Tag: reading

Lazy Sunday CDVIII: Opium Tales Reviews, Part I

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I’ve been working my way through Roman and Anna Riva’s collection of novellas, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve reviewed the first three books so far, so it seemed like a good time to look back at those reviews today:

These are fun books and quick reads; I highly recommend them (A Pirate’s Tale is my favorite; that’s an Amazon Affiliate link, so I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you).

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Midweek Novella Review: Opium Tales: The Staff

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I’m continuing to review the novellas adapted from Roman and Anna Riva’s planned animated series, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve followed Roman’s work for years, and he has grown an impressive and active presence on Substack. When I found out he and his wife had a series of short novellas in print—and that they are all, save one, under $8—I snapped them up and decided to review them one-by-one.

Last week, I reviewed the second book in the series, A Pirate’s Tale (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link—more of them below—so I receive a portion of any purchase made through that link, at no additional cost to you). As I wrote last week, the novella is “a full-on swashbuckling adventure in the vein of (as the Rivas point out in their introduction) the Pirates of the Caribbean films.”

According to the introduction of each volume, Roman and Anna sought, but failed to procure, funding for an animated series called Opium Tales. They hoped to call it Dark Tales, but the name was taken, so they leaned into the opium habits of early eighteenth-century Romantics and landed on Opium Tales. Since they still had all the rights to their stories, they decided to publish them as a series of novellas.

Here is the series—or, at least the volumes I purchased (the following are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any purchase made through these links, at no additional cost to you):

The entire series is (as of the time of writing) $46.94 before tax, so these are easy to scoop up in one fell swoop.

I was unclear which novella came third in the sequence, so I went to the source and asked Roman himself. He told me to read The Staff next. I’ve been on the road a ton lately with some SCISA work and to pick up our new puppy, and was worried I might not have a chance to read The Staff in time of this Wednesday, but Tuesday afternoon presented an opportunity with both dogs napping on the couch—and yours portly cracking open a book starring a clever thief with a heart as golden as the afternoon sunlight streaming into our sunroom.

So far, A Pirate’s Tale remains my favorite, but I’m a sucker for a pirate setting. The Staff is a close second, though, as I’m also a sucker for a skilled rogue who is experienced as a second-story man or cat burglar, the kind of guy who can get into impossible places with seeming ease. The Staff presents us with such a protagonist, the unnamed “thief,” who must retrieve a powerful staff as ransom for his lovely new bride, Katherine.

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Midweek Novella Review: Opium Tales: A Pirate’s Tale

The Portly Politico1 Comment

For the next few weeks I’m going to review the novellas adapted from Roman and Anna Riva’s planned animated series, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve followed Roman’s work for years, and it’s refreshing to see his active presence on Substack. When I found out he and his wife had a series of short novellas in print—and that they are all, save one, under $8.

Last week, I reviewed the first book in the series, Humpty Dumpty (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link—more of them below—so I receive a portion of any purchase made through that link, at no additional cost to you).

According to the introduction of each volume, Roman and Anna sought, but failed to procure, funding for an animated series called Opium Tales. They hoped to call it Dark Tales, but the name was taken, so they leaned into the opium habits of early eighteenth-century Romantics and landed on Opium Tales. Since they still had all the rights to their stories, they decided to publish them as a series of novellas.

Here is the series—or, at least the volumes I purchased; if I’m missing one, please let me know, Roman (the following are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any purchase made through these links, at no additional cost to you):

The entire series is (as of the time of writing) $46.94 before tax, so these are easy to scoop up in one fell swoop.

According to is introduction, A Pirate’s Tale was intended to be the second installment in the animated series. Indeed, there was some debate between it or Humpty Dumpty being the pilot episode, but H. Dumps won out due to name recognition. That move seems wise, as HD strongly establishes the series’ foundation in European folklore and fairy tales, so a classic nursery rhyme turned into a dark tale of corruption and excess was the fitting choice.

That said, A Pirate’s Tale is my favorite between the two. While I loved what HD did with the source material, A Pirate’s Tale is a full-on swashbuckling adventure in the vein of (as the Rivas point out in their introduction) the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

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Midweek Novella Review: Opium Tales: Humpty Dumpty

The Portly Politico1 Comment

For the next few weeks I’m going to review the novellas adapted from Roman and Anna Riva’s planned animated series, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve followed Roman’s work for years, and it’s refreshing to see his active presence on Substack. When I found out he and his wife had a series of short novellas in print—and that they are all, save one, under $8.

According to the introduction of each volume, Roman and Anna sought, but failed to procure, funding for an animated series called Opium Tales. They hoped to call it Dark Tales, but the name was taken, so they leaned into the opium habits of early eighteenth-century Romantics and landed on Opium Tales. Since they still had all the rights to their stories, they decided to publish them as a series of novellas.

