Jack by Andrew Sinclair, a review

Andrew Sinclair’s Jack (1977) is my first foray into the biography of a writer I consistently place in my top 10 favorites.

I greatly enjoyed it.

I don’t think it’s perfect. I wanted more analysis on the writing and impact of The Call the Wild and The Sea-Wolf, which I think every lover of adventure (that would be you, reader of this blog) should read. At 256 pages (albeit another 40 pages of notes and index), it feels a bit sleight on certain aspects of his life.

But what you do get in Jack is an unadorned look at London’s life, told by a dude with opinions. Jack is an even-handed corrective to the hagiography put out by London’s ex-wife and the baseless accusations of petty former friends. Sinclair is not afraid to criticize his subject. London had many defects as a person and Sinclair gives you those. But he also rightly places London as a greatly influential popular writer of occasional genius. 

I did not know the details of London’s life and death and Sinclair filled in some major gaps. For example, that he never knew his father and that absence dogged him his whole life. I knew London was a socialist but not as ardent as Jack reveals—nor as contradictory (London had ample cash and was not afraid to spend it lavishly and foolishly on himself and his retinue, not on socialist causes). Nor did I know London stepped away from socialism at the end of his life as well as his Spencerian beliefs in life as a biological survival of the fittest, and turned toward the mythography of Carl Jung. I did not know that London purchased more than a thousand acres of farmland in California and threw way too much money at a schooner that was barely seaworthy, nor served as a journalist and war correspondent.

London lived the equivalent of nine lives, both literally and figuratively, in his short 40 years on the planet. He packed in rags, riches, romance, adventure, wealth, debt, fame, success, and failure in four decades. He lived. London had at best a love-hate relationship with the writing life. He wanted to live a life of adventure and preferred material existence and working with his hands over the examined internal life. Yet he lived both. He wrote tirelessly and incessantly, completing 20 novels and some 50 books over his lifetime. He was quite different but also shared much in common with Robert E. Howard. Howard greatly admired London and both consciously and unconsciously imitated him, both in his writing and his beliefs and even mannerisms. I’ve noticed this prior and Will Oliver aptly points out the similarities in his recent Howard biography, but Jack offers even more parallels to the careful Howard reader.

I loved in particular the closing five pages, which sum up London’s literary legacy and read as though they were written to me by a guy who understands London like I do.

I was pleased to see Sinclair address the Jack London literary revival of the 1960s and 70s, which began to resuscitate his tarnished reputation as a flawed Darwinian racist and/or a children’s writer of simple dog stories. London was an incredible influence on writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Henry Miller and Sinclair Lewis. He pioneered the clipped Hemingway style and the Hobo/beat novels for which Jack Kerouac is credited. He was an early pioneer of the science-fiction genre. But for decades it became unfashionable to admit he was a first-rate writer, one of America’s greatest. Influential critics including William Dean Howells sought to diminish any of his literary contributions, dismissing London as a hack writer of adventure stories, and it took good work by the likes of Earle Labor to set matters straight.

Sinclair sums up these unfair appraisals (not helped by London’s frequent dismissal of his own writing) as follows:

“It was unjust, because his life had been experimental and questing, so that his dismissal as a totalitarian or a children’s writer was absurd. He had been his own worst enemy in his insistence that he was merely a farmer who needed a lot of money for the land, and who lit after inspiration with a club; but such a self-denying ordinance should not have dimmed the mytho-poetic magnificence of some of his books … no critical onslaught on him could kill off the affection of the masses for whom he had always said that he wrote.”

Read this.

Sinclair puts his finger on the complex figure of London with this brilliant observation: “He had a dialectic of appetites without a synthesis of satisfaction … in his books, he often split himself into two opposing characters, because he lived so uneasily within his single personality. In The Sea-Wolf, he was both Wolf Larsen and Humphrey van Weyden, the brute ego in conflict with the social being.”

London was a racist and Sinclair does not hold back there, though a glance at Goodreads confirms that you must take book reviews with a healthy grain of salt. Some idiot on that platform gave Jack 2 out of 5 stars because Sinclair “Completely ignores the racist bent that is a sad and pathetic black mark on London's past.” This is utterly, demonstrably false, and I left a comment of correction that platform. Sinclair repeatedly criticizes London’s racism and Anglo-Saxon mythologizing. But then again idiots read books too.

Anyway, I recommend Jack for any serious reader of London who wants to learn more about the man himself. 

