Imagine a black scientist discovered a way to turn black people into white people. What would happen to American society? That is the premise of George Schuyler’s 1931 novel, Black No More. It is very funny and very disturbing at the same time, portraying the extreme racism of early 20th century America in all its horror and absurdity.
To continue reading my review, click here.
I have lived in Nashville, TN, practically all of my life. My parents moved here from Milwaukee, WI, when I was less than a year old. My father was hired in 1961 by Vanderbilt University to start up its Materials Science Department in the Engineering School. Even though I could consider myself a “native” Nashvillian (especially when you take into account the thousands of California refugees that have moved here recently), I have never felt like I am truly am one. It’s a cliche that Nashville is a “big city with a small town feel”, but it’s true. There’s a relatively small circle of everyone who’s anyone, and they all know each other. Still, I managed to keep up with local politics and society gossip through reading the two newspapers, The Tennessean and The Nashville Banner.
Crockett White is a former reporter for The Tennessean, and he obviously spent his career learning all about Nashville’s prominent families’ skeletons in their closets. He utilized that inside knowledge to write West End, a thinly-veiled fictional account of John Jay Hooker’s run for senate in the early 70s. Hooker was a gifted politician who truly had charisma. That word gets thrown around a lot, but very few humans possess it. Hooker had it – even his political opponents acknowledged his gift for connecting with and inspiring practically every person he came in contact with.
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Last year I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch and very much enjoyed it. It has a deserved reputation of being one of the greatest English novels ever written. So, I decided to start at the beginning of Eliot’s career and read her first novel, Adam Bede. It’s not as good as Middlemarch – very few novels are – but it is quite entertaining in its depiction of English rural life at the turn of the nineteenth century.
To continue reading this review, click here.
The English Department at the school where I teach has a Writer In Residence every year: an author spends 3 – 4 days guest teaching English classes and then speaking to the upper school students at an assembly. This year’s writer was Kevin Wilson, a literature professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN and author of several bestsellers, including The Family Fang and Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine.
In his talk at the assembly, Wilson spoke of his terror of public speaking and how difficult his adolescence was due to his having Tourette’s Syndrome and social awkwardness. However, he managed to turn these personal obstacles into one of the most entertaining and inspiring speeches I’ve ever heard. He had everyone in the auditorium laughing hysterically one moment and wiping away tears the next. When I got home, I told my wife about how great Wilson was, and she said she thought she had recently bought a book of his. Sure enough, she Nothing to See Here in her stack of books to read; she had picked it up on the recommendation of her brother, who raved about Wilson.
Which is a long way of explaining how I ended up reading (and loving) a book I probably never would have been aware of. Readers of this blog have probably figured out that my tastes lean to nonfiction (history, science and technology), mysteries, and classics (especially Victorian literature). I am grateful that a confluence of events led me to Kevin Wilson’s work.
Nothing to See Here is told through the eyes of Lillian Breaker, a young woman who is a cashier at a small-town grocery store in Tennessee. She is very bright, but due to several circumstances beyond her control, she is at loose ends – living in her mother’s attic, smoking pot, and generally wasting her life. Her mother doesn’t really care about Lillian, having a succession of boyfriends, and living from paycheck to paycheck.
To read the rest of my review, click here.
What if “Magick” was an accredited science with the most prestigious universities offering courses of study in it? What if Dante, Orpheus, Virgil, et al. really did descend to Hell, and their writings were nonfiction accounts of their experiences? What if T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland was a travelogue of a real place? Those are the assumptions behind Rebecca Kuang’s enormously entertaining novel, Katabasis.
Cambridge University’s most renowned professor of magick, Jacob Grimes, has died accidentally in a spell gone horribly awry. His two most promising and dedicated graduate students, Alice Law and Peter Murdoch, decide to go to Hell to bring him back. Unbeknownst to each other, they each consider themselves responsible for Professor Grimes’ death. On earth, they have been bitter rivals for Grimes’ attention and favor. Down below, they have to figure out how to work together as they traverse the eight courts of Hell. Based on my description, I admit Katabasis sounds like a young adult fantasy novel. However, it is definitely written for an adult audience, and Kuang’s story gets very dark, very fast.
To read my full review, click here.
Kruekutt set the table for looking back at 2025 with his excellent post listing his favorite classical and jazz releases of that year. In the same spirit, here are my favorite albums from 2025.
Maybe it’s a function of getting old, but I tended to stick with familiar artists this past year. There are a few that I trust to always produce excellent music, and I usually devote my limited listening time to keeping up with them.
10. Steven Wilson: The Overview
I love everything Wilson releases, even his so-called “pop” albums. The Overview is unabashedly progressive, though, with two side-long tracks that overflow with beautiful melodies. Here’s a conversation Brad Birzer and I had about it.
9. Kevin Keller: Arcadia
This is more classical than rock, and it is simply beautiful. Here’s my review of it when it was first released.
8. Dave Bainbridge: On the Edge of What Could Be
Bainbridge is a phenomenal guitarist with an immediately recognizable style. He combines Celtic, jazz, and rock elements to create a unique sound. On the Edge of What Could Be is a double album chock full of fantastic songs.
7. The Flower Kings: Love
Another excellent album from the Flower Kings. I think they are making the best music of their long career. Here’s the conversation I had with Brad Birzer about our love for Love.
