Spring reading 2026

William Howard Taft reading at his desk c. 1904. The label pasted to the spine reads: “Copyright. Cannot Leave the Library.”

As personally difficult as this spring has been, with thirty-three books down—and almost perfectly divided between fiction and non-fiction—this turned out to be a stellar season for reading. Not only did I bulk up my non-fiction reading after a couple years of fiction-heavy lists, I also read more sci-fi and fantasy than usual. Almost all of it, of whatever genre, was good. I had to make myself leave things out of the list below, the ruthlessly selected best of the season.

The way I divide the year for these posts is always a bit arbitrary, but for the purposes of this one, “spring” is everything from New Year’s Day to the end of classes last week. As usual I present these in no particular order, and with my one audiobook “read” marked with an asterisk.

That said, I hope y’all enjoy and can find something good to read below:

Favorite non-fiction

On Conan Doyle, by Michael Dirda—A succinct and insightful overview of Conan Doyle’s life and work, with special attention to the Holmes stories as well as his more often overlooked work: Professor Challenger in The Lost World, the Hundred Years’ War novels The White Company and Sir Nigel, and the Napoleonic adventures of Brigadier Gerard. I was especially interested to learn more about Conan Doyle himself: his personal life and character, his intelligence and work ethic, and even his much-derided interest in spiritualism and fairies.

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman—A solid new biography of Alfred the Great’s grandson, the first king of a unified kingdom of England, that gives a lot of attention to the complicated political situation of the time and just how much we can and can’t know about what was going on. Occsionally this means extended parsing of primary sources rather than narrative, which may not appeal to the general reader, but that comes with the territory. An Æthelstan biography is also going to be a historiographical paper to some extent and I think Woodman balances it all well. I used The First King of England as an example of the judicious use of incomplete sources for historical inferences here.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans—This is an insightful series of character sketches of people from all levels of the Reich, starting with a 100-page biography of Hitler himself (which I’d love to see the publisher break out as its own little paperback, an ideal classroom text) and the Nazi Party’s elite (Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and the like) down through the functionaries and ideologues and enablers (e.g. Heydrich, Eichmann, Hess, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen) to the ordinary people doing the work of the Reich: the generals, the gunmen who traveled Eastern Europe massacring Jews, the camp guards, the propagandists, and even the ordinary citizen. Evans has chosen good subjects and, taken together, these sketches give the reader a top-to-bottom feel for the culture of the Reich and how it worked—especially with regard to dimensions of the regime that don’t get as much attention, like labor organization or even motherhood—as well as the sheer variety of people it involved. Not all of them were motivated by the same things and not all of them explained or justified their participation the same way.

The Desecration of Man, by Carl Trueman—A more narrowly focused “how we got here” account from Trueman, this time looking specifically at how a changing understanding of anthropology—how we answer “What is man?”—was meant to liberate but has instead undermined and destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, by Matthew Restall—An interesting multi-layer biography of Columbus, one that starts with the man (about whom, contrary to a widespread myth, we can know quite a lot), his goals and pretensions (he was a single-mindedly ambitious climber), and what he actually accomplished and follows his various “lives” through the five hundred years since: as a symbol of Manifest Destiny, an icon of Italian-American patriotism, a would-be Catholic saint, a progressive scapegoat for all the bad that has happened in the Western hemisphere ever since. Wide-ranging, deeply researched, fair to Columbus the man—warts and all—and attentive to how his character and actions have been interpreted in shifting contexts. I learned a lot from this book.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass, by Dave Barry—A funny and often moving memoir covering everything from Barry’s childhood in New York and his early years in journalism to some of his antics as a reporter and his work since retirement. Hugely enjoyable.

Honorable mentions:

• The Sleep You’re Longing For: How Rest Connects Us to Happiness, Healing, and Hope*, by Ken Wytsma—A helpful short guide to sleep, sleep problems, and some of the ways we can make life more generally restful, not just grudgingly recharging for a few hours at night.

• The Way of Dante: Going Through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven with C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Charles Williams, by Richard Hughes Gibson—A series of expanded lectures on Dante’s reception and interpretation by Williams, Lewis, and Sayers that illuminates all four. I was especially intrigued to learn how late Sayers came to Dante, and with what overwhelming gusto she embraced the Comedy.

• Cicero: A Very Short Introduction, by Yelena Baraz—Exactly what it says on the tin: a short overview of Cicero’s life, legal and political career, and his literary and philosophical work. An approachable place to start and just over a hundred pages. Would pair well with reading his letters, speeches, or especially late essays like On Old Age or On Duties.

Special mentions

I’ve started including these “special mentions” sections for books that are neither straightforward fiction nor non-fiction as usually understood. Most of the time this is epic poetry. This time you’ve got not just any epic but the original, the very first, as well as some important primary sources for American history.

Gilgamesh, translated by Simon Armitage—A new translation of the epic that prioritizes coherence and readability above the precise indication of every gap and mystery in the text as it has come down to us. At that it succeeds admirably and was a pleasure to read. It was exciting and moving and conveyed the foreignness of the ancient world in an approachable and readable way. This is likely the version I’d recommend to people coming to Gilgamesh for the first time.

