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As this Year of Our Common Calendar 2010 began its downhill slide, I turned 32 years old, saw bleakness on all sides of me, and read the following books:

The Rise of the Roman Empire, Polybius. This one took forever. Not because it’s long; I read the far more lengthy Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in much less time. Whereas Gibbon’s prose still seems very contemporary after a couple of centuries, however, no translation can really quite bridge the ten-times-as-long gap between us and Polybius. As I find to be the case with many classic works, it was interesting, and if you settle into its rhythms you can make good progress, but it’s still very easy to set aside.

Having finished it, I confess that I’m still not entirely sure how Rome built its empire; this book was really more like “How Rome subdued Carthage and became kingmakers among the Greeks.” I can note, however, that while “killing those who opposed them” certainly did play a role, I really don’t think it was the key. (After all, a province with a productive, taxpaying populace was of far greater value than a desolation.) In fact the Romans employed canny diplomacy as much as sharpened steel.

If there was one concept in particular that stuck out, it was Rome’s combination of bloody-minded will to win, however long it took, with a remarkable open-mindedness toward strategies and tactics. The agriculturalist Romans were initially at a disadvantage against the seafaring Carthaginians in the Mediterranean, for example, but after reverse engineering a captured enemy ship and introducing some ideas of their own, they quickly built up a powerful navy. By contrast, the Greeks stuck with their inflexible phalanx despite defeat after defeat against Roman legions, and thus Greece ended up a province of Rome rather than vice versa. I will leave any possible lessons for modern America as an exercise for the reader.

The Stolen Village, Des Ekin. In the 17th century, much of the population of Baltimore, a small Irish village, was stolen away to Algiers and enslaved following a raid by Barbary pirates. A well-written and interesting account of a time when a pirate capital could flourish at Europe’s doorstep and an African society regularly pressed Europeans into slavery, rather than vice versa, with some of the enslaved captives eventually preferring the social mobility and prosperity of Algiers, for all its hazards, to a life of poverty in near-feudal European villages.

The Unquiet Bones and A Corpse at St. Andrew’s Chapel, Melvin Starr. Though I read some of them, obviously, I can’t help rolling my eyes at the countless new novels that come along boasting “the first of a new historical mystery series.” These two, moreover, are a bit clumsily designed and typeset, and the first page of The Unquiet Bones seemed painfully amateurish. I am nonetheless glad that I persevered, because these novels proved to be a decided pleasure to read. They recall some elements of Ellis Peters’ Cadfael series, also set in the quieter, slower-paced (if, for story purposes, rather frequently disturbed by murder) world of medieval England, though the lead character comes from a much different background and thus offers refreshing differences as well.

Remarkably enough, I also found the occasional diversions into musings on Christian thought interesting, too; I’ve no idea how period-accurate they really are (though the lead character is acknowledged as something of an unusual free-thinker) but, even as an atheist, I can certainly appreciate humble and open-minded philosophical curiosity about ethics, meaning, etc. (All of which was wholly unlike, of course, the typical aggressive certainty of a modern American evangelical.)

Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. A fascinating little volume combining glimpses of the author’s own childhood and adolescence in was-once-Constantinople with musings, on the city and on melancholy itself. In some parts, actually, a good deal like a nonfiction version of Midnight’s Children without psychic powers, etc. The author is definitely not a cheery man nor his work uplifting, and would probably turn off a lot of people, but it certainly suited me and my mood just now.

Elephantoms, Lyall Watson. An odd one, this. I picked it up at the library’s recent book sale along with a few others for 50¢, because it was well-designed and seemed like it might be interesting. It was, though it was also very little like what I had expected. Part memoir, part near-hallucinatory visions, part fringe biological science. Watson, apparently, was something of an odd man.

You Can be Anything, Sarah Montague. This one scarcely counts, being a satire of a typical small child’s book and therefore a good deal shorter than a typical blog post. But, it was also funny, even if it was the kind of thing they have in the spinner racks next to the checkout line at Borders.

Chasing Cézanne, Peter Mayle. Another slow read, by contrast, in this case due not to difficulty with a millennia-old writing voice, but to frequent over-cuteness and plain old annoyance. On the surface, this one should have been very well-suited to my tastes. I love caper stories. It seems that much of the appeal is ruined, however, when all of the lead characters in the caper story are already well-to-do, fashionable and near-insufferably smug with their own fabulousness. Toward the end of the story, when one of these smirking, sophisticated Manhattanites is suddenly and unconvincingly transformed into a breathless and wide-eyed schoolgirl because “I get to see Paris!?!” it sticks out like a sore thumb.

The story did feature plenty of entertaining characters, lines and scenes, but even if the “aren’t we so marvelous” bits didn’t rub one the wrong way, the ending was an absolute blank squib. Like The Grapes of Wrath, the book just quits with no resolution whatsoever; unlike Steinbeck, Mayle had only written a short, breezy “beach” novel before he bailed out. I swear, I’m just about done bothering with authors whose biography includes something like “so-and-so divides his time between New York and his 14th-century Tuscan villa.”

Running to the Mountain, Jon Katz. Bit of an odd choice, picked up on a recommendation. Basically, a neurotic 50-year-old writer buys a “fixer-upper” mountain retreat, and muses on this, and other life experiences. And on this odd American monk whose writings seem to fascinate him. Very enjoyable, though, all the same; I could closely relate to some things (e.g. a career gone haywire) while others were entirely foreign to me (e.g. marriage, parenthood, pets).

Mystery of the Blue Train, Agatha Christie. Another 50¢ book sale purchase. I bought this one because I’m a sucker for train stories, and figured that an Agatha Christie mystery novel would at least be readable. It was about what I expected, though railroad travel really played only a small and incidental role. Ah well. (Yes, I have read Murder on the Orient Express.)