Educated Guesswork

In fulfillment of a promise I made you a little while back, allow me to present the last 100 books I read in my silly, silly little book tracking project, wherein I’ve been cataloguing all my books since the summer of 2013, and have been recording each book I complete since July of 2015. This is all my wife’s fault, as she gave me a barcode scanner and database software back in 2013, and now I’ve become kind of a nut about this stuff. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I still love to read. A lot. But of course there’s a difference when you start tracking anything. (And no, this has nothing to do with Schrödinger—Cut that out!) Indeed, it is only this week that I’ve admitted to myself that I have to let go of some of my books without reading them. Heretofore, I’d thought that if I entered them in my database well I had to read them before I could get rid of them. However, I’ve realized that I have to let some of these things go … whether I love them or not. Also for any of y’all reading about my own self-imposed stupid rules for the first time (and likely I’d have given up reading this page by now, so … moving on), I should note that I count as a ‘Book Read’ only those non-comics (& graphic novels, and that ilk) I complete. Thus the first book of this ‘century’ of books, Book #1401, is pictured here. Though I do keep track of the comic books as well, as we shall see.

Also I like to highlight some of the better reads in each tranche of ‘Books Read’ in this book listing. (Generally 10 at a time, plus any comics I read during that set.) And boy oh boy was Book #1402 a winner! I read this seemingly throwaway novel about Abercrombie Fox, forced to endure service in the English navy at His Majesty’s pleasure, while looking out for the real prize: Mr. Fox. I jumped in out of order because … well, look at it! Obviously a tossed off book for a quick buck. But no! Because behind the pen name of Adam Hardy lies the actual pen (or, more likely, typewriter) of one of my favorite writers of action, Kenneth Bulmer. He is in fine form here, combining his love of military tactics with a great eye for plotting and dialogue and action. Now I have to find the first book in the series so I can give it the attention it deserves.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1401	2/28/25	Stephen Mitchell	Tao Te Ching: A New English Version	Religion & Spirituality
1402	2/28/25	Adam Hardy [Kenneth Bulmer]	Fox: Treasure Map	Fiction
1403	2/28/25	Michael Bonner, ed.	Uncut Magazine March 2024	Music
	2/28/25	Mike Baron	Badger #25	Comics
	2/28/25	Mike Baron	Badger #26	Comics
1404	3/1/25	Ron Goulart	Too Sweet To Die	Mystery
	3/1/25	Mike Baron	Badger #27	Comics
1405	3/1/25	Agatha Christie	Appointment With Death	Mystery
	3/2/25	Subba Rao	Raman: The Matchless Wit	Comics
	3/2/25	Yagya Sharma	Rana Pratap: The Heroic Struggle of a Rajput King Against the Might of an Empire	Comics
		Subba Rao	Rani Abbakka: The Queen of Ullal Who Stood Up to the Might of the Portuguese	Comics
1406	3/3/25	Margery Allingham	No Love Lost	Mystery
1407	3/4/25	Ken Smith	Junk English	Reference
1408	3/4/25	Will Self, intro.	Revelation (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian
1409	3/4/25	Michael Barson	Better Dead Than Red: Nostalgic Look at Russiaphobia Red-Baiting, and Other Commie Madness	History
	3/4/25	Russ Cochran, ed.	Two-Fisted Tales #20	Comics
1410	3/5/25	Fay Weldon, intro.	The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian

 

Russ Cochran saved so much of our cultural heritage by making available reprints of the old EC comic books in many different guises and under so many different publishers. Often imitated but never bettered, the original pre-code comic books from genius William Gaines might be known only through a handful of pages and panels in historical works on the comic publishing trade were it not for Mr. Cochran’s monomaniacal pursuit of promulgating these classic comics to new readers. (It certainly wasn’t the cash.) So we’ll let this reprint of Tales From The Crypt stand in for all those wonderful reissues of those old EC Comics. After all, who are we kidding? It was the horror comics that made that publisher’s reputation. So reputed, in fact, that the reaction, led by Herr Wertham, destroyed all those great books, leaving behind only MAD magazine to keep the American kids salivating for great art and societal insight each month. The particular issue pictured here reprints a 1952 issue, full of great stories—especially that cover tale!—from start to finish.

In 1998 the folks at Canongate Books had the bright idea of publishing individual books of The Holy Bible as individual volumes, calling these the Pocket Canons. Each volume was to be (and was) introduced by some literary light or like that, and the text was the good ol’ King James Version (still under crown copyright in the United Kingdom). The theory was that this was the way these books were originally read, as each book would have been a single scroll passed from one literate hand to another, to be read in contemplative reflection. This gospel, that of John (no relation to The Revelator), proves the worth of this ideal. The introduction by Blake Morrison is both useful and moving, and (re-)reading the words of John in this format gave them a very different impact. I also learned (or realized for the first time) that Judas was Jesus’ bagman.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1411	3/5/25	Constantine Cavarnos	Byzantine Thought and Art	History
	3/5/25	Russ Cochran, ed.	Tales From The Crypt #18	Comics
1412	3/6/25	Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö	The Fire Engine That Disappeared	Mystery & Thrillers
	3/6/25	Russ Cochran, ed.	Tales From The Crypt #14	Comics
1413	3/6/25	André Gide	The Immoralist	Fiction
1414	3/7/25	John Mortimer	Rumpole and the Golden Thread	Mystery & Thrillers
1415	3/7/25	Katherine Fischer Drew	The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad, Additional Enactments	History
1416	3/8/25	Blake Morrison, intro.	The Gospel According to John (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles
	3/8/25	Russ Cochran, ed.	Tales From The Crypt #13	Comics
1417	3/8/25	Robert Barnard	Death of an Old Goat	Mystery & Thrillers
1418	3/9/25	Royal Armouries Staff	Torture and Punishment	History
1419	3/10/25	Lawrence A. Yates	Power Pack: U.S. Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1965-1966 (Leavenworth Papers No. 15)	Militaria
1420	3/10/25	J.S. Richardson & Marguerite Wood	Edinburgh Castle	Militaria

 

I’ve talked before about the pithy sayings and stories of the so-called ‘Desert Fathers’ (Book #1041 in my list of books read #s 1001–1100), the strange cenobites and hermits who left the world behind (this would be the Roman world) in 3rd Century Roman Egypt. These recluses sought a deeper Christian faith by renouncing possessions and spending their days and nights in contemplation and solitude. The Waddell book referenced above gives a nice bit of background, but it is primarily concerned as is this book by Thomas Merton, The Wisdom Of The Desert, with the spiritual insights of this small but influential group of men (and a few women!) which had such influence upon the path taken by the Christian church. Merton is a good person to retell these stories and sayings, coming as he does from a modern contemplative monastic life. And he offers beautiful little versions of these gnomic utterances and tales of love, and more love.

