I don't like when people try to use possessing or reading books as a mark of status. This is a point I feel obligated to clarify, because this page contains a big ol' list of books I read throughout anno domini 2020. Such lists are most commonly created by boring bibliomaniacs who wish to posture about how special and intellectual they are. I cannot stress enough how much I do not intend to impress anyone with this modestly long list, composed mostly of pulp fantasy novels. I just read some books, and thought some thoughts, and wanted to squeeze that brain juice into some writing somewhere.
Please note that I've taken no particular effort to avoid spoilers. If that's something you care about, don't read this.
Prince of Wolves and Master of Devils
by Dave Gross
Licensed D&D fantasy novels were a cornerstone of my adolescence. During the years that I was big into Pathfinder (2011~2013), I thought it was great that Paizo was continuing the tradition of helping to get fantasy adventure fiction stories published. I bought a small collection of them all at once, and the first I read was The Worldwound Gambit. That book was a huge disappointment. I never mustered the interest to even attempt any of the others I'd purchased. That is until late 2019 or so when I decided to clear out many of the unread books on my shelves. I only got to these in early 2020, and read both of them a few months apart. I cannot say they're better than The Worldwound Gambit, but my expectations were lower, and I was better able to enjoy them as a bit of trashy adventure fiction.
As such, I wasn't mad about either book being a tepid mélange of mangled fantasy cliches. What I am kinda mad about is that the first book is built around a thinly veiled, fantasy analogue for racist depictions of Romani peoples. That sucks. In similar wise, the second book is set in fantasy not-China, and reads like a kung fu film directed by an American whose only exposure to Asian cultures are badly dubbed kung fu films. I don't expect every book I read to be woke AF, but these books have so little going for them that this shit really stood out.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about these two books is that they both turn around the same central plot device. Each of the two main characters believes the other is dead, only to discover they're still alive in the final act. I don't want to call this a bad choice, necessarily. It could have been a fun and funny conceit for a series of adventure stories, but it just didn't vibe with me. Perhaps a series that didn't feel stale from page 1 could have made the conceit work better?
I don't think I walked away from either book having been enriched at all, but they were a way to pass time. Sometimes it's valuable to read a book that falls short, just so you can understand and appreciate the books that don't.
State & Revolution
by Vladmir Lenin
Thus far in my study of early 20th century revolutionary theory, everything reads like a scene drama recap. State & Revolution is no exception. It is a document of its time, directed at people familiar with the figures and movements of its time, which makes it particularly difficult to parse for a modern reader. That having been said, I do think I came away from State & Revolution with a fuller understanding of my own beliefs. There are yet many questions I have to answer for myself, but Lenin's argument works for me. I am reasonably satisfied that a post-revolutionary state is necessary, and have not yet encountered any anarchist arguments to dissuade me from that specific point. There may yet be such arguments. Education is a lifelong pursuit and all that.
Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy
by Martha Wells
It is difficult to think about the books of the Murderbot Diaries series individually. Each is quite short, and taken as a whole the first four books in the series form a sort of singular fix-'em-up novel. Taken together they are a stellar work of scifi adventure fiction, which I frequently recommend whenever people ask me about good books. And yet, because I read the first two in 2019, I now find myself trying to come up with something to say about the middle and end of what is—to me—a single book. I had to look up the plot synopses on Wikipedia to even remember which specific stories these two books told.
What I've been forced to realize is that these stories that I've been thinking of as excellent are, actually, just serviceable. The plots themselves leave very little impression, and serve more as a vehicle for exploring the character of Murderbot themself. A character study which I do believe is absolutely excellent and worth the time of anyone who enjoys adventure fiction. The books are superb, but they are superb for their character work rather than for their narrative.
Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast
by Ken Forkish
Holy fuck, Ken Forkish is really proud of being rich. Like, wowzer, he sure is the bravest boy in the whole wide world for being rich enough to take several years off work to learn how to bake bread! He seems to think it took courage, and really wants everyone reading this book to be impressed with his culinary accomplishments. An absurd number of pages are dedicated to a self-aggrandizing autobiography which I feel cheated for having paid for. You know how sometimes an incredibly shitty person will tell you about some argument they had with their partner, and even though they're clearly telling you a one-sided version of events, it's still obvious that they're the asshole? That's Ken Forkish. That's not even an analogy. There's a lengthy story in here where he attempts to relitigate an argument he had with some neighbors who didn't want him to open a bakery in a residential area.
I bought this book to learn how to make better bread. To the book's credit, it did help me accomplish that goal. But I am embarrassed to have learned anything from Ken. My bread is better, but my belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity is weaker.
I feel obligated to note that I've only read about 60% of the book, because baking pizzas and flatbreads are not skills I'm pursuing at the moment. Though my partner has purchased a pizza stone for me, so perhaps I ought to take the hint and start learning to make pizza.