An interesting side issue: In his introduction, Armitage states forthrightly that he does not know the languages concerned and worked from literal translations by experts, which to me raises the question of how much this can be called a “translation” in the normal sense of the word, but Alan Jacobs persuasively argues here that Armitage’s project to craft a Gilgamesh that “will be exciting, that will make the text vivid” is a worthy one.

The Alien and Sedition Acts—Part of a new series from Modern Library, this volume collects four laws signed by John Adams over about a month in the summer of 1798—bills that extended the timeline for naturalization, empowered the president to arrest and deport foreigners, and criminalized written or spoken criticism of Congress and the president—and the Jefferson- and Madison-authored Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that challenged them.

The laws themselves are bad enough, but most galling are the responses by several state legislatures to the resolutions, all of which assert that, nah, the violation of the 1st and 10th Amendments is in fact constitutional, that Kentucky and Virginia are the real threats, and that anyone who loves the union should back up whatever the president does in time of crisis. (Notably, these responses all come from northern and New England states. Massachusetts goes out of its way to praise the wisdom of Adams, an obsequious defense of its hometown boy.) The longest document, Madison’s background notes on the Virginia Resolution, is an angry masterclass on federalism, the proper relationship between state and central governments, the danger of the loose interpretation of the constitution pioneered by Alexander Hamilton (mentioned, but not by name) and the failure of the states to protect their prerogatives.

The introduction, by a civil rights lawyer who has written about growing up as an illegal alien, suggests the publication of these texts now is some kind of gotcha to the current administration’s immigration policies, but the documents themselves are much, much more concerned about states’ rights and free speech. What the book really shows is that the violation of the 10th Amendment, the federal government’s bent toward setting itself up in newer and more expansive spheres of authority, the expectation that the states fall into line behind whatever the executive wants, and the desire to curtail speech in the name of preventing the spread of false information are as old as the Republic. The Antifederalists’ fears of an overreaching, tyrannical federal government, something all conservatives should be concerned about, were not fulfilled in Obama, LBJ, FDR, or even Woodrow Wilson, but came true almost immediately. A sobering consideration.

Favorite fiction

This section will be somewhat shorter not out of any lack of good reading—this was an exceptional spring for fiction—but because I managed to review a lot of these in full, dedicated posts of their own. I’ve linked to those below.

Mars in Aries, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—In the days leading up to World War II, an Austrian cavalry reservist falls in with a strange crowd and becomes infatuated with the mysterious woman at their center. Then he’s deployed, and his recurring visions of past people and events start to merge with reality. Perhaps my favorite Lernet-Holenia so far. Full review on the blog here.

The Mills of the Gods, by Tim Powers—One I had hoped to review in full but couldn’t find the time to. Powers’s latest takes place in 1920s Paris, where expat American illustrator Harry Nolan finds himself involved with a young woman named Vivi and both end up on the run from the sauteurs, a centuries-old secret society striving for immortality by stealing into the bodies of specially prepared newborns. The sauteurs are dangerous and possessive of their target bodies, and Vivi’s most especially. Together, Harry and Vivi must free her and, with clues gathered from Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and a sympathetic and helpful Gertrude Stein, unearth the true history of the sauteurs and defeat them permanently. The plot moves briskly and I was absorbed from the first chapter. I greatly enjoyed the Parisian setting, the cameos by Lost Generation artistic figures, and the connections to the ancient world Powers establishes for the sauteur cult. (As deadly and satanically parasitic as the villains are, I mercifully did not find them as spiritually oppressive as the succubi of The Stress of Her Regard.) But I most liked the relationship between Harry and Vivi. Both the First World War veteran Harry and intended sauteur host-body Vivi are damaged goods in need of redemption, and while they begin in mutual suspicion and work together out of necessity they move, over the course of the novel, through collaboration and friendship to something, not coincidentally, full of grace. A beautiful and moving ending caps a breakneck supernatural adventure.

A Rough Shoot, by Geoffrey Household—A lean, tightly-focused thriller from the author of Rogue Male. An English businessman and veteran of World War II surprises what he thinks are poachers on his patch of rented hunting land and accidentally kills one. His effort to cover it up embroils him in deeper, more complicated, and more far-reaching events than he could have anticipated. Full review on the blog here.

State of Siege, by Eric Ambler—An English engineer working in postwar Indonesia has finished his contract and hopes to fly home but finds himself, and a casual date, in the center of a military revolution. Fast-moving and suspenseful while also sweeping in scope, this is almost certainly my favorite of Amber’s post-WWII novels. Full review on the blog here.

The Lost Language of Oysters, by Alexander McCall Smith—The latest in McCall Smith’s long-running series about hapless German philologist Professor Dr Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, this is a unified novel rather than a collection of interrelated short stories and finds the good Professor jockeying for status with a pesky old colleague and, to his own surprise, falling in love with an American linguist after she gives him a ride on her motorcycle. The more recent entries in the series are gentler and don’t have some of the darkness or ironic bite of the earlier ones, but they are always enjoyable, funny, and—just occasionally—surprisingly sweet. This one has some particularly good twists and surprises and a great ending.

Other Paths to Glory, by Anthony Price—Paul Mitchell, a young military historian studying a battle on the Western Front, receives two strange visits on the same day: the first is with two intimidating, authoritative men who are clearly not what they say they are; the second is with an assassin who throws him into a canal in an attempt to stage a suicide. The first two men, Audley and Colonel Butler, who were introduced in Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (which I briefly reviewed here), come to Mitchell’s aid and together they return to the former battlefield. What could be hidden there that would lead to murder and, with a secret international conference about to occur nearby, a threat to world peace? Another good thriller with a historical dimension from Price.

Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn—My first Star Wars novel. Picking up a few years after The Return of the Jedi, this story follows the New Republic—formerly the Rebellion—through instability and infighting in the aftermath of success and the emergence of a new threat from the Empire, the skilled and intelligent Grand Admiral Thrawn. A fun read, and truer to the spirit and characters of the originals than much of what’s been sold as Star Wars since. Full review on the blog here.

Honorable mentions:

• The High Crusade, by Poul Anderson—Vintage sci-fi with a fun hook—knights mustering for a crusade in medieval England encounter aliens, commandeer their ship, and set off on a crusade across the stars—that actually delivers. Brisk and enjoyable.

• Spy Hook, by Len Deighton—The beginning of Deighton’s second Bernie Samson trilogy. A former secret agent murdered, a slush fund missing, old colleagues back from the dead, and Samson’s burgeoning romance with a younger woman threatened. Not quite as tight as the Game Set Match books but an involving story with a lot of surprises.

• Beast in the Shadows, by Edogawa Rampo—An eerie, atmospheric, disturbing short novel in which a woman who believes she is being stalked approaches a crime novelist for help. Rampo was a devotee of Poe (Edogawa Rampo is his pen name, a Japanese near-equivalant of Edgar Allan Poe) and it shows clearly: concision, intricate construction, darkness, a beautiful tormented woman, violence, and insanity. Bleak but enthralling.

• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham—A young boy living in a farm community that, following a nuclear war, has reorganized itself around an intense religious vigilance for genetic mutation questions what he’s learned about mutants and realizes that his gift for telepathy, which he had always taken for granted, may be endangering him and his friends. Not my favorite Wyndham but a brilliantly imagined situation with a suspenseful final third.

Favorite kids’ books

The Raven: The Classic Poem, by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Chloe Bristol—A beautifully illustrated new edition of Poe’s masterpiece, with moody, atmospheric but kid-friendly pictures. Full review on the blog here.

Bones and Berserkers, by Nathan Hale—A fun anthology of short horror stories—some true, some fictional, several somewhere in-between—by one of my kids’ favorite graphic novelists. Full review on the blog here.

Corduroy, by Don Freeman—A teddy bear for sale in an apartment store wants a home and finds unexpected fulfilment. I somehow made it to adulthood without having read Corduroy. I read it to our twins and just about lost it. A simple, beautiful and moving story with a lot of emotional and even spiritual depth.

Count Yourself Calm, by Eliza Huie, illustrated by Mike Henson—We got our own copy of this picture book after an occupational therapist worked through it with one of our kids. It helps create a simple routine for calming anger, fear, frustration, and other “BIG feelings,” per the subtitle, by counting down gifts from God: parts of creation that bring us joy, the gifts he’s given us, the people who love us, and more. Simple and helpful for both kids and adults!

Ember Falls, by SD Smith—The second of Smith’s Green Ember fantasy series about anthropomorphic rabbits Heather and Picket; another fun adventure and a worthy followup to the original.

Looking ahead

I’m already into the reading for this year’s John Buchan June—the fifth June since I began this event!—so be on the lookout for that to begin in just a few weeks. I’ve also got a lot of other good fiction and non-fiction lined up and I hope to slow things down a bit for a few older, longer novels in the late summer or fall. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and I hope this list will have led you to something you can enjoy this summer!

Great literature is popular literature

…but not necessarily vice versa.

Two items that got my attention this week and continue some literary themes I’ve thought a lot about over the years (eg here, here, and especially here):

First, a writer at Front Porch Republic bookends his review of Alan Jacobs’s new book Paradise Lost: A Biography with an interesting story. Here’s the beginning of the review:

As I drove into a hotel parking garage one afternoon, I mentioned to the attendant that I had come for a conference on John Milton. “Milton?” he replied. “Wasn’t he the one who had Satan say it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven?” Yes, I said, that’s the guy!

and the conclusion:

Jacobs ends the book by asking whether Paradise Lost has any future outside of academic scholarship. He suggests that yes, it might. . . . After all, if a parking garage attendant in an American city still knows who Milton is, there is hope that Paradise Lost will continue to find admiring readers in the twenty-first century.

Second, a friend on Instagram sent me this reel of an Italian butcher reciting part of Inferno in his shop. As I noted on Instagram, hearing a native recite Dante really brings out the rhythm of Dante’s verse and especially the rhyme of terza rima in a way I seldom get picking through a bilingual edition. But what I most appreciated was his exuberant enthusiasm for Dante and the way he brought that into his shop. Here’s a man who has passages of the Comedy memorized and can recite them at length for their own sake, not because he’s a tweedy professorial type or so that he can dissect and deconstruct them.

This brought to mind a story about Dante himself related by 14th-century Florentine writer Franco Sacchetti. One day Dante overheard a blacksmith singing some of Dante’s poetry but garbling the words, “clipping here and adding there,” which “seemed to Dante to be doing him a very great injury.” Dante entered the smith’s shop and started hurling his tools into the street. When the smith protested, they had this exchange:

“What the devil are you doing? Are ye mad?”

Dante asked him: “What art thou doing?”