Since we’re already doing the ‘Christian Thang’, I may as well give honorable mention to this little throwaway pamphlet from 1932, The Catholic Mind, which reprinted essays of interest to good Catholics, mostly about social issues. I of course picked this up because of the Chesterton essay, but both of the articles are surprisingly good. That of G. K. Chesterton, unsurprisingly, is just a bit precious. However, his comments on smoking and the nanny state are both prescient and laughable. Interesting to read these tracts written while Father Coughlin was just beginning to promulgate his Radio League to more and more listeners. Also interesting to comtemplate the fact that thousands of Americans were expected to read with attention and enjoyment these fairly erudite (or at least they’d seem so in our AI-darkened Age) essays.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1421	3/10/25	Thomas Merton	The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century	Religion & Spirituality
1422	3/10/25	Lewis Watt & G. K. Chesterton	The Catholic Mind, Vol. XXX, No. 6 – “Economic Principles and Social Practice” & “A Sermon”	Religion & Spirituality
1423	3/10/25	Claude Lévi-Strauss	Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture	Anthropology
1424	3/11/25	Godfrey Holloway	The Empress Of Victoria	Travel
1425	3/11/25	Anthony de Mello	The Song of the Bird	Religion & Spirituality
1426	3/12/25	Hilda Lawrence	Blood Upon The Snow	Mystery & Thrillers
1427	3/12/25	Richard Holloway, intro.	The Gospel According to Luke (Pocket Canons)	Christian Books & Bibles
1428	3/12/25	Rius & Friends	Mao for Beginners	History
1429	3/12/25	Sylvia Angus	Dead to Rites	Mystery & Thrillers
1430	3/13/25	Georges Simenon; Geoffrey Sainsbury, trans.	Maigret’s War of Nerves [La Tête d’un homme]	Mystery & Thrillers

 

It’s the second book in the series, but One Corpse Too Many is really where my love for Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael begins. This is the book where we first meet Hugh Beringar, who will play the foil in so many future adventures with our favorite crime-solving Benedictine monk. All of the things we love, well, that I love, about Cadfael are here: his human and humane insight, his knowledge of plants and love, his own legalisms and duty-shaving in pursuit of what he sees as higher ideals. Plus in this one we get some crazy fun hiding this and that from not-yet-sheriff Beringar. Of course, some of the unrolling of the mystery is barely plausible, and coincidences will as ever come to the aid of Cadfael, but then again, why wouldn’t he find favor from on high in pursuit of both the truth and the Truth?

Since I talked to you about Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis book in my last Book List (Book #1371), I may as well mention another book harping on the same theme, though it’s as terrible as the Donnelly book was great. And the Donnelly book was very great, if wrong-headed. (Hey, plate tectonics was proposed over a decade after his demise, and was laughed at as much as Brother Ignatius’s theories, possibly mores.) But this piece of trash, The Second Atlantis by Robert Moore Williams, is worth reading solely for the awfulness of its prose. You wonder if Mr. Williams had ever experienced an earthquake, but that takes second place to the crazy techno-boosterism which perhaps Steinbeck could have pulled off, but … well, why would he want to? The story itself is piffle, the sort of ‘human drama’ which the movie Earthquake did so much better (and it was a terrible movie), but somehow manages to become worse as it slides into a “To Infinity … and Beyond!” claptrap ending that manages to disappoint our already extremely low expectations. At least it’s short.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1431	3/13/25	Margery Allingham	The Allingham Case-Book	Mystery & Thrillers
1432	3/14/25	Erle Stanley Gardner	The Case Of The Horrified Heirs	Mystery & Thrillers
1433	3/14/25	Hyman Shapiro	Scotland in the days of James VI	History
1434	3/15/25	Ellis Peters	The Rose Rent	Mystery & Thrillers
	3/15/25	Mala Singh	Rani of Jhansi: One of the Bravest Leaders of the 1857 War of Independence	Comics
1435	3/15/25	Ellis Peters	A Morbid Taste for Bones	Mystery & Thrillers
1436	3/16/25	Nick Cave, intro.	The Gospel According to Mark (Pocket Canons)	Christian Books & Bibles
	3/17/25	Satyavrata Ghosh & Luis M. Fernandes	Rash Behari Bose: Story of a Revolutionary	Comics
1437	3/18/25	Ellis Peters	One Corpse Too Many	Mystery & Thrillers
	3/18/25	A. Saraswati	Ravana Humbled: Three Tales About the Lord of Lanka	Comics
1438	3/18/25	Robert Moore Williams	The Second Atlantis [Ace F-335]	SF & Fantasy
1439	3/19/25	Frances & Richard Lockridge	Murder Comes First	Mystery & Thrillers
1440	3/20/25	Jack Vance	The Pnume	SF & Fantasy
	3/20/25	Kamala Chandrakant	Sati and Shiva	Comics

 

This book, J. J. Pollitt’s Art and Experience in Classical Greece, was one of my textbooks from a survey course I took in freshman year at college, and I see highlighting through the first two-thirds of the tome. The highlighting itself has aged, and in places one cannot be sure if the yellow marker’s marks are present or not. I, too, have aged, but haven’t yet reached the level of ‘classic’, which is the subject of Pollitt’s work. The book repays well its reading, clearly delineating the Archaic, Ancient, Classical, and post-Classical movements in the art (primarily statuary, natch, but with pottery as well and just a soupçon of surviving painting) of that small rocky world which gets much of the blame for Western Civilization. The author provides much insight in this slim (220 pages) volume, especially for one as ignorant of art as I. Pollitt maps the changes in artistic display to the substantial changes in the Greek polity (or polities) during the crucial years of the rise and fall of the Athenian dream.

Almost a hundred books after I read the classic Dr. Mabuse, I found myself reading Thea von Harbou’s novelization of the movie she wrote that you all know so well, Metropolis. However the movie is, the book is even moreso. The words are whack—crazy in some way that seems defined by 1920s Germany, hard to explain and not all that comprehensible even on its own terms, but it’s genius. There is even more matter in the book than the film, and I would give a lot to see a modern movie of the Von Harbou novel. (It would likely just get a Marvel/Michael Bay treatment, however, and that would be a tragedy.)

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1441	3/24/25	J. J. Pollitt	Art and Experience in Classical Greece	Art
1442	3/25/25	Thea von Harbou	Metropolis	Fiction
1443	3/25/25	David Goodis	The Wounded and the Slain	Mystery & Thrillers
1444	3/26/25	Kenzaburo Oë	A Personal Matter	Fiction
1445	3/28/25	Francis L. Wellman	The Art Of Cross-Examination	Law
1446	3/28/25	John Kenneth Galbraith	How To Control The Military	Politics & Social Sciences
1447	3/29/25	Youngman Carter	Mr. Campion’s Quarry	Mystery & Thrillers
1448	4/1/25	Penelope Hunting	Royal Westminster: History of Westminster Through Its Royal Connections	History
1449	4/1/25	Daniel Patrick Moynihan	Secrecy: The American Experience	Politics & Social Sciences
1450	4/2/25	Joshua L. Golding	Rationality and Religious Theism	Religion & Spirituality

 

Perhaps this particular exemplar of 1940s noir has a few thin spots at the end, but Leigh Brackett’s novel No Good From A Corpse crackles with fantastic dialogue and its brilliant depiction of a seedy, seamy World War II Los Angeles. This tale of detective Ed Clive and his search for a beauty’s killer is worthy of reading on its own terms, so I won’t mention all the other panoply of interest around this book, and I recommend you read the story before the introduction (my edition had Anthony Boucher’s informative essay) or anything online. You won’t. I didn’t, and I still liked the story very much.

