So, with my partner still living overseas one would think I have been passing time by reading many many books. Sadly this isn’t true, but I have read the odd one or two of late. One was even role-playing related, though terribly embarrassing on the train… Here is a brief review of books I have read lately, role-playing related or not.
- The Third Reich in power, Richard Evans: Part 2 of a 3-part series, discussing the trials and tribulations of a youthful Nazi movement preparing for a catastrophic war. I get into these kind of third reich funks, and one started with this book… unfortunately I am not skilled at reading history, and have found it’s very easy to believe a really shoddy historical analysis if one is not trained. I swallowed Hitler’s Willing Executioners hook, line and sinker, and only discovered a year or two later that it was largely a crock. I believe others have done this with Iris Chang’s book on Nanjing, which includes a fake picture, just as the author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners apparently used some pretty shoddy research. So I shan’t give an opinion on this book…
- The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi: Primo Levi’s masterpiece If this is a Man was in my wedding Amazon wishlist, and I pretty much read it twice as soon as I received it. That book was the story of his survival in Auschwitz; this is his attempt 20 years later to understand why and how it happened from a more philosophical viewpoint, and particularly to dwell on those who did it, and those who abetted them. The chapter called The Grey Area is perhaps the core of the book, because in this chapter he attempts to understand the motivations of those (Jewish and non-Jewish) who protected themselves in the camps by coming to an accommodation with the Nazis. This book is a compelling read, of course, as is everything in this topic, but it is particularly compelling because of the balance of Levi’s perspective. He refuses to judge, and also refuses to forgive, while approaching the whole question with a strong sense of sadness and compassion. I think Levi’s is a rare voice, and it’s a shame that he died soon after this book was written.
These books are totally unrelated to the entire topic of this blog of course, I have just presented them in order to defend my intellectual credibility, since I have also been reading comics, which are particularly unserious:
- Emma, Mori Kaoru: a comic about a maid called Emma (why would I be reading this, I wonder, when my partner is still in Japan and happens to have the same name…) who is currently the object of 4 men’s desire. Emma is set in Victorian London, which seems to be a bit of an object of fascination in the whole maid culture, but it doesn’t have any of the titillatory effects one might expect of a comic about a maid being chased by an elephant-riding Indian Prince. It is more of an attempt to resurrect the well-mannered and archaic society of the time, and portrays Victorian London as the very height of genteel society, in which a man of high birth and income falls in love with his old governess’ maid and (typically of a Japanese boy) completely fails to pursue her. I’m sure it will come good in the end. Unfortunately the comic is in Japanese so I am reading it at a rate of 2 pages a week. (My efforts to read in Japanese are described here). The end will not come for a long time yet…
- Daemonifuge, a Warhammer 40000 comic about Ephrael Stern, a Sister of Battle, who is possessed by an ancient power and is a weapon against chaos. Warhammer may be a shit gaming system, but its world rocks, and the whole chaos-war idea is great. This comic has very broody, gothic artwork and a massive amount of slaughter. Everyone who is worth anything dies horribly, anyone who should be trustworthy has long since been tainted by chaos, and you just know that nothing good can happen. In fact, I don’t think anyone fighting chaos uses the word “good” at any point in the novel. They use words like purge, cleanse, eliminate, eradicate. There is no “good”. This is exactly what you expect in a universe beset by Chaos. I love this world but I think it is so replete with allegory that sometimes it is painful to read. Ephrael Stern is the embodiment of teenage male fear of nascent sexuality; or she is the woman every teenage boy wants to protect, simultaneously frighteningly powerful and vulnerable, needing only the guiding hand of a (slightly nerdish, but well-meaning) boy to set her on a … cough … better path. Warhammer is replete with this imagery, like a bad novel written by a nerdy teenage boy living in cold war England. It has a lot in common with Adrian Mole’s diary. And wouldn’t Adrian Mole be fascinating in a post-fantastic technological chaos-warped future? Dear diary… also, just by way of explanation, this Daemonifuge comic is doubly excellent because random words are marked in bold all through the text…
Compromise and Conceit 
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