2025 read #11: The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel.

The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel

Translated by Gesche Ipsen

281 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)

Read from January 29 to January 31

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I expected this to be a book about social ecology and its evolution through the centuries. The lovely cover, the title, and even the jacket flap copy certainly suggest an examination of crop rotation, coppicing, and common land, and how those traditional lifeways might be integrated with renewable energy for a wholesome solarpunk future. The book touches on some of that, but it isn’t Kehnel’s main focus.

Instead, Green Ages is mostly concerned with economics: communal abbeys, beguinages, microfinance, circular economies, and so on. Important things to think about, just not what I anticipated. And Kehnel does little more than introduce some ideas; she rarely digs deeper. A typical topic line: “Diogenes and the origins of the ‘tiny house’ movement.”

Like other academics with competent but uninspired prose, Kehnel writes in a faintly patronizing, “let’s learn about this together” voice directly out of a freshman textbook. (Or perhaps that’s just the style common to translations from German; I recall that Forest Walking had a remarkably similar vibe.) A typical sentence: “They were medieval influencers with a high impact factor.”

Overall, Green Ages was worthwhile, but didn’t quite deliver on the vibe of its packaging. I’m really not an economics girlie, so I can’t say for certain, but I feel like this book doesn’t offer much there beyond broad generalizations. Perhaps I’m merely disgruntled. Now, though, I want a book that actually documents the ecology of medieval lifeways.

2025 read #10: The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Illustrated by John R. Neill 

145 pages

Published 1904

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

Perhaps because this second installment lacks the nostalgic familiarity of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I didn’t appreciate it as much. Or perhaps it’s because it’s hard to find the joy in life when an illegitimate fascist government employs shock doctrine to demoralize and dismantle your country.

It’s hard to separate Wizard from its movie, so it’s difficult to say which book is better. For most of Land, Tip is a less engaging protagonist than (the movie version of) Dorothy. Pumpkinhead has a promising introduction, but the eventual adventuring crew of the Scarcrow, the Tin Man, the Saw-Horse, the Wobble-Bug, and so forth feels much less entertaining than (the movie version of) Wizard’s cast. Their scenes are full of bickering, and puns, and bickering over puns. For a depressed adult in the twenty-first century, it grows tiresome.

Without beloved cinematic plot beats to carry it, Land is a bit of a trudge to this modern reader, the frenetic bedtime story pace giving very little to latch onto. Even its proto-feminist message of “girls get to sit at the table too” gets lost in its “girls want jewelry and bon-bons” antics.

That said, the final gender-bent twist is delightful, especially for a book this old. It elevates my final opinion of Land quite a bit, and reassures me that the rest of the Oz books might be worth reading.

2025 read #9: The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady.

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady

520 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve become more cautious, and more skeptical, of history books over the years. You never can tell when some (usually white, usually male) author will cherry-pick or outright misrepresent historical context in order to push some right wing bullshit. (Looking at you, Simon Winchester and Dan Jones.) I hesitate to take a chance on any author I haven’t encountered before.

But I want to read more history, both for personal interest as well as inspiration for future writing and worldbuilding. My library has woefully few books written by and about peoples of the global majority, so for now, I’m settling for a history of a part of Europe I don’t know much about.

Right from the start, Rady betrays a weakness for limited, almost Victorian interpretations of history. He still employs the suspect term “civilization” in place of culture (as in, “the vulnerability of [Central Europe’s] civilization” to invaders from the steppe). He has a passion for big men and their battles, and treats “peoples” as if they were solid game pieces being moved around a map by the big men, and not as complex social units with complex interactions. I don’t get the sense that Rady means anything nefarious or RETVRN-like with it, just that he’s an older scholar and perhaps hasn’t deconstructed a lot of the bad old assumptions from the bad old days. Plus, simplistic big man history is much easier to write at this vast scale.

Still, a historian who opines “[S]erfdom was not all bad” has earned a healthy dose of skepticism, a sense not fully dispelled until his relatively even-handed treatment of post-Soviet neoliberalism and its failures.