At Home: A History of Private Life
by Bill Bryson
If I were of a mind to rank the books I read this year, this would likely be in the bottom spot. While Dave Gross' two Pathfinder books were dumb fun, and Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast was insulting yet educational, this book is the only one I might call a waste of my time.
The elevator pitch has appeal: the history of modern [British] living, explored via the focus of a modern home, room-by-room. So, one chapter might be the dining room, in which the author discusses the history of food and eating in private life. Another chapter is the bedroom, and we learn about the history of sleeping and sex. It's an appealing structure, but one which seemingly exists as a veil to disguise a series of lazy anecdotes assembled by a pop history writer who doesn't want to work too hard. I don't trust any of the facts recorded in this book.
If that were not bad enough, every page is suffused by a discomforting perspective. I was left with the distinct impression that the author knows it is impolitic to admit he wishes he were enjoying the most brutal excesses of the British Empire. But, wink wink, nudge nudge, things sure were better in the old days, right? Right?
Nation
by Terry Pratchett
I find it uniquely difficult to know what to say about Nation. I read it because Strata was a pretty good book, and I wanted to read more of Pratchett without delving into the bottomless well that is Discworld. Nation wound up being an order of magnitude better than Strata. If I were of a mind to rank the books I read this year, Nation would certainly be up near the top somewhere.
Yet I don't know what there is to say other than "I enjoyed it." It is a book that wrapped me up in its story so thoroughly that my analytical apparatus was smothered for the duration. I came away from the book in a state of empty headed contentment. Which is not my way of attempting to offer superlative praise. There are other books I liked just as well or better which I have a lot to say about. But something about this book (or perhaps my own emotional state when I read it) caused me to enjoy it the way I used to enjoy art when I was a child. That's a pleasant experience to have from time to time.
Thirteen
by Richard K. Morgan
This book fucked me up.
It contains a textbook example of "fridging"—a female character being killed or brutalized as a narrative tool to motivate a male protagonist—but I can't be annoyed by it. It was so well done. The two characters were more or less co-protagonists with a complex relationship that arced through the whole narrative (a passable murder mystery). The fridging doesn't occur until fully three quarters of the way through the book. An unexpected poisoning leads to a slow and lingering death. It didn't feel real until the final pages when there weren't enough words left to describe a miraculous resurrection. I felt that character's death more acutely than almost any other fictional death I can recall. So much so that it's difficult to credit my feelings entirely to artistic skill on the author's part. Maybe I was particularly morose that day, and the book tapped into a convergence of drifting emotional ley lines at just the right time. I can't say for sure.
So much did that death come to define the book that it takes a bit of thinking to bring any other detail to mind. As noted the murder mystery which serves as the plot is entirely passable. The setting is compelling: Capitalism in decline, America fractured into several bickering states. The picture painted of 'Jesusland,' felt real enough to be unsettling. There was a peculiar bioessentialist bent to the setting that felt goofy. Of the "your DNA determines what your favorite sports team will be." sort. For the life of me I can't recall if the narrative subverted that by the end or not, I just remember frequently rolling my eyes about all the things people are supposedly 'coded' for. Among them is a peculiar out-of-left-field claim that humanity's DNA makes communism impossible, which obviously did not endear the book to me.
Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon
by Thomas Harris
I read Silence of the Lambs as part of that effort to clear out my book shelf. It's a book I had long regretted buying. Neither murder mysteries, nor police stories are something I usually enjoy. But I couldn't bring myself to discard it without at least trying to read it. An echo of the bibliomania that haunts my own mind. In any event, I'm glad I gave the book a chance! I enjoyed it so much that I've actually turned around on murder mysteries. I read quite a few more of them as the year progressed.
The moment I got through SotL, I immediately sought out and read the book which came before it, Red Dragon. The protagonist of this earlier book is less interesting than Clarice Starling, but the killer is an order of magnitude more compelling than Buffalo Bill. I found myself rooting for him as he seemed about to break free from the mental prison that drove him to kill. I really hoped the fictional world would contrive to let him build a better life for himself, despite the terrible violence he'd done to others.
Despite my surprising and genuine enjoyment, I doubt I'll make an effort to read any of the other books in this series. It is perhaps unfairly judgmental of me, but the plot synopses of those later books are so profoundly repellent to my sensibilities that I don't even want to give them a chance.
Whenever I think of these books, they bring to mind a particular memory. After a long day of work, my car had broken down. I was technically within walking distance of home, so I decided to walk home rather than pester friends or family for a ride. I spent perhaps four hours trudging along the sides of dangerous and busy streets in the hot summer heat. I live on top of a tall hill, I had a lot of gear to carry, and I had to hustle so I wouldn't miss a teleconference with my editor. All in all, though, it is a pleasant memory for me, because I had the audiobook for Silence of the Lambs to keep me company.
