2025 in books: fiction

Gartenterrasse (detail), by Caspar David Friedrich

Happy New Year! After realizing yesterday that my annual reading list was nearing 5,000 words and wasn’t even finished, I decided to break it up and went ahead and published the non-fiction section. You can read that here if you missed it. Here’s the rest: fiction, kids’ books, and a simple list of the books I revisited in 2025.

As always, I hope y’all will find something good here to read in the new year. That said, in no particular order, here are my

Favorite fiction reads

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A lean, tight, dialogue-heavy crime thriller about a washed up conman trying to make quick money by playing different criminal elements off each other, some gormless hoods trying to run guns, and the authorities who are closing in on them—if they can just figure out who’s up to what. Excellent, almost musical dialogue. When I noted this in my spring reading-in-review, I wrote that it “reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard.” This summer I read a biography of Leonard (see yesterday’s post) and learned that, in fact, Leonard’s crime fiction sounds like The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It was a huge and openly acknowledged influence on him. A great short read and one I hope to revisit soon.

The Sound of Waves, by Yukio Mishima—Here’s a strange thing: a novel by Mishima with a happy ending. The story of a young man and young woman on a remote Japanese fishing island, where life in the 1950s continues, season by season, much as it has for hundreds of years, of love at first sight, of jealousy and gossip, of the beauty and resilience of local custom, and of the triumph of steadfastness. I think I read this in two days. It’s as powerfully sensual and moving as any of Mishima’s other work, but with a deep love of the ordinary.

Baron Bagge and Count Luna, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—Two novellas from a great Austrian writer. Baron Bagge tells of ill-fated love born in the middle of WWI and Count Luna, a post-WWII story, concerns an aristocrat who believes a man killed in a concentration camp is haunting him. The former is a beautiful, ethereal vision; the latter is a fever dream. Full review of Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review here.

Game Without Rules, by Michael Gilbert—Two retirement-age spies in rural England fight the Cold War on their own terms, and with no diminishment of their skills or intelligence despite their age. A delightful collection of tightly-plotted, surprising, and thrilling short spy stories that run the gamut of the espionage genre while feeling fresh and exciting throughout. Full review on the blog here.

Payment Deferred, by CS Forester—Mr Marble is a impecunious banker with a dim, eager-to-please wife, two growing children, and a few habits—drinking, photography—that keep the family cash-strapped. When a long-lost relative unexpectedly arrives talking of his vast inheritance and lack of connections in Britain, Marble, a passive man all his life, acts impulsively and aggressively to get the money he needs. He poisons the man. (No spoilers: this is all in chapter one.) The rest of the novel is the tale of Marble’s slow descent into greater and greater paranoia and bolder and bolder sin. Based on my reading of The Good Shepherd, a later Forester novel, Forester was biblically literate, and while Payment Deferred rarely brings up religion, it is thematically suffused with Old Testament observations: “Be sure your sin will find you out” and “The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” among others. (It also brought to mind an old Jordan Peterson adage: If you think strong men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.) A grim but utterly absorbing 1920s British noir with a brutally ironic ending.

The Labyrinth Makers, by Anthony Price—A brisk espionage thriller in which the reemergence of a crashed RAF cargo plane from a manmade lake more than two decades after the end of World War II reopens the question of what happened to the pilot and why the Russians have always been so keen to find the wreck. The first of a long-running series by Price. I’ll be reading more.

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A brilliant novella about an orphan boy adopted and raised by the Comanches. Absorbing and brutal, with a strong touch of the uncanny, and sharply, powerfully written for maximum effect in a tight form. I read it in less than two hours but felt like I had spent the same hard years on the plains as the main character. I mean to reread it soon.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Foster, a British playwright, travels to an unnamed Eastern European country after of World War II to report on the Stalinist show trial of “Papa” Deltchev, a former agrarian politician accused of collaboration with the capitalist Western powers. Foster senses that something isn’t right—about the trial, about Deltchev, about Deltchev’s family, about Deltchev’s accusers, and most especially about Pashik, Foster’s repulsive local press contact—and he determines to get to the bottom of it. A good anti-Stalin novel—one that lost Ambler friends—and a good thriller. Full review on the blog here.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker—I made it to the age of 41 having never read Dracula. All through high school and college the received wisdom was that it was boring and dumb. Nothing could be further from the truth. This was a gripping novel, and the best evidence for its greatness is that I already knew virtually every beat of the story but still couldn’t put it down. A classic for a reason.

The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers—I had heard that this was Powers’s most horrifying novel and so far that’s proven true. This is the story of Michael Crawford, an English doctor who unwittingly invites the conjugal attentions of a possessive female spirit. After a horrific wedding night incident results in Crawford being wanted for murder, he flees into the heady world of the great Romantic poets Shelley and Byron (with a small but important role for my man Keats along the way). It turns out that they not only lead the original high-flown and debauched “tortured poet” lifestyles, they do so at least in part because of the attentions of their own predatory, consuming otherworldly lovers. By turns eerie and horrifying, with a thrilling descent deeper into the mad worlds both of the poets and of the ancient vampirical entities—I don’t want to give away who they really are at the root of things—this is both powerfully imagined and believably oppressive. As in, I had a few restless nights of sleep until I was able to see Shelley and Byron buried and our heroes freed of their possessors. Reading this immediately after Dracula proved a knockout one-two punch. The Stress of Her Regard is brilliantly done, and I think I’m quite finished with vampires for a while.

Gabriel’s Moon and The Predicament, by William Boyd—A new historical spy series about Gabriel Dax, a British travel writer, who is slowly pulled into the paranoid world of Cold War espionage—dead drops, surveillance, “artifice” (tradecraft), “termites” (moles), double and triple agents, clandestine weapons training, and betrayal—as well as a strange, shapeless romance with his handler, Faith Green. I’ve enjoyed these first two entries, which are short and well paced. Gabriel reminds me of an Eric Ambler protagonist in starting off as a naive everyman and, though gradually learning how to cope with the dangers of espionage, is a bit dense and sometimes makes decisions out of frustration or spite—none of which ends well. Boyd nicely integrates Gabriel’s missions with some real-life events in the contested Third World. The second book veers into some conspiracy-mongering territory, which annoyed me but didn’t detract from what a good read it was. Hoping for more in this series soon. Full review of Gabriel’s Moon on the blog here.

John Burnet of Barns and The Path of the King, by John Buchan—A rambling, high-spirited historical adventure in the Scottish Borders and a novel-in-stories spanning everything from the Viking Age to the American Civil War. Two of my favorite reads for this year’s John Buchan June (for a full list, see the summer reading list). Full John Buchan June reviews on the blog here and here.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle, an undistinguished scholar of Romantic poetry is offered a strange gig by an eccentric businessman: accompany a tour group to London in 1810 to listen to a lecture by Coleridge. The businessman’s engineers have discovered a method that allows for some limited time-travel and he seems eager to use it—for reasons beyond meeting literary greats, as will become clear later. Complications arise when Doyle is left behind in Regency London and desperately fends for himself through begging, where he encounters increasingly strange and unsettling people like Horrabin, the disfigured street-performing clown to who commands an army of beggars from his underground lair, or Dog-Face Joe, a predatory body-hopping werewolf. Their inexplicable activities become more and more threatening and more and more obviously magical. Intricately plotted, totally engrossing, and with one of the most satisfying conclusions in my year of reading. Another excellent historical fantasy, and close to being my favorite of the year.

Runners up:

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—A solid short novel about the unique environment and frustrations of Allied commandos fighting the Nazis in Albania during World War II. Full review on the blog here.

• A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—“Salvage consultant” Travis McGee travels to Mexico to avenge the death of an old friend who had gotten mixed up in some business involving Aztec gold. An involving and suspenseful crime classic.

• Chess Story, by Stefan Zweig—An involving, moving novella about the passengers of an ocean liner competing at chess with two men: a machinelike prodigy and a mysterious tortured man who, we learn, gained his expertise at terrible cost. Short, absorbing, and powerful. I mean to reread it soon.

