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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4039 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

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So, what are you reading?

I'm starting Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer, after a re-watch of the LoTR films. It's an "other side" story from Mordor's perspective mentioned occasionally on /r/rational. Hopefully it doesn't accomplish this by ruining the "good guys" entirely, but I suppose we'll see.

Slogging through Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History.

Taking a break from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to read Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead. It's a necromancy murder mystery in a refreshingly unfamiliar setting. I'm quite enjoying it so far.

I also picked up a couple older reference books, including an aircraft encyclopedia with some excellent plates. I enjoy looking at history in this lens.

I've been reading The Foreigner Group by Carolus Löfroos. It's evidently somewhat infamous as being written by a Swedish man who volunteered for the allegedly Nazi-aligned Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine during 2014-2015, well before the time of the 2022 Russian invasion.

It was initially set to be published by Ian McCollum's Headstamp Publishing. Ian is a fairly mainstream source of firearms trivia, and his imprint mostly publishes books about various intricacies of firearms manufacturing and history. Apparently they for some reason agreed to publish this book, then a bunch of people flipped out (I've never seen it specified exactly who flipped out or what specifically they did) and they cancelled it. It's now being published by the considerably more heterodox Antelope Hill. I'll refrain from taking a position on them, you're welcome to take a look at what other things they publish if you want to.

Anyways, I'm about 2/3 of the way through it. For all of the furor, I haven't seen anything all that remarkable yet. It's a moderately interesting tale of a man who volunteered to fight in a somewhat poorly-equipped informal formation in a mostly low-intensity and undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. The author seems to have suffered some reputational issues in Sweden due to his volunteering. I haven't yet seen the book express any opinions about racial issues, Jews, or pretty much any political issue aside from opposing Russian expansionism and imperialism. The author does liberally refer to thinks he doesn't like as "gay", but it seems to me to be more of a 90s-style meme than actual hostility to homosexuals. I don't really see anything here worth cancelling over.

I haven't actually started reading it yet, but I picked up The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation because I think, without the author necessarily intending it, it might serve as an argument for the good sides (in terms of economc development at least) of British rule in Ireland.

The potato famine of the 1840s and the century of population loss due to emigration that followed gives the misleading impression that Ireland was always a relatively tiny country. But it had nearly half the population of England and Wales in the 1750s (roughly 3.2 million vs 6.5 million) and Dublin was Europe's 14th largest city, on par with Berlin. The story of how this happened should be an interesting one.

Currently reading D.E. Stevenson's Five Windows, a bildungsroman about a young Scot making his way in post-war Britain and cultivating his gift for writing. Great so far.

Aside: I volunteer at a non-profit bookstore in my neighborhood on Saturdays. I started reading Five Windows last week, and so yesterday, I went to see if there were still some D.E. Stevenson books there. Indeed there were six or seven. I thought, "Forgotten British writer of light romances, dead for 50 years - surely those will still be there when I finish up. I'll go do my shift." Naturally, someone bought all of them while I was working. That'll teach me. But really, I'm happy to think that there's someone out there with the same taste that I have.

I'm reading "Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond Our Shame" by Fr. Stephen Freeman. I like reading his blog, he's a very gentle and straightforward writer, and this is a nice little book he released a couple of weeks ago, and about my speed lately.

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