Post Office
by Charles Bukowski
This book is miserable. That's not a dig—not necessarily—it's what the book was meant to be. An exploration of the banality of human misery.
The protagonist's experiences working for the U.S. Postal Service are straight out of Kafka. But while Kafka stories are usually about nice young men who do all the right things, and are yet still crushed by the inscrutable machinations of bureaucracy; Bukowski's is a greasy, stinking, human sort of misery. The job the protagonist works would make anyone miserable. He would have been miserable without it, though, and he makes everyone he meets more miserable for having known him. It is a deeply unpleasant story to spend time in. One that challenged my thinking and enriched my life, but I am not eager to read another Bukowski story any time soon.
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
An absolutely singular novel. It is difficult to think of anything I've ever read which is quite like it. Perhaps because I do not read many comedy novels, but then, I can't think of any comedy novels I'm aware of which I haven't read. I've read a few comedy books which are generally a sort of extended version of someone's standup, or are a comedian's memoirs, but this is a novel. It has characters, a setting, a plot, all of which are really well developed, filled with personality and humor. The book is hilarious, and beautiful, and tragic in more ways than one.
I hesitate to describe the book, because it's difficult to find words that succinctly convey its reality without undermining my claim that it is a consistently delightful book. The protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a sort of prototype for a white kid radicalized by weird Internet nonsense. The book was written and set in the 1960s. Ignatius is an educated medievalist who lives with his mother, and wants to return society to a state of theocratic monarchy. The ways in which he constantly deludes himself into thinking he's a very serious person with very important thoughts is distressingly familiar in the best way. His disconnect from a reality which he views through a lens of self important nonsense results in a book I know I will return to again in coming years.
The Sunless Citadel
by Bruce Cordell
The first of several D&D modules I read this year in order to prep them for my "Danger Neighbor" D&D campaign. Sunless Citadel is an old favorite. In fact, being run through it by the fellow who first introduced me to the game is one of my earliest memories of playing D&D. Coming back to it with a more experienced eye made me appreciate how much this module held to the style of classic play I've come to appreciate, in an era when that was particularly uncommon. There are rules for resource tracking and light sources. The dungeon even includes factions which the players can have relationships with. It's far from perfect in this. The purity of the faction play is muddled by the dungeon's construction, with a very clear "faction the party are meant to empathize with," and "faction they are not." The 'good' faction is encountered first, speaks English, has a cute little sadboy NPC to serve as their ambassador, etc. It feels a bit like a cheap trick to give the illusion of complex dungeon play while softly railroading the players through an intended route, but perhaps that is being too harsh. The adventure is much more open ended and interesting than most 2e or 3e adventures I've read, and I'm glad to have returned to it after all this time.
If you're curious, the entirety of my party's adventures through the dungeon were documented on my website Papers & Pencils.
Return of the Black Widowers
by Issac Asimov
Though I enjoyed this book, I am hesitant to recommend it, and uncertain if I would pursue reading any more of the Black Widowers stories. The setup is charming enough: a group of pals get together for a big fancy dinner each month. They rotate who among them hosts the dinner, and the host is also responsible for providing one guest member for the evening. The guest will be interrogated about their life ("How do you justify your existence?") to enliven the conversation. As a conceit of the stories, each of these guests arrives with some mystery for the Black Widowers to unravel for them over dinner. The ultimate solution is always provided by the waiter. A much cleverer and more observant man than they are.
Reading old books is always a roll of the dice as to whether the joy they give me will outweigh the moments of discomfort whenever they're casually racist, misogynist, or homophobic. Return of the Black Widowers is just on the wrong side of that scale. Usually I've found Asimov is actually not so bad about this. The sexism in his writing is usually of the genteel sort, where there are very few women, but those who exist are at least interesting. The Black Widowers, by contrast, are explicitly a club whose most sacred rule is that no woman ever be present. The characters who do attend the dinners are all tedious. I could never really tell them apart, even after reading a dozen short stories featuring more or less the same cast. They're all crusty old white guys with too much money and not enough empathy. The constant barbs about the annoyances men must endure when sharing spaces with women got just so profoundly tiresome. It's a shame, really, as the mysteries are charming. There's a coziness to the idea of dedicating a whole story to the mystery of where a guy left his umbrella.
By far the part of the book which impacted me most was an essay Asimov wrote about his philosophy of writing mysteries. To whit: they're literary puzzles. Their function is to be challenging, but solvable, and to that end a predictable formula is not only acceptable, but desirable. Moreover, he lambastes the proliferation of police procedurals, strongly preferring mysteries be solved by precocious amateurs than by men with guns. In this sense he described himself as the last working member of the school founded by Agatha Christie. Such a utilitarian approach to storytelling was new to me. I don't know that I'd ever heard working with a consistent and predictable form described in such positive terms before, and it was eye opening.
