My “I Read This” List for 2019

I finished reading 47 books this year. That’s only a little under my annual average, but it feels padded by a few children’s books, some zines and a few essays. Not reflected in this list is the time I spent reading parts of a couple large books I have been making slow progress in and haven’t finished. I’ll get them finished eventually. One of my goals for the year was to read more books by women. I have 18 on my list, which isn’t even half, but it is more than last year. My top five of the year, in no particular order, are:

Barbara Hambly – The Silicon Mage – This is part two of the series. I read the first one years ago and finally read the other two. The thing I liked most about this book was the writing about two of the secondary characters. She is a noblewoman who secretly trained to be a warrior before her arranged marriage to the land’s second most prominent noble. He’s a mage-born with almost no power so he had to settle for being a body guard to wizards. The are united by their longing for some other life impossible for them to have. It struck me as better exploration of character then I usually read in fantasy books. Also, the main plot of the book about a wizard trying to use computers to gain immortality is pretty cool too.

Patricia McMillan – Marina and Lee – I read a bunch of books over the last two years about the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. This wasn’t the absolute best one, but I love how McMillan explored the story through interviews with Marina Oswald about her life with this infamous man. I particularly liked the chapters about life in the Soviet Union. Whatever else may have been going on, McMillan presents a strong through-line which explains Lee’s defection, his haphazard activism, and his violence all the way through his death.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Speigelman – This is a classic for a reason. What Speigelman was able to do to tell both his father’s story of life in Poland during the Holocaust and to explore his own relationship with his father is stunning. And he’s done it all with little pictures of mice and cats! This is comics at its best.

Rachel Carson – Silent Spring – Another classic long on my list. It makes it on the best list for it’s importance and legacy. It’s odd to read it now because many of the points she makes about the dangers of untargeted spraying via airplane and “bio-accumulation” of toxins are things I’ve known about since grade school. But that’s the whole point. This is the book which first popularized the idea that more chemicals may not always be better. Carson’s writing is why twenty years later I grew up reading about these ideas in Ranger Rick and Boy’s Life magazines.

A Primate's Memoir – Robert M. Sapolsky – This was one of the most emotional and affecting books I have ever read. Sapolsky is a scientist who has measured stress hormones in baboons as a way to study the impact on humans from the stresses of our social systems. This is not a book of his research, but a memoir of his experiences in East Africa as a younger man. The way he writes about visiting villages, climbing mountains, seeing his baboons roll through the generations is incredible. He made me feel the wonder and horror of the things he saw in a way which I rarely get from travel writing and non-fiction. A triumph of words.

Honorable mentions for this year are Into the Wyrd and Wild, written and (mostly) drawn by Charles Ferguson-Avery. I’d say nice things about this creepy forest supplement to roleplaying games even if I didn’t know him. I also finished book twelve of The History of Middle-earth. It’s been at least 18 years of my life getting through that series (savoring it, not struggling), and now I have that feather in my cap.

