For those of you wondering at my reading speed: Between 9:30 and 6:00 today, barring the usual interruptions of checking in and eating and so forth, I finished two-thirds of The Dirt on Clean, polished off the translation of Beowulf, devoured Ghost Brigades, and then got 230 pages into The Year of Living Biblically.

I wasn’t particularly trying, and admittedly all of it was light reading – while that’s probably about a thousand pages overall, I know I wouldn’t have been able to finish off SQL For Smarties in that timeframe.

But I am inching closer to the centennial mark for the year, which is nice.

Book Review #89: Fiendish Codex #1: Hordes of the Abyss
I’ve picked up increasingly few D&D books now that I no longer use the D20 system for my game mechanics. That’s a shame, because there was a time when D&D books satisfied both the crunchy and the imaginative bits for me – they had whole landscapes I could steal as a GM, realms and monsters I could use in any campaign.

Alas, the newest books are filled with new spells and mechanics that really are only useful if you’re using 3.5. You can take up a ton of space with new prestige levels, but none of that means anything if you’re using a point-based system.

This book, however, is what I’d like all D&D books to be like. It’s chock-full of D20 tidbits, but it’s also packed with lots of creative ideas for the GM that can be used anywhere. And it’s made with the GM in mind – not only are you given a demon from the Abyss, but you’re given a sample of what this demon will do in the first four rounds, just to show you their common tactics. You’re shown lots of creative, awful locations for PCs to visit, and artifacts that can be dropped easily into a campaign.

This is a book that really shows you what it’s like to fight the hordes of Hell, and it’s very well done. Kudos to the design team, and I hope it sold well for you.

Book Review #90: Military Misfortunes, by Eliot Cohen
Supposedly a classic in the field, this is a book that tries to analyze why modern armies fail. The obvious tendency is to blame one guy for a failed battle, which is both quick and easy, but the authors go deeper, usually looking for systematic failure.

They look at high-profile failures and tag them – the failed American 1942 anti-submarine campaign as “Failure to adapt,” whereas the 1973 Saudi attack on Israel is “Failure to anticipate.” They wrap up with the collapse of France in 1940 as an example of total collapse.

It’s interesting because it shows how it usually isn’t just one man who puts the screws to a whole army – generally, it’s a multitude of small bad decisions creeping up at once, losses that might have been fixed somewhere down the chain except the whole chain is rusting.

I don’t know whether that’s true. What is apparently clear, both here and in modern warfare, is that every army’s always ready to win the last war it fought in. The big problem usually comes from when that army doesn’t understand that technical advances and shifting priorities have altered the shape of things.

That said, this book doesn’t deal with bad decisions. You won’t get any clear-cut “The general should have gone after their the left flank” in here; it’s almost always a more global issue. Which means that what I was hoping to get out of it – namely, an introduction to good tactics – will not be found here.

Book Review #91: Magical Thinking, by Augusten Burroughs
Augusten’s the master of memoirs; both Running With Scissors and Dry were excellent books. And it’s funny watching this collection of essays unfold, because what you see here is a man of considerable writing talent bending his will to… Well, to pretty much nothing.

Because “nothing” is what you find here. He tells anecdotes that don’t climax, they just run to a stop. He’ll describe a character he knows, and then you realize that that’s all he’s doing. It’s not bad, mainly because he has a great turn of phrase, but his inability to place these mundane experiences in the service of some greater philosophy makes this a collection of, “Well, I guess that’s a place it can end.”

Book Review #92: Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way
Bruce Campbell is a man who seems intrinsically comfortable in his role in life. He knows he’s not a great actor, and he knows he’s been in a lot of terrible films. But he also knows he got lucky to have a bunch of fans who adore him, and so he occupies that happy space where he can wink at his audience and say, “Wow, isn’t this crazy?”

This isn’t a memoir – as he admits, he hasn’t done enough since his first two memoirs to make it worthwhile. So instead, he’s written a book on his supposed role in a new Mike Nichols film starring Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger.

What works really well is when he outlines what it’s like to work with big stars, bitching about the little details that make an actor’s life hell; he makes the process of finding and starring in a movie seem like work, but still fun. (Which is why I’ll have to pick up his memoir.) The weaker parts are where, in “research” for his role, he goes around to Southern gentleman’s clubs and Liz Taylor’s apartment in vague comedy sketches. Some of ‘em work, some of ‘em don’t.

But you know, Bruce is affable. He’s like your favorite uncle singing at your wedding; yeah, he’s not great, but who cares? It’s Bruce.

Book Review #93: The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, by Katherine Ashenberg
During the Middle Ages, the aristocracy was aggressively unclear. Kings bathed perhaps three times in their whole lives, believing that the protective coating of dirt clogged their pores and shut out the plague. Instead, they changed their shirts.