Here is the series—or, at least the volumes I purchased; if I’m missing one, please let me know, Roman (the following are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any purchase made through these links, at no additional cost to you):

The entire series is (as of the time of writing) $46.94 before tax, so these are easy to scoop up in one fell swoop.

According to is introduction, Humpty Dumpty was the first installment in the series, and intended to be the pilot episode of the animated series. It is a dark fantasy rendering in the spirit of the Brothers Grimm, in which H. Dumpty is not a clumsy egg, but instead a brutish feudal lord with dark appetites.

Read More »

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part IV: Poetry

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP

After some delays and enjoying America’s 250th anniversary, yours portly is back with some reading, now featuring a once-great literary form: poetry.

Poetry gets a bad rap, likely because the former has largely devolved into the latter. It’s pretty easy to write prose and then chop it up into sentence fragments with some white space and indents and call it poetry.

Here’s that last sentence as “poetry”:

Poetry gets a bad
rap, likely because the former
has largely
Devolved
into the latter.  It's pretty
easy to write
Prose and then
chop
it
up
into sentence frag
ments with some

     white space      and
          indents
and call it
Poetry.

Well, you can see the problem right away. It’s obvious that this style isn’t really poetry at all. A humorous example of this phenomenon is the gag book The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump, 2009-2019, which Dr. Wife (then Dr. Girlfriend) got me for my fortieth birthday. The “poetry” consists of our president’s tweets formatted into various blends of shapes and white space akin to my example above. It’s fun and a big, beautiful addition to my collection, but part of the joke is that it’s not poetry (although there is a poetic quality to President Trump’s tweets, at time).

That said, one needn’t harken back to the days of yore to find good poetry. All of today’s examples are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Naturally, there’s tons of great poetry from the first half of the twentieth century (apologies to W. B. Yeats for not making the list this time; you will soon!), but the twenty-first century tends to be moms writing lengthy odes to their children on Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the efforts are rarely “poetic” in the truest sense of the word.

But poetry is vitally important, as is the ability to read and analyze it. Consider that large chunks of the Bible consist of poetry. The Book of Psalms is a collection of poems and song lyrics. Song of Solomon is a sensual love poem that depicts both the intense passion of a groom for his bride while also echoing the intense love of The Groom (Jesus Christ) for His Bride (us, the Church).

All that preamble aside, here are four works of poetry and/or collections you should add to your home library:

You can pick up all of these in paperback on Amazon for between $36.88 and $51.88 (Jeremy Miles’s—God Rest his soul—collection in full color is $30, but the greyscale edition is half the price). Centrism Games is the best value at just $5.57, and I highly recommend it.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part III: More Fiction

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP

It’s summertime, so it’s a great time to do some reading, especially the reading of fiction!

I was hoping to highlight some worthwhile poetry this week, but we’ll save that for next time. I’m out of town at the time of writing and don’t have immediate access to my books. However, I did recently purchase three books and I want to feature them.

Some of these will fall under “Short Fiction“; I defined that category in the first post in this series as “both short story collections and shorter novels/novellas” at fewer than or equal to 250 pages in length. Some of these probably come in a bit over that (admittedly generous) page length. Regardless, they’re all books I plan to read this summer, and I’ve already made substantial progress in one of them.

You can reader Parts I & II here and here, respectively. Part I looked at short fiction; Part II looked at non-fiction.

Here are three books I purchased earlier this week, and which I am currently reading:

  • Richard Matheson, I Am Legend – I’m currently reading this classic of 1950s horror. I recently watched the film adaptation starring Vincent Price, and realized it was high time I grabbed a copy of this book. The book is a harrowing study of the protagonist Robert Neville’s struggle against demons, both real (the vampires attacking his home) and psychic (his own tortured, alcoholic realization that he’s the last man on Earth). This version also comes with a collection of Matheson’s other stories and novellas.
  • Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes – I wrote a review of the film adaptation last October, and I love the flick. I cannot remember if I purchased a copy of the paperback at that point, because it feels like I remember reading it last fall; now, however, I can’t remember, so I may have just blown cash purchasing another copy. Regardless, I’m looking forward to reading—perhaps re-reading—this book.
  • Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz – Canticle has been on my list to read for awhile. Apparently, it’s one of the inspirations for the Fallout video game series. The concept is that a group of monks in the Utah deserts piece together bits of the past from some Jewish guy’s shopping list. Naturally, all of this occurs after a nuclear war of devastating proportions (I Am Legend also happens after a less devastating war in which—it is implied—atomic bombs fell in the United States).

More on I Am Legend below the punch. I’ve nearly read the entire novella (it’s around 170 pages). That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of dystopian, horror, and weird fiction, you can scoop them all up for under $35.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part II: Non-Fiction

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link.

