Kenneth M. Swope's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Tolkien is my all-time favorite author. The material in this book had appeared before, but was scattered all over in books published over several decades. 

Bringing all this material together and organizing it in a more coherent fashion makes the stories come alive like never before and allows the reader to more easily situate them within the grand scope of Tolkien’s mythology. Moreover, the depth, beauty, and complexity of the writing demonstrate just how much more erudite Tolkien was than most of the hacks posing as fantasy authors today. You get a real sense of the history of Middle Earth.

When I started college, I majored in English because I had ambitions of becoming a Tolkien scholar. I was also interested in history, particularly that of Asia, which just seemed deeper and more mysterious than the Western history I learned in high school. But by the end of my first semester I realized that history was in fact my real love and that’s what I most appreciated about Tolkien was the history embedded in his stories. 

As a professional historian I have endeavored to relate history through the epic stories of the heroes & villains who made it, while also talking about the effects on ordinary people, just as Tolkien does with Hobbits. This book is the third in my series on the Ming-Qing transition in China. I am working on the fourth book now.

This book offers an excellent overview of the military history of Asia in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing especially on the grand strategies of China, Japan, and Russia/USSR in the era under consideration. 

It correctly highlights the fact that World War II began in Asia and connects this to broader historical developments that impelled Japan to attempt continental conquest in search of resources. The excellence of the work stems from the author’s ability to carefully offer a balanced analysis of the decisions of the major actors. 

Rather than simply look at the success or failure of specific actions or policies, she tries to understand why certain decisions were made within the context of the times.

I had never heard of this historical figure when my uncle, who lives in Italy, recommended this book to me. The subject was a poet, writer, and early pioneer of the militarism that came to embody Fascism in Italy in the early 20th century.

This is a fascinating and engrossing biography of a real-life lothario turned rabble-rouser. It offers a fascinating window into European politics in the era of World War I offering insight into how Fascism and other radical ideologies were able to take off in the 1920s-30s.