wolffyluna

Books

Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher

I had heard good things about T Kingfisher, and borrowed the first book my library had without looking into it at all. So I was a bit surprised, after it opened on a severed head, to find out it was a romance. It's a very good romance though! The dialogue is top notch, and really sells you on why the leads should be together.

My only complaint is actually downstream of it being well written: Grace is an accurate* portrayal of living with trauma. This sometimes makes her internal monologue deeply irritating. But I want to give Kingfisher points for writing a character with a mental illness that just doesn't go away when it's narratively inconvenient, and is a really accurate depiction of a specific experience. And also: Grace has a conception of what's going on that makes sense for someone who lives in a fantasy world without the DSM, and it's so great to see.

*I am not the Queen of Knowing PTSD, and could be inaccurate myself, but. You know what I mean.

The Templars by Dan Jones

I am who I am-- I am a sucker for elite historical cavalries. And now I know more about the Templars!

This is a chronological, ~narrative history of the Knights Templar. (There's actually a funny section in the introduction, where the author feels he has to justify presenting events in chronological. "I know us professional historians know that time is an illusion made up by Big Chronology to sell more Timelines, but I'm having to explain this to lay people!") I found it quite readable, and I liked how the author actually got into the potential biases of different sources.

The Knights Templar was an odd organisation: it was simultaneously incredibly competent ('training not to break formation' was a devastating military technology for all it's simplicity, and they were good at it) and incredibly dumb (a requirement to always follow orders and leaders that semi-regularly went "what, are you a chicken? buk-buk-bukAWK!" in the face of overwhelming force lead to dumb outcomes.) Also, all the individual knights were (relatively) poor, but the organisation was swimming in cash. (Louis the IX got kidnapped and needed to raise a ransom. The Knights Templar would not give a loan, because they had sworn an oath to keep the treasure in safe keeping. "But you know, if you took the treasure by force, we'd simply have to get compensation for it once we got back to Acre, hintHINT.")

I now know more about the Mamluks, and am going to have to research them, as another elite historical cavalry :P

My one quibble with the book is that there is a time skip, and the thing they skip over is the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller having a proxy war on behalf of Venice and Genoa, which feels like a weird thing to skip?

I knew that the Templar order fell because of Phillip the Fair, who had very realpolitik reasons for getting rid of them. But also he seemed to um, believe his own wild claims about the Templar's 'heresy?' It's weird in that this 13th century guy is very recognisably doing something similar to QAnon??? Very weird.

Also, fun fact that will now haunt me forever: the Knights Templar? Long gone. There is no secret order of Templar knights that still stands (because... how? The leadership died, everyone else got absorbed into other monastic orders.) The Teutonic knights, those johnny-come-latelies to the crusades? They're still a going concern... technically. There's not many of them and they mostly provide pastoral care to German ex-pats. But the Knights Hospitaller, whatever happened to them? I mean, it would be weird if throughout the last 800 or so years they were a going concern, even weirder if they were still having notable influence over the world. Like, it would be strange if a crusading era organisation was doing first aid for music festivals, teaching CPR, or running the Northern Territory's ambulance service. ...yep.

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