• Call for the Dead and The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—Two solid early spy novels involving, in a greater or lesser role, George Smiley before the magnum opus of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The second of these two is an ironic take on the public response to Le Carré’s Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

• The Watcher by the Threshold, by John Buchan—A great early collection of weird fiction and horror from John Buchan. Some especially eerie stories about relict forces—ancient people, restless spirits—beyond the ken of modern man. Full review for John Buchan June here.

• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—Jim Dixon, a young, feckless historian at an English university, is up for the review that could make his probationary lecturer position permanent. You know what they say about everything that can go wrong. Surely my worst case scenario as an academic, and hugely entertaining.

Best of the year: the year of man and machine

As with my non-fiction post yesterday, I’m cheating a bit by naming multiple “bests” thanks to a coincidental overlap across a few really good novels: war stories of men depending on their skills, training, and courage to survive combat in unforgiving environments aboard sophisticated and dangerous machines.

Bomber, by Len Deighton, tells the vast story of a single RAF bombing raid over Germany on a single day during World War II. Deighton gives us the civilian and military authorities in an ill-fated German town, the Luftwaffe defenders both in the air and at radar installations, the ground crews and command staff at a RAF base in England, and the bomber pilots and crewmen.

The characters’ personal lives, relationships, jealousies, misunderstandings, and preoccupations—a widowed German officer who has just begun an affair with his housekeeper, a bomber crew about to fly its last mission, an insomniac pilot and his anxious wife who works at the base, a squadron commander who mistakes one of his best pilots for a leftwing subversive—all develop alongside their assigned tasks, so that this sometimes technical novel always remains intimately personal.

But Deighton’s omniscient perspective also shows the reader things no character could be aware of as the story unfolds, especially the interplay of unwitting decisions, technical errors, and pure bad luck that direct the bombers over a small German town instead of their industrial target—and this is only the largest and most obvious of many such mistakes, some of which no one will ever know about. A harrowing account of all dimensions of a single raid, Bomber is also deeply, bitterly ironic. It’s gripping from start to finish and very moving.

The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat, is another British novel of World War II, but this time about the Royal Navy and of almost the exact opposite scope of Bomber, encompassing the whole war for a handful of men. (Not all war novels are the same, folks—you can do a lot with the genre.) Beginning with Commander Ericson’s assignment to a brand-new corvette, HMS Compass Rose, in Scotland in 1939, The Cruel Sea introduces as well junior officers Ferraby and Lockhart and other key officers and enlisted men. Compass Rose has been assigned convoy escort duties in the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic between Greenland and Britain, and as the war escalates the German U-boat presence increases as well.

Monsarrat conveys the physical and mental strain—and occasional excitement—of protecting the convoys and hunting the U-boats brilliantly, and like Deighton’s later Bomber balances the dangers of the war with the vicissitudes, disappointments, and joys of the home front. A powerful novel and rightly regarded as a naval classic.

Finally, The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin, is a contemporary novel of the US Navy, Somali piracy, Iran, and ISIS, but as a loose, subtle retelling of the Odyssey it brilliantly and vividly evokes the spirit and pathos of Homer. Bookended with a court martial, the novel follows aging Captain Stephen Rensselaer, who loses a cushy Pentagon job after speaking too honestly with the president. He’s assigned a dead-end final command meant to finish his career as an embarrassment: overseeing the construction and finally taking to sea the last of the Navy’s smallest class of combat vessels, a patrol coastal or PC he christens Athena. While at the dockyards in New Orleans he meets another marooned soul, Katy Farrar, a lawyer whose husband abandoned her. Together these two well-matched, intelligent souls kindle a poignant mid-life romance. What they had thought were their lives and careers have passed them by; they can start over together.

Then war with Iran breaks out and Rensselaer must put to sea, where he does combat in the Indian Ocean and even on land—engaging superior Russian-built Iranian ships, rushing to the aid of a cruise ship attacked by ISIS pirates, chasing after them when they retreat into Somalia with hostages. It’s technically interesting, thrilling, and emotionally rich and moving. I found the first part of the novel, when Rensselaer and Katy are simply washed up and finding each other, achingly moving.

You’ve probably picked up at least some parallels with Homer. There are more. But this isn’t a simple retelling or slavish point-by-point modern adaptation; you could certainly read The Oceans and the Stars and never catch the allusions. But they do enrich the novel and create dramatic irony and suspense. After all, the prologue details the beginning of a court martial, and the war keeps Rensselaer and Katy separate and vulnerable. What will happen, and how will they be reunited?

Despite their differences in time period, subject, structure, and style, Bomber, The Cruel Sea, and The Oceans and the Stars all offer interesting, compelling characters in suspenseful and deadly circumstances, with the former—character, family, relationships—only enhancing the danger of the latter. All three of these are stellar, and while some might resist reading novels like them out of some kind of Tom Clancy impression that war novels are all technical specs, ballistics, and tough-talking, invulnerable men, these showcase the richness of war as a subject for literature. Homer is apropos here—remember that before the Odyssey came the Iliad, the great war story.

Two of these I reviewed in full on the blog this year: The Oceans and the Stars here and The Cruel Sea here. Any one of these three would be well worth your time. I hope y’all will check one out in 2026.

Favorite kids’ books

The Reluctant Dragon, by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Ernest Shepard—I loved the Disney cartoon as a kid and only learned as an adult that it was based on a story by the author of The Wind in the Willows. A lark, and lots of fun to read aloud—which I did twice, once to my kids while camping and once to my wife.

The Green Ember, by SD Smith, illustrated by Zach Franzen—A fun fantasy series about a kingdom of rabbits at war with wolves and predatory birds. When the novel begins, the rabbits are on the back foot, their king having fallen and the kingdom in disarray, with isolated bands longing for the coming of “the Mended Wood.” Main characters Picket and Heather have a believable brother-sister relationship, and Smith includes numerous fun side characters like warrior and preparedness obsessive Helmer. My daughter ate these up and demanded I read them. I’m glad I finally got to the first one.

The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King, by Lloyd Alexander—A classic fantasy series that is well worth reading in its entirety, as my wife and I did aloud over the first few months of the year.

Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim—Another good entry in this series about a group of boys in Diocletian’s Rome solving mysteries and gradually getting to know the persecuted Christians in their midst. Just got my daughter the fifth and sixth in the series and plan to read them aloud to the kids in the new year.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl—Fun and bizarre. I had never read any Roald Dahl before last year. His status as a classic children’s author is well-deserved.

The God Contest, by Carl Laferton, illustrated by Catalina Echeverri—A picture book based on one of my favorite Old Testament incidents: the mountaintop contest between the prophet Elijah and King Ahab’s prophets of Baal. Not the kind of story that gets a lot of traction in our modern therapeutically-oriented Christianity, so this book, with its clear explanation of the handy victory of God in a competition for divine authority, was refreshing. A good read-aloud with all five kids.

Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, by William Shakespeare, adapted by Gareth Hinds—A good, atmospheric comic book adaptation of my favorite Shakespearean tragedy. I’m a big fan of Hinds’s work. Check it out if you haven’t heard of him.

Rereads

Lots of good rereads this year, with my two favorites probably being Emma and The Prestige, a book I last read in college and barely remembered. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Emma, by Jane Austen

• The Prestige, by Christopher Priest

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

• Athelstan: The Making of England, by Tom Holland

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John Le Carré

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Looking ahead

I’ve gradually realized that I’m pretty bad at predicting what I will or won’t be reading over the next year, so while I have some goals and ambitions I’m going to refrain from sharing those. Like the mass of people playing “cheat the prophet” in that line from Chesterton, I tend to listen politely to my own predictions and then go and do something else. So we’ll see what the next year brings. If it’s a crop of reading as good as this year’s, I’ll be satisfied.

In the meantime, I hope y’all have found something good here to read yourself in 2026. Thanks as always for reading—your attention to this blog means a lot to me—and happy New Year!

2025 in books: non-fiction

Die Lebestufen (The Stages of Life) (Detail), by Caspar David Friedrich

Though this has been a rough break with lots of sickness I’ve managed to find time here and there to make sure I at least get my annual reading list put together. But I realized this afternoon, as I was about to rouse a couple of recently sick kids from their naps and go check on the two people who are currently sick, that I wasn’t quite finished with the fiction section and the total post was already pushing 5,000 words. So I’ve done something I don’t think I’ve done since the heady reading days of 2020—split the post in half. This evening y’all will get my non-fiction and “special mentions.” Tomorrow I’ll follow up with fiction and a few other oddments.

