January and February of 2026 were not so great for reading. While I didn’t have to teach after mid-January, I spent a lot of my energy in that month working on music for an upcoming computer game that my friend Jeremy’s working on, and February, well… besides working on a translation due in the middle of the month, my son was on school holidays for most of February, so… yeah. I didn’t get to read as much as I would have liked. Still, I did get through four books, which is not nothing, especially when one of them was like 500 pages long with footnotes. 

Also, I did read a bit more than it looks from the below, but since I only generally write about books after I’ve finished them, this list is pretty short. The books I have ongoing are all big huge fat tomes, each with a bookmark jammed into it. Expect more about those in future posts. For what it’s worth, the books I have on the go are:

• Sir Thomas Malory’s Complete Works edited by Eugène Vinaver. 
• Clive Barker’s Imajica
• Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence

I should be finishing at least some of those in the next readings period. We’ll see about Imajica—I loved Barker’s novels Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show as a teen, but whenever I have tried to get into Imajica multiple times over the years, I’ve never gotten past page 20 or 30. (I’m at page 45 now, so that’s something.) I’m much further along in the Bennett, which  is one of the books my wife has recently recommended to me. The  reason I’m proceeding so slowly with the Malory, on the other hand, is specifically because I’m taking my time with it. I’m enjoying it, but I still find it takes a certain amount of concentration to read much of it in one sitting.  

Anyway, that’s stuff I’m reading now, but below, I’ll just discuss what I finished in January and February.

Nonfiction

I saw Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin praised in a post on Bluesky a while back, and after taking a look, I found it was available in the university library system, so I requested a copy and tore through it in early February. (I’m reading what appears to be a new edition from 2015. As writing guides go, it’s approachable, full of examples, and packed with useful exercises that illustrate what Le Guin discusses. Most of her points are sort of familiar to me, but then that’s to be expected, and I think the book would have been useful to me back when I was starting out. Even so, I think I’ll probably make copies of some of the exercises before returning it to the library, so that I can try them out sometime. (I’m trying to get myself back into writing fiction, and I feel like these exercises are a good way to do that.) One thing I agree with Le Guin about is that certain exercises are especially useful as self-sensitization tools: you do the exercise so that you’re sensitized to this or that issue in writing, and you hopefully stay that way. In any case, the book is short, full of example passages, thoughtful, and something I’d recommend to any younger writer over lots of other writing books I’ve read.

Robin D.G. Kelley‘s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is a stupendous biography of a crucial musician that I was luckily able to access through the library at work. (I have no idea who ordered all these jazz books for the Seoul campus of the university I work for, but good for them!)

For too long, Monk’s memory has been overshadowed by stories of his eccentricities, antics, and frankly made-up nonsense about the man. (It turns out a lot of that made-up nonsense was made up in the wake of the stories used (with good intention, sadly) to sell him as a “kooky genius” early on in his recording career, though some of it can be attributed to his, well, real personal oddness.) Kelley digs through all of that, but also much more, in order to provide us with a wide-ranging and accurate picture of one of the most iconoclastic and unique musicians that the United States has ever produced. His recounting of Monk’s life is very detailed, busts a lot of myths about the man, and really made Monk’s life more coherent and accessible. As a fan of Monk’s music, I appreciate having been able to read it and understand the man better. It’s also pretty inspiring to see Monk’s artistic triumphs came after an early struggle to be taken seriously. Lesser artists would have given up long before the end of the time it took for Monk to “make it,” however you set the bar for that achievement.

Lesser artists would also have probably give up when faced with all of the negative press and reviews Monk received, though looking back it’s not so unusual for jazz innovators to face that. Still, I winced at some of the reviews that Kelley recounts, especially earlier in Monk’s career. Like, some of them were outright mean. It makes me thankful that, at some point years ago, I decided not to say nothing about a book I dislike, and to be polite when criticizing parts of a book I did like. Most enraging was the story of how Leonard Feather went out of his way in his book Inside Bebop to mostly write Monk out of the history of bebop, or that is at least how Kelley describes it. (I haven’t read Inside Bebop, or Inside Jazz as it’s titled now. so I don’t know how mean Feather was about it, but I felt for Monk, reading about how he confronted Feather in public about it.) Well, and of course all of Monk’s run-ins with cops were enraging, too. I hadn’t realized that the NYC police department were able to make independent decisions about cabaret cards, much less that they were able to suspend them when someone was merely arrested, even when they were released without being charged with anything. (This happened when cops pulled over Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter in Delaware with Monk and his wife in her car. The cops arrested them, released Monk without charging him, and still the NYC cops suspended his cabaret card.) Worse, all this happened because during the drive, Monk got thirsty and they stopped somewhere in Delaware to ask for a glass of water, and might or might not have had a dissociative episode… and he encountered a racist proprietor who called the cops on him.  

