Spring reading 2025

It’s been a hard semester, but through it all I’ve had some astonishingly good reading. With over thirty books read I feel like my reading has finally bounced back from the birth of the twins almost two years ago. I had a hard time narrowing this list down, but below you’ll find a handful of favorite novels, history and general non-fiction, and kids’ books, as well as a few honorable mentions in the two main categories and the books I revisited this semester.

For the purposes of this post, my “spring” ended Monday the 19th, the first day of summer classes here at my school. As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

Favorite fiction

A Month in the Country, by JL Carr—A veteran of the Western Front, physically and spiritually broken, is commissioned to restore a defaced medieval mural in a small church in the English countryside. A short, seemingly simple, but rich, beautifully written, and moving story. One I plan to reread soon, as even while reading it I was aware that I wasn’t picking up all it had to offer.

The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers—Brendan Doyle is an undistinguished scholar of 19th-century British literature and an expert on the obscure Romantic poet William Ashbless. When an eccentric businessman contacts Doyle with the opportunity to lead a group of millionaire tourists to 1810 London to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Doyle is skeptical but accepts. To his astonishment, the businessman’s time travel works—but Doyle is stranded in London when the party returns. Reduced to begging, he encounters Jacky, a girl disguising herself as a man in order to avenge her murdered brother; Horrabin, a terrifying street-performing clown who leads an army of beggars from an underground hideout; Dr Romany, a magician with ties to the gods of ancient Egypt; and Dog-Face Joe, a werewolf with the ability to swap bodies as the one he occupies becomes more and more obviously a monster. As Doyle simply tries to survive and find a way back to the present—with the help, he hopes, of Ashbless, whom he knows from his research will be in London soon—all of these characters try to use him, and even the businessman who got Doyle into this mess turns out to have hidden designs for Doyle, for Dog-Face Joe, and for the capabilities he has developed. This is the best kind of time-travel story, with minimal explanation of how the technology actually works and a great emphasis on a realistically rendered past for the characters to get lost in. The horror elements are, as a friend put it, a “fever dream,” a totally involving and mysterious adventure, and the intricately constructed plot resolves with one of Powers’s most satisfying conclusions. One of the most purely absorbing and enjoyable reads I’ve had in a while.

Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd—A short but complex and well plotted spy novel concerning a journalist, having gotten a rare interview with the president of a revolutionary government in the decolonizing Africa of the early 1960s, being slowly pulled into the world of espionage and deception. Shades of Buchan and Ambler with a more powerful sense of uncertainty and paranoia than is usual in either. Full review on the blog here.

Bomber, by Len Deighton—The story of a single day and a single fictitious air raid by the RAF on Germany in the middle of World War II. Deighton moves between the bomber crews, ground personnel, German radar operators and night fighter crews, and the civilians and military authorities of the small German town that the bombers, through technical malfunction and bad luck, accidentally target. Brilliantly executed, gripping from beginning to end, with powerful and moving irony throughout. With The Anubis Gates, one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis—The Jim of the title is Jim Dixon, a lecturer in history at a small English university. Jim is not very enthusiastic about his job but needs to pass the review chaired by his department head, the vague, inscrutable Professor Welch, in order to have his probationary position made permanent. In his increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with Welch he gets drunk and embarrasses himself at a party hosted by the Welches, antagonizes Bertrand, Welch’s bohemian artist son, and must contend with a manipulative sometime girlfriend, irrationally hostile flatmates, an earnest student who knows more than he does, and his own growing attraction to Bertrand’s girlfriend, the angelically beautiful Christine. Hilarious and cringe-inducing, Lucky Jim’s vision of hapless academia is often all too recognizable, and Jim himself vies with Ignatius J Reilly as the worst-case-scenario version of myself. Another one I intend to revisit soon.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V Higgins—A short, snappy crime thriller about low-level Boston thugs selling guns and an aging con trying to play the cops and other crooks off each other to his own advantage. Any plot summary will make the novel sound more familiar and predictable than it is. Higgins’s dialogue is excellent and his storytelling reads like an even more stripped down version of Elmore Leonard. A great surprise, and I’m going to seek out more of Higgins’s work.

Runners up:

• Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, by John Le Carré—Two short, brisk, sharply observed detective stories that also happened to introduce George Smiley, one of literature’s greatest spy characters, to the world. Read before revisiting The Spy Who Came in From the Cold for the first time since grad school.

• Baron Bagge, by Alexander Lernet-Holenia—A moving, dreamlike novella about an Austrian cavalryman’s brushes with love and death during World War I. Full review for Substack forthcoming.

• Eight Hours from England, by Anthony Quayle—An involving fictional account of one of World War II’s many frustrating side-shows by a man in a thick of it. Full review on the blog here.

Special mention

Back in January I read Uppsala Books’ newly republished edition of Waltharius, a medieval Latin epic translated by Brian Murdoch. The story is set in the mid-5th century and concerns Walther of Aquitaine, Attila the Hun (briefly), and other semi-historical figures familiar from centuries of subsequent legend and poetry. I greatly enjoyed it, and wrote about it in some detail here.

Favorite non-fiction

Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, by Russ Ramsey—The followup to my favorite non-fiction read last year, Rembrandt is in the Wind, this volume is not quite as good as that book but was still a thoroughly involving, moving, and thought-provoking look at art and faith with the added dimensions of pain and suffering as a theme. I hope to revisit both of Ramsey’s books sometime soon.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare—A massive account of the life of James Bond’s creator. Shakespeare has not only read every source, he has spoken to every possible living connection to Fleming and incorporates all of it into the story. At first the level of detail is overwhelming but once Fleming reaches adulthood and steps into his crucial role in British intelligence during World War II the book settles into a confident stride and breezes through hundreds of pages. The result is an exhaustively detailed picture of Fleming, his world, and his work. Bond doesn’t come along until at least two-thirds of the way through, a good reminder of how much life Fleming was drawing from by the time he created this character. It is also powerfully sad. One gets a sense of Fleming as both a first-rate bounder and a damaged little boy who lost a sterling father and lived his life under the thumb of a ghoulish, manipulative mother—and then married a woman just like her, who mocked his books with her highbrow friends during all-night salons while Fleming tried to catch up on sleep. Far from “failing upwards” because he was posh, as I’ve seen some online critics of Fleming assert, Shakespeare shows that Fleming had both natural talent and a powerful work ethic alongside serious personal flaws. Charm and connections may have gotten him far but can’t account for his success—as reporter, intelligence officer, and finally novelist. This is probably far more Fleming than casual readers will want to spend time with, but a very good biography and a worthwhile read.

Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, by Jeffrey Meyers—A comprehensive, readable, and fair biography of Poe that pays good attention to his life, character, work, and reputation. A few years ago I read short biographies of Poe by Peter Ackroyd and Paul Collins as well as thematic studies of his life and work—Poe and science, Poe and the American city. I’d recommend Meyers’s longer biography to anyone wanting a more thorough treatment. His examination of the confusing and controversial parts of Poe’s life is especially judicious, and his account of the posthumous smearing of Poe’s reputation and the long process of rehabilitation since is very good.

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier—Why do so many kids from affluent families have vaguely-defined anxiety? Why do so many in sheltered suburbs suffer from trauma? Why are so many taking psychoactive meds? Why are so many seeing therapists? And, most importantly, why is none of it helping? Shrier’s basic thesis is that modern American parents, operating from fundamentally flawed premises about harm, have panicked and committed whole generations to regimes of psychiatric “help” that actually leave them emotionally stunted and make them more anxious, passive, morbidly self-absorbed, and less resilient. Shrier couples this with a critique of the child psych industry and the dangerous theories its practitioners often field-test through their patients. A tough but necessary read. Should pair well with The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, which my wife read about the time I was reading this and which I mean to read sometime soon.

The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, by Florian Illies, trans. Tony Crawford—A wide-ranging thematic account of the life and art of the great German Romantic painter as well as a poignant, often bitterly ironic look at his work’s afterlife—forgotten, rediscovered, repurposed, occasionally stolen, and much of it destroyed. Full review on the blog here.

Runners up:

• Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, by Andrew Wilson—An interesting look at the political events, social trends, and intellectual currents in a single year that contributed to our present WEIRDER world. I found some chapters weak and the overall point muddled, but the majority of the book is excellent.

• Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood—A good overview of Cicero’s legal career that also attempts to chart the breakdown of law and order in the late Republic. The former is better than the latter, which is when the author strains for relevance or lessons in this story.

• UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There, by Garret M Graff—An enjoyable if necessarily incomplete survey of the evolution of the UFO phenomenon since World War II. Full review on the blog here.

Rereads

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

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

• On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger*

• The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander

• The Black Cauldron, by Lloyd Alexander

Kids’ books

• Macbeth: A Graphic Novel, adapted by Gareth Hinds from William Shakespeare

• The Castle of Llyr, by Lloyd Alexander

• Taran Wanderer, by Lloyd Alexander

• Troubled Waters, by Sophie de Mullenheim

• James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl

Looking ahead

I’m still reading a few books I had started before my cutoff date and I have several more promising reads lined up, including more John Le Carré and Len Deighton and several books for John Buchan June. Stay tuned next month for those. In the meantime, I hope as always that this list leads you to something good to read, and that y’all have a pleasant and restful summer. Lord knows we need it.

Thanks for reading!

The Return

Ralph Fiennes strings Odysseus’s bow in The Return

Last night I finally had a chance to watch The Return, last year’s film adaptation of the climactic second half of the Odyssey. After anticipating it eagerly for some months, and more so as a steady drip of information about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey epic for IMAX has begun, I was underwhelmed.

First, the good. Ralph Fiennes is an excellent choice to play Odysseus and got into gnarly physical shape for the part. He looks every bit the weathered and toughened old warrior-king, and when he first opens his eyes on the beach at Ithaca they shine with sharply focused intelligence.

And, to be honest, that’s about it. There are a few nice touches I want to come back to, but the best I can say of The Return is that Fiennes performs excellently at the center of a movie that doesn’t measure up to what he’s doing.

I had two big problems with the film. The first is that, from production design and costuming to tone, the film is relentlessly dull and bleak. In the first two areas this bleakness betrays a depressing unoriginality and inauthenticity: inauthentic because this is not what Homer’s or Odysseus’s world looked like, unoriginal because The Return offers the same coarse, dingy, brown-on-brown vision of past peoples as primitives that was already old when Monty Python and the Holy Grail spoofed it.

The Return reminded me of Franco Zefirelli’s Hamlet in that it makes token nods toward a popular misconception of what a period is like—rough wool clothing in impractical designs, rickety dwellings made of sticks, cavernous stone palaces—while using flagrantly anachronistic elements—medieval castles in both cases—to create atmosphere. This could be forgiveable. Indeed, I love Zeferelli’s Hamlet. There will probably never be a movie that gives us a realistic look at the Bronze Age world Homer describes, but at least try to come up with something other than a stereotype.

The bleakness of the film’s tone is the bigger problem. Homer is serious when he needs to be, and presents the stakes—for Odysseus, for Penelope, for Telemachus, even for the suitors—seriously, but is never dour. The Return is simply dour. The film has no comic relief, no joy, no gratitude, no fond reminiscence or hope for the future. There is not even an Athena to pity or help or intercede for Odysseus. The Return is not just demythologized, it’s dehumanized.

This tonal problem is rooted in the film’s approach to the source material. The screenwriters have used the Odyssey to dramatize and explore modern pathologies. This is most evident in the case of Odysseus’s two most important allies upon his return, Eumaeus the swineherd and Telemachus, Odysseus’s son. In the film, both of them hate Odysseus for leaving for Troy and tell him so. They help him grudgingly. When he finally reveals himself and kills the suitors, Penelope reacts in horror and intervenes to spare Antinous, one of the ringleaders, whom Telemachus kills anyway. Penelope turns on them both, berating Odysseus for turning their hall into “a slaughterhouse” and leading Telemachus into a life of violence.

