2023: What I Read
This year I went full A Canticle for Doomer Millerites of Alexandria mode. Spending a few thousand hours stockpiling PDFs and organizing them kept me from reading as much as usual, but if you follow the “Library Sciences,” archivist, librarian world—especially on Twitter—it’s hard not to be blackpilled (not to mention the whole Naming Commission thing). There might be a Guy Montag or two keeping the Squeezit-haired semi-sapient gatekeepers of the “banned-book” society at bay, though I’m not hopeful.
I no longer set reading goals. For a year or two now, I tend to read more essays, articles, and chapters than entire books—especially since deciding to give this writing thing a go. Of the 60 books I read this year, some I have no recollection, many were audiobooks, a few were “real” books, and a handful were e-books. I find audiobooks great for road trips, random books I wouldn’t want to buy, and certain types of entertaining genres.
1. 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America: And Four Who Tried to Save Her by Brion T. McClanahan. Brion’s work for the Abbeville Institute is invaluable. He’s also a great guy. Check out his podcasts: The Brion McClanahan Show and The Essential Southern Podcast.
2. A Brief History of the Celts by Peter Berresford Ellis. Just reading about my people. Am I the only one rooting for Gaul against Julius Caesar in The Gallic Wars?
3. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Read this on a cruise.
4. Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by M. Stanton Evans. I’m a big M. Stanton Evans guy.
5. Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy. Read this on a cruise. My Twitter review: Chase reads it. He aint done. It aint yet done with him. His thoughts ferment in the cimmerian murk. His brain? Shipwrecked, entombed at chthonic depths. A penumbral dance, enveloped by nights sepulchral shroud. He peeked behind the atramentous curtain. Whats seen can't be unseen.
6. Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement by David Hackett Fischer. My Twitter post after reading: This book began as the catalog for an exhibit at the Virginia Historical Society, honoring a full century since Frederick Jackson Turner's theory in 1893 on how the frontier shaped America.
The authors reinterpret Turner's thesis by examining three centuries of migration from Virginia, rather than towards the frontier.
In a manner true to the author of Albion's Seed, it links Virginia's culture to its roots in southern England, using dialects, culinary preferences, architectural styles, and social views on work and familial relationships as evidence to support its claim.
At the dawn of American independence, Virginia emerged as the wealthiest, most populous, and politically powerful of the colonies. However, within seventy-five years after the Revolution, Virginia's population, wealth, and political influence dwindled.
What led to this? A mass exodus of Virginians to the Deep South and West, which depleted the state's resources and influential figures.
Turning away from both Turner's frontier theory and the Altlandschaft/germ theory that Turner himself questioned, Fischer and Kelly propose a different perspective. They call it the "mediating model of Albion's Seed," a mix of powerful cultures that keep a link between the center and the fringes, maintaining their individuality while adapting to new surroundings.
7. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill. A favorite. Familiar to all MartyrMade listeners.
8. Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters.
9. Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough. Same as Chaos
10. Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
11. Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy's Last Hurrah Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville by Wiley Sword
12. Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign by Stephan Talty
13. English and Literature by C.S. Lewis
14. Essays, 1993-2017 by Wendell Berry. Read this while researching my Moonshine & Magnolias essay. Relevant post
15. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America by Eric Jay Dolin
16. George Washington I: Young Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman
17. George Washington II: Young Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman
18. Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn. Eventually, I need to do a research deep-dive on Bonnie and Clyde.
19. Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life by George P. Garrett. "I was reminded of something the novelist and historian Shelby Foote once told me. He said that in the Civil War, veterans used to tell green recruits who were going into battle for the first time that they were “going to see the elephant.” Bear in mind that few, if any, of these farm boys from the North and the South could have ever seen a living elephant in fact or in the flesh: the great traveling circuses came later in the century. It was a bad joke, whether any recruits believed it briefly or not. But it had a deep truth.
Ever since Homer, storytellers trying to tell war stories have justly complained that the experience of combat is unimaginable to those who have not experienced it and, thus, finally, no matter how accurately rendered, indescribable, incommunicable.
Writing about the battles in Western Europe in November and December of 1944, Stephen E. Ambrose (in Citizen Soldiers) adds the stipulation that the experience of combat cannot be prepared for."
“Every rifle company coming on the line that November had a similar experience and drew the same conclusion: there was no way training could prepare a man for combat. Combat could only be experienced, not played at. Training was critical to getting the men into physical condition, to obey orders, to use their weapons, to work efficiently with hand signals and radios, and more. It could not teach men how to lie helpless under a shower of shrapnel in a field crisscrossed by machine-gun fire. They just had to do it, and in doing it they joined a unique group of men who have experienced what the rest of us cannot imagine.”
George Garrett on the Poetry of Fred Chappell:
One of the great problems we face in much contemporary American poetry is in its trendy insistence on a central core of unearned nihilism. Poets in the Gulag have written with more hope and even good cheer than many of our most honored urban bards.
Because Chappell is a lifetime reader, ceaselessly curious, there is more than Lang’s “erudition” in his work. He is one of our most sophisticated writers, bringing to his work a restless intelligence disciplined by deep study.