The 2019 List:
A+Plus #1-5 - Kevin Siembieda & Alex Marciniszyn, eds. [comics]
Rachel Held Evans - A Year of Biblical Womanhood
JK Rowling - The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Heroic Dark - Dustin DePenning [RPG]
Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him - George de Mohrenschildt
Sarah Elisabeth Orr - Beautiful and Terrible: Women and Power in Early Science Fiction
Barbara Hambly - The Silicon Mage
Hiroko Yoda & Matt Alt - Ninja Attack!
Priscilla McMillan - Marina and Lee
Caitlín R Kiernan - To Charles Fort, With Love
Into the Wyrd and Wild - Charles Ferguson-Avery [RPG]
Ellen Gunderson Traylor - Noah
Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Speigelman [comics]
MetalShark Bro - Walter Ostlie, Bob Frantz and Kevin Cuffe, Chas! Pangburn [comics]
Manjane Satrapi – Persepolis [comics]
Microscope - Ben Robbins [RPG]
Umbrella Academy, Vol 1: Apocalypse Suite - Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá [comics]
Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
The Peoples of Middle Earth (HoME XII) - JRR Tolkien
Summerland: Revised and Expanded Edition - Greg Saunders [RPG]
Gail Simone & Brian Bendis - Birds of Prey (1999-2004) #56-61 [comics]
Barbara Hambly - Dog Wizard
TaoLand #1-5 - Jeff Amano [comics]
TaoLand Adventures #1-2 - Jeff Amano [comics]
The World of the Dark Crystal - Brian Froud & JJ Llewellyn
Kids on Bikes - Jon Gilmour & Doug Levandowski [RPG]
Copernicus Jones: Robot Detective #9 - Matt D Wilson, Kevin Warren & Josh Krach [comics]
Sarah Vowell - Assassination Vacation
Cathriona Tobin & Simon Rogers, eds. - Seven Wonders: A Story Games Anthology [RPG]
Barbarella - Jean-Claude Forest, adapted by Kelly Sue DeConnick [comics]
Tales from the Bully Pulpit - Benito Cereno, Graeme MacDonald, Ron Riley & Chad Manion [comics]
A Primate's Memoir - Robert M Sapolsky
Making History: Three One-Session RPGs - Tristan Zimmerman [RPG]
Horrorism #1 - Brendan Carrion
Roquia Hussain - "Sultana's Dream"
Eve Titus - Basil of Baker Street
The Articles of Confederation (1777)
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think - Dr. Seuss
The King's Stilts - Dr. Seuss
The Cat's Quizzer - Dr. Seuss
I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today - Dr. Seuss
Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? - Dr. Seuss
Karen Armstrong - Mohammad: Prophet for Our Time
The Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
The Jewish Bible Quarterly Vol. XXX:3 July-September 2002
Sharon Stiteler - Disapproving Rabbits
Dark Places & Demogorgons – Eric Bloat & Josh Palmer [RPG]

The Books I Read in 2018

I tend to read between 40 to 50 books a year. I know this empirically, because since 2006 I have kept a record of every novel, comic book, role playing game rules book and non-fiction book I have read. I’ve reviewed some of them here, but I don’t think I’ve put my full list up before. It’s below. Before that, I want to say a brief word about my favorite five books of the year.

Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943
This is an art book with very little text. It is essentially the senior project of artists David Leventhal and Gerry Trudeau who were looking at how to make images do more narrative work than just illustrating a text. Leventhal has already reached his mature form with his soft focus photographs of toys which create images of the Eastern Front which seem real. Along with the text by Trudeau the book is, as it is titled, a graphic chronicle of that phase of the war. This was on my want-to-read list for a long time and I enjoyed the impression it created of seeing dramatic moments of history recreated. I have more thoughts about this one and some images in an earlier post.

Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City (Second Attempt)
I also previously talked about this role playing game by Jared A. Sorensen. I got to play this game for a second time at NerdLouvia earlier this month and two of my players were there specifically to play this odd dreamscape crime solving game. It remains unlike any other RPG I have ever read and I look forward to playing it again and getting better at bringing all the weirdness this game has to offer to the table.

Soldier of Sidon
This is the third book in what became a trilogy. I was wary of if because this book was written almost 20 years after the second book in the series. There is a little bit of disconnect in style, how could there not be after two decades? That said, it’s not much of a disconnect. I also may like this one the best of the three books. It’s more intimate and personal and I enjoyed that this year. I have long said Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, largely because one of his early books immersed me in a way which has rarely happened to me. In this series, Latro is a Roman mercenary from when the Greeks were ascendant who, because of an injury, cannot make new long term memories – and also sees the gods. The text is Latro’s journal written day by day about whatever has just happened. It’s a great set-up for storytelling. This adventure follows Latro as he sails up the Nile. Since I wrote a NaNoWriMo about ancient Egypt a couple years back, I was fascinated to read all the fictional Egypt stuff. It also felt a bit like a self-indulgent closure for the character, but since I like Latro, and had just read two other books about him, I was happy to get this closer examination of this character. I recommend all three books in Wolfe’s Soldier series.

