→ December 1, 2025
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Cascadia: Alpine Lakes (Kickstarter preview).

Cascadia is one of my all-time favorite games, combining easy-to-learn rules with plenty of strategic depth and a high degree of replayability because the base game comes with so many different ways to score the game’s five animal types. Designer Randy Flynn and the folks at Flatout Games are back with a new game, on Kickstarter for a few more days this week, called Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, that adds a little bit of complexity for a very similar game that’s slightly more difficult than the original to play well, but just as easy to learn. (Flatout provided me with a pre-release copy, so the rules I describe below may not be the same as in the final version.)

In Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, players are once again building environments that comprise habitat tiles and animal tokens. The habitat tiles here comprise two hexagons rather than one, and there are just three habitat types: forests, meadows, and glaciers. On your turn, you select one of the four habitat-animal pairs available from the table and add it to your environment, placing the animal token on a matching space anywhere in your space (not limited on the tile you just took).

Some hexes don’t show animal figures, but show lakes, which are one of the two main new features in the game. Lakes score 1 point per level, because the other new feature here is that you can build upwards, stacking habitat tiles according to a couple of straightforward rules (the big one is you can’t create a two-level drop from one habitat tile to any adjacent one). You also double a lake’s value if you’ve surrounded it with other tiles, regardless of those tiles’ levels.

Unlike in Cascadia, the animal tokens don’t score by themselves in Alpine Lakes. You score each habitat type based on the scoring card chosen at the start of the game – there are six for each habitat right now – and you can also use three advanced scoring cards if you wish to add a little more variance. The one way in which animal tokens score by themselves is in awarding points to the player(s) who have the highest animal token of each type, meaning one placed on the highest tile level, so there’s a little competition here, especially in a two-player game, to try to deprive your opponent of getting that advantage.

Players get exactly 20 turns, as in the original, and if you’ve played Cascadia you’re familiar with the nature tokens that you can acquire (same method here) and use to break up tile-token pairs in the market or refresh the animal tokens. It’s fundamentally the same game as Cascadia, adding some complexity because you have more choices to make, such as when to build upwards versus expanding outwards, and the relative values of each will shift slightly depending on the scoring cards used in any particular game.

I was already primed to like Cascadia: Alpine Lakes because I love the original so much – I just recommended it to someone with 8-year-old twins, in fact, because it’s so easy to teach and still gives the adults plenty to chew on. Alpine Lakes is a standalone game, but it feels to like like an expanded version of Cascadia rather than an entirely new title – which I much prefer to the “let’s extend a brand with a totally unrelated game under the same title” trend. If you like Cascadia and want something more, especially something a little more challenging, then Alpine Lakes is for you.

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→ November 20, 2025
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We Do Not Part.

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature in part for her 2021 novel We Do Not Part, which appeared earlier this year in English translation for the first time. This exploration of one of the darkest moments in modern Korean – and American – history works through a struggling female protagonist, somewhat similar to the lead character of her novel The Vegetarian, who finds herself called to the hospital bedside of a friend with whom she was once collaborating on a project about the Cheju genocide. This call leads to a visit to the sick friend’s house, where the lines between reality and dream start to bend, and it’s unclear whose memories we’re reading or how legitimate they are.

Kyungha is a writer who is deeply isolated and almost certainly depressed, often forgetting to eat, sometimes lying for hours on her apartment floor to escape the oppressive heat of the city’s summers. When she sleeps, she’s plagued by nightmares related to the massacres at Cheju, which inspired a scene in her latest, unfinished novel. She gets a call from Inseon, with whom she’d worked on a documentary of sorts about the same killings; Inseon is injured and will be stuck in the hospital for weeks, so she asks Kyungha to go to her house to feed her bird Ama. Once there, however, Kyungha gets stuck in the house without power due to a blizzard, and she begins hallucinating, or perhaps she has died and is experiencing something paranormal, with the result that she ends up hearing the history of Inseon’s family during the massacres.

