Category: book reviews
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I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which is an excellent book about one of UK history’s more influential non-regal people, Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall tells the story of his early rise to becoming Henry the 8th’s chief advisor, with lots of reflection on his childhood, his past in Europe and his religious beliefs.…
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I recently finished reading Manchukuo 1987, by a person known by the pseudonym Yoshimi Red on Twitter who blogs at lateral thinking. It’s in the Sci-Fi section in Amazon, and presented as an alternative history military sci-fi detective novel by Yoshimi themself, which I think is a good description. I think it’s self-published (sorry Yoshimi…
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I am writing a series of posts about my attempt to re-read The Mists of Avalon in light of the terrible things we know about the author Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB). The story has now advanced considerably and although it wasn’t my original intention in this re-reading, I feel I am able to glean a…
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Update[2023/12/6]: This post is getting a bit of attention, but it’s actually only the first of a series of posts exploring this topic. Here is the full list, which I will update as I write them, so that those interested in this journey down memory lane can follow me all the way to its grim…
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I found Jock Serong’s novel Preservation through the pages of the sadly defunct magazine Great Ocean Quarterly, of which he is the editor. Great Ocean Quarterly is an Australian magazine about the sea that was published between 2013 and 2015, covering miscellanea about life around and in the sea, art and culture connected to the…
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I have just finished reading The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, by Peter Hessler. I found this book because I stumbled on some tweets of his that suggested he actually had a nuanced view of China, which is highly unusual for a western journalist. He is a journalist working at the New Yorker,…
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I just finished reading A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, an entertaining story about the collapse of a small American town by a local journalist, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. It was a fun and engrossing tale with a lot of good points which I really enjoyed reading, but ultimately it failed to live up to its promise,…
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Daniel Defoe is the author most famous for Robinson Crusoe, an awful story not worth reading, but he also wrote an account of the great plague of London, which I recently read. This plague was apparently the Black Death, which is spread by fleas of a rat, so it attacks more effectively in summer and…
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America is currently Having a Moment, and various historical works have been identified as having predicted or foretold her Current Predicament, including Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Since I am interested in tracing the cultural and historical origins of the Present Unpleasantness – and since I have already made the…
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I was very excited to discover Max Brooks, author of World War Z, has a new book out, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of The Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, and bought it as soon as it was released. It turns out to be excellent airplane reading (I went to Okinawa for a few days’ relaxation) and not…
Compromise and Conceit 