“I am doing my own business,” answered the smith; “and ye are spoiling my tools, throwing them into the street.”

Said Dante: “If thou desirest that I should not spoil thy things, do not thou spoil mine.”

“Thou art singing out of my book,” Dante explains later, “and art not singing it as I wrote it; I have no other trade but this, and thou art spoiling it for me.” Again—a writer’s words matter.

But that’s not my point here. What struck me in both stories were the humble—a butcher, a parking lot attendant—knowing their epic poetry (albeit imperfectly in the case of the smith, but who wouldn’t prefer a world in which you could walk downtown and hear tradesmen and shopkeepers talking about great literature, even if they make mistakes quoting it?). And they didn’t just know this poetry—it mattered to them. In case we needed any further proof, great literature really is for everyone and always has been.

By the way, the butcher is eighth-generation butcher Dario Cecchini. Here’s his shop and one of his restaurants, which specializes in fantastic-looking steaks. If and when I ever visit Florence again, this is on my to-do list. And he’s reciting lines from the beginning of Canto V of Inferno.

Palma’s Divine Comedy

Considering how much space his work takes up in my mind, I don’t write about Dante often enough here. Some books you read so early, and at such a formative time, that they become part of the foundation of one’s taste, worldview, and imagination, informing everything without always being seen. The Divine Comedy is one of those for me, and I want to make a rare comment about it here, specifically in praise of the recent English translation by Michael Palma.

One of the commonplaces of writing about Dante in English is the difficulty—in English—of terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante created for the Comedy. This is a “threefold rhyme” of aba-bcb-cdc-ded-efe etc, with each tercet linking ahead and behind. It’s elegant, beautiful when done well, and theologically significant. (Dante’s three-part epic ends with a vision of the Trinity, after all.) All well and good, but it’s also a bear to work with. As many, many translators have noted, the lack of inflected endings on English words severely limits possible rhymes in comparison with a Romance language like Italian.

What’s an English translator to do, then? The solutions depend greatly on a given translator’s priorities, which usually boil down to choices between the following:

• Accuracy of wording or sense

• Accuracy of tone

• Accuracy of form, including rhyme

Wording, of course, is the most flexible of the three. Dante wrote in medieval Italian. The particulars of how one renders that in English is going to depend greatly on the latter two priorities. Most translators go for tone, capturing Dante’s force and directness while using an unmetered or loosely metered line and little or no rhyme. The most literal translations—Hollander and Singleton, for example—do this successfully. Dante comes through even if a notable aspect of the form doesn’t.

But there are rare translators who do chase the white whale of rhyme. The most successful have typically done so only when natural-sounding rhymes present themselves, like Anthony Esolen, long my favorite for reading, or by limiting or altering the rhyme scheme in some way, like John Ciardi, who rhymes the first and last lines of each tercet and doesn’t worry about the rest. Both suggest what Dante sounded like without straining.

Much more rare is the translator who tries to do the entire Comedy in Dante’s rhyme. Dorothy Sayers is the most famous example. While her notes are rightly praised and valued, her translation, in retaining terza rima, lengthens the poetic line to accommodate involuted English constructions, the contorted grammar of which is larded with archaisms. One feels at all times the effort she is putting into achieving end-rhyme. While she manages to keep the rhyme, she loses Dante’s concision, energy, and wording. I’ve never found that a worthwhile sacrifice.

I mention all these technical considerations and poetic hazards to highlight Palma’s achievement in his Divine Comedy. He has successfully translated the Comedy in terza rima from start to finish—one hundred cantos!—without strain or contortion, without reaching for rhymes, and while accurately capturing both Dante’s wording and his forcefulness, directness, and every subtle emotional register. Words, tone, and form all align effortlessly. I didn’t think it was possible.

The greatest pleasure of this reading of the Comedy, which I undertook at leisure over the last five weeks, was to glance up from the page and realize I’d been reading English terza rima without even noticing. Palma has made this great work, which I’ve read umpteen times over the quarter century since I discovered it in high school, fresh and powerful again. Dante’s final vision in Paradiso XXXIII, which I read this afternoon while giving an exam, was vivid to me in a way it has never been before.

Given recent receptiveness to formalism in translation—such as Emily Wilson’s blank verse Iliad and Odyssey—I hope Palma’s Comedy will find enthusiastic widespread appreciation. It will certainly take its place on my Dante shelf alongside Esolen, Musa, and Ciardi as one of my favorites. If you’re looking for a good opportunity to reread Dante or to read the Comedy for the first time, I heartily recommend it.

The damned and the blessed

Dante’s Comedy has three parts, but people commonly read only Inferno. I can somewhat understand why—Inferno is dramatic, fast-paced, and gossipy, with passages of seemingly straightforward horror. I think modern readers can also mistake Dante’s meditation on sin for salacious wallowing. But even if they read it in good faith, those who read only Inferno shortchange themselves.

I had already read the Comedy several times by the time I took Classical and Medieval Lit as an elective in college. (The chance to read my favorite book for credit was one reason I took it.) I’ve always been interested in structure as a part of storytelling, but it was in this class that my professor first drew my attention specifically to Dante’s use of parallelism across the three parts of the Comedy.