Cheju (or Jeju) Island is located south of the Korean peninsula and currently has over 600,000 people living there. The residents of the island had begun protesting the planned election in the southern half of Korea, controlled by the United States at the time, because they believed it would lead to a permanent partition. In 1948, the communist party on the island organized a general strike, which turned into an armed insurgency. The strongman Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, responded with brutal force, with the full backing and consent of the United States, killing somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 people on the island. The Korean army forces killed children and babies and gang-raped women and girls. Tens of thousands of others were imprisoned for their alleged roles in the insurgency. After the massacre, it was illegal to even mention the government’s actions on Cheju until 1990, and South Korea didn’t hold a truth & reconciliation commission until 2003, when the government finally admitted they had committed genocide against the people of Cheju. (For more on the history of the Cheju genocide, the Wikipedia article is superb, as is this 2000 story from Newsweek.)

We Do Not Part deals with such heavy material that it’s hard to call it a “light” read, but Kang is such a strong prose writer – and some of this may be a credit to the translators, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – that it is an incredibly compelling, accessible read, even for someone (like me, before I read the book) with zero knowledge of the history involved. The first half of the book reads quite a bit like Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, with the protagonist’s alienation permeating all aspects of the narrative, while the second half veers almost into magical realism. As Inseon and her mother retell the histories of Inseon’s father and uncle from the time of the genocide, including witnessing massacres of civilians, Kang’s technique and prose give them a hazy quality to emphasize that these are ghosts or spirits or even Kyungha’s subconscious relating these stories.

I’ve been sitting on this post for four days now, and I think I’m just stuck on this one. I loved this book, but I also know this book has way more going on than I understood or appreciated. I’m not Korean and I didn’t know a single thing about the Jeju genocide until I read it and went to Wikipedia to figure out what I was missing. I’ll just stop here and say the book is fantastic, and I would recommend this even before The Vegetarian.

—

In 2021, LitHub published a list of the 50 best classic novels under 200 pages, which included several titles I’d already read and enjoyed, so I copied the list into a Google sheet and started reading my way through it – often just reading whatever I found in bookstores on my travels. I grabbed Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart at Changing Hands last month, since it’s on the list and takes its title from the same James Joyce quote that Japandroids used for their best album. It got the better of me; I did finish it, but I struggled because nothing happens in the novel. It presents the inner monologue of Joana, flashing back to her childhood and her present marriage to her faithless husband Otávio, with the sort of disjointed sentence structure of Joyce or Alfred Döblin or Virginia Woolf, all of whom I have found difficult to read. This one just wasn’t for me.

Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man also comes from the LitHub list; he’s better known now for his Berlin Stories, which inspired the musical Cabaret, but this is a more serious novel and seems like it was considered his best work during his lifetime. The title character is George Falconer, a gay man whose partner Jim has recently died. George is British and now lives in California, in the house he shared with Jim and some pets he seems to have gotten rid of after Jim’s death, teaching at a local university and trying to find new meaning in his relationships with other people. The story moves in fits and starts, but picks up towards the end with two much more meaningful conversations, before the slightly ambiguous ending (I think it’s real, but I see online some people believe it’s a what-if). Falconer is a flawed character, pretentious at times, mopey at others, probably just not a very nice guy, but still makes for an interesting study. I can’t find an answer to this, but I wonder if John Cheever was paying homage to A Single Man in his novel Falconer, another influential gay novel that came out about 16 years after this one. The dialogue here can get a little stilted, but it seems to be in service of making George’s awkwardness in social situations – but not in terms of his own sexuality – clearer on the page.

Next up: Susan Orlean’s The Library Book.

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→ September 25, 2025
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Two books about games.

In Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, neuroscientist Kelly Clancy examines how the frameworks of games have affected myriad aspects of human society, and how more recently game theory and related ideas have led to damaging and even ruinous policies that continue today with the mindless (pun intended) push to make everything AI.