At this point, by replacing Homer’s characters with modern people, the story becomes absurd. What did you think was going to happen when Odysseus came back, lady? When Telemachus hesitated to give Odysseus his bow in the first place, why did you tell him to do so? Why did you bother to delay the suitors at all?

Then, in their long-anticipated reunion, Odysseus tells Penelope that he took so long to come home because he was ashamed of what he had become during the war. At this point all clicks into place: he’s been traumatized you see. Everyone in The Return is dealing with trauma. Trauma, trauma, trauma, just like a bunch of suburbanites moping their way through life. In place of Homer’s lost world of custom, loyalty, duty, ritual, and protocol, a world in which there is still room for love between father and son and tenderness between a well-matched husband and wife, The Return gives us angst and resentment.

It’s strange to me that the film finally squandered what goodwill I still had toward it during the climax, the well-staged slaying of the suitors. But I suppose it was there that the film shows its hand and I realized how far from Homer this story has wandered.

And yet a few glimpses of Homer shine through. When Odysseus poses as a beggar and is beaten and mistreated by the suitors, I felt an outrage true to the poem. When Eurycleia, Odysseus’s elderly nurse, recognizes him from a scar on his leg and is overpowered by excitement that he has returned, I felt that excitement, too. And, most poignantly of all, Odysseus’s encounter with his dying hunting dog Argos, abandoned outside the palace and the first creature on Ithaca to recognize his master, makes it into the movie. This simple, wordless scene moved me to tears.

If I’m being harsh it’s because I’m disappointed. I’m grateful to see an attempt to treat this story seriously, but grieved that the original wasn’t apparently good enough for the filmmakers. That the most emotionally powerful moments in the film were those lifted from the Odyssey with the least alteration or meddling makes The Return a useful warning against trying to improve on the classics.

I suspect it’s already too late for Nolan to learn the lesson. We’ll see next summer. In the meantime, I plan to reread Homer.

Backwards ran technology

I’ve been setting up one of my summer courses all day. As I’ve been doing the drudge work of the process—changing due dates, editing attendance rosters, rearranging grade columns—I’ve listened to a few episodes from the back catalog of a favorite podcast. It’s a sort of “Unsolved Mysteries” from a Christian angle and, though I’m not interested in every topic it covers, I’m very fond of it.

But in listening to episodes about the Lonnie Zamora UFO sighting, purported Area 51 insider Bob Lazar, and the Pascagoula abduction in 1973, I noticed the host returning several times to an assumption that I have to question. Though ordinarily properly skeptical about a lot of this stuff, he nevertheless infers advanced technological development in other sciences—medicine in the Pascagoula case, propulsion systems in the Zamora case—on the simple assumption that That’s the kind of thing a civilization able to achieve interstellar space travel would have.

There are a lot of points to argue about here, but I don’t think that assumption is a safe one. Consider the nearest thing the real world has ever experienced to an actual alien encounter: the contact of Europeans with Native Americans.

• The Spanish and Portuguese had sufficient shipbuilding and navigational technology to cross the Atlantic, but their astronomy was nowhere near as accurate as the Mayans’—or ours, since the Ptolemaic geocentric model was still the unchallenged paradigm at the time.

• The Mayans and Aztecs on the other hand built vast cities that astounded their European guests, but had never developed metal tools (despite the availability of the raw materials to do so), domesticated animals, or even invented the wheel.

One could multiply examples across many other cultures and civilizations. (Every time you hear someone dog on medieval medicine, go look at a gothic cathedral.) Scientific development in one area might proceed linearly, but not all of them will develop at the same pace or toward the same ends. To assume otherwise is to read our own present state of science and technology and its history backwards into circumstances that are almost entirely speculative.

Imagine a flying saucer landing, a ramp descending, and creatures from another world disembarking bearing spears.

It is entirely possible that an alien civilization could develop interstellar faster-than-light travel and have rudimentary medical science, or no written language, or no projectile weapons, or no way to communicate beyond the nearest hill much less with their home planet. I’d even say—granting the existence of such civilizations, which I doubt—that it’s not only possible but likely.

Intelligence in 1066

Harold Godwinson listens to a messenger in the Bayeux Tapestry

This morning on my commute I listened to the latest Rest is History Club bonus episodes. Among the questions Holland and Sandbrook fielded was one about the intelligence networks available during the Norman Conquest. Could William have known what Harold was doing before he sailed from Normandy?

Such questions are ultimately, per Holland, “unanswerable,” though it is not quite true that, as Sandbrook says, there is “no evidence.” The following passage from Wace’s Roman de Rou, which I cited and expanded upon in my master’s thesis, comes immediately to mind. From Glyn Burgess’s translation:

One of the knights in the area [of Pevensey] heard the noise and the shouting coming from the peasants and villeins, who saw the great fleet arrive. He was well aware that the Normans were coming with the intention of taking possession of the land. He took up position behind a mound so that no one could see him; he stood there watching how the great fleet arrived. He saw the archers emerging from the ships and afterwards the knights disembarking. He saw the carpenters, their axes, the large numbers of men, the knights, the building material thrown down from the ships, the construction and fortification of the castle and the ditch built all around it, the shields and the weapons brought forth. Everything he saw caused him great anguish. He girded on his sword and took his lance, saying he would go to King Harold and give him this news. Then he set out, sleeping late and rising early. He travelled extensively night and day in search of Harold, his lord, and found him beyond the Humber, where he had dined in a town. Harold was acting with great arrogance. He had been beyond the Humber and defeated his brother Tostig; things had gone very well for him. . . . Harold was returning joyfully and behaving with great arrogance, when a messenger gave him news of the sort which made him think differently. Suddenly the knight who had come from Hastings arrived.

‘The Normans have arrived’, he said, ‘and established themselves in Hastings. They intend to take the land from you, unless you can defend it. They have already built a castle with brattices and a ditch.’

Later, in a passage I’d forgotten about until rereading it this morning, Duke William benefits from similar intelligence:

In the land there was a baron, but I do not know his name, who had loved the duke greatly and become one of his close advisers; he would never have wanted things to go wrong for William, if he could manage it. He sent him word privately that he had come with insufficient forces; he had few men, he believed, to accomplish what he had undertaken. There were too many people in England and it was very difficult to conquer. In true faith he advised him, and in sincere love sent him word, that he should withdraw from the country and go back to his land before Harold arrived; he was afraid that things would go badly wrong for him.

