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Friday Vocabulary

1. stridulate — to make a shrill grating, chirping, squeaking or similar sound by rubbing together body parts (e.g., as a cricket does)

The latex body suits made the grotesque couple fairly stridulate as they writhed in the heat of, for want of a better or at least more acceptable term, what Will could only call their passion.

 

2. exedra — room or recess, often semicircular, with a bench or benches where discussions can take place; such a bench

Tucked behind the bench in the exedra just to the right of the main church doors was a small brown leather bag, which was found to contain directions about paying the money, and for all his vaunted awareness, Timmy had to confess that he had spotted nobody even going near to the recess while he watched during the service.

 

3. hypotaxis — [grammar] subordination of a clause to another

“You can’t just say ‘While I’d like to stay…” and pause and expect me to play fill-in-the-blanks to your hypotaxis because you’re too diffident to stand up for yourself!”

 

4. feretory — reliquary; part of church where relics are kept

He had stolen the medicine cabinet from the home of this most beloved author before the bulldozers came in, and over the years it had become a feretory for the strange miscellanea of artifacts he collected at book signings and other public appearances: a discarded coffee stirrer, a leaky pen, a torn packet formerly containing ibuprofen.

 

5. chevauchee — calvary raid into enemy territory

Along these Scottish border lands the tradition of the chevauchee—although usually referred to by the more prosaic term ‘raids’—was so strong that it is believed the term was the etymological ancestor of the famous Chevy Chase.

 

6. pung — one-horse sleigh

Somehow it didn’t seem as romantic as she’d imagined, riding in the pung in the biting wind as the horse kicked up slushy snow which kept finding the crevices in the scarf she’d wrapped around her head and face.

 

7. solfeggio — do-re-mi system of learning notes of the scale

Winston never learned to read music and even the simplified solfeggio from The Sound Of Music left him painfully going through all the verses to find which note corresponded to ‘a drink with jam and bread’, and when Marnie told him about sharps and flats he simply gave it up as a lost cause.

 

8. nefandous — [archaic] execrable, appalling, unspeakable

You cannot commit such nefandous atrocities and then return to me with a mealy-mouthed apology asking for forgiveness.

 

9. groyne (also [US] groin) — breakwater

The first body was found caught in the pilings of the terminal groyne, which gave the detectives a pretty clear idea where the corpse had entered the water.

 

10. trenchant — incisive, cutting, biting

He rarely spoke in contradiction during these presentations, but the merest lift of an eyebrow as a junior executive made his case could be a more trenchant blow than any harsh words might have been.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(nautical)

slungshot (also slung shot) — weight attached to small cord used to cast lines from one place to another; similar device with shorter rope used as a weapon similar to a blackjack

These slavers would subdue the natives with a blow from a slungshot, but this time one of the pirates had struck with too much force, leaving only a corpse to be disposed of.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. chuck-farthing — [British] game similar to pitchpenny prevalent in 18th & 19th Centuries

Lorson had the eye and arm to almost always succeed in the first round of chuck-farthing, but he flung his coins instead of bunching them in the second round, so was almost always a loser in the end.

 

2. incontinent — unable to control bladder or bowels; having no or little moral or sexual restraint

But the second letter to Timothy also points out that these self-loving men (which condition we once styled as narcissism) will thus be incontinent in all their dealings with others, as they care not a whit for any persons than their own.

 

3. dule tree (also dool tree) — [Scots] gallows tree, mourning trees where gibbets were hung

The dule trees upon which the men of Gilnockie were hung were said to have withered and died in shame at playing a role in such treachery.

 

4. whin — gorse, furze

Eventually Mr. Tytler fed all of his horses upon the whins prepared in this manner, finding prudent use for the gorse which his land had in such abundance.

 

5. whin — hard dark rock

In these hills the whin is always found in a layer above the shale being quarried.

 

6. thrawn — twisted, misshapen; perverse, obstinate

But she forgave Petey’s behavior, telling all and sundry not to take any never no-mind, as he was just having one of his “thrawn days.”

 

7. madreporic — of or related to madrepore coral; resembling stony coral

But the bones had been weathered and fused into the gray sand as the shore retreated over the centuries, leaving only this madreporic ossuary to bear witness to the tragedy that had occurred.

 

8. hap — [archaic] to happen, to occur

“Aye! and if so it once happed it may well hap again.”

 

9. blackavised (also black-avised, black-a-viced, blackavized, blackaviced) — swarthy, having a dark complexion

But this blackavised jongleur was quite content to play the minor parts in these rural hamlets.

 

10. withindoors (also within-doors) — [obsolete] indoors, into or inside a house

These hair decorations are only revealed withindoors, however, for the tribe believes that evil sky spirits will be jealous of the bizarre decorations and would plague or even slay the wearer in consequence.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Norse mythology)

Fimbulwinter — the harsh three years long summerless winter which precedes the end of the world

The barn door was frozen shut tightly in place as if held in Fimbulwinter‘s icy doomed grasp.

 

1400 Books

Kindly readers of this blog will know that I’ve been tracking my books in a database provided by my lovely (and talented!) wife many years ago. And that I’ve been numbering the books read in that same software. And, additionally, that I have some strange scruple by which I don’t count comic books (and graphic novels) against the total number of books read. And that I recently gave you all the deets on the last tranche of a hundred books read, viz., those up to Book #1300.

As I intimated in that last report, I finished my 1400th book read in my silly book tracking project just shortly after giving you that full listing of the hundred books read previously (#s 1201-1300). Indeed, a mere three days after I’d published the “Book List: 1300 Books” listing detailing my poor reading habits for the previous century (of books), I hit Book #1400 in the aforementioned silly database project. The wonderful tome which saw me pass another fictional finish line? The supposed first entry in the Hank Janson series, Kill Her With Passion, supposedly written by Hank Janson. I advisedly say ‘supposed’ and ‘supposedly’ here because I find from the Interwebs that this Gold Star Book from 1963 is really only one of hundreds written under the ‘Hank Janson’ imprimatur, and is by no means the first. (In fact, it appears that this title is somewhere around #150 in the ‘series’.) I say ‘series’ in that last parenthesis because the Hank Janson character originally was penned by one Stephen D. Frances starting in 1946, and supposedly those earlier books by his hand were much better than the later ones written by house authors for quick cash. I can believe it. Kill Her With Passion is a very silly, throwaway little book, though it was quite fun. It is a terrible mishmash of hipness and sex, where beat clubs dig old school jazz in the heart of not-yet-swinging London, and a brash American brashes his way through a stupid set of murders committed by the stupidest smart guy in the business. A dumb enjoyable quick read.

