What are you reading in 2025?

[Autumnal]

A lot of Orwell’s best work is in his essays. A couple faves:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that ‘non-attachment’ is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

- Reflections on Gandhi

But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. But it is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as ‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot yet foresee. The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. ‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.

- Charles Dickens

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I would skip anything by Leiber that appears in his last two Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser books.

The early stuff, especially the stuff set in Lankhmar, is probably the best. "Bazaar of the Bizarre" (which Dragon stole the name of for a recurring magazine feature) is pretty good. I also liked the one where the guys break into the thieves guild, which is an incredibly dangerous gauntlet, but I don't remember the story name.

 

[Mistwell]

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.

I am a fan of The Whistler and listen to it on Radio Classics (Sirius/XM). That, and Suspense (And X-1 and some of the detective shows like Johnny Dollar).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I stopped reading Fritz Lieber’s When the Sea King’s Away because he was explaining that a story was happening, with endless asides and bizarre flashbacks, instead of...you know...telling a story. That’s the 3rd or 4th time I’ve been bored into dropping a Lieber story. Maybe he’s just not for me.

Any Lieber fans have any action-adventure, pulse-pounding yarns of his to suggest? Every one of his I’ve tried so far has just been boring. Page after page after page and nothing happens.

I would go with The Lords of Quarmall or Ill Met in Lankhmar, if you haven't already given those a shot. If sci-fi is more your thing, maybe The Night of the Long Knives.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I just finished How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, which turned out to be shockingly timely.

The book absolutely blew me away, drawing a straight line through American history, running through Daniel Boone, the rise and fall of guano, an unvarnished look at Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, the empire we inherited at the end of the Spanish-American War, all of the other strikes on the United States around D-Day that we don't talk about, the two attempted assassinations of American presidents by Puerto Rican nationalists, Manilla envelopes and folders, why the Nazis had to develop the Blitzkrieg and why the U.S. didn't need to, why there are so many Filipino nurses in the U.S., the use of American territories and possessions to test birth control technologies on with and without the local population's knowledge, how America's chemical companies and military air power eliminated the need for a traditional empire, the spread of English and cultural imperialism around the world, America's more than 800 military bases around the world as a de facto empire, the very strange story of the Bin Laden family's relationship to the United States and birtherism as a reflection of America's feelings about its empire-in-all-but-name.

A fantastic, fantastic book. Highly recommended. Maybe there are some historians who know all this stuff, but according to author Daniel Immerwahr (a great name for an historian of empire), a lot of this got left out of even major books on the individual periods.

 

[Autumnal]

Fantastic. On my list now.

 

[Alzrius]

I just finished James J. Butcher's 2022 novel, Dead Man's Hand, the first in his Unorthodox Chronicles series.

I'll admit that I picked this one up on the strength of the author's father's name. I've read all of the books in the Dresden Files, and when I saw that Jim Butcher's son had also written an urban fantasy novel, I wondered if it might take place in the same universe, and that even if not it was likely to be in the same style as his old man. Either way, it seemed worth taking a chance on.

For the record, this is decidedly not a part of the Dresden Files, which strikes me as a wise decision. While setting the action in another part of the same universe (this book's setting is Boston, as opposed to the Dresden Files taking place in Chicago) might have given it access to a built-in audience, that probably would have become a stone around the authors' necks quickly enough. Having to take each other's work into account with each new novel would, I suspect, quickly have become burdensome for both.

And indeed, if anything the younger Butcher seems to have gone out of his way to differentiate his writing from his father's. Although he's also penned an urban fantasy story, numerous details are different, the most obvious being his use of third-person narration, rather than the Dresden Files' first-person. Likewise in numerous in-character differences, the biggest one being that the general public is aware that magic and monsters exist (and have a lot of prejudice against witches, which here is the gender-neutral term for magic-users).

But what struck me as the most salient difference was the presentation of the protagonist. While Harry Dresden starts out as an underdog, that's only in terms of his professional standing among the governing body of wizards; in terms of power, skill, knowledge, and all-around competence, he's quite capable. Not so for this book's main character, Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby; while he's decidedly an outcast among witches due to his mediocre level of power and barely knowing any spells, he's also a major nebbish. Meek, cowardly, and all-around incompetent, he's Clark Kent ratcheted up to eleven and with no Superman alter ego.

Which of course raises flags when one of the strongest witches in the region is found murdered, and her last dying act was to write "kill Grimsby" in her own blood (presumably she'd been watching The Da Vinci Code before getting offed).

As it was, the author's highlighting of Grimsby's general terror and incompetence started to grate on me after a while. I get that this was laying the groundwork for a zero-to-hero kind of story, but it spends a long time at the "zero" stage before we see Grimsby start to step up...and even then, he doesn't so much become a heroic figure as one who barely manages to scrape by while avoiding dying mostly due to luck and a much-more-competent supporting cast member. It's like watching a 0-level character struggle to make it to 1st-level by the end of the book.

Still, there's a lot of potential here. I think the plot pacing and story beats are a bit rough, but that's not unexpected; this is the younger Butcher's first book, after all. Hopefully he'll improve with time; as it is, the next two books in the series are already out, and this one was enjoyable enough that I think I'll give them a try.

 

[Mistwell]

Whoops wrong thread

 

[overgeeked]

I just finished How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, which turned out to be shockingly timely.

The book absolutely blew me away, drawing a straight line through American history, running through Daniel Boone, the rise and fall of guano, an unvarnished look at Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, the empire we inherited at the end of the Spanish-American War, all of the other strikes on the United States around D-Day that we don't talk about, the two attempted assassinations of American presidents by Puerto Rican nationalists, Manilla envelopes and folders, why the Nazis had to develop the Blitzkrieg and why the U.S. didn't need to, why there are so many Filipino nurses in the U.S., the use of American territories and possessions to test birth control technologies on with and without the local population's knowledge, how America's chemical companies and military air power eliminated the need for a traditional empire, the spread of English and cultural imperialism around the world, America's more than 800 military bases around the world as a de facto empire, the very strange story of the Bin Laden family's relationship to the United States and birtherism as a reflection of America's feelings about its empire-in-all-but-name.

A fantastic, fantastic book. Highly recommended. Maybe there are some historians who know all this stuff, but according to author Daniel Immerwahr (a great name for an historian of empire), a lot of this got left out of even major books on the individual periods.

Yeah. Definitely adding that to my list. Thanks for the review.

 

[overgeeked]

Apropos of nothing. Hmm. I wonder what’s popular on Project Gutenberg…

Oh, that’s interesting. Wait…oh. Oh!

Frankenstein is more popular than Shakespeare. Yeah. Makes sense.