Books Read in 2025, Part 2

And now the exciting conclusion!

Enjoy!


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The Bluecoats: Bull Run (Raoul Cauvin, author, & Willy Lambil, illustrator)

Corporal Blutch was at the Battle of Bull Run – presumably the first one – as was Sgt. Chesterfield. When a new soldier in camp later mentions the name of that battle Blutch hurries him away before the other soldiers can attack him and then explains what happened there to make that name so problematic, from his own rather idiosyncratic perspective of course. Blutch is a con artist, Chesterfield is a blowhard, and the events of the day more or less follow the historic record with certain notable exceptions designed to make Corporal Blutch look like the hero of his own story. This was the second of the three graphic novels that our Belgian friends gifted us.

The Adventures of TinTin: Destination Moon (Georges Remi, writing as Hergé)

The final graphic novel that our Belgian friends gave us was originally published in 1959 – a decade before the actual moon landing – and is clearly the first installment of several. TinTin and Captain Haddock arrive back home from a different adventure only to be sent to Syldavia to assist Professor Calculus with his moon rocket. Nefarious outside forces are conspiring against this, of course, and there will be setbacks and slapstick and an astonishing amount of dialogue compressed into the sharply drawn panels until, at last, the rocket is away with the Professor and the Captain on board. What will happen to them? Stay tuned for the next installment.

Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art (Christopher Moore)

This is the third time I’ve read this book – Moore published a sequel to it this year and I like to read the previous book before picking up a sequel, especially if it has been a while since I read it – and it holds up well. It’s a story about the color blue, about love and time, and about the price one pays for art. Lucien lives in Paris in the late 19th century. He and his family run a bakery on Montmartre, where the Impressionists live, and all of them are part of this story. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec plays a major role in the story but most of the others are here as well – Pissarro, Renoir, Manet, Monet, Van Gogh (Vincent and Theo), Seurat, as well as Whistler, Degas, and any number of others. All of these artists are plagued by The Colorman and his assistant, a stunningly beautiful woman named Bleu who can inhabit other bodies and is instrumental in the making of sacré bleu, the rarest and most exquisite pigment in the world. She is, as she says, a muse – and that’s what she does: amuse. As Juliette she loves and is loved by Lucien, and it is their love that is in many ways the center of the story. Art has a cost, and it must be paid, though how and by whom is something that can be negotiated. Most of this story happens in the second half of the 1800s, but the story as a whole stretches back to the dawn of human culture and forward to the 21st century, and if it is a quieter and more thoughtful book than Moore’s usual fare it is no less well written and often just as funny – Toulouse-Lautrec in particular has a lot of really great dialogue.

Anima Rising (Christopher Moore)

It turns out that this isn’t actually a sequel to Sacré Bleu, not really and not directly, though it does share a sensibility and, broadly speaking, a time. It’s about art and the price you pay for it. It’s about sex and the price paid for that, particularly by women. It’s about Gustav Klimt and Frankenstein’s Monster and the ways that culture and genius mix in ways both toxic and creative. Also, there’s a dog. When Klimt discovered a naked woman in one of the canals of Vienna in 1911 – drowned, but apparently still alive – he brings her back to his studio, cares for her, and names her Judith. His assistant and model Wally gets conscripted into this as well and as Judith recovers she and Wally become fast friends – in the postscript, Moore goes so far as to say that in many ways this is Wally’s story more than Judith’s or Klimt’s. Judith is much older than she appears to Klimt – she was killed by Frankenstein’s Monster (Adam) in 1799 and spent most of a century afterward being horrifically abused by him, a commentary on the monstrosity of men toward women, perhaps. Judith, it turns out, has died four times and come back each time, and she wants to know who she was before all this happened to her. There are nefarious people seeking her out. Somehow Alma Mahler, Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung get involved. There are Inuit gods and Dutch policemen. And, as always, there is the dog, who mostly goes by Geoff though sometimes by Akhlut There’s really quite a lot going on in this story and sometimes it can get hard to follow but Moore writes with his usual verve (his flair for comic dialogue is unmatched in modern fiction) and he does clearly warn you about the more unsavory parts of the book so if you find yourself offended you have nobody to blame but yourself. Like Sacré Bleu it’s a fairly serious novel leavened with humor rather than the other way around like most of Moore’s writing, and also like Sacré Bleu it sticks with you.

