Books on my Nightstand: November

I am always reading several books at once. I started a bunch in October, which I will probably finish this month. I am enjoying them as I go, and I want to share my enjoyment. So what follows are reviews of partially read books—a genre of critical writing that I don’t foresee ever catching on. (Coming up next—a series of film reviews based on the first 15 minutes of various movies.)

HISTORY

I saw a meme recently that posited that men think about the Roman Empire once a day. I’m sure that is not true of most men, but it is totally true of me. I’ve always had a modest interest in history, but Covid threw me into the arms of YouTube’s history channels, which has become one of my favorite entertainments—they are almost perfectly aimed at satisfying old dude intellectual needs. (Some of my favorite YouTube history channels are Ancient Americas, Crash Course World History, Khanubis, Odd Compass, Historia Civilis, and Epimethius.) I was browsing at my favorite bookstore, Brazos Books, when the cover above slapped me in the face, The bookcover served its purpose—it made me pick up the book and look at it.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is a popular historian. This book does not contain original research—Montefiore depended on other histories for source material. The bibliography is not printed in the book—it is a 149 page pdf that you have to download to access. The text runs 1260 pages. In it, Montefiore tries to tell the entire history of the human world. Montefiore apparently began this as a COVID project. Just as COVID lead me deeper into the study of history, it allowed Montefiore the space for a really big project.

Montefiore is best known for his books on Russian history. I had read his Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and liked it, although it wasn’t the best biography of Stalin that I’ve read. (I don’t know what it says about me that I have not only read multiple Stalin biographies, but I have mentally ranked them all.)

Montefiore makes a point of saying that The World is a “family history of humanity”. As a consequence, we learn a lot about the sex lives of the world’s elites, which is simultaneously horrifying, fascinating, and—um—sexy. But Montefiore is always careful to let us know if a source may be biased. For instance, when he gets to Theodora, the incredibly accomplished wife of the Roman emperor Justinian I, Montefiore writes the following:

His paramour was Theodora, a blonde actress twenty years younger [. . .] who had performed in live sex shows on stage with penetration of all orifices by multiple partners and geese eating grains off her private parts—according to the embittered courtier Procopius.

Montefiore loves to repeat these 1000 year old sexy stories, but leaves it to you whether or not to fully believe it them. But what does seem to be universal in human history is that the people who rule empires like to fuck a lot. Almost as much as they like to kill. The book is full of the most unbelievable violence that Montefiore seems to delight in recounting. For example. he relates the Mongol conquest of the Khwarizmi capital of Gurgamj (located in modern Turkmenistan). When the city fell, the 50,000 Mongol soldiers were ordered to kill 24 people each. Assuming this historical account is acurate, they murdered 1.2 million people by hand. “This may have been the largest single massacre in history.”

Twelve hundred pages is simply not enough. Early on in the book, whole civilizations get written off in single footnotes. Such is the fate of Teotihuacan, the enormous city in Mexico that was one of the largest in the world before it fell in the 7th or 8th century. (In Teotihuacan’s case, we don’t even know what the residents called it. The name “Teotihhuacan” is the Aztec name for the city. Montefiore works hard to call things by their own names (while reminding us of the more familiar names, often bestowed on a place by conquerors, colonizers, or Greek geographers.) For instance, we have no idea what the people Indus River Valley Civilization called themselves because we’ve never been able to transcribe their text. One footnote is the volume’s only description of a massive civilization that existed from about 30 to 375 CE in the area of modern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and which was instrumental in spreading Buddhism. The footnote begins, “The vast Kushan empire. . .” Part of the problem is space—Montefiore doesn’t have enough space to include everything. Another part of the problem is actual history. In the case of Teotihuacan, we just don’t have written records. So much of what we know comes from people who were writing about them hundreds of years after the events or from archeology. The Kushans were literate, but there wasn’t a Kushan Herodotus or Sima Quan to write their history.

This book is pure pleasure, designed for an aging bachelor like myself to love.

Continuing on the theme of all men thinking about the Roman Empire once a day, we go to a living embodiment of that—me reading Julius Caesar’s The Gallic War. This is one I just started—I’ve barely gotten beyond the introduction, which mainly seeks to present Caesar’s reputation after his death amongst the learned of Europe. I was inspired to pick up this piece of classical propaganda after reading about it in The World. It is one of those sources you have to take with a gigantic grain of salt, but it is supposed to be a really good read.

Among the reflections on Caesar that caught my attention, translator Carolyn Hammond mentions Thomas Aquinas who felt that Caesar’s murder was justified because he took power by violence (because it is important for 13th century theologians to have opinions about pagan warlords who died more than 1000 years earlier). But most interesting to me was Napoleon. It is not surprising that he would be fascinated by classical conquerors like Alexander and Caesar. He asked Goethe to write a play about Caesar (which would have ruled). Goethe apparently described Caesar as the “incarnation of human greatness.” I see him as a power-hungry murderer who wasn’t above a little genocide if it helped him reach his ambition to be dictator of Rome.

POP CULTURE

This is a weird one. Ashley Holt is an illustrator who I have followed on Facebook for years. I can’t remember how I stumbled across him—I may have met him at a small press convention or something like that. He has a great, minimal illustration style, he has a Substack newsletter called The Symptoms, and self-published this tiny book of essays about Holt’s iffy relationship to nerd culture. with which Holt appears to have a simultaneous attraction to and discomfort with. This book consists of short essays about this.

The title makes it seem like you are in for a slightly serious read. The punning title, Dorkness Visible, might lead one to think of Milton describing Hell, or William Styron describing his own deep depression. In “Halloweak”, Holt points out, “Even then [in his childhood] I noticed a disparity between the majority of these costume options and the theme of the holiday itself. What did Minnie Mouse and Spider-Man have to do with Halloween. Shouldn’t your Fonzie mask at least include a hatchet in he head?” As he got older, he retreated from celebrating Halloween. “There were a few Halloween parties in later years. I either resurrected the Green-Faced Dude [a homemade costume of previous years] or ignored it altogether in favor my preferred Halloween activity: staying home with the lights off (to deter trick-or-treaters) and watched Karloff and Lugosi movies.” The essays are witty and light so far.