Computer God, Black Sabbath

I suspect Paul Kingsnorth isn’t a metal fan but he has an ally in the late Ronnie James Dio. 

“Computer God” opens up the vastly underrated Dehumanizer with a bang. Dio saw what was coming, back in 1992, when he penned these prophetic lyrics:

Computerized God, it's the new religion

Program the brain, not the heartbeat

Onward, all you crystal soldiers

Touch tomorrow energize

Digital dreams and you're the next correction

Man's a mistake, so we'll fix it, yeah

My inconsequential machine rebellion has begun. I picked up this rig on Tuesday. A Yamaha RX-595 receiver with a pair of Boston Acoustics speakers and a DVD/CD measure for good measure. The price was right (zero). It sounds fantastic. I can now play my old CDs again. Remember what it was like to hear an entire album without commercials, comments, and digital distraction?

Name the CD for bonus points...

No internet, no algorithms, no copyright strikes, just metal. Dio would have approved.

Virtual existence with a superhuman mind

The ultimate creation, destroyer of mankind

Neil Peart, six years gone

Me and Scott (of Scott's thoughts) at the Neil Peart pavillion.

Six years ago we lost Neil Peart. 

I still remember hearing the news; on Jan. 10, 2020 I was home, in the kitchen, when my phone flashed. A text, then another. Several of my friends had started a chain, sharing their shock and grief. Later, we shared YouTube clips of his best solos. Neil was a very private man and his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer was a closely guarded secret. So secret that we learned he actually died three days earlier, on Jan. 7. 

His death was a shock, and hurt us all deeply. I still feel the ache.

Since then I’ve been to Lakeside Park in St. Catherines Ontario, the very one that served as inspiration for the Rush song of the same name. I stood outside Neil’s boyhood home. And walked the Neil Peart Memorial Pavilion (that's me at right, in the Spinal Tap t-shirt).

Against all odds Rush is playing again this year. They’re back on the road, touring without Peart. In his place is German drumming virtuoso Anika Nilles. 

I love the decision. Alex and Geddy have more than earned the right to keep playing music. They were itching to get back on stage but out of respect for Peart took a long leave of absence. I’m sure Nilles will be fantastic. 

I hate the pricing. 

Well over $500 reported in many venues for average seats. Which means I very likely won’t be going. It’s not too rich for my blood, but it’s too rich in a year with a lot of planned travel and other expenses.

I’m sure it will be a great event. A catharsis for the band. I will regret not seeing whatever tribute Rush has planned for Neil.

But it won’t be the same without the professor, so perhaps it’s best to keep my old memories of the original three intact.

I don’t know if Neil is the best drummer of all time; I’m very much not qualified to make that call. I am confident in saying that if he’s not somewhere in your top five rock drummers you’ve made an error in judgement.

Peart not only was incredible at his craft but wrote the lyrics to all of Rush’s songs. Dozens of classics, among them the quiet, delicate, wistful “Rivendell.” 

From that song:

Yet you know I've had the feeling

Standing with my senses reeling

This is the place to grow old till

I reach my final day

After a life marked by deep tragedy culminating with his own untimely death, I hope his soul has found peace in the immortal lands.

Namárië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar. Nai elyë hiruva. Namárië!

Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!

Here’s to being weird

I like being weird. 

Most never see this side of me; they see a balding, middle-aged man with 20 pounds to lose (I’m working on it). A respectable dad who works in healthcare marketing to raise two children who are now young adults and nearly fully raised, but is now shifting responsibilities to elderly parents. A dude who lounges around a house in baggy jeans and a flannel shirt, at the balloon end of a respectable cul-de-sac in old blue Massachusetts. Who likes to mind his own business. Crack a few dad jokes and a few beers on the weekend.

Average, boring.

But if you look closely enough you might see a few cracks in this not-carefully crafted façade. 

I don’t watch sports (though I do hold an unhealthy relationship with the Buffalo Bills; please win one Super Bowl before I die). I don’t have a woodshop or a golf bag or fishing rods or a sports car.

I have a combination basement office and barroom hangout full of books. Fantastic artwork adorns the walls—here a Frank Frazetta print, there a Tom Barber skeletal warrior, and a tapestry advertising Iron Maiden’s Stranger in a Strange Land. In one corner, a CD tower of heavy metal music. A decent sized collection of Savage Sword of Conan magazines. DVDs and VHS tapes of The Lord of the Rings, Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max, Jaws, The Shining, Blade Runner, and odd horror films.