The Secret of Kells: The Graphic Novel (Samuel Sattin, based on the film by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey)

Kim and I went to the Irish Festival in Milwaukee last summer and they had a book booth there. This was one of the books we ended up buying. It’s a graphic novel, which I always feel is a bit wasted on me since I tend to focus on the words and have to remind myself every couple of pages to look at the artwork as well. The artwork here, done in the style of the movie it’s based on, is gorgeous. The story is a retelling of how the Book of Kells was created, with some liberties taken for a good story. The central character is a young monk named Brendan in the monastery in Kells, and there are Vikings, monks, a fae named Aisling, a cat, and a monk fleeing Iona with a partly finished illuminated manuscript that will eventually become the Book of Kells. I’ve seen the actual book, which is now housed at Trinity College in Dublin, so it was interesting to read about its creation. It was a dark and violent time, yet even in the midst of that there was art and beauty.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution (Cat Bohanan)

There is nothing on this earth more beautiful than the female body. Honestly, I have no idea why straight women even exist, though I am profoundly grateful to them for doing so. But what is it like to live in one of those bodies, and how exactly did they end up the way they did? What impact do either of those things have on human society and morphology? If you really want answers to those questions this is the place to start reading but be forewarned – this is not a fluffy pop-science provocation designed for social media influencers. It is instead a fairly serious work of evolutionary biological science, a synthesis of decades of research from across a wide range of fields, and while it is presented in a readable and often informal style (enlivened by a raft of personal anecdotes from Bohanan’s life) it is, nevertheless, a dense and rigorous book. Bohanan explicitly rejects the obsessive focus on male bodies that generally occupies those fields and instead posits a series of Eves – individual species in the long line of evolutionary descent toward modern humans – whose female bodies introduced various critical aspects of human biology, starting with Morganucodon, a small species that seems to have been the origin of mammalian milk some 200 million years ago, and from there proceeding through a number of different species while looking at everything from the development of perceptive senses (seeing, hearing, etc.) to the modern brain to the idea of love. Each new Eve is the earliest known species to display that trait. Bohanan is particularly good at exploring the ramifications of each development beyond biology – the chapter on Love, for example, delves into things as far afield as the biological origins of sexism and the uniquely human idea of citizenship – and while she is not a biological determinist she implores us to remember that we have physical bodies and those bodies inevitably have a lot of influence on every aspect of our being, even aspects that we don’t ordinarily consider as being influenced by our bodies. Much of human culture today, she argues, can be traced back to the twin facts that women have wombs and that human reproduction is, compared to that of most animals on this planet, deeply flawed – time-consuming, risky, inherently dangerous in unique ways even among primates, and thus requiring all sorts of work-arounds in order to preserve the species. I found this book fascinating.

Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy (Tommaso Astarita)

Most histories of Italy focus on the central and northern regions – Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin, Venice, and so on. Those are the regions where the money, the industry, and the power are today, and those are the regions where most of the tourists go. Southern Italy, by contrast, is poor, hot, neglected, and generally regarded as culturally backward, at least by the Northern Italians. But two-thirds of the Italian immigrants who entered the US came from the south – my ancestors included – and it is a distinctive and fascinating region. Astarita tries to encompass the entire history of the place beginning with the Romans, which means that he has to narrow down his focus geographically. The vast majority of this book is about Sicily and Naples, on the western side of the south. Basilicata, where my grandfather’s family is from, barely rates a mention until very late in the book. The story that Astarita tells is one of wealth, power, and cultural sophistication lost over time to political stagnation, economic decay, and general corruption. From its splendor during the Roman and medieval periods to its current state of disrepair is a long fall, and the villains of this book are the Bourbon monarchs who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the centuries before the Risogimento. It’s a well-written book and a fairly dense one, but if you’re interested in southern Italy there are few other books out there that attempt to cover its history and this one is actually pretty good. It’s an older book now, published in 2005, and that does show at times. It’s worth reading, though.

