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Notes -
So for this week's "What Are You Reading" thread, we're coming to the end of the year and I just finished a few books, so I'm going to post my whole 2025:
Books 2025
Same rules as last year. These are the books I finished in the year 2025, meaning I read them, on paper or screen, all the way through. There are some other books I started but haven’t finished, I don’t give myself credit for those.
I aim for 26 books finished every year, so one every other week. Mostly because you hear about figures like Teddy Roosevelt reading a book a week, and I cut that in half for various reasons and try to stick to it. This is a totally arbitrary personal goal, and it is funny to me how IRL it’s almost impossible to discuss with anyone without it turning into a weird personal dick-measuring contest. There’s almost no one I talk about it with who doesn’t reply with some variation of: A) Insecure Excuses along the lines of I WISH I had TIME to read so much, and I wasn’t so BUSY all the time [with things presumably far more important than FHM’s leisurely reading]; B) Books are Dumb along the lines of I only read blog posts summarizing non-fiction self help books; C) Braggadocio, Actually I read THREE HUNDRED SIXTY FIVE BOOKS this year, how did you ONLY read 26.
I don’t get why, to me, it’s only relevant to me personally, because only I can know how I read things. What I skim and what I comprehend every word of. The quality of the stuff I read. How much free time I have. I’m not really interested in comparing with people, but they can’t help themselves IRL, it touches a nerve. Which I guess it does for me to, but only to me, in that this is important to me in some way.
Anyway, recommendations if you want stuff a mottizen might like, or if you’ve read it and want to discuss it, feel free to comment.
I define a “book” by format, a bound codex front to back.
Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger — Might have been the most fun I had reading anything this year. It’s a great book in its own right, a gonzo creative writing exercise in half-invented rumor mongering gossip about people you might have heard of vaguely. Read it, afterward you’ll be able to confidently expound these anecdotes at parties, and when someone talks about modern celebrity culture, you can talk about how everything really went downhill after Fatty Arbuckle was fingered for raping a girl to death.
The Odyssey Emily Wilson — A lovely, crisp new translation. I try to read Homer at least once every year. There are a lot of things I got out of this version that I didn’t get out of other versions. Translation is its own art. Wilson’s work is right at the border of what I’d consider a useful translation. Read it if you have read the Odyssey before, but want another angle.
Where Men Win Glory Krakauer — A biography of Pat Tillman. I’ve always liked Krakauer ever since reading Into the Wild years ago, when I gift Tolstoy to anyone I inscribe it “Listen to Pierre.” The book is a real throwback to early GWOT times, how everyone felt right after 9/11, and just how bad the cover up was. The book is a bit of a hagiography, despite Krakauer’s best efforts, trying to portray Tillman as something other than a professionally violent guy who saw an opportunity to do some real violence for a good cause, but it leaks through in journalistic accounts of Tillman sucker punching other teenagers and hiding the assault charges from colleges to avoid the consequences of his actions. Read it if you feel like it, but it bogs down in the second half trying to figure out exactly what happened to Tillman when I don’t really care.
Rivals Jilly Cooper — This is such a fun romp, I read it with my wife. A Jeffrey Archer type 80s business heist forms the scaffolding of the story, but it’s all just window dressing for various characters to bounce off each other in various erotic combinations. It’s a shame bisexuality hadn’t been invented yet, Cooper could have done so much more if you have a few utility players on the team. Read this if you want something funny and light at the beach, she’s a good enough writer that some of the jokes make me laugh out loud.
Alperton Angels Janice Something or Other — A modern epistolary mystery novel told through text messages and notes apps. It starts off pretty good, and seems like it might really work, but ultimately it was one of the worst books I read this year. I read it with a friend, and when we were 3/4 of the way through, I posited a ridiculous twist ending as a bad joke, and that’s exactly what she did! The whole book is ruined in the last ten or twenty pages! Bails on everything that was interesting in the first part. No one can write a good ending to a scary book anymore! Do not read this one, and if you do stop 3/4 of the way through and just remember it that way.
