What I Just Read

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a  lot  that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min

A readable and creepy manga novel built on themes of guilt, agency and how to grapple with genuine evil. Over the course of nine volumes,  Monster has a lot of plot threads, many left hanging, and there are many, many  minor character extras drifting in and out of the story. Thus it reads less like a cohesive story and more like the middle third of David Copperfield . This is considered a highly-regarded work (it sold more than 20 million copies), but I don't recommend it unless you're a serious manga aficionado. And if you're a serious manga aficionado, you've already read it. A few thoughts on Monster's  central themes, which are more notable than the story itself. It is increasingly obvious today that quite a lot of evil exists in the world--certainly more today than during the 1990s when Monster was published. And so we have to figure out how to navigate that evil somehow: perhaps confront it, perhaps avoid it, and of course sometimes it's simply not clear