The Portable Door (Tom Holt)

I’ve read this book a couple of times before and it was worth reading again. For one thing, Tom Holt (or, in his more serious persona, KJ Parker) is one of the masters of the English language when it comes to putting sentences together and designing plots. For another, it’s been a while since the last time I read it, and when Kim discovered that someone had made a movie out of it we sat down to watch and I thought, “This is a really good movie, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the book.” But I couldn’t remember enough of the book’s plot to be more concrete than that, so a reread it was. And no, the movie does not have much to do with the book but that works out well because you can do both and enjoy them equally. Paul Carpenter – gormless British prole that he is – ends up with a job at JW Wells & Co in London, sharing an office with prickly, bony Sophie Pettingel who, through no fault of her own, becomes the love of Paul’s pathetic life. They spend a fair amount of time doing menial things before discovering what JWW&Co actually does, and from there it gets complicated. JWW&Co is the foremost purveyor of magic and demon control in the UK, after all, and once you figure that out the rest of it kind of makes sense. The portable door of the title doesn’t appear until about halfway through. Paul and Sophie end up entangled in a centuries-old revenge plot that more or less works out, as you knew it would, but the real fun of this book is simply the writing and the twists and turns of the plot along the way. There are four or five more books in the JWW&Co series and I’d read all of them at one point but then more came out and I need to go back and immerse myself in this world again.

Katabasis (RF Kuang)

I bought this book because I thought the set-up for it was funny – two graduate students in applied magic at Cambridge University decide to go to Hell to rescue their dissertation advisor so he can write them letters of recommendation. Anyone who has been through graduate school – and clearly RF Kuang has – understands this sentiment immediately. But this is not a light or humorous story and perhaps that should have been obvious as well. Alice Law feels personally responsible for her advisor’s death and she has extremely mixed feelings about her fellow graduate student, Peter Murdoch, whom she did not want to accompany her on this journey. Hell, it turns out, is not a place of eternal torment but rather a place of Courts, each centered on one of the Seven Deadly Sins plus a final one where the Lord of Hell (in many names and guises) sits in judgment, where the Shades of the dead pass through on their way to forgetting and rebirth, and finding their advisor will be no small feat. Alice and Peter engage in a fair bit of discussion along the way, mostly about what life, death, self, and purpose might mean in such a place and in the world of the living as well, but also about their time in Cambridge. Hell also contains a small number of moral free agents of a sort, some of them friendly and some of the decidedly not, and while the whole thing is quite an adventure – it’s probably not an accident that the main character in this grim wonderland is named Alice – it is one that has serious, often existential consequences. Kuang lets Alice and Peter’s backstories unfold slowly over their journeys, deepening the events with each revelation, and she seems to hold a special place in her heart for cats, who can come and go freely even in Hell. There’s a lot to think about here, and it’s well worth the effort, though the deluxe edition suffers from uncorrected printing errors.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Dennis E. Taylor)

Bob is a computer programmer, or at least he was. At the beginning of the novel he has just sold his software company for more money than he has any idea what to do with and then finalized a contract to have his head cryogenically preserved for the future after he dies, except that he dies almost immediately afterward (not a spoiler) and then wakes up more than a century later in a world he doesn’t recognize and didn’t anticipate. The earth is now ruled by a small number of conglomerate nations, all at each other’s throats – particularly the Brazilian Empire and the dominionist theocracy that was once the United States. Bob – or at least the self-aware digital recreation of Bob that survived into this time and place – is now owned by FAITH (the government of said theocracy) and subject to their commands. Eventually he finds himself at the heart of a Von Neuman probe, launched into deep space on an exploration and colonization mission. Such probes are self-replicating and eventually there are a whole lot of Bobs out there, each slightly different and with a different name, and when things go to pot back on earth the situation gets complicated fast. Despite whatever questions may arise about the nature of self, identity, and personhood – all dealt with fairly quickly and easily – this is at heart a space opera, one that is a fair bit of undemanding fun and apparently the first book in the extended Bobiverse. It was a gift, and I enjoyed it.


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Total Books: 20
Total Pages: 6119
Pages per day: 16.8


Happy reading!