Reflections On Twelve Months
A few years back I made myself the promise that I would not read another fiction book until I had been published as an author myself.
This was a horrible idea for a number of reasons. Not the least of which being that that is simply not how behavioral psychology works. Second-most in importance is how the subject matter I chose to read was mirroring the world that we all shared falling deeper and deeper into shit.
I was reading a book called the Fascist Tradition while watching the January 6th Insurrection, specifically the part of the book describing which classes and groups of people that a fascist revolution needed in order to succeed.
The week that Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time in my lifetime I had come to the chapter of William Montgomery McGovern’s book From Luther to Hitler where he examined the development of the concept of international sovereignty and international relations.
On October 7th I had picked up the Fundamentals of Genocide.
A Theology of Liberation was my companion in the weeks before and after JD Vance murdered the Pope.
Power Worshipers was my read for November into December as the global impact of allowing Christian Nationalists to fund Republican campaigns like they’re madrasas funding Al-Qaeda became increasingly apparent.
Madeline Albright’s Fascism, A Warning, talked about the failures of Republican diplomacy over the last two decades and what would happen to America’s soft power at the beginning of January as Donald Trump pissed the way the last vestiges of leadership or power that the United States had on a world stage.
I went to follow up Albright’s misnamed book about authoritarian threats to democratic institutions and ideals with On Democracy, by Robert Dahl.
But then I stopped. Twelve Months, the latest book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series came out a little more than a week after my thirtieth birthday. My mother had bought it for me for Christmas, I told her I wanted it the same day that she called to tell me she was in the hospital again - one of the scariest phone calls I had had in my life.
Butcher’s Dresden Files share a status with Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere as stories that have saved my life in the past. It’s an urban fantasy series. Meaning that the main wizard character named Harry does not shop in hidden alleys of a demimonde and then secret himself away to a boarding school separated from the world.
Harry Dresden walks the streets of Chicago a private detective listed in the phonebook under wizard. Or at least, that’s where the series started. Now he suffers the consequences of being an very, very effective wizard, batting out of his weight class and making himself important to the general fabric of international politics in the magical world.
In Twelve Months he is paying for that impertinence and importance. Mourning the loss of someone close to him, forced into an arranged marriage with his half-brother’s succubus-vampire half-sister, struggling to save his half-brother from the demon devouring him from the inside and from a nation of elves that want his head in restitution. And navigating a Chicago that suffered damage in a magical that rocked the city back into the Middle Ages.
Dresden’s story is one of navigating grief, pain, loss and the general sense that the world is wrong due in no small part to his presence in it.
At 480 pages Twelve Months is about half of the length of what I would consider to be a long book. It took me less than a week to read it, and that only in part to some other constraints on my time. two of those nights were staying up late, turning page after page. Just saying it would only be one more chapter. And then Dracula’s father shows up to crash a Halloween party in the last line and suddenly I’ve made a liar of myself.
You don’t have that same kind of dilemma when you’re reading about history, or the science of kraterocracy. Yes, I love my research. I love the work that I’ve dedicated a third of my life to; learning, educating, working to improve the world and pull it out of the tail-spin we’ve fallen into as best I can.
The difference between fiction and non-fiction is not as simple as the difference between true and false. Real and fabricated. Non-fiction is learning through information, while fiction is learning through imagination.
Butcher told a story about people, going through some of the hardest moments and deepest pains of their lives. Coming together in order to recover, despite the inclination to tear each other apart. Yes this story contained faeries, wizards, vampires of death and lust, ghouls that devoured the flesh of the living and spoke in Cajun accents. Valkyries and a Tibetan mastiff reading the chronicles of Narnia.
Despite what one might think, those elements did not detract from the truths in the story. They enhanced it, made it somewhere comfortable and safe to feel and grow alongside all of those characters. To cheer when they overcame all odds and surmounted and vexed obstacles that were beyond there power to defeat until they did.
In Twelve Months, Jim Butcher told me a story that reminded me why I became a bookworm in the first place.
Dogs bark. Adders bite. Scorpions sting. Dresden vexes. Readers read.