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!

Back in ’82

Our first glimpse of Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) in Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Just about this time a couple years ago, I reflected on the pain and melancholy running through some old kids’ films like Angels in the Outfield and The Land Before Time. I’ve been pondering that again thanks to an unlikely film: Napoleon Dynamite, which I introduced to my kids over the weekend.

Napoleon Dynamite, like I noted about those other movies, is not Shakespeare or serious drama, but it’s well enough made and true enough to life to suggest more upon repeat viewings—especially when those viewings are separated by a decade or so. It’s been at least fifteen years since I watched it. When I last saw it in my twenties, it was pure quirky goofiness, like Mormon Wes Anderson costumed by a rural thrift store. Watching it with my kids in my early forties, I was not surprised to laugh again—especially since my kids thought it was a such a hoot—but I was surprised at how sweet, poignant, and melancholy I found it.

There’s a lot of unremarked upon pain in Napoleon Dynamite. Why do Napoleon and Kip live with their grandma? Where are their parents? How long has it been like this? Years, to judge by Napoleon’s behavior. His diaphragm-deep sighs are both hilarious and suggestive of repeated disappointment and frustration. Pedro, too, as comically stoic as he is, panics at least twice in the movie and develops psychosomatic fevers. They’re both holding a lot in. One sympathizes.

But there is also the case of Uncle Rico. He’s one of the movie’s sort-of villains, but is perhaps more fully developed than almost all of the other characters and actually talks about his melancholy several times. We learn that he is separated from Tammy, who is presumably his wife. His bluff, cocky way of dismissing Kip’s concern is funny when you’re in your twenties and suggests he’s hiding something—his own misbehavior, or simply how much it hurts—in your forties. He approaches his pitiful door-to-door Tupperware sales job with a confidence that smacks of desperation. He’s trying, but trying to do what?

The movie backs all this up visually. It introduces Uncle Rico utterly alone, in a beautiful and desolate landscape shot. His weird behavior only underlines what we grasp intuitively. And his first substantial scene, eating steak on the steps with Kip, gives us his “Back in ’82” monologue, which is hilariously pathetic, recognizable (the guy who peaked in high school is such a well known type he would be a cliche if he weren’t real), and sad. Uncle Rico is lonely and filled with regret—the football memories are just the way he can safely handle it.

It helps immensely that Jon Gries is a good actor. Watch him in that scene and look at the emotions that pass over his face. As with so much else in the movie, it’s both funny and poignantly done.

Not that Uncle Rico should be viewed more sympathetically. He’s a manipulative con man and liar who turns into a creep as the movie goes on. If this were his story rather than Napoleon’s, it’d be about hitting rock bottom. But at my age Uncle Rico is less of a joke than he used to be. He’s a there but for the grace of God caricature who proves both poignant and cathartic to laugh at.

I don’t want to get too far up the movie’s own tail end, because Napoleon Dynamite is a comedy. But part of what makes it funny is how identifiable it is—at least for those of us who were awkward and frustrated in high school. And, like all great comedies, that seam of melancholy only makes the humor deeper and richer and its little notes of redemption, as for Uncle Rico, to whom Tammy returns in the final seconds, more moving.

In Dilbert memoriam

A childhood favorite. some of my interests have never changed.

I’m late to the game in memorializing Scott Adams, who died a week ago today, and can offer only a personal appreciation. I hadn’t kept up with him consistently for about twenty years and heard of him just often enough to be amused at what he was getting up to. When I heard of his terminal illness last year and his plans to seek assisted suicide, I was grieved.

But to begin in the proper place. I was a comics-loving kid and while I was aware of Dilbert, which came packaged with all my favorites in my grandparents’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Anderson Independent, I don’t know how often I actually read it. My fundamental sense of what comic strips were came from Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and—for one-panel high strangeness—The Far Side. These are still the three highest peaks in my estimation of the form. Dilbert was of a different world and valence than these, and its subjects and artwork probably didn’t immediately appeal.