I believe that this intellectual sophistication, often worn as lightly as that of Robert Frost, has confused, perhaps even outraged, poets who confuse sophistication with cleverness, as they confuse fashion with tradition.
Chappell’s intelligence and sophistication are a serious cultural threat to those who have profited from a public stance of inward and spiritual emptiness.
Chappell is one of maybe half a dozen living poets writing in our language who is a true master of prosody and metrics. Never mind the self-advertisements of so many of the neoformalists.
Since the death of O. B. Hardison, Jr., Chappell stands among the diminishing number of American poets who can work well and easily in the tightest and most complex verse forms (as well as the lightest) in such a way that, for the life of the poem, you can safely believe, without doubt or question, the poet’s pretense that we really and truly can think and speak that way—extemporaneously.
In addition to fluent mastery of prosody—a mastery that allows for a perfected free verse whenever he and his subject require it, Chappell’s poems are extremely interesting technically.
George Garrett on working with James Dickey at South Carolina:
It was there, on the lazy elevator, that the hat event took place. Both of us showed up and stepped aboard the elevator wearing broad-brimmed hats, cowboy hats. Jim’s was his sheriff's hat from Deliverance. Mine was an elegant, supple, and heavy leather hat made for me by the Maiolo brothers. There were no girls or ladies on the elevator, so we didn’t remove them.
He looked at me and I looked at him. Nobody blinked. Then we arrived at our floor. The lackadaisical elevator doors began their slow-motion opening and closing. Jim stepped out. I followed.
He turned toward me. “Don’t misunderstand me, George, but the way I feel is there should only be one cowboy hat in this department. And I was here first.”
20. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. So Cringe
21. Griswoldville by Jordan M. Poss. Haunting and beautiful. One of my all-time favorites. Jordan is also a great dude and has a must-read blog.
22. Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman. Very random read. I wanted to learn about food supply logistics. Don’t think the book answered my questions.
23. Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson
24. His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine by S.C. Gwynne. Read because I love Gwynne’s Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
25. Let Us Die Like Men: The Battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864 by William Lee White. Complete blackpill.
26. Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven. Probably read because Roland told me to.
27. Magazines of the American South by Sam Riley. I’m weird, so this is one of my favorites.
28. Mary Chesnut: A Diary From Dixie by Mary Boykin Chesnut. A classic and low-key hilarious.
29. Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville
30. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts
31. Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters by Andrew Gumbel. Meh
32. Plain Folk of the Old South (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) by Frank Lawrence Owsley Sr. A classic and one I’ll be writing more about in the future.
33. R. E. Lee: A Biography I by Douglas Southall Freeman. No commentary needed.
34. R. E. Lee: A Biography II by Douglas Southall Freeman
35. R. E. Lee: A Biography III by Douglas Southall Freeman
36. R. E. Lee: A Biography IV by Douglas Southall Freeman. Made me very sad.
37. Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America by Jim Rasenberger. The main thing I remember about this one is that Sam Colt’s brother murdered a dude with a hatchet, hacked him into pieces that he put in a crate, and paid to ship the crate to New Orleans. link
38. Sarum: The Novel of England by Edward Rutherfurd. Just reading about my people.
39. Sing Me Back Home: Southern Roots and Country Music by Bill C. Malone. I’ll write about Malone more in the future. He has several classics about Country/Southern music.
40. Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland by Avery Odelle Craven. Read this while researching my Moonshine & Magnolias essay. Relevant post
41. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
42. The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell. I gift to Normie Boomers.
43. The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War by Howard Bahr
44. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Totally holds up.
45. The Burden of Southern History by C. Vann Woodward. I’ll definitely be writing about Woodward and his work in the future. One of my favorite essays is his “The Search For Southern Identity”
46. The Conservative Movement by Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming. Deserves its own post. “This book treats the American Right primarily as a political movement— or, more properly speaking, as a series of movements—since World War II.
Yet one conclusion that may be drawn from this book is the increasing irrelevance of prewar, especially non-American, traditionalist thinking for the postwar Right. A distinctive feature of the contemporary American Right is its emphasis on progress: moving beyond the past toward a future of unlimited material opportunity and social improvement.
Whereas the older traditional Right, particularly in Europe, looked backward for its ideals and values, the politics of nostalgia has been in decline on the American Right for at least the last two decades.
A more thoroughgoing antimodernism can still be found on the American Right—for example, among disciples of Russell Kirk and among those of the Southern Agrarians—but its impact on American conservative politics at this time continues to be negligible.”
Also, you don’t hear much these days about Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips.
47. The Cowboy Church by J.L. Mackey. Follow him
48. The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen. Meh. Fascinating subject though.
49. The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard by Marc Eliot
50. The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861 by David M. Potter. Wrote about here
51. The Last Monument by Michael C. Grumley
52. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel
53. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
54. The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
55. The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era by Gareth Russell. Read on a cruise.
56. The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History by Douglas Southall Freeman. A favorite and will be the catalyst for a future recommended reading post. Book link
57. The Stand by Stephen King
58. The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood
59. Victory Ruins by Troop Brenegar. I reviewed this book here
60. Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate. I will write about this one more in the future. A Must read. Book link. Also, here’s Ralph Nader’s essay about the book.