The Sandman Omnibus Neil Gaiman — From a pile of recommendations for graphic novels that y’all gave me, I pulled this one. I don’t know if it counts as a book, it’s a comic. But if I had bought it in print, it would have been like seven books or something like that. I’ll just count it as one. Really strong work, very interesting, at first it’s a little bit too far into just being comic book slop, but it develops in interesting ways. Reading it around all the Neil Gaiman controversy, it made me think a lot about the way Gaiman projects himself into the work, and a particular kind of man. Gaiman wants to be a master who doesn’t want to be a master, a feminist patriarch who wants to uplift women who want to be his slaves. His behavior with women makes perfect sense reading his work, and it’s hard to see how fans of his expected anything different. Read this one if you want a long fantasy read without too much thinking.
Fewer Rules Better People Lam — It’s barely longer than a pamphlet, but makes a compelling argument for why removing laws and regulations is necessary to produce virtuous outcomes for everyone. Read it so that when you buy copies for all your local councilmen you can explain to them why they should read it.
Ask Not Callahan — A history of women destroyed by the philandering, and other crimes, of the men in the Kennedy clan. I have this bad habit of reading oppositionally: when I read a polemic against someone I make points for the, and when I read a polemic for them I make points against them. In this case, while I was blown away by the detailed research into all the terrible things that had been done, and the ridiculous horniness of JFK and brothers and fathers and children and cousins and nephews (seriously, it’s genetic) I didn’t necessarily buy all the harm they were supposed to have done. Read this if, like Mrs. FiveHour, you love Kennedy dirty laundry, but I’m still in search of a neutral historical group biography of the JFK-RFK-Teddy group; everything is either slander or hagiography and it nearly always focuses on just one brother and mentions the others when I want all three of them to the same detail.
The Story of a New Name Ferrante — Second book in the Neapolitan quartet. Exquisitely written, and worth reading for the art of it, but a whole lot of nothing happens for the most part, it’s a lot of work to get anywhere. Read it if you like the series, I’ll get to the third and fourth this upcoming year.
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace — My big project for the year. I’m not sure what to say about it. It’s brilliant. It feels like it one hundred percent predicted the modern world in many ways, but it’s also so long and so intricate and so weirdly plotted. Reminds me of and probably inspired Motte-Adjacent writer TLP’s and his hatred for his own reader, DFW is engaged in a meta conflict with his own reader. It’s brilliant but it is almost intentionally bad, disgusting at times for no reason, but the writing is so brilliant, I can’t make up my mind. I love DFW’s short stories, but this took me several tries to read, and in some ways I feel like at its best Infinite Jest is a collection of short stories that are connected into a madcap plot. I’m still processing this one. It appears in the list where I started it, but I finished it much later. Read this if you want to read something brilliant, and don’t mind that the author actively hates the audience, you probably owe it to yourself to read it once, it might be the last really great book ever written.
Moneyland Bullough — A pretty good nonfiction book of anecdotes about different ways that rich people use the tools of international law to hide, launder, secure, and otherwise use money. An ok and pretty informative book, but kind of lacks in a moral argument without fully committing to anticapitalist marxian analysis. If it’s their money, why can’t they use it how they want? Who cares about divorce laws for billionaire trophy wives who get traded up? Read it if you want a quick light read for information, I got it off the free pile at the bookstore.
Journey to the End of Night Celine — What a slog! Why do people like this one? I went in expecting some really interesting cynical WWI book, instead I got a half-assed Henry Miller, a book with no characters who ever felt either realistic or admirable, just an absolute slog of a book that never even hints at an interesting point. Don’t read this one unless you’re determined to finish some stupid list of books, like I was.
The Official Preppy Handbook Birnbach — Oh my God you need to read this. Don’t talk to me about “This is what they took from you” on twitter if you haven’t read this. WHAT A TIME! WHAT A PLACE! WHAT A FEELING! This book captures what it felt like to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of place at a certain time, and if you’re like me you’ll be deep diving eBay for vintage Lacoste and cashmere for a few weeks afterward. It’s a two day read at most, written as a how-to guide for being perfectly preppy, from cradle to grave. Read this if you love subcultural study and love Americana.