But sometime in the mid-90s I got a new classmate at my small Christian school. I already owe one lifelong debt to Clint because he told me about this short story he had read at his previous school, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and accidentally introduced me to Poe, but he was also a huge fan of Dilbert. I remember him bringing a copy of Fugitive from the Cubicle Police—the politically correct title for what in the strip itself is referred to as the Cubicle Gestapo—to read between classes. His enthusiasm and the specific strips he shared with me from this book led me to look closer at Dilbert. It was soon a favorite.

It’s a testament to Adams’s genius that a couple of twelve-year olds could have found Dilbert’s workplace humor so funny. For us Dilbert was essentially fantasy literature, full of strange races and the vocabulary of forbidden tongues. I had no idea what HR was (those were the days) or what a consultant or software engineer did or what any of the office-specific jargon and tech lingo of the mid-90s actually meant, but we floated along on the vibes and characterization, inferring the meaning and import of jokes. Adams was very good at this. His skill with story, characterization, and the crucial timing of written humor meant our lack of experience of this world posed no obstacle to understanding—and laughing. We got the point even when we didn’t get the reference.

The chapter on office pranks was not especially helpful job preparation for a middle-schooler

Soon I had a respectable stack of Dilbert books, including one that worked as a key to Dilbert’s world and appealed to my Aristotelian love of taxonomy: Seven Years of Highly Defective People, a best-of sorted by character with notes by Adams in the margins. These were informative and funny and his personality came through clearly.

I got to know that better by signing up—again, this is still the mid or late 90s—for his e-mail newsletter, which automatically made me part of the DNRC: Dogbert’s New Ruling Class, the intellectual elite of his forthcoming new world order. Here Adams offered updates and commentary and responded to reader e-mails with a brimful serving of his wry snark. It was here, I think, or perhaps in The Joy of Work, one of his non-cartoon books on business culture, that I learned the word cynical.

I was in middle school by then (I remember reading The Dilbert Future on my first trip to Europe in 1998, not quite fourteen) and that’s a heady moment to be introduced to cynicism. Not that it wouldn’t naturally have occurred about that time, but I’m not sure learning that one could adopt a self-aware, sardonic, Olympian aloofness about one’s environment was helpful to me. I’m already bent, in Malacandran terms, in these directions anyway, and Dilbert encouraged me to adopt a more self-conscious and ironic posture strictly because it was funny. This cynicism was, ironically, quite naive.

Perhaps this would have been fine in a Sisyphean office environment, but at fourteen my environments were family, church, and school, fields where earnestness is actually warranted—most of the time. Because I learned cynicism as a way of humor about the same time I learned that, as a true believer, I would often be let down, I learned to use wry humor as a shield. I don’t think Dilbert did me any long-term damage but I’ve had to mature past these attitudes and habits.

Back to Adams himself and the DNRC. The Dilbert newsletter was probably my first experience of a writer opening up his mind to his readers. In addition to cartooning, the business world, and the vast intellectual superiority of his subscribers, Adams unironically flogged his vegetarian taco brand and his thought experiments—another phrase I learned from him. He shared a lot of the ideas he’d eventually package as God’s Debris. I may have been naive but I wasn’t suggestible and wouldn’t follow the funny man into woo-woo agnosticism. I had accidentally learned how to observe proper boundaries with people I liked but couldn’t agree with on the important stuff, a lesson I can take no credit for. It also won’t be the last appearance of grace in this story.

I kept up with Dilbert online through college—it was one of several strips I checked daily—but Adams himself, whom I admired as the off-kilter mind behind the cartoon, fell out of my awareness and I was content simply to read the strip. Somewhere between my undergrad and grad school years I lost the habit even of this, so it was a shock to run across it occasionally and see updates. Dilbert in polo and lanyard? That would have been unthinkable in 1998. (But guess what I wear to work every day.)

I have no opinion on Adams and politics. When he popped up on my radar over the last ten years saying contrarian things to the great consternation of a lot of people, I was unsurprised. Hadn’t y’all met him? He was a contrarian. If he hadn’t been, Dilbert would never have had the edge and absurdity that made it great. It would have been Cathy in a software company.