Case in point: I’ve been reading Michael Palma’s new complete translation of the Comedy and began Purgatorio last night. In canto II, Dante kneels to wash the smut of hell from his face—a requirement before he can enter Purgatory—and encounters a shipload of saved souls arriving to begin their purgation. They’re singing Psalm 114 as a hymn of deliverance and, before Dante can speak, greet him:

. . . with every face
turned toward us, the new people raised the cry:
“You there, do you know this mountain? If you do,
then show us the right road to climb it by.”

These souls are joyful and eager.

The contrast with the vestibule of hell, which parallels it in Inferno III, could not be more striking. There, instead of singing, there is pure, unrelenting, cacophonous noise. (“We will make the whole universe a noise in the end,” Lewis’s Screwtape asserts.) Instead of greeting Dante, the damned are too consumed with their tortures to do anything but flee the wasps that sting them. And where the souls arriving in Purgatory have a goal and direction, the damned run in circles—the central image of Inferno—forever.

The contrast extends through both books. In Purgatorio, souls repeatedly speak to Dante before they are spoken to. In canto IV, where I left off last night, the soul of Belacqua actually calls out to Dante and Virgil to get their attention; they wouldn’t have noticed him otherwise. The redeemed are as eager to share how God has saved them as they are to begin their sanctifying journey up the mountain. Here’s Manfred, a secular ruler who was excommunicated by multiple popes and only repented as he lay dying on the battlefield, in canto III:

After two mortal wounds had done for me,
weeping, I placed myself into the care
of Him who gives forgiveness willingly.
My sins were horrible beyond compare,
but the arms of Infinite Goodness open wide,
and all who return to It are gathered there.

The shades of the damned in Inferno, by contrast, are famously reluctant to give their names and are often identified by other souls out of pure spite. Grace gives direction and continues to unify and open, even after death; sin, aimless, turns in on itself and closes, especially after death.

Dante is one of the rare writers who can make goodness desirable, not least through contrast. After the thirty-odd cantos of ever deepening evil in Inferno, the opening of Purgatorio is the same splash of cool dew that cleanses Dante’s face. That tiny moment—a single tercet of dialogue—in which the new arrivals ask Dante where they must go to find the path upward filled me with an inexpressible yearning for grace.

Again, if you only read Inferno, you miss more than you might guess.

Spring reading 2024

As I hinted at last month, this has been a tough semester, with a lot of illness in the middle and plenty of simple busyness throughout. For a good part of it my reading felt almost as lifeless as I did. Being wrung out by work, the babies, my commute, and many, many trips to the doctor (all good problems to have), I read more fiction than history or other non-fiction this spring, and much of that I didn’t feel too strongly about. Even the disappointing books were only disappointing, not outright bad. Everything felt grey. But looking back several weeks after final grades were in and I could rest for a moment—mentally if not physically—there was actually quite a lot of good reading packed in with the mediocre stuff.

Here are the highlights: my favorite fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books as well as the handful of books I revisited. For the purposes of this blog, “spring” is defined as everything from New Year’s Day to the end of my first week of summer classes, which was last Friday.

Favorite fiction

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—Two monks, a widely-read Franciscan scholar and his young Benedictine assistant, investigate a series of strange, seemingly symbolic murders in a remote Italian monastery ahead of a conference of monastic leaders. This is one of the great literary historical novels even if Eco takes the wrong side in the medieval disputes over Ockham’s Nominalist theories and perpetuates some medieval stereotypes along the way, which is frustrating given how well he knows the era. But those a niggles. Erudite and richly detailed but fun, engrossing, and, above all, atmospheric, I greatly enjoyed it.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers—A wide-ranging collection of more than twenty stories that deal with ghosts, vampires, used books, time travel, custom-edited Bibles, revenge in the afterlife, the sacrament of confession, tomato plants under siege by pests, the grave of HP Lovecraft, and, yes, Purgatory. As with any 700-page collection of short fiction, these are of mixed quality, but all range from good to excellent, with plenty of the creativity, surprises, and wry humor of Powers’s novels. Personal favorites included “The Better Boy,” “The Bible Repair Man,” “Through and Through,” “Fifty Cents,” “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” and the title story, “Down and Out in Purgatory.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler—An English writer in Istanbul, his curiosity piqued by the discovery of the body of a notorious gangster, investigates the gangster’s life and discovers there’s no bottom to interwar Europe’s dark underworld. Evocative and atmospheric, this is a detective story and crime thriller wrapped up in the globetrotting of a spy novel. Full review here.