300 Miller — When the movie came out my Boy Scout troop could recite most of it from memory on a ten mile hike, I decided to finally get back to the original material. Wow, was it different. Where the movie felt very GWOT, about beautiful manly White Greeks fighting shifty turbaned Brown Persians. The comic art style makes the Greeks look vaguely like an anti-negroid attack ad from Harper’s in the 1870s. It was decent, but exactly the same as the movie for the best parts, without the inherent homoerotic ‘miring of Gerard Butler’s abs. Skip it.
American Sniper Kyle — Read it for Memorial Day weekend. A quick, interesting read. I have a notes app draft of an effort post about how the book feels more like an athlete memoir than a war memoir, Kyle feels more like Michael Jordan than he does like Carlos Hathcock. Ultimately to pad the book out they include a lot of his wife’s reminiscences about the period, which I really didn’t care about, and the editions released after his death include a bunch of eulogies about how great he was. It’s a quick read and influential so I’d recommend reading it.
Storm of Steel Junger — This was one of my favorite books I read this year. Excellent, brilliant, lovely, incredible, harrowing. Absolute masterpiece. Junger was a brilliant free spirit, who wound up in the most important places on the Western Front, and wrote about them as they happened. Made me want to read everything by Junger, which I plan to. You need to read this one.
Band of Brothers Ambrose — I have a personal connection to this unit, and I loved the HBO series, so for me this was one I should have read a long time ago, and finally got around to. It was the right moment for WWII historiography, and it’s such an interesting account of such an interesting journey for the Screaming Eagles and Easy Company in particular. There’s a lot of inherent depth to a work that has that much first hand interview to it. Read this one at least once.
Fat City Gardner — Recommended by Alex Perez as a great boxing book, it’s a fictional account of two struggling pro-boxers, one teenage almost-an-up-and-comer and one 30ish never-was. It’s a real nuts-and-bolts boxing book, and a vignette of the low end of life in mid century California. Short, punchy, a really solid book, read this if you like the fight game.
The Fight Mailer — A literary journalistic account of the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Ali and Foreman. I’m fascinated by Ali, a singular figure in world history. When our cousins from Austria visited by Great Aunt back in the 60s, the first thing they wanted to do was travel to Deer Lake to try to catch a glimpse of Ali. The best way I can describe in modern terms is maybe if Shohei Ohtani was also Kanye West, or if Tom Brady was also Bronze Age Pervert, if an athlete whose brilliance cannot be denied was also a controversial political and cultural figure. Mailer’s writing is good, and he had a LOT of access, but the book itself was ultimately mediocre. Read it if you feel like it, it’s short and easy, but it mostly just teased me, and made me want to read Eig’s Ali biography.
Original Sin Tapper — An interior history of the end of the Biden presidency. I read it with my wife to see what all the fuss was about and wrote a review on the motte. Mediocre and boring, an exercise in trying to do a directional autopsy. TLDR the Biden senility crisis was totally unpredictable and no one outside of Biden and his two best friends did anything wrong. Don’t bother reading it, just read my post about it.
All the Light We Cannot See Doerr — A well reviewed WWII book about a blind French girl and a German boy escaping allied bombing at the end of WWII. It started out well, but the ending was totally limp. And, to be honest, I’m not this guy normally, but one of the things I really liked about the book was that it kept the atrocities mostly off-screen, but then at the very end it goes into a very unnecessary explicit gang rape scene of the Red Army and German women. Which was just such a weird change in tone that it bothered me a lot. I thought it was good that he didn’t turn the WWII story into a Holocaust centered story, which too many authors can’t resist, but then to turn around and focus in on anti-German atrocities while avoiding German atrocities sets off my crypto-Nazi alarm bells for a book that isn’t that. Skip this one, not worth the effort.
On The Marble Cliffs Junger — Junger’s Animal Farm, his allegory mythology of the rise of Hitler. Junger was always a right winger, but Junger hated Hitler, Ernst Jr was killed by Nazis for involvement in a plot to overthrow Hitler, and Junger himself was only spared because Hitler was a fan. I’m not sure I really got it, I keep meaning to take some time to go back and read interpretations of it to see if I can really get into Junger’s feelings and values within the work. Probably read it if you are a fan of Junger, but not otherwise.