But to return to where I started, when Adams announced his imminent death from pancreatic cancer and his plans to end his own life, I was grieved. I remembered my mixed feelings about his dorm room-style philosophizing, his know-it-all pandeism, his air of superiority—in a word, his arrogance, a trait that attracts middle schoolers like a whirlpool attracts flotsam—and worried that his gifts would end in a final act of nihilism as dark as anything in Catbert’s HR department. What I did not do was hope or pray for him.

I am in no position to weigh the merit of Adams’s announcement of his conversion to Christianity just before he died last week. The various algorithms have tried to feed me a lot of videos—all with thumbnails of frantic, outraged people mugging in front of microphones—arguing yea or nay on his reasons. What I do know is that Adams was facing death, the ultimate argument-ender, and these podcasters are not, and that God is not willing that any should perish. In a history replete with sinners converting in the most miserable of conditions, how is God diminished by saving one more? What I felt when I learned of his decision, a Pascal’s Wager deathbed conversion, was relief and gratitude.

Again, these are my observations as an old fan who, after childhood, held Adams at arm’s length but always appreciated him. Dilbert’s peculiar sense of humor is a key middle-layer of the development of my own sensibilities, and Adams’s genius was the same as that that made Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side great—the ability to heighten the ordinary while keeping it familiar, to people his imaginary landscape with characters we recognize as our friends, family, coworkers, and ourselves, to make this hilarious, and to do it seemingly effortlessly. Also like Schulz, Watterson, and Larson, he was, for better or worse, uncompromising. That his complicated story and difficult personality ended with not just a turn toward grace but a casting of himself on God makes it all the more poignant.

Adams’s story seems to me one of eucatastrophe, of grace snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It is not a story Adams would have written. Is there any better end for the cynic than redemption?

1970s comment sections

See what this passage from Dave Barry’s recent memoir Class Clown in which he recounts his experiences working at a local daily newspaper as a young reporter in the early 1970s reminds you of:

“I also learned a lot about what readers of a local newspaper are, and are not, interested in. You could make a major mistake in a story about a meeting of a zoning board and never hear a peep from the readers about it. But if you, in writing a photo caption, misidentified a goose as a duck (I did this), you would hear about it from literally dozens of readers, some of them quite irate. And if the newspaper should ever—God forbid—leave out the daily horoscope, the phones would not stop ringing.”

I’ve given it away in the title of this post, of course, but this reminds me of nothing so much as trying to communicate on the internet. Majoring on the minors, mindlessly angry criticism, even astrology—there is nothing new under the sun. And there’s that famous bit of internet advice that, if in need of information, you shouldn’t directly ask for it, but instead make an incorrect assertion on the topic and watch the corrections pour in from the Actually guys.

Just in case we forget that technology seldom introduces entirely new bad behavior, it just amplifies it. And Barry has tons and tons of these stories.

Class Clown is a great read, by the way—funny throughout, often moving, it offers both a fun capsule overview of Barry’s life and about fifty years of journalism and culture.

Mr Bennet’s library

I’m currently reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my wife every night before bed. Though I know the story well, this is the first time I’ve actually read it since college probably eighteen years ago. As much as you can appreciate Austen’s wit, goodness, and insight, there is nothing like actually reading her work to blow you away.

It’s also easy to forget, in a world full of imitators that feature the trappings of Austen’s world but not the wit, goodness, and insight—and are increasingly skanky, to boot—how fantastically funny Austen is. It’s hard for me to get through a chapter because I’m constantly laughing.

Last night we read some of the choicest early chapters featuring Mr Collins. After finding Mr Collins “as absurd as he had hoped,” Mr Bennet is stuck with a living, breathing, rapidly aging joke in his house. Specifically his library. This is bothersome to Mr Bennet, because, as Austen tells us:

“In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there.”

Sarah and I agreed to have that made into a nice sign for our own office/library door.

Sandbrook, Anglo-Saxons, and mad Americans

I think I’ve said all that I want to say (here and here) about the academic controversy surrounding the term Anglo-Saxon, but I wanted to acknowledge one more news item about it and an appropriate response from a favorite historian.

