurs about halfway through the book, and the second half describes in horrifying detail the immediate aftermath–told largely through the eyes of the ordinary survivors we’ve been getting to know in the first half–the relief and cleanup efforts in the following few weeks, and the later legal wrangling to determine blame, a series of four trials that started with the local Wreck Commission and ended up being appealed all the way to London. The descriptions of the medical relief efforts, from both the local and semi-local Canadian doctors who could make their way in that day and the US contingent sent by Massachusetts’ first experimental iteration of a disaster relief commission, are thorough, vivid, and incredibly nasty. I found it absolutely riveting but some readers might get squicked, so caveat lector if you are squeamish about gross medical stuff, especially eyeballs.

While I read this in December specifically to be seasonal, I did not expect the Christmas season connection to affect me as much as it did, especially reading it warm and cozy in my bed on a bitingly cold morning, reading about these poor folks whose windows had all been blown out of their houses trying stay warm through a particularly ill-timed blizzard. It manages to get all heartwarming at the end, so I guess it really is a Christmas book. It’s not one that could ever be made into a family holiday movie, though; too many people get their eyeballs removed.
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At Readercon this summer I did something that, for me, is almost unthinkable any time of year, but especially in summer: I bought a Christmas item. The item in question was a tiny Pomegranate Press edition of John Updike’s The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, a grinchy little satirical number illustrated by whimsigothic genius and asexual lifestyle icon Edward Gorey. Each of the twelve Terrors, which start with “Santa (the man)” and “Santa (the concept),” has a few short sentences of maximally cynical and paranoid observation (Christmas tree ornaments are “bomb-like” in shape, which is certainly one take on “round”) about how dreadful the thing is, paired with one of Gorey’s characteristically pseudo-Edwardian line drawings. The whole thing takes about 45 reasonably amusing seconds to read; the purpose of the book is to stand it up on a shelf with the other Christmas decorations so people know you’re not too bought into the whole thing. I put it next to my fancy red copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol so people know that I think Christmas is predominantly about ghosts and lamenting the miserliness encouraged by industrial/post-industrial capitalist society (I don’t want that little Nativity set I’ve got to send the wrong idea or anything). Whatever, it was worth the 8 dollars to be able to incorporate some Gorey illustrations into my Christmas decor–no offense to Updike, the actual author of the thing.
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Continuing my Lois McMaster Bujold adventures, I read Cetaganda, the next installment in the Vorkosigan Saga. This one follows Miles and his much handsomer, much dumber cousin Ivan as they go on a diplomatic mission to the Cetagandan Empire, which until very recently has been a recurring enemy of Barrayar.

Miles and Ivan were actually not sent to Cetaganda on any mission other than their public one, which was to represent and deliver a gift from Emperor Gregor at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress Lisbet Degtiar. However, a very sensitive intelligence mission attacks them before they’ve even docked properly at the Cetagandan shuttle station (getting them to dock improperly is the opening salvo of the plot, in fact). Miles then spends a tight 300 pages trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and which Cetagandan nob is trying to frame Barrayar for their own treason so they can start another war, which, while Barrayar has won the last couple wars against Cetaganda, they’d still really like to take a good generation-long break from. Miles’ ability to do intel/counter-intel is initially hampered by being in a strange civilization where he doesn’t know anybody and doesn’t know how stuff works, but through sheer enfant-terrible-whiz-kid-ness and plot armor a mile thick, he manages to avoid dying (multiple times) for long enough to talk his way into cultivating some allies, spinning some theories, and gaining access to all sorts of very off-limits-to-barbarian-outworlders spaces in Cetagandan culture.