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers—An intriguing supernatural tale of the last remaining members of a cursed family living in their ramshackle old mansion, ominously named Caveat, in the Hollywood Hills. Scott and sister Madeline return to the family manse following the death of their aunt but their cousins, wheelchair-bound Claimayne and angry, standoffish Ariel, make it clear to Scott and Madeline that the siblings are unwelcome and the house rightly belongs to them. We soon learn that the members of this family can travel through time by staring at eerie, abstract, spider-like illustrations on slips of paper. The downside is that using the spiders is addictive and can cause permanent physical and mental damage. In the course of the family drama, trips into the past involve the characters in unsolved mysteries from Hollywood’s silent era, and an unexpected love story blossoms between one of them and a long-dead film star. It also becomes clear that a fabled über-spider, a drawing that contains the visions of all the others and guarantees lethal insanity if even glanced at, may not only still exist but be much nearer Caveat and the warring cousins than Scott would like. And on top of the visions and body-jumping and Old Hollywood gossip and Lovecraftian threat of world-ending madness there are overtones of Poe’s House of Usher, ancient myth, and more. Medusa’s Web has a lot going on and it’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but I greatly enjoyed it and read the entire book in just a few days. Worth checking out if you’re looking for something completely different.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht—A simple but haunting “fable for grownups” from the creator of “Calvin & Hobbes.” A story of the disenchantment of the world, human hubris, and the inevitable consequences of both. One of my favorite books this spring. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A biography of Palin’s great uncle, a man who was killed in action at the Somme and whom Palin never knew, this is a remarkable piece of detective work, archival research, and familial pietas that also commemorates a lost world and a generation destroyed. A continuously engaging and moving book. Full review here.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—An excellent short introduction to Orwell’s life and work, ranging from his childhood to his death and posthumous reputation—indeed, the book begins with the birth of his legend almost the moment he died—and covering everything from his personal character, novels, journalism, and his evolving political ideas to his attempts at farming, his friendships with other writers, his love of England, and his hatred of pigs. I strongly recommend this book to any and everyone. Taylor is also the author of two (two!) full-length biographies of Orwell. I have his Orwell: The New Life on standby for future reading. I blogged about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four twice based on observations made in Taylor’s book. You can read those posts here and here.

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Mark Brotherton—A solid examination of the psychology of conspiracy theories and conspiracist thinking. Brotherton does not make a case that conspiracy nuts are, well, nuts, but rather that they let run unchecked natural and useful thought processes that simply need discipline. Some of this will be old hat to anyone who has studied conspiracy theories seriously, but this may be the best and fairest one-volume assemblage of this material that I’ve come across. Full review here.

Campaldino 1289: The Battle that Made Dante, by Kelly DeVries and Niccolò Capponi—A thorough and thoroughly-illustrated guide to the bloody battle between Guelf Florence and her allies and Ghibelline Arezzo and her allies, in which a young Dante Alighieri participated. I wrote a paper about Campaldino in a graduate seminar on medieval and renaissance Florence at Clemson and the available material was thin back then. This book would have been a godsend. Worth looking at for anyone interested in Dante, medieval Italy, or military history.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—This briskly written book tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first is an overview of Poe’s life, with all of its hardships and all-too-brief victories, up to 1849. The second is the story of Poe’s final months, in which he both behaved erratically (telling friends in Philadelphia that pursuers were trying to kill him and had, in fact, murdered and dismembered his beloved mother-in-law, who was alive and well in New York at the time) and also seemed to be on the cusp of overdue success (having reached an understanding with a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and working on soliciting support for his long-dreamed-of literary journal) before dying under unexplained circumstances in Baltimore. Dawidziak offers a good capsule life story of Poe in the one half and a thorough examination of Poe in the weeks before his death in the other, and follows these up with a good explanation of the evidence and competing theories about what exactly happened to Poe on that final trip. Had Poe had an alcoholic relapse? Was he the victim of cooping? Some kind of brain swelling? Cholera? Syphilis? Rabies? The theory Dawidziak offers is one of the more convincing that I’ve come across, and he makes a good case for it. I would have liked a slightly more scholarly and well-sourced treatment of this subject but this is a good book and a worthwhile read for any fan of Poe. I wrote a short post about one offhand comment by an interviewee in this book. You can read that here.

Rereads

As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

A strong set of books to revisit, especially Wise Blood, which I last read in college and hardly remembered. I’m enjoying but not loving Lombardo’s translation of the Comedy. I hope to read his Paradiso this summer.

Kids’ books

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series set in the Rome of Diocletian and the Great Persecution, in which the emperor is all-powerful and Christians are despised and suppressed as threats to order. This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far but it has an engaging, multi-thread plot and was enjoyable both to read aloud and, for my kids, to listen to.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—Somehow I’ve made it to the age of 39 having never read anything by Roald Dahl. I read this on my daughter’s recommendation and loved it. (And what a joy to take a book recommendation from one of your children!) Clever, briskly paced, darkly and wryly funny, and most of all really fun to read. Looking forward to James and the Giant Peach soon.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple, but nicely illustrated retelling of the story of two East German families who flew over the wall to West Germany and freedom in a homemade hot air balloon. A fascinating story that my kids really enjoyed, and a good opportunity to talk about why Germany was divided and what Communism is (as opposed to what some people would like it to be). This also prompted us to check out the 1982 film Night Crossing, which we enjoyed.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A delightful picture book with a rhyming story and beautiful woodcut illustrations by the author. Bustard also has books on St Valentine and St Nicholas of Myra—the real Santa Claus—but this Patrick book is far and away his best of the three. Going to add this to my list of recommended St Patrick’s Day reads soon.

Looking ahead

That’s it! I’m already reading some good stuff—a Viking adventure by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, a study of Dante by Charles Williams, a short book on Old Testament wisdom literature by a favorite philosopher, and my first novel for this year’s John Buchan June—and I’m looking forward to more in the relatively more relaxed days of summer. I hope y’all found a book or two above that sound enticing and that you’ll check them out. Thanks as always for reading!