Earlier this month Cambridge announced that Anglo-Saxon England, the preeminent academic journal in the field, was changing its name to Early Medieval England and its Neighbors. This comes, as Samuel Rubinstein noted at The Critic, during a seeming lull in the Anglo-Saxon wars, one that had suggested to Rubinstein that the controversy had finally petered out.

But after Grendel comes Grendel’s mother, and between institutional inertia and the unsleeping restlessness of intersectional ideology, such a name-change—even if too late to please the activists originally fulminating against the term—was probably inevitable. Perhaps we can look forward to academic presses changing the titles of the thousands of old studies, monographs, and histories using Anglo-Saxon on their covers.

But as Luther said, in a line used by Lewis as an epigraph to The Screwtape Letters, “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” And so Rubinstein linked to this great response to Cambridge’s Twitter announcement from Dominic Sandbrook:

Hear hear.

“A handful of mad Americans” is exactly right. As I noted in my original post on this subject, the chief activity of the small, insular, pettifogging, puritanical, ruthlessly status seeking, and ideologically captive American academy today seems to be to export American neuroses to the rest of the world—ideologically colonizing foreigners and demanding conformity and obedience. This observation isn’t original to me, but it aptly describes the situation. It’s embarrassing. More mockery and an occasional firm “no” to the tiny number of activist scholars who push this kind of thing could help tremendously.

I remarked recently on the irony of mentioning Sandbrook and The Rest is History here only when I had a problem with him, which is rarely, so I wanted to make sure I noted this model reaction to academic nonsense. May his tribe increase.

Read Rubinstein’s latest on the controversy here. And get yourself a good book about the Anglo-Saxons that doesn’t dither over the term Anglo-Saxon. Here’s a good recent one, and here’s a great old one.

An annoyance of collective nouns

Last week First Things posted an article by George Weigel on “terms of venery,” that is, collective nouns, especially those used of groups of animals. There are a lot of them. Weigel cites “a pomp of Pekinese,” “a tower of giraffes,” “an ostentation of peacocks,” and “a murmuration of starlings”—among many others—as favorites, and writes that “an exaltation of larks,” which is also the name of a book on these words by the late James Lipton, “may be as good as the venereal game gets.” Veneral being an approximate adjective form of venery, just so we’re clear.

I’ve actually mulled writing about terms of venery for a long time, since the very early days of this blog. But I’ve avoided doing so for a long time because I try to keep this blog relatively positive and these words just plain bug me. So permit me a half-serious rant.

These collective nouns bug me in the way lots of twee, intentionally precious things do, even where they’re meant as jokes—as many of these terms clearly are. (So much so that joke collective nouns have persistently been mistaken for “real” ones, “a congress of baboons” being the best example. This raises the question of who actually gets to decide which of these things is official.)

Which is not to say that some animals don’t have odd collective nouns. Some are quite ancient. Fish move in a school, for instance, because in Old English such a group was called a scolu. The modern alternative shoal is likely the direct descendent of that word and is pronounced almost the same. It’s a strange linguistic accident that it came to resemble the Latinate school. A few others go a ways back as hunting jargon, the professional shop vocabulary of gamekeepers on the estates of the landed aristocracy. But there’s no earthly reason anyone should called a flock of starlings a murmuration.

I didn’t have strong feelings about this until I read an otherwise good novel by a contemporary Southern novelist who used three of the outlandish bird-related ones—I remember a murmuration and a murder—within a few pages of each other during a dramatically and thematically important funeral scene. I was so distracted and irritated that I swore off such terms altogether.

So as far as I’m concerned, and regardless of species, birds gather in flocks, larger mammals in herds, predators in packs, fish in schools. I may not get the lip-pursing amusement of writing about obstinacies and ostentations when some buffalo or peacocks blunder into a scene, but at least I won’t distract the reader.

Weigel ends his article by proposing some new terms of venery to go along with the better established ones. I’d like to end this post by proposing one of my own—a collective noun for groups of collective nouns: an annoyance.

Dr Strangelove versus technocracy

Peter Sellers as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake in Dr Strangelove

Last week I showed my US History II students one of my favorite movies: Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. While the usual points of discussion of Dr Strangelove are the Cold War policies and theories that inspired it—the arms race, brinkmanship, deterrence, paranoia, and most especially mutual assured destruction—for years now I’ve noted a more subtle strain of critique running through the film: the false promise of technology and technocratic leadership.