See Part I here, and read the full post here. —TPP

I’m back with Part II of The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, with a focus on non-fiction. As a history teacher and a writer primarily focused on non-fiction, I possess a particular interest in non-fiction writing of every stripe. While I do love reading history, I enjoy reading broadly, so today’s list will have works of non-fiction from multiple genres.

Typically I leave the full list behind the paywall for paid subscribers; however, as several of these authors are indie/self-published and/or newer authors, I would like to boost their works more broadly (and, naturally, gain access to those sweet, sweet affiliate clicks). So, here are four books I’ve read and/or am currently reading that I highly recommend you order:

  • Nicholas R. Ochs, Age of Rot: A Right Wing Dissident’s Prison Dispatches from a Torn America – Nicholas Ochs was arrested following the Epiphany Protests for covering the events as an independent journalist. His association with the Proud Boys made him an easy target for Biden’s Justice Department, and he ended up with a four-year sentence (!) in a maximum security prison in Butler, North Carolina, where he faced a number of abuses (including an arbitrary stint in solitary confinement in winter without a mattress or blanket for his cot; he burned so many calories trying to stay warm that he became dangerously emaciated). This book is his collected prison writings, and it is a stark window into the political persecution and prosecutions that faced so many patriots in 2021.
  • Landis Brown, Life Under the Shadow of the Almighty: A Journey Through Psalm 91 – My pastor while I was living down in Lamar wrote this book. Pastor Dana, as we call him (his middle name is “Dana”), had an issue while preparing his manuscript: his editor backed out of the project. Pastor Dana contacted me and asked if I could edit the last four chapters, which I did last spring. I finally ordered a physical copy earlier this week, so I am excited to read the first two chapters (and re-read the four I edited). It’s an interesting blend of scholarly work and devotional.
  • H.H. Scullard and A.A.M. van der Heyden, Shorter Atlas of the Classical World – I picked up this delightful little survey of the classical world, which focuses on ancient Greece and Rome, when I was a teenager. I devoured it, cover-to-cover, and I love all the maps and the lithographic plates.
  • Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults: An Analysis of the Major Cult Systems in the Present Christian Era – I borrowed—and never returned, gulp!—a copy of this book from my Aunt Cheryl some years ago. It is the “textbook” on the various cults of the twentieth century from the perspective of an Evangelical Protestant Christian theologian and historian. Martin gives detailed historical information about the foundation of a number of cults, including the Nation of Islam and Mormonism, and offers Christians useful theological and historical grounds for arguing against these movements. My (well, my aunt’s) edition is from the twenty-fourth printing in 1977, and it certainly reflects the cultic activity of the time (some of the movements are now just footnotes in religious history, while others are still thriving).

More below the punch. That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and you can scoop them all up for under $70.71 at the time of writing.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Minecraft Camp 2026

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Part II of The Portly Political Summer Reading List 2026 will be out next week! If you missed Part I, read it here. —TPP

Minecraft Camp was this past Monday through Thursday, and it was another fun week of crafting and King’s Hawaiian Rolls. I can never quite remember when the first Minecraft Camp was, but it was likely either the summer of 2013 or 2014, which means the camp has been going on for over a decade.

When it began, a former colleague of mine got us setup with this gloriously old version of MinecraftEDU, based on Minecraft 1.7.10. That ancient version, one of my knowledgeable counselors informed me, was right before a number of major updates to the game. It’s fun seeing kids come in each year and trying to figure out why their preferred building material and/or mechanic isn’t available (no dolphins, sorry). That said, they all come to adapt to the older version; indeed, many of the veterans insist that we keep it.

Our version is also based on an old Java install that exists on a handful of USB sticks and a backup hard drive. Microsoft purchased Minecraft and MinecraftEDU some years ago, but our school computers at the time lacked the proper version of Windows to run it (I think we needed Windows 10 and our computers were running Windows 7). I’ve kept using this version out of inertia and, again, due to popular demand. I just did a search, and it seems it is available for download, so if you want to try the version we play, download and give it a shot.

All technical talk aside, let’s get into the heart of this year’s camp.

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Lazy Sunday CCCXC: Summer Reading Lists of Yesteryear

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Book titles in this post have an Amazon Affiliate link. I receive a portion of purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP

It’s been one of those rare, near-perfect Sundays, the kind of Sunday that is so peaceful, it’s hard to believe it’s possible. I know that Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the Sabbath, a day of rest, but I don’t think it’s ever really been that way for me.

Growing up, Sunday was a marathon of excessive churching, in which a hot, sweaty nap would be squeezed between seemingly endless church services and band practices. I’m very thankful for that upbringing in many ways, but it always meant Sundays were an exhausting scramble, usually topped off with finishing math homework after we finally got home at 9:30 PM.