This essay, combined with the new interest in murder mysteries Silence of the Lambs instilled in me, did much to direct my reading selections later in the year.
Song of Blades & Heroes
by Andrea Sfiligoi
Early in 2020 I developed an enthusiasm for painting miniatures and crafting terrain. There was no purpose to it beyond the joy of artistic creation, and in particular the joy of pursuing a tactile art. However, as I created more things, I started to want to do something with them. I figured it was finally time to explore my long-neglected curiosity about war games.
I purchased 3 games, and began my reading with this one. It is admirably simple and broad-minded in its approach. I was explicitly looking for something flexible enough to accommodate whatever miniatures I felt like painting, and this one does seem to work for that. Unfortunately, I was never able to get my partner to set aside the time to play with me, and COVID meant nobody else could play with me either. I always find it difficult to wrap my head around a game's rules until I'm able to play it, and work out the kinks in my understanding. As it is, I wound up losing my enthusiasm for the project. It's really too bad, actually. I often miss the painting and the crafting, but I lack that enthusiasm which prompted me to actually spend time on those things. I'm not certain why that is, but I'm sure I'll come back to it sometime.
Dhalgren
by Samuel R. Delaney
It is difficult to know where to start. I've owned a copy of Dhalgren for longer than I remember, likely because I thought the cover of a broken city beneath a red haze looked neat when I was a teenager, but never got around to cracking it open. As mentioned above, I cleared out a lot of books like that, and made a point of getting audio books so I could discard the physical object without FOMO. On the whole this was a good decision, but in the specific case of Dhalgren I really wish I'd kept my physical copy.
This book came right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic for me. The regular rhythms of my life were disrupted, and so too were my regular reading habits. As such, there were a lot of lengthy gaps in my reading of this book. This was not helped by the fact that I really hated the book for a goodly portion of it. It took a great long time for the story to grow on me, but it did. I won't say it was ever really compelling, even in the latter half when I'd realized how good it was. Dhalgren is good in a way that precludes being compelling. It is a book that frequently prompted me to stop reading, sit it down, and mull.
At almost 900 pages, combined with my slow pace of reading, this single text took up almost one third of my year. I started it very near the beginning of May, and only finished it on the last day of August. It became a sort of institution in my life. I recall that when I finished it, I felt cut adrift. The idea that it was time to start a new book didn't fully register. What other book was there than Dhalgren anymore? And because it is a cyclical novel—the end of it leads right into the beginning of it—I did actually start it over again for about 30 pages. It is a book I need to return to someday. I am hungry for this book, and for some literary scholar to help me see the connections I don't see myself. I would buy a book about this book, or preferably attend a lecture series devoted to it. Not because I need someone to explain it to me. It is not so dense as to need explanation. But this is a book absolutely pulsating with meaning. Someone with the inclination could spend years peeling back the layers of this thing. That is not my inclination, but I'm eager to know what insights such an inclination might produce.
It bears note that just as I reached the end of the book, the great red haze which ended the summer of 2020 occurred. It felt especially portentous to me, reading a story about a self contained apocalypse in a city where nothing made sense beneath an ever-present shroud of red mist. To now see my own world—itself in a slow apocalypse that does not make sense—shrouded beneath a similar red mist. Positively eerie.
Thrawn: Treason
by Timothy Zahn
As I will discuss in some greater detail below, I was a big fan of the Bantam-era of Star Wars novels. That era began with Tim Zahn's three masterwork Thrawn novels. I am very much less of a fan of the later Del Rey published books, and have more or less lost interest in Star Wars entirely since Disney's big canon reset in 2012. It is difficult to care about a world where so many of the characters I came to care about have been un-created, and now their world goes on as if they never were.
Somehow, though, Tim Zahn has been managing to continue writing Thrawn stories which technically take place in the new canon, but neatly avoid contradicting the old canon. In a sense he'd been doing this even before the Disney purge, presumably allowed his own fiefdom within the fiction as reward for his books' consistent popularity. As the boundaries of his fiefdom have started to fill up, Zahn's stories have become a bit less interesting. It feels like he has less space to maneuver, and has been falling back on the Star Wars staple of explaining backstories that don't need to be explained. But he is a skilled storyteller, so even these later stories remain pretty darned fun.
This is the second book which chronicles Thrawn's Imperial career, though I believe there may have been some short stories I missed. For the first time in this book, the Thrawn character doesn't sit right with me. In the original stories—some thirty years old now—Thrawn is the villain. Unequivocally the bad guy. Ever since, though, the stories have been gradually more sympathetic towards him. He's morphed into a sort of Sherlock Holmes character: mentally 3 steps ahead of everyone else, constantly taking actions which seem cruel at the time, but in retrospect were always for the best. It is suggested that he is motivated by an underlying compassion which drives him to autocracy, because he's just so much better than everyone else.
