The podcast Stasi

Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) at his listening post in Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Speaking of omnipotent moral busybodies, this short piece in the Atlantic, which profiles the mission and struggles of the people monitoring podcast content at Media Matters and other listening posts, came to my attention yesterday by way of Alan Jacobs’s blog. Jacobs’s pithy commentary caught my attention. He confesses his surprise at two things:

(a) that to many Americans it now seems normal for people to devote hundreds of hours of their lives to listening to one podcast solely in order to find something, anything that can be used to shame the podcaster; and (b) that the people who behave in that way think their actions are politically meaningful.

I highly recommend reading the Atlantic piece, as it provides a uniquely open and unashamed profile of people who seem utterly unaware that they are colossal, thundering creeps. Devoting hours and hours to listening (at 2x speed, since they are not only creepy but lazy*) to podcasts they don’t like, carefully cataloging offenses, filing bullet-pointed reports to be used as political ammunition, struggling with a workload based on ever-growing mountains of raw material, hoping for laws requiring podcasts to be transcribed and indexed for greater “accessibility,” and congratulating themselves for tackling such difficult but important work, they remind me of nothing so much as the Stasi.

The Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst or State Security Service) was the East German secret police. Far more powerful, pervasive, organized, and effective than the underfunded and understaffed but more infamous Gestapo, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the Stasi had vast, well-indexed archives covering the activities of over five million people, and one in four East Germans were working for them as informants.

But what reminded me of the Stasi wasn’t just the Atlantic’s subjects’ left-wing politics or their obsessive ferreting out of offense, but their work ethic—their startling willingness to do drudge work:

But going big and searching manually through the archives of any podcaster with a substantial back catalog requires not just time but motivation—an axe to grind, or at least an angle. “It was not a terribly glamorous reporting process. . . . It was not like what they show in the movies.” It was just sitting around listening to some guy talk.

I think it was that line that brought to mind the Stasi, and specifically the image of a small, quiet technician sitting in an attic, attentively listening—Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler in the magnificent film The Lives of Others. In that film, pointedly set in 1984, Wiesler is assigned to watch playwright Georg Dreyman, a seemingly loyal Party man who has used the stage for dour dramatic messaging about the oppression of capitalism but whom the authorities now suspect of subversion. The film is thorough in its depiction of the bugging process, of the cataloging and reporting of every bit of potentially relevant minutiae (right down to “Geschlechtsverkehr,” sexual intercourse, in one report), of the horrible consequences for everyone, and, above all, the listening. Wiesler and others take long shifts in Dreyman’s attic, just listening, staring at the walls as Dreyman’s life plays out through their headphones.

For Wiesler, this ends up being not only transformative but redemptive, and depicting this transformation is the great power of The Lives of Others. But for the people in this Atlantic piece?

I doubt it. Part of my pessimism in this regard is the striking tone† of the report, both on the part of the subjects and of the Atlantic’s writer—not just reportorial, though it is an informative profile; not just approving, though the listeners’ work is treated as obviously legitimate and their struggles as obstacles that must by any means be overcome; but participatory. The author inserts a revealing parenthetical late in the piece:

(As a sometimes-listener of the chat show How Long Gone—they get good guests and they’re always laughing together!—I have imagined what it would look like to CTRL+F the entire catalog for all of the hosts’ weird comments about fat people.)

There you have it. This is the behavior of bitter exes, of forum trolls, of the weird kids we knew in high school who actually kept enemies lists. Though this piece seeks to portray its subjects’ work as legitimate owing to the heinous threat posed by Joe Rogan (whom I don’t follow and have intentionally avoiding mentioning before now) and his “misinformation”‡—or racial slurs, or transphobia, or “sexist comments,” or whatever—it becomes clear at this point that this industry of Stasi hirelings is driven by personal animus.

Which shouldn’t be surprising—especially if you’ve seen The Lives of Others, in which it turns out that the government’s suspicions of Dreyman stem from a bureaucrat’s obsession with Dreyman’s girlfriend.

I’d say I’m less worried about this kind of thing since Media Matters et al are private organizations and the Stasi was a government agency. But we’re learning more all the time about the way the US government is doing internet-age versions of the same things the Stasi did, but, thanks to technology, on an even vaster scale, and we’re also seeing how little the government needs an agency like the Stasi when powerful corporations and self-appointed case agents will do this work virtually gratis, and answerable only to the mob.

I don’t have a lot of conclusions to draw or solutions to propose, but I do hope a disgust with this kind of thing can grow sufficiently strong and widespread to drive it out of existence. I hope, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the Stasi from books like Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, and I can’t recommend The Lives of Others highly enough. Watch it if you haven’t, and think.

Notes, asides, and remonstrations:

*Also stupid. “‘He is the most popular podcast host in the world,’ Paterson told me. Yet few not in Rogan’s intended audience ever hear most of the things he says.” Congratulations, you’ve discovered how an audience works.

†Another revealing choice of words: “This is not to say that podcast fans are incapable of criticizing the voices they spend so much time with—only that they’re also prone to forgiveness.” Note that, here, forgiveness is a bad thing.

‡I’m struck that there is so much debate now about misinformation, disinformation, and even malinformation, but very little reference to truth.

Against the clarity of caricature

Jeremy Black has a good succinct review of Allen Guelzo’s Robert E Lee: A Life at New Criterion, saying in a few words what I struggled to say in a couple thousand last fall. Black rightly notes the many strengths of Guelzo’s biography, as well as pointing out its weaknesses—ideological inflexibility and a refusal to acknowledge historical contingency, whether in Lee’s life or in the broader context of the United States’s history as a republic. For Guelzo, there is, with the benefit of hindsight, precisely one right answer to the one big question Lee had to answer on the fly, as events unfolded. Black mildly offers that “this approach is not completely helpful”:

Guelzo’s comments on treason look far less appropriate from the perspective of the events of 1775 and 1776, and this comparison was certainly one made by commentators at the time of the new civil war. One does not have to be a cynic to ask how far judgments would be different in each case had success been otherwise. This is obviously true if the most talented commanders of the American Revolution are assessed, notably Benedict Arnold and Charles Lee, as well as George Washington. This point raises comparable ones about assessment of the Civil War. So it is more generally when factors are taken for granted and treated outside any political context.

But it is one passing phrase from Black, in relating the fate of Richmond’s Lee monument, that most caught my attention. Noting that the statue has apparently been donated to a museum to be “transform[ed] . . . into a new work of art,” thus institutionalizing the vandalism of 2020, Black remarks that

“Robert E. Lee is one of so many swept from the complexity of life into the clarity of caricature.”

A phrase I’m going to hang onto.

Because the struggle between complexity and caricature is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Complexity is tough. People don’t know what to do with it. I’ve thought and written a lot about simplifying, reductionist accounts of history in the last several years, but what we’re really talking about is caricature: taking away complexity, exaggerating a handful of features—sometimes even just one feature. To continue with the example of Lee, here’s an apolitical anti-slavery Unionist who ends up in command of a Confederate army. That demands investigation and an attempt to understand. But a racist? Well, we know what to do with racists. And we move on to the next statue.

All of which brings Herbert Butterfield to mind, in a line I’ve shared here several times before because I think about it so often as I teach, trying to cram in as much real life complexity and understanding into the two and a half hours I get with my students per week:

“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”

— Herbert Butterfield

It’s a tightrope walk, but worth infinite pains.

In the meantime, I think the good, honest student of history could do little better than to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn: “Let the caricature come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Read Black’s full review at New Criterion here or at the link above. Compare the thoughts on a passage in Black’s Short History of War I shared last month here. And speaking of historical figures it’s fashionable to dunk on, I reviewed Black’s biography of George III for the Penguin Monarchs series on the blog last June, which you can look at here.

Omnipotent moral busybodies

Two quotations from dramatically different contexts that make the same broader point:

First—Orestes Brownson, in his essay “Liberalism and Progress,” October 1864. Brownson was a pro-Union, anti-slavery New Englander but was nevertheless impatient with the radical Puritan-descended ideologues surrounding him, radicals like the author of the unpublished manuscript to which he’s responding here, in which its author advocates “exterminating the southern leaders, and new-englandizing the South”—what in any other context would now be called cultural genocide. In this passage he critiques the culture that produces such men:

The New Englander has excellent points, but is restless in body and mind, always in motion, never satisfied with what he has, and always seeking to make all the world like himself, or as uneasy as himself. He is smart, seldom great; educated, but seldom learned; active in mind, but rarely a profound thinker; religious, but thoroughly materialistic: his worship is rendered in a temple founded in Mammon, and he expects to be carried to heaven in a softly-cushioned railway car, with his sins safely checked and deposited in the baggage crate with his other luggage, to be duly delivered when he has reached his destination. He is philanthropic, but makes his philanthropy his excuse for meddling with everybody's business as if it were his own, and under pretence of promoting religion and morality, he wars against every generous and natural instinct, and aggravates the very evils he seeks to cure.