Yet another blast from the past, a re-reading of a book beloved in what passes for my youth … and yet another disappointment. Oh, don’t get me wrong, A Child’s Garden Of Grass (which is strangely subtitled The Official Handbook For Marijuana Users, but I guess officialdom was more loosey-goosey back in the day) is still an interesting document of its time, and we should remember and honor those who got a twenty-year sentence for a couple of seeds found on the floor of their car. But authors Jack S. Margolis and Richard Clorfene turned out to be not as funny as I remember them, which is weird when you consider that the marijuana of their time was sooooo very much less potent than the brain splatter they sell nowadays. (Their first instruction after you buy a lid? Remove all the seeds and stems, especially those seeds! Ah, good times!) Of course, the fact that I remember it being funnier may say something which we shan’t look into too closely. There are a few good bits, true, but it’s mainly of historical interest.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1451	4/3/25	Bob Woodward	The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat	History
1452	4/3/25	Timothy Harris	Wild at Heart: Discovering The Secret of a Man’s Soul	Christian Books & Bibles
1453	4/4/25	John Weber, ed.	Kyd for Hire	Mystery & Thrillers
1454	4/4/25	Leigh Brackett	No Good From A Corpse	Mystery & Thrillers
1455	4/5/25	Harvey Cox	The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay On Festivity And Fantasy	Religion & Spirituality
1456	4/5/25	Jack S. Margolis & Richard Clorfene	A Child’s Garden of Grass: The Official Handbook For Marijuana Users	Drugs
1457	4/7/25	Michael Bonner, ed.	Uncut Magazine April 2024	Music
1458	4/9/25	Lewis E. Birdseye	Vastation	Fiction
1459	4/9/25	Charles G. Finney	The Circus of Dr. Lao	Fiction
1460	4/10/25	Honoré de Balzac	The Girl With The Golden Eyes	Fiction

 

I knew Georges Simenon as the wildly prolific and possibly profligate author of the Maigret series, which to be honest has been an on-again off-again reading pleasure—the books seem to me to be all about mood, and I’m moody enough already. But The Premier was a revelation, a deft portrait of an aging politico in decline that leaves no doubt about Simenon’s vast powers. I believe my comment after finishing this slim volume (All of his books are slim volumes.) was “Wow. Just wow.” In these 159 pages of dense prose, we live the thoughts, the overwhelming, powerful, lucid dreaming of a political animal at the end of his long run. The novel is amazingly well-written (translated by Daphne Woodward in this edition), and gives no little insight into French politics of a certain age. (The book came out in 1958, the year that saw the collapse of the 4th Republic and DeGaulle’s creation of the current, 5th, French Republic.)

And I guess since I finally got around to reading Naked Lunch I should say something about that. I guess. I guess my main take is that William S. Burrough’s arguably most famous book has brilliance indeed, but only in spurts. (Heh heh.) There is a lot of good stuff here, and don’t get me wrong I liked it, but some parts of the book are merely indulgent, kinda like some of Ginsberg’s poetry. Likely, however, I’m just not the right audience for the work, being a very boring bourgeois fearful middle class ecch who wouldn’t know Art if it hit him in the face. That said, it was also humorous to read Ginsberg’s oh so erudite interpretation of the homosexual elements in this book. Indeed, I’m not sure I recognized the book discussed in the trial extracts printed at the front with the ‘novel’ as printed in these pages.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1461	4/10/25	Ellis Peters	Monk’s Hood	Mystery & Thrillers
1462	4/11/25	Georges Simenon	The Premier	Fiction
1463	4/12/25	H. John Poole	Militant Tricks: Battlefield Ruses of the Islamic Insurgent	Militaria
1464	4/13/25	Ellery Queen	The Chinese Orange Mystery	Mystery & Thrillers
1465	4/14/25	John D. MacDonald	The Damned	Mystery & Thrillers
1466	4/15/25	A. N. Wilson, intro.	The Gospel According to Matthew (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles
1467	4/16/25	Colin Dexter	The Daughters of Cain	Mystery & Thrillers
1468	4/17/25	A. S. Byatt, intro.	The Song of Solomon (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles
1469	4/17/25	William S. Burroughs	Naked Lunch	Fiction
1470	4/18/25	Caleb Carr	The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians	History

 

This appears to be my first Graham Greene novel, … or at least the first I’ve read since commencing this silly book tracking project. And The Ministry Of Fear is a fine book, even if it has a fatal flaw. Of course, I don’t meant harmatia in the classic sense; I mean the fact that the book is wonderful as long as you don’t think too hard about the premise. Like many British novels of this ilk—I just read The Great Impersonation yesterday—it only seems silly if you think about it too long. And that ending disturbs me a little—though it may have been necessary in terms of the characters and like that. But this is an excellent revisioning of the Buchan-like thrillers that kicked off the genre, and the main conceit of the murderer’s narrative is brilliant.

Geisha In Rivalry was one of those surprises that confirms me in my decision to try almost anything once. Thinking of it now, it reminds me of my world-weary doubts before reading the books of Jon Hassler. Certainly, reading this hundred year old novel (it was published originally in 1910) about a Tokyo lifestyle that was almost gone even when this realistic fiction was written isn’t exactly something I’d expect to enjoy, or even condone. But Kafu Nagai penned a simply brilliant novel of the Japanese demimonde at the beginning of the 20th Century, deftly capturing the intricate and involved lives of these men and women—and capturing my interest as well. Truly a masterwork, and full of revelation.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1471	4/19/25	M. Wiesenthal	The Belle Époque Of The Orient-Express	History
1472	4/19/25	Helen MacInnes	I And My True Love	Mystery & Thrillers
1473	4/20/25	Doris Lessing, intro.	Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles
1474	4/21/25	L. A. Mayer	Saracenic Heraldry	Reference
1475	4/22/25	Tanith Lee	Sung in Shadow	SF & Fantasy
1476	4/23/25	Graham Greene	The Ministry Of Fear	Mystery & Thrillers
1477	4/24/25	Kafu Nagai	Geisha in Rivalry	Fiction
1478	4/25/25	P. G. Wodehouse	Psmith in the City	Fiction
1479	4/26/25	Norman Daniels	Operation S-L	Mystery & Thrillers
1480	4/27/25	William W. Johnstone	War of the Mountain Man	Western

 

If you crave mindless action have I got a book for you! Even if Martin Wulff, the titular ‘Lone Wolf’ of The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit, spends most of this novel in his own head brooding on his upcoming death which can’t come soon enough unless maybe just maybe he can claw his way to the bastards who murdered his … well, there’s a whole host of people murdered by ‘The Network’ (as the criminal gang pushing smack on the street will be called here) who were near and dear to Mr. Wulff. Anyway, the plot is ludicrous, from the opening hijacking to the titular Havana to the strange and laughable and unrecognizable communist Cuba of Mike Barry’s imagination. The author (actually the workmanlike Barry Malzberg, just trying to make a living here) seems to hate commies almost (almost!) as much as he hates the crooks that would peddle drugs to kids on the street. Anyway, it’s mindless fun of the best type, an object lesson in headlong rush pacing to get to a writer’s needed word count.