Having gone rogue and radioed his wing of nuclear-armed B-52s “the go code” without authorization from the President or the Pentagon, Gen Jack D Ripper can wait in satisfaction for his men to breach the peace and commit the US to all-out war because he is the only person in the world who can communicate with the bomber crews. This is thanks to the CRM-114 “discriminator” on the radio, which blocks out any transmission missing a three-letter code prefix. While the bomb is the most obvious technological threat in the film, it is communications technologies, technologies meant to connect and to facilitate greater understanding, that most stymie the characters in their efforts to recall Ripper’s bombers.

Kubrick plays with some rich irony here. Radio communication with the bombers is blocked thanks to the CRM-114, but Ripper also barricades himself inside his headquarters, won’t answer the phone, and impounds even the privately owned radios on his base. During the US Army’s frantic attempt to shoot their way in, capture Ripper, and put him on the phone with the President, the phone lines are cut.

All but one: a Bell pay phone, through which Group Captain Mandrake—perhaps the only sane character in the film, and who spends most of the movie frightened out of his mind in Ripper’s office—attempts to call the Pentagon only to be blocked by an unhelpful operator.

Technology surrounds every character, insulating them from each other and limiting not only the options available to them but even the options they can imagine. Not for nothing is Mandrake introduced in the midst of a massive bank of IBM computers (see the imagine above), staring at a continuous feed of printed data. The President and the Joint Chiefs in the War Room depend entirely on “the big board,” an electronic map of Russia marked with the bombers’ targets and flight paths, for information about what’s happening outside. The film’s climax begins when they learn that some the information presented on the board is incorrect. And Dr Strangelove both enters and exits the film talking about computers—first to explain how the Soviet doomsday machine works, and at the end to describe a potential method of selecting suitable survivors to go into hiding. The latter comes after the doomsday machine has already been triggered and everyone on earth has mere minutes to live.

The saddest aspect of the film is the way the technological trap US leadership has walked into rubbishes the virtues of the men in their charge. Rippers’s men and the US Army troops sent to capture him shoot it out with each other and even die, both in the belief that they’re the good guys.

But the point is made clearest with B-52 pilot Maj Kong. Though played by comedic actor Slim Pickens, Kong is the film’s straight man. (Supposedly Kubrick never told Pickens that the movie was a comedy and Pickens treated the role as a serious thriller lead.) He is visibly bothered to receive the go code and treats his mission in deadly earnest. As far as he knows, flying in a vast sky of ignorance thanks—again—to the communication blackout, the US is under attack and he and his men may be the country’s only defense. He unironically invokes patriotism and pluralism to buck up his crew and navigates his plane with immense ingenuity and courage. In any other story Kong and his men would be the heroes. But their flight is ironic comedy gold because of the situation created for them by leaders that trusted too much in technology to do their judgment for them.

The ideology and amoral strategizing of the Cold War creates the scenario depicted in the film, but it is technology that keeps it moving toward destruction regardless of the characters’ increasingly panicked attempts to prevent it. Dr Strangelove’s most famous attribute—alien hand syndrome, which allows his right hand to operate independently, not to mention embarrassingly—works as a neat visual metaphor for the entire situation: an amoral genius who cannot control his own body. The machines are in charge.

Perhaps the most telling line in the film comes from Gen Buck Turgidson, when he is first briefing the President on the situation: “I admit the human element seems to have failed us here.” Pesky humans.

If not an intentional critique, Dr Strangelove at least gives pride of place to technology as one of the causes of the accidental nuclear war that obliterates the world at the end. Given the realistic short-sightedness, love of technology for its own sake, and self-serving foolishness of most of the characters, it presents a good argument against depending technology to make our decisions for us.

But then again, Dr Strangelove came out sixty years ago. The bombers are probably already past their fail-safe points.

Wildcat trailer reaction

Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat

As I noted in my 2023 movie year-in-review, Wildcat is one of the films I’ve been looking forward to this year. Though it was completed and premiered at a film festival last year I hadn’t heard any news about its distribution or release until yesterday, when a great trailer appeared on YouTube.

