Alas, we’ve reached the fall. But there’s still plenty of reading to do.

For this edition of the reading list, I’ll continue with the themes of baseball and history. Along with those books, I’ve also got some new sci-fi for you.

Enjoy!

Brad Balukjian – The Wax Pack/The Six Pack

I’ll have more to say about Balukjian and his books over at my Medium profile. But for this post, I’ll say that I read both of his ‘road trip’ books, and enjoyed them both.

The Six Pack is a true road trip book, where Balukjian hits the road in search of the lives of the players from a 1980s Topps baseball card set. He finds lots of guys who have ‘retired,’ but still want to get back into the game.

But he does find some curious cases along the way. He finds one player who has become a drug addict, one tax accountant, and some guys who just don’t want to be bothered.

Balukjian also pitches The Six Pack as a road trip book, but it really isn’t. In this one, he traces down the professional wrestlers on the card the night the Iron Sheik defeated Bob Backlund for the WWF championship. And these stories get wilder.

Professional wrestlers of the 1970s and 1980s were under strong pressure to perform every night, and they basked in the adulation of the fans. Many couldn’t let go of those things when they left the ring, and it shows. One wrestler lost the ability to distinguish between wrestling ‘kayfabe’ and reality. One struggles with his role as a father. And one (the Sheik himself) continued to wrangle with his life arc from immigrant to American.

In both books, Balukjian gets at insights into the complexity of people in ‘large’ roles.

KT Hoffman – The Prospects

In lots of ways, this book is a standard rom-com. Hoffman combines baseball with romance, where a young minor league prospect meets a new love interest.

There’s nothing new about that. People have been combining baseball with the romance genre for decades. But Hoffman makes it a romance between two teammates. And one of the teammates is a trans man. So, we’ve got a story about two gay minor league players looking to get to the big league roster. And one of them is a trans man.

So, that is new.

As for the story itself, it’s a fine read. Romance novels generally aren’t my thing, but this one has enough to make for an interesting story. And the baseball story, while implausible at times (e.g., the ‘perfect game’), works pretty well.

I enjoyed reading.

Anthony Kaldellis – The New Roman Empire

Kaldellis presents the first comprehensive, thousand year history of the Byzantine Empire* (more on that term later) in a long time. And it’s an excellent one. On the whole, Kaldellis tells the story of Constantinople and its empire comprehensively and well.

First, more than anything, Kaldellis writes his history as a corrective to those who consider Byzantium to be a ‘Greek’ Empire that’s foreign and unfamiliar to the Roman imperial tradition. To counter this view, Kaldellis points to the continuities from Augustus all the way to Konstantinos XI Palaiologos (i.e., “Constantine XI”). He sees a Roman Empire all the way through, though he does do some hedging by calling it the ‘New’ Roman Empire.

I’ve discussed this topic a number of times. And while Kaldellis still hasn’t convinced me that the Roman Empire, as such, survived the Arab invasions of the 7th century, he did convince me that the so-called ‘Byzantine’ rump state was Roman in at least some sense.

What sense is that? Kaldellis lays out a compelling case that the Byzantine Empire united itself around an ethnic Roman population and turned them into a quasi national state. He even argues compellingly that this state started looking like a ‘new’ (i.e., not the same as the old) Roman Empire by the late 9th century.

Kaldellis strikes a proper balance between broader economic forces, personalities and politics, and things like disease and climate change. There’s been a scholarly trend to over-emphasize the latter of these things, which Kaldellis helpfully doesn’t succumb to.

Finally, I’ll just say that this is an excellent book. Anyone looking for a one stop ‘Byzantine’ (that word again) history to add to their library should buy this one.

Arkady Martine – A Memory Called Empire/A Desolation Called Peace

These two sci-fi space operas are from Arkady Martine – a Byzantine historian and new sci-fi author. They tell a story set in the Galaxy-spanning Teixcaalan Empire, which looks suspiciously like Byzantium in space.

And they’re great stories. The first book follows an isolated outpost at the edge of the Empire, looking to maintain its independence. Its ambassador navigates complex (byzantine?) imperial politics. She also seems to fall in love with her cultural liaison, and she struggles with a piece of technology that allows her to communicate with her (now dead) predecessor.

The second book picks up where the first left off, following the war kicked off at the conclusion of the previous novel, as well as the continuing struggles of the Teixcaalan neighbors to remain independent.

Both books do an excellent job weaving together a complex series of characters and events.

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