I’ve spoken to you about John Le Carré before, but I cannot help it, I have to underscore again just how incredible this author is at what he does. In Smiley’s People he shows once again that he is simply the best at what he does—perhaps he’s the only one who can do it. How he manages to craft such interesting tension out of what are basically a set of extended—usually very extended—interviews is a marvel to me. Possibly only the Kevin Costner movie No Way Out can come close to his ‘thing’. This book is as good as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which was perfect.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1481	4/29/25	Julian Symons	The Broken Penny	Mystery & Thrillers
1482	5/9/25	J. R. Jones, ed.	Liberty Secured?: Britain Before and After 1688	History
1483	5/10/25	Michael Bonner, ed.	Uncut Magazine May 2024	Music
1484	5/11/25	Charles Johnson, intro.	Proverbs (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles
1485	5/12/25	Ross Macdonald	The Barbarous Coast	Mystery & Thrillers
1486	5/13/25	Bruce Sterling	Holy Fire	SF & Fantasy
1487	5/14/25	Robert Wilder	Fruit Of The Poppy	Mystery & Thrillers
1488	5/15/25	Robert Bloch	Lori	Horror
1489	5/16/25	Mike Barry (Barry Malzberg)	The Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit	Mystery & Thrillers
1490	5/18/25	John Le Carré	Smiley’s People	Mystery & Thrillers

 

I just talked about Philip K. Dick in my last 100 books, but here I go again. (And I’ve talked about him before, the last time I read his best book … well, one of the three.) This time I was revisiting The 3 Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, which I admit I didn’t even remember very well, which I suppose made the story even more arresting. As I enter deeper unto my oldening age, I found the re-reading very affecting. PKD’s flaws as a writer are here his strengths, his dissociative and fractured plotting shown as real insights by the damaged minds that inhabit his universe. He does dumb down (literally) a loved woman in the tale, but … ah, well, what do we expect for nothing?

I can hardly speak to half of this book of Pablo Neruda’s book of revolutionary erotic poetry, The Captain’s Verses (Los versos del Capitan), because I cannot read Spanish. But I still loved its rhythm and force, and the English versions (here in translations from Donald D. Walsh) were beautiful and seemed fairly literal—but what would I know? Neruda’s words are more powerful than any I might have, and the other poetry book in this tranche of ten books finishing off this last set of 100 books was also great. Penguin Modern Poets 9: Levertov Rexroth Williams has a great sampling from three of the best poets of the mid-20th Century (as I suppose you could argue each volume in the series does), and I also learned that William Carlos Williams is even better than Bukowski at writing about the boozers and sluts of the drunken world. Good stuff.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
	5/19/25	Dolat H. Doongaji & A.K. Lavangia	Shakuntala: An Adaptation of Kalidasa’s Famous Sanskrit Play	Comics
1491	5/19/25	Louis de Bernières, intro.	The Book of Job (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles
	5/20/25	Kamala Chandrakant	Shiva Parvati	Comics
	5/20/25	B.R. Bhagwat	Shivaji: The Story of the Founder of the Maratha Empire	Comics
1492	5/21/25	Georges Simenon	The Third Simenon Omnibus: Maigret Has Doubts / Maigret & The Minister / The Old Man Dies	Mystery & Thrillers
	5/22/25	Kamala Chandrakant; Pradip Bhattacharya & Meera Ugra; Shyamala Mahadevan	The Sons of Shiva: Ganesha, Karttikeya, Ayyappan	Comics
1493	5/23/25	Tanith Lee	Anackire	SF & Fantasy
1494	5/25/25	Philip K. Dick	The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch	SF & Fantasy
	5/25/25	Mike Baron	Badger #28	Comics
	5/25/25	Mike Baron	Badger #29	Comics
1495	5/26/25	Alistair MacLean	Seawitch	Mystery & Thrillers
	5/28/25	Mike Baron	Badger #30	Comics
1496	5/28/25	Erle Stanley Gardner	The Case of the Haunted Husband / The Case of the Careless Kitten	Mystery & Thrillers
1497	5/29/25	Margaret L. Wiley	The Subtle Knot: Creative Scepticism in Seventeenth-Century England	Philosophy
1498	5/30/25	Pablo Neruda	The Captain’s Verses (Los versos del Capitan)	Poetry
1499	5/30/25	Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, & William Carlos Williams	Penguin Modern Poets 9: Levertov Rexroth Williams	Poetry
1500	5/30/25	David Grossman, intro.	The Second Book of Moses, Called Exodus (The Pocket Canons Bible Series)	Christian Books & Bibles

 

And now I’m finally caught up with my book list, having lost a whole century during my last pell-mell reading spree. Even better, I have a little while left before the next set will be due, as I’m only a third of the way through the next set of one hundred. I hope all your books are great ones!

 
 
 

The lists of previously read books may be found by following the links:

• • Books #1 – #100
  • #101 – #200
  • #201 – #250
  • #251 – #300
  • #301 – #325
  • #326 – #350
  • #351 – #375
  • #376 – #400
  • #401 – #500
  • #501 – #600
  • #601 – #700
  • #701 – #800
  • #801 – #900
  • #901 – #1000
  • #1001 – #1100
  • #1101 – #1200
  • #1201 – #1300
  • #1301 – #1400

On the last day of February this year I finished book #1400, Hank Janson’s Kill Her With Passion, a “very silly, throwaway book” as I called it when I told you I’d completed another century of books. And yet I haven’t thrown it away. I have a special fondness for books that aren’t great, but are bad enough to be interesting. I recently tried to order a mystery that the great connoisseur of bad called the worst mystery book ever written, but that failed due to … well, I’m planning on writing about that experience in these blog pages, so I’ll update this paragraph with the link if and when I ever really post that whiny plaint. This book was not the worst, far from it, though it certainly had its moments. If you want to learn more about what I thought of this ‘Hank Janson’ book (and why would you?), go to that hyperlink above and you can read about it there.