And I’ve been doing a lot of quick reading lately, blowing through lots of short and easy prose just to get my ‘books read’ count up. Why? I confess. I bought a bunch of books lately, and am trying to offset the new purchases of which there are too many by reading as quickly as I can some others I already have. My goal is to be carbon-neutral, I mean, my goal is to have my books acquired equal to or less than my books read. So that’s why the numbers have gotten all weird lately, and that’s also why you’ll note in the full Book List which I swear I’ll get to you posthaste that I’ve been reading lots of comics. (Though I don’t count those towards the ‘Books Read’ total, they are included in my total number of volumes, so I’m reading those to help balance my (once more, need I remind you, fictional) accounts.

The first book of this past century was another entry in the fantastic Dray Prescot series, Delia Of Vallia. Alan Burt Akers (pen name for this series of Kenneth Bulmer) has created an amazing world in this series, and this book is no exception to the high quality I’ve become used to, though it is a bit of an outlier. For the first time, the tale of the wonders of the far-off planet of Kregen under the suns of Antares is told from the perspective of someone other than Dray Prescot himself, that doughty fighter thrown from Earth onto the strangest of planets were a man’s brawn and brain must constantly struggle to survive the dangers of bizarre races and deadly beasts that populate that fascinating planet under the double suns. The eponymous Delia of Vallia is Prescot’s beloved, and this story from her perspective is fun, with Akers (Bulmer) going up to the line in this anti-slavery tale. The frame story is shaken a little, but the result is a good one.

Mysteries were overwhelmingly the most-read genre in this last set of 100 books, with 44 read (45 if we include my re-reading of Hickory Dickory Death, which I originally read back in 2018, but we won’t, so there). The next most read genre is Science Fiction & Fantasy, at 16 books. (I’m including Stephen King’s Cell in this category, because though it’s gory enough for Horror (and boy-oh-boy, is it gory, I mean, really gory, gory with a bite, dang does it have gore), it has its SF elements as well.) There are 8 Fiction books read, and then little dribs and drabs of that and the other thing, such as 4 each of Religion, History, and Poetry books … though 2 of those Poetry genre books I’m including in Comics, because, well … they’re comic books. Speaking of Comics, I read 17 of those in this last set.

The pace was a blistering 142 days to read these 100 books, though this is in fact 23% slower than the pace set in the last century of books. If we include the comics and the re-read Agatha Christie, the pace was just north of 1.2 days per book read. Of course we don’t, so … moving on. The absolute pace of reading was also lower than in the previous century of books, at 186.6 pages read per day; or, if we include the return to a rather mediocre Poirot and the comics, 193 pages per day. (Compare with 230 pages/day and 245 pages/day, respectively.)

   1 Book per 1.42 Days   

I shall endeavor to provide you with the entire list of books soon, as I’m already up to Book #1440 in the newest set of 100.

Friday Vocabulary

1. mayhap — [archaic] perhaps, possibly

Mayhap you’ll find your keys immediately after I hang up the phone, but mayhap you’ll not, so I might as well come over to give you a ride should you need one.

 

2. smarm — to smooth down with ointment or grease; to fawn over

Babbidge’s hair was smarmed down to his collar, which of course was grease-stained by the rancid stuff.

 

3. soigné — well-groomed, fashionably made up

She was a grand old dame, and though her dresses were thirty years out of date she was perfectly soignée at any hour of the day and I daresay that even had a fire necessitated her running into the street at three in the morning, she would have appeared as perfectly made up as if she’d just finished two hours at her vanity.

 

4. twit — to censure, to tease

Margery twitted him for having missed her birthday—again—and he took her reproach in the spirit it was intended, asking if there were an ancient emerald in some distant land that he could bring back to her as amends … preferably one with a curse.

 

5. yett — [Scots] gate

Arthur rode through the grand yett for the first time, his chest swelling as he thought what a pretty sight he must make upon his chestnut charger.

 

6. decussate — to cross at right angles, to intersect

So they decided to decussate their crops so each could claim the bounty to father, Petey plowing north to south and Jackson planting his on an east-west axis.

 

7. clement — temperate, mild; merciful

When sober Papa was the most clement of men, and would forgive even a dire injury, but in his cups, he transformed into a veritable monster, and would find faults where none were intended.

 

8. cenobite — monk

But the desert fathers took this quietistic Christianity much farther than had the cenobites who sought solace in the forbidding wastes of this parched land.

 

9. casemate — bombproof shelter for troops or for artillery

Best practice is to build concrete casemates at the same time the parapets are constructed, though of course sandbags or earthworks may be used in the field.

 

10. ning-nong (also ning nong) — [Australian slang] idiot, dunderhead

“Oh, I’ll admit he’s fancy enough with that row of medals on his chest, and his title’ll impress the folk that go for that sort of thing, but don’t let him say more than two words together or they’ll see right away that he’s a total ning-nong!”

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(from obscure meaning of ‘cast‘ as a persistent turn, ultimately from the Middle English casten meaning ‘to overturn’)

a cast in one’s eye — the condition of having one eye twisted permanently to one side, the state of being cockeyed

Kathleen has a slight cast in her left eye which is not, however, unattractive in the least.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. shandrydan — hooded chaise; old ramshackle two-wheeled horse carriage or cart

Now I heard the creaking axel of the pastor’s shandrydan and knew we’d been betrayed, for there was no other reason Mr. Goodfellow would be riding down this lonely stretch of path at this ungodly hour of night.