Wildcat takes place over a short stretch of the early 1950s, when young writer Flannery O’Connor (Maya Hawke) moves back home to Milledgeville, Georgia and is diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father when she was sixteen. While struggling with her illness and its severe effects she tries to sell her first novel, a searing Southern gothic religious fable called Wise Blood. Like her short stories, it’s deeply Catholic and Southern and poignant in the sense of sharp, cutting. It’s a hard sell.

It’s unclear from the trailer precisely how much of O’Connor’s life Wildcat covers, but there are scenes suggesting her time among the literary elite in the northeast in the late 1940s, after she had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and when she was laboring over Wise Blood. The trailer suggests a strong contrast between the world O’Connor leaves behind and the clay-banked roads and nosy church ladies back home in Georgia—a contrast O’Connor was certainly aware of and wrote about.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing in the trailer are the scenes from several of her short stories—”Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Revelation,” and especially “Good Country People”—in which O’Connor and her mother Regina (Laura Linney) play major characters like the cynical Hulga or the self-righteous Mrs Turpin. Catching even short glimpses of scenes I’ve imagined many times—a crowded doctor’s office waiting room, a Bible salesman running across a field carrying a prosthetic leg—got me excited in a way I haven’t felt for a movie in a while. Apparently these are intricately intertwined with the events of O’Connor’s real life. I’m curious to see how this works, especially since it’s so easy for a film about a writer to slip into the biographical fallacy (or what CS Lewis called The Personal Heresy): the idea that everything a writer writes is based on his or her actual experiences.

But I’m most pleased to see that Wildcat takes O’Connor’s Christianity seriously. Apparently Ethan Hawke, who directed and co-wrote the film, was inspired to make it when he read the Prayer Journal that O’Connor kept as a writing student in Iowa. O’Connor, in addition to being a brilliant writer, was prickly, hard-edged, had a chip on her shoulder as an outsider in the postwar literary world, and was fervently orthodox and devout. Her faith suffuses her work not only coincidentally but by design. Wildcat’s trailer manages to evoke all of this. Here’s hoping that the full film delivers.

A few other notes:

• The Southern accents sound pretty good. O’Connor was originally from Savannah and, though recordings of her remind me a lot of my paternal grandmother, an Athens native, O’Connor’s speech has some peculiarities that must be down to her roots, Savannah having some distinctive dialect features even by Southern standards. Listen to her read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” sometime.

• I’m interested to see how the film explores what some people perceive as O’Connor’s cruelty (“Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to stick pins in your readers,” her editor says in the trailer). The question of just how unpleasant a writer can or should make the reader feel in order to make a point has concerned me for a long time.

• Maya Hawke looks a lot more like O’Connor than I would have guessed was possible based on what I’ve seen of her in “Stranger Things” and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kudos to her and the film’s hair and makeup folks.

• I like the cinematography a lot. It’s clearly digital but has some creative composition choices and lens work—e.g. the way the focus and bokeh fall off at the edges off the frame, which reminds me of The Batman. A distinctive look will probably help support O’Connor’s story and give it the otherworldly feel it will probably need.

• Wildcat was apparently shot mostly in Kentucky rather than Georgia. From what I can see in the trailer it looks like a good stand-in, though it’s funny to me that, with so many movies shooting in Georgia as a substitute for more expensive locales, such a Georgia-centric story wound up being shot elsewhere.

It’s striking, having watched the trailer several times now, how present O’Connor’s crutches are. The final “coming soon” shot of O’Connor at the family mailbox, which has been one of the only images available for a while, has them plainly visible but I never noticed them. And there they are behind her as she types up a manuscript or struggles even to walk around the house. Some early film festival reviews I’ve read suggest that Wildcat is not just a story about a writer publishing a novel but a meditation on suffering, the threat of death, and God’s grace. I’m here for it.

Wildcat is currently scheduled for a big-city release on May 3 with wider availability to follow, though I haven’t been able to find any details about that yet. Hopefully we can look forward to a time in the late spring or early summer when we can catch Flannery O’Connor in theatres.