And I also talk in the same place about the first book of this now not-the-most-recent century of books, Book #1301 in my great (and silly) book tracking project, the 28th book in the staggeringly epic (and more than epic, considering that I’m just hardly halfway through the series) series of fantasy novels concerning the magnificent deeds of the heroic Dray Prescot on the faraway planet of wonder Kregen circling the stars of Antares (or is it the other way round?). This particular book, Delia Of Vallia, as I noted before, is a change of pace from the usual first-person narratives of Prescot, being told from the perspective of his beloved Delia … which is both interesting and problematic. Perhaps Kenneth Bulmer (the real author behind the Alan Burt Akers pseudonym penning the series) was getting tired of the lengthy set of tales, though he seems just as creative and interested as ever in the next book in the series, Book Read #1317, Fires Of Scorpio.

Here’s one I hadn’t read in, oh, I don’t know, maybe since the 90s … maybe even earlier. And this re-read brought home just how freakin’ amazing Harvey Wasserman was when he pulled all this together and published Harvey Wasserman’s History Of The United States. Besides the best opening line of any history bar none (“The Civil War made a few businessmen very rich”), the book manages in a few hundred pages to cover the vast sweep of the promise of America and the shattering of that promise by the vested and monied interests. It is still masterful, and pulls together so many threads I didn’t even notice my first reading, such as Smedley Butler and most everything (well, not everything; not by a long shot) in Against The Day. Hard to believe it was published in 1972! The work is not revisionist history, but rather visionist history, a clearer vision with which to hold up a mirror to our country and ourselves. Sad to see that a half-century later we’re no closer to the end of this particular Yuga than we were then.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1301	10/9/24	Alan Burt Akers	Delia Of Vallia	SF & Fantasy
1302	10/10/24	Philip K. Dick	Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)	SF & Fantasy
1303	10/13/24	Harvey Wasserman	Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States	History
1304	10/18/24	Rudyard Kipling	Stalky & Co.	Fiction
1305	10/20/24	Stephen King	Simetierre	Foreign Language
1306	10/21/24	Adrian Roberts	Burning Man Live: 13 Years of Piss Clear, Black Rock City s Alternative Newspaper	Other
1307	10/21/24	Greg B. Smith	Nothing But Money: How the Mob Infiltrated Wall Street	True Crime
1308	10/22/24	Benjamin Franklin	Poor Richard: The Almanacks for the Years 1733-1758	Essays
1309	10/25/24	Ayn Rand	The Fountainhead	Fiction
1310	10/25/24	August Derleth	Mr. Fairlie’s Final Journey	Mystery & Thrillers

 

The Stephen Dain series of thrillers by Robert Sheckley are one of my favorite kind of action novels: quick reads from a more and more distant past that evoke the zeitgeist of a world now almost wholly forgot. He makes the reader believe in all the exotic and mysterious locales of Live Gold, which I thought was going to be a potboiler about fighting over oil in the Middle East, and instead turned out to be … well, let me tell you. In this entry in Dain shockers, the story is actually set in the near past, in 1952 (if memory serves), a decade before this paperback original was published. The reason for this story told in flashback (all the others I’ve read in the series have been contemporary tales) is that the major plot point of the novel is the fact that slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia up until … (checks notes) … 1962. Which was quite a shock to me; I had no idea. The basic plot revolves around a poor pilgrim given a miraculous chance to make the Hajj and travel to Mecca, only to find once he reaches Saudi Arabian soil that without the proper paperwork he is now sold into slavery—which is apparently one of the major ways in which new slaves were created in Saudi Arabia. As I say, I had no idea. The unfolding of the plot is a real blast; Sheckley is firing on all 12 cylinders here.

Steven Saylor’s historical mysteries, though they feature the anachronistic shamus Gordianus the Finder, may be the best way to learn Roman history from the time of Catiline on. In this retelling of the events surrounding the clash between Milo and Claudius—two would-be power brokers cum paramilitary leaders in the 50s BC—Saylor manages to breathe life into dead as dust Roman history, while making that historical record play to his tune just as Ellroy made magic from the Black Dahlia story. In A Murder On The Appian Way, I am struck, as I always am, by the essential humaneness of Gordianus’s character; this is perhaps his most un-Roman quality, but it is very endearing, and gives a modern window into what is truly a very foreign (though maybe all-too-familiar, given the collapse of our own republic) world.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1311	11/26/24	Robert Sheckley	Live Gold	Mystery & Thrillers
1312	11/27/24	Stephen King	Cell	Horror
1313	10/29/24	Peter Tremayne	Smoke in the Wind	Mystery & Thrillers
1314	10/31/24	Edmund Crispin	Holy Disorders	Mystery & Thrillers
250*	11/1/24	Agatha Christie	Hickory Dickory Death	Mystery & Thrillers
1315	11/2/24	Samuel Eliot Morison	History of United States Naval Operations in World War II – I: The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939–May 1943	Militaria
	11/2/24	Mike Baron	Badger #20	Comics
1316	11/3/24	John Dickson Carr	The Crooked Hinge	Mystery & Thrillers
	11/3/24	Mike Baron	Badger #21	Comics
1317	11/4/24	Alan Burt Akers	Fires Of Scorpio	SF & Fantasy
	11/4/24	Mike Baron	Badger #22	Comics
1318	11/6/24	Steven Saylor	A Murder on the Appian Way	Mystery & Thrillers
1319	11/6/24	Robert Sheckley	White Death	Mystery & Thrillers
1320	11/7/24	Donna Leon	Fatal Remedies	Mystery & Thrillers

* Re-read this Poirot book ’cause we’re getting into the BBC series, but … well, it’s still a bit of a mess, the characters of the students and all. Not one of Christie’s outstanding examples

 

It seems silly to write about a book wherein the poems themselves are (mostly) shorter than this short paragraph will be. But Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems From The Japanese is well worth reading, and not just because of or in spite of the fact that these poems are preciously small perfect works of just a few lines. Rexroth seems to be an honest translator, giving literal transcriptions in the notes when he gets a little … ‘poetic’. (Give a guy a Poetic License and he’ll fish for compliments his entire life.) Published originally in 1955, these poems bring to life a faraway and long ago place and time. But then … so is 1955 nowadays, if you think about it.

Close readers of these occasional Book Lists will have noticed that I’m a huge fan of Erle Stanley Gardner—and with good reason!—, though I’ve only highlighted before his books in non-Perry Mason series (specifically the Cool & Lam books, as well as one of the (two) Terry Clane novels). But I just had to give a nod to the amazing early books in the Mason series, and this exemplar, The Case Of The Perjured Parrot, is one of the great ones. As you can see from the cover, it was #14 in the series, and originally published in 1939. I dinged it slightly for the sense that I saw the sappy finale coming from a ways off … but it’s just possible I am remembering not predicting, as this is one of the plots reworked for the TV series. The intricate plot, however, is amazing and very satisfying, with Perry pulling more than one rabbit out of the hat in this one. Gardner is a whiz at this sort of thing, as Chandler always said, and this one sees Perry at the top of his form. Truly, as Perry himself says at the end, “I never had a more satisfactory case, or a more satisfactory client.”