Playing games leads our brains to produce dopamine, and games with uncertainty function as variable reward systems, increasing those dopamine surges and further encouraging us to keep playing. Thus we see evidence of games going back to ancient Babylon (the Royal Game of Ur), Egypt (Senet), and Africa (mancala), with games often used as tests of intelligence or readiness for a position as a leader or even as royalty. Such games often included substantial elements of chance, including the progenitors of dice, which led to early calculations of probabilities well before the Europeans started to figure this stuff out in the wake of the Renaissance. Games have evolved over time in complexity, and as they have developed, they have further permeated our non-playing world.

Clancy sets the stage by giving that history and an explanation of what happens in the brain when we play games, including games of chance and games of strategy, and then moves into the more sordid history of games affecting … well, history. She goes into the story of Kriegsspiel, an early wargame that was first developed by a Prussian nobleman two hundred years ago, and after several decades found its way into military leaders’ hands, where it became a tactical training tool for officers in the Prussian and later German armies. Clancy connects it to the Germans’ early successes in World War I and the use of the Blitzkrieg strategy in World War II, both as a way to explain how we can use games to learn and to think more flexibly, as well as how games can lead to unexpected and even tragic outcomes when used without guardrails.

Game theory ends up the main character of the second half of Playing with Reality, as Clancy points out that the way game theoreticians took over much of economic teaching, dovetailing as it did with the myth of the ‘rational’ man, led to decades of policy failures across the world that were based on a set of faulty assumptions about how people would act. (She did not, unfortunately, mention the “it’s time for some game theory” meme.) This idea of “economic man” or “rational man” had a stranglehold on economic instruction throughout the world for decades, well past the point where folks like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had published research showing that people are in fact not rational, and often fall prey to cognitive biases, leading to results you won’t predict if you’re stuck in the standard model.

Clancy saves some of her particular ire for the AI gold rush and the grifters pushing it, cautioning that these LLMs are not actually exhibiting ‘intelligence,’ and that there’s danger in treating “language like a game without meaning.” Much of what she says about these energy-devouring scams could have been written this week, even though the book itself was first published last year; she decries the lack of regulation or even common sense in many of the uses of so-called AI, and the history of the overapplication of games and game theory to real-life – often treating the world as a zero-sum game, when it is manifestly not – shows how easily we can destroy the world by thinking in those terms. (She cites a specific example from the Cold War, where one Soviet engineer decided to ignore an alarm that a U.S. ICBM was heading towards Russia; the alarm was false, of course, but that one person’s decision, against the ‘rules’ of the game, saved us from World War III.)

Clancy’s focus is on how games are intrinsic to humanity, how we’ve tried to model reality in our games and then taken the games and tried to apply them back to reality, with mixed results if we’re being kind. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy takes a different approach in his book Around the World in 80 Games: A Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the Greatest Games, which may not actually get to eighty games (and certainly not the greatest ones) but does at least provide some interesting histories of games outside of the western canon, truly going around the world to explain the origins and uses of games in Africa, South America, and across Asia. The book offers some superficial looks at the math behind some of these games, but it’s scant, and it’s hard to get away from du Sautoy’s pie-eyed optimism around AI, which he seems to view as an unmitigated positive that will take drudgery from our lives and allow us to play more games.

Du Sautoy succeeds most when he gets a little deeper into the specifics of a game, such as the analysis of which properties are the best ones to buy in Monopoly (the orange ones above all), or the history of tarot cards (which had nothing to do with the woo for which various charlatans have adapted the game), or the stories of games from non-European cultures that were unfamiliar to me, like Sudan’s Dala – many of which have been ‘solved’ by mathematicians, for better or for worse. Du Sautoy writes very much like a mathematician, so when he’s in the weeds, he’s actually clearer and his passion is palpable, but when he starts veering off into philosophy or his almost religious belief that AI is going to save the world, not only is the prose harder to read, but he’s clearly out of his depth.