Sturgeon Wars

Last week some of the staff writers at National Review, of all places, had an amusing exchange of views on the current state of Star Wars. It began when one wrote of being “Star Wars-ed out.” Another seconded that feeling and drew an analogy with the Marvel movies: both are series that have decreased in quality as the suits behind them have produced more and more “content.” Yet another followed up specifically critiquing the trilogy produced by Disney while rightly reserving some small praise for Rogue One.

But the best and most incisive perspective came from Jeffrey Blehar, who with aggressive indifference toward everything since Return of the Jedi forty years ago, mildly suggested that not much of Star Wars is any good. Dissect and fuss over the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the Disney+ shows, and cartoon shows and novels and comics and video games however you want, none of it is as good as the original trilogy and most of it is terrible. In fact, the best thing to come of Star Wars since 1983 is Mr Plinkett.

I mostly agree (and wholeheartedly agree about Mr Plinkett), and that’s because I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. In its simplest formulation, Sturgeon’s Law states that:

“90% of everything is crap.”

For several years now I’ve been saying that Sturgeon’s Law applies just as much to Star Wars as to anything else, it’s just that Star Wars got its 10% of quality out of the way first. What they’ve been producing ever since is, well…

I have ideas about why this is, including but by no means limited to Disney’s desperately overvalued purchase of the rights to the series and—probably more importantly—its merchandising, executive mismanagement, ideological capture of the filmmakers, oversaturation (speaking of Marvel), and of course simple artistic failure. But there are three more fundamental problems that I’ve seen with Star Wars over the last couple decades.

One is that everyone forgot that Star Wars was lightning in a bottle. The original film didn’t emerge fully formed from George Lucas’s head like a nerd Athena, it was the product of a difficult production, a demanding shoot, and a host of other limitations. The many points of friction in the production required genuine creativity to solve, not least from a brilliant editor and one or two real creative geniuses like Ben Burtt and John Williams. But the very success of Star Wars meant that the circumstances that shaped the originals have not recurred. Everything since has been greased by money, money, money, and the synthetic smoothness of the prequel and sequel trilogies allowed bad or incomplete or incoherent story ideas to slide straight through into the finished films.

Second and relatedly, with one or two exceptions the fans and producers of Star Wars drifted into a category error regarding what kind of stories these are. Star Wars since Return of the Jedi has been treated like fantasy set in space. Mr Plinkett, among many others, has noted the ridiculous and gratuitous multiplication of planets, species, vehicles, and everything else since The Phantom Menace. But Star Wars wasn’t originally fantasy—it was a Boomer pastiche of westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, World War II movies, Flash Gordon serials, and a film school dweeb’s skimming of Joseph Campbell. As Star Wars quickly became the cultural remit of younger generations and more and more Star Wars “content” was churned out, those referents were lost to all except the buffs and nerds. The galaxy far, far away came to be treated as an infinitely expandable object of “world-building” when it is and always was an assemblage of spare parts.

I don’t mean that dismissively. Being made of spare parts is not necessarily a bad thing. The originals are greater than the sum of their parts, and it’s worth pointing out that the handful of new Star Wars material that tried to tap directly into some of what inspired Lucas—war movies about ill-fated missions in Rogue One, westerns in the first season of “The Mandalorian”—were good. Eventually ruined by committee-think, but good.

The final problem, which brings us back around to Sturgeon’s Law, is that the fans allowed it, even demanded it. Having had that 10%, they gobbled up that 90% we’ve been getting since and kept wanting more. I know plenty of people have complained about the storytelling, the filmmaking, the behind-the-scenes drama, the ideological drift of the Disney films, and everything else, but for every Mr Plinkett or Critical Drinker on YouTube there are a thousand people who are satisfied with anything as long as it has the Star Wars logo on it. From archetypal storytelling to lifestyle brand—that’s the real Skywalker saga.

This is by no means unique to Star Wars fans, as some trends among purported Tolkien fans have made clear in the last couple years. But if people want to enjoy their favorite things again they need to regain their suspicion of corporations as well as remember the difference between quantity and quality.