Pictures of the Pain
I’ve read a few books about the JFK assassination this year. This one is my favorite so far. It’s an attempt by Richard Trask, a professional archivist, to put every photograph and film strip into print. That in itself is fascinating, especially for the many photographs by the journalists who were in the presidential motorcade. Not only are their photographs objectively better than the famous amateur photos because their greater training and better equipment, they were also able to capture all the moments of the immediate aftermath of the assassination because they were right there with their cameras ready. More interesting than the photos for me, however, was Trask’s collection of the biographies of the photographers, details about their cameras and the state of the news industry at the time. Why was Zapruter filming that day? What kind of camera was Nix using? How does an image wire service work when it’s still the age of wet chemical film? Trask answers all these questions.

Rock Candy Mountain #1-8
I don’t read a ton of comics, but this series written and drawn by Kyle Starks with color by Chris Schweizer and design by Dylan Todd is the best one I have read this year. It is the story of a hobo who is searching for the fabled rock candy mountain, which is essentially hobo heaven. There’s a lot of fist fighting and a significant about of magic weirdness. It’s so engaging and thoroughly interesting – at least to me – I am nothing but pleased I read it. It’s just good comics.

For honorable mentions, I read several things I’ve been meaning to read for a long time; Frankenstein, Jim Henson's Tale of Sand, My Friend Dahmer, and old comics like Samurai Penguin, Cutey Bunny and Magnus Robot Fighter. I also completed all the Conan and Sherlock Holmes stories, which feels like something of an accomplishment. I also read a collection of Jon Ronson’s journalism called Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries which I enjoyed.

Books I Finished in 2018
-The Voice Out of the Whirlwind: The Book of Job - Ralph E Hone, ed.
-Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronical, 1941-1943 - David Leventhal & Gerry Trudeau
-Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
-Soldier of Arete - Gene Wolfe
-Stories of Soldiers and Civilians - Ambrose Bierce
-The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie
-The Coldest City - Antony Johnston & Sam Hart
-House Made of Dawn - N Scott Momaday
-The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - James Wallis [RPG]
-The Wood Beyond the World - William Morris [LibriVox]
-They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK - Jessie Ventura [JFK]
-Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell
-Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries - Jon Ronson
-Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth - Reza Aslan
-Dead Lands: Reloaded Player's Guide: Explorer's Edition - Shane Lacy Hensley & BD Flory [RPG]
-Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City (Second Attempt) - Jared A Sorensen [RPG]
-The Bible
-Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Omnibus Volume 1 - William Moulton Marston, HG Peter, et. al.
-Dead Lands: Reloaded Marshal's Handbook: Explorer's Edition - Shane Lacy Hensley [RPG]
-Samurai Penguin #1-7 - Dan Vado, et. al.
-This Side of Paradise - F Scott Fitzgerald
-Imperial Earth - Arthur C Clarke
-Russ Manning's Magnus, Robot Fighter, Volume 3 - Russ Manning, et. al.
-Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot - Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard [JFK]
-The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle -Army Surplus Komikz Featuring Cutey Bunny #1-2 - Joshua Quagmire
-Jim Henson's Tale of Sand - Jim Henson & Jerry Juhl as realized by Ramón Pérez
-Dance Night - Dawn Powell
-Soldier of Sidon - Gene Wolfe
-The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Jill Lepore
-The Book of Mormon
-Prometheus: Fire and Stone - Omega - Kelly Sue DeConnick & Agustin Alessio
-Twelve Ordinary Men - John MacArthur
-American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond - E Howard Hunt [JFK]
-The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain
-They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - Horace McCoy
-The Bloody Crown of Conan - Robert E Howard
-The Satanic Bible - Anton LaVey
-Thieves Like Us - Edward Anderson
-11/22/63 - Stephen King [JFK]
-Native Drums #1-6 - Chuck Paschall & Vince Riley
-Revolutionaries: Join, or Die [RPG]
-Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
-"The Shadow of the Vulture" - Robert E Howard
-My Friend Dahmer - Derf Backderf
-The Last Battle - CS Lewis
-The American Revolution: First-Person Accounts by the Men Who Shaped Our Nation - TJ Stiles, ed.
-Pictures of the Pain - Richard Trask [JFK]
-The Letters of JRR Tolkien - Humphery Carpenter, ed.
-The Evolution of Physics - Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld
-The Island of Doctor Moreau - HG Wells
-Drawings from the Gulag - Danzig Baldaev
-The Screwtape Letters - CS Lewis
-Copernicus Jones: Robot Detective #1-8 - Matt D Wilson, Kevin Warren, et. al.
-Dracula the Unconquered #1-4 - Chris Simms, Steve Downer & Josh Krach
-Yo Mate a Kennedy - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán [JFK]
-Rock Candy Mountain #1-8 – Kyle Starks, Chris Schweizer & Dylan Todd