I was expecting a neat little history of what sort of habits the peasants had… But what I wasn’t expecting was some excellent writing that not only discusses how people cleaned themselves, but how the attitudes they carried towards cleanliness have changed. It would have been easy for Katherine to point back and go, “Hoo, look at the stinky peasants,” but instead she manages something more delicate: she makes us realize that perhaps our current obsession with cleanliness and constant fear of BO is something equally freakish.

And there are a lot of good things here, including a very thorough analysis of the Roman bathhouses that’s rife with contemporary bitching about the complaints that the ancients had, and a long discussion of how medicine slowly transformed what people thought of as “sane” habits as the plague first drove people from the publics baths and then back to the sea and then, ultimately, water.

This was perhaps one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year. The only ding I’d give is that the final chapters were less interesting to me, since the 20th century is the rise of advertising and the bringing of the terror of BO – “YOUR FRIENDS WON’T TELL YOU YOU STINK! EVERYONE WILL SECRETLY DESPISE YOU IF YOU DON’T WASH WITH THIS!” – and I’ve read extensively on that. But still, I was surprised at how much of culture comes out, well, in the wash.

Book Review #94: Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney
There were many who complained that the recent movie of Beowulf didn’t have much to do with the book. Which confused me, since the book – or, okay, poem – that I remembered would have made a pretty lame movie.

Here’s what I remembered:

• Beowulf kills a monster
• Beowulf kills another monster
• Beowulf kills a third monster and dies.

“Surely, I must be wrong,” said I. “I’m no studier of classical literature. There must be more depth, more characterization, to be wrung from this!” So I read what is, by most accounts, the best translation (and not the version I read, oh, two decades ago). And here’s what actually happened:

• Beowulf kills a monster with the power of sheer badassery
• Beowulf kills another monster
• Beowulf kills a third monster after his punk-ass army runs off and then dies.

Really. Beowulf is indeed a great story, but it’s not because of the plot; what I find fascinating is that the reason it’s good not because we know Beowulf; we don’t. Beowulf is an action hero without regrets or real motivations. He seeks glory, he wants to fight things, he’s a good man and a good king. But why does Grendel kill people? Who cares? Why does Beowulf do anything? Because he’s a badass.

Beowulf succeeds because it’s tremendously evocative of the culture of its time – the sword triumphs and God saves and nobility is what we all seek. It’s a fabulous window to another era where people were concerned with different things; the actual fighting itself takes up less than five pages. What’s important is the sense of place, the attitudes, the style.

But the story itself? Tissue paper. And a movie based purely on Beowulf would suck beyond the telling. Thank God they changed it, say I.

Book Review #95: Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi
Here’s a rarity: A sequel that’s flat-out better than its progenitor. “Old Man’s War” was at its best when it was showing the reactions of the newly-regenerated old men, but the last half of the book was pretty cookie-cutter space combat. Ghost Brigade steps away from the temptation to continue the story of the protagonist of the first story, instead finding a new person and telling his story.

Fortunately, that story is just as interesting as the old men, and the plot that propels this story really carries it all the way through. And this is a thornier moral ground, questioning whether Earth is as noble as it thinks it is. I don’t want to give anything away (since a lot of this book depends on surprises), but I will be picking up the third and final book in this series to see where it leads. It’s a perfectly balanced ending for a series, leaving you really wanting to know what happens without feeling like sequel bait.

Book Review #96: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest To Follow The Bible As Literally As Possible, by A.J. Jacobs

The quest is fascinating: A.J., a secular liberal Jew in New York, decides to follow all the tenets of the Bible for a year. This is no mean feat, considering that some of the Bible contradicts itself and other tenets are flat-out illegal. But A.J. does his best.

Unfortunately, this one doesn’t gel for me the way The Know-It-All (his quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica) did. He’s living the words but not the heart – which is, in fact, the entire point of it, seeing whether taking on the aspect of an ascetic can change your mind. But whereas he welcomed the knowledge of the Encyclopedia within himself, he holds himself at arm’s reach from the Bible… As he himself acknowledges. And perhaps that’s for the best, since the kind of new life he could create would tear him from his wife and his two-year-old son, but it’s a less interesting journey.

So the Encyclopedia changed him more, and watching that change is the interesting bit. It also feels like we’re stiffed more on characterization here, since his wife has to be irritated by his crazy, beard-growing, non-female-touching antics, and all we get is snippiness. What sort of toll did this take on her? How did his son get affected? Alas, we don’t know.

It’s a fun read. But it feels like a follow-up to me. People seem to like this one better, but I suspect that’s because some people are conditioned to think that books dealing with religion and faith are inherently superior. What we have here is a good book, but not a great one.

(Tell me I'm full of it)