Second—CS Lewis in “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” originally published in the Australian journal Twentieth Century in 1949 and collected in God in the Dock. Here Lewis argues forcefully that modern concepts of judicial rehabilitation are actually crueler than traditional imprisonment or corporal punishment:

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

To return to Brownson’s picture of the New England radical reformer:

He has his use in the community; but a whole nation composed of such as he would be short-lived, and resemble the community of the lost rather than that of the blest.

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon us. Food for thought.

Compare Brownson’s portrait of the 19th-century activist above with Ernst Jünger’s description in The Forest Passage of the modern mass-man—“he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence . . . whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system”—which I blogged about here. And for a paradigmatic modern busybody, see here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Macbeth (Denzel Washington) watches as King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson) greets Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth

As I noted a few weeks ago when ranking the Coen brothers’ films, I’ve been looking forward to The Tragedy of Macbeth. Not only is a Coen (Joel, flying solo) involved, Macbeth is by far my favorite Shakespeare. I’ve seen the full play several times. I’ve seen an excellent one-hour version performed by only four people. I’ve seen multiple film versions. So I’m glad to say that Joel Coen’s new film adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth is excellent.

I’ve wondered before whether I love Macbeth because it has many of the things that I like in a story—introspection, murder, revenge, a bold streak of the uncanny or supernatural, an eerie atmosphere redolent of unspeakable age, and a climax played out in a stack of corpses—or because Macbeth taught me to love Macbeth and to look for itself in any good story. Regardless, The Tragedy of Macbeth leans hard into the weird and uncanny elements of the play right from the beginning, with a contortionist witch prophesying to Macbeth and Banquo in the mist-gloomed aftermath of battle. Hailing Macbeth with a title he doesn’t possess, she predicts his rise to kingship and the future royalty of Banquo’s descendants and sets the plot in motion.

You should know the story, so I won’t belabor it. Joel Coen has done an excellent job of trimming the play to a brisk, fast-paced size (the whole movie, including credits, is well under two hours long) while still leaving in all the dynastic complications and the untidy genius of Shakespeare. Case in point: Stephen Root appears briefly as the drunken porter, a bawdy comic relief character whose one scene underscores the darkness surrounding it but that is often cut from more po-faced adaptations, such as the great-looking but overserious 2015 film starring Michael Fassbender. That scene doesn’t have to be there—certainly not in an hour-and-a-half version—but it’s good Shakespeare, and Coen transforms it into good film.

And while both condensing and remaining faithful to Shakespeare’s text, Coen still finds interesting things to do with the play and characters. Ross, one of a crowd of “Noblemen of Scotland” swelling the scene in the play, appears in surprising places, suggesting there is even more going on than the Macbeths’ scheming at the heart of the play. A final, wordless scene just before the credits, with Ross and another character unseen for a long time, also provokes questions—or at least the realization that killing Macbeth doesn’t mean the story is over.

But while the adaptation itself is well done, nicely tailoring the play to the dimensions of a film, it’s the visuals that really elevate The Tragedy of Macbeth. Stagey and sparse, shot in black and white and in the 1.37:1 full-frame aspect ratio of the era before widescreen, and chockablock with eerie images—ravens circling a battlefield, a single witch reflected twice in a pool, a ruined house by a twilit crossroads, a shower of leaves bursting through a window of Macbeth’s throneroom, the ramparts of a castle slashing through a sea of fog—the look of the film is key to its weirdness. I’ve seen the visual style here compared to German expressionism, but it reminded me most of film noir, especially in its use of contrast and sharp geometric compositions, and, in the film’s attention to faces in wide-angled closeup, the austere medieval vision of The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film in which vast landscapes and castles loom—but always in the background, always half-glimpsed through fog or shadow. Macbeth demands atmosphere, and The Tragedy of Macbeth drips with it.

The performances are excellent as well, with particularly good performances in small parts—a sure mark of a Coen’s touch. I liked Brendan Gleeson as King Duncan and Harry Melling as Malcolm, who make the most of their limited roles, and the aforementioned Stephen Root, who really hams it up as the porter. Alex Hassell’s Ross is also striking, an ambiguous presence whose intentions are often murky but who always seems like a threat. And Corey Hawkins is excellent as Macduff; when Macduff learns that his wife and children have been murdered, Hawkins’s performance moved me to tears.

Macduff: What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / at one fell swoop?
Malcolm: Dispute it like a man.
Macduff: I shall do so; / but I must also feel it as a man.

Hawkins’s Macduff also presents a credible physical threat to Macbeth when their final confrontation comes, and their one-on-one duel on the walls of Dunsinane Castle is tense and surprisingly brutal.

Which brings me to the standouts in the film: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the Witch.

Denzel Washington’s Macbeth didn’t actually impress me as much as it did many of the reviewers I read. His understatement early in the film gives the character a gravity and seriousness I liked, but he rushes through some of his lines as if challenging himself to finish his speeches in one breath. Odd, but a quibble. But Washington shines in every scene he shares with Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth. Hers is the best performance in the film, but their onscreen partnership is indispensable to them both. Their interplay, at once affectionate and a kind of harsh rivalry, full of loving confidences and cruel digs, feels real, especially once the hesitant, scrupulous Macbeth turns the tables on Lady Macbeth and becomes an even bigger and more frightening monster. This was the most convincing and chilling version of that transformation that I’ve seen.

And Kathryn Hunter as the Witch, or Witches—she’s impossible to describe. The bodily contortions, the rasping metallic voice, the seemingly half-bird physicality, the ambiguous manner and expression—explicitly remarked upon by Macbeth in the play—all make her the creepiest version of the Bard’s weird sisters that I’ve ever seen. And the film’s all-pervading atmosphere, that sense of the uncanny hovering over everything, both derives from and contributes to the Witch’s presence. She feels like a real menace, and in watching her you don’t just believe the supernatural elements of the play might be real, they must be.

I could go on. The Tragedy of Macbeth is wonderful, exactly the right mix of the stage and the screen. Like the other major streaming offering from the Coens—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix—I hope some benevolent outfit like the Criterion Collection will swoop in one day to save it from the streaming services. In the meantime, find a friend with Apple TV+, like I did, and see this film.

In the House of Tom Bombadil

Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings has questions about Tom Bombadil. What is he doing in the middle of Frodo’s journey to Rivendell? What does Frodo’s interlude at Tom’s house mean? What’s with the yellow boots and all the singing? But there’s one question, right there in The Lord of the Rings, with which CR Wiley begins his new book In the House of Tom Bombadil:

The hobbits sat down gladly in low rush-seated chairs, while Goldberry busied herself about the table; and their eyes followed her, for the slender grace of her movement filled them with quiet delight. From somewhere behind the house came the sound of singing. Every now and again they caught, among many a derry dol and a merry dol and a ring a ding dillo the repeated words:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

‘Fair lady!’ said Frodo again after a while. ‘Tell me, if my asking does not seem foolish, who is Tom Bombadil?’

‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling.

This is a characteristic passage of Bombadilana: charming and upbeat, with a dreamlike half-detachment from that which goes before and comes after it, and—like Goldberry’s answer to the crucial question—both straightforward and enigmatic. No wonder Frodo feels a mite foolish, and no wonder some people get bent out of shape about Tom.

Since Wiley and, in the book’s warm and spirited introduction, Bradley Birzer both share some of their personal histories with Tom Bombadil, let me do the same by way of confession. I may be the only person who has ever read The Lord of the Rings who doesn’t have much of an opinion on Tom. What is he doing there? Well, it’s an episodic adventure, so why shouldn’t he be there? What does he mean? The same thing any character in such an adventure “means,” I reckon. Next question.

Having simply accepted Tom as part of the story, it has never occurred to me to ask some of the questions some people do about him.

Wiley does not tackle all of them, but starting with Frodo’s question for Goldberry proves wise. By looking into who Tom is, he shows us what he’s doing in this story. Wiley begins by gently disposing of a handful of the more popular theories about Tom’s past or identity (that Tom is a Maia gone native, or even the incarnation of Eru Ilúvatar himself, etc.), then turns to the few chapters where he appears, the handful of later allusions and references back to him—including one by Gandalf that is considerably more significant than I ever thought—and a few sources outside the novel, especially Tolkien’s letters. This last source proves particularly helpful, since Tolkien himself, in his gnomic way, insisted that Tom is important to the story, but not precisely how. This is especially telling, as Wiley notes that Tolkien, a slow-working, minutely precise writer, would throw away large passages if he found them unsatisfactory or if he felt them narrative dead-ends, and yet Tom and his hosting of Frodo and company remain.