A Review: Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane

3 of 5 stars.

When reading about the Kennedy assassination, the idea of conspiracy and cover-up are always waiting in the wings even if the author doesn’t mention it. I figure it is best to go ahead and embrace that fact. As part of my reading, I what to read the best evidence from those who disagree with the official story. The first stop has to be Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. It appeared the year after the Warren Commission Report and proceeds from the supposition that any truth the Commission uncovered was not in the Report itself, but in the 26 volumes of recorded testimonies and statements made to the Commission’s legal team. Lane’s book, if nothing else, is a source for some of these extended interviews which offer readers a wider sample of what people said to the Commission. This quote from near the end of the book serves as a good abstract of Rush to Judgment:

“The Commission reviewed the testimony of 552 witnesses. Some of the testimony was inconsistent with other testimony, in sum or in part, and it was necessary for the Commission to evolve a standard for assessing it. I believe that it did so: testimony compatible with the theory of Oswald as the lone assassin was accepted, even when incredible, while incompatible testimony, no matter how creditable, was rejected.” p. 395

Mark Lane was hired by the Oswald family to represent Lee Oswald’s interests to the Warren Commission. Since there could not be a true trial owing to Oswald being dead, Lane acted as his defense attorney to the extent the Commission allowed. Having seen the sausage get made, so to speak, after the Commission issued its Report, Lane felt it was his duty to point out how far from “beyond a reasonable doubt” the Commission had actually proved its case. Lane points out time and again how key witnesses for the Commission would not have survived cross-examination. Witnesses frequently changed their stories and sometimes were led by Commissioner questions and other times all-but admitted to being coached by lawyers for the Commission. He also quotes numerous ways in which the Dallas police and Federal government representatives gave statements to the press which would have hindered a fair trial.

Lane attacks virtually every element of the Commission’s conclusions. Playing the defense attorney, Lane seeks to show the bullets which hit Kennedy weren’t fired from behind. They weren’t fired by Oswald. They weren’t fired by the rifle found on the sixth floor of the building where Oswald worked. The rifle found didn’t belong to Oswald. Lane does not present alternative evidence, he is only trying to poke holes in the Commission’s arguments using evidence collected by the Dallas police and Federal investigators which the Commission didn’t quote in its Report. If Lane has a coherent alternate theory about what happened in this book it seems to be there was a shooter of some sort on the sixth floor, but also another behind the fence at the top of the infamous knoll. Neither of these two shooters was Oswald, who was out front of the building at the time.