 

2. polysomnogram — multi-valued recording of an individual’s sleep pattern, including brain, heart, lungs, and limb activity

Of course it is vital while recording a polysomnogram (or PSG) that the technician remain awake and alert.

 

3. juggins — [British] fool, simpleton

He was such a silly juggins that I didn’t dare leave Rebecca in his care while I attended to the car.

 

4. trebuchet — medieval siege engine using a sling at the end of a counter-weighted arm to hurl projectiles at an enemy’s position

Vital in the action of a trebuchet, of course, is the release mechanism of the top lines forming the sling’s bucket.

 

5. flemish — [nautical] to coil a rope in a pleasing flat spiral pattern

After the blood had been holystoned off the deck and the lines flemished down, I took a turn upon the larboard deck, feeling how my prize handled and striving not to smile at this, my first command.

 

6. albescent — becoming white; whitish

The wood beneath the painted duck still had a rich red hew, but the window sill around the mallard had been sun-stained to a sickly, albescent gray.

 

7. myology — [biology] study of muscles and their structures

Harper has just returned from West Texas, where he’s much in demand as one of the world’s leading experts in the myology of cattle.

 

8. querulent — abnormally suspicious or complaining

Was this my once hale and hearty childhood friend? now transformed by the loss of a petty lawsuit into the querulent paranoiac I saw leering up at me from his crouch at the rude table in the far corner of the darkened room?

 

9. metic — foreign resident required to pay tax to live in Ancient Greek city states

Worry about Xerxes’ invasion led many metics to flee Athens, with a concomitant loss of revenue to the Athenians.

 

10. stengah — [Malaysian] whiskey and soda

“Well, ‘stengah‘ means ‘half’ in Malay, and that’s how Conrad uses it, but in this house it means a decent drink, chop-chop, because nobody should be drinking straight whiskey in this beastly weather.”

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(from ‘scrag’ meaning the lean part of the neck of mutton)

scrag end — cheap cut of mutton from the neck chiefly used in stew; leftovers; least desirable parts

That’s me all over—biggest jewelry heist in a century and I end up with the scrag end of the haul: diamond dust and a handful of stones so flawed that they didn’t even dare mount them.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. dysphoria — state of feeling bad or unhappy, malaise

The marketing team finished their presentation on moving the Overton Window of dysphoria so that people at least didn’t feel so bad about feeling bad, but nobody in the room felt any better about the plan.

 

2. punnet — small basket for selling strawberries or other fruit

The strawberries looked luscious, and at $2 a punnet (or 5 for $8) the price was great.

 

3. runkle — to crease or wrinkle

He runkled his forehead as he strained to decipher the crabbed handwriting of his nephew.

 

4. petcock — small hand valve used for drainage or testing

After Decker’s pleas, the nurse opened the petcock slightly to allow more morphine into the IV.

 

5. ort (usu. plural) — leftover

As he was feeding the orts to the pigs, he thought of how the swine ate better than he, and he decided to humble himself and go back home and swallow his pride as well as his father’s food.

 

6. risible — laughable

The risible nature of their sexual congress dampened the anger that drove him into Milady’s chamber, and his hoarse demands to “Get out!” were accompanied by tearful guffaws instead of ire.

 

7. selachian — of or related to the subclass Elasmobranchii consisting of sharks, rays, etc.; sharklike

Madag favored me with a selachian smile and began to put on a pair of tight black leather gloves.

 

8. horse-coper — buyer and seller of horses, usu. of ill repute

Your typical horse-coper is well aware of all the intricacies of contract law as it relates to the sale of horseflesh, so any complicated clauses in the bill of sale should alert you to the possibility that you may find yourself with neither your horse nor your money.

 

9. spital — place for care of sick charity cases

The 15th Century spitals at Highgate were solely for the care of lepers, and of course were privately funded.

 

10. petrissage — deep massage using kneading motions

Henry submitted himself to the trainer’s petrissage and felt his shoulders relax for the first time since he and Ollie had stolen that car outside the banker’s garage.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(historical policy of Louis XIV to reconvert Huguenots by billeting troops in their households and turning a blind eye to consequent abuse and thefts)

dragonnade — abandoning civilians to the pillaging of soldiers

After three days of this dragonnade the city elders returned to General DuCloit and asked under what conditions he could be persuaded to withdraw the troops.

 

Book List: 1300 Books

Just after Christmas of 2023 … it may have been in the new year and it may not … my wife and I were driving by a Little Library in our neighborhood and she said “You want to check it out?” and I said yes and—30 seconds later she saw me coming to the car with a stack of paperbacks, a whole passel of these Penguin Modern Poets series. And so I’ve been reading these for the past year or so, and my last completed set of a hundred books (finished back in early October last year) saw me finishing this exemplar, No. 7 in the series, as book #1300 capping off that last century of books. I’ve already mentioned the two poets of three who I liked in this slim volume, so I won’t repeat myself here.

And as I’ve also already told you before, I started this last set of 100 books with Vonnegut’s arguably most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five. I waxed rhapsodic (I think that’s the only way to wax; is that right?) about it in one of those last two posts I linked to just now, so I won’t bother you anymore about it, save to say that it has been a pleasure revisiting Kurt Vonnegut, and has made me more willing to try returning to some old favorite authors of my misspent youth (pace Tom Robbins, and R.I.P.).