The Cetagandans are master… well, eugenicists, basically, although (as far as we can see) they are less about murdering undesirables (for genetics reasons, anyway; they’re real big on it as part of regular imperial expansionism) than about tinkering with gene lines to create an incredibly baroque and insular aristocratic power structure, kind of like how all European royalty are cousins with each other, except since it’s being done by Science instead of the old-fashioned way they can avoid any unfortunate Habsburg chins and suchlike. The upper class of genetically on-purpose Cetagandans are called the haut, and they are all very hot, and the women float around in little force-bubbles when in public so no one can see them. The sort of gentry or lower-aristocratic class, from which most of the military brass is drawn, are called the ghem, and the highest honor a ghem-lord can win from the Emperor, even higher than the Order of Merit, is an haut-lady wife. The other big division of labor in Cetagandan society is gender, with the women in charge of the genome project and the men in charge of externally facing Imperial politics. This division does not in any way usurp the class solidarity of the haut, of course.

All this is a bit baffling to Miles, who comes from Barrayar, a place where power is very firmly in the hands of Men Who Can Kill Lots of People. Fortunately, as befits a protagonist, Miles is a quick study, and has the benefit of being constantly underestimated. (He is, in fact, so underestimated that at one point the as-yet-unknown antagonist sees Miles poking around and assumes that Ivan must be the one directing him, and promptly kidnaps Ivan, who is a dumbass who doesn’t know shit about what’s going on.)

In very classic Miles fashion, our hero spends nearly as much time and effort trying to avoid reporting his mission to his superiors–either the Barrayaran ambassador, or the protocol officer, who is actually the embassy’s ImpSec commander–because he doesn’t want them to take the mission away from him and send it up the chain of command, which is what would probably happen given that Miles is a 22-year-old lieutenant with no subordinates.

This gets increasingly difficult as the shenanigans heighten. A low-ranking, broke young ghem-lord takes a sort of half-assed interest in the Barrayaran oddities and plays a series of minor xenophobic pranks on them that are sometimes actual assassination attempts, which he doesn’t seem to be aware of. Ivan develops a reputation among the ghem-women while Miles does detective work and keeps causing minor diplomatic incidents by being in places he shouldn’t be. An Imperial servant is murdered and it is staged to look like a suicide, and Miles tries to gently direct the Cetagandan security officer in charge of the investigation to do actual investigating instead of wrapping it up quickly and quietly, which he is under significant pressure to do. This works because Miles, insufferably protagonist-y as he can be, is certainly not The Guy With the Only Brain Cell–in fact, in this particular book he seems to be surrounded mostly by very smart and competent people, except for Ivan and Lord Yenaro (and even they are competent at some things. Yenaro’s competency, unfortunately, is perfumery, not political intrigue).

Overall verdict is pretty in keeping with the rest of the Saga: a little tropey but a lot of fun.
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The November installment of my end-of-2024 Ben MacIntyre marathon was The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, about the double agent Olev Gordievsky.

Oleg Gordievsy was the son of a KGB officer, and his older brother was also a KGB officer. His first wife was a KGB officer, and his second wife was also from a KGB family. The KGB employed quite a lot of people.

Gordievsky had a couple of serious political experiences that eventually pushed him toward double-agenting on behalf of the West, such as witnessing the construction of the Berlin Wall, but largely he was just also a cultural dissident who like such decadent bourgeois illegal stuff like listening to classical music, which was apparently not allowed in the USSR, which for some reason I find particularly illustrative of how badly they had lost the plot.

Gordievsky and his first wife got posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. From what I understand, if you’re trying to make the capitalist West look like a great option, the Scandinavian social democracies are the place to do it. While he was in Copenhagen, his marriage fell apart, he started having an affair with a nice young secretary, and the Prague Spring happened, which further convinced him that the Soviet Union was not where it was at and he should throw in his lot with the folks that at least let you listen to whatever music you wanted. This is about when he started working with MI6.

