The book year for me began in earnest over Valentine’s Day travel in San Diego—and on the way to it. Driving through west Texas and El Paso I listened to Mike Rowe’s interview with Nikki Stratton about her grandfather, Donald Stratton, and the book he wrote with Ken Gire about being on the USS Arizona during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

I’ve long been aware of a Stratton on board the Arizona. While I’m pretty sure we’re not related it did of course interest me. So, when I happened to see Don Stratton’s All the Gallant Men a few hours later at Coas Books in Las Cruces, I couldn’t resist buying it.

To Donald Stratton, the attack on Pearl Harbor mirrored the September 11 attacks, and he lamented that the lessons we learned on December 7 are being forgotten. One of those lessons is a question: “Am I worth dying for?”

To paraphrase Kevin Smith, the Arizona wasn’t even supposed to be there that day. It had been involved in an accident and stayed in place for minor repairs. It accounted for “nearly half of all the Americans who died that day”.

We were so young, those of us who enlisted—eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old… If we were not quite men on December 6, by midmorning of the 7th we were.

It’s an incredible story. He covers not just the morning of December 7, but also his recuperation back home in mid-America and his return to the United States Navy to finish out the war.

Though I may have left Pearl Harbor on a stretcher, I had returned on a Destroyer. I had recovered my strength, as had my country.

While in San Diego I picked up a book at the big monthly University Heights Public Library sale that was to occupy my time on and off literally up to the end of the year. I began reading Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Il Dolore in March while traveling in and around Barcelona. I finished it this morning as I write this post, New Year’s Eve, 2025, making it my “last review of the year” according to Goodreads.

This collection of poetry grew into grief (il dolore) over a lost son, his nine-year-old Antonietto, in 1939; it ended with grief over the loss of hundreds of thousands in World War II, and the desolation of Italy.

While in Barcelona I picked up another Italian book, which I’ll be talking about more in The Year in Food.

A series of science fiction and gaming conventions in June and July netted several classic works of science fiction. I came home from the North Texas RPG Convention with A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool, Poul Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, and John Wyndham’s Out of the Deeps. Trader to the Stars is pure Traveler and, in fact, I received it from the GM of a Traveler game session.

Wyndham’s Out of the Deeps is a take on War of the Worlds that puts the aliens underwater, and from Jupiter instead of Mars. Wyndham added two twists to Wells’s alien invasion: what if the aliens were so alien that understanding between them and us is literally impossible? And what if the invasion had come in modern times when politicians have no faith in their own culture, and so dither completely about when and even whether to fight back against invasion?

I’m a reliable witness, you’re a reliable witness, practically all of God’s children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation, which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

I also re-read War of the Worlds itself, something I’ve been wanting to do since hearing Mark Steyn read The Time Machine and re-reading that Wells book. War of the Worlds is fascinating for what it has and for what it does not say. It may feature the first use of what we’d recognize as a modern science fiction ray gun, used on humans that for the most part still got around by walking or by horse.

It even ties back to All the Gallant Men. Something most film interpretations tend to lose is the strong implication by Wells that the Martians’ real advantage lay not in their technology but, as Donald Stratton also feared, in mankind’s complacency.

A trip to Chattanooga for LibertyCon, and up north and back to Texas, resulted in two H. Rider Haggard books. Every time I read another Haggard story I’m more impressed by him. The People of the Mist is a wonderfully weird adventure story, over the top even for Haggard. Everyone at the end is just slightly confused as to their place in the universe and as to what really just happened.

But When the World Shook is the real highlight of this year’s Haggard. It is, superficially at least, very similar to Merritt’s equally amazing The Moon Pool. Both take place in the south seas, both take place just after the Great War, both postulate ancient civilizations living deep underground and about to return to the surface and wreak havoc, whose technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Both would make for great D&D-style campaign worlds.

Now throw your arms around me and I will tell you strange stories of lost days…

If you want strange stories of lost days, no one does this better than Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the New Braunsfels library sale I picked up the latest attempt at a Tarzan movie, with Tarzan played by Alexander Skarsgard. While well-acted, it was a weird, mopey take on the Lord of the Jungle. It was also a mashup of The Return of Tarzan and The Jewels of Opar, the latter of which I hadn’t yet read despite it being in my to-read room for over a decade.

So I remedied that.

The Jewels of Opar highlights exactly what the movie was missing: an internally consistent very weird world of hidden treasures, lost civilizations, and the conflict between civilization and barbarism. It’s a focus on individuals. Even Jane Clayton is on her own for most of the book. Despite finding herself in more and more desperate situations, it’s up to her to extricate herself from them. All the while Tarzan must extricate himself from a prison he doesn’t even know exists, even as their Belgian tormentor slowly realizes that he’s imprisoned himself with walls of greed and hatred.

It’s one of the best books in the Tarzan series I’ve read so far.