Sometimes I’m not in the right mood to enjoy S. J. Perelman, but that’s on me. Because, as this Modern Library collection proves, Perelman writes humor (which is the most difficult type of writing to essay) as well if not better than anyone else ever. Nobody can write the way he does, and The Best Of S. J. Perelman proves this over and over again. He’s like a manic uncle who you haven’t seen who remembers every movie y’all watched together at grandmama’s house that Christmas forty years ago, but he’s mixed up the plots with something his co-worker told him about a book his daughter was reading (the co-worker’s daughter, not your uncle’s, although … you know what, never mind). Nobody can top him (Perelman, not your uncle’s co-worker’s daughter), so I won’t even try.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1201 6/16/24 Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five Fiction
1202 6/17/24 Daniel M. Pinkwater The Worms of Kukumlima Children’s
1203 6/18/24 Leonora Carrington Daniel M. Pinkwater Surrealism
1204 6/19/24 Doris Lessing Martha Quest Fiction
1205 6/20/24 S. J. Perelman The Best Of S. J. Perelman Humor
1206 6/21/24 Homer; Richmond Lattimore, trans. The Iliad of Homer Poetry
1207 6/23/24 Arthur Morrison Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories Mystery
1208 6/24/24 Mark Steel Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution History
1209 6/26/24 Albert Soboul The Sans-Culottes History
1210 6/27/24 Christopher Moore Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal Fiction

 

Stoner was that rare novel that lived up to the hype and made it understandable, made me want to add to it, hype this book to all and sundry. The beautiful perfect story of a seemingly ordinary man who finds his life’s calling and a passion for literature is … well, perfect. It’s the best novel I’ve read in years and years and years. Really, I cannot describe it nor would I want to, when you can read the book yourself. I have to confess, however, that I loved this novel so much that I’ve hesitated to read or even acquire (which is what I do mostly with books) any other of John Williams’s novels—and there’s only three I believe. I’m so afraid the magic won’t be repeated, and I’m still almost a year later blown away by just how freaking good this story is.

Is this book the first movie novelization ever? I doubt it, but the fact remains that this thin volume was written especially as an adjunct for the movie release—though strangely enough, if I remember aright (like I said in the paragraph above, it’s been almost a year since I was reading these books), the book of King Kong actually came out before the movie. (Can that be right?) The story is credited to one Delos W. Lovelace, which is good, because the writing credit for the movie is fraught with caveats and footnotes. The novelization is excellent, with almost the same perfect pacing as the movie, though the ending felt perhaps just a trifle rushed.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1211 6/27/24 John Williams Stoner Fiction
1212 6/28/24 Steve Allen Murder On The Atlantic Mystery
1213 6/29/24 Connie Willis & Cynthia Felice Water Witch SF & Fantasy
1214 6/29/24 J. R. R. Tolkien Leaf By Niggle SF & Fantasy
1215 6/29/24 John Robinson, ed. John Lennon: Every Album Reviewed! Music
1216 6/29/24 Delos W. Lovelace King Kong SF & Fantasy
1217 6/30/24 Thomas Cleary Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom Religion & Spirituality
6/30/24 Kamala Chandrakant Prahlad: The Child Devotee of Vishnu, from the Bhagawat Purana Comics
7/1/24 Bharati Sukhatankar King Janaka Comics
7/1/24 Anant Pai, ed. Krishna: The Childhood of the Eighth Avatar of Vishnu Comics
1218 7/1/24 Patricia Wentworth The Alington Inheritance Mystery
7/2/24 Kamala Chandrakant Krishna and Jarasandha: The Story of How the Invicible Magadhan Emperor Was Vanquished Comics
1219 7/3/24 Michael Crichton Prey Thrillers
7/3/24 Kamala Chandrakant Krishna and Rukmini Comics
1220 7/3/24 James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and A. J. Storey Cambridge Jokes: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Library Collection – Cambridge) Humor

 

There were a few good ones in the next set of ten books, but there were also some so-sos, and even a few ughs. But one of the good ‘uns was another one of the Penguin Modern Poets series, as you can probably guess by the poets included: Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg. Ferlinghetti was the revelation here; I don’t think I’d really read much of him before, and I found myself loving what he did with words, moreso than Ginsberg. But poetry’s a personal thing, natch, so … well, that’s what I thought … according to my notes. Like I said, it’s been a year. Almost.

The other highlight from this decade of books was the classic Varieties Of Religious Experience, by William James. It had been a while since I’d read it, and James’s prose was even more powerful than I remembered. This is how religious thought should be examined, with respect and interest, and letting the facts lead to the conclusions, rather than vice versa. Speaking of the conclusion, William James really hits his out of the park. (Also worthy of note are his chapters on ‘Mysticism’ and ‘Philosophy’.)

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1221 7/6/24 Terry Pratchett Interesting Times SF & Fantasy
7/7/24 Shubha Khandekar Mahabharata – 31: Bheeshma In Command Comics
7/7/24 Shubha Khandekar Mahabharata – 33: Drona’s Vow Comics
1222 7/7/24 Aaron Betsky, K. Michael Hays, Laurie Anderson, et al. Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio Architecture
1223 7/8/24 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine September 2023 Music
1224 7/10/24 Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, & Allen Ginsberg Penguin Modern Poets 5 Corso Ferlinghetti Ginsberg Poetry
1225 7/10/24 William James The Varieties of Religious Experience Philosophy
1226 7/11/24 Johnny (Appleseed) Rossen, ed. The Little Red White and Blue Book: Revolutionary Quotations by Great Americans Reference
1227 7/12/24 James Ellroy The Big Nowhere Mystery
1228 7/14/24 Piers Anthony Juxtaposition SF & Fantasy
1229 7/17/24 Anthony Blond A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors History
1230 7/17/24 David Icke Phantom Self (and how to find the real one) Wacko

 

Mounds of ‘meh’ in this next tranche of books, of which this collection of some of Marcel Gotlib’s work from old bandes desinéees is the second best. Really, some of this stuff is very, very clever, and would give MAD magazine a run for its money. Or likely it would, were my French better. But it’s not all gravy, or tea and crumpets, or whatever the appropriate phrase would be en français. Some of this stuff had aged pretty poorly, but then a lot of stuff from the 70s doesn’t hold up too well to close inspection. I’m not talking about The Eagles, more stuff like Quincy M.E., which has nothing to do with anything. Never mind.