There are a lot of elements to Monk’s world that are familiar if you’ve read jazz biographies before: the sidemen ruined by heroin addictions, the ridiculous run-ins with cops and struggles with New York City cabaret card issues, the labels probably screwing over the musicians, but also the community vibe that the musicians and the people in their lives shared, the propensity for jazz elders to take on a teacherly role with younger musicians, the financial struggle, the incredible creativity under sometimes absurd working conditions. (It surprised me how many New York jazz clubs had messed up pianos in this book, but maybe it shouldn’t.) Monk’s quite interesting because, though he drank and smoke reefer and occasionally tried harder drugs, he never seemed to develop an addiction, nor did he particularly hold it against musicians who did—at least, not if they held themselves together during their addiction. He seemed to be willing to work with a really wide variety of people, though he struggled to keep a regular band together.  (That’s something I noticed that he shared with Bill Evans—one of the few parallels I noticed between the two—though in Monk’s case, it was more a side-effect of the cabaret card nonsense affecting his ability to book work in clubs.)

The discussion of the latter years of Monk’s life is… well, it’s sometimes saddening to read. The worsening of his bipolar condition, and the effects of the treatment he finally started receiving in the 1970s; the really depressing stuff that formed the backdrop of his later career, including many crimes against humanity and assassinations of Black and progressive leaders; Monk’s own withdrawal into a kind of traditionalism as he aged, and his rancor towards anyone playing anything he considered too far away from real jazz; and his long silence toward the end of his life. It comes on slowly, but it’s a lot by the end, and I couldn’t help but wonder if part of Monk’s withdrawal from the world in the late 70s until his death in early 1982 might partly have been driven by sheer exhaustion at seeing what had been a somewhat hopeful moment in America—the 1960s with its civil rights movement—give way to a flood of awfulness, much like the flood of awfulness that’s washing over America today. I can see how a person, especially one faced with over-the-top casual and systemic racism every day of his life, could end up being just plain burned out by it all, and, if they could, simply sort of giving up on everything… and that’s without even factoring the effect of his disorder and the side-effects of his medications, as well as the fact that his genre of music had gone from the limelight into the wings during the span of his career. 

On a more positive note, one wonderful side-effect of reading this book is that it got me to check out so many other musicians who passed through Monk’s inner circle over the years, but whose work I haven’t heard much (or at all): Gigi Gryce, Sahib Shihab, Wilbur Ware, David Amram, Julius Watkins1, and more. I dug around online and when possible, I listened back to some of the music mentioned and it really does enhance the reading experience. Anyway, I highly recommend this book if you’re interested in jazz history, as much for the appearances of so many other people as for its coverage of Monk himself. It’s a great, meticulously researched, and sympathetic account of the man’s life. It’s an empathetic, thoughtful, deeply-researched account of Monk’s life and I found it fascinating and very enlightening. 

As a taster, here’s an interview with the author about Monk and some of the things that Kelley learned while researching the man’s life for the book, along with an interesting one-hour documentary covering some of Monk’s life:

RPG Books

Knock #1 is a exactly what its subtitle suggests: a bric-a-brac of adventure gaming contents. Reading it felt like digging into a Halloween treat bag and finding a bewildering variety of treats and surprises. I enjoyed checking out different contributors ideas on everything from things to do with old D&D modules like Keep on the Borderlands to randomized tables of things like special weaknesses for powerful wizards, the effects of cannibalism on player characters, randomized sewer generation, and monster derangement syndromes. There’s also a fair amount of short articles giving opinions about the OSR, or some aspect of OSR gaming. One thing I like is that Knock is designed with a big-tent view of what the OSR is, including games like Troika, while also being pretty easily usable by GMs no matter which system you’re actually running, which I think is very much in the spirit of the OSR. 