In these newest novels Thrawn is the protagonist, and in this particular novel he is a protagonist with a great deal of political and military power. So now we've got an übermensch protagonist accumulating military and political power because he's the only one who knows best and—oops! It's fascist propaganda now. This is a trap military science fiction falls into frequently. A legacy from Heinlein and Herbert perhaps.
To be clear I don't think Tim Zahn set out to write fascist propaganda. Regardless of intent, however, that is what this story turned out to be. The back half of the book was really soured for me because of this. Which is a shame, but it would be much easier to revel in the misdeeds of an antihero if I didn't feel like the book was trying to present him as a good guy.
Thulian Echoes
by Zzarchov Kowolski
Another module I re-read in preparation for including it in my Danger Neighbor campaign. As before, a chronicle of our adventures through it is available on Papers & Pencils.
There simply isn't anyone else like Zzarchov writing RPGs. It's not enough to say that each of his adventures stand on their own as exemplary prompts for adventure gameplay. Many adventure modules accomplish that. What makes Zzarchov's books singularly impressive is that they introduce whole new modes of play. He uses simple dungeon jaunts to turn the game completely on its head.
In Thulian Echoes this takes the form of a journal the players receive. It describes an ancient adventuring group's attempt to plunder the dungeon. Reading the journal involves the players taking control of those ancient characters, exploring the dungeon on their own terms in the distant past. Presumably they will die, but their mistakes and successes will be instructive to the actual player characters who follow in their footsteps. In effect, the players go through the exact same scenario twice—though a few things do change in the several hundred years that pass between the two delves.
I've only been running published adventures for a little over 2 years now, and at a pace of 3 or 4 per year I cannot claim to have a great depth of experience. That said, Thulian Echoes is a strong contender for my favorite.
Capital: Volume 1
by Karl Marx
I made my third serious attempt to plow through this volume in 2020. It has so far been my most successful attempt, with fully 426 pages studied. It's a dense beast both in terms of the sort of language Marx uses, and in terms of the literal thickness of the tome. My efforts have been greatly aided by following each section of reading with an accompanying lecture from the series put together by David Harvey. I confess I have somewhat fallen off from regularly reading the book in recent months, but it remains a high priority for me.
Axiom's End
by Lindsay Ellis
A lovely little story about first contact with intelligent alien life occurring in the mid 2000s. I found myself particularly charmed and encouraged by the ways in which the novel was obviously a freshman effort. I've followed Lindsay Ellis' work for many years. Her video essays are always entertaining and educational. She's so insightful in her understanding of art that it feeds into a sort of intimidation that I feel. Her work often makes me feel that I am behind the curve. As if I could never create art, because I don't understand it as well as she does. Then to read her book and see the prose are a little uncertain in places, the dialogue a little forced. Never so much as to make it a bad book—it's a very good book!—but enough to ground me. That the people I look up to aren't supernaturally better than me at the things I want to do. It is a lesson that needs to be relearned every once and awhile.
Also, nobody who isn't familiar with her work would ever notice it. But there was a moment near the end of the book where I realized that this was, low key, fan fiction about Optimus Prime leaving his lover Megatron because he'd fallen in love with the author's self insert character. That delights me.
Start of Darkness, On the Origin of PCs, Dungeon Crawlin' Fools, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, War And XPs, Don't Split the Party, Blood Runs in the Family, and Utterly Dwarfed
by Rich Burlew
I do not now recall what prompted me to crack open my Order of the Stick collections, nor do I recall which one I started on. However it happened, though, I spent two weeks or so ravenously re-devouring this lovely story. I ignored a lot of my usual obligations while I did so, never able to go very long without being pulled back to my books. When I got to the end of what I had, I couldn't help but to immediately buy Utterly Dwarfed. Webcomics have been a precious medium to me since the early/mid 2000s, and I have a particular fondness for those handful which have managed to remain consistently relevant to my life since that time.
I was somewhat disappointed by the early years of the comic. It did not always respect its characters, and in at least one panel included a transphobic slur (obscured in a code, but none the less present). I cannot claim any high ground over Rich Berlew on this, as it was published at a time when the idea of a "transphobic slur" was not in my lexicon. The comic has evolved a lot since then, and Burlew made a point to address the story's early failings directly in the text a few times, which is much appreciated. Even so, it is sad that I must qualify my recommendation for what is easily among the most important pieces of art in my life.
Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk
I once heard someone say that anti-consumerism is the victim-blamer's version of anticapitalism. That quote kept rising to the forefront of my mind the entire time I read Fight Club. I don't think its social critiques hold up terribly well, though they do gesture in the right direction. It was an enjoyable enough read. Surprisingly terse, and different from the film in interesting ways. None the less, it didn't really stick in my brain, and I find I have very few thoughts about it just a few months later.
