Books Completed August 2022

Two photos this month because I wasn't expecting to tear through one book in the last few days of the month after already having mailed out another I'd finished. Whoops!

The History of the Buccaneers of America: Containing Detailed Accounts of Those Bold and Daring Freebooters by Alexandre Olivier Esquemelin - I found this in a little free library while I was walking along humming an Alestorm song and thinking about rules for a pirate RPG I was writing, so that's fate. It took me most of a year to get through a page or three at a time, as it's pretty dense, fairly archaic first-hand account from the late 1600's. Though there was lots of content that would make great additions to a game (and I started keeping notes for that way too late in my reading), to be honest it kind of put me off making anything about the pirates of that time into a game. They were desperate and brutal men, and all the excitement is bound up with suffering and wanton cruelty. After I finished, I mailed it off to my friend Matt, who happens to be a historian and the author of:

Free Hands #1 by Matt Wilding and friends - Got this through the Kickstarter. It's the first issue in what promises to be a bloody, piratical romp from Sequential Decay comics. I should take some inspiration from this that perhaps there is a way that we can tell stories of the pirates of yore in a meaningful way. My only gripe is the colors in my copy seem dark or murky. Might be an artifact of the production.

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe - I finished the Book of the New Sun tetralogy last month, and immediately ordered this when I found out he had written a fifth book as a "coda". In a way, I wish I hadn't. There's praise aplenty heaped on this book, and from a technical perspective it's really interesting. Wolfe managed to create a work he clearly hadn't planned as part of the original and have it fit seamlessly into the continuity. However, it reminded me a bit of Sandman Overture: The author seemed compelled to come back to a completed work which contained loose ends and ambiguous events as part of its appeal and wrap them all up, taking most of that opportunity away from the readers. Also, this book introduces a whole bunch of time travel to make it happen which... I'm not a time travel fan.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery - Another little free library find I happened past and grabbed on a whim because I realized I'd never read it despite seeing the old PBS miniseries several times in my youth. Though it's not much of an achievement for a kid's book, I read this in two sittings in two days and found it delightful. Some of it's surely pure nostalgia for a time and place that basically never existed, but the characterization is so precise and delicate, and the descriptions of the land so loving, it just skims along. It somehow manages to capture the whole of a childhood and the melancholy of growing out of that in just a few hundred pages. I know there are sequels, but I think I might just let this one stand alone in my memory for a while.