After a couple years in which fiction has threatened to overwhelm my reading in history and other subjects, I deliberately tried to steer back to a slightly more balanced mix in the latter half of this year. And good thing, too, as 2025 turned out to be a good year for great big literary biographies and shorter works on a diverse variety of fun subjects. I hope y’all will find something good here for next year. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Favorite non-fiction reads

A Time to Keep Silence, by Patrick Leigh Fermor—Beautifully written, evocative, and meditative account of Leigh Fermor’s stays in several monasteries in northern France—twice with Benedictines and once with Trappists—and his visit to the abandoned rock monasteries used by medieval Christian anchorites in the rugged hills of central Asia Minor. A brisk but by no means light read.

The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall, 1918-1933, by Frank McDonough—An exhaustive history, year by year, of the Weimar Republic from Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication, the German military collapse, and the armistice in the fall of 1918 to the first month of 1933, when Hitler’s rise culminated in his assumption of the role of chancellor. There are isolated passages on cultural trends (e.g. the “New Woman,” cabaret life, Bauhaus architecture, silent cinema like Metropolis, literature like All Quiet on the Western Front) but the emphasis is almost entirely on nitty-gritty party politics. Given the chaos and corruption of the Weimar Republic and the proliferation of parties (at least 41 in one election), McDonough does an admirable job keeping the narrative clear and understandable and emphasizes contingency throughout. A Hitler dictatorship was not a foregone conclusion. But the epilogue, in which McDonough specifically blames Paul von Hindenburg for the death of “Weimar democracy,” is a bit of a fumble, as it is abundantly clear from McDonough’s own narrative—and even the earlier parts of the epilogue—that the Weimar Constitution had built-in weaknesses that were bound to weaken and undermine it. McDonough essentially faults Hindenburg for not believing in democracy hard enough. But if “democracy” in the abstract gave Germany this democracy in concrete, stubborn reality, it deserved to go. The pity is that when it went, it fell to Hitler, who only achieved electoral clout very late. This aside, The Weimer Years is a hefty expert introduction to an important period.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—A grim but necessary study of the outsized role of therapy and medication in the neuroticism, self-absorption, and worse among modern kids. Highly recommended if you’re skeptical of our therapeutic culture already or openminded enough to question the way therapy has become the panacea for everything we find disordered—or even out of the ordinary—about other people and ourselves.

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—A welcome biography of one of my favorite authors, a comprehensive volume that illuminates Leonard’s life, work, and craft in almost equal measure. Most interesting to me were the sections on Leonard’s childhood, education, World War II service, and early career—when he balanced a full-time white collar job, daily Mass, and raising a family with researching and writing the Western stories that put him on the map—as well as insight into his creative process, which changed in slow and subtle but significant ways over the years. Also entertaining: stories of his struggles against Hollywood, including the exasperating abortive collaboration with Dustin Hoffman that inspired Get Shorty. If the book lacks in any area, it’s in the personal as it approaches the present. Kushins gives good attention to Leonard’s religiosity early in the book, so what precisely turned him from a devout Catholic into a gentle agnostic in the 1970s? What was going on with his final marriage? We can only infer. That is, however, a minor problem in an otherwise thorough book. This was very close to being my favorite read of the year.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A study of the life and work of German artist Caspar David Friedrich, whose Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog you certainly know even if you don’t recognize his name. Strangely structured but full of surprises and insights. Full review on the blog here.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—Another of the big fat literary biographies I read this year. Not just thorough but exhaustive, Shakespeare having apparently tracked down everyone who had any connection whatsoever to Fleming and his family in order to get insight into the man. This is a brilliant portrait of Fleming, one that emphasizes the pressures and frustrations of his life—especially the domineering, manipulative mother, the wife who despised and mocked his work, and the onetime film producing partner who sued Fleming into an early grave. Fleming, in Shakespeare’s telling, was a gifted man who did great work in a variety of fields, not least in military intelligence, where he was one of a handful of people to know the whole secret of the Bletchley Park codebreaking program, but who lived a fundamentally unhappy life. Some of this was Fleming’s own doing, and the womanizing, drinking, and smoking eventually caught up with him. The Complete Man deepened my admiration of Fleming’s strengths and my appreciation of his work, but troubled me with his tony but self-destructive lifestyle. An absolutely worthwhile read if one can soldier through the genealogy and namedropping in the first chapters.

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King, by Dan Jones—A thorough, well-paced biography of Henry V that is both scholarly and approachable, though Jones’s decision to tell Henry’s story in present tense feels like an unnecessary gimmick. More importantly, however, Jones is evenhanded and fair to Henry and his time, avoiding some of the more popular modern misperceptions and false accusations (e.g. calling Henry a “war criminal”) and emphasizing his purposeful embrace of the divinely ordained duty of rule. A refreshing and worthwhile Late Medieval read.

The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History, by Robert Tracy McKenzie—A good brief study not only of the First Thanksgiving and the people who experienced it—Pilgrims, Strangers, and Indians—but of how history works and how and why people remember and celebrate the things they do. It also implicitly conveys a truth I realized long ago: the true story of just about anything is always more complicated and much more interesting than the simplified versions people fight about. If I taught at a Christian institution I’d certainly assign this for US History both to give students the straight story on the Pilgrims—and how little we know about the meal mythologized as the First Thanksgiving—and to give them the rudiments of historiography. An excellent little book. I gifted my dad a copy on Audible and he greatly enjoyed it.

The UFO Experience, by J Allen Hynek—An interesting account of some genuinely inexplicable sightings from an astronomer who worked for years, through much frustration, as an expert consultant on the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, and who sought to apply genuine scientific rigor to a phenomenon that was already evolving into folklore and crowdsourced mythology by the time he wrote this book. Also interesting as a window into a specific period of UFO history. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garrett Graff—Readable, wide-ranging, but flawed overview of the government and academia’s attempts—honest and otherwise—to research and understand the postwar flying saucer phenomenon. Full review on the blog here.

• Van Gogh has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being, by Russ Ramsey—Not quite as good as Ramsey’s first book on faith and art—which was easily my favorite non-fiction read last year—but a worthwhile read nonetheless, especially given its more specific focus on art and suffering.

• George Washington: The Founding Father, by Paul Johnson—A good short biography by one of the masters of the good short biography. Thorough (for its length) and, more importantly, evenhanded.

• Frederica: Colonial Fort and Town, by Trevor R Reese, illustrated by Peter Spier—A handy informative booklet about Fort Frederica on St Simons Island, with excellent drawings. Published in the late 1960s so some of the information may need updating from more recent research and archaeological work at the town, but still a solid introduction.

• Caspar David Friedrich: The Painter of Stillness, by Norbert Wolf—Good short overview of the life and work of Friedrich with many, many good color plates of his work. From a series by art publisher Taschen.

Best of the year: Poe vs Poe

This year I read a number of good biographies, several of which I’ve mentioned above, but two of the most enjoyable and with the greatest interest to me concerned Edgar Allan Poe. One book was older, one was brand new; one was shorter and one was long; but both were good. It was hard to select a favorite read this year—especially among a crop of good biographies of writers I love—so I’ve cheated and gone with both of these.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers, is a biography published in 1992. Meyers gives good attention to Poe’s life and work and is fair to this perplexing, exasperating, much-maligned man, especially in controversial personal episodes like his marriage to his first cousin Virginia, his spats with various literary celebrities, the controversy and mudslinging stirred up by the female literary elite of New York City in a strange episode concerning letters between Poe and an admirer, and most especially his tragic final year. Meyers also approaches Poe’s work with good critical sense, avoiding the autobiographical and especially Freudian readings that had been popular with Poe for quite some time. (Not long after Meyers’s book, Kenneth Silverman published Edgar A Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, which is famous for going whole-hog into autobiographical and psychological interpretation. That way lies madness.) Short, readable, and comprehensive without being overwhelming, Meyer’s insight and good judgement make this one of the best Poe biographies I’ve read.