Scattered on my bookshelves are a few odd items. Skulls. Viking warriors. A painted candle carved as a dark wizard. 

All of this office stuff might give someone pause, my in-laws for example. But inside of me is where things truly get weird.

I am a hopeless romantic. In the old and true sense of that word. I am in love with stories of heroism and adventure. I see the world as enchanted (though that enchantment is largely vanished from sight, subsumed by modernity and the machine). I believe in the existence of objective morality, of good and evil, and that some type of omnipotent creator probably exists. 

I can’t explain the world otherwise. And so I’ve taken the inward journey, deeper into the weird than most. 

I once explored imaginary dungeons of my own making. Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop RPGs were a formative experience in my youth, and I played again in young adulthood. Video and computer RPGs are abandoned childhood pursuits. Even today I wouldn’t say no to either of them; I just prefer to read and write about weird things. In the pages of books I let my mind explore other’s creations and wander in strange worlds.

I have been to the steppes of the Hyborian Age and the deep woods of Middle-Earth. Prowled the dank streets of Lankhmar with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Listening to the songs of Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, I am a Trooper charging on horseback in the Crimean War, a Sentinel in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

I have been these people, inhabited these places. Have you? 

I remember thinking in my teenage years that one day this would all wear off. That my musical tastes would soften to top 40. I’d drink Miller Lite and grill and play golf.

I hate golf. God is it terrible.

I do enjoying grilling and I’ll drink a Miller Lite if pressed. But I never gave up heavy metal or sword-and-sorcery. You can take my SSOCs when you pry them from my cold dead fingers. I know I’ll be weird forever.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be normal. More than once I wished I was born with a fix-it gene, but the physical world is sadly not my forte. I wonder what it would be like to be more interested in the events of the world, a political junky. To enjoy pop culture, TV shows like Ozarks or Breaking Bad, or take interest in the lives of celebrities. It would make awkward conversations easier. I hate those too.

I might have achieved more in my professional life if I made money my master KPI.

But in the end I could not do these things. The weird kept calling. 

For a short while I denied this, as I transitioned to adulthood. In college I tried to be someone else. It did not work; the weird came back. It never left.

I’m proud to be weird. Today I embrace it; I wear Conan the Barbarian or KISS t-shirts and listen to metal and don’t give a fuck. I write a dusty old blog about old shit very few care about. Because it’s who I am. Maybe it’s who you are, too.

We need weird people. The world would certainly be a lot less fun if everyone were normal. Maybe, interminable.

Here’s to being weird.

Happy 2026! Time to get after it.

Happy New Year!

I can get caught up in unproductive routines, doom loop cycles, and this time of year, overeating and overdrinking. I appreciate the fresh start the year affords.

It’s time to get after it in 2026. Renewed discipline, but also optimism, commitment, engagement with the world. I want to get outside more, walk, touch grass.

My reading is off to a good start with Jack, a biography of Jack London. I’m about a third of the way through and am greatly enjoying learning about a favorite author who typically falls in my top 10. These days I seem to be gravitating more and more toward nonfiction. The world, and its past, are so strange and full of wonder that fiction, even the weird, seems pedestrian in comparison. I do think both should be read, as fiction activates different parts of the brain, and good fiction connects us to myth and story in a way most non-fiction cannot. And I am starting to itch for a Lord of the Rings re-read. I like and agree with some recent advice from a booktuber to “read for quality, not quantity.” It does seem best to me to know a book a depth that it shapes you, changes you, rather than to read as many titles as you can for breadth and only be able to recall them shallowly, if at all.

I am going to publish my heavy metal memoir. This book bridges both fiction and non-fiction; it is the unadorned facts of my life, and observations and insights on the music that shaped it, but also told with what I hope is a driving and engaging narrative voice found in good fiction. I can’t wait to share it with the world and hope it finds readers for whom it resonates.

Speaking of heavy metal I’ve got a couple of Iron Maiden concerts on the docket for this year. 

I will in all likelihood be hosting one final heavy metal themed party here at my house, over the summer, with a live band. For years this was an annual event. Eight years after the last in 2018 I plan to bring it back one final time, a "retirement sucks" tour worthy of Ozzy Osbourne.

We’ve also got a trip to Alaska lined up, land and sea, which I’m greatly looking forward to. At 52 I am very aware of my steady advance into middle age and want to see and experience more of the world while I still can. 

What plans do you have for 2026? What behaviors do you hope to adopt, or drop? 

