Reading

"The strongest impression I kept coming back to while reading If on a winter’s night a traveler was of a slight-of-hand trick. You may have seen one of those videos where Penn and Teller explain how they do a trick, but they do it so smoothly that even in the explaining you are taken in."

https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2025/if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler/

Three words, and the first one is "What"

I am not much of a reader of contemporary fiction, and didn't know anything about Dewitt beyond recognizing her name. Wikipedia says she studied at Oxford, specifically Lady Margaret Hall.

I'm worthless as a poetry critic, other than to say that I liked this. Several very striking poems: "Church Going", "I Remember, I Remember", and "At Grass" particularly stuck out. He's clearly grown quite a bit from the not-particularly-essential The North Ship.

"Given the title, I expected this to be something like Diary of a Country Priest. A priest put into a difficult situation, forced to die bravely, obediently, young.

That was not this novel at all..."

https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2025/death-comes-for-the-archbishop-a-review/

Whenever Razumikhin's not on screen, I was asking "Where's Razumikhin"?

I don't normally enter the books I read the kids, but I have to get this one off my chest: it's kind of weird that the through-going plot (text, not subtext) is about a guy driving down a woman's self-confidence until, when he finally pays her a compliment, she immediately goes home with him, right?

"[H]aving finished A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, I can see why he’s considered among the middling English poets…"

https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2025/a-shropshire-lad/

"Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow is regarded as a classic of horror writing. I have to say I was less impressed."

Full review at: https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2024/the-king-in-yellow/

Robert Frost makes poetry look so effortless I tell myself I could probably do that. Auden makes poetry look so daunting and effortful that I'm shocked anyone can do it.

Lovely, I’m not sure how else to describe it. Proustian without the interminable scenes of awful people blathering on. Woolf (at least here, I haven’t read anything else by her) is gentle and empathetic. Each viewpoint character, as strange or damaged as they might be, is a person who makes up a part of the infinite not fully knowable mosaic of human experience. It’s Chestertonian, without being religious…

https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2024/mrs-dalloway-quick-review/

This book provides something I've always wanted but never found written before: a brief (very brief, a page and a half at most) description of various poetic meters and then a bunch of examples. Looking at a stress/unstress pattern chart is all well and good for an initial introduction to a poem. But (at least for me, a learn-by-doing minded person), the FEEL of the pattern only becomes clear when you've read a dozen poems in that meter and you internal monologue starts slipping into it.

I, for example, never got hendecasyllables until I read this collection. When you encounter one example among a collection of poetry, it feels like a mistake. Like a misstep in the rhythm, or a lesser poem that the poet couldn't quite get right. But when you've red 5-10 of them in a row, you can sense the stutter step in the middle that the writer is creating intentionally.

If you're already quite adept at reading poetry this is probably all very basic, but if you're a beginner it really drives itself home.

A brief review with a couple of very mild spoilers: https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2024/quick-review-northanger-abbey/

My various thoughts on Robert Frost can be found here:
https://aaronmorey.com/tags/robertfrost/

I wrote a review at my blog: https://aaronmorey.com/posts/2024/the-extinction-of-irena-rey/

"The Extinction of Irena Rey wears a lot of masks: it's part political thriller, part locked room murder mystery, part psychological horror (are the pagan Polish gods real, or is she having a mental breakdown?). But most of all, it's a Borgesian exploration of the concept of death of the author."

This is one of the wildest works of literature I've ever read. Not simply that the plot is full of wild action, but that the book itself is written wildly, as if in a manic rush to get it all out. The tone, the pace, the style of prose all careen from one to the next. Humorous, academic, poetic, operatic, maniacal Shakespearean monologs. I admit there were points in the middle where I was waiting for something, for goodness sake to finally happen. But the final chapters come upon you in a rush.

The more I think about it, is the book itself structured like a sea voyage? The jovial early days of preparing to sail and setting off, the tedium of innumerable days at sea, and finally the terror of the mission at hand.