But I read Meyers in the first place while awaiting the release of Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley, which my wife graciously got me as a birthday gift. This is a massive new biography of the kind usually called “magisterial,” and lives up to the hype. Kopley is a well-established and accomplished Poe scholar and his mastery of every bit of material on Poe’s life and work is evident on every page. Like Meyers, he approaches Poe sympathetically but not uncritically, faulting him where appropriate—e.g. his self-sabotaging tendencies and his violent feuds with former friends—and defending him likewise. This is most evident in his treatment of Poe and race, which had not become the obsession that it is today when Meyers wrote. Kopley, despite some nods to present pieties, situates Poe in his time and place and in the landscape of opinion common at the time, rubbishing simplistic accusations of racism in Poe and his work. Kopley is primarily a scholar of literature and gives more detailed critical attention to Poe’s work than Meyers, including some new and helpful insight into Poe’s use of structure and poetic effects. This is a strong, weighty, exhaustive biography, but I did find Kopley relied heavily—perhaps too heavily—on some late sources for Poe’s friendships and personal character, things like the reminiscences of Poe’s best friend’s stepdaughter, which offered strangely detailed commentary on a man she had never met. Some explanation of the reliability of sources like this might have been helpful, but the book was already over 800 pages long and this is mostly a quibble.

So I got a two ten-gauge barrels of Poe to the face and loved every bit of it. While I appreciate and would recommend both biographies, I think for general purposes I prefer Meyers’s slightly older book as shorter, more approachable, less burdened with present-day anxieties, and with a bit more context and explanation for how Poe came to have the reputation he does today. But either could be a worthwhile read depending on what kind of emphasis you want in a study of Poe or just how much Poe you need.

Special mentions

Here are three favorite reads that don’t neatly slot into the fiction or non-fiction categories: all medieval, all poetic, all with some good scholarly apparatus and/or great artistic merit in translation.

The Divine Comedy, by Dante, translated by Michael Palma—The Divine Comedy is my favorite book, and since I have no Italian I have always read it in translation. That said, I have read enough about the original Italian, the perils of translation, and specific translators’ rationales for their approaches that I thought 1) I had seen everything and 2) that a translation of the Comedy that was both rhymed and faithful to Dante’s original tone and style was impossible. I’m glad to say I was wrong. Palma’s recent translation manages to capture Dante’s force, directness, and vividness while retaining his difficult rhyme scheme, brilliantly conveying not just the feel of the original but its most often neglected formal quality. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read the Comedy but this is the most I’ve enjoyed it in some years. I reflected in more detail on Palma’s achievement with this translation here.

Waltharius, translated by Brian Murdoch, ed. by Leonard Neidorf—A good English translation—with the original Latin on the facing page—of a lesser-known Early Medieval epic concerning Walthari (Walter of Aquitaine), his beloved Hildigunda, their flight from Attila, and their confrontation with Walthari’s old friend and comrade-in-arms Hagano. I wrote about some of the moral and cultural aspects of the story, especially the binding (and sometimes entangling) role of “unchosen obligations,” here.

Old High German Poetry: An Anthology, trans. and ed. by Brian Murdoch—If you’ve read any medieval German literature it is almost certainly something like Parzival or the Nibelungenlied, Middle High German epics or Arthurian romances. German poetry came into full flower in the High Medieval period, but of course it had much earlier antecedents. This book collects a huge variety of fragmentary poetry in Old High German—bits of epic, devotional verse, charms, prayers, and more—with informative commentary and recommended reading. A great volume, though it is sad and frustrating to look at these fragments, palimpsests, and marginalia and infer how much else was lost to time. Ach, Weh!

Stay tuned

I’m thankful for so much good reading this year and hope y’all will find something in this post to read, enjoy, and think about in 2026. In the meantime, be on the lookout for the second half of this post—fiction, children’s books, and rereads—tomorrow morning, and have a fun and happy New Year’s Eve!

The Cruel Sea

Several years ago I read CS Forester’s 1955 World War II novel The Good Shepherd, a short, intense story about an American destroyer captain as he attempts to protect a convoy through the worst of the U-boats’ hunting grounds in the North Atlantic. Though told in the third person, it is intensely, claustrophobically internal, bringing the reader into intimate contact with both the calculating mind and physical punishment of its protagonist over the worst 72 hours of his career. It’s excellent, one of my favorite reads that year. The Cruel Sea, published in 1951 by Royal Navy veteran Nicholas Monsarrat, is even better.

Beginning in a Scottish shipyard in the fall of 1939, The Cruel Sea introduces the captain, Commander George Ericson, a dedicated but undistinguished officer who already has a long career behind him, as he takes command of a newly constructed corvette, the HMS Compass Rose. He also meets his three junior officers—the untried Lockhart and Ferraby, a journalist and bank clerk fresh out of officer training, and the experienced but boorish Australian Bennet.

As the Compass Rose is fitted for anti-submarine duty in the North Atlantic, the reader gets to know the ship, its crew, and these central characters. Ericson is well-trained, disciplined, and eager. Lockhart, an unattached former freelancer, begins the war single and with few connections to make him fearful of combat; he’s cool and a quick learner. Ferraby, only twenty, utterly inexperienced and with a new wife at home, is uncertain and often unmanned by his lack of skill. Bennet, cowardly and lazy, pounces on that. Testing the new ship and undertaking its first missions into the warzone strains and exposes weak points in Compass Rose’s leadership. New officers and crew, like the posh, university-educated Morell, who has a flighty actress wife back home in London, and Baker, a young man obsessed with women despite his lack of experience with them, further complicate matters.

I don’t want to give much away about the plot. The Cruel Sea is not plot-driven. Having established its characters and their task—a task they’ll labor at almost without pause for six years—the story hums along on two brilliantly combined storytelling elements.

The first is the day-to-day reality of convoy duty and actual combat, both of which Monsarrat describes unromantically and with startling clarity. The drudgery and physical misery come through palpably, as do the horrors Compass Rose’s crew confront on nearly every mission. Sailors incinerated by the burning oil leaking from a torpedoed tanker, survivors discovered floating in their lifejackets weeks too late, a man dying of third-degree burns as a hapless officer rubs ointment on his exposed muscles, men wounded, drowned, frozen, blown to pieces—Monsarrat never embellishes or wallows in his descriptions, and the simplicity and directness of his narration makes it all the more disturbing and moving.

The second key element is the character of the men themselves, especially leaders. War, The Cruel Sea impresses upon us firmly, depends as much on relationships and leadership as it does on technology. This is a character study spread across six years of danger, combat, and death, and the smooth functioning of superiors and subordinates, their mutual trust, and the judgements each is empowered to make are as crucial as sonar, signal lamps, or depth charges.

Personal character matters. More than one man is wrecked by a bad relationship with a woman. The book’s title emphasizes the cruelty of the sea, but the torture some characters are put through by unfaithful wives rivals the sea for unfeeling destructiveness. Other men lead dissipated lives ashore or lives otherwise marked by moral weakness. Compass Rose’s greatest trial—again, I don’t want to spoil any specific incidents—painfully exposes the strong and the bad.

One incident I will describe, one of the most famous in the book and one included in the trailer for the 1953 film adaptation, combines the stress and danger and technical demands of combat with the problem of personal character and responsibility. In Compass Rose’s worst mission, a convoy to Gibraltar that is almost annihilated by U-boats, Ericson steers the corvette toward a group of men who survived the sinking of their ship and are struggling in the water. As he approaches he learns that Compass Rose has picked up a strong sonar signal directly underneath the survivors. It is almost certainly a U-boat. Ericson must decide in an instant: pick up the survivors and let the U-boat get away—and possibly even torpedo Compass Rose—or drop depth charges into the middle of the struggling men. He orders the depth charges launched. He lives with the consequences for the rest of the book.

The novel’s six-year span, with characters coming and going and the scene occasionally shifting to the homefront, to the Arctic convoy route to Murmansk, or even to Brooklyn, gives the reader a sharp sense of the experience of the war, especially its long years of struggle before success and the escalation of the violence. The first two-thirds are a bleak grind. The harshness of the work, the unrelenting danger, and the horrors and personal stresses the characters are subjected to hardens or dulls them by turns. They feel they have not only been caught in a machine, but worry about becoming machinelike themselves. Ericson struggles with memories of a softer, more flexible earlier stage of the war; a young sailor who went AWOL to check on his wife might have been let off with a warning in 1939, though by 1944 the same man committing the same offense would be sent to prison, and Ericson feels he must shut down even good-natured joking among his offers in order to maintain discipline. Lockhart, self-protective, closes himself off to all but his captain, but finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Wren and must decide whether to commit with the war unfinished.