Both books quote many of the same sources on the philosophy of games, including Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper and C. Nhi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art, which makes their tonal differences more stark. Clancy is the realist here, someone who certainly seems to like games but understands their limitations as models for society as a whole, while du Sautoy is the Panglossian dilettante whose life of relative privilege – his grandfather ran the publisher Faber & Faber and his godmother was T.S. Eliot’s wife Valerie – has perhaps blinded him to the realities of daily life for most people. Du Sautoy does cover more specific games, if that’s where your interest lies, while Clancy has much more to say about games as a whole.

Next up: Staying on a theme, I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s pulpy The Game-Players of Titan.

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→ September 11, 2025
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Glyph.

Glyph was Percival Everett’s tenth novel, published in 1999, at a point when Everett was earning critical acclaim but not much commercial attention. It’s a much more academic work than any of his later novels I’ve read, satirizing post-structuralism and some of its leading lights, but you can see more than a few glimpses of Everett’s humor, foreshadowing his more broadly successful later work.

Glyph is narrated by Ralph, a very precocious baby who is able to read and write at the level of a graduate student before he turns one, shocking his parents – whom he calls Inflato (father) and Mo (Mother) – and eventually leading to unfortunate interest from a series of would-be evildoers who plan to use him for their own nefarious purposes. Ralph communicates via written notes, which, of course, people don’t believe he wrote at first, but after his parents accept that Ralph is indeed a genius, they take him to a psychologist for evaluation, only for the psychologist to decide that Ralph is her ticket to research fame and to kidnap him – which works until the government shows up.

The plot itself takes up maybe half of the book, with the remainder split between Ralph’s musings and various interstitials, like imagined conversations between important personages from history, including literary theorist Roland Barthes, one of the major figures of structuralism and post-structuralism – and thus a prime target for Everett’s satire. Inflato is a failing professor of literary theory, and at one point he has Barthes over for dinner, only for the French philosopher to leer at Mo and eventually admit he’s never read Inflato’s work.

Other literary theorists and thinkers in related fields like semiotics and philosophy come in for further satire or just outright mockery, whether directly in the text or in any of the many asides, like constructed dialogues between two such figures from different times in history. Every chapter is divided further with subheadings that almost seem drawn from a hat filled with terms from lit-crit movements of the latter half of the 20th century, including structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and post-modernism. Everett wrote the book while he was a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, but had moved on to become chair of the English department at USC by the time it was published, which at least makes me wonder if he was mocking some of his by then former colleagues at UCR for their adherence to these philosophies – not least because he has said many times since that Ralph is the closest of all of his protagonists to his own character.

Glyph also has plenty of lowbrow humor, including a slew of potty – well, first diaper, then potty – jokes, bad puns, and Airplane!-esque gags, which softens some of the more abstruse material here for readers who, like me, don’t care for these distinctly anti-literary schools of thought. Yes, academics can certainly spend their time on textual analysis or examining the relationship between a work and its broader context. I’d probably do just that if I were a professor of literature somewhere, or if my livelihood otherwise depended on it. I read for pleasure, however, and I can’t read books in that way at all. If a book doesn’t grab me with its plot, or its protagonist, or its prose, I’m not going to like it or appreciate it. Glyph skewers some of the same ideas I disdain for their desire to strip literature down to the studs and ignore the trappings of great fiction, but it also does so with a strong and funny central character, Everett’s acerbic wit, and a ridiculous plot that just barely holds together for the novel’s 200 pages.

Related: This 2024 profile of Everett in the New Yorker, written by Maya Binyam, is outstanding.

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→ August 15, 2025
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The Ministry of Time.

Kaliane Bradley entered the crowded field of time-travel fiction last year with her debut novel The Ministry of Time, earning a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and landing a coveted spot on Barack Obama’s best-of-2024 list. It’s a marvelous book that does this sort of fiction right: it’s very light on the time-travel parts, and spends extremely little time worrying about the mechanics or the paradoxes, instead jumping off time travel for a story that is by turns philosophical, psychological, and quite romantic.