JFK Jr An Oral Biography — I never really knew who JFK Jr. was, only knew him from references from others. This book was a fascinating dive into a very interesting person. How would you move through life if everyone wanted to make love to you? Everyone. The female speakers in the book that don’t want him are so up-her-own-ass about being just frineds that you can tell that not sleeping with him is a weird kind of active choice. The beautiful man that everyone wants, the son of a martyred president who in turn was famous for fucking starlets. Literally everyone wanted him. Women wanted him, men wanted to hang out with him to play the MAC system off his scraps. It’s fascinating. Among other anecdotes: JFK Jr. once had an intervention for a friend, and invited his cousin RFK Jr. to come to share stories from RFK Jr’s own addiction struggles, RFK Jr. proceeded to share stories so harrowing that JFK Jr.’s friend decided that he himself didn’t have a problem at all because he was nowhere near RFK’s. Read it if you like the Kennedys, like Mrs. FHM.
Coup d’Etat Luttwak — Luttwak’s original provocative how-to book on taking a government by Coup D’Etat. Not as good as I expected it to be, I liked all the Luttwak I’ve read, but when I finally tracked this one down, it kinda fell flat. It’s interesting, but all felt kind of obvious, like one of those self-defense manuals that say things like “don’t walk home alone.” Maybe if you want to read it, try to find the original, I had the updated reissue with modern interpolations which kinda ruined the flow. Gets a don’t bother from me.
The Sun Also Rises Hemingway — Maybe the best book I read this year. Hemingway is probably my favorite author of all time, the greatest to ever do it, numero uno, the best combination for my money of being a readable masculine author who is also a brilliant and important literary mind. The book itself is all about conflicting visions of masculinity, the big question is who is the cuck? The idiots who read Hemingway and see a simple view of masculinity have never read this book or understood it. Read it.
To Have and to Have Not Hemingway — And of course, as soon as I get on a kick of wanting to read Hemingway because I love him, I run into a terrible one, the worst of Hemingway. Commercial, racist, derivative, flat, unrealistic. A mediocre noir about a Key-West smuggler and his fat wife. I’ve got plenty of stomach for period-appropriate racism, but this one was a step too far for me, the main character seems to be willing to betray chinks just because they’re chinks, and Cubans just because they are Cubans, there’s no moral logic to justify his actions except his racism. I get an unlikeable protagonist but this guy is so annoying and bullshit-tough-guy-hard-times that I actively root against him and for the rich guys forcing him out of Key West and the Cuban revolutionary gangsters shooting at him. Skip it unless you’re a Hemingway completionism.
Ride the Tiger Evola — My first introduction to Evola’s thought. I’m fascinated by his self description at his trial after the war, when asked if he was a Fascist he replied “No, I’m a Super-Fascist.” His doctrine of internal resistance without external action is interesting, but ultimately it might be too esoteric for me to actually understand what’s going on. If we have any Evola-heads on here, feel free to DM me and explain it to me. I’d recommend it, but I don’t know that it’s for everyone anyway.
Cry Havoc Mann — A memoir supposedly written in an African prison by a British mercenary leader. A series of stories about overthrowing corrupt African regimes, written seemingly by a character from Cooper’s Rivals, an upper class Englishman of the Old-School, in a regimental tie and full of the old times. The last gasp of the colonialist. Read it because it’s fascinating, but don’t take anything he says too seriously.
Portnoy’s Complaint Roth — The first person account of a Jewish man to his therapist, describing his struggles with his sexual mania over his first thirty years. Oedipal doesn’t even begin to cover it. At times it seems uniquely Jewish, at times it uses the Jewish experience to universalize to the male experience, but when I identify with Portnoy it makes me nauseous. It makes me want to read more Roth. Also a good example of a book where it was widely recommended, but the anecdotes that people pull out of the story are all from the first 30 pages, so the idea you would get from the reviews of what the book is about is wrong, it’s not about a teenager it’s about a 35 year old man. Absolutely read this one, and DM me to discuss what you think of it.