Gordievsky’s career with M16 had approximately four phases. The first was his posting in Denmark, which was pretty fruitful for M16 in terms of learning about the inner workings of the Soviet embassy and the KGB. The second phase was a period of a few years when Gordievsky basically went dark–his posting over, he went back to Russia, where due to his divorce his career stalled out for a few years. He kept his head down, tried to have as normal-looking a family as possible with his second wife, learned English, and started very slowly working his way into consideration for a posting to London. When he finally got it, he read all of the files he could find on KGB operations in Great Britain, purely for the purposes of being better prepared for his job, of course. The third phase was his London posting, where he gave M16 truly enormous amounts of information collected during the years he was in Russia and what he was learning in the embassy in London. In return for this service, M16 gave him “contacts” and information he could bring back to the embassy to make it look like he was doing his day job without actually giving the Soviets any information it was too dangerous for them to know.

Then Rick Ames happened, which catapulted Oleg into phase 4.

Rick Ames was also a double agent although not from any motives as noble as wanting to listen to classical music all day. Ames, in an extremely American capitalist sort of way, was simply running out of money. He was a middlingly paid, middlingly talented CIA agent with a bit of a drinking problem who was not rising in the bureaucratic ranks as fast as he felt entitled to, although he did end up as an officer in Soviet counterintelligence. He also had an expensive wife. So he made the very American decision to fuck up anyone he needed to fuck up to get more money. In this case, it meant approaching the KGB via the Soviet embassy in DC and offering to pass on the identities of American and allied spies. This list included Olev Gordievsky, whose identity M16 had not in fact revealed to the CIA at any point. But Ames’ boss, in a fit of typically American entitlement to know everything, had at one point assigned Ames to trawl through a bajillion pages of data and figure out who the Brits’ most prized spy could possibly be, simply because it was vaguely intolerable to him to not know something. This feeling is one I have much sympathy for, but the unfortunate result is that Ames did the assignment correctly, and then told his new friends about in exchange for several thousand dollars.

Gordievsky, having maneuvered his bosses out of the way and gotten himself appointed head of the London embassy, was now recalled to Moscow on a quick work trip and told he’d be back in a few weeks. Instead he was entered into a labyrinthine bunch of bureaucratic wrangling where his bosses were unwilling to actually execute him until they caught him red-handed doing something double-agenty, so he was instead interrogated and spied on and generally dicked around for several weeks while he went slowly insane. Eventually, Gordievsky took the risk of sending the signal to activate the highly improbably and elaborate escape plan he had put in place with M16, and the last third or so of the book is a minute-by-minute recounting of this brazenly insane exfiltration scheme that basically nobody thought was going to really work. Fortunately for Gordievsky, it did, and while the diplomatic fallout was pretty nasty because the KGB was, quite understandably, absolutely infuriated that they had been made fools of, and after being so restrained and modern as to not just shoot Gordievsky the minute they had suspicions about him, like they used to do in Stalin’s time, too.

The exfiltration is absolutely riveting thriller stuff and I stayed up too late reading it. Overall I don’t think this is MacIntyre’s strongest book, and while I feel like I understand exactly why Gordievsky did what he did and do not think it was wrong, at the end of the day I simply cannot get that stoked about any take as un-nuanced as “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were On The Side of Freedom And Democracy,” even if this is really secondary to the main storyline. Most of the book does deal in much more interesting, concrete details, that paint a picture that is interestingly nuanced even if MacIntyre’s occasional pronouncements that the Soviet Union was Bad and Britain was Good are not. But it is still squarely within the realm of Fun And Exciting Real-Life Spy Shenanigans, which is after all what I read MacIntyre for.
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My yearlong read for 2024 was a very fancy copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which I had never had to read in school, even during the three weeks when were trying to speed-learn Middle English (I think we might have looked real quick at the prologue, but that was it).

The Canterbury Tales is very serious foundational English literature, which is why there are copies of it with leather binding and gold-edged pages and ribbon bookmarks, and all the bells and whistles. But despite what I thought was a decent amount of familiarity with the idea that classics are usually classics because they are good and entertaining and the things that make stories good and entertaining is that they are usually at least a little bit funny and a little bit insane, I was still not quite prepared for how chaotic this work was. The individual tales vary wildly in tone and genre and content and, occasionally form–most of them are told in verse, but an apparently random handful are told in prose. They each have a prologue that connects them back to the frame story, introducing who will tell the next tale and chronicling the general bickering and nonsense between the pilgrims.

