the year in books [II]

The next installment of 2023's Reading Queue is a mixture of fiction and nonfiction. On the fiction side we have Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, William Johnstone's To the River's End, Simon Scarrow's Centurion, and Brian Godawa's Noah Primeval. My favorite of these was Godawa's Noah Primeval, which is surprising, because I expected that laurel to be won by McCarthy's 2022 publication. Alas, while The Passenger has gotten generally rave reviews, even die-hard McCarthy fans have been disappointed. It has a different 'feel' than a lot of his earlier works. 

In the nonfiction camp we have two excellent books: Michael Oard's Biblical Geology 101, an introduction to creationist interpretations of geology, and Steve Weidenkopf's The Glory of the Crusades. Oard's book encapsulates a lot of the most recent argumentation for a young earth whose features speak of a global flood some 4400 years ago; The Glory of the Crusades was a retelling of the medieval Crusades in light of recent scholarship that sought to destroy the common perception of the Crusades as being wars of conversion and conquest. The ultimate motivator behind the Crusades was the recapturing of territory lost to foreign armies (who happened to be Muslim), and while religious motivations were certainly present in the rank-and-file warriors, they weren't fighting to convert or massacre Muslims. The only downside to the Crusades book is that the author's Catholicism overshadows everything (though his jabs at Protestantism were fun to read).