Soul on Ice Cleaver — The letters and essays of a Black Panther in prison in the 60s. I picked it up because I’d seen it cited so often by Darryl Cooper, and everyone else on the alt-right internet citing Cooper or learning it from him, about Cleaver writing about rape and isn’t that terrible that leftists loved this guy. I quickly found that those quotes were taken pretty far out of context, as is typical for any gotcha meme like that, and there’s a much more interesting conversation to be had about what is going on in Cleaver’s writing, and Cleaver is kind of interesting in his own right. I’m thinking of diving into the leftists of the time a bit. Read it if you’re interested in an “of its time” period piece.
The Naked and the Dead Mailer — My least favorite book I read this year, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of an island hopping WWII Pacific battle. This book was terrible. It somehow managed to be boring despite being a short book about WWII jungle warfare, it managed to be testosterone sapping in its maudlin vignettes of miserable American lives left behind despite being a war novel, despite following only a half-strength platoon of men the characters still managed to be repetitive and unnecessarily boring, despite its pretensions of grim realism it uses too many confusing literary narrative innovations to have any immediacy. Skip this one unless you want to read it to commiserate with me about how terrible it was.
Glorious Exploits Lennon — A fun Classical Historical novel, set in Syracuse after the failure of the Athenian invasion, two buddies set out to put on a prisoner-cast production of Euripides Medea to preserve the art in case Athens is destroyed and the work lost forever. It reminds me a lot of the vintage Chris Moore novels I loved in middle school, showing we can still do that kind of thing if we want to, even if I’ve been disappointed by Moore himself lately. Mostly funny, written in a modern Irish vernacular rather than trying to do the stately or pseudo-accurate Greek idiom thing, some moments that will make you feel or think. Does a really good job of writing about prisoners of war without caring about who was right or wrong in the war itself. Read it, it’s a fun little book and won’t cost you anything in time or effort.
Comment below with what you're reading this week, what you read this year, or any thoughts on any of these books. Feel free to DM me or get my TG if you want to discuss any of these in more depth than makes sense on a forum post.
Not a complete list, I don't remember all the fiction, and some of them are either so specialized in focus to be irrelevant, or I just read on a bet and a review is besides the point (eg, Minotaur Milking Farm after it became a short-lived twitter meme, which beyond its obvious problems was also just bizarrely normie).
Conventional Books -
A Market of Dreams and Destiny: Alternate universe London Underground Gaiman-esque fantasy where everything has a price. Serviceable prose, decently interesting universe, but it needed several editing passes or maybe even a serious rewrite. The author has too many viewpoint characters and too little meat to each tone, the politics go beyond overt to the point of hilarious inconsistency, there weren't any real big payoffs or conclusions, and the central questions just didn't hook me much. I was kinda hoping for a something akin to Fable Of The Swan, so might expectations might have just been too high for what's ultimately just angsty slash, but I just came away feeling meh.
Icarus Series: Scifi series rolling around spacers that operate somewhere between couriers and smugglers, with some twists to that. I'd actually read Icarus Hunt a couple decades ago, but I'd filed it away as a Zahn one-off; stumbled across the reset of the series in a B&N and splurged. I think I prefer the characters from Hunt, since for goofy publishing reasons, Plot and subsequent stories focus on a different set of main characters, but each story still works great and a not-absolute-best-tier Zahn character is still a great character. Not my single favorite Zahn series -- I think the Conqueror's Trilogy just had a better central gimmick -- but well-executed and consistently clever and easily beats Blackcollar.
Hugo Award Novels: yes, I still get the packet, though it's harder and harder to justify paying for it. Mostly a lot of meh. A Sorceress Comes To Call is well-executed prose and nothing else; The Ministry of Time has a great idea it does absolutely nothing with, Someone You Can Build A Nest In is about as shallow as xenofiction gets. Alien Clay's the only one I'd really put a vote into, and that's just workable rather than deeply memorable -- it's far from Tchaikovsky's best.