Sometimes Lane mounts an effective defense, other times less so. Take a couple short examples. He is pretty convincing when describing how the rifle tests, supposedly performed under similar conditions to the day of the assassination, were actually from a different height and a different distance than from the Depository window to presidential limo. “Could Oswald have made the shots?” has always been a pretty important question so maybe it is important to know the shot wasn’t actually repeated by the Commission. A weaker point by Lane is the medical report which estimated a 60 degree angle of entry for the wound in Kennedy’s back proves the shot came from too high up to have come from sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. I read that and have to ask what is more likely; the medical report is wrong about the angle or a shot was fired from some imaginary sniper’s nest high enough above the street that a 60 degree angle was created? I must conclude, as the Commission did, that the medical report was inaccurate on this point.

Lane does his best work throwing question on exactly what happened (and when) that led to the death of Dallas police patrolman J. D. Tippit in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The Commission’s reconstructed escape route from downtown is shown by Lane to go well beyond what can actually be proven. From the unfair police line ups where Oswald was picked as the man seen fleeing the scene of Tippit’s murder, to the conflicting witness statements in the bus and taxi Oswald supposedly rode to the fact two types of bullets were found in Tippit’s body; there are holes in a narrative the Commission simply papered over with heavy-handed lines like, “Nevertheless, the Commission has concluded...”

“Perhaps the Commission thought that if Oswald spent a single moment unaccounted for between the assassination and the time of his arrest, it would be unable to deal effectively with those rumors, current at the time, of Oswald’s participation in a conspiracy. Its criteria for investigating and accepting evidence were related less to the intrinsic value of the information, I believe, than to its paramount need to allay fears of conspiracy.” p. 175

I think Lane’s assessment of the Commission’s goal to “allay fears” is spot on. The Warren Commission Report presents a complete narrative of what happened on 22-24 November 1963 and comes as close to answering the question “why?” as they can, considering Oswald was killed. To reach this clear narrative, they left out some of the details. In essence, they sought the “best fit” line of evidence through a lot of conflicting testimony. Lane spends this book pointing out that not all the data points are on the “best fit” line. While some of these points are interesting in their own right, it doesn’t really change the overall narrative. There will always be data which isn’t on the line. That alone doesn’t mean the Commission’s conclusions are wrong. To take one example Lane mentions over and over again. After the shots were fired many people converged on the area of the parking lot behind the fence at the top of the knoll. Many witnesses thought the shots came from this direction. Many others said they moved to or looked toward the area because others were already doing so. Lane assigns great importance to these initial reactions. My question, though, is what evidence was found there? No shell casings. No discarded rifle. No reports of people running from the scene. The knoll is a data point not on the line.

While Mark Lane’s book failed to convince me the official story is wrong, it did its job is raising questions about the Report and the bias of the Commission. I think Lane’s biggest success is in pointing to the evidence of how hard the Federal government and, even more so, the Dallas police worked to minimize their own failings as relates to the assassination. They should have done a better job to protect the president (and later Oswald) and they could have; they just didn’t because of their own assumptions and some gross miscommunication. I don’t think Lane has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but it is interesting to see how much the Dallas police were working to save face by altering or omitting testimony and pushing time lines as much as possible and how much the Commission let them do so. To the extent there is a cover-up it is all in the mishandling of the evidence and witnesses after the event. That leads back to where this review started, the Commission couldn’t have proven its case in court, but for better or for worse, it never had to.

The last word will go to Lane himself, because I basically agree with him on this point. From page 207; “If historians are required to conjecture as to the meaning of the altered transcript,” or any of the other things which don’t quite add up, “the responsibility for such speculation must rest with the Commission.”

A Review: The Warren Commission Report

4 of 5 stars.
For the last few years I have always been reading a series of books on a set theme in the background while I read other books. I read about a dozen books about the sinking of HMS Titanic and the destruction of Pompeii in the past. Now I have begun a series about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I read Profiles in Courage which is by Kennedy, but I didn’t have much to say about it. I have just finished the report of the official investigation into the assassination: The Warren Commission Report. A text-only copy (with frequent OCR processing errors) is readily available.