The narrator of The Ministry of Time is a British-Cambodian woman, like Bradley, and has been working in various government agencies when she’s tabbed for a special project as a ‘bridge’ to one of six people that the British government has plucked from history and brought to the present. There is a single time-travel door, and while the government hasn’t mastered its use – far from it, as we learn – they went through history and found people who were otherwise about to die, usually in horrible ways, to ‘save’ them by way of making them guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The narrator’s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was aboard the HMS Terror during the doomed Franklin Expedition in the Arctic waters north of and around what is now Nunavut, where the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia led to the death by exposure and starvation of over 100 men, along with no survivors. The Ministry extracted Gore, knowing he would die shortly anyway (so his removal would not affect the historical timeline), and put him in the narrator’s care, housing them together in a shared apartment once he’s released from several weeks of confinement and forced re-education so he and his fellow time travelers, some of whom came from the 1600s, would know what a car is or how money works.

There is a thriller here within The Ministry of Time – as you might imagine, the British Crown’s intentions here are hardly pure or altruistic – but the novel is a love story at its core, as the narrator and Graham develop feelings for each other from very early on, despite the gulf between them in times, cultures, and ethnic origins. (Race and racism are frequent fodder for dry humor in the book, especially as the various ‘expats’ from times past, all of whom are white, struggle to adjust to a multicultural society where a whole bunch of words are no longer suitable for common use.) The relationship comes across as natural, almost inevitable, including the required element where one gets furious at the other and appears to break things off, which here happens simultaneously with the big twist and leads to a slightly ambiguous but extremely satisfying conclusion.

Bradley also has a knack for creating supporting characters who manage to be three-dimensional and yet still useful in various ways, often for humor but occasionally for purposes of intrigue or suspense. The narrator’s own handler, Quentin, might be a conspiracy theorist, or he might know more than he lets on. Maggie, from the 1600s, turns out to be a saucy wench (channeling my inner Laurence Sterne here), and gets to explore her sexuality in a way that would never have been permitted in her time. Arthur was about to die during World War I, and has a harder time adjusting to the fact that he’s now in a time when his life and liberty won’t be at risk just because he’s gay. And Adela, the Ministry of Time’s Vice Secretary, starts out as a sort of comic relief taskmaster character, but plays an increasingly essential role in the plot as the story develops.

I said before reading The Ministry of Time that I thought it was going to win the Hugo, because it had so much hype and positive press behind it, and because the last ten nine authors to win the Hugo for Best Novel have all been women, with only one of the other six nominated works written by a woman author. Bradley’s work also includes significant explorations of race, sexual orientation, and culture, again all things the voters have tended to favor, over the sort of hard sci-fi that dominated the award’s first 40-odd years – with the winners then nearly always white men. (One exception is The Calculating Stars, the 2019 winner, one of the worst novels ever to take this award. The author was the President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association at the time.) Now that I’ve read it, I also think it’s going to win because it deserves it* – it would be an upper-half novel among all the winners, probably the best novel to win since N.K. Jemisin’s three straight wins, just edging out T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. It’s sci-fi, but it’s literary sci-fi, one that uses a single speculative element to tell the sort of story an author couldn’t tell otherwise, and those are nearly always the best examples of the form.

*The other three nominees I’ve read, all of which were good: Service Model, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Tainted Cup.

Next up: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, a classic of 20th century Italian literature.

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→ August 12, 2025
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The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.

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→ July 1, 2025
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Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

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→ June 9, 2025
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Masters of Renaissance.