So in a series of short topical chapters, Wiley examines what we see and hear of Tom through the hobbits and his creator, focusing especially on what Tom does in his limited time in the story. He looks at Tom’s use of song and language, his role as “master,” his household, his relationship with Goldberry, and the grim incident with the barrow wight. Along the way, Wiley brings in some especially insightful comparisons with other key characters, like Saruman, who pursues a mechanical or technical mastery alien to Tom, and he concludes with a beautifully written and genuinely moving meditation on what Tom means for the future of Middle Earth—restoration.

Wiley does not pretend to have “solved” the mystery of Tom Bombadil—“if Tolkien meant for Bombadil to be an enigma,” he writes, “who am I to try to clear things up?”—but he does present a compelling argument that Tom’s presence is an important thematic counterpoint to the later darkness of the story, a vision of unspoiled, unfallen dominion over creation that treats the world as an end rather than a means, and of the delight and divine restfulness that comes with that dominion.

In the House of Tom Bombadil is a brisk, easy read, but rich and thought-provoking. I breezed through it in two sittings, relishing the insight it brought to a character I had taken for granted and not thought deeply about, and I look forward to revisiting it soon. I highly recommend it to anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings and wondered about Tom, but especially to anyone who has wondered what goodness is supposed to look like in the middle of a fallen world.

On kids and making art

An observation from British novelist JG Ballard, which I recently ran across at writer Austin Kleon’s blog here:

“Cyril Connolly, the 50s critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally—it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about. My children were a huge inspiration for me. Watching three young minds creating their separate worlds was a very enriching experience.”

— JG Ballard

Kleon notes that Ballard, whose wife died unexpectedly in their early thirties, raised his three children as a widower.

There’s a lot to think about here, and someday I’d love to develop a full-length, completely thought-out essay on the topic of family, creativity, and the pernicious myth of the genius whose art excuses his neglect of his family. (Kleon links to a pretty good takedown of that myth here.)

But for the time being, suffice it to say that good art is directed other-ward, and the good artist begins with a desire to show, to tell, to share. As Roger Scruton explains it in Why Beauty Matters, the child’s desire to share his or her vision gives us one of the purest expressions of the artistic impulse we can find. That desire is an innate link to our fellowmen—binding them to us and, perhaps more importantly, us to them—and we break it at our peril. As Kleon puts it, “Art is for life, not the other way around.”

And remember that there is no fellowman closer than your own flesh and blood.

My children have greatly enriched my life, not to mention my artistic perspectives and impulses, and they are, after all, the only thing I’ve made that will last forever. I can always find ways to work around them—and, indeed, I have. But if I ever find myself in the position of having to choose between them and my art, to hell with my art. Literally.

What passive voice is (and isn't)

Permit me a moment of annoyance.

It’s become apparent to me, through years of reading, that a lot of professional writers don’t know what passive voice is. I emphasize that I’m noticing this in professional writers, because these are people who should know better. Here’s the passage that finally broke me, from a long-form essay on cognitive dissonance within the pro-life movement:

A friend of mine was at a big conservative Christian donor conference recently and told me a prominent speaker there used the phrase, “women who have experienced an abortion.” . . .

This extreme passive voice expression goes beyond saying that women who abort their babies are victims who don’t deserve moral blame; it treats abortion as something that just happens to a woman. . . .

Emphasis mine.

Here’s the thing—the phrase the writer here picks out is not written in the passive voice. It’s vague, clunky, and awkward, an unnecessary circumlocution, but it is not passive. What the writer means here is everything I’ve just said about the phrase’s construction, with the added implication that the use of this phrase betrays deceitful intent, but it is not passive.

So, a brief, highly annoyed primer on what passive voice is (and is not):

Passive voice is not:

• Any sentence including the verb “to be.” This should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Because to be is a passive sentence’s auxiliary or “helping verb,” this can trip people up. As I’ve argued before, reliance on to be in your writing can weaken it, but that’s not the same thing as the passive voice. Here’s an example from way back of an otherwise careful and observant writer striking blindly at any passing be verb in hopes of hitting a passive construction.

• The progressive aspect. This is, in any verb tense, a construction that indicates than an action is ongoing. Above, I wrote that I am noticing this trend. I am still the subject of the sentence, and I am doing something. This is the active voice, even if the main verb is still to be. See above.

• Vagueness. This is the real bone of contention for the writer quoted above, and I’ve noticed “passive voice” or “passive language” used disparagingly of vagueness, bureaucratese, or other (usually official, almost always political) obfuscation and deceit—what Dilbert calls “weasel words.” I hate these forms of linguistic shiftiness as much as anyone, but obscuring your meaning behind jargon or constructing statements so as to diffuse or avoid blame is not, in itself, the passive voice.

Passive voice is:

Not a particular usage, tone, or even intent, but a grammatical voice—that is, per Britannica, the “form of a verb indicating the relation between the participants in a narrated event (subject, object) and the event itself.” To demonstrate using the classic example:

Active: The pitcher threw the ball.
Passive: The ball was thrown by the pitcher.

There are two “participants” in this “narrated event”: the ball and the pitcher. In one, the pitcher (actively) acts upon the ball; in the other, the ball is (passively) acted upon by the pitcher.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. This shouldn’t be hard.

How to identify the passive voice

Here’s a simple way to identify passive voice constructions: you should be able to ask By whom? or By what? of them. Asking these questions of a passive sentence highlights the fact that the “participant” that would ordinarily function as the subject of the sentence has gone missing as the action has been inverted. So:

• “Mistakes were made.” (The classic weasel word statement.) By whom?

• “The town was destroyed.” By what?

• “The generalissimo is being overthrown.” By whom?

• “The cornfield has been destroyed.” By what?

• “It is said that money cannot buy happiness.” By whom?

Now compare a few other sentences (or fragments) that I’ve seen incorrectly labeled “passive” online:

• “Women who have experienced an abortion.” A fragment in the first place, but as it’s the women who are doing the experiencing, this is still grammatically the active voice.

• “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” Whatever this is, it’s doing the unfolding, and despite its clunkiness this sentence is still written in the active voice.

• “The suspect’s death at the hands of police appears to be entirely unjustified.” Chop out all but the grammatical essentials and this reads death (subject) appears to be (verb) unjustified (predicate). This is an overcomplicated and clunky sentence, but not passive.

Conclusion

If when you describe some language as “passive” you mean written in the passive voice, with what would normally be the object in the subject’s place but being acted upon, then more power to you.

But if when you say this you mean that the language in question is deceitful, misleading, obfuscating, suspiciously hedging, or simply a lie—if, that is, your problem is not with the speaker’s grammar but with his motives—then say that. You’ll be more accurate and, what is more, you’ll make your own meaning clearer.

Ranking the Coen brothers

Joel Coen’s new solo movie, The Tragedy of Macbeth, goes into wide release via Apple TV+ this weekend. According to the Hollywood rumor mill, Joel undertook this project on his own because Ethan either “didn’t want to make movies any more” or is “giving movies a rest.” I hope it’s the latter, as I’ve followed the brothers since chancing upon their work more than twenty years ago and they’ve produced some of my favorite movies.

I’ve long sorted the Coens’ work into three tiers—a bottom tier of good but so-so movies, a middle tier of very good ones, and a top tier of masterpieces. I’ve dithered over which movies I’ve sorted into which tier, and more often than not the ranking has come down to longtime favorites and momentary whim. So to commemorate their long and fruitful collaboration and to celebrate the arrival of The Tragedy of Macbeth, I’ve finally made myself definitively sort their movies, bottom to top.

Note: I don’t include here short films produced as parts of anthologies or films they wrote or co-wrote but did not direct. There are some gems there—I’m quite fond of Bridge of Spies, which they did work on, and my wife and I love the underrated Gambit remake starring Colin Firth—but I’m restricting this list to movies that they wrote and directed.

And finally, as I’ll reiterate later, this is essentially a list of favorites, not a judgment of artistic merit, but naturally I do think the two mostly parallel each other.

Bottom of the barrel

Despite going into detail about that three-tier system I’ve always imagined, I include two extra sub-tiers at the top and bottom. Here’s the bottom, a space occupied by only one movie:

Intolerable Cruelty

This is the only one of the Coen brothers’ movies I dislike even a little bit, though it’s fun and clever enough and well enough acted. Part of my dislike stems from a curious shapelessness to the plot—it doesn’t always feel like it’s really going anywhere, which is not unusual for the Coens’ films but doesn’t work here. The main characters are also pretty unlikeable—again, not atypical for the Coens but in this case but it proves insurmountable. But the largest part of my dislike stems from its stylistic throwbacks to 1930s screwball comedies, which are hit or miss but mostly miss: the fast-paced rat-tat-tat dialogue works; the mugging and doubletakes and generally exaggerated clowning for the camera don’t. This is partly a matter of taste (Clooney’s own sports comedy Leatherheads falls flat for me for the same reasons), but it’s especially off-putting in a film set in the present and the result is a weaker film than usual, and the only one of their movies I resist watching.

