Hollywood is panicking because attendance at movies is down again this summer. I’m afraid I’ve gone along with the trend; while in past years I would go to one or two, I can’t remember having seen a single film in the theater this summer.

I do make frequent visits to the local library, however . . .

So instead of 2046, I give you Moscow 2042, a hilarious comedic dystopia written by Vladimir Voinovich in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Instead of The Great Raid, I give you Servitude and Grandeur of Arms, by Alfred de Vigny, a strange hybrid of history, philosophy, and storytelling, the type of book Adam Greenwood would like, concerned as it is with honor, stoicisim, loyalty, and other such heroic virtues.

Much of my reading this summer has been preoccupied by war, and the figure looming largest behind it all is that of Uncle Joe Stalin in all his wanton and capricious evil. Watch him manipulate events from afar in The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of Jose Robles, an account by Stephen Koch that has at its center the Spanish Civil War, where Fascist and Bolshevik were fighting a tune-up in preparation for their future death struggle, and where even today, many instances of executions and torture are unresolved.

Watch as Stalin creates an atmosphere of paranoia in his own country in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a neglected novel by Victor Serge who wrote it in Mexico in 1942. Born in Belgium to expat Russians, he had returned home after the Revolution but became increasingly disillusioned. Imprisoned in the mid-30s he became the subject of protests in Paris, and was the only writer released (expelled) from Russia as a result of a foreign campaign of support. Stalin still needed the support of intellectuals such as Andre Gide and Romain Rolland for propaganda purposes, and hoped to manipulate them as he was manipulating Hemingway.

Finally, the most epic of my summer reading projects, one in which Hitler joins Stalin whom he almost out-sinisters: William Vollmann’s Europe Central, a monumental evocation of an entire half-century’s history. The composer, Dmitri Shostokovich, is a main character, and other artists, (Kathe Kollwitz, Roman Karmen) and military figures (Generals Paulus and Vlasov, each of whom is made a propaganda tool of the enemy) make strategic appearances. Especially affecting is the long section on Kurt Gerstein, an SS-man who documented the atrocities of the death camps and tried to alert foreign governments but no one would believe him. There’s also a phantasmagorical section called Airlift Idylls, in a style reminiscent of Gravity’s Rainbow. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pychon (to whom Vollmann is often compared), this is a book best enjoyed by someone who already has a pretty thorough background knowledge of WWII. It’s not quite as recondite or all-encompassing, but it’s just as beautiful.