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1321	11/9/24	Kenneth Rexroth	One Hundred Poems from the Japanese	Poetry
1322	11/9/24	Tim Hitchcock	Pathfinder Adventure Path: Giantslayer Part 3 – Forge of the Giant God	D&D
1323	11/9/24	Matt Davids & Erin Davids	Dungeons: 51 Dungeons for Fantasy Tabletop Role-Playing Games	D&D
1324	11/10/24	Piers Anthony	Castle Roogna	SF & Fantasy
	11/11/24	Dave Morice	More Poetry Comics	Comics
1325	11/11/24	C. S. Lewis	The Great Divorce	Religion & Spirituality
1326	11/13/24	Erle Stanley Gardner	The Case of the Perjured Parrot	Mystery & Thrillers
1327	11/16/24	Erle Stanley Gardner	The Case Of The Smoking Chimney	Mystery & Thrillers
1328	11/17/24	Magaret Allingham	More Work for the Undertaker	Mystery & Thrillers
1329	11/17/24	Atlanta Science Fiction Club	Deep South Con 18 Program – ASFiCon 1980	SF & Fantasy
1330	11/18/24	Isaac Asimov	The Caves of Steel	SF & Fantasy

 

Next on the hit parade (and there were several winners in this tranche of ten books, including one of my habitual re-reads of Lewis Carroll’s worthy books) is the So-Bad-It’s-OMG-I-Can’t-Believe-What-I’m-Reading! The Eye Of Argon, by Jim Theis, which has apparently been a famous ‘mostly lost’ story much beloved among the cognoscenti at Science Fiction conventions since it first appeared in a fanzine in 1970. Of course, I’ve never been hip and the cognoscenti won’t even return my calls, but my brother turned me on to this work of terrible dark (in the sense of opaque) fantasy. Besides the fact that this is just supremely awful, a truly staggering masterpiece of bad, it includes excellent afternotes detailing the tangled history of this work which has been read at cons for decades apparently, but only heretofore in partial versions before this publication found the original source material and presented the complete entirety of the … well, it’s really bad. You’ll find yourself reading it out loud yourself, either to annoy your neighbors or your own self.

A very long time ago, Eugene Ionesco wrote four children’s stories. (Or, at least, he wrote four that I know of.) And, only slightly less long ago, the odd and arty Harlin Quist published a series of odd and arty children’s books, of which this is one. Story Number 1 tells the story of Jacqueline and Jacqueline’s parents, the latter of whom seem to have had a little too much of something the night before. Illustrated by Joel Naprstek, the book turns out to be very Jacqueline. Highly recommended.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1331	11/19/24	Isaac Asimov	The Naked Sun	SF & Fantasy
1332	11/20/24	Mary Roberts Rinehart	Miss Pinkerton	Mystery & Thrillers
1333	11/23/24	Isaac Asimov	The Robots of Dawn	SF & Fantasy
1334	11/26/24	John Dickson Carr	The Case of the Constant Suicides	Mystery & Thrillers
1335	11/27/24	Donna Leon	Death and Judgment (aka A Venetian Reckoning)	Mystery & Thrillers
1336	11/28/24	Jim Theis	The Eye Of Argon	SF & Fantasy
1337	11/29/24	Ilya Ilf & Eugene Petrov; Charles Malamuth, trans.	The Little Golden Calf	Fiction
1338	11/30/24	Maureen Jennings	Vices of My Blood	Mystery & Thrillers
1339	11/30/24	Lewis Carroll; Martin Gardner, ed.	The Annotated Snark	Children’s
1340	12/1/24	Eugene Ionesco	Story Number 1	Children’s

 

Norbert Jacques created an anti-hero for his time when he penned the first book about Dr. Mabuse in 1921. (Originally it was Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (the Gambler).) And the bizarre and intriguing novel shows why the life given to Jacques’s monster did not die but lived on through many movies throughout the strange and savage 20th Century. (See David Kalat’s book, The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels, also read in this slice of ten, for more and fascinating details.) The book is even moreso than the movie: crazy, vibrant, compulsive, moving. This scream from the depths of 1922 Germany sometimes makes sense, sometimes not, but always is informed with a depth of feeling that seems lost nowadays. Sort of like an Ayn Rand with talent (and a lot less wordiness—things happen!) Not everyone’s cup of tea, I expect, and its flaws are (or should be) obvious. However … a great book, in its odd, anti-Futurist, passionate (as it might call it) way.

Another book that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but which is excellent in a much more modern way than Mabuse, is Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm. The novel is truly a stunning work, worth all the superlatives you can throw at it. A noir tale of the ‘60s, a strangely compelling portrait of a criminal, a depraved journey into a callous psychopathic man, told through the eyes of those closest to him who will never, ever know him—if there’s something to be known. Makes me want to read up about the Krays … and I really don’t think I want to do that.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1341	12/3/24	Norbert Jacques	Dr. Mabuse	Mystery & Thrillers
1342	12/4/24	Basil Copper	The Dossier Of Solar Pons	Mystery & Thrillers
1343	12/5/24	D. de Quelus	The Natural History of Chocolate	Cooking
1344	12/6/24	Harry Lorayne & Jerry Lucas	The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory at Work, at School, and at Play	Health
1345	12/7/24	Jake Arnott	The Long Firm	Mystery & Thrillers
1346	12/8/24	Chuang Tsu; Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, trans.	Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters	Religion & Spirituality
1347	12/10/24	Ian Fleming	You Only Live Twice	Mystery & Thrillers
1348	12/11/24	David Kalat	The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels	Entertainment
1349	12/17/24	Stephen R. Donaldson	Lord Foul’s Bane	SF & Fantasy
1350	12/18/24	Kenneth Bulmer / John Rackham	The Chariots of Ra / Earthstrings [Ace Double 10293]	SF & Fantasy

 

Raymond Chandler was one of the best writers of mystery fiction in the mid-20th Century, whether you call the style noir, hard-boiled, or what-have-you. All of his books are worth reading—all the mystery books, that is. Some of his early poetry is pretty rough going. But he was also an inveterate letter writer, and his private musings are well worth reading as … well, well. In Raymond Chandler Speaking some of the highlights of his voluminous correspondence are given us under several subject headings (e.g., Hollywood, writing, cats), and the Mr. Chandler that emerges turns out to be one of the most wonderful men ever. Sort of like a childless Atticus Finch in his sensitive humane approach to life and life’s problems. And his devotion to his wife is both cheering and heart-wrenching after her demise. Check it out.