Favorite line: “He had a device he called ‘the intruder’…”

Third tier

Third tier movies are fine movies that, for whatever reason, I seldom pick to watch. Having completed my rankings, I notice now that all three of these are slightly more arty (for lack of a better word) or thematically obscure than usual, and two have off-beat, potentially unsatisfying endings. That doesn’t diminish my enjoyment, but perhaps that, somehow, makes them a little less fun.

The Hudsucker Proxy

Here’s proof that the Coen brothers can do throwback screwball comedy and make it work. Bizarre and over-the-top, but riotously entertaining and inventive and with a generous dab of the uncanny thrown in. It’s also beautifully shot and designed. It’s bold and bizarre, and though I really like it, it’s just not one of my favorites.

Favorite line: “You know—for kids!”

Inside Llewyn Davis

Calling Llewyn Davis the Coens’ least likable protagonist is really saying something. This is a meandering but continuously interesting film that is long on atmosphere (the chilly, slushy big cities of the northeast and midwest in the most miserable part of winter) and the lore of early 1960s folk singers, and I appreciate the way it gently but clearly shows that the whole bunch were phonies. But Llewyn himself is not pleasant to spend time with and the film’s bookend structure, with its last-minute reveal of significant change coming the way of the folk music scene, feels more like a trick or gimmick than is usual even in the Coens’ bolder experiments.

Favorite line: “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

The Man Who Wasn’t There

A stylishly shot and well-acted black-and-white tribute to post-war suburban noir. You could say this is a triumph of style over substance, but there’s enough classic Coen brothers humor, dialogue, and general weirdness thrown in that it moves along really well. I especially like all of the weird, ambiguous, inexplicable UFO stuff lurking just outside of your awareness through the first half of the movie, and—best of all—Tony Shalhoub’s fast-talking lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider, and his half-informed disquisition on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It’s entertaining and intricately laced with irony, but unusually off-beat even for the Coens.

Favorite line: “The more you look, the less you really know.”

Middle tier

Again, this is a list of favorites, not necessarily a list judging artistic merit. The Coens’ “middle tier” movies would be masterpieces for a lot of other filmmakers. That said, this is a strong selection of their movies that I’ve watched many times but aren’t quite in that subjective, all-time-favorite top tier for me.

Raising Arizona

I originally assigned this one to the third tier, as I seldom pick it to watch, but you know what? I quote it all the time (“That’s you boys’ whole raison d’etre, ain’t it?”), my wife and I use it for comparisons and in-jokes all the time, and we have only grown to enjoy it more since having kids. It’s over-the-top and zany (“wacky” is the word cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld ascribed to it, in contrast to a “handsome” movie like Miller’s Crossing) but it never stops being fun and enjoyable. It’s also got a touch of poignancy that sticks with you and runs much deeper than the wackiness, which may be why it sticks with you.

Favorite line: “Son, you got a panty on your head.”

A Serious Man

I really, really admire this movie as a modern (suburban 1960s) retelling of Job, which is perhaps my favorite book of the Bible. It cleverly mimics some of the structure of Job, with a conga line of both disasters and miserable comforters coming Larry Gopnik’s way, and has a dark, ambiguous ending that I really respond to. The Coens also revisit the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle here, with a line I’ve quoted a lot during the last two years: “We can’t ever really know… what’s going on.” But I’ve found in the years since it came out that I simply don’t enjoy it as much as I admire it.

Favorite line: “Please! Accept the mystery.”

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This anthology film is essentially a collection of shorts, all of them good, some of them small masterpieces. I’m particularly fond of the Coens’ nearly wordless experiment “Meal Ticket”; the Jack London adaptation “All Gold Canyon,” which is almost entirely one old prospector grubbing in the dirt and singing to himself but which nevertheless manages to be riveting; and “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” a by turns sweet and grimly ironic wagon train story that, tonally, feels a lot like True Grit. The opening short featuring the titular Buster is also a hoot. I just wish it were available on home media rather than being sequestered in Netflix. Perhaps the Criterion Collection will rescue Buster someday.

I wrote more about The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Favorite line: “I’m not a devious man by nature, but when you’re unarmed, your tactics might gotta be downright Archimedean.”

Blood Simple

If you were to watch the Coens’ filmography in random order and told to figure out which movie was their first, picking Blood Simple would be a lucky guess. This is a moody, well-paced, stylistically confident noir thriller and one of the most suspenseful films I’ve ever seen.

Favorite line: “I ain’t a marriage counselor.”

The Ladykillers

I anticipate this being the most controversial ranking in my list. The deck would seem to be stacked against The Ladykillers—it’s a remake of a beloved British black comedy that still has fans, it was originally written for someone else to direct, it’s got a lot more slapstick than usual for the Coens, and, for a certain kind of person (known colloquially as a snob), the presence of Tom Hanks is a sign of the Coens “selling out.”

I say balderdash. This is the best possible combination of the Coens’ instincts for farce (much more successfully used here than in Intolerable Cruelty), black comedy, and—crucially—that hint of the spiritual or uncanny that hovers over so many of their films. In addition to being funny and quotable as the day is long, with a particularly great running gag involving my undergrad alma mater, there’s something interesting going on with the way the unassuming, crotchety, pious church lady Mrs Munson thwarts the dismissive, pompous, overeducated, and pointedly church-averse master criminal Professor Dorr. Knowledge puffing up? The foolish things of the world confounding the wise? Intentionally or not, there’s a lot of that here. The Ladykillers is not just a black comedy or farce, it’s a morality play.

A great soundtrack, including a lot of archival music arranged, like that of O Brother, Where Art Thou? by T Bone Burnett, helps make the movie and sell its themes. My favorite track, by Blind Willie Johnson, closes the film.

Favorite line: “Why, Professor! I’m surprised.” “Well, uh, properly speaking, madam, we are surprised. You are taken aback.”

Burn After Reading

A broad but incisive satire of self-help and positive thinking culture, with brutal consequences for just about everyone but the person who causes all the trouble, this has some great performances and one of the only genuinely shocking moments I’ve ever seen in a movie. But, based on conversations with friends, its unblinkingly savage satire and willingness to go dark may make Burn After Reading an acquired taste.

Favorite line: “…The Russians?”

Miller’s Crossing

An intricately plotted, well-written, and brilliantly acted gangster movie that is both witty and grim by turns. Miller’s Crossing is a slow burn that rewards close attention and repeat viewings.

Favorite line: “What’s the rumpus?”

Top tier

The top tier consists of my favorites of the Coens’ filmography, movies that I’ve found endlessly entertaining and meaningful and about which I have no complaints. My second and most important sub-tier comes at the end, with my three all-time favorites from among these.

Fargo

The Coens have always shown interest in regionalism—local culture, local mores, and especially local dialect—and Fargo is almost certainly their masterpiece in this regard. It also perfectly mingles wildly disparate tones: nearly documentary-style true crime, kitchen sink realism, horror, and, of course, dark comedy. Carter Burwell’s score, based on a Norwegian hymn, is also excellent.

Favorite line: “And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper.”

Hail, Caesar!

Another potentially controversial ranking, judging from some of what I’ve seen online from people who expected it, apparently, to be a straightforward mashup of classic Hollywood or who have strong opinions about Esther Williams parodies. This is the Coens’ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and as such follows a handful of specific characters through the Tinseltown zoo over the course of one day. Eddie Mannix, a tough but put-upon studio fixer, and Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy shoehorned into an arty chamber drama, are wonderful characters (and two of my favorites of any on this list) and offer perhaps the strongest moral center of any of the Coens’ protagonists. In contrast to the juvenile, pompous, sloganeering, resentful Communists threatening to undermine the studio (the same studio, incidentally, from Barton Fink), Eddie and Hobie have a sense of vocation and duty to something transcendent that gives their otherwise absurd lives worth. The final confrontation between the film’s two worldviews, the Catholic Eddie versus materialist Communist proselyte Baird Whitlock, ends with a powerful teleological expression of life’s meaning.

That’s a wonderful theme, but themes do not a great film make. Fortunately, as rich as the film is in meaning, it’s entertaining first and foremost. Hail, Caesar! is a ton of fun, with its parodies of 1950s genre filmmaking, its delight in the workaday activity of a studio, and the sense of a vibrant, gossipy, yet slightly seedy little community within the studio, and most especially its collection of interesting and funny characters.

Favorite line: I’m going to cheat here—it’s either the entire scene with the priest, rabbi, minister, and patriarch or the entire “No Dames” musical scene, a master class in, uh, extended double entendre.

The Big Lebowski

The ultimate hang-out movie: a big, shambling, sprawling, continuously surprising comedy that is by turns funny, shocking, outrageous, and—very briefly—poignant. Meandering but never unfocused, as seemingly aimless as The Big Lebowski is, it is perfectly paced. Drop in anywhere during its runtime and you’ll be there for the rest of it. It’s also perhaps the most quotable movie ever made, which is why, when trying to choose a favorite line for this movie below, I gave up and wrote the first one that came to mind.