6. Gazpacho: Magic 8 Ball
Another one from some old favorites. However, they sound like they’re having a party this time! Here’s the link to our conversation about it.
5. Glass Hammer: Rogue
Speaking of old favorites, Glass Hammer is a perennial one! Rogue is a fascinating story of a man at the end of his life looking back. Here’s my longer review.
4. Karmakanic: Transmutation
Here’s a new one (for me, at least!). This album has spent quite awhile on my stereo, and I think it’s a beautiful work. Led by Jonas Reingold of Sweden, it features John Mitchell on vocals. The epic title track is terrific.
3. Jonas Lindberg and The Other Side: Time Frames
Another set of songs that is bursting with fun melodies and top notch musicianship. I had the pleasure of interviewing Jonas, and you can read it here.
2: Echolyn: TimeSilentRadioII & VII
Echolyn returns after a long absence with two of their best albums ever. The edit from “Water In Our Hands” is my favorite song of 2025. Here’s our conversation about these albums.
1. Lunatic Soul: The World Under Unsun
My favorite album of 2025 (at least for today!). A double disc of uniformly wonderful songs. Everything Mariusz Duda has done under the Lunatic Soul moniker comes to fruition on this fantastic album.
Check out the extraordinarily informative interview our own Erik Heter conducted with Duda here.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this list of albums from 2025 – it was a very good year! Let us know what your favorites were in the comments. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful 2026.
I have been a big fan of the progressive rock group Rush since the early ’80s when “The Spirit of Radio” was all over the radio. In fact, Permanent Waves is probably my favorite Rush album. I also enjoy reading musicians’ autobiographies and getting a “behind the scenes” look at how their music is created.
That said, Geddy Lee’s autobiography, My Effin’ Life, is somewhat of a disappointment. Lee is the bassist and vocalist of Rush; he and guitarist (and lifelong best friend) Alex Lifeson wrote almost all of the music to their vast catalog. Drummer Neil Peart was their lyricist. My Effin’ Life weighs in at a hefty 536 pages (the draft was allegedly 1200 pages!), and I was hoping to learn about the genesis of such classic songs as “Natural Science”, “Tom Sawyer”, and “The Big Money” among many others. Lee comes up short on the working details of how they composed their songs, but he doesn’t stint on describing how much and how often they all consumed drugs!
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A friend gave me this book for Christmas. I don’t usually read books by politicians, but How to Test Negative for Stupid by Senator John Kennedy (R, Louisiana) is one of the funniest and entertaining memoirs I’ve read in a long time. He is definitely one of a kind, known for the very humorous quips and questions he makes during Senate hearings. He has a thick Southern drawl, which can lead an unsuspecting witness or nominee to underestimate him, but he is smart as a whip.
Practically every page has a laugh-out-loud passage:
For as long as I can remember, one thing has been true about me: I have the right to remain silent, but not the ability. (Page 1)
Most Americans imagine the Senate as this grand theater filled with distinguished lawmakers delivering erudite speeches. In reality, it’ usually empty as a timeshare salesman’s heart. (Page 13)
I observed to a reporter one time that you can lead a person to Congress, but you can’t make him think. (Page 21)
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I have been a subscriber to Joel Miller’s excellent Substack, Miller’s Book Review for a couple of years. He never fails to pique my interest in whatever he’s reading, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s a hell of a good writer. So, I was very pleased when he announced that Prometheus Books had agreed to publish his book, The Idea Machine. It’s premise is very simple: How have books changed the world, and what is the history of them? As Miller writes on page 1:
The book, as I argue in the pages ahead, is one of the most important but overlooked factors in the making of the modern world. Why this lack of appreciation – or even awareness? Arguably, the book is a victim of its own success. Familiarity usually breeds more neglect than contempt. We fail to recognize the book for what it is: a remarkably potent information technology, an idea machine.
So begins Miller’s history and appreciation for the written word. He starts at the beginning with ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, through ancient Greek and Roman ways of storing and retrieving information on scrolls, the development of codices in Christian medieval Europe, to the explosion of books made possible by the printing press. Along the way, I learned all kinds of fascinating facts.
To continue, click here.
I love old books, but sometimes the gulf between the culture in which a book was written and my own is so great that I fail to get the original intent of the author. Nadya Williams’ new book, Christians Reading Classics, is an invaluable guide to some of the most time-tested classic works from the ancient world, and it can help bridge that cultural divide. It is divided into five parts, in rough chronological order.
Part I is Longing for Eternity, and it covers Homer’s The Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, Pindar’s Odes, and the Histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Each chapter is relatively short but packed with profound insights. For example, in her analysis of The Iliad, Williams writes,
The externally governed nature of this heroic code – that one is only a great hero if this person is recognized by others and has accumulated great prizes of honor, including prizes that are real people! – is a warning to us as we consider how aspects of such a code appeal to our own desires even today. Each of us wants to be declared good – as God once spoke when he created Adam. In fact, we would like to be declared “the Best”, and we would like this coronation to come unconditionally from absolutely everyone around. But our worth and any declaration of goodness, excellence, and ultimately righteousness is to be found in God alone, not in other people’s view of us. The suffering of the heroes in The Iliad and in other ancient epics, where heroes do all they can to be declared “the Best”, is an important warning of what happens if we place our value in others’ opinion of us. It reminds us of the empty promises of this kind of glory – it cannot satisfy. (p. 9)
To continue reading, click here.
Spirit of Cecilia 
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