Humble Tech Book Bundle: Computer Science the Fun Way: a bunch of No Starch Press compsci books. I'm mostly self-taught (and worse, self-taught in weird focuses), so these were a kinda interesting read from a formal programming perspective. They're all pretty reasonable for their subjects, but what those subjects actually were and how closely they related to computer science versus computer engineering was rough at times. Computer Graphics From Scratch is literal 'how you'd do things without a graphics API, which you will never do', while on the other extreme Data Structures the Fun Way was a distillation of the various 'how do B-trees do and why would you actually use them'. Only real big complaint I have within the content was Code Craft, which felt both very opinionated on what coders should be doing and simultaneously fell prey to many of the same problems that mauled the old Clean Code movement. On the other side of things, The Book of I2C and Introduction to Computer Organization were the sort of writing that seem like great dives through layers of abstraction that I was looking for. Dunno that I could recommend any of these on their sticker price, but the shop regularly offers deep discounts.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Yudkowsky's AI safetyism to the masses. Takeaway: Not Great, Bob. There's few things more frustrating than a good writer making bad arguments for a position you think is worthwhile, and Yudkowsky's written single one-off jokes (eg, Moore's Law Of Science Fiction) that were more compelling than this book, while providing only the least-plausible defenses against his proposed horror stories. The first half of the book is telling us how People Won't Just in the face of a superintelligent system, and then the second half gives a list of things that would work if People Would Just. Few people are going to buy into the assumptions, here, and those that do won't trust the conclusions. I've long complained that post-golden era LessWrong erred by emphasizing pivotal moments and extreme runaway, but the book comes across as less grounded in its speculative fiction than Friendship is Optimal, and where a reread of FiO leaves people going oh fuck, I keep coming away from sections thinking they'll be dated in years, if not months. Maybe there's something valuable here I've missed because I've read Yudkowsky since the 00s, but I just don't see it.
The AI Con: Takeaway: Even Worse, somehow. Where Yudkowsky seems likely to be dated quickly, The AI Con seems like it was dated before it even started writer. Computers Make Mistakes, IQ Doesn't Exist, Stochastic Parrots, Water Consumption, yada yada. I don't know if the authors originated this stuff or just absorbed it from those around them, but they sure as hell didn't care whether anything was meaningful or correct. Even where it should have been strong, on the economics and social impact, it still couldn't bother: "bossware" is up there with eyetracking for something that could become a dystopian hellscape, and deepfake ransoms are already making the world cyberpunk in the worst ways, and the authors can't actually sell those stories. Finally, the policy proposals are a grab-bag of the impossible and/or useless.
((There was some "how to deal with AI for normies book", too, but the part where I can't remember the name tells you about how valuable it was: think three-hundred-plus pages of 'ah, but LLMs do X' that were marginal predictions for Llama.))
The Unplugged Workshop : woodworking handtool-focused crafting guides. Hard to review this because, outside of watching a few youtubers, I just don't know the topic that well, and it's impractical enough that few people I know do either. Worse still, it's definitely an intermediate-level work, with only occasional accommodations for beginners like myself. Still, highly readable, well-organized, functional, and good project layouts, and the stuff I've tried so far has... well, not always turned out well, because I'm used to chisels as a de-riveting tool, but at least been more limited by my skill than that of the writer. Even if you're really into woodworking, a marginal buy, decent borrow.
Complete Guide To Sewing: I was told this was The Standard Book on the topic, and I can see why. Where a lot of 'beginners to experts' books tend either, this covers the whole spectrum from before your first stitch all the way to deep project work I couldn't even begin to understand. Not an enjoyable read by any means, but a good reference. The projects are my only big complaint: not only were they clearly marketing to a specific demographic that had zero overlap, these felt more like they were trying to help guide people who were already working from a pattern, leaving you to really guess at sizes and shapes. If you're doing anything sewing-wise more serious than patching torn pants, worth a buy... but get a used copy.
Comics -
Promethea: another one I'd read before, but that was borrowing it from a library, and now the local comic book store had the full series in trade edition. It's an Alan Moore comic, with all the benefits and costs that involves : wildly metafictional, deeply detailed, uncomfortably sexual, not quite as clever or as dedicated to its principles as the writer wanted it to be, and with an unfulfilling conclusion. Still, if you like Common Grounds or Astro City, it's worth looking at, and far more approachable and optimistic than the typical Moore comic.