Favorite line: “Don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey.”

True Grit

Charles Portis is one of two authors—with Cormac McCarthy—for whom the Coens are ideal cinematic adapters. (I wish they’d take a crack at his final novel, Gringos.) This film, a second adaptation of the novel rather than a remake of the original John Wayne version, perfectly captures the knowing, wry, understated, and witty but surprisingly poignant tone of the book. Great action and performances, especially in the central relationship between Mattie and Rooster, and a beautiful soundtrack elevate and enrich this seemingly simple Western revenge story.

Favorite line: “I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

Absolute favorites

I’ve really struggled to sort this list into a neat and tidy hierarchy, and if you catch me some other time some of these films may be reshuffled. But not these three.

In addition to my three-tier model of the Coens’ movies, I’ve had a theory for a long time that, thanks to how wildly varied their eighteen films are, a psychologist could potentially create a personality test more accurate than the four temperaments, the five factor model, the Myers-Briggs, or—Lord knows—the Enneagram by simply having people pick their three favorite Coen brothers movies. Here are mine.

Barton Fink

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that writers like stories about writers and like writers who write stories about writers. Guilty. There’s plenty of that to go around, but this is the pinnacle of that genre—my favorite writing movie. Part writer’s block drama, part black comedy, part noirish mystery, part supernatural apocalypse, Barton Fink incorporates several of my favorite kinds of storytelling in a dark but funny and atmospheric package. (It also perfectly captures how I perceive all hotels.) John Turturro is brilliant as the smart but self-regarding and cowardly Barton, and John Goodman, as Barton’s next-door neighbor in the hotel, gives a wonderfully warm and genial performance that only makes some of the film’s final-act revelations more chilling.

I don’t want to say much more, because part of this film’s peculiar power for me was going into it knowing virtually nothing about it. Check it out. Just know that I’m not exaggerating when I say that if I can craft just one climax in one story with the eeriness and uncanny, overrushing sense of apocalypse of Barton Fink, I’ll consider myself a success.

Favorite line: “Me? I just enjoy making things up.”

No Country for Old Men

Well-written, well-acted, beautifully shot in desolate Texas locations, with precisely constructed action and steadily building tension, this is a brilliant adaptation of a great novel and probably the Coens’ perfect movie. And despite its downer ending, I’ve found it and Tommy Lee Jones’s haunting final monologue a profound meditation on the duty to preserve the good in the face of ubiquitous and seemingly unstoppable evil, and it’s only gotten better in the years since I first saw it in theatres.

Favorite line: “Well, it’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?” “If it ain’t it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Putting in a couple weeks thinking through, organizing, and writing this list has actually helped me determine that, yes, I do have a single favorite Coen brothers movie, and it’s the very first one I watched over twenty years ago now. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is funny from beginning to end, is brilliantly constructed and written, has a great cast and wonderful soundtrack, and is deepened, sweetened, and made all the funnier by the riches of both Homer and the South. It has a little of everything, and it’s all great.

And, as a nice bonus for me twenty-odd years on from discovering this film and the Coens, this is one of the only films that, reliably, the majority of a given class of students will have both seen and remembered well enough to make it a useful point of reference in class. This isn’t just entertainment for me, it’s actually helped me teach. A rare distinction, and I’m glad it’s true of a movie I love so much.

Favorite line: “Sweet Jesus, Everett. They left his heart.”

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to catching Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth. In the meantime, thanks for sticking with me through this project, which I’ve been mulling over since before Christmas, and if you haven’t seen all of the Coen brothers’ films, I hope you’ll find something enticing enough here to seek out and enjoy.

Kirk (and Eliot) on good and evil in literature

Dante and Virgil encounter Ugolino and Ruggieri in Gustave Doré’s illustration of Inferno XXXII

I’m currently reading Russell Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things, a study of the “abnormity” in culture and politics that results from an abandonment of tradition and norms, the “permanent things” of the title, a phrase borrowed from TS ELiot, and the embrace of nihilism. Kirk examines this trend—already pronounced when he published the book in 1969—through literature rather than politics or policy, those things being downstream of culture.

Here, in an early chapter on the purpose of literature, he discusses “the normative end of letters”:

The great popular novelists of the nineteenth century—Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope—all assumed that the writer is under a moral obligation to normality: that is, explicitly or implicitly, bound to certain enduring standards of private and public conduct.

Now I do not mean that the great writer incessantly utters homilies. . . . Rather, the man of letters teaches the norms of our existence through parable, allegory, analogy, and holding up the mirror to nature. Like William Faulkner, the writer may write much more about what is evil than about what is good; and yet, exhibiting the depravity of human nature, he establishes in his reader’s mind the awareness that there exist enduring standards from which we fall away; and that fallen nature is an ugly sight.

Whether and how to describe or depict evil in literature is a question I’ve discussed with friends many, many times over the years. As an adolescent resentful of the bowdlerized literature I’d read in high school I’d often make a pretty simpleminded argument in favor of “realism”—a term I’m less and less fond of now.

Fortunately, early in my college career I came across this, in TS Eliot’s essay “Dante,” in which he considers the savage, gruesome punishments meted out by obscene demons in a hell populated by grotesque, unrepentant, blasphemous sinners:

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

— TS Eliot

This is, of course, tricky, and Eliot continues with a subtle warning: “not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from negative to positive.” And he notes earlier in the same essay that “[y]ou cannot . . . understand the Inferno without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso.” Evil will be incomprehensible without contemplation of the good as well.

I’ve never worked out any precise solution to these problems, but adapted book by book, using whatever style or method I saw as appropriate to a given story. It’s art, after all. But whether in depicting good or evil, subtlety must be a key consideration. Kirk again:

Often, in his appeal of a conscience to a conscience, [the writer] may row with muffled oars; sometimes he is aware only dimly of his normative function. The better the artist, one almost may say, the more subtle the preacher. Imaginative persuasion, not blunt exhortation, commonly is the method of the literary champion of norms.

Kirk’s book is excellent so far, and I’m grateful to have received it from my in-laws for Christmas. Some of Kirk’s concerns, observations, and admonitions remind me of a strikingly different writer, John Gardner, who explored similar territory in his book On Moral Fiction. It’s been a few years since I read that—here are my brief thoughts from back then—but it’s worth seeking out if you care at all about the cultural and moral implications of fiction and art.

Black on the diversity of military history

Maori troops of the New Zealand Army perform the Haka, North Africa, 1941

From “Australasian and Oceanic Warfare,” a chapter in A Short History of War, one of the most recent books by the prolific military historian Jeremy Black:

It would be all too easy to leave Australasia and Oceania out of a book with space constraints. Indeed, most histories of war do so, or restrict mention to the idea of a primitive ‘other’, one that essentially enters the picture in order to be conquered by the imperial powers and then to provide the setting for the War in the Pacific in 1941-5. That is a misleading approach, and at a number of levels. It is based on the idea that there is a key strand of development, one moreover closely related to social development and economic capability, with the world ranked accordingly. Instead, it is more helpful to think in terms of fitness for purpose, with adaptation to circumstances being a crucial dynamic. From this perspective, Australasia and Oceania saw both success and enormous variety. The remote valleys of highland New Guinea were a very different environment to Polynesian atolls, and the density of the population on the North Island of New Zealand contrasted with that on Australia; and so on. Thus, to even group the whole as a region is misleading, and to provide an overall evaluation accordingly is problematic. The best conclusion is one that works with this variety, and presents conflict as fundamental and protean, rather than an activity with clear characteristics that can be readily evaluated.

Military history, no less than other subfields within the discipline, has a whiggish or Darwinist tendency to seek out what Black calls “a key strand of development” that will give a clear narrative arc to the story of warfare.

Often, this key strand is technological, with “more advanced” weapons systems gradually outmoding and displacing each other. Thus you get amateurs endlessly arguing about whether samurai or Roman legionaries would win in a fight or, on the professional level, historians like interwar tank advocate (and gifted self-promoter) Basil Liddell-Hart dismissing virtually all of medieval military history as “drab stupidity.”

One may also find political versions of this search for “a key strand of development.” In these versions, “freer” societies gradually outmode and displace unfree societies. Thus you get Fukuyama’s much-maligned “End of History” argument and an infinite supply of neocon interpretations of military history. These tend to be markedly Hegelian, and advanced with the same kind of zeal with which Marxist historians predict the end of “late capitalism.”

Often the technological and political are combined (see, for instance, Victor Davis Hanson’s Second World Wars, in which liberal capitalist societies beat the Nazis and Japanese because they could produce more and better equipment). Often there is something to these arguments—but only something.