Only late in the book do the characters realize that there is an end in sight, a sense that brings its own anxieties with it. By the time two of the central surviving characters stand together on the bridge of a different ship, different men from those they began the novel as six years before, we feel their gratitude that the war is over but understand why it is a muted, subdued gratitude—exhaustion, and much more besides.

I don’t want to give the impression that The Cruel Sea is especially dour. It has frequent moments of wit and levity of the best British kind—wry, understated, often dark—and its characters are a pleasure to spend time with. But precisely because Monsarrat has peopled his novel with such lifelike, sympathetic characters, when they suffer and die it is as powerful and agonizing as their good times were enjoyable. By the end the story has reminded us, in case we forgot, that every life has shares of joy and loss. Monsarrat makes us feel both.

Despite overlap in subject matter, the comparison I began with is not entirely fair. Both are excellent novels. But where The Good Shepherd concerns one man, a captain, over three days, The Cruel Sea follows multiple members of a ship’s crew across the entire duration of the war. The Good Shepherd is a minutely focused portrait of a leader in his most acutely stressful moment. The Cruel Sea, on the other hand, vast, changeable, dangerous, and beautiful like the sea itself, is an epic.

Ruritanian notes

A few years ago I realized that, for the most part, I don’t actually like time-travel stories. I, who spend most of my waking life thinking about what it was like in the past! I finally decided it was because a lot of time-travel stories, under the influence of various kinds of nitpicking, get so fixated on the mechanics of time travel and its resulting theoretical problems like the grandfather paradox that actually visiting the past—traveling through time—ceases to be the point.

Something similar is at work in Ruritanian fiction. Ruritania is the imaginary Central European kingdom invented by Sir Anthony Hope for his great adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda. Hope’s story was so popular that it spawned a long-lasting subgenre of adventure fiction, the “Ruritanian romance.” Note the word romance carefully there. We’ll come back to that.

Last night I finished The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler’s first novel, published in 1936 when he was 27. It’s at least partly a parody of British spy fiction at the time—including the work of John Buchan—and follows a mild-mannered English physicist who, having revisited some pulpy spy novels on a trip, gets into a car accident and wakes up thinking he’s a spy. He winds up involved in industrial espionage in the Eastern European republic of Ixania, a corrupt state that has just developed the first atomic weapons.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but despite my love of Ambler I didn’t enjoy it very much. Even as I was reading the climactic action I was wondering why The Dark Frontier and Ixania weren’t working when Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev and its unnamed, fictional Eastern European state did. Then I started thinking about all the Ruritanias I’ve visited over the last few years, and which ones I enjoyed and which ones I didn’t.

Here are several novels set in fictional countries that worked, and worked well (links will take you to reviews here on the blog):

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Sir Anthony Hope (1894, Ruritania)

• Castle Gay, by John Buchan (1930, Evallonia)

• Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh (1932, Azania)

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh (1938, Ishmaelia)

• Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler (1951, unnamed Eastern European country somewhere near Bulgaria)

Here are several that did not work:

• The House of the Four Winds, by John Buchan (1935, Evallonia)

• The Dark Frontier, by Eric Ambler (1936, Ixania)

And here’s an outlier, a novel that I think illustrates both the weaknesses of Ruritanias and how they’re best overcome:

• The Courts of the Morning, by John Buchan (1929, Olifa)

I’ll stipulate here that when I talk about Ruritanias, I mean fictional countries that nevertheless are meant to exist in our world, not a fantasy world or alternate universe. Much of what I lay out below could also be helpful in thinking about fantasy worlds—though I have no time for alternate universes, much less multiverses—but that isn’t the subject here.

In mulling these stories after finishing The Dark Frontier last night, I found something in common between those that actually work. Judgment on Deltchev, the most obvious point of comparison being a later Ambler novel, is an indictment of Soviet show trials and Western acquiescence to the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe, all acted out through one confused, put-upon reporter’s moral struggle with the situation he’s been placed in. Ambler doesn’t even name the country in question. In a quite different vein, Black Mischief and Scoop are savage, blistering satires of modern journalism and efforts to “modernize” African nations. Castle Gay, which takes place in Scotland but concerns the upheavals of the faraway Evallonia, is straightforwardly a story of moral transformation through hardship. And the ur-text of the genre, Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda, is an adventure testing a man’s honor, loyalty, physical courage, and moral strength. In all cases, you get just enough detail about the fictional country to make it believable, but the heart of the story are the characters’ moral and ethical conflicts.

In short, the best Ruritanian stories work because Ruritania is not the point—it’s a convenient setting where real-world locations won’t distract and that allows the outworking of moral or character drama and action. Ruritania is a device. The “romance” or adventure comes first. Tellingly, all of these novels work as genre stories: Deltchev is suspenseful, Black Mischief and Scoop are unbelievably funny, Castle Gay and Zenda are fun and exciting.

When Ruritanias don’t work it’s because the nitty-gritty details take over from the characters. Following the climax of The Dark Frontier we get several pages about the events of a peasant revolution in Ixania, including which leaders took control of which government ministries and how many army officers were placed under arrest, and I realized I just didn’t care. And I didn’t care because I was not sufficiently invested in the main characters—physicist-turned-master-spy Professor Barstow and his sidekick American reporter Carey. (The first half of the novel, which is more character-driven, is much more interesting.) Likewise with Buchan’s House of the Four Winds, which has isolated episodes of thrills but mostly staggers along through over-detailed explanations of Evallonia’s tottering interwar government and the uncertain role of its populist movements. Buchan is telling a similar story of moral formation, but that gets lost in the details.

To bring the fantasy genre back in, you might recognize some of what bedevils these novels as “world-building.” This is the danger of making the world you’re building more important than the story, or of having a story too weak to support the world you invent for it to take place in.

The Courts of the Morning, the Buchan novel I suggested straddles the good-bad divide in this genre, is an instructive counterexample. As noted even at the time it was published, it occasionally bogs down in explanations of the geography, industry, and economy of Olifa, the South American republic where it takes place. But it balances this with a strong, intricate plot of great moral weight and redemptive arcs for several characters, all of whom are vividly realized. These mostly work well, and mostly counteract the overwhelming effect of industrial sabotage and train schedules.

This is by no means the last word on such a topic—the novels that don’t work have problems beyond their setting, for instance, and there are plenty of other Ruritanias I haven’t traveled to—but consider this post notes toward a fuller understanding of how best to use a fictional country in a story.

Game Without Rules

I can’t remember where I first saw Game Without Rules recommended, though I think it was John Wilson recommending it, but I’m glad I sought it out. I’ve read a lot of great espionage fiction over the last several years—Buchan, Ambler, Fleming, Le Carré, Deighton—and this collection of stories by Michael Gilbert offers some of the most intricately constructed, surprising, suspenseful, and plain enjoyable spy stories I’ve come across.

Published in 1967, Game Without Rules collects eleven short stories about Mr Calder and Mr Behrens, agents for a British intelligence service during the early-1960s height of the Cold War. Now retirement-age, they live near each other in a quaint Kentish village where Mr Behrens lives with his aunt and keeps bees and Mr Calder spends quiet days with Rasselas, his Persian deerhound. They have pints in the village and drop in on each other once a week to play backgammon. And just occasionally their handler, Mr Fortescue, a seemingly unremarkable bank manager, calls them up to London on a mission only their organization can complete.

The missions are classic spy stuff. In the first story they discover a corpse left over from World War II that hints at a deep-cover mole they must identify. Later, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens bring down a ring of drug and pornography smugglers. In another, they track the progress of a young agent along a Soviet exfiltration route through Europe, hoping to uncover its operations but risking detection and death. In another, the two take part in an urgent Christmas Eve assignment in Bonn—recovering equipment, helping a defector escape—with a snowstorm threatening from the sky and East German operatives moving in on the ground. In yet another, they provide security for the young boarding school student who has unexpectedly inherited the throne of his father’s unnamed Middle Eastern kingdom and who must be shielded from kidnappers and enemy agents seeking kompromat. In the final story, they confront a German agent with a decades-old grudge and no remaining reasons to hold back from revenge.

