First, no weekly albums for now. I need a break and I don't relish starting eight weeks in the whole. God willing, I'll bring them back in 2017, hopefully with a bunch of exciting new stuff. Looking over what was reviewed - 365 of them in 2014 and 52 in 2015, I was amazed to see there are still plenty of great albums out there needing attention. And bad ones too. Those might actually be more fun to write about!
Second, while the books are holding down the fort this year, I'm starting a reading project that will live on a different blog site. Unlike this little vanity project, this would be a site I would like to promote in the best of completionista tradition. Essentially, I plan to read every Stephen King book written, from Carrie to whatever he most recently published by the time I finish. This will be a very long undertaking since I still want to read other things, but I'm hoping that the pacing is properly enough to give each work the proper amount of thought and consideration. When the site goes live (probably on the first post on Carrie since I don't want to be a tease) I will give out of the details, including a name and a link (neither of which I have thought of!).
That's that. Now let's travel back in time to late 2015. I am desperately hoping to complete a 43rd book for the year, but must settle for the crushing humiliation of falling ten books short of my goal and not getting a flashy badge on Goodreads. Book 43 of 2015 must therefore become Book 1 of 2016.
Rubicon is a darn fine way to start of the new year, earning a bona fide 5-star rating, something only about one in six books achieve and particularly rare in recent years either because I'm becoming jaded or picking worse-than-usual books. Tom Holland is an excellent writer and has managed the trick of writing books that educate the beginning learners, yet can still be enjoyed by folks with degrees in the field. I was a little worried about what I had gotten myself into when I was a little underwhelmed by his 2005 book Persian Fire, which chronicles the epic conflict between Greece and Persia. I was hoping for a more Persia-centric account, but Holland had a uphill battle in that most of the sources come from the Greeks. Therefore it ended up reading a bit more like a standard Persian War story than a fresh new angle. Rubicon, on the other hand, occurs during one of the most heavily-chronicled periods of world history, plus I think the subject matter lies somewhat closer to Holland's expertise, all of which made for a really enjoyable reading experience.Why this book, among the plethora of reading choices about the late Republic era? First off, it is a fresh account, which considers the vast amount of prior scholarship in its narrative. Holland moonlights as a novelist, so it doesn't hurt that it reads like fiction (in a good way) at times. More interesting, however, is the lens Holland uses to examine the period. His main interest here is the role of the Roman citizen during a time of great violence among two parties, the optimates and the populares. In fact, he indicates that he had hoped to call the book Citizens, but that title is already owned by a well-respected work on the French Revolution by Simon Schama. The Rubicon incident itself is not the entire focus of the book, but, all cliches aside, it remains perhaps the single most dramatic point in the turbulent flow of late Republic history, therefore Holland wasn't ashamed to use it as the title.
The copy I read was borrowed from the public library and the book is commonly held by most public libraries and many academic libraries. Look up the book on Worldcat to find a library near you that carries it and check it out for yourself!
(Note for a new year: all book cover images are linked to Goodreads data and are intended as fair use for this decidedly non-commercial endeavor.)
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