Another aspect of this, especially common among amateurs, is the quest for some kind of eternal, immutable, archetypal “warrior” spirit recognizable and transferable across societies as different as ancient Mesopotamia, archaic Greece, migration-period Germanic tribes, the Norse, and, naturally, modern day special ops. Again, there is—and has to be—something to this, as courage, strength, and physical hardihood are going to be the minimum necessary to endure warfare.

The problem, of course, is that the partial accuracy of a given “key strand”—whether the amateur Jungian guru’s warrior archetype or a more considered technological or political argument—will conceal as much as it reveals.

Three takeaways from the passage in Black’s Short History above:

• warfare is “fundamental”—i.e. a basic reality rather than an aberration. Whether we like or not, peace is not the norm. Warfare and warmaking need to be understood as fundamental.

• warfare is “protean”—i.e. shifting and changing, like Proteus. How and why peoples fight wars—not to mention when and where, and against whom, and on what terms—change constantly.

• “adaptation to circumstances” is “the crucial dynamic”—Why does warfare, which is unceasing, also unceasingly change? Because circumstances change. This, in the end, is the proper place to locate technological development, but only as one of many factors to which warring societies adapt.

These understandings allow for a greater appreciation of the diverse ways people fight wars. Rather than fitting a society—“primitive” or otherwise—into a predetermined narrative of upward technological progress (even where technological disparities play a real role, as in the Spanish vs the Aztecs or a thousand other examples), and obscuring a lot of non-technological factors, one will have room to understand them on their own terms. This understanding also allows for greater variety and complexity rather than oversimplification, not least with regard to the very particular, and often peculiar, ways many societies understand their warriors—and the ways their warriors understand themselves.

Jünger (and Lewis) on the homo religiosus

From section 24 of Ernst Jünger’s 1951 treatise on freedom in the face of the authoritarianism of the modern state, The Forest Passage:

Still more important is the consideration that in many people today a strong need for religious ritual coexists with an aversion to churches. There is a sense of something missing in existence, which explains all the activity around gnostics, founders of sects, and evangelists, who all, more or less successfully, step into the role of the churches. One might say that a certain definite quantity of religious faith always exists, which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches. Now, freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything. This is the gullibility of modern man, which coexists with a lack of faith. He believes what he reads in the newspaper but not what is written in the stars.

One thinks immediately of CS Lewis’s observation, in his 1943 essay “Equality,” that “spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

But just what happens when you’ve spent a generation or two gobbling poison? Later in The Forest Passage, Jünger further describes this gullible, average modern man mentioned above—the kind mass-produced by materialistic modern education (of whatever political persuasion):

Theologians of today must be prepared to deal with people as they are today—above all with people who do not live in sheltered reserves or other lower pressure zones. A man stands before them who has emptied his chalice of suffering and doubt, a man formed far more by nihilism than by the church—ignoring for the moment how much nihilism is concealed in the church itself. Typically, this person will be little developed ethically or spiritually, however eloquent he may be in convincing platitudes. He will be alert, intelligent, active, skeptical, inartistic, a natural-born debaser of higher types and ideas, an insurance fanatic, someone set on his own advantage, and easily manipulated by the catchphrases of propaganda whose often abrupt turnabouts he will hardly perceive; he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence beyond all legal limits or international law whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system. At the same time he will feel haunted by malevolent forces, which penetrate even into his dreams, have a low capacity to enjoy himself, and have forgotten the meaning of a real festival. On the other hand, it must be added that he enjoys the advantages of a peaceful age of technological comfort: that the average life expectancy has significantly risen; that the basic tenets of theoretical equality are universally recognized; and that, in some places at least, there are models to be studied of lifestyles that, in their comfort for all levels of society, their individual freedoms, and automatized perfection, have perhaps never existed before. It is not unthinkable that this lifestyle will spread after the titanic era of technology has run its course. Just the same, man is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence, which in some cities and even in whole lands so overshadows life that the last smiles have been extinguished and people seem trapped in Kafkaesque underworlds.

This is strikingly recognizable, like a description of the entire population of Twitter. And again—this is from 1951.

And what is one to do, at least with regard to reorienting man’s religious instinct? Jünger continues:

Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

This is a tall order, not least because of the objection that Jünger anticipates earlier: of the self-evident goodness of statistical progress. Compare Jonah Goldberg’s review of The Reactionary Mind, by Michael Warren Davis (which I briefly recommended in my reading year-in-review). Davis spent much of his book pointing out the dislocation, distraction, and spiritual rot of modern culture and Goldberg responded with life expectancy and GDP. These people are not speaking the same language.

Food for thought.

The Forest Passage isn’t solely about modern man as a hungry homo religiosus, but it’s a significant support for Jünger’s overall argument about the powerlessness of the individual—atomized, overawed, divorced from the institutions that used to offer support, and neither educated nor pious enough to develop the individual will to resist—in the face of the state, which seeks to usurp the place of everything of importance in the individual’s life. This, as it happens, is something Jünger knew a lot about.

It’s dense and borderline mystical in places—an altogether German combination—and very good so far. I look forward to finishing it.

I’ve posted one of Jünger’s sharply observed descriptions of a typical modern man before, The Glass Bees’ Fillmor, “one of the highest peaks” in the modern “mountain range of narrow-mindedness.” Read that here. And I’ve speculated on one very particular field’s role as a substitute religion here.

2021 in books

If I complained a lot about what 2021 was like for movies in my last post, here’s some good news—it was a great year for reading. I ultimately got through 118 books, including many good rereads, children’s books, and an awesome selection of fiction, history, and other non-fiction. Believe me—as long as this post is, it was hard to narrow my selections down.

You can look at everything I read this year on Goodreads here.

Top ten fiction

In no particular order, my ten favorite fiction reads of the year—with the two top reads spotlighted at the end—plus five honorable mentions:

Beast, by Paul Kingsnorth—A man alone on a wild English moor grapples with terrible injuries, the hostile environment, unseen forces beyond his control, and his fascination with a great beast living somewhere on the moor with him. One of those novels it’s impossible to summarize, a hallucinatory masterpiece of tone and atmosphere that is as immediately engrossing as a dream and that steadily builds in intensity. Beast is the second book of a loose trilogy by Kingsnorth, the first being one of my favorite books of the last decade, a novel set in the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest and written in an alien and poetic hybrid of Old and Modern English, The Wake.

Through the Wheat, by Thomas Boyd—A forceful, harrowing story of the Marines in World War I, based on the author’s experiences on the Western Front during the summer of 1918. Almost, but not quite, an American All Quiet on the Western Front.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet—Both a novelistic account of the career and assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most cutthroat and callous Nazis in the Third Reich, as well as an account of the young’s authors attempt to write this novelistic account, HHhH is, the author, mid-book, “an infranovel.” Hard to explain, but outstanding through and through. Full blog review here.

V2, by Robert Harris—A straightforward and engaging World War II thriller. The novel begins with Dr Rudi Graf, a German rocket engineer and longtime associate of Dr Wernher von Braun, the head of the Nazi ballistic missile program, at work in Belgium preparing a launch aimed at London. On the receiving end is the unwitting Kay Caton-Walsh, an aerial photography analyst with British intelligence. Following this first in a series of continuously escalating strikes, Graf and Kay will be drawn nearer and nearer as Graf works to keep up with Hitler’s government’s demands and Kay works to bring down the Nazi missile program. I read this as a diversion, but it proved by turns ironic and poignant, especially in its final surprising revelation.

Forever and a Day, by Anthony Horowitz—A James Bond continuation novel, this time a prequel to the events of Fleming’s first story, Casino Royale. Horowitz presents a newly-minted 007 investigating the murder of the previous agent with that number, and Bond’s on-the-job learning—his feeling out of the dangerous world of espionage, assassination, and organized crime—provides part of the charm. A fun ride, with some striking secondary characters and an embittered villain with a genuinely interesting plot and motivation.

The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner—The life of Jacob, brilliantly retold in a style that takes this familiar story and makes it strange and new again. The evocation of alien worlds has been one of Buechner’s strengths—as in his two novels based on the lives of medieval saints, Godric and Brendan, which are two of my all-time favorites—and here he mines the oddities of the biblical story and the grotesqueries and darkness of the Patriarchs’ historical context to highlight just what is so special about Abraham—already present only as a memory—Isaac, and Jacob. Especially good is his dramatization of Jacob’s betrayal of Esau, whom Buechner breathes life and sympathy into. Beautifully written and very moving. You can read an extract I shared upon the birth of a friend’s baby here.

The Outlaws, by Ernst von Salomon—A whirlwind of a novel, an only lightly fictionalized version of events the author lived through. Ernst von Salomon was a Prussian military cadet at the time of the armistice in 1918, and soon found himself fighting Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries as a member of one of the Freikorps, German paramilitary units, before getting involved in political assassination. He ended up in prison as an accomplice in the assassination of Weimar Germany’s foreign minister, Walther Rathenau. If you want a sense of just how bad things can get politically, just how fractured and chaotic one society can become, just how much upheaval can break out, and just how far patriotic young men will go to make things right—and if you want an unusual but gripping real life story—read The Outlaws. I haven’t stopped recommending it since I first read it.

