What are you reading in 2025?

[Alzrius]

I just finished reading Eero Tuovinen's 2022 book Muster: A Primer for War (affiliate link), which is a collection of advice and insights on playing D&D in the "wargaming way."

I've been on a years-long kick to read nonfiction about tabletop gaming, ranging from histories on the design and development of the most notable TTRPG companies to memoirs from people who use the game as a foil to examine their own lives. And while I've eased off of the gaming-related nonfiction in recent years (after thirty-odd books on that topic, I wanted to cast a wider net), I haven't abandoned it entirely. Hence my having picked this up (in a physical copy, of course; as always, I much prefer print to screens, and usually forget that audiobooks even exist).

Tuovinen's book is very much an OSR how-to, explaining not only the processes by which D&D is played in what he calls the "wargaming way," but the philosophy behind it. It should be noted that he doesn't advocate for playing this way per se; he's not throwing stones on other play-styles. Rather, he's explaining what the appeal is of this particular style, and how to go about actuating it.

In this regard, I think that Tuovinen does a remarkably good job. He exhibits a remarkably straightforward, almost conversational style of both what he's trying to achieve and how to achieve it. For instance, he forthrightly states that this style of play is unconcerned with narrative structures or "rule of cool" conceits; the GM functions both as an "opforce" (i.e. they run the opposition that the PCs encounter) and a neutral referee, adjudicating the results of the PCs' actions in a way that best simulates the nature of the world that their characters inhabit. If that means the characters die (and, he makes it very clear, they will almost certainly die with great frequency), then they die, and the players roll up a new character and move on.

In many ways, this doesn't break much in the way of new ground. The idea of players having multiple characters which they cycle through as appropriate to a particular adventure, GMs using location-based design rather than scripted-scenarios, "dynamic balance" where the PCs decide their own level of engagement (e.g. they fight an enemy, sneak by an enemy, run away from an enemy, try to befriend the enemy, etc.) rather than having the enemy artificially adjusted to match their threat level, etc. are things we've heard of before. But Tuovinen does an excellent job explaining both their virtues and their methodology.

Likewise, praise is merited for the wider gaze this book casts in examining D&D in terms of how well it does (or does not) facilitate this style. Tuovinen outlines three schools of D&D products, with the old school being everything from OD&D to the advent of Dragonlance (though TSR's Basic D&D line kept the old school going until the mid-90s), the middle school (concerned with overarching narratives) being AD&D from Dragonlance to the fall of TSR, and the new school (bespoke characters and intricate rule sets) being everything WotC has done to date (though he notes that how much the present day falls into the latter category and not some new designation is for later historians to parse, since an era is only ever defined after it ends).

Similarly, Tuovinen is notable for how, despite referring to D&D consistently, he isn't actually advocating that you play products under the D&D brand. In fact, while he does speak fondly of the "old school" D&D products, he doesn't mince words about their faults, and more solidly recommends contemporary OSR products such as Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, or Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Now, having heaped so much praise on the book, I do have to note some areas where I think it fell down. Not in terms of its main topic, but in some fringe areas that it touches upon. For instance, fans of "free kriegsspiel" games might be a bit miffed at how Tuovinen (after recommending free kriegsspiel for beginners in order to get a feel for the "wargaming way") characterizes it as "a kind of ultimately stripped primitive D&D." Likewise his declaration that "D&D is at the end-point of the free kriegsspiel journey, not the beginning."

Another area where the book wasn't entirely satisfying (though here it openly acknowledges it) is the lack of coverage for domain-level play. In this case, Tuovinen remarks that this area isn't so much outside of the "wargaming way" as it is (and I'm paraphrasing here) beyond it. Given the high rate of character lethality, most players are going to become more and more risk-averse the longer their characters survive. The result is that most of the time, they'll either die or be retired right around the point where they'd cease dungeon-delving and take up politics. It's not that you can't have domain-level play in this style of gaming, just that it's rare enough that it's still an "open frontier." (Of course, the strong adherence that new characters should always start at 1st level is a big part of that.)