Wace is a late, poetic source and is problematic for reasons both obvious (his portrait of Harold as a hubristic usurper) and subtle (using post-Conquest feudal terms like “baron” and “knight” and “villein” in an Anglo-Saxon context), but here he presents a plausible picture of what is now called HUMINT or human intelligence. It jibes with many, many other stories from the world before signals intelligence and aerial and satellite surveillance, a world of eyewitnesses desperately offering actionable information to their side’s leadership—something they can only do as quickly as the fastest horse can carry them—not to mention a world of rumor, uncertainty, and, in the case of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon lord who feeds information to William, secret betrayal.

Further, it jibes with the Bayeux Tapestry, which several times shows messengers bringing word to Harold, William, and others and the recipients listening intently, and other sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the Chronicle writes, over and over in every extant version, that Harold “was informed” or “came to know” of some new development, we should probably picture something like what Wace describes.

The evidence is extremely limited and raises as many questions as it answers, but it gives us enough for reasonable inferences. It also—and this is why I remembered the story so many years later—offers a rare glimpse of the men involved in these campaigns at the ground level. Who can read Wace’s account of that anonymous thegn, alerted by the people fleeing in terror and watching from behind a hill as the invasion proceeds unopposed, and not feel his “great anguish”?

You can read the whole passage of Wace in an older translation at Project Gutenberg here.

The King of Kings

We were too late for Easter, but last weekend my three older kids and I finally saw The King of Kings, a new animated movie about the life of Christ from Angel Studios.

I admit I was skeptical of the project when I first learned about it. The King of Kings is based on The Life of Our Lord, a posthumously published retelling of selected stories from the Gospels by Charles Dickens, of all people, and Dickens appears in and narrates the movie. I also have to admit that I’m a bit wary of Angel Studios, not only because I’m reflexively and mulishly suspicious of popularity but because much of their work, based what I’ve read about their prestige projects like Cabrini and Bonhoeffer and what I’ve seen of “The Chosen,” strikes me as slick but hollow. I’d be glad to be wrong. I’m certainly glad I took the kids to see The King of Kings.

The movie begins, startlingly, with Ebenezer Scrooge in the cemetery, insisting to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that he has repented and changed. When noisy children interrupt him, we discover that we’re watching Dickens give a live one-man performance of A Christmas Carol in London sometime in the mid-1840s. The noisy children are Charles Jr, Mary, and the youngest (at the time), Walter. The King Arthur-obsessed Walter proves particularly troublesome, disrupting Dickens’s reading until his father shouts at him and confiscates his toy sword.

At home, Dickens and his wife Catherine put the older children to bed and Dickens takes Walter into the family library to talk things over. He gives Walter’s sword back and begins to tell him about the true story of the king who inspired Arthur. What follows is a quick, thematically-oriented tour of the life of Christ from his birth in Bethlehem, through some of his ministry, and finally his death and resurrection.

Any movie revisiting such familiar stories must have an unusual angle to make them fresh again. Many of the rote, stagey Biblical epics era of the 1950s and 60s are forgotten today because they never improved upon what The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur did. The King of Kings, to my surprise, brilliantly used Dickens to narrow the focus of the film and tease important but easily overlooked themes out of it.

By starting off with a Victorian boy’s love of King Arthur, The King of Kings takes Christ’s rule as its central theme, and every part of the story portrayed onscreen supports and expands on this. Christ’s birth was the birth of a king, resisted by a rival king. Each miracle shown in the film demonstrates his authority over some part of creation—his kingdom. Beginning with his healing of a blind man and following with the feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, casting out Legion from the demoniac of Gadara, healing the paralytic on the Sabbath, raising Lazarus from the dead and, finally, rising from the dead himself, they also show an unmistakable escalation in his claims to rule.

A parallel theme is the irony of Christ’s lordship. Walter, like those anticipating the Messiah’s rule two millennia ago, expects something else in a king. Born in a stable, followed by a council of fishermen, scorned, humiliated, and killed—at every step, Christ’s life upends those expectations. You have heard it said, but I tell you…

Even the film’s odd starting point—the end of Dickens’s Christmas Carol—proves aptly chosen. The King of Kings begins with repentance among snowy tombs and ends with Jesus leaving a tomb having conquered death and made redemption possible. The writing, by director Seong-ha Jang, is simple but brilliantly effective.

Something else that pleased me: The King of Kings was made with children in mind and is kid-appropriate, but it does not sand all of the rough edges off the Gospel accounts. Christ clearly suffers on the cross and endures relentless mockery from the crowd. The film also includes things I’ve seen in very few kids’ books and no other animated version of the story. Not only are the demoniac and Legion here, so are the pigs into which Christ casts the demons. And following the feeding of the five thousand, when some of the crowd talk about making him king on the spot, the film includes Christ’s sobering note that many of the people following him are doing so for material reasons, not because they recognize in him the Son of God. This is not merely a feel-good Sunday School story, but a challenge.

Technically, the film is fine, better than a lot of similar independent animated features. Limitations in the animation show occasionally, but the characters and environments are nicely designed—some of the disciples have a nice Rankin-Bass claymation look to them—and the directing inventively supports the story. A series of flashbacks to the earlier miracles during the crucifixion works especially well, with Walter imagining himself as Peter sinking into the Sea of Galilee and Jesus saving him only to sink himself. The King of Kings may not be on the same level as Pixar or Disney, but the director and animators did a wonderful job making sure the visuals were part of the story and not merely the necessary visual means of telling it.

The voicework is also good, with Kenneth Branagh’s narration as Dickens being the backbone of the film, Oscar Isaac as a subtle, understated Jesus, and many smaller parts filled by big names for a scene or two—Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pilate, and Forest Whitaker as Peter, for example. But the chief strength of the movie is its story and the manner in which the filmmakers, a South Korean animation team led by Seong-ho Jang, have chosen to tell it.

