Wheel of Time, to a certain extent, works by leaning into tropes and making them more, rather than avoiding or subverting them. The advantage of a story sprawling across fourteen books is that what starts as a trope can be fully developed and made into as unique a part of the worldbuilding as the most inventive, original aspects.
Nicomachean Ethics Review
After reading philosophers’ ideas of morality and ethics from Plato up to Camus, I remain convinced that Aristotle’s core idea – virtue is the mean between two vices – is the most insightful, and the most useful, standard of ethical behavior we as humanity have.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms Review
Sometimes likened to a Chinese Odyssey, the story is epic in a literal sense, at some eight hundred thousand words over one hundred twenty chapters, and its structure has more in common with modern storytelling than you might expect.
Atlas of Medieval Europe Review
Organized by both timeframe and subject, the collection presents the clearest maps I’ve ever found in a history book, which usually attempt to cram far too much information into a single, static map. With Atlas of Medieval Europe, you can instead experience a kind of stop-motion animation as you watch Europe evolve over the course of a few centuries.
Optimal Illusions Review
As the saying goes, “when you have a hammer, everything’s a nail.” In Krumme’s Optimal Illusions, we contemplate what happens when the hammer decides it is no longer content being a hammer, and would prefer to be a rock, instead.
The Dragon Reborn Review
It gives us immense character growth from viewpoint and side characters, massively raises the stakes and complexity of the plot, and sets the stage for the broadening war against the Dark One coming in the subsequent installments.
The Brick Moon Review
In 1869, a century before the moon landing, eighty-eight years before Sputnik 1, and one hundred nine years before the first navigational satellite, Edward Everett Hale used a science fiction story to propose launching an artificial satellite into polar orbit to enable anyone, anywhere, to determine their longitude by measuring the satellite’s elevation from the horizon.
Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini Review
With many caveats, this is said to be the first autobiography, which is the reason it ended up on my reading list. To be more specific, it is the earliest surviving autobiographical text written with the intent of being autobiographical in nature, as opposed to serving some other didactic purpose while being incidentally autobiographical.
The Great Hunt Review
It is possible both to read The Great Hunt as a contained, quest-style fantasy, following the chase after the Horn of Valere after its theft by agents of evil, and as an installment of a vaster epic in which this quest is a kind of backdrop to the main drama of our protagonists, and especially the struggle against destiny.
The Bookseller of Florence Review
To what extent do the books that come down to us from long ago do so because they are exceptional and there have been deliberate efforts to preserve them throughout the ages, and to what extent are they books that, by accident or happenstance, have happened to survive into the present?
IGC Publishing 