If you were intrigued by my review for The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, but struggled with reading English translations of Rustavelian quatrains, Buell’s retelling is an excellent opportunity to approach the story in a different way.
The Wayfinder Review
What many people might consider to be reasons to put the book on their reading list were reasons I hesitated to put Adam Johnson’s The Wayfinder on mine, and I hesitated again before picking up the book to read. I was not entirely wrong.
Galileo’s Notes on Ptolemy
Copernicus and Galileo, who are credited (perhaps in slightly overstated fashion) with entirely recontextualizing our place in the universe, are thought of in this way, but the reality is that most seemingly revolutionary thinkers were less people who ran in a different direction from everyone else, and more people who saw the trail ahead more clearly and could take the next few steps for us.
Kings Review
What stands out most about Kings, even compared to the previous books, is its ex post facto attempt to impose religious and moralistic justifications for the successes and failures of different kings, and the associated flourishing of the Jewish states.
Beowulf Review
It can be read, outside of some of the trappings and language, as a kind of historical-fantasy tale with which plenty of people today are familiar. We still tell monster tales, albeit usually not in alliterative verse.
Life in a Medieval City Review
We’re all supposed to be getting away from the stock, default medieval Europe-inspired fantasy settings, because they’ve become passe. It’s true such settings can be overused, but they are mostly overused because so many authors fail to utilize books like Life in a Medieval City.
Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia
Reading Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia is most interesting for its comparisons: to Chinese Buddhism, of course, but also to Christian, European monastic traditions, and to the tenets, rules, and commandments of other religions.
Samuel Review
In reading these texts as books, rather than as selected vignettes and parables, we experience a rather different, more historical, more complex story than the excerpts which exist in the popular understanding convey.
A Historically Adjacent “Adaptation”
I was intrigued by how well the riddle’s tone and contents, read through the lens of referring to a travelling minstrel increasingly unneeded by his society, could map into the world of Impressions, and especially the druids’ fate.
Sides of History
Legacy says more about the people doing the remembering than it does about the people or events being remembered, which is also true of things on the right or wrong side of history – such judgements say more about the people doing the judging than about what they are judging.
IGC Publishing 