But these few areas of dissatisfaction on my part notwithstanding, this was very much a good book for anyone who wants an accessible, easily-understood guide to both the practical aspects and philosophic nature of (this particular style of) OSR play. Given that the PDF for this is free, and the print book is remarkably cheap, I'd recommend it to anyone who's curious.

 

[jian]

Just read The Village Library Demon Hunting Society by C M Waggoner, which was quite interesting and fun. The author has written two cosy fantasy novels I rather enjoyed (Unnatural Magic and The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry) and this one is something of a departure since it’s set in our world, in rural upstate New York in fact (where Waggoner is from). It’s a pastiche of Murder She Wrote and similar media, as well as The Thursday Murder Club and suchlike, but of course with a rather well-written and eerie supernatural cause. Quite worthwhile.

 

[Alzrius]

I just finished reading Rebecca Jordan-Young's 2011 book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, and there's a lot to digest, here.

I picked this one up after a discussion with a friend of mine regarding the question of nature vs. nurture with regard to men and women. Several sources were thrown around, some of which I knew (such as the January/February, 2017, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Research, which was devoted to the "nature" aspect of the topic), and some of which I didn't, which was this book. Looking to correct that, I picked up a copy of Jordan-Young's work and started in on it.

My major takeaway from this is that there's a reason why so much of the nonfiction I've read over the last two years (when I started making a dedicated effort to read more) has been in the areas of the arts, history, and "soft" sciences. Given that this book is concerned with examining neuroscience research, and so is very much in the "hard" sciences, I found it to be a slog. Not because it was difficult (it wasn't)—outside of some specific chemicals that I hadn't heard of before, such as diethylstilbestrol, there wasn't much here in the way of difficult vocabulary—but because I'm simply not that interested in this area (even that research journal I mentioned before was one that I'd found for work-related reasons). As such, reading through this felt like a chore, which severely dampened the enjoyment I usually take in recreational reading.

Having said that, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find this book to be very interesting...though not quite convincing (or at least, not as much as the author clearly hoped). I'll try and summarize the book's basic points below:

1. Research on "brain organization theory" (i.e. the theory that brain hormones are responsible for the intrinsic psychosexual differences between men and women, including things such as sex-typed interests, wherein men are more aggressive and women are more nurturing, etc.) cannot be conducted as experiments per se. That's because an experiment involves control for all factors except one, and observing the changes, which cannot be done to humans where hormonal development of the brain is concerned, as that would involve unethical treatment of gestating fetuses and infants as well as an impossible-to-achieve level of isolation to control for external factors.
2. As such, neurologists instead perform quasi-experiments to try and find evidence of brain organization theory in action.
3. Since quasi-experiments can only look at certain variables, different variables regarding the same hypothesis need to agree with each other in order to confirm that hypothesis. Since there are numerous instances of brain organization theory quasi-experiments disagreeing with each other, this threshold has not been reached where that theory is concerned.
4. However, despite the lack of convincing evidence, both the scientific community and the public at large seem to be under the impression that brain organization theory is, if not proven outright, highly credible.
5. Those quasi-experiments that do seem to suggest that brain organization theory is real have (serious) methodological problems and/or have issues with unconscious bias on the part of the researcher(s) involved.

The bulk of the book is concerned with expounding on these points, particularly that last one: a large number of specific quasi-experiments are addressed in terms of their failings.

Now, to be clear, Jordan-Young doesn't go quite so far as to suggest that brain organization theory has been debunked, nor does she refer to it as any sort of pseudoscience. Quite the contrary, she notes at multiple points that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Likewise, she suggests that there's good reason to posit that those differences exist, and even that they're salient (essentially echoing a statement that Stanford Medicine would later make when summarizing the journal I linked to above, in that "The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.")

However, she does suggest that the present viewpoint(s) regarding brain organization theory are antiquated (to the point of calling it "folklore" at the end of the book) and in dire need of updating. By the last chapter, she's instead advocating for what is essentially a cyclical model whereby biology and environment are continuously shaping each other over the course of a person's life, from the womb until the day they die. Men and women have differences, she grants, but they're neither deterministic nor absolute.