The King of Kings is not an exhaustive cartoon version of the life of Christ, but through the thoughtful selection of stories that resonate with each other, it offers a surprisingly and wonderfully deep meditation on how Christ transformed what kingship means while clearly demonstrating who the true king is.

Star Wars as a religious experience

Sunday, for May the Fourth, my in-laws took our family to see The Empire Strikes Back with the score performed live by the Greenville Symphony Orchestra. The best Star Wars movie, the best Star Wars score, live—it was great. The orchestra performed with flawless timing and great power. I didn’t think I could appreciate John Williams’s work more than I already did, but hearing the entire Empire score in concert revealed yet more of his genius.

The main draw, of course, was the movie and the orchestra, but I was also struck by the audience. The event took place not in the concert hall or theatre at the Peace Center in downtown Greenville but in Bon Secours Wellness Arena (still the Bi-Lo Center to me), with a crowd of several thousand. I fully expected wackiness—people chanting lines of dialogue back at the movie, hooting and hollering, loudly snacking, and running around in costumes during the movie.

Instead, it was one of the best filmgoing experiences of my life. The audience interacted—cheering twice, once at “No, do or do not; there is no try” and again at “I am your father”—and laughed appreciatively at some of the humor, but the mood, to a startling degree, was one of reverence.

I can’t think of the last time I saw such a large group of people sitting still, paying attention, alert and undistracted. Few people left or walked around during the movie. I didn’t see people on their phones and didn’t hear ringtones or text alerts. I didn’t even notice people talking or whispering. Even the children, some very young, were well behaved. It could be that they were taking a cue from the grownups—something important is happening, something worth our attention.

As it happens, English has a word for giving appropriate attention to something that deserves it—worship, from the Old English worðscip, “the condition of being worthy.” Our idea of worship is severely atrophied. Worship is behaving toward something, especially in the matter of attention and respect, in a manner that demonstrates its worth. The audience Sunday knew that intuitively and acted accordingly, showing, as a group, the esteem in which they hold the movie.

I’m not saying the folks watching The Empire Strikes Back with me Sunday were “worshipping” Star Wars in the narrow way we use the word now; I’m saying I haven’t seen such a truly worshipful attitude toward anything in a long time. That it came along for a popcorn space adventure—which happens to be one of the best movies ever made—is interesting.

In a nice coincidence, this week The Rewatchables dropped a long, long two-part episode on the original 1977 Star Wars. (No, I’m not calling it A New Hope.) Twice during the course of the discussion, Sean, one of the regular guests, makes the point that the Star Wars phenomenon rose during a downturn in religious adherence. He doesn’t make any arguments as to which caused which but my experience Sunday made one thing clear: people are starving for the religious in their lives, and Star Wars meets that need in a way many other overtly religious things are not right now.

Necessary caveats: the sociology of American religiosity is fraught with controversy, rival bodies of statistics, and hairsplitting distinctions, and Star Wars is a relentlessly, cold-bloodedly commercial product—now more than ever. But…

But the audience at Sunday’s concert keeps coming back to me. It was like Easter mass in Notre Dame at the height of the Middle Ages, a congregation of pilgrims and local parishioners turned together in adoration toward the altar, complete with music inspired by and inspiring religious awe. It was clearly, in the manner revealingly described by James KA Smith in You Are What You Love, a liturgy, an act of worship.

It was a marvelous experience on many levels. But I’ve been wondering ever since: what would it take to bring that kind of worshipfulness back to the things that are actually worth it?

Gibbon vs geographic determinism

I’m reading a good, thoughtful, thought-provoking book about the factors behind the emergence of the secular, industrialized modern West, but its early chapter on geography bugs me. The author leans hard into geographic determinism, the historiographical theory that human cultures are largely at the mercy of the environments in which they arise—an odd position for an intellectual history to take, but stranger books have been written.

The author introduces this theme through an anecdote from Captain Cook’s voyages. Having landed on Easter Island and taken in the colossal wreck of the civilization that had once flourished there, Mahine, a Polynesian accompanying Cook, commented, “Good people, bad land.” The author takes this at face value, but Mahine’s observation is rubbished by the very thing he’s responding to: the land was good enough to support a large, sophisticated society. It must be some other factor that led to its collapse.

The author signals that he’s focusing on geography as an explanatory factor in order to avoid racial determinism—or suggesting even a little bit that some cultures are more successful than others, an observation commonly confused with racism—but using race to explain everything and using geography to explain everything is not even a false dichotomy. There are other options.

Whenever I run across geographic determinism in my reading, a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall always springs to mind. Here we have, to paraphrase Mahine, good land and bad people. From Vol I, Ch X:

The Goths were now in possession of the Ukraine, a country of considerable extent and uncommon fertility, intersected with navigable rivers, which, from either side, discharge themselves into the Borysthenes; and interspersed with large and lofty forests of oaks. The plenty of game and fish, the innumerable bee-hives deposited in the hollow of old trees, and in the cavities of rocks, and forming, even in that rude age, a valuable branch of commerce, the size of the cattle, the temperature of the air, the aptness of the soil for every species of grain, and the luxuriancy of the vegetation, all displayed the liberality of Nature, and tempted the industry of man. But the Goths withstood all these temptations, and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty, and of rapine.

I first read this in grad school at the same time I was reading books that were part of the then-current wave of geographic determinism, books like Michael Cook’s Brief History of the Human Race or the massively popular Guns, Germs, and Steel, by anthropologist Jared Diamond. Gibbon’s pervasive emphasis on culture was refreshing. Plunk any society you care to come up with into an environment rich with natural resources, but it takes more than the mere presence of those resources for that society to use them.

Conversely, a society with poor land but a spirit of ingenuity can make much out of little. Witness Icelandic society, which has sustained itself for a thousand years despite almost immediate deforestation during the Viking Age and a lack of much else that their forebears from Scandinavia depended on. Nature and human cultures exist in a constant push-and-pull. Geographic determinism makes it all nature, pushing, all the time.