Another one of my re-readings, James Robert Baker’s wannabe roman à clef Fuel-Injected Dreams presents several obvious stories of music industry excess disguised enough to make them publishable. Baker spins a crazy yet engaging romp through a fantasy Los Angeles and the accreted plaque of pop music dreams of the 60s. The story becomes more and more twisted, eventually implausibly so, but you only notice once it’s gone. Flawed in fairly serious ways, still, the novel provides a whole lot of fun.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1351	12/19/24	Kurt Vonnegut	Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction	Fiction
1352	12/20/24	Raymond Chandler	Raymond Chandler Speaking	Literature
1353	12/21/24	John Weber, ed.	An Illustrated Guide to The Lost Symbol	Conspiracy
1354	12/23/24	J. H. Elliott	Imperial Spain: 1469-1716 (Pelican)	History
1355	12/31/24	Doris Flexner & Stuart Berg Flexner	The Pessimist’s Guide to History: An Irresistible Compendium of Catastrophes, Barbarities, Massacres, and Mayhem—from 14 Billion Years Ago to 2007	History
1356	1/3/25	James Robert Baker	Fuel-injected Dreams	Fiction
1357	1/8/25	D. T. Suzuki; William Barrett, ed.	Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki	Religion & Spirituality
1358	1/10/25	Isaac Asimov	Robots and Empire	SF & Fantasy
1359	1/12/25	Margaret Frazer	The Squire’s Tale	Mystery & Thrillers
1360	1/15/25	Steven Saylor	The House of the Vestals: The Investigations of Gordianus the Finder	Mystery & Thrillers

 

Iain Pears magisterial novel of intrigue and philosophy in 17th-Century England, An Instance Of The Fingerpost, is lauded justifiably for its nuanced narrators and its complex plot, counterplot, and other plots. I found it not always an easy read (and it is very long), but then again one of my many failings is my sheer laziness as a reader. Thus, I was not always able to recall the earlier version of events in this book where subtle differences in the 4 narrators’ tales are important. And I was most impressed by how this turned out to be a completely different novel than I expected right there at the end … well, a hundred pages or so before the end. But comparing what I learned about the 2nd narrator may make that doubtful as well. Still, worth reading and pondering over, though the actual scientific philosophy so deeply imbued in this book and that time have always left me a bit cold, though I suppose you have to leave scholasticism in some fashion, and this one is not the worst. (For an alternate view of the same century’s English philosophical ideas, try The Subtle Knot by Margaret Wiley.)

Usually, of course, I use these interstitial paragraphs to laud books in the next set of ten that I found great pleasure in reading. But this particular decade of books was mostly ‘meh’ (with an exception for the Stephen Dain book Time Limit, though even that made a mistake by putting Dain front and center in the narrative, unlike the others in the series), and so maybe you can consider it a warning when I say that 100 Battles: Decisive Conflicts That Shaped the World is not a good book. The main problem in this work supposedly edited by Martin J. Dougherty (‘constructed’ may be a more accurate term) is that there are too many ‘battles’, too little insight. A formulaic template may work for Wikipedia, but here it is just a distraction from real military history. The tiny inset maps accompanying each entry are next to useless, and the battle maps are … clunky, at best. The text is sometimes interesting, but usually misses the mark, or just parrots the press releases. I learned a few things, but mostly that this sort of thing likely won’t be worse when our overlords institute the AI-only history books.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1361	1/18/25	Caroline Tiger	The UFO Hunter’s Handbook	Children’s
1362	1/19/25	Iain Pears	An Instance of the Fingerpost	Fiction
1363	1/21/25	Robert Sheckley	Time Limit	Mystery & Thrillers
1364	1/21/25	Frances & Richard Lockridge	Hanged For A Sheep	Mystery & Thrillers
1365	1/23/25	Charlotte Armstrong	The Girl With A Secret	Mystery & Thrillers
1366	1/23/25	Tom Broadman, ed.	Bloodhound Detective Story Magazine April 1962 [feat. Find A Victim by Ross Macdonald	Mystery & Thrillers
1367	1/24/25	Martin J. Dougherty, ed.	100 Battles: Decisive Conflicts That Shaped the World	Militaria
1368	1/27/25	Charlotte Armstrong	The Mark Of The Hand / The Dream Walker [Ace Double G-526]	Mystery & Thrillers
1369	1/28/25	Todd Pruzan & Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer	The Clumsiest People in Europe, Or: Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World	Humor
1370	1/29/25	Charlotte Armstrong	The One-Faced Girl / The Black-Eyed Stranger [Ace Double G-533]	Mystery & Thrillers

 

I went into Atlantis: The Antediluvian World with low expectations, to say the least, but I was pleased to find instead that this was a prime example of Wacko Done Right. Written by Ignatius Donnelly, one of the stranger figures in U.S. history, the book makes actually the best case for the existence of Atlantis that I’ve seen—including any new TV shows with the ‘latest findings’ slickly produced for Discovery or whatever. Compared to most of these ‘new’ investigators that pollute cable TV and YouTube and podcasts and whatnot, Donnelly is at least intellectually honest, mostly: though he doesn’t even glance at the evidence contrary to his hoped-for conclusions, he does assemble facts and expert opinion which represent the best of the state of knowledge current at the time he’s writing. In 1880, when this book was first published (he’d been working on it for years whilst serving in Congress as a Minnesota representative), Donnelly and his contemporaries had no idea of tectonic plates, nor many other facts we take for granted to day. And yeah, maybe he sells his ideas a little hard, but … well, he makes a pretty good case, fallacious as it is.

The first collection of Zippy the Pinhead comic strips from the mind and pen of Bill Griffith has the zippy title of Zippy Stories. And the words of that wise weirdo were a blessed balm during the 3rd week of the current nightmare. Talking (or writing) about the nonsensical sine qua non of non sequiturs would be silly, and trying to talk like Zippy would be impossible: I’m surprised even Bill Griffith is able to do it. Trust me. Go out and find a little Zippy this week. It’ll improve your life, materially or immaterially, one of those two.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1371	1/31/25	Ignatius Donnelly	Atlantis: The Antediluvian World	Wacko
1372	2/1/25	Gavin Black	The Cold Jungle	Mystery & Thrillers
1373	2/2/25	Michael Bonner, ed.	Uncut Magazine February 2024	Music
1374	2/3/25	Sergei Lukyanenko	Twilight Watch	SF & Fantasy
1375	2/3/25	Raymond Chandler	The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler & English Summer: A Gothic Romance	Mystery & Thrillers
1376	2/5/25	Sax Rohmer	The Mask of Fu Manchu	Mystery & Thrillers
1377	2/5/25	Grace Sloan Overton	Living With Teeners	Parenting
1378	2/5/25	Roger Zelazny	The Guns of Avalon	SF & Fantasy
	2/6/25	Bill Griffith	Zippy Stories	Comics
1379	2/7/25	John Fowles	The Collector	Fiction
1380	2/8/25	Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö	Roseanna	Mystery & Thrillers