The best of a bad lot is this tradeback collection of George Gamow’s physics lectures disguised as dream fictions, Mr. Tompkins In Paperback: Containing Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland And Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom. And it was … okay, again. Don’t get me wrong. I love … love, love, love Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland. That book and its essays are some of the best explanations of quantum physics ever given for the layman, and they’re real fun, too. But … well, the other stories, from … Explores The Atom, don’t quite have the same panache, plus they were outdated rather quickly, and have aged even more since that collection was first published in 1945. (Everyone wanted to learn more about the atom at the time, for some reason.) Plus—and this is the deal-breaker—pretty much all the original illustrations from the first book are replaced by poorer versions from the pen of Mr. Gamow himself. And, as an illustrator, he’s a wonderful popular science writer.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1231 7/20/24 Richard P. Stebbins The United States in World Affairs 1959 History
1232 7/21/24 Ken Lytle & Katie Corcoran Lytle The Little Book of Big F*#k Ups: 220 of History’s Most-Regrettable Moments History
1233 7/22/24 Francesco Colonna; Joscelyn Godwin, trans. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream Fiction
7/22/24 Marcel Gotlib Rubrique-à-brac, tome 5 Comics
1234 7/24/24 Kate Ross The Devil in Music Mystery
1235 7/24/24 Larry Wilhelm Pathfinder Adventure Path #92: Giantslayer Part 2 – The Hill Giant’s Pledge D&D
1236 7/25/24 Richard McKee The Clan of the Flapdragon and Other Adventures in Etymology by B. M. W. Schrapnel, Ph.D. Linguistics
1237 7/26/24 George Gamow Mr Tompkins in Paperback: Containing Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland And Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom Science
1238 7/27/24 Laurie Lee A Rose for Winter Travel
1239 7/28/24 A Rose for Winter Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex Science
190* 7/29/24 Alan Axelrod The Complete Idiot’s Guide To The Civil War History
1240 7/30/24 Stephen B. Oates The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion History

* I mistakenly re-read The Complete Idiot’s Guide To The Civil War (originally read back in 2018) under the misapprehension that I hadn’t read it before

 

I re-read I Am The Cheese as part of my recent project of revisiting the books I loved in youth to see how (and if) they held up, to see what my arguably more mature viewpoint—or at least my older eyes—found in those volumes that had meant so much to me in my teenage years. And Robert Cormier’s multi-layered tale of teen angst and fear and mistrust certainly was still compelling, very well-written even to my aged and perhaps more cynical and jaded sensibility. The story was, however, completely different from how I remembered it. For years I’ve been telling people that I can’t believe they proffered this book to children, to teenagers, as something those youthful minds should read. And I stand by that statement. Only, I’d remembered it as something much more internally oppressive and dark, whereas the actual tale was … well, it’s something you should read yourself, n’est-ce pas? I can only imagine how it must have fed my already nascent antipathy towards psychology and psychologists.

Whatever you may think of his reimagining of French historical approaches to the French Revolution, François Furet is truly one of the great geniuses among French historians. This book, The French Revolution: 1770–1814 (Part I of Furet’s Revolutionary France, 1770–1880), is simply brilliant. As they say, “magisterial”. The sweeping overview of one of the most knotty and overfull spans of history is a masterpiece, written by a master of his materials. The excellent bibliography is worth the price on its ownsome. Reading Furet’s history was the very first time that the Directory and the rise of Napoleon made sense to me.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1241 7/31/24 Alex Bosse Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments Science
1242 7/31/24 Margery Allingham Pearls Before Swine Mystery
7/31/24 Rishabhdas Ranka Mahavira: The Prince Who Became a Recluse and Propagated Jainism Comics
8/1/24 Meera Ugra Mahiravana: The Son of Ravana Comics
8/1/24 Anant Pai, ed. Mirabai: The Touching Tale of a Great Devotee of Krishna Comics
1243 8/1/24 Kenneth Atchity A Writer’s Time: Making the Time to Write Reference
8/2/24 Anant Pai, ed. Nala Damayanti: Retold From The Mahabharata Comics
1244 8/3/24 Coach Jim Everroad How To Flatten Your Stomach Health
1245 8/3/24 Robert Cormier I Am The Cheese Fiction
8/6/24 Gayatri M. Dutt Narayana Guru Comics
8/6/24 Padmavati: A Tale from Vetala Panchavimshati Comics
8/6/24 Luis Fernandes Panchatantra: Crows and Owls and other stories Comics
1246 8/6/24 Herman Melville Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories Fiction
1247 8/9/24 François Furet The French Revolution: 1770–1814 History
1248 8/10/24 Susan Cheever Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker Biography
1249 8/11/24 George Carlin Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George Humor
1250 8/12/24 Robert van Gulik The Chinese Nail Murders Mystery

 

Bond is back, baby! After the ridiculous pretensions of The Spy Who Loved Me, where Ian Fleming tried to prove that he is too a real writer dammit—with the result that the first 65 pages of that slight tale (nothing like the movie) are a coming-of-age tale of a sweet young thing not entirely unacquainted with love and sex—James Bond returns to fine form in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It is an exceptional tale in Fleming’s oeuvre, with bona fide pathos—though of course I knew how it would all end. Sad, ruthless, and slightly less drunken than usual.

Welp … I must’ve disliked State Of Fear so much that I didn’t even scan the cover (my usual procedure with all my books nowadays) before getting rid of it. Don’t get me wrong: I love Michael Crichton. When he’s in his element and doing what he does best, there’s nobody to compare. I read The Andromeda Strain something like five times in high school, and still think that The Eaters Of The Dead is the best retelling of the Beowulf story bar none. But I spent my time whilst reading this tome debating to myself whether I was reading a so-so polemic or a not-so-good thriller, before deciding that it certainly was polemic, and that the thrills were few and far between. The ludicrous plot of a ludicrously well-financed group of eco-terrorists constructing ecological disasters to promote their conspiratorial takeover of government funding was … well, ludicrous. Not just unbelievable, it made me feel sorry for the successful smart people who apparently live in an information bubble as impenetrable as those that pundits worry that devotees of Fox or MSNBC find themselves trapped in. Pity those people who only get their ideas from mirror images of rich people who see conspiracies in every funding bill, and who have literally zero idea of how the great mass of humanity makes it from one end of the day to the other.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1251 8/13/24 Michael Crichton State Of Fear Mystery
1252 8/15/24 Ian Fleming On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Mystery
1253 8/16/24 Phil Cousineau Soul: An Archaeology: Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles Religion & Spirituality
1254 8/17/24 Michael Rutter Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West History
1255 8/18/24 Victoria Thompson Murder on St. Mark’s Place Mystery
1256 8/19/24 Victoria Thompson Murder on Gramercy Park Mystery
1257 8/19/24 Walt Disney Bambi Foreign Language
1258 8/21/24 Thomas Ayres That’s Not in My American History Book: A Compilation of Little-Known Events and Forgotten Heroes History
8/22/24 Pushpa Bharati, Suresh Chandra Sharma, & Kamala Chandrakant Poet Saints of North-India: Soordas, Tulsidas, Mirabai Comics
8/23/24 Gilbert Shelton, Tony Bell, & Joe Brown Wonder Wart-Hog and the Battle of the Titans! Comics
1259 8/24/24 Victoria Thompson Murder on Bank Street Mystery
1260 8/25/24 Alice R. Huger Smith & D.E. Huger Smith The Dwelling Houses of Charleston South Carolina Mystery

