And here we are again, at the end of another year, where it is time for me to follow my usual tradition, stretching back a whole five years (!!!) and put together a list of my favourite books from the past 12 months for everyone (who can be bothered to read any more).

I have to admit that I didn’t keep up with my previously sterling records when it came to reading – I did not manage my usual one book per week, or even anywhere close to that level, this year, for many reasons. But I still managed to do a decent amount of reading, and here is my selection of my favourite books from the 45-odd ones that I read during the year.

It is worth bearing in mind that a lot of the books that I read come straight from Castalia House, because – let’s face facts – they publish some of the very best and finest SF/F out there these days, and they have never produced anything of less than at least solid quality. As a result, I am a loyal and devoted reader of Castalia House-published authors, and my reading from this year certainly reflects that fact. Pop over to their online store and buy from them directly, it is actually much better for them than buying through Amazon – and they are moving all of their stuff off of Amazon Kindle Select anyway pretty soon, so you have to buy the books directly. Might as well give them a bigger cut of the profits without getting Amazon, a moderately SJW-converged corporation, involved.

Also, it turns out that I only read like 7 or 8 non-fiction books this year – and only 5 of those were actually worth reading in the first place. So the non-fiction books from my list this year really are my top 5 non-fiction books, because they’re the only 5.

That’s what happens when you get lazy, basically.

As always, my list of books and their ratings will be moved to a standalone post tomorrow for all to see and examine.

The Didact’s Top 5 Non-Fiction Books of 2018

1. The LawDog Files: African Adventures by D. LawDog

I read this right after I read the first book of LawDog’s misadventures. I did not think it was possible to laugh so hard from reading the misadventures of a beat cop in a teeny tiny Texas town called Bugscuffle (seriously). I was very obviously quite wrong, because his misadventures in Africa as a yoof were, if anything, even more uproariously funny. I remember with particular pleasure his descriptions of the drunken pilot and the chimpanzee, which had me utterly paralysed with laughter and gasping for air while I was reading it in bed one cold and frosty February night. This is easily the funniest book that you will read outside of Gerald Durrell’s stories about putting snakes in his brother’s bathtub.

2. Jordanetics: A Journey Into the Mind of Humanity’s Greatest Thinker by Vox Day

I gave this book a long-form review earlier this month, so I will give it only the most cursory of glances here, other than to say that if you have ever heard of or seen the name of Prof. Jordan B. Peterson, then you need to read this book. It is a brutally efficient, dispassionately surgical, and devastatingly effective take-down of a man who many of us on the Right thought of as being “on our side”. He is nothing of the sort, and what he is peddling is downright dangerous to any right-thinking man (in the simplest meaning of the term).

3. The People vs Muhammad – Psychological Analysis by J. K. Sheindlin

This book is basically an investigation of the character and psychology of the very-likely-fictional “prophet” and warlord Muhammad, examined through the Koran, hadith, and Sirah – along with significant sections of the tafsir. Basically the author is attempting to present a prosecutor’s case to an imaginary jury that Muhammad was either insane, psychopathic, or possibly both. There is a hell of a lot of material presented in this book, and some of it will strike the reader as pure speculation and even fantasy, but it is hard to get past the evidence presented, which is taken directly from Islamic primary sources. My major beef with this book is the fact that it is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors – and, being the utter grammar Nazi that I am, this annoys me beyond measure.

4. 4-D Warfare: A Doctrine for a New Generation of Politics by Jack Posobiec

This short book – tract, really – by Jack Posobiec is essentially a how-to guide for meme warfare. It is of great value to the Right because, basically, we can meme and the Left can’t. The idea behind this book is to teach the reader how to use meme warfare to maximum advantage, to demoralise, destabilise, and destroy the Left using simple ideas and easily digested memes that deliver hard truths. Short, simple, and straight to the point, this book makes an excellent companion to The 4th Generation Warfare Handbook by William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiele.

5. The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama by Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan

When I first came across this book, I found the title to be more than a little hyperbolic, given what I know of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. To claim that Barack Obama could actually be worse than FDR, given the manner in which that supposed lion of progressive thought and action prolonged the Great Depression and did so much to destroy American prosperity, is hard to believe. Yet the two authors make a compelling case, with (as I recall) over 200 different examples of egregious abuses of power, outrageous corruption, extreme disregard for Constitutional limits and bounds, and utter contempt for the American people. While I remain unconvinced that Barack Hussein Obama truly was the worst President that the United States of America has ever had, he certainly ranks in the bottom ten at this point.

The Didact’s Top 5 Fiction Books of 2018

1. Retribution (Galaxy’s Edge Book 9) by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole

The 9th book in the main Galaxy’s Edge series definitely lived up to the hopes of all of the fans. It was action-packed, explosive, powerful, and extremely satisfying. Unfortunately it also left a fair few questions hanging in the air, particularly with respect to the fate of little Prisma Maydoon (no longer quite so little), and the source of the powers of Goth Sullus (a.k.a. Casper). The spin-off novel Imperator, published earlier in the year, was supposed to answer questions about where Casper got his incredible powers from the Crux – the equivalent in the GE Universe of “the Force” in STAR WARS – but I found it an incredibly confusing and difficult book to read, for some reason. At any rate, there is no question in my mind that the Galaxy’s Edge series is doing what the STAR WARS universe always should have done – and is in fact doing it better at this point.