Masters of Renaissance might be the game that finally kills Gizmos for me, as it scratches the same itch but is more balanced overall, without a dominant strategy (which is a common but not unanimous complaint about Gizmos) to cut the value of repeat plays. It’s the card-game version of a heavier worker placement game called Lorenzo il Magnifico, which was designed by three of the top Italian designers in the field who are responsible in part for games like Egizia and Tzolk’in, among others. Masters has an extremely satisfying resource management aspect along with simple victory conditions that capture some of the vibe of the original while putting it in a much more accessible package. (Right now it’s only available used in the U.S., such as here from Noble Knight, but it’s available new in Europe, with publisher Cranio selling it for €32.)

In Masters of Renaissance, players will gather four resources to buy development cards from the 3×4 card market. Each player has three columns for those cards, which come in levels 1, 2, and 3; you can only build a level 2 card on a level 1 card, and a level 3 on a level 2. Each development card has a color, a cost in resources, and an action that will be available for the rest of the game.

On your turn, you can choose to take resources from the resource market, which is also a 3×4 grid; to acquire a card; or to activate the visible cards in your play area. The market is one of the best parts of the game: it has 12 marbles sitting in a little plastic tray, with one marble always left out (so sad). To take resources, you pick a row or a column, take the resources matching those marbles’ colors, and then use the 13th marble to push the row/column so that one marble falls out, changing the market for the next player. There are marbles for the four resources, one red marble that lets you advance on the faith track, and white marbles that have no value (unless you get a card that says otherwise).

You only have six spots to store resources you take from the market, however, and if you end up with any resources you can’t store, every opponent moves up one spot on their faith tracks for every resource you have to discard. Your storage has three rows that can hold 1, 2, or 3 resources of one type, and you can’t store the same resource type in two rows. It’s a very tight constraint that I find makes decision-making easier because some moves are just so obviously bad that you can eliminate them from consideration. The storage limit doesn’t apply to resources you get from activating cards, though. Buying a card is just a matter of paying the appropriate resources and placing the card in one of your three columns; if you buy a level 2 or 3 card, it covers up the card below it except for its victory point value.

Activation is the most powerful action, and if you’re savvy about the cards you acquire, you can build a potent little engine even though you’ll never have more than three development cards active at any one time. Most cards let you convert one or more resources into other resources and/or faith points, and there are no cards that leave you worse off – at the very least you’ll swap one resource for another of a different type. Every player’s board has a default action of trading any two resources for one, useful if you can’t get the resource you really need for a future action.

Players also start the game with two Leader cards they may be able to play once they meet the cards’ conditions, which include having certain development cards in your play area, having at least X of a specific resource, or reaching a certain level on the faith track. These leaders are worth additional victory points and most of them give you a new power, like an additional conversion action, a discount on future card purchases, or the ability to take another specific resource when you take a white marble (a double-edged sword given the storage limits).

The game ends when a player builds their seventh development card or reaches the end of the faith track. You then tally up your points from all played development cards, even if covered; any points from leaders; and the highest point total you’ve passed on the faith track. There are also some small bonus tokens on the faith track that you can flip to their scoring side through the call to the Vatican, which isn’t that complicated but which I won’t explain here for the sake of brevity.

I can’t avoid comparing Masters of Renaissance to Gizmos because the cores of the games are just so similar: gather resources in four types, use them to buy cards, use the cards’ powers to convert and/or gain more resources, score the cards for points. Masters of Renaissance can allow a player to run away with things, but it’s a matter of choosing the right cards and getting lucky with what cards are available in the market when you have the resources to buy them. Creating synergies across your cards and leaders is the key to winning, but that’s true for all players, and I haven’t found specific cards that are overpowered, not even the leaders. It doesn’t have the cute marble dispenser that Gizmos has, and it could use better art that made the icons and point values easier to see at a glance. Otherwise it hits every high note, and plays like its own game rather than the poor cousin of another game, which is true of a lot of card- or dice-game adaptations of heavier titles.

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→ June 4, 2025
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Assumption.

Percival Everett’s Assumption is a triptych of a novel, three neo-noir detective stories featuring the same character, Ogden Walker, a deputy in a small town in New Mexico who’s confronted with three murders in fairly short succession, each of which seems to revolve around at least one person who isn’t who they claim to be. The first two proceed almost traditionally, although Everett is still playing around within the confines of the genre; the third, however, slides into a hallucinatory haze where Walker’s reality is suddenly open to question.