There is one thing that struck me, though. Something in the book which really seems like it ought to have been in the movie. In both versions, while waxing poetical about the anarcho primitivist future he's attempting to bring about, Tyler Durden says "You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life." In the film it's just kind of a cool line I guess? In the book, however, it connects to an earlier experience the unnamed protagonist had. In his job performing financial assessments on automobile manufacturing defects he learned that the leather seats in a certain luxury car were giving people cancer, and moreover that they were doing this because the leather had been produced by some group of lowest-bidders who didn't know what they were doing. I thought it was a great signpost for the fact that Tyler's vision of the future is cataclysmically flawed. And it's kind of a bummer that only half of that signpost made it into the movie.
Also, to my knowledge there is no historical evidence that any pre-modern culture wore leather clothes. It's just a terrible material to make clothes out of. So that's another reason Tyler's plan is doomed to fail.
Greyhawk
by Gary Gygax
A friend of mine noticed that the original description of Magic Missile—introduced in Greyhawk—was phrased in a peculiar way. It suggested that the spell might work in a very different way than the way we've all come to assume it ought to. This discovery prompted a lovely little discussion, which in turn prompted me into a brief phase of Rules Archaeology. I read Greyhawk from cover to cover, not with any intent to play with its rules, but out of curiosity to see an old version of a familiar thing.
I am not the first person to say that the charm of early D&D is that it doesn't feel like a slick corporate product with all the rough edges smoothed out. The charm is that it feels like a toybox. A chest filled with neat ideas to play with. Some are better, some are worse, some are broken, but the experience of digging through them is a joy of its own. Greyhawk epitomizes this. At least once or twice a page I would think "Oh, that's neat, I could see incorporating that into a game sometime!" Which is really something, considering how many works derivative of Greyhawk I've read over the years, that there are still tidbits in here that can inspire.
The nice thing about books written by one person are the peculiar moments of personality that come through. The drastic shifts in tone that would have been removed if the book went through the gauntlet of a developmental editor, line editor, and copy editor. When a fairly dry list of magic items includes some all caps "This item can SEND AN EVIL CLERIC TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH." moments. Or—my goodness—the friggin' in-jokes. There are in-jokes in this book, completely inscrutable to anyone outside the author's immediate circle of friends. That's such an absurdly terrible idea that it wraps all the way around to being delightful.
Chainmail
by Gary Gygax & Jeff Perren
It is ironic that this year, when I fully intended to get into wargaming, the wargame which I read most thoroughly is the only one I didn't intend to play. Reading Chainmail has been an ambition of mine ever since reading the Three Little Brown Books of OD&D. When I did that I thought I was going back to the very roots of my hobby, and was terribly frustrated to find the text littered with notes that I ought to refer to some other game—this one—to learn about specific combat actions.
This text left less of an impression than Greyhawk, though I was amused by the game's claims of a high degree of historical accuracy. Not because of the fantasy stuff, which is explicitly set aside in a supplemental section, but because some 50 years after the game was written it's hard to imagine that this could have been the standard for historical realism. That said the game seems eminently playable, and even fun. I didn't go into this game intending to play it, just to look for early D&D tidbits, but I'd be interested in playing it if given the opportunity for sure.
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit was the form that wizards take. In games where each player only has a single character, there must be some effort to create a rough parity between the various types of adventurer. No such parity exists in Chainmailem>. The lowliest wizard is worth a dozen fighting men. They're mobile artillery, with spells meant to threaten whole armies.
I'm currently running a game where I take a particular delight in pulling spells from different sources. Thus a magic user might have a 1st edition copy of Magic Missile, but a 3rd edition version of Hold Portal, and Spell of Subterranean Gullets from Wonder & Wickedness. It would be fun to include one of these titanic wargame spells in the campaign at some point. It'd be wildly overpowered, but sometimes you just gotta give your players a nuclear bomb to see what they do with it. >: )
Solutions and Other Problems
by Allie Brosh
I stayed up much later than I ought to the day this book arrived, and got up early the next morning to finish it. I hadn't expected Allie Brosh to produce more work, so having a whole new book from her was like a treasure. I was overjoyed to become reacquainted with an artist who holds an important place in my heart, and devestated by the hurt she expresses here. Brosh has mixed funny and sad stories before with great success, and this is a great book. I wouldn't have read it so voraciously if it were not. But the magnitude of hurt she has experienced of late years, and given voice to here, is sobering. Whenever I think of this book I am prompted to remind my loved ones that I care about them.
Murder on the Orient Express
by Agatha Christie
This one has been on my radar for a lifetime. Ten or fifteen years ago Agatha Christie was pointed out to me by a friend as an author I ought to be more familiar with. As I so often do with older authors, however, I never seriously considered that her work might be compelling. For some reason anything written prior to the 1940s or so requires me to make a conscious effort to give it a try. Some part of my mind holds on to the passive assumption that such books will be boring. The sort of thing an adult who doesn't read books would force me to read at a frantic pace to conform to their syllabus. It really isn't true of course. Even the books which first instilled that assumption in me would likely be quite good if I were to return to them without the grim specter of literary fetishism at my back, but none the less that passive assumption remains firmly in place for now.