 

My Russian coworker has been touting this book for ages, and I finally bit the bullet and bought it new, after failing for a couple of years to find it in used bookstore. And it was great. Hard to believe it’s almost a hundred years old, and it may have made me rethink the Russian Revolution entirely. For me it started slowly, which isn’t too surprising seeing that it was written in serial form, but it got progressively funnier and crazier and more madcap until …. Well, one doesn’t speak of endings or spoilers, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Yet Dmitri tells me there’s a sequel?

I told you before how much I liked Hal Clement’s Mission Of Gravity, in one of my rare book reports of the past few years. And the hard science acumen Clement displayed there is also foregrounded here in The Nitrogen Fix, though without quite the same level of pedantic mathematical detail. But I may have liked this one better, certainly found it an easier read, because of both the interesting psychology and the deep backgrounding of the heavy hard science.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1261 8/25/24 Mary Lynn Rampolla A Pocket Guide To Writing In History Historiography
1262 8/26/24 Roger Price I’m For Me First: The Secret Handbook for the Me First Party Humor
8/26/24 Mike Baron Badger #18 Comics
8/26/24 Russ Cochran, ed. Weird Science #7 Comics
1263 8/27/24 Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov The Twelve Chairs Fiction
8/27/24 Mike Baron Badger #17 Comics
1264 8/28/24 Alexandra Villard de Borchgrave & John Cullen Villard: The Life and Times of an American Titan Biography
1265 8/29/24 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine December 2023 Music
8/29/24 Shobha Gangolli & Malati Deshpande Pundalik and Sakhu: Two Famous Saints of Maharashtra Comics
1266 8/29/24 Hal Clement The Nitrogen Fix SF & Fantasy
1267 8/30/24 Jack Clemo, Edward Lucie-Smith, & George MacBeth Penguin Modern Poets 6: Clemo Lucie-Smith MacBeth Poetry
1268 8/31/24 Barbara Hambly Fever Season Mystery
1269 8/31/24 Eileen Roth & Eliabeth Miles Organizing for Dummies Pocket Edition Home & Garden
8/31/24 Russ Cochran, ed. Weird Science #6 Comics
1270 8/31/24 Robert Aitken The Dragon Who Never Sleeps: Verses for Zen Buddhist Practice Religion & Spirituality

 

Rifleman Dodd was not at all what I expected. Of course, my edition was a wartime Fighting Forces Series edition from The Infantry Journal, and in the US the thrilling tale of partisan fighting was retitled from the original Death To The French, so I had little reason to suspect I was about to read another of C. S. Forester’s matchless tales of military derring-do, this time the narrative of a British grunt who gets cut off during the orderly retreat of his unit fighting in Portugal during the Peninsular War against Napoleon. Really, it’s an amazing tale, and I can well see why the military would want its own soldiers to read and learn the book’s many lessons on how to think and survive and fight even at the lowest level of the army. An excellent book, though it made me cry, and even though patriotism is the most shameful emotion for a cynic; still, Forester does such a better job of tugging (gently) on those heartstrings than anything the MCU ever thought of.

Mazes Of Scorpio finds Dray Prescot returning to his roots in this slash-‘em devil-may-care romp. In this 27th [!] book in the series, Alan Burt Akers (pen name for Kenneth Bulmer) puts Dray (now emperor of Valia, among many other titles) back together with Seg Seguturio as his companion as they struggle through the hellish mazes of far Pandahem. Along the way, however, are strange intimations from the Star Lords and yet one feels the worries of the Emperor of Vallia falling from his massive shoulders as he traipses through the jungle with one of his oldest friends.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1271 9/2/24 Bill P., Todd W., and Sara S. Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects – Steps Six and Seven Self-Help
9/2/24 Russ Cochran, ed. Weird Science #4 Comics
1272 9/2/24 National Lampoon National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody Humor
9/2/24 Russ Cochran, ed. Weird Science #1 Comics
1273 9/6/24 Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love SF & Fantasy
1274 9/6/24 Albert Camus La Peste Foreign Language
1275 9/7/24 C. S. Forester Rifleman Dodd Fiction
1276 9/9/24 Leslie Charteris The Saint: The Last Hero Mystery
1277 9/12/24 Diogenes Laërtius; C. D. Yonge, trans. The Lives And Opinions Of Eminent Philosophers Philosphy
1278 9/13/24 Tom Robbins Another Roadside Attraction Fiction
1279 9/14/24 Robert Sheckley Calibre .50 Mystery
1280 9/15/24 Alan Burt Akers Mazes of Scorpio (Dray Prescot #27) SF & Fantasy

 

There were so many exceptional books in this slice of ten that I find myself having a hard time choosing only two to highlight. Still, Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder was a true standout. Edited with commentary by H. Arthur Klein, this wide format Dover edition showed his prints (and one woodcut) in excellent detail, displaying their startling simplicity … and their complications. I might have wished for even more details of possible allusions to this or that Dutch folk saying or symbolic reference, but Klein’s commentary was always helpful and insightful, teasing out the details while letting the overarching power of the art shine through.