Culture matters. Contra Mahine, what went wrong on Easter Island wasn’t the land, but the use of the land. That’s a cultural problem, just like the Goths’ neglect of their land. The environment imposes barriers and places sometimes hard limits on societies, but whether the people living in a given place creatively adapt to the land, reshape it to their liking, or simply accept it and eke out a living within the limitations imposed by nature is a much more complex question. Their priorities—dutifully serving their gods, seeking honor through war, maintaining their inherited order, raking in cash—are the determining variable, not the environment.

Despite all my disagreements with and misgivings about Gibbon, this is one of the things that keeps his work engaging and readable 250 years later. Likewise the ancients he drew upon. Read Tacitus’s Germania for more on the cultures of Germanic peoples, not all of which, contrary to a common interpretation of his work, is laudatory.

To his credit, the author of the book I’m currently reading acknowledges late in the chapter that culture does matter, but the long meditation along pure geographic determinist lines makes this feel like a feeble gesture toward the immense complexity of man’s relationship with his world.

The Great Books Podcast, RIP

A serious bummer this week: National Review is discontinuing both of its podcasts hosted by John J Miller, namely The Bookmonger and The Great Books.

The former is a long-running short format show—usually no more than ten minutes—featuring interviews with current authors about new releases. I subscribed but didn’t listen to every episode, dipping in when an interesting title or a favorite writer came along, and I found out about a number of good books this way. The latest and final episode, titled “Farewell,” dropped a few days ago.

The latter, however, The Great Books, was a favorite. I subscribed as soon as National Review announced it and I enjoyed and appreciated it for years. It got me through many a long commute through the South Carolina countryside. I have fond memories of misty early morning hayfields whizzing by as Eleanor Bourg Nicholson discussed Dracula, and of driving home some other day, that same landscape now bright and hot in the late afternoon, to the sound of Bethel McGrew praising Watership Down.

Or perhaps it was Robin Lane Fox discussing the Iliad, or Matthew Continetti talking about The Bonfire of the Vanities, or Barry Strauss on Josephus’s Jewish War, or Holly Ordway on The Hobbit, or Brad Birzer on all three volumes of Lord of the Rings, or Nicholson again on Tim Powers’s Declare, or Christopher Scalia on Scoop, or Cat Baab-Muguira discussing Deliverance or quite rightly bringing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to more attention, or Michael Ward talking about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and That Hideous Strength—and on and on.

The show ranged incredibly widely and Miller got great guests, who spoke eloquently about what made these books—everything from Gilgamesh to Casino Royale—great, and made the case for continuing to love and enjoy them.

There was nothing else quite like it in tone, approach, range, earnestness, and simple joy. Through it I revisited old favorites and discovered some great new books, both classics I hadn’t read (or heard of) as well as books by the guests Miller brought on. A Bloody Habit and Poe for Your Problems are two I’ve mentioned here.

I got into podcasts through The Christian Humanist Podcast, a three-man show that ran for over a decade before fizzing out a couple of years ago. Every episode featured sharp, brilliant, thought-provoking discussion, and David, Michial, and Nathan made it fun. It set my standard of comparison long ago. Miller’s Great Books is one of the few other shows that has come close in quality and enjoyment. With its passing, it feels like the true end of an age. At least for me.

Miller stated in his farewell to The Great Books that he may revive the show on his own. I hope so. In the meantime, the 371-episode archive is still on National Review (albeit paywalled). Hopefully it will remain there.

Miller also announced that he can be reached through his website, which includes his contact information. I plan to write a thank you note, something I don’t typically do. If you’ve enjoyed his show in the past, let me encourage you to do the same.

Warfare

A few years ago I quoted Stephen Hunter’s review of Windtalkers, a bad movie for which Hunter offered good insight. In comparing the arch, balletic, frenetic action of that movie to real footage of men in combat, Hunter wrote of how the latter always “amazed” him: “The soldiers appear so informal and undramatic. They never seem to be in any heroic poses; their minds, if you can infer from their body postures, are concerned with very small things, like ‘Let’s get over there’ or ‘Let’s get down’ or ‘Gosh, I wish I wasn’t here.’ They are beyond rhetoric or exhortation.”

I have thought of that passage many times over the years, but it came to mind especially clearly and strongly when watching Warfare over the weekend. A new movie co-directed by Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL turned film military advisor Ray Mendoza, Warfare is the nearest a movie has ever come to fitting Hunter’s description of real-life combat footage.

Part of that is surely down to Mendoza himself. The movie, which is apparently the result of conversations with Garland during the making of Civil War, is based on his experiences during the Battle of Ramadi in the fall of 2006. Mendoza appears as a character, a young SEAL radio operator, though he is by no means the central protagonist. Warfare is an ensemble picture, and the team—radioman Ray, observation post commander Erik, sniper/corpsman Elliott, petty officer Sam, Marine fire support officer Mac, callow new guy Tommy—shares the spotlight.

Briefly, because I really don’t want to give anything away, Warfare recreates a single incident from Mendoza’s time in Ramadi almost in real time. Having commandeered a house shared by two Iraqi families, whom the SEALs confine to a downstairs bedroom, Mendoza’s team observes a busy street in a hostile neighborhood. An opening title tells us they’re operating in support of a Marine unit elsewhere in the city, and though combat can be heard elsewhere and it occasionally diverts the SEALs’ air support, we never see it.

While watching as a growing group of MAMs (military-age males) gathers in a busy market down the street, the SEALs are hit by a grenade and rifle fire and have a furious shootout with enemies they can’t see. Following a second deadly surprise attack, the SEALs are trapped in the house trying to stabilize their wounded while the insurgents from down the road launch their assault. They need air support, their fellow SEALs from other observation posts nearby, and medical evacuation by road—before they’re overrun, and before their friends die of shock or blood loss.

Another quotation that came to mind, this time from Clausewitz: “Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Utterly unromanticized, detail-oriented, and agonizing in execution, Warfare makes you feel that in your bones.

In addition to eschewing a main character, Warfare scraps most of the other conventions not only of war movies but of movies in general. Other than a brief, comedic prologue, the film follows the classical unities, taking place entirely in and around a single house over the course of an hour and a half of a single day of the battle. No one talks about the girl they left behind or what they plan to do when they get back home and no one finds an excuse to explain to a buddy—for the benefit of the eavesdropping audience—what military jargon means or why they’re doing what they’re doing. The characters receive no more characterization than what we can observe of them, and we must infer the reasons for their actions from their results (or the lack thereof).