For my part, I think she makes a very good case...mostly.

I say that because, in the course of reading this book, there were a few things which seemed (for lack of a better word) off. The major one was how the author, when noting information that didn't fit with her point, had a tendency to speculate how that information could be wrong, without actually showing that it was.

For instance, in an early chapter she pulls a quote from a scientist talking about how brain organization theory became dominant around 1967 or so. That quote is in the body of the chapter, which makes it seem rather sus (as the young people of today say) that the remainder of the quote was relegated to an end note, where that same scientist notes that brain organization theory had been largely dismissed by the scientific community around 1980. Jordan-Young then spends nearly half a page speculating why that scientist would say something so obviously wrong, settling on "she's a biologist, rather than a neurologist, so she probably misread the field."

Obviously I'm paraphrasing there (and for pretty much all of my characterization of this book), but that is nevertheless a less-than-evenhanded treatment of the subject, and it casts doubt on the validity of Jordan-Young's work. Worse, that's not the only time that happens; a later notation about how two of the largest surveys of the gay community in Britain found that gay men did exhibit feminized cognition compared to straight men (whereas three smaller studies didn't find that) had another long end note where Jordan-Young speculates about how those two large studies could have suffered from selection bias. She presents no evidence that they actually did, nor acknowledges the possibility that the three smaller studies suffered from selection bias; instead, she simply posits that the studies which disagree with her point might have, and leaves us to draw the conclusion.

That's a problem that is infrequent, but nevertheless keeps cropping up throughout this book. It was enough to make me want to go back and look at some of the specific studies that Jordan-Young was critiquing, but that led to another problem, which was that a lot of them (particularly the older ones) are behind paywalls, so even if you wanted to go back and make your own evaluations, that's exceptionally difficult to do. I don't hold that particular gripe against this book—it's not the author's job to make those old studies available to all and sundry—but the aforementioned issue of presentation makes me reluctant to trust that salient details aren't being glossed over (which is, ironically enough, one of the major issues that Jordan-Young herself has with many of these quasi-experiments).

Overall, though, this book still offered quite a bit of food for thought. I just wish the author hadn't undercut herself in presenting her points, as that serves to make the entire thing less airtight than it might otherwise have been.

 

[Alzrius]

I just finished Ann Pang-White's 2018 work, The Confucian Four Books for Women, which is her new English translation of the classical Chinese texts collectively known as the Nü Sishu ("Four Books for Women").

If this sounds familiar, then you might be thinking of my recent post about the Lienu Zhuan ("Biographies of Exemplary Women"). That I read two works about women in ancient China is no coincidence; I was actually going to read this text (i.e. the Nu Sishu) first, but in researching it found repeated references to the Lienu Zhuan, and so put that one ahead of this on my reading list. In hindsight, I was right to do so, since the former text referenced the latter multiple times, but I suspect that I would have been better served to have read the Sishu ("Four Books"), which are the better-known texts on Confucianism, first since they're referenced much more. As such, I'll likely read them later.

As it is, this is what it says on the metaphorical tin: a collection of four different books on women's conduct, written by women for women. What's notable here is how disparate these four treatises are, having been written in the 1st, 9th, 14th, and 16th centuries. It was only in the early 17th century when they were collectively referred to as being the "four books" that women should read (apparently this was done by the son of the woman who wrote the fourth book, and his annotations are also reprinted here as footnotes).

The works themselves are an interesting combination of conservative and liberal in their attitudes toward women's conduct, though they move more toward the latter over time. Even then, some of the lessons and attitudes don't sit well with contemporary Occidental values, such as the three obediences that are repeatedly reiterated throughout these works (i.e. that women should obey their father when young, their husband after leaving their parents' house to marry, and their sons if their husband should predecease them). On the other hand, the fourth and final book explicitly renounces an idea from the first book that "a woman's virtue is without talent" (i.e. that the most virtuous women are the ones without talent, presumably so they can focus on being good wives and mothers).