How can one really even review this report? It is the text of the official explanation so I have heard most of the story before. If you happen never to have heard the official story before, it goes like this: President Kennedy died of a single gunshot wound to the back of his head. This shot and (only) two others were made by a single shooter from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. That shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. The bullet fragments in the presidential limousine were fired by the gun found on the sixth floor. That gun was bought by, shipped to and photographed with Oswald months before the assassination. No evidence of material, logistical or planning assistance of any kind from any source was uncovered. Jack Rudy killed Oswald two days later for his own reasons and had no previous connection to Oswald or any other conspiracy. I didn’t find any unreasonable leaps in logic or gaping holes in the Commission’s theories given the information presented. Re-examinations of the case usually start here. All alternate theories must be mounted in opposition to this body of collected information.

What a massive body of information the Report is, too! It is 888 pages including footnotes and is based on what must be thousand of pages of sworn testimony and depositions by eye-witnesses, experts, government officials, and family members and acquaintances of Oswald and Rudy. Since I watch a lot of non-fiction crime shows I am familiar with fingerprint evidence, microscopic comparisons of firing pins and bullets, and question document examination. All of these were used to match the evidence to Oswald. All of these lines of evidence are explained in detail for people who in 1964 had seen fewer episodes of Forensic Files than I have. A bullet matched to a gun, matched to a suspect, who was seen in the area before, during and after the assassination is strong evidence. Plenty of people have been convicted of murder on less. Though, to be fair, and the Report itself points this out, since Oswald was dead by that time the Commission was not bringing evidence to criminal trial so not all of the evidence gathered quite rises to that high level of proof. Case closed!

Unless all the evidence is manufactured, of course... In many ways, reading this report in the 2017, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, after the Watergate scandal, after the Iran-Contra affair, after actual impeachment hearings against a sitting president and that whole “we were wrong about WMD” misadventure it becomes impossible not to think of the possibility the Commission was lied to. The Report makes constant mention of whom the information reported comes from. About half of the information is “according to the FBI” or “according to the Secret Service” or “according to the Dallas Police” or (even!) “according to the Soviet Union’s embassy in Mexico City.” Are these really trustworthy sources of information?! Maybe in 1964 they were. The Commission certainly had faith in the reports and records turned over to them by other government agencies. As the biographies of the commission members make clear, some of them were literally born in the Nineteenth Century! There was criticism of the trusting nature of the Commission even at the time. Overall, it seems that was a simpler age and there is something beautifully old-fashioned about the Report and its tone of assurance.

Speaking of beauty, the part of the Report I find most striking is the domestic portrait it paints of Lee Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. (Since her family was from Minsk, she’s probably Belarusian, but these intra-USSR distinctions were not the concern of the Cold War-era Commission.) After concluding Oswald was the assassin, a large part of the report and a very long appendix (Appendix 13) deals with all the minutia of his life. Perhaps the Commission was intending to encourage disdainful pity, but to me, he comes across as very nearly sympathetic. He never really succeeded at anything in his life and he ended up bitter about it. Born into humble circumstances and never able to rise above them, he was a loner and a constant reader who had big ideas he was never able to put legs under. I see something of myself in that biography. He became disillusioned of the American system, but after living in the USSR, he learned that wasn’t really any better. The only positive he took from Minsk was his marriage to Marina. They seem to have come to care for each other, but initially they both married to spite previous partners. I want to know much more about Marina. She is a major source of the Commission’s information on Lee, but she is not the focus of their investigation. After the Oswalds came to the US, Lee seems to have been searching for some way to make a big splash and become important in the political scene in the way young people often do. He was 24 at the time. He bought a gun. Missed a shot at a right-wing ex-general. He tried to start a pro-Cuba group and found no support. He tried to go to Cuba and they didn’t want him. Then he read on a certain Monday the President would be passing below his office window that Friday. He never got the advice Holden Caulfield did about living for a cause rather looking for a way to die for it. To me, that’s just another tragic part of what is an American tragedy on almost every level.