With so little Hollywood convention to rely upon, Warfare’s brilliance rests on two things: the performances, which are great across the board—I really forgot I was watching actors for a long time—and its technical excellence, especially its cinematography and sound design. There is no musical score; all sound is diegetic, sourced within the world of the story, and though we have all seen soldiers in war movies briefly lose their hearing after an explosion, in Warfare it takes a long time to come back. An uncomfortably long time. And when it does, you might prefer not hearing.

Warfare is exclusively about the experience, the “What was it like?” of the Iraq War, and refreshingly takes no political stance whatsoever. It concerns these men in this house, and what they have to do to fight and survive. If they are “beyond rhetoric and exhortation,” they are also beyond policy and partisan talking points. (This has, predictably, upset some people.) Like their experience of war, Warfare is blunt, direct, stripped down, and teaches no obvious lesson. To do so would be to cheapen and uncomplicate what these men lived through. Warfare brought Ernst Jünger’s entomologist eye to mind: like Storm of Steel, it seems to say War is a thing that is. Here is the specimen I observed.

Warfare is a one-of-a-kind movie, a small gem that deserves a wide viewership and all the praise it’s gotten. It is, in short, exactly what it says in the title, with no embellishments or flourishes. Per Hunter, it is “informal and undramatic,” and though the men fight bravely they do not do so in “heroic poses.” They do what their training and duty and their affection for their friends—never stated or explained but obvious through their actions—require them to do, and several times they do things so dangerous that the word hero, which seems irrelevant in the moment, only occurs to us afterward.

More if you’re interested

While I’ve read a lot about the two battles of Fallujah in 2004, most of what I know about Ramadi comes from the excellent memoir Joker One, by Donovan Campbell, who commanded a Marine infantry platoon in the city at the same time Fallujah was dominating the news. This was two years before Warfare takes place, but would be a worthwhile read whether your see the Warfare or not. Here’s my Amazon review from fifteen years ago.

Addendum, May 1: Since posting this review earlier this week I’ve come across two more good items. First, here’s Kyle Smith’s review for the Wall Street Journal, which says much of what I was trying to praise, only better. Second, here’s a long interview hosted by Jocko Willink with the two real guys wounded in the fight depicted in Warfare. It’s powerful.

Diagnosis of diagnosis

Earlier this week, Alan Jacobs offered up a new taxonomy of (non-fiction) writers: diagnostic, prescriptive, and therapeutic. (This is a riff on a post from a few years ago similarly categorizing thinkers.) Regarding the first category, he writes that

Diagnostic writers are usually also Explainers, and what they’re trying to explain is What Is Wrong. What’s our affliction? Where did it come from? . . . Our moment, it seems to me, is greatly overpopulated by diagnostic writing. As I’ve commented before, most of our diagnostic writers seem unaware that hundreds or thousands of writers before them have made precisely the arguments that they make. (That doesn’t stop readers from treating them as savants, though.)

After describing the other two, he concludes by returning to this observation:

We have so much diagnostic writing because it often tells us something we very much want to know: which of our enemies are to blame. That, I think, is why we can read it endlessly, even when it repeats what we’ve already read.

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you’ve looked through the non-fiction current events books on the tables and endcaps at Barnes & Noble, all of which seem to have been written within echo chambers for the purpose of affirming what is already held as unquestionable fact within those echo chambers. But I also wonder whether the present glut of this kind of “diagnostic” writing, especially when it repeats accepted pieties or tries to turn them into political cudgels, doesn’t have perverse effects.

If you actually read what the people who lionize Darryl Cooper, or who mock Douglas Murray for his rant on Joe Rogan about the necessity of expertise, or who get into flatly wicked things like Holocaust denial say online, you’ll find that they view themselves as fighting back against a false consensus. They reject what they perceive to be a politically imposed misdiagnosis that confers in-group status and prevails through ad nauseum repetition by bad-faith insiders and wish to assert their own diagnosis—one that provides the right enemies to blame. This is, as Jacobs points out, “something we very much want to know.”

That impression of monolithic consensus is reinforced by the kind of thousandfold repetition of old diagnoses that Jacobs mentions, but is almost always false. Any specialist in, say, the history of the Third Reich could immediately point you toward faultlines within the field and legitimate points of debate. Here’s one. That false impression is usually born of ignorance, which is regrettable. But is also preventable. You only have to trust someone to teach you, not strike out on your own with nothing but suspicion to guide you.

To conclude, I feel like I should apologize for adding to the heap of diagnostic writing in the internet landfill, but I’m terrified to be prescriptive and you don’t want to read my therapeutic advice.

Listening is not reading

Last week on Substack the perennial argument over audiobooks flared up again: does listening to an audiobook count as reading, and is having listened to a book the same as having read it?

I mentioned the pedant in me in my recent post about The Last of the Mohicans. He is never far from the surface but must be kept in check with regard to colonial New York bridge architecture and whatnot. But on this topic I’m happy to let him off the chain.

No, listening is not the same as reading, and if you’ve listened to an audiobook you haven’t read the book.

This opinion probably provoked a kneejerk reaction in at least some of y’all. These arguments get passionate quickly. But here’s my pedantic take on the whole thing: they shouldn’t. Such passion is misplaced for two interrelated reasons.

The first is the basic semantic fact that listening and reading are different words describing different things. Saying “I read War and Peace last month” when I listened to it in my car is simply untrue. This seems pedantic but it’s an important distinction; we have different verbs for these things for a reason.

The second reason has to do with the reality of reading and listening in and of themselves. These are not the same activity. You are doing different things and different things are happening to you. You can get scientific and neurological about it—as my wife, who has a degree in literacy, can and does, having recently led a professional development based on Proust and the Squid at her school—but common sense proves this, too. I both assign readings to my students and lecture. If there were no difference I could assign only readings or only lectures.