As I say, too many good books in this tranche, including Jack Vance’s 3rd Demon Prince Novel The Palace Of Love and the light-hearted silly youth SF from Heinlein Starman Jones (which made up (to some extent) for the slog I’d had to go through trudging to the end of Time Enough For Love in the last set of 10). But if I could bring to your attention just one of these many choices, I have to underscore over and over again just how freaking good Bored Of The Rings is. Well, the first half, anyway, but that’s a problem shared by its source material. Beard and Kenney really wrote comedic gold with this parody, and if you have any love for Lord Of The Rings, you owe it to yourself to read the Harvard Lampoon humor book. True, some of the jokes are getting a bit old, and you have to be my age or older to get many of the allusions, but it really is just spectacular, starting with the delightful parody of the author’s introduction that accompanied the Ballantine paperbacks of Tolkien’s trilogy (so-called). Plus, unlike every movie version—even Bakshi’s!—they dare to use the Tom Bombadil sequence. Check it out.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1281 9/15/24 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine Review of the Year 2023 Music
1282 9/16/24 H. Arthur Klein, ed. Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder Art
1283 9/18/24 Stephen Weir Encyclopedia Idiotica: History’s Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them History
1284 9/18/24 Harvard Lampoon, Henry Beard, & Douglas C. Kenney Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Humor
1285 9/19/24 Mickey Spillane Nettoyage par le vide Foreign Language
1286 9/20/24 Robert A. Heinlein Starman Jones SF & Fantasy
1287 9/20/24 Cintra Wilson A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations Essays
1288 9/21/24 Jack Vance The Palace of Love SF & Fantasy
1289 9/22/24 Frank R. Adams Arizona Feud Western
1290 9/23/24 Truck Drivers Dictionary and Glossary Reference

 

True or not—and there’s every reason to doubt this account (though as much reason to doubt any other)—this is a great story. The Conspiracy And Death Of Lin Biao is told with the inexorable detachment of a Njal’s Saga, the massing of evidence and testimony supposedly from secret files tells an entirely plausible tale, which is all history turns out to be in too many cases. Wikipedia now goes with … well, the original story, mostly, after a 1994 ‘new look’ at the event. But there’s only smoke everywhere, and it’s almost suspicious that there’s so little commentary online about this book or the tale it purports to tell. (Though that sort of thinking leads to madness.) Maybe this book is just another My Sister And I, but if so, it’s a good creation (which you can’t say of the other).

And let us now praise famous books. The Maltese Falcon is still one of the best if not the best of noir mysteries. Dashiell Hammett’s objective eye leaves all the story-making to the dialogue of his characters, and the terse, almost placid description never tells us what to think. And so we keep guessing until the end, or at least we once did, before we knew it all. The movie follows the book almost slavishly, even to much of the dialogue, but there’s that one passage in the book, the key to the whole thing really, that never made it to the screen. It’s only a page or two, but tells more about Sam Spade and Hammett and maybe damn-all than anything else ever may.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1291 9/26/24 Alan Dean Foster Outland SF & Fantasy
9/27/24 Russ Cochran, ed. Weird Science #4 [Gladstone] Comics
1292 9/27/24 Yao Ming-le The Conspiracy and Death of Lin Biao: How Mao’s Successor Plotted and Failed – An Inside Account of the Most Bizarre and Mysterious Event in the History of Modern China Conspiracy
9/28/24 R. Crumb Uneeda Comix #4 Comics
1293 9/29/24 Carol J. Adams The Pornography of Meat Social Science
1294 9/29/24 Martin J. Brayley American Web Equipment: 1910–1967 Militaria
1295 9/30/24 Molière Uncut Magazine January 2024 Music
1296 10/2/24 P. G. Wodehouse The Inimitable Jeeves Fiction
1297 10/5/24 Stephen King The Green Mile: The Complete Serial Novel Fiction
10/3/24 Chester Gould Dick Tracy: The Thirties : Tommyguns and Hard Times Comics
1298 10/5/24 Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon Mystery
1299 10/8/24 Peter Occhiogrosso The Joy of Sects: A Spirited Guide to the World’s Religious Traditions Religion & Spirituality
1300 10/8/24 Richard Murphy, Jon Silkin, & Nathaniel Tarn Penguin Modern Poets 7 Murphy Silkin Tarn Poetry

 

And I’ve already told you about the repeated mishegas with my book counting issues, so I won’t go into that again here, and I gave you a fairly quick rundown on the stats in the earlier post, so not gonna repeat that either. What I will do, however, is wish you well, and promise not to take quite so long getting this stuff before you for the next set of 100 books … which promise you’ll get to see whether I keep or not pretty quickly, as I’ve delayed writing all this stuff out so that I’m only about five books away from hitting #1400. But … well, reasons, and long story, and like that. Until next time!

 

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

Friday Vocabulary

1. foment — to incite, to encourage; to apply heat or ointment to (body part)

After the splint has been removed, foment the limb at least twice daily.

 

2. mugfaker — [obsolete slang] street photographer

We contacted all the mugfakers within three blocks of the boardwalk to see if they might have taken a portrait of the girl.

 

3. hiemal (also hyemal) — of or related to winter

His head was crowned with a hiemal garland of holly leaves and pine boughs.

 

4. egality — [archaic] equality

The egality and fraternity of The Revolution quickly gave way to less and less liberty.

 

5. illeism — referring to oneself in the third person

Bob Dole is the obvious contemporary practitioner of illeism, though the term derives from Julius Caesar’s various self-promoting histories.

 

6. instancy — immediateness; urgency, insistent nature

The instancy of sensory experience, argued the Belgian philosopher, discounts the sort of ‘best guess’ approach offered as a counterexample by his rival at Leiden.

 

7. subvention — grant of money for aid, support, or relief; honorarium paid to supposedly amateur athlete

The Riksdag has for years paid subventions directly to the parties, the amounts apportioned according to the number of seats held.

 

8. clunch — pale limestone rock mixture (sometimes with chalk or clay) used as building material

The normal range of clunch houses is eastern England and Normandy, so it is quite unusual to find a building—even a small outbuilding such as this one—deep in the mountains of Wales.