Double agents, enemy tech, infiltration, exfiltration, and assassination may seem familiar, but these stories are intricately plotted and written with effortless economy—some are rich enough for novels but run a tight twenty pages—and always surprising. They’re also witty. Humor—wordplay, wry observations, and frustrated sarcasm between the two—works throughout to dissolve tension and reveal character, not least that of Gilbert’s two aging operatives.

Mr Calder and Mr Behrens are now some of my favorite spy characters. Gilbert characterizes them minimally. One is short and bald, the other barrel-chested. It’s sometimes hard to remember which is which, but they have distinct personalities that make their missions together fun to read. Both are in their late 50s at at the youngest (a dossier at the beginning lists them as born in 1910 and 1913, but there is an ambiguous allusion in one story to Mr Calder having served in World War I) and have both spent decades in espionage, being recruited in the 1930s and serving in important intelligence and special operations roles during World War II, so they’re in their early 60s at least. They’re experienced, capable, skilled—in multiple languages, marksmanship, and practical tradecraft—and utterly dependable. Their friendship is revealed through their professionalism with each other rather than in spite of it.

Imagine the cozy bonhomie of Frog and Toad combined with the ruthlessness of Fleming’s Bond and the most hard-bitten pragmatism of Le Carré. “In this job,” Mr Behrens tells another agent after a high-stakes assignment that was nearly botched, “there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” One senses this is bluff, as this expressed coldbloodedness is belied by his dedication to fighting Communism—the Soviets are, refreshingly, always presented as evil—and by his actions in other stories, especially when it comes to saving Mr Calder.

One realizes just how much one has come to feel for the pair in the penultimate story, in which Mr Fortescue worries that Mr Calder, who has started plotting the genealogy of Prometheus on a giant paper chart, is going mad—an unsurprising turn for someone who has lived so much of his life under cover. Dispatched to London to look for him, Mr Behrens takes Rasselas with him. Their genuine distress over Mr Calder is moving, and makes the revelation at the end of the story all the more surprising and satisfying.

I’ve looked back through Game Without Rules and, of the eleven stories, can’t select any of them as in any way weak or unsatisfying. This has been some of my most purely enjoyable reading in a while, especially in the spy genre. I read it aloud to my wife before bed over the last four weeks, and we both loved it. If you’re looking for some strong, well-crafted stories that combine mystery, thriller, and espionage with some subtle character work, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

When I wrote about the epistolary form and other framing devices in gothic storytelling earlier this week I forgot to mention The Screwtape Letters. I want to correct that. But first, check out this short Substack piece, which looks specifically at the opening “Author’s Preface” of Dracula.

In the essay I quoted Monday the author argued that framing devices like letters and diaries create a metanarrative “uncertainty” that tinges the reader’s perception of the story, building suspense and horror. The form itself generates the gothic’s sense of the uncanny. I agreed, and added that the epistolary or found document form also contributes the sense of discovery or unveiling that digging through old documents produces, heightening the genre’s feeling of mystery.

The above piece from The Middling Place about Stoker’s preface looks at another aspect of the form, namely the authority and veracity established by presenting a story’s “sources” in the manner of non-fiction:

This is not a fictional story written by an author. In fact, the author has nothing to do with the story. . . . Because they were found, they must be fact and not fiction. Obviously, we know that these are indeed works of fiction, yet it is a technique used by the author to make it seem less so.

In other words, they “substantiate authenticity.” The verb “seem” near the end is especially important, as while all fiction is an illusion of sorts—or a dream, as I prefer to think of it—the gothic relies upon and exploits the seemingness of the illusion more than usual.

So, what framing devices like letters or diary entries do for a gothic tale, in brief:

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

The Middling Place author does a good job examining how this works through a close reading of Stoker’s preface to Dracula. Consider two other cases.

First, the Coen brothers’ Fargo opens with this notorious title card:

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.

At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.

Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

I say “notorious” because some people think this crossed a line, but considered in relation to Dracula and the other examples provided in those two Substack essays, the Coens don’t seem to be doing much different here. Leaving that aside, those who view this opening text as a violation or lie confirm the ability of this kind of preface to sell the strange and unbelievable as authentic—which was the whole point, according to the Coens.

But Fargo poses as a low-key true crime story. The gothic asks its readers to accept much more, which brings me back to The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis’s opening note to this epistolary novel is often forgotten—it’s not even included in the sample on Amazon—but look at these sentences and, in light of the above, think about what they accomplish for Screwtape:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Like Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, or what have you, this one sentence both 1) tells the reader that what he is about to read is real and 2) suggests immediately the mystery of its origins and contents. Not only can the editor not explain what we’re about to read, he won’t. Lewis reinforces these effects throughout the note while maintaining what seems, on a literal reading, the dry, dispassionate language of the textual critic. Consider this line from the final paragraph:

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters.

The authenticity or reality of the story—one can picture the scholar, frustrated, working into the night to compile and arrange Screwtape’s correspondence—as well as the mystery are reiterated one last time, and lines in the middle like “The reader is advised to remember that the devil is a liar” develop the aforementioned uncertainty. The whole effect is powerfully tantalizing, and though I’ve never heard anyone describe Screwtape as gothic, Lewis uses these effects masterfully.

By a nice coincidence, I just started Dracula last night. It’s engrossing. The gestures toward authenticity, uncertainty, and mystery embedded in Stoker’s preface are not the whole reason for this—plenty of bad books open with similar notes (pick up any Dan Brown novel)—but they have a subtle power worth learning from.

Vastness, might, and self-destruction

Near the end of Count Luna, Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s eerie postwar novella about an Austrian businessman who believes he is being stalked by a man he accidentally sent to a concentration camp, Lernet-Holenia includes a lengthy excursus on Rome, its history and especially its subterranean architecture, in the course of which he breaks out into this apostrophe:

O happy days of long ago when the city was still young! O early, rural Rome! Your sons, a sturdy race of peasant warriors, tilled their own ancestral soil; with their own hands, they yoked the oxen, and when the evening sun cast long shadows from the hills, they bore home on their own shoulders the wood from the forest. Food was simple, clothing plain, and people still honored the gods, the children their parents and the woman the man. Women did not paint their faces, nor did married people break their vows; friend did not betray friend. But when, on the pretext that all this was too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned, they strove to make everything bigger and better, their lives at once began to deteriorate. The more the nation’s power grew the more did its inner force diminish. The talons of the legions’ eagles might stretch to the borders of Latium, might hold all of Italy in their grasp, might reach out toward the ends of the earth; the city which had been built of clay and brick might clothe itself in gilded stone; the peaks of the Capitol might bristle with temples and pillars of Pentelic marble, with triumphal arches and bronze chariots with effigies of its own and conquered gods, with statues stolen from Greece, with the captured banners of foreign peoples and with countless trophies; but the moral decency, the strength of mind and of spirit, in short, the very qualities that had enabled the Romans to build up their vast empire, were destroyed by the vastness and the might of their own creation.

The key sentence, the hinge point in the story told here, comes near the middle, when the Romans themselves come to regard their own origins as “too rustic, too coarse, too old-fashioned.” This is the self-loathing oikophobia of new money enticed by old decadence and trendy ideas.* The moment they shift from the pious duty of preservation to a quest for improvement and raw power, their corruption has already begun. Their contempt for their own past means there can be no course correction.

In the end, success proves enervating and self-defeating, not simply by inviting logistical overextension and military defeat—the inadequate material explanations for Rome’s collapse—but for hollowing out the spiritual and moral qualities that had made the Romans successful in the first place.

Lernet-Holenia puts all this quite pithily, and though he is reflecting on the final collapse of the Roman Empire, the way he tells the story is strikingly similar to the argument of Cicero’s final, impromptu speech about the collapse of the Republic in my novella The Last Day of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Decline appears in many ages, but never in disguise.

I wrote Cicero nine years ago, mostly as a way to tell a story I find interesting and inspiring but also because some broad cultural trends were bothering me. A lot has changed since then but the circumstances that somewhat inspired it have only gotten worse. I stand by it.