Shatner, Dante, and the overview effect

In his recently released memoir, William Shatner recounts the unexpected emotional experience of going to space and seeing Earth:

I thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. . . . It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

Later, he writes, he learned that this profound feeling was his experience of the “overview effect,” something commonly felt by astronauts. As summarized by NPR: “The overview effect is a cognitive and emotional shift in a person's awareness, their consciousness and their identity when they see the Earth from space.” Smallness, delicacy, beauty—the overview effect, per its name, gives perspective to a place too big to comprehend in ordinary life.

As is my wont, I immediately thought of Dante, who describes precisely this effect in Canto 22 of Paradiso. Flying through the highest reaches of the heavens with Beatrice, she tells him to look down.

My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: . . .
I saw Latona’s daughter radiant,
without the shadow that had made me once
believe that she contained both rare and dense.
And there, Hyperion, I could sustain
the vision of your son, and saw Dione
and Maia as they circled nearby him.
The temperate Jupiter appeared to me
between his father and his son; and I
saw clearly how they vary their positions.
And all the seven heavens showed to me
their magnitudes, their speeds, the distances
of each from each. The little threshing floor
that so incites our savagery was all—
from hills to river mouths—revealed to me
while I wheeled with eternal Gemini.

This is not only Earth but the entire solar system, from moon (“Latona’s daughter”) to Saturn (Jupiter’s father), and Dante—working purely from imagination six hundred years before the advent of space travel—correctly predicts the shrinking and sharpening perspective that a sight of Earth as a tiny blue orb between his feet would impart. All “our savagery” plays out in nothing but a “little threshing floor.”

“Everyone's overview effect is unique to them,” according to NPR, and Shatner’s, sadly, is a formulaic mélange of environmental admonitions and therapeutic bromides:

The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. . . .

[The overview effect] can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

Dante, by contrast, has no call to action, no language of collectives or harmony or nurturing or “human entanglement” or false humility about “our planet.” He offers pure, unflinching perspective. Confronted with the Earth in all its smallness, Dante

smiled at scrawny image: I approve
that judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.

Real hope begins with a properly oriented overview effect—it should begin with not only a sense of physical, planetary scale but of eternal perspective, so that even the things Shatner both laments and praises will be seen in their true smallness.

You can read a longer excerpt from Shatner’s Boldly Go at Variety here. NPR talked to him and got more disappointing soundbites, with outside commentary by the man who coined the term “overview effect,” all of which you can read here. The translation of Paradiso XXII is that of Allen Mandelbaum; you can read the whole thing at Columbia’s Digital Dante.

Infernal topography

Malacoda, everyone’s favorite farting demon, in Alpaca and Molotro’s “Infernal Topography” interactive map

Yesterday I ran across this great interactive map of Dante’s Inferno, the first third of his Commedia. Developed by Alpaca and Molotro, two Italian design companies, with the support of the Società Dante Alighieri, “Infernal topography” allows you to scroll through Hell from top to bottom, visiting most of the major characters along the way.

The map has a lot of excellent and intuitive explanatory features. Clicking on a character highlights them, and their name and a portion of the relevant passage of Inferno (in either the original or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s English translation) pops up in a sidebar. The sidebar also displays information about each circle, who is punished there, and which cantos of the Inferno you can find it in. Another helpful graphic brackets and labels each particular level as you proceed downward toward “the bottom that devours Judas and Lucifer.” This might prove particularly helpful to students navigating the eight circle, with its subdivision into bolgia filled with different kinds of frauds.

There are also an alphabetical list of the characters in the book, a topographical breakdown of every level of Hell, and a clickable list of the 34 cantos which will take you to the relevant section of the map.

It’s not complete, but it’s really good. The article through which I discovered this describes the design as a “charming, children’s-book-graphic visual presentation” that “ditch[es] accurate human anatomy and horrific violence for a cartoonish video game romp through hell that makes it seem like a super fun, if super weird, place to visit.” I think that’s a little ungenerous. I think the visuals suggest the horrors of Hell well enough and are minimalist enough not to distract from the story itself. More detailed attempts to chart Dante’s Hell, like this famous one by Botticelli, skew toward being too busy to make sense of.

(You can argue that this makes artistic sense, as one of the defining traits of Hell is its pervasive, top-to-bottom noise and confusion, but that’s not usually an asset in visual art.)

It’s a trade off. When trying to reduce a vision as intricate and detailed as Dante’s Commedia to a single visual representation like a map, you can have a detailed but confusing image or an elegant but incomplete one. I love what Alpaca and Molotro have achieved here and appreciate their accomplishment—especially since I love maps, cross-sections, schematics, and illustrated guides as a tool for learning—and I hope this will encourage new readers to encounter the Commedia, students to stick with what can be a challenging, arcane work, and old readers to revisit it.

I just hope that they’ll make similar maps for Purgatorio and Paradiso (now there’s a visual challenge). In the meantime, take a few minutes to browse this map, which you can view in either English or Italian here. And here’s another Open Culture post about other attempts to map the Inferno, from Botticelli to a pretty twee 8-bit version.

Eliot on offensive content

In his essay "Dante" from The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot responds to people who object to Dante's vivid descriptions of the vile and disgusting, especially throughout Inferno:

“The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.”

Goodness never looks so good as it does when contrasted with evil. I think this is, at least in part, why we respond so strongly to self-sacrifice, heroism, and love in terrible circumstances.