Continuing the high adventure theme into space, I ran Flashing Blades! a second time at North Texas, this time mashing up the golden age of sail with the golden age of evil Trek.

While doing other research, I found this cartoon from December 28, 1944.

On the opposite end of that, Robert Zimmerman’s Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 puts our first trip to the moon into the context of those who made the trip, those who watched those who made the trip, and the era it happened.

Zimmerman perfectly captures that sense of an incredible journey by humanity from the ground to the skies to beyond, all in less than a century. And the sense of wonder and faith that drove it. Faith not just in God, but in a God Who makes scientific progress possible for Man.

Chaim Potok’s Old Men at Midnight puts an entirely different journey into the perspective of its times, but it’s still the same period as in Genesis, covering World War II and the Cold War that followed.

How tedious and commonplace, this business of mortality. Infrequently considered, and when considered, too quickly put aside. What returns it to remembrance is irony.

Stanislaw Lem’s Peace on Earth also takes on the Cold War, and the very absurd ways that the countries on various sides chose to maintain the peace. The title alludes to the fact that there is peace on Earth only because there is perpetual war on the Moon, guaranteed by treaty and with no human intervention at all. It’s all artificial intelligence and robots.

Which makes it a real problem when the Lunar Authority loses their eyes on the Moon, a Moon now filled with the greatest weapons of each nation and the most ruthless computers.

So of course they send noted explorer and semi-scientist Ijon Tichy to investigate, and hijinks ensue…

In heroic tales of space such things never happen.

I re-read two of the greatest comic books of the last century this year. Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck remains the most influential comic of my comic reading career. I read his Deadline Doom when it came out, after thoroughly enjoying his 1976 Presidential campaign issues, and it changed my perspective on how comics, and in turn books, were created. I suddenly realized that they were written by people.

Plants are like people. Writers are like plants. Therefore, and this may come as a surprise, writers are like people.

What Gerber was doing in the seventies has not been matched since; the closest is probably Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, which gets there only by recreating Hunter Thompson for science fiction. But Ellis’s work, wonderful as it is, never transcends Ellis’s politics. Gerber shared most of those politics, but understood human nature enough to write a work that went far deeper into the way human relationships really work rather than merely how one person would like them to work. And all with a duck for a protagonist!

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is entirely different, a fantasy world based on the horror books that DC used to publish, House of Mystery, The Witching Hour, among many other once-popular anthology-style comics. Like Ellis, Gaiman inserts a great writer into his comic. But Gaiman’s great is G.K. Chesterton, and that makes all the difference.

What power have dreams in Hell?

Music was also on my mind this year. I began the musical year with Mark Steyn’s American Songbook and closed it out with the sheet music collection 100 Best Songs of the 20’s & 30’s, introed by Richard Rodgers.

It’s amazing how influential that period of music remains today. 100 Best Songs could be opened randomly and you’d likely hit something not just recognizable but influential. The Birth of the Blues. Embraceable You. Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins.

100 Best Songs doesn’t go into the legacy, it presents the sheet music and the lyrics for home musicians to use. Mark Steyn covers the legacy, in a book filled with wonderful anecdotes, from the funny, such as the origin of “That was no lady, that was my wife!” to the genius of writers like Dorothy Fields:

Lesser writers were wont to give serious love songs to the serious love interest and funny songs to the comedy couple and ne’er the twain shall meet. But most of us are serious and funny, romantic and hokey, sensuous and foolish all at the same time—and few songs walk that tightrope as adroitly as this one.

Read the book^• to find out what Fields song that one was!

In between, I read Maria von Trapp’s autobiography My Own Story, about her own amazing life. My Own Story covers the parts of her life outside of Story of the Trapp Family Singers. So it covers growing up and joining a convent; it skips the years of The Sound of Music; and jumps to adjusting to not just America but Vermont, and then to being a celebrity after the movie’s popularity.

…we had believed that home could only be one spot on the globe—Austria. If you were so unlucky, so unhappy, to have lost your home, we thought you had to be homeless for the rest of your days. Now we discovered this was not so because home is where you belong, and having a little house on six hundred acres of Vermont soil made us belong again.

I bought von Trapp’s book while at LibertyCon, but not at LibertyCon. The Chattanooga library happened to be running a library book sale almost directly across the street. I picked up quite a few interesting books there, which I hope to get to in 2026. Hopefully not over a decade later…

The most popular book I read this year was The Fellowship of the Ring. I read a lot of Tolkien this year, re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy and re-reading Humphrey Carpenter’s fascinating biography, Tolkien. I first read it in high school, and quoted from it for a high school speech.

Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt and guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and then slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.

“It’s a gift!” he said.

A Tolkien book that wasn’t a re-read was Christopher Tolkien’s collection of his father’s earlier stories, The Book of Lost Tales, another book I bought while in San Diego in February. It’s a fascinating collection of what could have been and of Christopher Tolkien’s observations of how his father worked.

A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.

The untold stories within the written word. They are a gift. Happy New Year!