For more on early Rome’s “sturdy race of peasant warriors,” see the Kenneth Minogue quotation here. And I didn’t post about it at the time, but I reviewed Lernet-Holenia’s haunting novella Baron Bagge at Miller’s Book Review last month. Check that out here.

* Sketch idea: A bunch of Romans from, say, the 2nd century AD protest a statue of Cincinnatus. A reporter interviews a pedagogue, who lays out how problematic the story of Cincinnatus is. His farm stood on land stolen from the Etruscans, and the Senate didn’t even allow women. In the studio, a panel of pundits expand the scope to condemn Scipio Africanus, Augustus, and both ends of the line of Brutus. While they fulminate against the ancients, a band of mustachioed Cherusci from the Praetorian Guard enter the studio and, well…

Summer reading 2025

My reading has tipped more toward fiction than non-fiction for the last couple years, and this summer may be the most fiction-heavy season yet. I try to read at whim, but I plan to correct that a little this fall. I have a lot of good history and biography sitting around, waiting. In the meantime, I enjoyed a lot of good books this summer, and the following—presented in no particular order—are my favorites. As always, I hope y’all can find something here to enjoy.

For the purposes of this blog post, “summer” runs from mid-May to Labor Day. And, as usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

The Cannibal Owl, by Aaron Gwyn—A short, beautifully written Western novella based on a real person, an orphan boy taken in and raised by Comanches who nevertheless becomes their destructor. This story defies easy summary but is totally absorbing and breathtakingly dramatic. One of the rare short books I’ve actually wished were longer.

A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D MacDonald—An old friend of “salvage consultant” Travis McGee pays a visit after several years’ absence and shows him a solid gold Aztec idol. He also asks McGee to set up a meeting with Nora, the girlfriend he unceremoniously abandoned, and is unceremoniously killed. In the aftermath, Nora hires McGee to investigate the provenance of the idol, where the rest of the treasure his friend mentioned has disappeared to, and who had him killed. McGee, eager to avenge his friend, travels to luxury villas in Mexico and the estates of pervy millionaires in California and gets entangled with the illicit antiquities trade, killer guard dogs, multiple women, and Cuban exiles along the way. Gripping throughout.

Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s first postwar novel. A British playwright is recruited to report on the Stalinist show trial of a leftwing anti-Communist in an unnamed Eastern European state just after the end of World War II, as the Iron Curtain falls and Soviet puppet governments consolidate control and eliminate rivals. Intricately plotted and, unfortunately, all too realistic. Full review on the blog here.

The Schirmer Inheritance, by Eric Ambler—Ambler’s second postwar novel, a legal thriller in which American lawyer George Carey attempts to find the heir to a fortune with tangled roots the Napoleonic Wars. The last surviving descendant of a Bavarian soldier who deserted following a battle against Napoleon has died intestate, and before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania seizes the inheritance they must first confirm that there are no other potential heirs. As it turns out, there may be one—a German soldier who went missing in Greece near the end of World War II, but hasn’t been confirmed dead. Carey must either him or confirm that he was killed by guerrillas. His search will take him across Europe and closer and closer to danger. I read this one before Judgment on Deltchev, and while that is clearly the superior novel, The Schirmer Inheritance offers a solid, atmospheric slow-burn and the vintage Ambler pleasure of a glimpse into a complicated, unsettled, dangerous underworld.

The Looking Glass War, by John Le Carré—After a British agent retrieving a canister of film is run down by a car in Finland, the small, understaffed, impotent agency behind him attempts to run an infiltration operation in East Germany. The followup to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which Le Carré—somehow—feared made espionage look too glamorous and exciting, this is a story of confusion and futility. Be prepared for that. It sags just a bit in the middle but has exceptionally gripping opening and closing chapters. Le Carré at his best still astonishes me with how effortlessly his novels read.

The Properties of Rooftop Air, by Tim Powers—A powerfully creepy novella set in the subterranean world of Regency London before the events of The Anubis Gates, which I read this spring. A satisfying and meaningful self-contained story.

The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin—A subtle and clever Odyssey for the age of presidents (instead of gods) and terrorists (instead of monsters). A US Navy officer in a dead-end career oversees the construction of a last-of-its-class small ship, and falls in love with a lawyer whose husband has abandoned her. His daring and courage and her commitment will be tested when he and his new ship, the USS Athena, deploy to the Indian Ocean to fight Iran, Somali pirates, and ISIS. Full review on the blog here.

Favorite non-fiction

Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard, by CM Kushins—After Nicholas Shakespeare’s recent Ian Fleming biography and an older Poe biography back in the spring, I read two more big literary bios this summer, both new. One I had been anticipating, but this one, a new authorized biography of Elmore Leonard, was a great surprise. I learned about it only the week before it was published, and was gifted a copy by the publisher. It’s excellent—a comprehensive cradle-to-grave account that pays close attention to Leonard’s life, career, and craft. I especially appreciated the latter: Kushins notes key influences on Leonard’s imagination and writing at different stages of his life (especially crucial: All Quiet on the Western Front as a boy, For Whom the Bell Tolls as a young writer, The Friends of Eddie Coyle just as he pivoted from Westerns to crime) as well as his writing process. The book is also full of delightful stories: Leonard the Seabee sending coy letters to an old friend from the South Pacific, Leonard the ad man writing longhand in his desk drawer at work, Leonard, in mounting frustration, working on film adaptations with the mercenaries and prima donnas of Hollywood. The one area I wish were covered in more detail is the personal. Kushins pays close attention to the young Leonard’s devout Catholic faith but, though we sense a change comes during his divorce in the early 1970s as well as his struggle toward sobriety, why he ended up agnostic is left unclear. That said, the otherwise solid coverage of his life and the thorough attention to his work is wonderful.

Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris—From Yale UP’s Jewish Lives series, this is a short biography of the Russian-born Sigmund (or possibly Solomon) Rosenblum who, as Sidney Reilly, spied off and on for the British before becoming a professional agent during the First World War and committing himself to the defeat of Bolshevism. This is an extraordinarily complicated story with lots of points of confusion, myth, and missing information, but Morris tells it well. There are longer biographies of Reilly out there, which I am going to seek out, but this offered a solid introduction to a tumultuous life.

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley—The other of the two big literary biographies I read this summer, Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe is comprehensive, sweeping, exhaustively researched, and combines a thorough account of Poe’s life with criticism of his work. Kopley demonstrates mastery of both, but has not grown too close to his subject; though charitable, especially toward Poe’s drinking and his feuds with other authors, which to some biographers smacks of jealousy or mere trolling, Kopley is not uncritical. He is especially good on Poe’s personal relationships, not only his fraught relationship with his foster father John Allan and his doomed wife Virginia, but also his friendships with other writers, childhood friends from Richmond, and the various women he loved both before and after Virginia. Kopley’s literary criticism is also insightful and thought-provoking. Though some of his interpretation is perhaps too autobiographical for my taste, I benefited greatly from his emphasis on structure and allegory, especially in Poe’s early work. This is probably the most thorough life of Poe that I’ve read, but is also probably too long and detailed for the casual Poe fan. But for anyone with more than passing interest in the subject I highly recommend it.

Julius Caesar: A Biography, by John Buchan—A succinct overview not only of its subject but of his life and times, with a special concern for the decline and collapse of republican institutions. See below for a link to the full John Buchan June review.

John Buchan June

This year for John Buchan June I emphasized Buchan’s short fiction, reading three collections of stories. I also read one of his short biographies and three novels, including his first full-length historical adventure. Here are all eight of this year’s reads, each linked to the full review here on the blog, in order of reading:

• The Runagates Club (1928)

• John Burnet of Barns (1898)

• Julius Caesar: A Biography (1932)

• The Watcher by the Threshold (1902)

• A Prince of the Captivity (1933)

• The Courts of the Morning (1929)

• The Path of the King (1921)

Of these, The Path of the King, particularly its early stories set in the Middle Ages, may be my favorite, though “No-Man’s-Land” in The Watcher by the Threshhold is a stellar bit of creepiness. Of the full novels, I think the early, flawed, overlong, but hugely enjoyable John Burnet of Barns was my favorite.

