Nine Reasons I'm Reading War and Westerns

- It’s a break from SF (shocking! … but I hop from this to that by nature)

- It tests me by making me seriously wonder how I’d function in such an environment – would I thrive or simply survive? (or even that?)

- It’s historical – and I’ve always loved History (with a capital-H)

- There’s a code of morality, a code of ethics, there – yes, there is – that’s simpler, bolder, more obvious, and more masculine than the cultural relativism we’re forced to swim in these days

- Similarly, it definitely and brutally ain’t PC ... guaranteed to induce crying jags and apology manifestos from college professors who may accidentally read in the genre

- It’s escapist, and does the trick that SF hasn’t been lately … pulling me into a world vastly different from my own

- Cinematic tie-ins: literally dozens of Westerns and War movies for every quality book in the field I can read

- And, like SF, it brings me back to my childhood days (“playing war”, mostly, as opposed to reading about it, though I did read The Man Who Never Was and a slim paperback history of WW2 as a kid)

- Details, details, details … six shooters, tactics, living off the land, the fog of war, horses, ammunition … it’s what interests me of late



[Note: I tried to come up with ten reasons, of course. The first nine flew off my fingertips in less than ten minutes, then I spent yesterday’s commute home, dinner preparation, and the half-hour before bed wracking the brain for the tenth. It wouldn’t come. So – nine it is!]