Skip to main content

The Way of Edan by Philip Chase

Expansive, richly-detailed fantasy novel by a first-time author (who happens to be a friend of mine!). A coming of age story, part one of a trilogy, set against a grand backdrop: a brewing military and religious conflict, triggered by a blasphemous false flag event, that sets off shifting and unsettled alliances among a wide range of peoples.

The main character, Dayraven, young but yet old in soul, captivates the reader on a few levels: he has a powerful gift that he can't control, he's deeply unsure of himself, and he has a seemingly impossible hero's journey in front of him. 

Author Philip Chase creates a textured Norse/Anglo-Saxon-inspired world, featuring multiple cultures, nuanced geopolitics, even an interesting linguistic history, and he tells his story with a mirthful writing style and a flair for turning a phrase. And everything in The Way of Edan is expertly described and accurate, right down to the most specific aspects of dress and weaponry. 

The story carries the reader along and climaxes with a gloriously gory battle, leaving the reader thrilled for the next volume.

Finally, while Chase began work on this novel many years ago, somehow it's a timely story right now as our "real" world feels like it's going through its own tensions, its own false flag events, its own shifting and unsettled alliances--and perhaps we will also face war. 

I'm partial to my friend's book of course, so take this with a grain of salt: but this work is a really good read.

More Posts

The Stress of Life by Hans Selye

Gives a useful set of lenses for how to think about stress in all its forms and manifestations. The bulk of the book deals with stress in medical biology and human physiology, but there are applications beyond our bodies, to our lives, communities, even among civilizations. A very interesting work.  The chapter "When Scientists Disagree" by itself makes this entire book worth reading. It is an eloquent articulation of the nature of scientific debate (including implications of when scientific debate turns insulting and hostile), and the author quite humbly provides the reader *all* of the professional disagreements and contentions with his model of stress. This part of the book really sings out with humility, sincerity and a scientific rigor we seem to have lost in the postmodern era. Notes:  * General adaptation syndrome (G.A.S.): how we adapt to stressors: various shock therapies across history (fever treatments, electric shock, etc) provided improvement with no direct r...

Broken Money by Lyn Alden

Our money is broken, and the sooner we wrap our minds around the implications, the better. In Broken Money, Lyn Alden, a lucid writer and gifted teacher, offers a highly readable grand tour of monetary history: she explains the emergence of money, what makes a good or bad money, how money gradually became more and more "abstracted" away from gold, and how the modern fiat financial system evolved. Most importantly, she explains, clearly, how inflation, purposely designed into the modern system, is used as a wealth extraction tool: "...the financial system in its current form is designed in such a way that 1) the money supply continually inflates, 2) purchasing power is gradually siphoned away from savers and toward arbitrageurs who sit near the source of money creation, 3) the system rewards large and well connected entities at the cost of small and poorly connected entities, 4) liabilities gradually shift from the private sector to the public sector to keep the system f...

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy

This is a blatantly repetitive and poorly-organized book, and yet it's still highly useful: filled with good tactics and reminders to observe and control your thinking--and more importantly, to be attentive to the implications of your thinking. Thoughts are things! How you think and the beliefs you hold play an enormous role in your reality. And so, despite its flaws, I think The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is still worthwhile. Think of it as a book-length practice of autosuggestion, or even a sort of extended mantra. The book's repetitiveness then becomes a benefit: it helps you practice and build good mental habits, it gives you plenty of examples of affirmations and mental scripts to apply to various life situations, and so on. A minor warning: if you consider NLP , autosuggestion or visualization and affirmation techniques to be useless woo-woo silliness, do not read this book. It's not for you. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You ca...