The day after the previous post, thanks to a long barefoot walk and run along the North Sea coast, I tore a muscle and tendon in my left calf.  "It will get better in about two months," the Dutch physiotherapist accurately predicted. "Just one thing: don't get fat.  Your calf has enough to worry about."
Sadly, a season of immobility -- even when one writes at a standing desk, as I must now do, by doctor's orders -- means gaining a couple of pounds is inevitable.  On the benefits side, I didn't have the gym or the prospect of climbing my beloved White Mountains peaks to distract me from writing and reading, so while I've been working hard I've also indulged myself without stint in novels, poetry, and one or two works of non-fiction.

In the last category falls C. V. Wedgwood's epic monograph The Thirty Years War.  In a few months I may not remember the particulars.  I'm already grabbing futilely at fading memories -- who ended up with the Palatine Electorate, which margraviates and landgraviates were Calvinist and which Lutheran, why exactly the Swedes didn't return to Sweden after the death of Gustavus Adophus.  What will stay with me are the characters who willfully mis-ran the war year after year, an all too believable assembly in our age of outright conflicts and simmering unofficial hatreds, from Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, the two Sudans, Congo, Mali, the southwestern United States and Mexico.  The vacillations of John George of Saxony, the uncertain leadership and self-destructive greed of Maximilian of Bavaria, the emperor Frederick's self-deceptive vision of a wholly Catholic Germany, the stubbornness that led to the Czech warlord Wallenstein's assassination by order of his own imperial patron, the mercenaries who sold their armies from prince to prince, Richelieu's devious diplomacy -- so devious it blew back on him, and on France, more than once.  Below all these lie the peasants whose misery can only be guessed at.
Wedgwood has an eye for the awful unforgettable detail -- the burgher who, when seeking justice for his daughter, raped and murdered by occupying forces, was informed by the local commander that had she not been so niggardly with her virginity, she might still be alive; the city councilman who scrawled a desperate prayer on the back of an imperial command to feed and quarter troops, "Lord Jesus and Mary help us."  
It was a war so obscure that even the treaty conference at Westphalia asked for a special meeting to decide on the reasons it was being fought -- over a year after the conference began, and four long years before the fighting finally ended.  Recommended reading for anyone insisting that Islam is a specially murderous religion or that only Muslims try to convert people at swordpoint.  

In sum: I'm gradually recalling the world and my obligations to it.  More soon on why my passion for genre fiction might be related to my love of classical texts, and my fortuitous encounter with a Carl Andre sculpture in a Franconia vacant lot.