The scope of The Middle Kingdoms — covering a considerable portion of a continent, from the time of Ovid to the present — is both central to its appeal and its main stumbling block. I always love the sound of a history of a vast region, over an extensive span of time, but inevitably, it ends up superficial, breezing through decades in a paragraph.

However simplistic its big man approach to history may be, Middle Kingdoms was an interesting introduction to a region of the world that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the anglophone press.

2025 read #8: Normal Women by Philippa Gregory.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

580 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 22

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Everything in any given society is the result of a choice. The choice may have been deliberate, something coded into law to achieve a stated purpose on a documented date, or it may have been a gradual drift from a former attitude, but it was a choice either way. It’s endlessly frustrating that a significant political faction is either ignorant of this basic fact, or choosing to obfuscate it to ground their appeals to “traditional values” in some myth of “it’s always been this way, it’s natural.” In human culture, nothing is natural; nothing is a default. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to enforce your own preferred choices on others.

This book is a vast documentation of the choices that have been made in England regarding the roles, liberties, limitations, and expectations placed upon women since 1066. Gregory’s dexterous prose turns a potentially dry recitation of people and places into a compulsively readable narrative, equal parts inspiring and enraging. From the imposition of oppressive Norman laws, to the wholesale invention biblical misogyny in William Tynsdale’s translation, to the creation of binary sexes by elite men of the Enlightenment, to the cultural vilification of single mothers in the 1970s, Gregory traces the step-by-step creation of today’s gender hierarchy, drawn up in imaginary lists of differences between women and men, and enforced through courts, the pulpit, and the university.

Hand in hand with the laws and social movements meant to demonize and marginalize women went acts by the elite to create an enclosed, landowning, cash-driven society. The loss of connection to the land, and the prosecution of those who formerly could make a living off the common, created the conditions for colonialism, extractive capitalism, and the carceral state. I’ve often said the English aristocrats first colonized their own working classes; Normal Women documents the sociopolitical connections between classism, misogyny, and the invention of modern inequality:

The tradition that women work for their families without payment, and that men dedicate themselves to wage earning, became established by the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century — long before the rhetoric of a ‘breadwinner wage’ was invented.

In an era when the worst impulses of the elites — grasping for absolute power, artificially inflating prices for necessities while stripping the working population of livable wages — are racing toward fruition, the history of these cultural choices is a bracing, infuriating, necessary read.

2025 read #7: A Mystery of the Campagna by Von Degen.

A Mystery of the Campagna by Von Degen (pseudonym for Ann Crawford, Baroness von Rabe)

88 pages

Published 1887

Read January 19

Rating: 2 out of 5

When you’ve gotten into the habit of reading as many books as possible for over two years, it’s difficult to pump the brakes and switch to a slower, more deliberate reading pace. The last couple weeks, I’ve been working my way through three large books, hoping to redevelop my old attention span. But it hasn’t been easy; progress has been slow. And finding a new digitized source of weird old books in the Merril Collection, it’s tempting to knock out a quick Victorian vampire novella once in a while.

This is not the best writing I’ve read, even by the standards of its time. Von Degen has some ability at quickly establishing character, but this asset gets lost in a muddle of amateurish prose (and repeated allusions to how rural Italians look like murderers). Her most vivid passages heap scorn upon rustic food that, honestly, sounds delicious to me:

There came to light pecorino cheese made from ewe's milk, black bread of the consistency of a stone, a great bowl of salad apparently composed of weeds, and a sausage which filled the room with a strong smell of garlic. Then he disappeared and came back with a dish full of ragged-looking goat's flesh cooked together with a mass of smoking polenta, and I am not sure that there was not oil in it…. It was a terrible meal, but I had to eat it….

Oh no, it’s flavor! An English aristocrat’s natural enemy!

Aside from all that, Campagna isn’t bad; it’s a brief, relatively painless curiosity, an early example of the English vampire genre. As a little bonus, the nurses (particularly Sœur Claudius) are the most collected, competent female characters I’ve ever encountered from this time period.

2025 read #6: In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts.

In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts 

311 pages

Published 1922

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’d never heard about this novel until I browsed through the digital holdings of the Merril Collection, attached to the Toronto Public Library. Another excellent resource to bookmark! Too bad I chose this book as my first download, because yikes.