Dante's rejection letter

I recently rediscovered this bit I wrote for a contest almost a decade ago. The contest's theme was "Reject a Hit," fictional editorial rejection letters for great literature. I remember thinking myself terribly clever to bury a few Dante-related jokes—some obvious, some not so obvious—inside this. I would tweak a few things if I rewrote this now, but I was amused enough while rereading it to want to share. Enjoy!

* * * * *

Dear Signor Alighieri,

We are delighted to have received your manuscript entitled The Divine Comedy. Though your manuscript possesses some literary merit, we regret we are unable accept it for publication at this time. However, I felt your work was strong enough, often enough, to warrant more than the standard form letter.

There is a thriving market for supernatural narrative, and though you fail to incorporate current trends in werewolves and vampires, a story about the afterlife could certainly sell well. However, we find your constant topical allusions trivialize the subject. How are our readers in Venice, Paris, or London to know the reputation of Florence’s local glutton? Furthermore, your constant political references as well as inexplicable asides about Siena—which represents a large readership—also risk offending readers. In short, such allusions weaken your work’s staying power, which is to say nothing of your gratuitous toilet humor.

There is also—and I broach this subject cautiously—the issue of libel. This is, in fact, the deciding issue in our rejection. We began counting midway through the first section—which you tastelessly call Hell—and soon lost count of actual figures you have derided in your work. Such persons may in fact be dead (though you included a living pope at one point, then explained away his presence in hell by claiming that his body is possessed by a devil—a solution which in no way improves your legal stance), but they have friends and relatives still living, and belonged to organizations which could—and almost certainly will—object to your work. Issues of good taste aside, we cannot leave ourselves open to potential lawsuits which number in the hundreds.

I hope you understand our reservations, and accept our wishes for the best of luck in your other projects. We understand you have authored a few sonnets and a political tract—perhaps it is in those fields that you should pursue fame.

Thank you again for considering us.

Sincerely,

Giovanni Rusticucci, Editor

Reading Dante

Last week I finally got around to Reading Dante, by Prue Shaw. I've had it on my shelf for years, ever since it came out in paperback. I'm glad I finally took it down and read it. Significantly, I read this nearly 300-page work of expert literary criticism in five days. It's great.

Rather than give a full, detailed review, I want to point out two things that I appreciated about Shaw's book.

First, she largely lets Dante's own work speak for itself, in its own terms, in the context of its own era. She mines his works, those of his contemporaries, and the commentaries of early Dantisti (like one of Dante's own sons) rather than trying to squeeze Dante into modern literary-critical theoretical molds. Dante is a medieval man, after all, and a medieval Florentine in particular, and while his work never lets you forget that, it's easy, with modern theory, to sand off the angles and edges and make Dante into anything you like. Here's C.S. Lewis, in conversation with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, on just this sort of thing:

Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis; hence we have the spectacle of some wretched scholar taking a pure divertissement written in the seventeenth century and getting the most profound ambiguities and social criticisms out of it, which of course, aren’t there at all. . . . It’s the discovery of the mare’s nest by the pursuit of the red herring. This is going to go on long after my lifetime. You may be able to see the end of it, I shan’t.

Indeed, a lot of modern literary chatters seems primarily interested in turning a given text (always a "text," per postmodernism) into a profoundly political critique or subversion of this or that. It shouldn't take a lot of imagination to conjure up parodies: King Solomon's Mines as critique of imperialism and Victorian masculinity, etc. You can generate that kind of gobbledygook with a bot.

But Shaw gets out of Dante's way and lets him speak to his own times in his own clear and very specific way, and shows how this most topical of poets created a work of universal meaning. It's refreshing.

That's a high, theoretical problem with reading and talking about Dante. There's also a lower interpretive problem, one that affects first-time readers or uninformed discussion, and this is the second thing I appreciate about Shaw's book.

It's easy to read Inferno alone, as many students unfortunately do, thus getting only a third of the picture. Such readers often come away talking about Inferno as if the whole Commedia is nothing but a revenge fantasy fueled by Dante's rage at being removed from power and sent into exile. Couple that with the generally condescending attitude modern people feel toward the medievals ("chronological snobbery" in Lewis's term), whom they view as crudely literal-minded, superstitious, and morbidly religious, and you get a fairly widespread view of Dante as a particularly artful version of those middle school loners who keep enemies lists.

Here's Shaw, in a passage I read several times:

Dante is certainly not, as one sometimes hears said, vindictive, spiteful, sadistic. He is not merely engaged in score settling with old adversaries by assigning them to hell. The punishments in hell are horribly cruel, but the world in which he lived was horribly cruel. He had been sentenced to death both by burning and decapitation. Such sentences were almost routine. We think of the modern world as more civilised than his, but who could seriously argue that this is so, bearing in mind events on the world stage in the twentieth century?

In one elegant paragraph, Shaw not only cuts down the simplified autobiographical reading of Dante and the condescending view of him as a medieval oaf, but also turns those stereotypes back on the reader for some much-needed perspective.

Reading Dante is one of the best books I've ever read about my favorite poet. Pick it up if you have ever enjoyed or would like to know more about Dante's Commedia. I recommend at least a passing familiarity with the poem's content, since Shaw organizes the book topically—Dante's life, friendships, political beliefs, poetic career and technique, and so forth—and moves at will through Dante's life, influences, and work. It's effortless on her part, but a reader should probably go in prepared.