As an adult, Sundays have become a working day. After church, the day is spent prepping for the week, with lesson plans, scheduling music lessons, and the like. Sometimes that includes hammering out succulent blog posts for the week ahead.

Top that off with the “Sunday scaries”—that vague sense of dread and anxiety that settles in around 4 or 5 PM on a Sunday afternoon—and I’ve never much cared for the day, or thought of it as all that restful. Church is great (and you should go, just probably not for eight hours every Sunday), but by the time I’m home from it, the weekend is essentially over and work begins. It’s why I try to take Saturdays as my “Sabbath,” when I truly do try to rest and recuperate.

That said, today has been what I think Sundays are supposed to be. Dr. Wife and I had a quiet morning and headed to church, after which we had lunch and picked up groceries. We came back and knocked out some chores around the house and in the yard, and then took a glorious nap with the dogs, from which we both got up from a short while before I wrote this post. Minecraft Camp starts tomorrow and I have a few lessons to schedule, but I don’t feel rushed. Dr. Wife usually has to drive back on Sundays to North Carolina, but because of the nature of her new rotation (which starts tomorrow), she won’t have to leave until tomorrow morning, and she’ll leave when I head out for camp.

The net effect is that it’s been a glorious and restful Sunday. Even as we’ve gotten things done around the house, it’s been a day both to celebrate and worship the Lord with other believers and time for rest and reflection. There is a peace over the house that I’m almost hesitant to articulate, lest the momentary blessing be somehow broken.

Well, enough of that waxing poetic (and complaining about going to church, which is somewhat hypocritical of me). For today’s installment of Lazy Sunday, I thought I’d look back at various Summer Reading Lists of yesteryear:

So there you have it! A little late, but a Lazy Sunday bursting with summertime freshness.

Happy Reading—and Happy Sunday!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part I: Short Fiction

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP

It’s summertime! That means yours portly is getting in a ton of reading, especially in my favorite format: short fiction.

“Short fiction” here is a catch-all for both short story collections and shorter novels/novellas. Two of the works on today’s list are technically novels, but they’re both 250 pages or fewer (in the case of Jake Barter’s The Sniper, the book is exactly 250 pages). 250 pages might seem generous, but these are works that can be read over the course of several evenings, and are paced briskly enough that they won’t be piled on your nightstand for months or even years.

Typically I leave the full list behind the paywall for paid subscribers; however, as several of these authors are indie/self-published, I would like to boost their works more broadly (and, naturally, gain access to those sweet, sweet affiliate clicks). So, here are four books I’ve read and/or am currently reading that I highly recommend you order:

  • Jake Barter, The Sniper – “Jake Barter” is the nom de plume of blogger photog, proprietor of the excellent blog Orion’s Cold Fire. As far as I can tell, this book is his first outing. It’s the next on my “to-read” list after the next entry, but knowing photog’s writing, I can already recommend it. He’s been working on this book for years, and it’s not a hastily slapped-together book like one of mine.
  • Erang, Midnight Under the Monsters’ Mask – “Erang” is the nom de plume of, well, Erang, a mysterious, masked French musician who is among the pioneers of dungeon synth. I’ve just started reading Midnight in the English translation, and the stories so far are delightfully creepy. It’s a mix of horror and weird fiction that really shows Erang’s early exposure to horror flicks as a kid in the 1980s. Erang’s whole schtick is championing imagination over all else, and he creates in his music entire fantasy realms. Having listened to his music for years—over a decade, at this point—I can “hear” it in his writing.
  • Various authors, Amelia: Counterrevolution (the second anthology from authors of the “Lemurverse“) – this collection of short stories and poems found inspiration in Amelia, the viral, pro-British, pro-nationalist, anti-immigration character of a government-sanctioned video “game” that was intended to spook teens away from online “radicalization” (basically, becoming right-wing). The fatal flaw, however, is that the game designers made Amelia into a cute goth chick with a chic aesthetic and, well, commonsense arguments against flooding Britain with unassimilable invaders. It’s a fun collection and priced right at just $5.99 in paperback. Note that it does use AI-generated images, but not writing, as illustrations between stories, so if that cuts against your principles, be forewarned. However, the writing is 100% human!
  • John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids – a classic of 1950s British sci-fi, Triffids is a chilling tale of a world in which everyone is blind—and giant, carnivorous plants called “triffids” shuffle around killing people. But there’s way more to it than that; the work is post-apocalyptic, but it’s quaint in how “high-trust” post-apocalyptic Britain is portrayed—a stark reminder of how much that once-great nation has changed. I read Wyndham’s Foul Play Suspected earlier this year and can heartily recommend it as a tense crime thriller with an appropriately English sense of restraint and pacing.

More on Amelia and Triffids below the punch. I’ve read both of those in their entirety. That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of short stories or shorter novels/novellas, you can scoop them all up for under $50.

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