Walker is a Black man in a town that’s largely not Black, with its share of white racists, but also plenty of Latino and indigenous residents, and as you might expect in a small-town mystery or detective story, he kind of knows everyone and has his usual haunts where everyone knows him. He’s got good enough relationships with his boss and his co-workers, even though it becomes clear that Walker is a reluctant cop, and is close to his mother, who lives in the same town and whose house he visits several times in each story.

The first case starts when the possibly-racist Mrs. Bickers turns up dead just a few minutes after Walker visits her to take away her gun, turning into a larger mystery when her estranged daughter shows up unannounced. The second involves a couple of sex workers who end up dead in not-so-rapid succession, again tapping into a bigger story as Walker investigates it. The third starts out innocuously enough, as Walker stumbles on a field & game warden catching a poacher, with Walker taking the poacher’s nephew – maybe – to try to find the kid’s home while the warden takes in the poacher. The warden turns up dead and the kid disappears, making Walker a suspect and causing him to question everything around him.

Everett can’t help but allude to some of the masters of the form, with a line about “the postman ringing only once,” paying homage to the greats even as he upends and inverts the very genre he’s mimicking. The first two stories read like great works from Cain, Chandler, and Thompson, with the same stoic tone and grim imagery, right down to the matter-of-fact descriptions of corpses and gunfights. The third is where Everett gets imaginative, as the story quickly turns into a fever dream of sorts, with Walker trying to solve the crime to keep himself out of jail, while a second strand follows the cops investigating him, and the two stories seem to diverge in impossible ways.

Walker is a typical Everett protagonist – a stolid Black man experiencing some existential doubts, in a job he doesn’t love, either a bachelor (as Walker is) or someone who has distant relationships with women. He’s an outsider in this town in multiple ways, even though he has cordial relationships with most of the locals; he doesn’t have close friends, and he is keenly aware of his status as one of the few Black people there. The pointlessness of the killings he sees wears on him, as he questions the utility of his job and the meaning of any of what’s happening in front of him, including the scourge of meth and the cycles of poverty and violence. What begins as a traditional detective novel – even the triptych format has a history in the genre, as Rex Stout authored several Nero Wolfe books that comprised three semi-related cases – ends up flipped on its head as a story of deep existential despair.

The contemporary review in the New York Times compared Assumption to the Inspector Maigret detective novels by the French writer Georges Simenon, which also have an existentialist bent, a clear line of descent from Sartre and Camus in style and substance. Maigret has more panache than Walker, though; he’s a gentleman detective in many ways, a French Roderick Alleyn, while Simenon’s stories end with far less bloodshed. The similarity is philosophical, rather than stylistic, although I appreciated the reference to another of my favorites.

Next up: I’m about three-quarters done with Lois McMaster Bujold’s Brothers in Arms.

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→ June 2, 2025
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Sinners.

Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, return from a few years in Chicago working for Al Capone to their hometown in rural Mississippi, where they plan to open a juke joint for their fellow Black Mississippians, with booze, gambling, and good old-fashioned Delta blues. It’s all good, profitable fun, at least until the white vampires show up, and the whole show turns into a battle royale.

Sinners, the latest film from director and writer Ryan Coogler, is that story – but a whole lot more, with layers upon layers of meaning below the surface of a film that starts out as a celebration and ends up a horror film, although it plays with the tropes of all of its genres. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but with some strong performances and incredible music, it’s an unusually good time at the theater among the sequels and the IP- and merchandise-driven pablum.