After four years of this event I’m running low on Buchan novels but there’s more short fiction and I’ve barely touched his biographical work. Looking forward to next year!

Rereads

Reading Cooler than Cool got me to revisit a few of my favorite Elmore Leonard novels on my commute. I’d recommend any of these. And though I’m not sure how many times I’ve read The Hobbit, this is my second time through with the kids. A joy.

• Mr Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard*

• Hombre, by Elmore Leonard*

• Freaky Deaky, by Elmore Leonard*

• The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien

Looking ahead

I’m glad to say I’m already well into a couple of good reads for the fall, including Michael Palma’s recently published terza rima translation of my favorite book, The Divine Comedy, and I have a lot of classics lined up. I’m sure you’ll hear about some of them in the end-of-year recap. In the meantime, I hope y’all will check some of these out, and thanks as always for reading!

Judgment on Deltchev

Eric Ambler’s career as a novelist has two distinct phases. The first began in the mid-1930s with tense thrillers set in a Europe still coping with the effects of the First World War, not the least of which was the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian movements and the hulking influence of Soviet Russia. The second, in which Ambler resumed writing fiction after a break taken during the Second World War, began in the early 1950s and continued until his death.

Judgment on Deltchev is the first of this second phase, Ambler’s first novel since Journey into Fear eleven years before.

Published in 1951, Judgment on Deltchev takes place in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Foster, an English playwright, has been hired as a kind of stunt correspondent to attend the trial of “Papa” Deltchev in an unnamed Eastern European country. Prior to the war, Deltchev had been a mildly leftwing agrarian. During the war he had refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Following the war he attempted to prevent Soviet takeover and the installation of a Communist puppet government. Having failed, he is accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own people.

The novel begins as Foster arrives. His contact is Georghi Pashik, a shabby, unkempt international press agent whom Foster immediately dislikes. Foster feels guilty, telling himself that he is only repulsed by Pashik’s smell. But Pashik is shifty, passive aggressive, and manipulative, and his air of forced geniality both irritates and conceals much. It is not the first time Foster will delude himself.

The trial is a transparent fraud—a show trial. Foster, alive to the need of the new Stalinist regime to demolish Deltchev with lies and agitprop in order to prevent him being seen as a martyr, observes the scripted denunciations for a few days. At first Foster is impressed by Deltchev’s resolution in the face of mistreatment—he has been denied his diabetes medication by his jailers—but he gradually stops attending. Something about the trial suggests something in the charges is true. That bothers him. Further, it slowly becomes clear to Foster that the real story is outside the courtroom.

Foster meets Deltchev’s family: an impressive, haughty wife and a beautiful daughter, both under constant military guard. The daughter asks him to deliver a private message to a friend. When Foster arrives at the address, he finds a corpse, and someone else who has been stalking him.

Who is the dead man? Why was he killed? What has Foster gotten himself into? Intrigue, betrayal, an assassination plot—against whom? by whom?—the last remainders of a pre-war military secret society bent on revenge, spies for the regime among the other journalists, the lurking, looming influence of the Soviets, the inescapable threat of imprisonment, torture, and deportation, Pashik’s deceptive behavior, and attempts on Foster’s own life further complicate his simple reporting assignment.

Judgment on Deltchev is a good book. Well paced, suspenseful, its plausibly drawn fictitious environment creates an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that steadily builds, from the first chapter, through expert foreshadowing. It is striking that Ambler, after a decade away from novels, returned so immediately to form. That first phase of Ambler’s career described above, it must be said, produced the classics—Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios. The second phase begun by Judgment on Deltchev never quite approaches those heights of tension and excitement. And yet, from this novel on, they have something those earlier novels did not: perspective.

In Ambler’s novels of the 1930s, Soviet agents sometimes appear as allies. Never quite straightforwardly good guys, they still help the protagonists and are presented sympathetically—unlike the Nazi and Fascist agents or the cosmopolitan gangsters who oppose them. These characters are conventional anti-Fascist elements of the time. But as for so many others, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland clarified things for Ambler. Participation in the war and observation of Stalin’s brutal swallowing of Eastern Europe strengthened his convictions. Judgment on Deltchev reckons with the lies, envy, backstabbing, and tyranny imposed upon millions, ostensibly in their names, and the hollow legal theatre that consolidated these regimes.

The books following this one, the second-phase books, often have a more sweeping scope, suggesting the upheaval of entire regions—the wreck of post-war Germany and Greece in The Schirmer Inheritance and post-war Malaya and Indonesia in Passage of Arms, the Middle East of Palestinian terrorism in The Levanter—and taking place across longer, more intricate timelines. They also have an extra guardedness about them, seldom ending neatly, often with the protagonist’s name smeared as part of an agitprop campaign. The scale of the danger, somehow, has increased. This perspective, gained over Ambler’s decade away from his novels, enriches Judgment on Deltchev and even those later novels that quite don’t measure up to his greatest.

In Here Lies, Ambler reflects on his “happy return to writing thrillers” in this book. American reviews were mixed—readers there just wanted a rehash of The Mask of Dimitrios, apparently. His fellow Britons had a different reaction

In England, the letters I received about the book were all more or less abusive. I was a traitor in the class war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat’s-paw. One message was a single piece of used toilet paper. The single piece was a delicate touch, I thought; it spoke of careful premeditation.

Ambler had struck a nerve. He was doing something right.

Judgment on Deltchev feels a lot like one of Ambler’s earlier thrillers—the everyman protagonist who gets in over his head in a complicated foreign place—but crossed with Darkness at Noon and a dash of Animal Farm in earnestness and import. This is not just a good thriller, it has a clear-eyed vision of a time and place about which too many still deceive themselves.

The light on the leaves and so on

An aside about language, especially speech, giving shape to intelligence in a podcast I listened to over the weekend brought to mind the following exchange from “Unreal Estates,” the transcript of a discussion about science fiction between CS Lewis, Kingsley Amis (whose Lucky Jim I finally read back in the spring), and Brian Aldiss. Having brought up Lord of the Flies, which does not at first appear to be sci-fi but takes place in a World War III scenario, Lewis, Amis, and Aldiss continue:

AMIS: ‘Science-fiction’ is such a hopelessly vague label.

LEWIS: And of course a great deal of it isn’t science-fiction. Really it’s only a negative criterion: anything which is not naturalistic, which is not about what we call the real world.

ALDISS: I think we oughtn’t to try to define it, because it’s a self-defining thing in a way. We know where we are. You’re right though, about Lord of the Flies. The atmosphere is a science-fiction atmosphere.

LEWIS: It was a very terrestrial island; the best island, almost, in fiction. Its actual sensuous effect on you is terrific.

ALDISS: Indeed. But it’s a laboratory case——

AMIS: —isolating certain human characteristics, to see how they would work out——

LEWIS: The trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the detail of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life when you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves.

I seldom dare to disagree with Lewis’s critical judgment, but I think what he describes as a failure in The Inheritors is actually part of the point. Golding’s Neanderthal characters have alien minds, more passively attuned to nature: observing, scavenging, improvising. The Homo sapiens who wipe them out are active. Their approach is exploitive: they see, control, and make use of.

The third-person narration reflects this. Lok, the viewpoint character for much of the novel, struggles even to see the potential resources that the Homo sapiens use, and then cannot understand how they are using them against him. Cf every instance in which the humans shoot arrows at him, an event he never understands but learns to fear. The “signal” in his signal-noise ratio is easily lost because that is how he perceives the world. His senses are less discriminatory. He is part of nature in a way modern man—who can compartmentalize, think abstractly, and then use—is not.

It’s interesting that Lewis used the example of “the light on the leaves,” given prevailing theories about the human eye’s capacity for differentiating shades of green and the fact that Lok spends the most horrific passages of The Inheritors hiding in a tree, seeing but not understanding. The book’s feverish tone is part of the nightmare.

“Unreal Estates” is collected in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature—an old favorite, and well worth your time. I reviewed The Inheritors here two years ago. It’s a great novel and one I’d very much like to revisit soon. I have to wonder whether Lewis ever gave it a second reading as he was, by his own admission in “Unreal Estates,” much more perceptive of an author’s intentions upon multiple readings.