BTW I’m debating more posts like this, where I’m just sort of rambling not about any particular book or movie or author or trend. I enjoy letting my mind wander without needing to stop and reference facts or cite passages.

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity by Paul Kingsnorth, and the need for lines

My neighbors (most of them) outsource their lawn care. They used to fertilize and cut their own lawns, maintain flower beds and gardens. Now that’s done by hired help, men with faster and more efficient machines. “It was taking too long, I’d rather use my time to do something else,” they say.

I am one of a shrinking number of holdouts. I like going outside, working with my hands. Compared to a trained landscaper I’m quite inefficient; two men crews buzz through a lawn in half the time or less with zero-turn lawnmowers and gas-powered leafblowers.

I don’t begrudge my neighbors their choice. I favor active, informed choices, and planning one’s life. But sometimes I wonder: What is the end game of efficiency? Should our goal be removal of all hard things? 

What happens if we could outsource everything? Every effort, including thinking, creativity?

What would that sort of society look like? My guess is it would feel mechanical, uniform, disconnected from the organic. 

Inhuman.

Life is not all about efficiency. Humans need to encounter resistance, do hard things, because these are often the most rewarding. Accomplishing hard things make us who we are.

Today that notion is starting to feel outdated, quaint. Our species is obsessed with ease, efficiency, quantification, improvement. We are increasingly hell-bent on these pursuits, regardless of the tradeoffs.

We are allowing machines to take over. The machine.

In Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, author Paul Kingsnorth argues that the modern world is dominated by The Machine. We inhabit a world in which we have replaced our old myths with the Myth of Progress, a tale spun by the impersonal and unerring logic of circuitry. We have replaced spiritual beliefs with machine belief, that life is only material, that which is valuable is that which can be measured, quantified and can be “improved.”

***

The elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth viewed the world as an organic entity, a living thing worthy of preservation and beautification. They sought to preserve their natural surroundings. Trees were not resources to be harvested and processed, but nourished and shepherded. 

Conversely Saruman and his army of orcs saw the world not an as organism, but a mechanism. Their goal was to harvest nature, use its improvable elements to create a new and better reality made in the image of the machine.

The machine always needs more. More growth. More reach. 

I believe in the importance of myths, but I also recognize their limitations. Myths must be interpreted. They are subjective, open to more than one meaning. 

Almost everyone swallows The Myth of Progress, without hesitation. It says that history follows a straight line, from cavemen to peasant farmers to utopia. 

Have we made advances as a species? Of course. Anyone who fails to see our huge progress is delusional. I would not want to live in a world without electricity or modern medicine.

But how much is enough? Can there ever be enough? Are we allowed to talk about limits?

Certainly we understand there is a limit to how much ice cream we should eat, or alcohol we should drink. Too much of these are unhealthy. Even too much exercise will kill you.

But as for technology? We don’t seem to have guidelines. We have some dim idea that excessive screen time is undesirable. But we seem reluctant to pause, or certainly draw the line of “enough.”

And so we lose the battle to the black screen.

***

I admit this is hard, and the arguments for ever-progress, persuasive.

Where do you draw the line? At indoor plumbing? Trains, automobiles, aircraft? Telegraphs, telephones? Vaccines? Computers, the internet, smartphones? 

Advanced artificial intelligence, robotics, androids, artificial reality?

Far enough out and it seems the only options are soma and capitulation.

What is important is not precisely where to draw the line, but that we have one, or can even think of drawing one, Kingsnorth argues. Because when we draw lines we are demonstrating that we are human beings with self-determination. That we are bounded, and boundaries are a good thing.

Without boundaries we are formless voids. We fall out of touch with physical reality. Nature becomes just a math problem to solve. We are divorced from it and indifferent to the divine. We become our screens.

People, place, prayer, and the past, are our roots. Human beings have a nature. But in the machine age we are uprooted. We know something is wrong; half the planet is mad. The online world is on fire.

Kingsnorth advocates for something quite radical, for those able to do so.

Form local guerilla communities of dissidence. Smash your smartphone. Delete the internet. Burn the data centers.

Rebellion. Overthrow. Return to What Came Before.

Tolkien knew the One Ring had to be destroyed. Anyone who tried to use its power would be corrupted, even those with the best of intent would ultimately fall under its sway. 

AI adoption is shocking and disgusting. Humans ostensibly are in control and possessed of some modicum of free will, but with these gifts passively watch the virulent, viral like growth of a tech that destroys education, the environment, jobs, creativity, our very ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. It’s absolutely incredible to me. And yet here we are, like rabbits in Watership Down. We ignore the shining wire, the deadly trap, because the keeper of the wire keeps us well fed, safe, and “in charge.” We become willfully complicit in our own destruction.