Michael B. Jordan stars as Smoke and Stack, oozing charm and panache, although the two characters are largely indistinguishable beyond their attire. They come home and buy a decrepit mill from the obviously racist (Boss) Hogwood, planning to turn it into their new juke joint. They ask their young cousin Sammy, also known as Preacher Boy (perhaps a nod to Samuel Sharpe?), to come play his guitar at opening night, only to discover that he’s become an exceptional blues guitarist with a deep, powerful voice – so powerful, in fact, that it calls out to the devil himself in the form of Remmick, an Irish immigrant and vampire who has already infected a married couple who are Klan members and who are more than happy to join him in an attempt to invade the joint and turn everyone inside.

There’s so much story here that that alone would make it one of the most interesting American films of the last five years; so many movies work with less plot and equivalent run times, yet Sinners seems to abound with story and subplot, to the point that crucial characters, including Stack’s white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, in her first significant film role since 2018) and Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), get a fraction of the back story they deserve. There are multiple movies’ worth of material and strong characters here, and Coogler knows it, playing with genre and tropes, starting the film out as a glorious celebration of Black culture and music, then turning very hard into a neo-horror film with revenge-fantasy elements that pits its white vampires against the Black heroes, literally surrounding them and threatening to burn the place down.

You can watch Sinners as is, without even considering the subtext beyond the obvious racial stuff – one of the film’s few moments of outright humor is when the vampires start talking about their belief in racial equity, and act offended that they’re not invited into the club because they’re white – but there appear to be layers upon layers of meaning below the surface. My first thought as the film ended was that the entire story might be a metaphor for the Tulsa Race Massacre, a real-life atrocity where Black residents of Tulsa built businesses that were profitable and part of the community, and white supremacists burned it all down and murdered dozens of Black Tulsans. But it could apply to all of Black history in the U.S. after the abolition of slavery, right up to our modern moment of a white minority seizing power to reverse decades of gains in civil rights. The blood-suckers aren’t just coming for the Black lives in that juke joint, but to feed off of the culture inside it, to profit from Black music and dance and traditions and leave the Black progenitors poor, wounded, or dead.

Jordan is going to earn much of the praise for his twin performances here, and he’s very good, but the two characters aren’t distinguished by much beyond their clothes; there are some references early in the film that imply that one of them is the more responsible of the two, the better business mind. The story just doesn’t do much with this, and the main distinction between them becomes their women, not anything innate to their characters. Steinfeld and Mosaku are tremendous in their supporting roles, as is Delroy Lindo as the drunk harmonica player who just wants to be paid in beer but ends up a voice of wisdom when calamity strikes. Sammy is played by a newcomer, Miles Caton, who boasts an outstanding, deep singing voice and apparently learned to play a mean blues guitar in just two months, and who delivers in what turns out to be the movie’s most pivotal role.

Sinners is overly ambitious in the end; as much action as there is, by the time it hit the two-hour mark I was ready for the conclusion – which it sort of telegraphed in the opening scene, a gimmick many filmmakers use that I really don’t care for at all. Let the ending surprise me, or at least let me come to it on my own terms. The largest action scene is very hard to follow between all of the very fake blood spurting everywhere (vampires, you know) and the dim lighting; I missed the fate of one of the characters entirely in the melee because I just couldn’t see. There’s also a mid-credits scene that I would say only sort of works – it’s sentimental where the rest of the film is anything but, yet it’s also true to some of the broader themes of the story.

This one is going to show up in all of the awards talk later this year, as it was a resounding commercial success, hits on a lot of themes that the voters seem to love, and was made by an acclaimed director who only has two tangential Oscar nominations to date – one for producing Judas & the Black Messiah, the other for the original song from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I would be very surprised if we get to January and it’s not nominated for Best Picture, with a smattering of other nods, definitely for Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Score, maybe for Coogler’s directing or Jordan for playing two parts. Regardless, it’s the kind of movie that I love to see succeeding, because there’s at least some small chance that future projects like this, untethered to any IP or previous films, have a little more chance to secure funding. I liked Sinners a lot, but I doubt it’ll be my favorite movie of the year; that said, if it wins all the things, I won’t be upset in the least.

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