 

Of course, Philip K. Dick cannot hold a candle to someone like Jimi Hendrix for postmortem releases, but among authors, there are few so prolific after death. Maybe Wittgenstein or Kafka, but those guys hardly published all that much while they were alive. Unlike all these non-living artists, however, the quality of PKD’s posthumous work is somewhat ragged, good ideas wrapped in stories that showed why these remained unpublished. But this children’s story from the master of mind-bending Science Fiction, Nick And The Glimmung, is a fine example of a book that should have seen the light of day when it was first written, back in 1966, instead of being buried for over two decades, disinterred only after Dick had been dead and buried himself for a half dozen years. The story may seem a slight one, and the ideas are not new (for Philip K. Dick), but he crafts the tale with a fairly deft hand and a real appreciation for how children’s stories should be written. True, the ending has some problems, and I still wish the cat Horace’s plaintive search for meaning had more resolution, but it seems to me that Dick had the potential to have been a fine addition to kids’ bookshelves alongside Daniel Pinkwater.

I’ve written about Margery Allingham’s self-effacing detective Mr. Albert Campion before, but the fact is: I just love this non-detective detective. This late entry, the 17th book in the series, published in 1952, shows Ms. Allingham at the top of her form. The story is perfect from start to finish. Sure, the original coincidences seem contrived, but become less so as the (frankly ridiculous) backstory is revealed. My only complaint would be that Campion has little to do with the unfolding of the plot. Instead, we’re given a bracing and gripping tale of good vs. evil, a brilliant bit of tension which is more compelling and plausible than anything Chesterton ever wrote. (Pace Chesterton. He’s fine at what he does best, and that’s rarely fiction.)

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1381	2/11/25	Richard Matheson	I Am Legend	SF & Fantasy
1382	2/12/25	James Gairdner	Henry the Seventh	History
	2/12/25	Dave Morice	Poetry Comics #2 Aug ’79	Comics
1383	2/12/25	Michael Gilbert	After The Fine Weather	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/12/25	Swapna Dutta & Subba Rao	The Rainbow Prince: Two Folk Tales from Bengal	Comics
	2/13/25	Kamala Chandrakant	Ram Shastri: The Maratha Judge – A Model of Integrity	Comics
1384	2/13/25	Ed McBain	The Frumious Bandersnatch	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/14/25	Gayatri Madan Dutt	Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and his tales [Sri Ramakrishna / The Learned Pandit / The Pandit & The Milkmaid]	Comics
1385	2/14/25	Ed McBain	There Was a Little Girl	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/15/25	Anant Pai, ed.	Rama	Comics
1386	2/16/25	Philip K. Dick	Nick and the Glimmung	SF & Fantasy
1387	2/17/25	Michael Crichton	Jurassic Park	Mystery & Thrillers
1388	2/17/25	Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö	The Man on the Balcony	Mystery & Thrillers
1389	2/19/25	Margery Allingham	The Tiger In The Smoke	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/19/25	Greg Irons	Underground Classics #9 (Greg Irons early work vol. 2)	Comics
1390	2/19/25	Joshua Cohen	The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family	Fiction

 

Astute readers of the table above detailing the penultimate slice of Books Read in this full set of 100 (if readers there be; writing this stupid blog is an exercise in solipsism), will have noted the heavier than usual appearance of comic books. And there’s a reason for that. The reason is I acquired a whole bunch of great books at the beginning of February, and was trying to achieve parity between books bought and books read. In other words, I cheated. Counted comic books towards my totals so that I could claim to have balanced my book budget. And anyway, in this last set of ten (Books Read, that is; I ended up adding so many comics into the mix that the total number of books including comics (or ‘comix’, as the case may be) came to 16), all the very best books were comic books (with the exception noted below). So the image given here, of Ted Richards fantastic creation The Forty Year Old Hippie, will have to stand in for all the great reading I got to enjoy from the best age of underground comics, but don’t pass up an opportunity to read some Wonder Wart-Hog either.

I cheated a bit when I said the other great book in this last tranche wasn’t a comic book, because it’s a graphic novel. Sort of. Of course, the justly famous stories of Tintin by that incomparable Belgian artiste Hergé were originally promulgated on a weekly basis in the children’s supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle. Interestingly enough, this particular Adventure of Tintin was interrupted in its weekly release by of all things the Nazi invasion of Belgium. Go figure, right? Anyway, the Land Of Black Gold was eventually completed in 1950 and we can now enjoy in stunning color one of the best stories in the canon. It’s a fun tale that somehow manages not to be ruined by the presence of a pesky brat. And the pseudo-hallucinogenic effects of Formula Fourteen on the Thompsons are a lot of fun.

 

#	Read	Author	Title	Genre
1391	2/20/25	Richard S. Prather	Dead Heat	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/20/25	Ted Richards	Underground Classics #8 (The Forty Year Old Hippie Vol. 1)	Comics
1392	2/20/25	Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö	The Laughing Policeman	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/21/25	Gilbert Shelton, Tony Bell, & Joe E. Brown, Jr.	Underground Classics #5 (Wonder Wart-Hog #1)	Comics
	2/22/25	Gilbert Shelton, Tony Bell, & Joe E. Brown, Jr.	Underground Classics #7 (Wonder Wart-Hog #2)	Comics
1393	2/22/25	Trevanian	The Eiger Sanction	Mystery & Thrillers
1394	2/23/25	Margery Allingham	Tether’s End	Mystery & Thrillers
1395	2/24/25	Richard Osborne & Borin Van Loon	Ancient Eastern Philosophy For Beginners	Philosophy
1396	2/25/25	Jeff Wilser	The Maxims of Manhood: 100 Rules Every Real Man Must Live By	Humor
	2/26/25	Mike Baron	Badger #23	Comics
	2/26/25	Hergé	Land of Black Gold	Comics
1397	2/26/25	K. T. Berger	Zen Driving	Religion & Spirituality
1398	2/26/25	Margery Allingham	Deadly Duo	Mystery & Thrillers
	2/27/25	Mike Baron	Badger #24	Comics
1399	2/27/25	Joseph Glenmullen	The Pornographer’s Grief: And Other Tales of Human Sexuality	Psychology
1400	2/28/25	Hank Janson	Kill Her With Passion	Mystery & Thrillers

 

And I already owe you another 100 books, and I’ll try to get right on that, before I get even further behind! Hope you have lots of good books in your life!

 

The lists of previously read books may be found by following the links:

• • Books #1 – #100
  • #101 – #200
  • #201 – #250
  • #251 – #300
  • #301 – #325
  • #326 – #350
  • #351 – #375
  • #376 – #400
  • #401 – #500
  • #501 – #600
  • #601 – #700
  • #701 – #800
  • #801 – #900
  • #901 – #1000
  • #1001 – #1100
  • #1101 – #1200
  • #1201 – #1300