Missionaries, by Phil Klay—Missionaries introduces four major characters—an American reporter, an American ex-Special Forces medic turned military adviser, a Colombian army colonel, and a young Colombian man caught up in the brutal world of the rural paramilitaries—and interweaves their life stories, past and present, as all four are drawn into the American-assisted drug wars in the jungles of Colombia. A sprawling, complex, reflective novel rich in characters with harrowing pasts, an intricately crafted plot, and, as the title implies, quite a lot of theological overtones, Missionaries defies easy summary, but it’s a rewarding and powerfully moving look at just what modern warfare means for the least of these.

Honorable mentions:

• Brother Wolf, by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson—Another engrossing gothic horror story from the author of A Bloody Habit, this one about a prominent academic skeptic’s daughter, an eccentric English Dominican priest, and a Franciscan monk who is also a werewolf.

• The Dig, by John Preston—A fictionalized retelling of the discovery and excavation of Sutton Hoo that, like its subject, has much more buried beneath its surface than you might immediately detect. Hope to reread this one soon.

• 52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard—Pornographers and other lowlifes attempt to blackmail a prosperous Detroit businessman. Everyone gets more than they bargained for. One of my favorites of Leonard’s crime novels so far. Another of my quarantine reads from back in the spring.

• The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout—The grim but moving story of John Books, an aging, cancer-stricken gunfighter attempting to prepare himself—by settling accounts, turning away gawkers, and reckoning with his sins—for his rapidly approaching death.

• In the Valley, by Ron Rash—An excellent set of short stories from a favorite writer. Includes a novella continuing parts of the story of his novel Serena.

Favorites of the year:

Breakout at Stalingrad, by Heinrich Gerlach

This is one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. Gerlach wrote Breakout at Stalingrad during his captivity in Russia following his capture at Stalingrad, where he served as a junior officer in the German army. His role as an intelligence officer gave him a horribly clear vantage point for the collapse and demolition of his army, and the novel is a grim, unromanticized evocation of that long, arduous, bloody siege that only builds in tension as it goes on. No character is safe regardless of rank or role in the army.

As I noted in my full length review, Breakout at Stalingrad stands out because of its well-rendered and diverse cast of characters, the dense and all-pervading irony of its events, and its authentic, vivid, tactile details. The frigid weather, the terror of the mostly unseen enemy, the diminishing and finally nonexistent rations, the desperate struggle to find food or medicine or even the minimum ammunition necessary to fight off the Russians, the dwindling of the men—both statistically, in overall numbers, and physically and mentally, as individuals—all are brilliantly conveyed in what is ultimately a study not just of defeat, but destruction.

I was so impressed and moved by Breakout at Stalingrad that I wrote a longer, more detailed review of it back in the spring, which you can read here.

The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB

The best surprise of the year, The Eighth Arrow came my way at a really good time—during my two-week quarantine with coronavirus. I sat down with it and, for three days, barely moved or looked up from the book. It’s excellent.

The Eighth Arrow continues the story of Odysseus in the afterlife, the hell of Dante’s Commedia specifically. Trapped with his old friend Diomedes in one of the bolgia of the circle of the frauds, the novel begins when Odysseus is stirred from centuries of torment and reverie by the passage of Dante and Virgil above. Odysseus cries out for a chance at deliverance and finds himself and Diomedes, by the grace of “the Parthenos,” temporarily released from their places in hell. This begins a downward journey paralleling that of Dante in many ways, but uniquely Odyssean. The Eighth Arrow takes the best of Homer and Dante and fuses them in a genuinely surprising and engaging way, resulting in a theologically rich fantasy novel that is also immediately involving and vividly written, with comedy, horror, action, and deeply moving pathos skillfully interwoven throughout. I enjoyed it from beginning to end and couldn’t get enough of it.

You can read more about The Eighth Arrow in my post about my quarantine reading, which you can read here.

Top twelve non-fiction

In no particular order, but with my top choice saved for last, my twelve favorite non-fiction reads of the year, plus another ten honorable mentions. Believe me, it was hard to narrow it down even to twenty-two this year.

Saint Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, by Philip Freeman—A concise, engagingly-written account of what we know about the patron saint of Ireland. Freeman gives good attention to the historical context in which Patrick lived and ministered, giving the reader a vivid picture of a remote and ill-attested age of migration, invasion, piracy, warfare, and tribal politics, as well as the many dangers Patrick faced at every stage of his life in this world. I added this biography to my annually posted St Patrick’s Day reading recommendations, which you can view here. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat, by William R Short and Reynir A Óskarson—Speaking of the early medieval period, warfare, and piracy, here’s one of the best books I read this fall. Men of Terror is an attempt both to recover the Viking “mindset,” to understand the Vikings from the inside (about which more below), and to scientifically test the tools and methods of Viking warfare as described in the extant literary sources. It was an excellent read and will prove an excellent reference in years to come. I recommend it to anyone interested in Viking culture or the nitty-gritty of Viking combat specifically. Full blog review here.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, by Andrew Roberts—A mammoth new biography of genuinely good and honorable man who has been maligned, insulted, and vilified for two hundred years. Roberts, through exhaustive research and a well-written, extremely detailed political and personal narrative, presents a compelling case for George as one of the best and most important of Britain’s modern kings. Especially good are Roberts’s chapter-length examination of the Declaration of Independence—which Roberts demonstrates is a tissue of political spin, post facto justifications, and outright lies—and his coverage of George’s personal life. George was a deeply Christian family man who was faithful to his wife at a time when that was by no means normal for monarchs, and though virtually all of his children proved disappointments and morally compromised failures, his devotion to them never flagged. Roberts also examines George’s literary, artistic, and scientific interests, which were wide-ranging and achieved a high level of expertise for an amateur; real experts who conversed with him always found him well-informed on their subjects. And through all the extremely detailed political history, in which George routinely suffered slanders and misrepresentations from ungracious ideological enemies, Roberts never loses sight of George as a man, making his final decline into blindness, deafness, and incurable mental illness profoundly moving. This is a model of good research and writing and a much-needed corrective to a lot of cherished myths.

Operation Mincemeat, by Ben Macintyre—A well-researched and brilliantly written narrative of one of the oddest and most consequential counterintelligence operations of World War II. Wishing to distract the Germans and convince them to redirect vital men and materiel from Sicily, the target of the Allies’ largest operation to date in the summer of 1943, British intelligence agents developed a plan to craft a fake identity for the corpse of a homeless man, plant papers that would reveal—without being too obvious about it—the true target of the next Allied invasion as Greece, and plant the body off the coast of Spain to look like a courier killed in a plane crash. Macintyre tells this story wonderfully well, narrating not just the development, execution, and outcome of the plan but giving insight into the many eccentric personalities involved.

A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40, by William R Trotter—An excellent narrative account of the Winter War, in which the Soviet Union waged an unprovoked war of aggression against its smaller, hopelessly outnumbered neighbor Finland—and were stopped cold. Well-researched and written, with good attention to all levels of the conflict from international politicking and diplomacy to the grunt’s-eye view in the trenches of the Karelian Isthmus or the endless forests of central Finland. If you’re looking to learn about this storied war—and there are few more remarkable or dramatic—this is the book I’d recommend starting with.

Robert E Lee: A Life, by Allen Guelzo—A sweeping, deeply researched, well-written, and critical but not unsympathetic biography that nevertheless explicitly refuses to understand its subject on his own terms. Guelzo is an outstanding scholar and has done mountains of research, presenting us an encyclopedic account of Lee’s life, but he repeatedly, and quite consciously, lets his own nationalist biases skew his presentation of Lee’s story. Nevertheless, this is a mostly fair and evenhanded biography that conclusively does away with a lot of the nasty propaganda versions of Lee that have been given wide circulation lately, and, despite some of the book’s shortcomings, we are deeply indebted to Guelzo for that. Much, much more detailed blog review here.

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings, by Tom Shippey—An excellent examination of the Vikings by a preeminent literary scholar. Shippey attempts to understand the Vikings from the inside, on their own terms, and marshals a vast array of evidence to give us a glimpse of their wry, toughminded, and supremely alien worldview. Chief among his evidence is literature—poetry, runic inscription, saga, and the accounts of the Vikings’ neighbors, enemies, and victims—but he also brings in archaeological and material evidence. Comprehensive, exhaustively researched, and well-written, this is one of the best books on the subject I’ve read.

This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, by Peter Cozzens—A deeply researched and well-written narrative history of the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Highly recommended.