As it is, it's these liberal elements that characterize Pang-White's take on these works, as she explains in her introduction. Taking exception to what she characterizes as the colonialist aspects of contemporary Western feminism (i.e. that Confucianism's patriarchal nature necessitates its rejection by Chinese women), Pang-White repeatedly points out the progressive elements of Confucian thought found in the Nu Sishu, though she limits this to her overview of the works in question and a few scattered footnotes of her own, never letting it compromise her translation of the texts.

Overall, this was an excellent examination of cultural views of women throughout Chinese history, and certainly not uninteresting, but having finished this on the heels of several other very dense treatises, I think my next book will be some decidedly light reading!

 

[Nellisir]

Ugh. I thought I hadn't really read anything much in 2025 and then I put the "I guess I did read one book" books together and...yeah.
Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson is a sequel to The Space Between Worlds which is noted exactly NOWHERE on the the front or back cover, and I wish I would have known so I could have refreshed my memory of the latter. Good book, but read Space Between first.
Dreadful, by Caitlin Rozakis. Enjoyed it.
Mickey 7, by Edward Ashton. Also enjoyed it.
The Last Human, by Zack Jordan. I think I enjoyed it? I should leave myself notes. Book journal.
Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I know everyone loves him, but something about his characters leaves me cold. Still good if you like his stuff. Doesn't really break new ground.

Despite my firm resolution to try and get the "to be read" pile to go DOWN, the only way you can say I've down that is by splitting it in two.

Again. <sigh>

On the gaming side of things, I've been really impressed by The Star-Shaman's Song of Planegea by David Somerville and Atlas Games. I'm not always in tune with their products - kinda long on talking and short on meat has been my visceral reaction - but they've always seemed like quality. No change in that latter regard here. This is...something else. WotC wishes it could do something like this. It's a setting where the gods are just coming about; where the planes aren't differentiated; where reading, writing; and counting above 9 are taboos enforced by something similar to (and as defined as) the dark powers of Ravenloft. But it's also a toolkit for creating that setting, or another setting, or....y'know, I have no idea how many handy little charts are tucked into this. It's...a lot. The author seems to have a pretty impressive resume outside of the RPG sphere, and my initial gut impression is this is what you get when a trained professional takes a year off and actually focuses on a project they're passionate about...and then sends it through a really intense series of reviews, edits, rewrites, clarifications, expansions, revisions, and more. I've barely scratched the darn thing. I would give body parts to have the focus this must have taken.

That said...Brancalonia. Brancalonia is, per the blurb, Italian spaghetti fantasy, and there is more flavor in a paragraph than in everything WotC has done in at least five years. It's absurd, ridiculous, crazy, bonkers, madcap, and deadly serious. The translator should get prizes. The writers and designers should get prizes and then chained back to their desks. I laughed. I cried. I speak with my hands now. Brancalonia is the first setting in decades that I might actually run instead of my homebrew.

I do think running Brancalonia would require...some care. There are things (many things) that vanish if you look at them to closely. Too...scientifically. The Nonexistent (which are mentioned in the primary book but detailed in the second book, the Macaronicon), are...something. Sentient ideas inhabiting a suit of clothes. Morphic conceits. Passionately devoted para-physical whims.
Where did they come from? No idea.
How do they handle things? Not a clue.
If you take away or destroy all their clothes, where do they go? Haven't the foggiest.
How do they come back? By the same means as which they left.
How do curative spells work on them? Yes.

They're hideously, hilariously sort of meta ur-PC. A character that didn't exist in game until there was a game, and doesn't exist whenever they...aren't there. A nonexistent without something to wear doesn't exist, but they aren't tied to a particular object and they aren't damaged by not having an outfit (armor, clothes, a sock, whatever). They just...aren't there. Until they are. (Honestly, I love the image of PCs frantically disrobing and throwing their stuff into a heap so the fighter comes back). They don't have a background, really - they just come into existence - but they ACT as though they have a background and so they do. Which is really no different than any other PC.

Anyway, I know it's been around a year or two, and won a bunch of Ennies, but I'd forgotten it until recently and...wowzah. Good stuff.