A possible alternate title for this work would be “Are The Straights Okay?: The Poem,” and I must say that from my vantage point the straights do not seem to be particularly okay. A bunch of the stories are basically dumb sitcom Boomer humor about how marriage is terrible and the opposite sex is out to get you and women are awful for not endlessly submissive to their shitty husbands, although there are also a number of stories about how the shitty husbands deserve to be humiliated for being shitty. Some of these are very funny, like The Miller’s Tale, in which a young wife and her affair partner (a student who boards with them) play a series of tricks on both the dimwitted husband and a random local who is also in love with the wife, which culminates in tricking the wannabe affair partner into kissing the actual affair partner’s butthole. But there are other times when the various characters on pilgrimage appear to be trying to earnestly dispense worldly wisdom about marriage and men and women and I’m not sure if their ideas about good marriages or bad marriages are more appalling. The prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, which for some reason is like twice as long as the Tale itself, is simultaneously a full biography of the Wife’s marriages and completely incomprehensible. Reading it made me grimace so hard I almost got my face stuck like that.

Possibly one reason the straights are not okay is that they are all, regardless of their personal level of devotion, extremely Catholic. Catholicism permeates every word of this book, and not just the beliefs of Catholicism, but the omnipresence of the Church as the main institution in society. Catholicism is essentially hostile to both straight people and non-straight people, but differently. It also employed a huge number of people around the 1390s or whenever these poems were being written. Because it employed so many people, they could not all actually be pure of heart and godly of soul and ascetic of body and all that stuff good Catholics are supposed to be. This is great for the poem, and some of the funniest bits are about various clerically employed people who are bad at their jobs or who at least all hate each other. My favorite Tales in the book are the Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale, which come one after the other, because the Friar and the Summoner hate each other’s guts. The Friar’s tale is about how summoners are all nosy, greedy douchebags who would frame their own mothers for crimes for a nickel, which has fun ACAB energy. The Summoner’s tale in return is about how friars are hypocritical layabouts and freeloaders whose supposed vows of poverty rake in too much free loot from people with real jobs, and involves a guy tricking a friar into letting him fart into his hand, and then some sort of weird riddle where they have to figure out how to apportion a fart into equal shares and distribute it to all the friars. But my absolute favorite part, and possibly the best single page of poetry in all of English literature, is the prologue to the Summoner’s tale, in which an angel transports a sleeping friar in a dream to Hell, and the friar is like “I don’t see any friars here, is that ‘cause we’re all so good and holy?” and the angel is like “No, they’re around,” and then it turns out that all the dead friars in Hell live inside Satan’s butthole. Hilarious! Very serious classic literature is all about farts and Satan’s butthole, don’t you know.

Another very funny part is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where a canon shows up like “I heard we’re telling stories” and his yeoman is like “COOL I HAVE A STORY it’s about a canon who is an alchemist and a FRAUD, all the alchemists are FRAUDS, here’s how they trick people into giving them money DON’T GIVE MY BOSS MONEY” and truly people are people at all times in history (this is, in all seriousness, the point of reading classic literature).

Tragically not all of the Tales are this funny. The worst offender unfortunately occurs right at the end, with The Parson’s Tale, which is not a poem nor even a tale, but merely a 50-page sermon on sin (spoiler: Catholics think basically everything is sin). It ends with Chaucer apologizing for everything he’s written and translated in his life that isn’t appropriately religious, including for writing the naughtier of The Canterbury Tales. This is a huge bummer of a note to end on. I am biased because I am an unrepentant Catholic apostate, but I do think that the literary tradition of the West would be significantly impoverished without that section of poetry about dead friars living in Satan’s butthole.

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