We must rebel.

***

This is challenging book to read. You might be hurt. If you are a party adherent, of left or right persuasion, you will be offended. Kingsnorth takes on and takes apart identity politics and free market capitalism. He punches up against authoritarian impulses; he punches down against DEI initiatives.

I did not agree with his assessment of the COVID-19 vaccine, but so what? I’m a grown man.

Read it anyway. 

The questions it poses are ones we must grapple with. It’s a necessary live grenade in a land of stale thinking and blindness; we’re all complaining about politics and social sleights and online offenses when the real problem is machine culture.

While I don’t agree with all of Kingsnorth’s assertions and conclusions, where I am in full and vigorous agreement is the need to draw a line.

If you are unwilling to draw a line you don’t have one. Someone, or something, will fill that emptiness. Nature abhors a vacuum, so doom scrolling will fill it. Or AI.

The machine is doing this to us, more every day.

Do you have a line?

Mine is large language models for creative endeavors. Outsourcing my decision-making, my thinking, and myself, to a machine. I will not do it. My writing here is mine, and always will be.

***

In my creeping old(er) age I am cognizant of old man shouting at cloud syndrome. I strive to avoid reflexive negativity. I know we have made positive strides forward socially and technologically since my childhood and my early memories of the mid-late 1970s. I would not want to live in the pre-industrial age.

But when I see people everywhere hunched over screens, staring at hand-held boxes, consuming, I wonder. 

When I see AI derangement and manufactured news, I’m sure.

Technology and progress are not always synonymous. The Myth of Progress is just that. There is only Change, and some of it is good, some not.

***

I feel powerless, we all do, because we are some mixture of willing and unwilling participants in the machine. I used to write for a printed newspaper, now I write for algorithmic platforms that implore me to rewrite everything I type with AI. I write in ChatGPT wastelands of babble and emojis.

But this is how I feed and clothe my family. What are most of us to do, Kingsnorth asks?

The author moved his family out of his homeland of England and into rural Ireland, embracing farming, home schooling, and tech-restricted living.

Most of us aren’t in a position to do this. But we are all capable of the small rebellions.

Restrict your phone time.

Read paper books.

Meet with friends, in person.

Be in nature.

Worship.

How do we become indigenous again in the age of the machine?

Draw a line. 

Where is yours?

The Silver Key: 2025 in review

T-800s like it here... but people too.

Traffic to the blog EXPLODED in 2025.

Unfortunately some of it appears to be robots, likely using my posts to train LLMs. But robots are only part of the story. There are also a lot of fine folks who seem to like what I have to say here on the Silver Key. Lots of returning visitors, lots of comments. For which I remain very grateful.

I’ve got a lot to be grateful for on the writing front in 2025.

2026 will be the year of my heavy metal memoir. I spent a lot of time working on it behind the scenes. I shared it with three readers who appear in it and have taken their advice into consideration. Made a few changes. Re-read it after 3 months and rewrote quite a bit.  

The writing is done, I can’t make it any better nor tell the story I want to tell any more effectively. Next will be editing and cover design.

I’m in the process of helping my friend Tom Barber publish his memoir via Kindle Direct Publishing. I can’t wait to share more details about Tom’s book, which details the depths of his alcohol addiction, his travels out west, all lavishly illustrated with his own artwork. 

KDP is pretty easy to use and I’m near certain I will be using the same platform for my book.

It was a productive year for me on The Silver Key. This post is my 89th, the most I’ve published in a year since 2022, and my fourth highest annual output all-time. And as noted, traffic went through the roof.

People are somehow still visiting this archaic corner of cyberspace. As of this writing (Saturday, Dec. 20) I’ve had 71,000 views in 2025, up from 45,000 in 2024 and 29,000 in 2023. I expected to see traffic decline as folks use AI to find answers or information without going out to websites, but that’s not the case here.

I published broadly on heavy metal, sword-and-sorcery, reading trends, Arthuriana, and the war for our attention. All topics that interest me. All seemed to resonate.

My most popular post by far was a guest blogger writing about Rob Zombie.

Let’s take a look at the 20 most popular posts of 2025.