(Also, and totally unrelated, my daughter is graduating HS this year; was the lead in a big local youth theatre show; is the lead in her HS theatre show; and has gotten into her first choice college only two hours away from me vs the seven hours away she's been for the past...6 years, so I am Over The Moon. I am going to be THAT parent. I have been waiting YEARS for this.)

Sorry for the dump; I'm coming out of a bout of shingles and a really hectic few months, and it's literally kicked off some kind of mania in my brain. I'm riding it.

 

[overgeeked]

Despite my firm resolution to try and get the "to be read" pile to go DOWN, the only way you can say I've down that is by splitting it in two.

I’ve long since had to give up on the idea of a TBR pile. I have books I’m reading and books I own. I have read some from both. Either read and kept or re-reading. My TBR pile would clock in over a few thousand books at this point. I have an ever expanding library and I will hopefully get to most of them before I die.

 

[Nellisir]

I’ve long since had to give up on the idea of a TBR pile. I have books I’m reading and books I own. I have read some from both. Either read and kept or re-reading. My TBR pile would clock in over a few thousand books at this point. I have an ever expanding library and I will hopefully get to most of them before I die.

Yeah, my TBR "pile" exists in two different households, several different locations within each of those, and includes two large bookshelves. The "official" pile is on my bedside table and is probably at....I dunno. 12? 16?

Pity the books on the bottom. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

 

[Autumnal]

The last couple weeks…whoo. Two top-tier delights, an excellent short audio drama, and two DNFs. WTF?

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard. Top-tier reread. Set late this century as the world is heating (130 F midday in London, 180 F midday at the equator) and reverting to something like Triassic conditions. Sea levels are way up; London is a series of lagoons, its last human inhabitants scientists and scavengers, all of whom will soon have to retreat to settlements in the Arctic Circle. This is not any kind of hard sf novel, and Ballard knew it. At the heart of is the ways the characters face psychological deep time. Highly recommended despite some 1962 vintage racism. (He got clues and did way better later on.)

Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome by Guy de la Bedoyere. Top-tier first-time read. What a great book! It tours all sorts of aspects of life in republican and imperial Rome. Family relations, housing for rich and poor, shopping and eating and disposing of waste, clothing (no pockets - if sent there by time portal, invent some), popular and elite entertainment, forms of money, going to court, military and veteran life, religious duties, and like that. Funerary inscriptions in Rome and the murals and graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum loom large in the available evidence, along with entertaining descriptions of key historians and correspondents. This is what I’d like to read when it comes to cultures in RPGs.

The Watcher in the Rain by Alec Worley. A 74-minute audio drama set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The main characters are an Inquisitor and the administrator he suspects of heresy on a planet being evacuated as a Chaos storm approaches. It’s really well done. She’s not a heretic, she’s a psychopath. One administrator determinedly misdirecting supplies can kill a lot of people without ever leaving home. And there’s a fun twist ending.

Hellbound Hearts. A 2009 anthology set in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser universe. These stories give exciting new meaning to “repetitious”, and I couldn’t help thinking a fair number of folks here could do better. So I stopped.

Harvested: An Anthology of Reaping What You Sow. That subtitle is a damn lie. It should be An Anthology of Blaming Victims. Repeatedly, people bullied or manipulated into doing harm suffer and die so that the ones responsible can get away. I was disgusted. So I stopped.

Now on with A City On Mars, a skeptical but sympathetic and fascinating study of problems and complications facing space settlement, and Memories of Ice, the third volume of the Malazan Books of the Fallen. These do not suck.

 

[Autumnal]

I had a major panic attack over political developments and am dealing some 40K fiction into the mix for distraction. It does that well for me, being something to think about that doesn’t connect to current troubles.

 

[Cadence]

I love Rex Stout. Never read that one though, or his biography. How were they?

I'm only pretty early on ... will post more when I have a better feel.

I read his "How Like a God" over break. It was written in the second person, and the characters weren't likeable... but it kept me reading in hopes of a good payoff. (It reminded me of the old time radio show The Whistler in some parts).

Unfortunately, I really, really didn't like the ending and so it was not time we'll spent for me.