Again, this is both a semantic distinction and an immovable truth, the most important fact in the debate. Everything else is epiphenomenal. And yet if you point out that reading and listening are not the same thing, fans of audiobooks will infer from that distinction a snobbish judgment of inferiority or outright condemnation. But that inference—not to mention the defensiveness that arises from it—does not follow.

So why does this debate keep coming up? I think two factors are at play:

First, the valorization of reading. This is the “Fight evil, read books” school of reading, in which reading is treated as virtuous in itself. What used to be the specialist skill of clerks and chroniclers is now a badge of honor and mark of moral rectitude. This is pure self-congratulatory sentimentalism and should be dismissed as such. Reading is important—you’ll find no dispute on that point on this blog—but it does not make anyone good and, in a society of democratized mass education, it doesn’t even make you special.

Second—and I think the real culprit behind the rage—is the Dominion of Content. Our culture is in the grip of the erroneous assumption that all stories, media, and information are undifferentiated and interchangeable. Note how often the word consume comes up in these arguments. This is a giveaway. Failing to differentiate between reading a story yourself and having it read to you reduces writers’ work to free-floating, gnostic content that can be delivered any old way so long as it gives you some kind of picture in your head. In this view, writers don’t write books, they “produce” “content” at one end of a supply chain and at the other the “content” is simply “consumed.”

Combine content culture with a culture that makes proud little warriors out of people who happen to know how to read and you get a popular incentive to consume books without distinguishing how one has consumed them.

Conversely, put reading in its right place as an important but value-neutral skill (so that readers won’t lord it over audiobook listeners) and stop treating art as mere content to be consumed (so that audiobook listeners distinguish what they’re doing from reading) and the difference between reading and listening ceases to be pointlessly inflammatory.

Which is what I’d hope for. There’s nothing wrong with audiobooks. There’s no reason to be defensive about listening to a book and no reason to bridle at what should be a boring factual distinction. I prefer and always will prefer reading—and from a physical book, not a screen—but I have trained myself to follow and enjoy audiobooks, too. I listen to books that are hard to find and to books I’ve read before but want to enjoy in a new way. I have relatives who listen to books to pass the time on morning walks or while working a long nighttime shift in a patrol car. These are all legitimate and enjoyable—but they’re not reading.

To end on a positive note, everyone litigating this on Substack over the last several days made exactly one point I agree with wholeheartedly: listening to a book is better than just about any other activity you could be filling your time with at present. That’s why I’m always thrilled to recommend audiobooks to those relatives and friends I mentioned, why I’m glad Audible exists, and why I’m mad that AI is trying to conquer audiobooks, too.

Magua appreciation

Wes Studi as Magua in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

A few days ago Alan Jacobs posted a short appreciation of Michael Mann’s 1992 The Last of the Mohicans on his microblog. His first observation (of three) and his highest praise: “The best actor in the movie, by miles, is Wes Studi.”

Agreed. And recall that this movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis.

Comparison with Day-Lewis is instructive. As Hawkeye, Day-Lewis is impressive and believable. His preparation for the role—living in the woods doing the things an 18th-century frontiersman would do—is legendary. But his job as the hero is less complicated than Studi’s as the villain. Hawkeye must be believably tough, tenacious, and capable, not to mention charismatic enough for us to believe that this buckskin-clad wildman can get the girl, and Day-Lewis pulls this off handily. But Hawkeye, though a compelling character, is not deep. His openness is part of what makes him a hero.

Studi’s Magua, on the other hand, is all hidden depth. A French-allied Huron pursuing his own war of revenge against a specific British family for reasons he mostly keeps to himself, when we meet him at the beginning of the movie he is posing as a friendly Mohawk. He has somehow insinuated himself into British employ as a scout and guide and comes within a hairsbreadth of exacting his long-sought revenge, and even in the moment of his near-triumph he is cool and controlled. The only clue that he may not be what he seems is hidden in the subtitles. His behavior reveals nothing.

Studi takes a role that could have been merely inscrutable and imbues him with calculation. Watch any scene in which Magua appears—especially scenes in which he silently watches, like the British-French parley at Fort William Henry—and you can see Magua assessing and planning. His stillness is not passivity, and self-control is both his most admirable and his most dangerous trait. Compare Gary Oldman’s George Smiley in the more recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

I think Studi’s finest scene may, in fact, be entirely wordless. In the climactic mountainside showdown, Hawkeye’s adoptive brother Uncas ambushes and attempts to stop Magua in order to save Alice Munro, who has been sent into captivity/marriage by a Huron chieftain. Magua kills Uncas and Alice, distraught, despairing, throws herself from the cliff. Watch this interlude, a pause in the musket and tomahawk action, and pay attention to the range of emotion in Studi’s Magua as he fights and kills Uncas, tries to coax Alice away from the edge, and, puzzled, moves on.

The long closeups Mann gives him as he tries to understand Alice are powerful. The one shot of him lowering his knife tells an entire internal story. This is, notably, one of only two instances in the movie in which Magua shows any kind of vulnerability. I always leave that scene moved, and more for Magua than for Alice.

I could say more. Studi is terrific, one of the great screen villains in one of my favorite movies. Watch it if you haven’t.

Studi, by the way, is a Vietnam veteran. He talks a little about how that experience has influenced his career in this great GQ interview about his most famous roles. A great watch. In 2018 he paid tribute to veterans at the Oscars, speaking Cherokee—supposedly the first time a Native American language was used in an Oscar speech. The next year he received an honorary Oscar and thanked, among others, Michael Mann.

Jacobs’s final point in his brief post: “Michael Mann is such a ‘city’ director that it’s constantly surprising to see how beautifully he films forests and streams—and, in one memorable case, people crossing a bridge.” No argument. Jacobs includes a screenshot of this scene:

That’s the bridge over the Bass Pond in the grounds of the Biltmore Estate outside Asheville. It was designed, along with the rest of the gardens and grounds, by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park.

The Last of the Mohicans is set in upstate New York in 1757, and the question of whether there was anything like this in Albany when it was a frontier town nags at the pedant in me. But it’s a beautiful shot of a beautiful place, and nicely sets up a contrast with the untamed wilderness into which Mann’s civilized British characters are about to follow Magua.