1. An interesting personal insight into Moorcock’s inspirations (733 views). I learned something new about the author of Elric and Corum during this podcast interview—his father left the family when Moorcock was quite young, and the experience left him with abandonment issues and separation anxiety. Could this have been a formative influence on his writing?
2. Celtic Adventures wrapup and on into Cimmerian September (760 views). I’ve read 40 books in 2025 including DMR’s Celtic Adventures. Highly recommend this title, if for nothing else than John Barnett’s “Grana, Queen of Battle.” A unbelievably cracking good bit of historical adventure written in 1913.
3. Rest in Peace James Silke (775 views). The author of the Death Dealer series left us in February, age 93. That reminds me I need to read and review book 4, Plague of Knives. As I’ve noted these are so bad they cross back over to good territory.
4. We're living in an outrage machine (776 views). I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I can say with certainty that most of the problems we have are not as large and certainly not apocalyptic as you’ve been led to believe by the media. Rather, your attention is monetized and fear and outrage sells.
5. The Empress of Dreams—an (overdue) appreciation of Tanith Lee (776 views). I’ve never given Tanith Lee her just due and this collection from DMR books reminds me I need to read more of her stuff. Master stylist and atmosphere-ist.
6. Rest in Peace, Howard Andrew Jones (783 views). Sad and terrible news about HAJ, who was taken from us far too early. His works will endure.
7. The Ring of the Nibelung/Roy Thomas and Gil Kane (791 views). I’m glad I picked up this wonderful graphic novel by a pair of comic book greats. Recommended as an easily digestible entry point to Richard Wagner’s classic opera.
8. Of pastiche and John C. Hocking’s Conan and the Living Plague (797 views). Anything I write about Conan or Robert E. Howard performs well. This is one of the better pastiches I’ve read, and here I weigh in on John C. Hocking’s book and what I like to see in pastiches in general.
9. Knightriders, a review (817 views). As a fan of all things King Arthur I can’t believe I’ve never watched this odd little film about modern “knights” on motorcycle horseback. Quirky and flawed but unique and recommended.
10. Cold Sweat, Thin Lizzy (855 views). I continue to say that Thin Lizzy has been unfairly pigeonholed as a one hit wonder. Forget The Boys are Back in Town, listen to Cold Sweat. It rocks.
11. Revisiting H.P. Lovecraft's "The Silver Key" (927 views). Wherein I revisit the story that gave this blog its name. There is no cause to value material fact over the content of our dreams. 
12. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck, a review (1033 views). I finally got around to reading Steinbeck’s treatment of the Athurian myth. Sadly unfinished but definitely worth reading.
13. Goodbye to Romance: Reflections on Black Sabbath, Back to the Beginning, and the end of the road (1036 views). Another sad loss this year; the death of Ozzy Osbourne and the end of the first heavy metal band. Am waiting on the release of their final concert on DVD.
14. Robert E. Howard, The Life and Times of a Texas Author (1039 views). Kudos to my friend Will Oliver on writing what may well prove to be the definitive biography of Robert E. Howard. A heroic amount of research. Pick this one up.
15. Martin Eden (1909), Jack London 1083 views. Speaking of Robert E. Howard, this great story by the great Jack London contains many striking parallels to his life. It's an incredibly powerful book on its own merits.
16. Reading is in trouble … what are we going to do about it? (1084 views). Reading is in serious decline and it saddens me. I don’t want to live in a world where we have no attention span and consume content no longer than Tweets and short-form video, though that is on our doorstep. Keep reading, and read to your children.
17. Paper books are better than digital: Five reasons why (1085 views). I’m still a paper-only reader, don’t even own a kindle. One day that may change… but it is not this day.
18. Bruce Dickinson at the House of Blues, Boston MA Sept. 11, 2025 (1182 views): Fantastic concert by the seemingly ageless singer of Iron Maiden, whom I had ever seen perform solo until this fall. Tears of the Dragon nearly brought me to tears.
19. Disconnect (1423 views). The best remedy for many of the above ills is to take a technology detox (except for coming to the Silver Key). Also RIP Robert Redford.
20. Celebrating Rob Zombie, graphic artist, at sixty (4,529 views)  Guest poster Deuce Richardson stole my thunder with the biggest runaway post of the year. Why did this one outperform? Its well written, about a famous performer … but I also suspect it’s because Deuce had me include so many images of Rob's art. These show up in searches and drive traffic. Something for me to consider in my own posts. Either way, nice job Deuce.

***

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far thanks for reading the blog, today and all year long. I always welcome your comments and suggestions. 

Merry Christmas and I wish you a very fine 2026.