I think it was the Asimov essay I mentioned above which prompted me to finally seek this book out, and I'm delighted that I did. The book's characters, mystery, conclusion, and pacing are all phenomenal. It's a story that zips by, with an energy that left me feeling like I'd watched a really good 44 minute television mystery, rather than read a whole novel. It briefly became a bit of an obsession for me. I quickly acquired and watched both the 2017 film (which is superb), and the 1974 film (which is alright). Also, I've double checked my logbook, and it appears that I began watching Murder, She Wrote within 3 days of finishing this book. I'm just at the end of season 5 as I type this.
The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side
by Agatha Christie
After reading Christie's most well known mystery, I was curious about her later work. To see how her craft evolved. Moreover, I had heard that she'd developed a certain distaste for the famous Poirot character, and much preferred her work with Miss Marple. This also appealed to me, given the extra degree of separation from dirty dirty cop stories that an elderly spinster protagonist provides. And, while this is a good book, with a compelling resolution, I didn't enjoy it quite so much as I expected I would.
Part of that is that Marple herself is pretty unlikable. She spends a good chunk of her time thinking about how much better it was in the old days when landed gentry like herself wielded sterner power over their servants. She also complains quite a bit about how feminism is ruining a generation of women, and generally grouses about the social mores of the youth in a way that was probably charming when it was written in the 1960s, but is unpleasantly backwards today. It's particularly odd because Christie ostensibly started writing this character because she thought Piorot was an asshole, but I thought he was a great deal more charitable towards the people around him than Marple is. Of course, both of these characters appeared in dozens of works, and I've only just read a single example of each, so I cannot know.
The mystery didn't really grab me until the end, which is probably a bad thing for a mystery to do. As the various clues unraveled and prompted further questions, I never felt that I had the information necessary to think ahead. I was always dependent on the characters to drive the investigation, which made the book feel sluggish. In the end, the plot hinges around the way a particular illness effects pregnant people. It's the sort of mystery that is delightfully clever in retrospect, and looking back over the story I see how all the pieces fit together, but as I'm not a doctor, I don't know that I ever could have figured this out.
The Slaying Stone
by Logan Bonner
The final adventure module I read for Danger Neighbor last year, and the only one I read for the first time. We're just getting to the end of it here in early 2021. Like the others I've written play reports for our adventures through it so far.
When D&D 4th edition came out I skipped it entirely. All I know about it is what I've gathered through osmosis from being in the scene. After very successfully running Sunless Citadel (3rd edition) for my Labyrinth Lord (pre-1st edition) group, I thought it might be fun to venture one step further. Find a 4th edition adventure I could adapt for my players. I asked around with folks who'd played during 4th edition. The one which came most highly recommended were not accessible to me, so The Slaying Stone was my 2nd choice. The book itself is kinda banal. Boring art, boring structure, but a module that's boring to read can be a wonderful sandbox to play in. I was excited to adapt the book's combat-heavy structure for my players, and really thought it could work well.
I won't say The Slaying Stone has been terrible, but I've had to do much more work for it than I've done for other adventure modules. Not because of rules differences so much as because of style differences. With the whole game positioned like a set of combat encounters and dice checks, it's difficult to crack the book open and find spaces to play inside it. We've had fun, but I doubt I'll make another foray into 4th edition anytime soon.
That having been said, I do gotta commend Logan Bonner on his map. It's the standout piece of art in the whole module. The only piece which seems to actually be related to the content of the book, and not just a piece of stock art WotC had sitting in a drawer. Apparently they wouldn't allocate any budget for a city map, so Logan illustrated one himself. It's worlds better than the combat maps which litter the book, all assembled from digitized assets.
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
I didn't actually intend to start this book. Elbow deep in my reading of Capital at the time, I thought two heady political texts would overwhelm me, and I was correct. After getting hooked by the opening chapters, I only made it about 1/3 of the way through before I had to set the book aside. My brain is a weak and flimsy film adhering to the interior of my skull, it can only handle so much theory at a time. As evidenced by this list of nerd books I read this past year.
I was surprised both by how compelling de Beauvoir's treatise is, and how relevant its critiques remain. I fully expected it to be more of a historical document, to learn about the roots of Feminism. While obviously not the most contemporary work, I was surprised by how not-basic it felt to me. In retrospect, this is explained by the fact that de Beauvoir was critiquing patriarchy from the Left, rather than the center. Many of the problems she points out remain relevant because liberal feminism has often endeavored to suppress their importance. Problems like how race and class compound women's issues. I am eager to return to the book in 2021, and learn more.