Black Summer: second verse, same as the first: read it in the Obama era, and now could find it in full TPB. It's a very late GWOT story, and intensely political about it. The first pages have a superhero with blood-drenched hands lecturing the White House Press Corps about how 9/11 was planned and the Wars In the Middle East were just filling for corporate greed and the last two Presidential Elections were stolen, but he's Taken Care Of The Problem. The only men and women who can challenge him are the five(ish) surviving self-enhanced members who once worked with him... if they want to, and can get past a government presuming they are his allies. It'd run into political disfavor before it had even finished, as by 2008 concerns about a President's legitimacy had become much more popular in the wrong side of the aisle. In 2025, a man surrounded by floating eyes talking about stolen elections has rather different political valiance (and Ellis would get cancelled for other reasons). But where Ellis's other works in the same time period were either pointless gore porn (No Hero) or have a couple interesting scenes trying to cover up threadbare plot and nihilism (Supergod), Black Summer remains interesting enough to keep on the shelves, even if (or because) it'd never get written again. Not quite good enough to recommend as a buy -- the conclusion just doesn't feel earned, to the surprise of no one familiar with Ellis -- but might be worth a borrow.
Online Published -
Contention I and II: average Joe gets isekai'd into an alien or post-human world without even the clothes on his back, and gets to do the Primitive Technology speedrun. There's some really good plot seeds here -- the main character's obviously flawed in relevant ways without being an absolute asshole, there's a big driving question about the local precursors that's escalated really well, the not!magic system is useful and compelling without overriding a lot of the discovery and exploration bits. But it's also only two novellas into a story that seems built to go on for another two or three books minimum, the author only started on Book III in the tail end of last year (currently patreon-only), and that makes it hard to recommend.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat: basically Rimworld - with one of the more sadistic storyteller options - meets cozy fiction, where an (accidentally) self-uplifted domestic cat pits herself against all the plural of several post-apocalypses. My gold standard for xenofiction is Book Of Night With Moon, and Argus doesn't quite get that high. The plot's a little too meandering, the payoffs need to be set up better, and it needs an editing pass. Still a fun rampage, happy to have paid for it.
Reaper's Lottery and Executioner's Gambit: furry scifi, with very heavy raygun gothic and gumshoe inspiration. It's intensely furry, like the rest of the Hayven Celestia works, enough to probably be offputting to anyone else, but like Skinchange (cw: featureless furry nudity, scifi violence) it's got a pretty strong core underneath it.
I think it deserves higher praise here than you're giving it(though I'll confess that I'm a shameless Warren Ellis fan) if only for the fact that it basically subverts the entire expectation of what a political assassination entails and why they're always bad('Lots of people hated John F Kennedy. He barely got elected. But Lee Harvey Oswald isn't remembered as an American hero. Just a prick with a gun who killed a president. That's you now, John.')
The last moment where all the surviving Heros were all girls and all that implies was still a little cringe, though.
Yeah, especially given the broader zeitgiest at the time, it was a genuinely surprising take, and the level and degree of conflict between the heroes and the government is a much more nuanced take than the "you people are young" summary he'd give in interviews. As an exploration of political philosophy or philosophy of war, it does a pretty good job, if limited by its time and its awareness.
My big complaint's just that it doesn't really feel great about its characters. It's a comic book, and a short-run series at that, so expectations are never high to begin with, but the ending is undermined not just because It's Woke, but because it doesn't really feel like a conclusion for the characters that got to it. Tom feels very Batman-inspired and Horus very Superman, and that's a classic for a reason. Do their perspectives actually say anything about Truth, Justice, and the American Way? About
assassinscriminals being a cowardly and superstitious lot? Or if they're working as alternative company counterparts to Captain America and Iron Man, anything about their political philosophy? Artemis pointedly compares the US government with the Nazis in one argument with Dominic: did he persuade her before his death, or was her violent persona and facing always an act?You don't need this sort of deeper layering. Black Summer benefits in the sense that not doing it means you can't do it poorly, like No Hero or The Boys and their utterly wretched X-Men parodies. But it's frustratingly noticeable given how little else there is to say about the characters.
That said, I do think it's one of, if not the best, Ellis short series. So part of it's probably me not clicking with him as a writer in general.
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