2. Superluminary: The World Armada by John C. Wright

It should come as absolutely no surprise that a book by John C. Wright should feature way, way up on the list of the best SF/F books of any given year. Mr. Wright’s powers as a wordsmith are positively staggering, and his imagination is on a level unlike anything that I have ever encountered before. In the Superluminary trilogy, he plays around with concepts and ideas that are so mind-bending, so astonishing, and so flat-out crazy that it is hard to believe that a merely human intelligence came up with them. He comes up with ways to move planets. He talks about space vampires the size of solar systems. He writes about monsters that are so inconceivably terrifying that even H. P. Lovecraft would have had a hard time coming up with anything scarier. The entire series is brilliant, but the final book is the best by far, in particular because of the beautifully written and amazingly uplifting ending.

3. Pop Kult Warlord (Soda Pop Soldier Book 2) by Nick Cole

Judging by what I have read of Nick Cole’s work, both as a solo author and as half of the brilliant Galaxy’s Edge team, Nick Cole has got to be one of the finest talents who has ever worked in sci-fi. That sounds hyperbolic – until you read Ctrl-Alt-Revolt! and his GEU works (as referenced above), and then turn to his latest series, published of course by Castalia House. The Soda Pop Soldier series is incredibly imaginative and brilliantly written, with non-stop pulse-pounding action, plenty of great sci-fi references and tropes, absorbing characters, and plots that are so interesting that you will easily be able to suspend disbelief about the fact that video games (yeah, seriously) determine the fates of corporations and even entire countries. Definitely a must-read book, along with its predecessor.

4. Hammer of the Witches (The Covenant Chronicles Book 2) by Kai-Wai Cheah

I am not normally one for witchcraft and wizardry – I gave up that sort of thing long ago – but Benjamin Cheah, a Singaporean writer of considerable skill, has done a phenomenal job of building a plausible alternate reality to our own, in which the light and the dark fight against each other through human instruments that covenant with gods and daimons of either side. The world itself is quite absorbing; most of the countries and powers that we know of in this world, exist in that one, but with different names, and religion plays a much bigger role (as expected) in the politics and realities of those nations. The story of this book follows on directly from the previous one and pits Luke and Eva against the Unmaker’s machinations, but really expands on the already superb mythos and world-building of the previous installment. Eva’s character is explored a bit more, and you really get to like the quiet professionalism and absolute competence that Luke shows – but there are no Mary Sues or Gary Stus in this book, at all. The characters are flawed and wrestle with their own inner demons, yet they know who and what they are fighting for. It should come as no surprise that this book is so good, given that the previous installment made my list of top 5 non-fiction books last year. Highly recommended if you like old-school fantasy with a modern twist.

5. Six Expressions of Death by Mojo Mori

Definitely one of the more unusual books that Castalia House has published, this one is a novel set in 16th-Century Japan (i.e. pre-Tokugawa, pre-unification, etc.), and deals with the attempts of a samurai to solve a murder in his territory. As he unravels clues and hints as to the identity of the killer, he realises that there is much more at stake than the murder of one solitary traveler; the very existence of his lord and master’s realm is at stake, and with it the peace and stability of all of Japan. Brilliantly written, with real insight into feudal-era Japanese culture and traditions, this was one of the more unusual books that I read this year, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

HONOURABLE MENTION: God Hates Me (The Diary of an Ex-Angel Book 1) by Richard Cain

Okay, I know the cover art is ridiculous – and the book, author, and publisher all (rightly) got a lot of stick when it was published. Hell, even our own beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) admitted that it was a bit out of

 left-field when he noted its publication. Yet it is, in fact, a good book in spite of the silly artwork – and by the way, the cover art actually makes a LOT more sense once you’re about halfway through the read. It is a surprisingly good and sensitive take on Lucifer’s Fall and the rather hapless and bumbling attempts of one of the ex-angels caught up in that cataclysm to get back to his post in Heaven. It turns out that the demon in this book really isn’t that evil; he’s just not all that good either – and he’s mostly useless at actually being good. But in the end, things do go his way, just for once. Try this book out, I promise that you will be amused and impressed, at the very least, if not pleasantly surprised at just how good it is.

CLASSIC BOOK OF 2018: The Call of the Wild by Jack London

I first read this classic book back when I was in my early teens, and I have loved it ever since. This is a story of the primal urges felt by the descendants of the most ferocious and successful hunters of the animal kingdom, a tale of the triumph of flesh and blood and spirit against all of the greatest tests that Mother Nature herself can throw at animal and man. Its brilliance lies in the economy of its words; Jack London, like his contemporary American writers, knew how to use words to maximum effect in sparsely written, highly descriptive sentences. (Yes, I know – I could stand to learn a thing or two from writers like that…) I hadn’t read this book again in a long time, and picked it up after getting a full collection of Jack London classics on Amazon for less than a song. It is just as fresh and vivid and brilliant today as it was when I first picked it up, some twenty years ago. The climactic battle with the sled-dog Spitz still stands as one of the most harrowing and brilliant set-pieces that I have ever read.