Also, my edition of the book appears to have been translated by a presumed TERF, who wrote an introduction which attempted to claim the famous quote "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman." was outdated, and had been 'disproved by science' or some malarkey. Boo on that.
Wraith Squadron
by Aaron Alston
The Bantam-era Star Wars novels are personal touchstones for me. I have read them so many times that returning to them is a sort of meditative practice. They tell comforting stories with familiar characters. They help me to fall asleep, or relax, or calm down when I'm feeling anxious. This is particularly true of the first 7 books in the X-Wing series. This most recent re-read of Wraith Squadron (book 5 in said series, 1st book in the wraith sub-series) took over a year to get through. I went just a few pages at a time.
As I get older I find that Alston's work holds up better than most Star Wars stories do. Which is nice, because it gives me a unique opportunity to study prose I admire, and am also intimately familiar with. I can let go of any desire to push forward in the narrative, and simply study its construction. I wish I'd had the opportunity to meet Alston before his passing. He is a giant of my private literary pantheon.
The WoW Diary
by John Staats
I am conflicted about this book. On the one hand, it has been interesting to get some insight into the development process for this game which has been such a large part of my life. When I love something I always like to dig into the history of it, and I love WoW. Even when I hate WoW (which is often), I still love it. The book has given me a lot of neat anecdotes to share with friends, and do feel like I've learned a little bit about the game development process. All of which is nice.
I will say it's not quite as interesting as I'd hoped. The author prioritized telling an overall narrative of the game's development, which seems to rely a lot on anecdotes from coworkers and saved emails. I had hoped he would go into greater detail about his personal work on the project. The challenges and creative choices he faced as a level designer. The list of zones he completed include some real favorites of mine. In particular he seems to have been responsible for a lot of the areas in the game which play with vertical space—a topic I'm very interested in! Sadly, this all gets glossed over in the overall narrative. Occasionally we'll get a line like "I was working on X at the time," or "by now we'd finished A, B, and C," but very little text is spent going into those details. It's almost like reading a second hand account of the game's development. It has the aesthetics of a first hand account, but none of the personality. Perhaps that would have been too esoteric for a book like this, or maybe it's just not what John Staats wanted to write, but the plodding pace has eroded much of my enthusiasm for it. Here in 2021 I'm not quite finished with it yet. None the less it is a fun read for someone who loves WoW as much as me. Failing to meet my own personal expectations is not why I am conflicted.
My conflicted feelings spring from the fact that the whole thing reads like a puff piece for Blizzard. A big show is made of how the book isn't published or endorsed by them, but you'd never guess it from reading the text. One cannot get further than a few sentences without encountering some fawning praise. "X is what really set Blizzard apart from other game developers." or "That's why Blizzard's games are of such consistent high quality." It seems like Vanilla WoW is the only video game Staats ever did professional work on, so not only is his hyperbole tedious, it always comes off as being shallow and insincere. Worse, the book is absolutely loaded with similar praise for Vanilla WoW's lead developer, Mark Kern. Fuck Mark Kern. That asshole can eat my dick.
Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl and Madouc
by Jack Vance
At some point in the back half of 2020 I decided I would like to revisit some books which have had great impacts on me in recent years. I settled on rereading both Vance's Leyonesse cycle, and Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome books. I started with Vance, and managed to perfectly round out the year with him. I finished Madouc a few days before New Years, and began reading McCullough's books in January.
There is more to say about the three Leyonesse books than I want to put here. The use of language is beautiful. While I read them I found myself speaking differently in casual conversation for no reason other than the imprint Vance's style leaves in my mind. I love the way this story weaves itself into the history and mythology of our real world, and indeed emulate the rhythms of reading real history at times. Characters sometimes die at random, plot threads are unexpectedly truncated, or grow wildly out of proportion to their initial importance. I don't know if I could construct a good argument against someone who felt the story was unsatisfying or irritating because of this, but to me it lends the books such weighty verisimilitude. They are unpredictable because life is unpredictable.
Which isn't to say these are stories of gritty realism. They are fanciful in the supreme. At times they're written almost like a children's adventure story. The sort where pre teens and cute animals venture out into the wide world without parents. Of course, in Leyonesse, the trials the children face aren't sanitized. The kids face brutality, perversity, real evil shit. They suffer, but they come through in the end with almost Disney-esque assurance. The series masterfully juggles a whole collection of protagonists and antagonists, and Vance has a real talent for making all of them suffer. Everything always gets worse for everyone, in ways that consistently make one wonder how they could even muster the resolve to press on. But in the end the good guys almost all survive to win, and the bad guys all lose. The only exception which comes to mind is Suldrun. Somewhat to be expected really. Vance never does right by his women characters.
None the less, these three books remain an absolute joy, and were a wonderful way to round out the year.
—Nick LS Whelan
March 15, 2021