Morning is one of those “pageantry of life through time” confabulations that seemed to peak around the ’20s through ’50s. It opens with an amphibious sauropod observing Jurassic slaughter from the relative safety of an estuary. It’s all downhill from there, bearing us down through epochs of bullshit to a 1920s conception of Man. Specifically, White Man.

Along the way, we get red-in-tooth-and-claw vignettes of dubious scientific accuracy; chapter two brings us a Cretaceous Triceratops battling an Eocene Dinoceras, their fight witnessed by both a Jurassic Archaeopteryx and a Pliocene hominid, compressing about 145 million years into one moment. After that, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Grôm, a strangely Caucasian caveman who masters fire, figures out the bow and arrow, and invents love. True to the tastes of its readers, Grôm’s primary foe is miscegenation.

Everything is suffused with masculine rage and violence (and copious racist coding). This, inevitably, becomes tedious, trite, and ridiculous. The ape-man’s bride and child get fridged by some ceratopsians, for instance, which motivates him to single-handedly hasten the dinosaurs’ extinction in revenge. This accomplished, he goes off into the woods, desiring a new mate to bear him sons. Because daughters, even back in Missing Link days, lack inquisitiveness and resourcefulness, you see.

If that weren’t grotesque enough, you can only imagine the racism and patronizing misogyny simmering through the subsequent Grôm chapters. There’s a stink of The Birth of a Nation to the battle that opens the chapter “The Finding of Fire.” It’s fucking vile.

I’m only giving this garbage a full star because at least it’s better written than The Land that Time Forgot. That’s an extremely generous metric, and more than Morning deserves. But hey, I suppose the first chapter, the one without any people, is okay, at least by the standards of 1920s sci-fi, and later on Grôm and his pals have a pulpy encounter with giant dragonflies that feels moderately creative. Not worth slogging through the rest of it, though, by any means.

2025 read #5: Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 13 by Kamome Shirahama.

Witch Hat Atelier: Volume 13 by Kamome Shirahama

Translated by Stephen Kohler

180 pages

Published 2024 (English translation published 2025)

Read January 16

Rating: 4 out of 5

It’s been a hell of a bad ride since I finished the previous installment of Witch Hat Atelier back in September. Fuck.

It’s an adjustment to go from splurging through the series to being all caught up and having to wait months for the next translated tankōbon. The number of characters and tangle of plot lines in Atelier makes it especially difficult. I floundered at first to recall what was going on; when a new character (Richeh’s big brother) got introduced, I was confused, concerned that I’d completely forgotten someone important.

This is a solid installment, progressing the conflict between the principles of the Pointed Caps and their desire to help people. The way forward chosen by the characters — invent new spells! — seems a bit trite, but Shirahama’s artwork is stunning as always, whirling between characters and scenes with assurance and verve.

2025 read #4: Kids on Bikes: 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski.

Kids on Bikes: Strange Adventures in Small Towns, 2nd Edition by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski

Includes “The Horror in the House on Hook Hill,” written and designed by Sen Foong-Lim and Alara Cameron

180 pages

Published 2023

Read from December 25, 2024 to January 7

Rating: n/a

The only game system books I’d read in their entirety before this were the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook from the 5th edition of D&D. With Wizards of the Coast doing everything in their power to alienate their audience and burn years of goodwill to the ground, it’s time to learn some new systems!

Thanks to my partner R for gifting me this one. <3

What I like about this book: The wealth of thought that went into its discussions of how to play a mutually respectful game with others. I feel like the DMG and years of being the forever-DM taught me less than this book offered about the topics of table safety, collaborative storytelling, prompting players, backpedaling when the story goes places it shouldn’t, and ways to make failing a roll both interesting and an opportunity to move the game forward. Whatever system I use in the future, I appreciate having these role-play tools at hand.

What could have been better: Just like the Player’s Handbook, Kids on Bikes buried the rules of play within some sub-optimal formatting. I like the choice to foreground ethical gaming, but perhaps the core rules could be highlighted with an edge color for easy reference. More pertinently, the book explains what to do with a particular game condition before it defines the game condition, e.g. we get told we can spend Adversity Tokens several pages before we learn what they are or how we get them. It felt slightly disorganized.