I'll be chewing on this for a long time.

This is a fun little book, but very disjointed. I would like to have read a more coherent narrative around who the major characters were, how their techniques developed, how they interacted with other branches of the military, how they affected the course of wars, etc. Instead it's presented as a stream of loosely related paragraph-long anecdotes, which make neat little fun facts but don't provide a broader view of the topic.

To the extent that I have a political manifesto, it is this.

I should start by saying I liked this book a lot (I gave it four stars for goodness sake). It's deeply imaginative. It has, like any epic should, a strong sense of a larger world going on off the page, which the narrative of the book reveals only bit by bit. Lots of memorable lines and phrases.

It's not fair, I know, but I just wanted to like it more. It's not on the same level as the best of the best scifi/fantasy epics, like The Lord of the Rings or The Book of the New Sun. The prose is fine, it's not as bad as I was warned it could be, but Herbert not Tolkien or Wolfe. I didn't have the same sense of awed wonder that I expect from this kind of grandly ambitious novel. Maybe if I'd read it at 15 instead of 35.

All in all, a very good novel but it falls just short of the masterpiece tier I was hoping for.

I’ve read some of the other three star reviews and I feel bad that I gave it the same rating. I liked AMCE a lot.

Teixcalaan is an engrossing world to explore. The author avoided taking the easy routes of making the all-encompassing empire a direct clone of either Ancient Rome or Nazi Germany. There are obvious parallels to Aztec culture, and Martine has said she based Lsel on medieval Armenia, both of which I’d suddenly like to know a lot more about.

I have a lot of thoughts about home and empire but I’m not sure I could do justice here.

The only real reason I gave it three stars was that it’s probably not timelessly substantial. It’s not Shakespeare, it’s not even Gene Wolfe, but it’s better than you you can reasonably expect a pulpy space opera to be.

I’m a big Gene Wolfe fan, but this one didn’t do it for me. Usually Wolfe’s prose itself is lush and beautiful, leaving you *feeling* something about the story even when you don’t fully understand what’s happening on a rational level. The clipped, pulpy style he uses here didn’t draw me in or make me care particularly about any of the characters or what happened to them. I’ve gathered from reading the usual Wolfe sites that there’s quite a bit more going on here than I picked up in my initial reading. But I don’t think I could bring myself to pick it up again to find out.

I finished this book and thought "Meh". A lot of stuff happens and then it ends. It was enjoyable, but there was seemingly not as much substance as other of Wolfe's novels.

Then I started listening to a podcast called Alzabo Soup where the hosts go through the book chapter by chapter, explaining the some of the intriguing inconsistencies and double meanings that I missed the first time through. Without spoilers, I will just say don't trust the narrator and read the book closely.

I rated it a bit lower because I don't think the surface-level story is as enjoyable as other Wolfe books. But I think a careful re-reading and discussion open up a lot that isn't immediately apparent and very intriguing.

To the extent that I have a political manifesto, it is this.

If you want to understand the classical philosophical framework that much of traditional Christian theology is based on, this book does a great job of explaining it. Ed Feser is a Thomistic philosophy professor who really knows how to make complex concepts make sense in a concrete way. This might be the most accessible overview of classical and Scholastic philosophy I've ever read. I'd love to give it 5 stars.

Sadly, I can't. Feser spends too much time making snide comments about the purveyors of "New Atheism". They mostly deserve it and its often amusing to me to see a good BURN! against an ideological opponent. But by stooping to that level, the book becomes an exercise in preaching to the choir. The people who I'd like to recommend the book to and would be most likely to benefit from it would likely be turned off by the aggressive tone.

I wish Dr. Feser had taken Aquinas's cool-headed tone along with his philosophical framework.

A good overview of the Catholic faith for high school aged students. The topic is obviously too broad to go into much depth on any one thing in particular, but the content is good for the level it's at. A HUGE improvement over the previous edition.