This is the first of what currently are five volumes of Knock: I splurged on them when the earlier volumes were offered as a reward for the Kickstarter for the latest volume, and I don’t regret it at all. I very much look forward to reading my way through the remaining four volumes, as well as any further volumes the Merry Mushmen might put out in the future. (Hell, I’m even tempted to submit something for a future volume.)  One thing I will note is that it’s not the kind of book most people are likely to read straight through in one go. It’s full of short little articles, meaning it’s the kind of thing that’s best read in fits and starts, or at least that’s my experience. But it’s great for reading that way. 

For me, the essays on the philosophy of the OSR were find, but what was more interesting were the mechanical bits and pieces people have integrated into their games, as well as the tables and goodies like that. Reading Knock #1, at least, took me back to the days of Dragon magazine, which I get the feeling is what the publishers were going for. Actually, reading it felt like a cross between reading OSR blogs—from which some of the contents are in fact collected—and thumbing through old issues of Dragon magazine. I mean that in a good way. Well, and maybe a touch of Dungeon magazine, though the adventures in the collection interested me less than the rest of the contents. The thing is, that’s kind of faithful to the old RPG magazine experience, too: not everything will interest every reader, and you’ve got to expect that with a “bric-a-brac,” after all. But there was enough stuff that did appeal to me that I had good fun reading through the collection. All that was really missing was ads for weirdo RPGs I’d never heard of and would never be able to track down until decades later… and, well, I have enough weirdo RPGs I can’t get to the table as it is, so that’s fine!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to savouring the rest of the volumes of Knock that I have on my shelf.  

Dolmenwood: Player’s Book by Gavin Norman is only one of the books I received from the Dolmenwood Kickstarter, but since I’m currently playing in a Dolmenwood campaign, I have avoided reading the other books from the set (including the Campaign and Monster books, the maps book, and assorted individual adventure modules).

My opinion of the little of the set I’ve read—just this one book—is that it’s a fine not-quite retroclone that slightly integrates a more modern sensibility into class design and rules while still holding true to a lot of the lingua franca of the OSR: the mechanics will mostly feel familiar even when they’re slightly different from what you’re used to, in other words. The game offers a race/class split (though there’s also race-as-class options for the nonhumans), and has some weirdo classes like goat-people, cat-people, musical bat-headed goblin folk (that’s what my current PC is), and more. 

I hesitate to call it “innovative,” but at the same time I find myself hesitating to say it isn’t innovative, because I really don’t know what kind of material is in the other books in the set. I can say that the stuff in the Player’s Book doesn’t feel to me like it’s really trying to innovate, so much as it’s trying to adapt the familiar to a particularized setting. Dolmenwood kinda isn’t aiming to “innovate” in terms of mechanics and system, so much as it’s attempting to distill familiar OSR systems (and especially B/X D&D) down into something that nails the milieu, which is OSR-in-a-fairytale-forest. From what I can see in the Player’s Book, it succeeds well at that, reinforcing the vibe as much as possible. There are some innovations, really—for example, Bards work so much better in this system than they did in the old days—in AD&D 1E especially, bards were outright ridiculous! Classes like Bard and Knight and Hunter work very well, feel very OSE, and a simple and straightforward while being flexible and (as far as I’ve seen) fun to play, even at the very fragile first level.   

As for the presentation, the layout’s clear and the art is good—which everyone who’s familiar with Norman’s Old-School Essentials material probably expected—and I feel like it’d be a great introduction to the hobby. All that said, while I am happy to be playing it, I don’t know how likely I am to ever get it to the table, though I do know that if my son develops an interested in running RPGs in the next few years (and shows a willingness to read them in English), this one is what I’ll be handing to him first. The books are beautiful, and, well… I’m having fun with the game as a player, even if I suspect that in a lot of ways I would be having mostly the same fun playing any B/X or BECMI-inspired game. Mostly, but there’s some neat particulars I’m enjoying in this specific B/X-inspired game, I have to say.