I’m excited to (someday, hopefully) be able to play a Kids on Bikes game. This book also joins E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies, Now and Then, Super 8, and a general cultural awareness of IT (which I haven’t read, or watched in full) on my meager list of inspirations for the kids-on-bikes novel I began writing this week.

2025 read #3: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.*

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum*

Illustrated by W.W. Denslow 

122 pages

Published 1900

Read from January 6 to January 7

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

My partner R introduced me to the film version of Wicked the other night, a movie so enjoyable it rekindled my interest in the book version. I’m not sure I’ll ever follow up on that; I attempted to read Wicked back in 2014, got seventeen pages in, and gave up. It isn’t a good novel. Still, I might try again someday. And in either case, I thought it might be fun to revisit The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, perhaps even work my way into the later Baum books.

Having grown up on the 1939 musical, Wizard of Oz was a disappointment to my childhood self, who expected the same technicolor pageant in book form. The prose is weightless, as was so often the case with early chapter books. The story flits between wacky encounters and creatures at a bedtime story pace, and its ironies are about as subtle as a tornado. The Wicked Witch of the West, for instance, is Dorothy’s antagonist for just one chapter. In comparison, the movie is polished and tightly plotted. I can’t exactly criticize a book for doing exactly what was expected of it in its time, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it, personally.

I’d be curious to read a gloss of Oz that illuminated the turn of the century political satire underlying everything here. No publisher ever seems to bundle this book with commentary, sadly.

2025 read #2: bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward.

bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Foreword by Kiese Layton

145 pages

Published 2017 (expanded from original edition published 2013)

Read from January 4 to January 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

When it comes to poetry, I’m a dilettante. I only know my old circle of poets, plus maybe a handful of household names. My library has a modest collection of poetry books; one of my reading goals this year is to expand my poetry horizons.

bone is a mesmerizing introduction to Daley-Ward. Poems of love, of grief, of queerness, of god and violations too vast to outline, of negotiations within oneself to remain alive — all of them weave around one another, short stings of free verse that feel like the wisdom of aphorisms followed by epics hundreds of lines long. “Love is not a safe word,” she explains in “things it can take twenty years and a bad liver to work out,” then adds, “But it’s the safe things that kill you / in the end.”

2025 read #1: Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle: 1 by Kagiji Kumanomata.

Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle: 1 by Kagiji Kumanomata

Translated by Tetsuichiro Miyaki

168 pages

Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)

Read from December 31, 2024 to January 1

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

In 2024, I read 157 books, the most I’ve ever read in one year as an adult. It was also the very first year I read at least ten books each calendar month. Many, possibly most, of the books I read were quick reads: manga, magazines, novellas, poetry collections. Some might sniff at that, but a record is a record, and who cares what others think? It’s not like anyone but plagiarism bots reads these reviews anyway.

Moving into 2025, I want to read more deliberately, instead of for big numbers. I want to read less overall, to free up time for writing. So naturally the first book of 2025 is… a volume of manga.

I learned about this series thanks to an ad in the back of a volume of Frieren. I’m always open to charming high fantasy manga, especially now that I’ve finished Delicious in Dungeon and I’m all caught up with Witch Hat Atelier. Sleepy Princess looked promising, an adorable tale of a kidnapped princess who, safe and bored inside a castle of monsters, goes to great lengths to get quality sleep. As a fellow princess-and-the-pea sleeper myself, I could relate. The manga pretty much delivers on that premise, and does so adequately. The way Princess Syalis hunts through the demon castle for her various bedding needs is pleasantly reminiscent of Delicious in Dungeon, if you replace food with sleep.

Unfortunately, at least in this initial volume, Princess lacks characterization, and the princess’s nocturnal side-quests quickly become repetitive. This slim tankōbon is packed with thirteen chapters, each of which is fairly self-contained. As a result, the story is episodic, and never develops much substance. I don’t think I’m intrigued enough to continue spending money on this series.

Also discouraging any investment: the binding error in this copy (most of chapters nine and ten are replaced with repeats of chapters four and five). Bad luck, or a shoddy press? I’m not shelling out more to find out.