The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell—A briskly written short history of one aspect of American warfare before and during World War II that ventures down lots of fascinating and revealing rabbit trails. Not scholarly, but ideal for introducing some big ideas—especially with regard to culture, just war, and the ethical use of technology—to newcomers. I’ve already recommended it to my students. Full blog review here.

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science, by John Tresch—An excellent new biography of Poe that examines his intense lifelong interest in science and his attempts to synthesize the scientific and the artistic. A readable, wonderfully well-researched and surprising portrait not only of Poe but of his world—the striving, optimistic, skeptical, credulous, and thoroughly science-obsessed antebellum United States.

Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11, by Mitchell Zuckoff—An extensively-researched and well-structured, engaging, and readable account of September 11, 2001. Zuckoff presents the intertwined stories of hundreds of people, not all of whom lived to see the end of that day. An extraordinary, profoundly moving account, and a fitting memorial to the victims.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066, by Marc Morris—Very good history of Anglo-Saxon England from the immediately post-Roman migration period to the Norman Conquest. Well-researched, well-organized, and engagingly written narrative history with lots of good case studies and individual portraits of key figures.

• Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe—Two non-fiction satires of left-wing activism. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Wolfe at his best. More detailed Goodreads review here.

• Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, by Earl Hess—An excellent, impartial reexamination of a man who was ornery and difficult enough before becoming one of the most widely reviled and scapegoated men in American history.

• Never Greater Slaughter, by Michael Livingston—An outstanding examination and reconstruction of the Battle of Brunanburh, fought in 937 between the army of King Æthelstan of England and a coalition of Scots and Ireland-based Vikings, that gives good attention to the overall historical context on both sides. Livingston also presents a convincing argument that the battlefield, subject of long-running dispute, can be precisely located.

• The Ship of Fate: The Story of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, by Roger Moorhouse—Short, powerful history of the deadliest maritime sinking in history, which killed 9,000 people—mostly women and children fleeing the Red Army. That’s six times the death toll of the Titanic. Longer Goodreads review here.

• America’s War for the Greater Middle East, by Andrew Bacevich—A grim record of forty years of incoherent, directionless military involvement in regions and among cultures that American leadership could not be bothered to understand.

• Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, by Jeffrey Bilbro—Bilbro’s observations about the news and how it shapes—and warps—our minds and souls harmonize quite a lot with the worries I’ve been sharing about our news diet on here for several years. Unlike me, Bilbro offers some potential solutions, or at least some ways forward.

• The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic, by Ross Douthat—An insightful critique of the way America, whether in politics, education, literature, movies, or otherwise, seems to be circling the drain. Emphasis on circling. This one has stuck with me since I read it, comprising a sort of background noise as I react to and interpret trends in American politics and culture.

• Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, by Neil Postman—Solid critique of technocratic optimism from the early 1990s. Postman was a prophet.

• The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” is Not Enough, by Michael Warren Davis—A bracing, tongue-in-cheek polemic against virtually every aspect of our sterile, materialistic, rootless, godless, gutless modern world. Davis overstates his case for maximum effect and offers up some strange opinions with stunning assertiveness (A Canticle for Leibowitz is “garbage?” really?), but I got the sense throughout that he’s a guy I, as a fellow reactionary, would enjoy arguing with.

Favorite of the year:

Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, by Jonathan Clements

My interest in Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim began when I learned as a kid that—like George III as well—we have the same birthday. That’s not much, but it piqued my interest. Over the years since I’ve learned much more about him, albeit primarily in his role as wartime leader in the three wars Finland fought between 1939 and 1945—two against Russia, one against Germany. Throughout, his stalwart leadership and tenacity impressed me, and I wanted to learn more about him as a man.

Jonathan Clements’s biography fit that role perfectly, and, despite my preexisting interest in the subject, still managed to surprise me. A Swedish-speaking Finn born at a time when his homeland was part of the Russian Empire, Mannerheim flunked out of his first military academy; became a cavalry officer; served in the personal honor guard of Tsar Nicholas II, whom he knew personally; fought the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War and the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in World War I; narrowly escaped capture and execution by the Bolsheviks when they rose in St Petersburg in 1917; and then helped lead the White (anti-Bolshevik) forces to victory in a newly independent Finland. And all of this was before his most storied roles—coming out of retirement to repel the vastly numerically superior Russians in the Winter War; trying to take back lost territory in the Continuation War; and, as President of Finland, ejecting the Germans from his country in the Lapland War.

Oh—and he also spent several years on a long-term spying mission in western China, during which time he met the Dalai Lama.

This is a dramatic and fascinating life. I read this biography in just four days back in February, and it’s stuck with me. Well-researched, well-written, lavishly illustrated, with surprises and interesting asides in every chapter, this is an admirable biography of one of the most interesting figures of early 20th century history and an engaging introduction to some of the rich and fascinating complexity of that time.

Rereads

I’ve been working to revisit books I’ve already read more often, and I think this year I set some kind of record. Many of these were either audiobooks for my daily commute (marked with an asterisk, because I still don’t feel like audiobooks entirely count) or bedtime reading for either the kids or my wife and I. I’ve hyperlinked any titles that I recorded detailed notes for on Goodreads, especially the Fleming Bond books.

• The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh

• Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming*

• For Your Eyes Only, by Ian Fleming*

• The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope*

• Animal Farm, by George Orwell

• Thunderball, by Ian Fleming*

• The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming*

• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by Ian Fleming*

• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by CS Lewis

• You Only Live Twice, by Ian Fleming*

• The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

• The Man with the Golden Gun, by Ian Fleming*

• Octopussy and The Living Daylights, by Ian Fleming*

• Grendel, by John Gardner*

• Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton*

• Orthodoxy, by GK Chesterton*

• In Grandma’s Attic, by Arleta Richardson

• Killing Rommel, by Steven Pressfield*

• The Everlasting Man, by GK Chesterton*

• The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry

Additionally, my rereading (via audiobook) of the last several of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels enabled me, at long last, to write a piece on Fleming’s craftsmanship for University Bookman. The essay began life when the late editor of the Bookman, Gerald Russello, asked for a pitch on the subject. It took a few years, but I completed it late this summer, sent it to him, and he accepted it shortly before passing away. I’m deeply grateful for the chance to write and publish that piece and especially grateful to Mr Russello for requesting my very first piece of professionally published writing, a review of a book by Adrian Goldsworthy, many years ago. You can read my essay on Fleming at University Bookman here.

I also wrote a lengthy appreciation of Eaters of the Dead on the blog back in September. You can read that here.

Ancient, medieval, and other classics

• The Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle, trans. JAK Thomson

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Brian Stone

• The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen, trans. Gillian Clarke

• Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrek and Hrólf Kraki and His Champions, trans. Jackson Crawford

• The Executioner, by Joseph de Maistre (excerpts from The St Petersburg Dialogues), trans. Richard A Lebrun

• Politics, by Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker

Kids’ books

My five favorite books for children or young readers. I read all but the last to our kids as bedtime stories this year, and all were worthwhile.

• Black Ships Before Troy, by Rosemary Sutcliff, illustrated by Alan Lee—An exceptional adaptation of the better part of the Iliad as well as many other Trojan War legends, neither softened nor watered down. Both my kids and I enjoyed it immensely. Full review from earlier this year here.

• Bambi, by Felix Salten, trans. Whittaker Chambers—Episodic but poignant and thematically rich, this was certainly one of the most unusual reads of the year. I’m actually not sure whether to classify this as a children’s book or something else, as it presents a frank, unromanticized picture of forest life, red in tooth and claw, and the animal characters are only minimally anthropomorphized. It’s much more like Watership Down than its 1942 Disney adaptation. Don’t get me wrong—I think this unvarnished realism is a strength, but it may make Bambi a better read for slightly older kids.

• The Kitchen Knight: A Tale of King Arthur, by Margaret Hodges, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman—A straightforward adaptation of the story of Sir Gareth of Orkney, a lesser-known side story from Malory, that preserves both the oddity and romance of real medieval Arthurian literature. The illustrations, by the same artist who collaborated with Hodges on their award-winning Saint George and the Dragon, are magnificent. The kids enjoyed it a great deal.

• James Herriot’s Treasury for Children, by James Herriot, illustrated by Ruth Brown and Peter Barrett—A collection of several short veterinary stories adapted as picture books. Wonderfully charming stories and pictures. This was perhaps the favorite among my kids this year.

• Beowulf: Dragon Slayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff—A gift from my wife, who clearly gets me. Like Sutcliff’s adaptation of Homer above, her Beowulf doesn’t soften, bowdlerize, deconstruct, or otherwise modernize the heroes or events of the original. It’s an excellent, readable adaptation. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a kids’ Beowulf. Goodreads review here.

Conclusion

If you’ve stuck with me this long, thanks for reading! I had a great year, bookwise, and hope y’all will find something worth your while in the months ahead. All the best in 2022, and thanks again for reading.