 

9. palliasse — mattress filled with straw

The rude palliasses laid near the feasthall hearth seemed the softest featherbeds after the last three nights in the rain upon the sharp sides of that flint mountain.

 

10. sucket — sweet made from candied fruit

“No one can beat your sucket for delicious flavor, Mary Ann!” he said.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(slang originating with carnies)

donniker (also donnicker) — outhouse, privy

When last seen, Reinhard had been headed to the donniker with an old issue of Vanity Fair.

 

1300 Books

Welp

Has it already been three-and-a-half months since I first realized I’d made another data entry mistake in my Great Book Tracking Project and had to correct my ongoing mistake before giving you, my one or two readers of this blog (I’m being optimistic here), the summary data for the last hundred books I’d read? Yes, yes it has.

As I told you before, I messed up my book count in my database about thirty books into the last tranche of one hundred books, meaning I had to go back and change the data for about seventy book entries (more than that, because of comics (which, as you faithful readers of this blog know, I do not count to the overall total of Books Read, though I do keep count)). And I had to change that datapoint in the same number of entries in my Excel spreadsheet. And I had to do the same in a Libre Office spreadsheet, which I started because of reasons and which is now a parallel document which I should either give up or start using exclusively, but the original reasons are gone and … well, why should you care? Especially if I don’t? But anyway, long story slightly less long, I made those changes, and instituted a checksum (sort of) to prevent this sort of thing happening again (as it had done in the century of books before this one), and so that was good—indeed, the new checkdigit columns actually caught three similar mistakes in my data entry since I started using the new system (which either shows its value or that I’m getting sloppier in my senescence)—but that doesn’t explain why I’m only getting back to this last century of books over a hundred days later. No, that delay is because of my usual issues, which are: reasons, and procrastination.

With all that (not quite) said, let me get on with my usual program of giving you the brief statistical overview of the last set of one hundred books read, only just in time, as I’ve got only something like fifteen books left before I’ve read the next hundred. And so I’ll start by saying that the 1300th Book read, after correcting for my earlier mistake, turns out to be the entry in the Penguin Modern Poets series shown here, Penguin Modern Poets 7 Murphy Silkin Tarn. All three poets wrote poetry with a strong religious sensibility—an unusual occurrence for this series—and Richard Murphy and Nathaniel Tarn acquitted themselves quite well. I found Jon Silkin to be a bit overwrought, which is a danger with any sort of spiritual writing.

As I mentioned in my first abortive notice of 1300 Books Read, the first book in this last set of one hundred turned out to be Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Slaughterhouse-Five. (I keep seeing variations of the title, with and without hyphens, but this is what we’re going with here.) I fawned over it endlessly in my mistaken opening for my post about hitting my imaginary 1200 Book goal line, so you can read my deathless prose about how awesome Vonnegut’s book is there. Suffice it to say that I liked it (again). A lot.

The largest number of books read in the last set fell into the Mystery category, with 17 of those read. This is pretty standard for my reading pattern lately, especially as I’m reading a good bit at work during downtime, and those are easier to pick up and put down as needed than detailed works of history or literature. Actually, the genre with the most items read were Comics, as I read 27 of those in that last set. But, as I say …. The 17 mysteries were actually only a little more than the number of straight Fiction books I finished—14—, and I read more History books than Science Fiction & Fantasy in this last group of one hundred (11 versus 10). The real surprise to me was how many ‘Other’ genre books I read, nearly half of the total one hundred. After putting aside those five categories (viz., Comics, Mysteries, Fiction, History, and SF), I read 48 other books from sections such as Humor, Poetry, Religion, Science … heck, there’s even 3 French books in there. (Admittedly, one of those is a French version of the Disney version of the Bambi story originally written by an Austrian, but then again, my French isn’t all that good.)

The pace was only slightly less ludicrous from Books #1201 to #1300, seeing as how I got from the one to the other in only 115 days. This is even more impressive when we consider that I re-read an earlier read book (“on accident”, as my daughter used to say when she was shorter and we lived further north) as well as 27 items in the ‘Comics & Graphic Novels’ category. Which don’t, as I will go on about endlessly, don’t count towards the total I use in the … oh, there I go again. The absolute pace was higher than the last tranche, at 230 pages per day (up from 206 the century before). And that’s not including the re-read history book (an Idiot’s Guide to the Civil War) and the comics, which would bring that last stat up to 245 pages per day. (What can I say? It was slow at work.)

   1 Book per 1.15 Days   

I’ll try to get you the whole list of books read posthaste, as I know I’ll be finishing Book #1400 pretty darn soon now.

Friday Vocabulary

1. nous — mind, reason; common sense

“Use your nous, Shelly!” the captain said, “Place the pickets up on the ridge, not the tents!”

 

2. mesclun — salad of mixed young greens

The agency claimed that a pre-packaged mesclun mix was implicated in the outbreak, but this was denied by the distributor.

 

3. stridulous — harsh, annoyingly shrill; of or related to stridor

The stridulous wheels on the bus go round and round, but not very well.

 

4. tope — Buddhist memorial mound, stupa

Of the many topes around Bhilsa, none still retain the very top of the dome, though many have preserved almost every other part of their ancient architecture.

 

5. insufflate — to blow or breathe into; to introduce air or gas into a body cavity

When the carbon dioxide is initially insufflated into the peritoneal cavity, a pressure greater than 10 mm Hg may indicate that an omentum or the preperitoneal space has been entered instead.

 

6. exequy (always now in plural) — funeral rite, obsequy

He left £4 for his exequies, as well as a small stipend for annual masses in memory of his wife.

 

7. fanfaronade — braggadocio, boastful talk

I am no supporter of such fanfaronade, though it now seems the rank and file expect these loathsome displays of chauvinism and bluster.

 

8. eyetooth — upper canine tooth of men and women

Pils would have given his eyeteeth for a championship bout, if he’d still had them.

 

9. pseudologue — habitual or pathological liar

Being a pseudologue, Timmy cared little if his tales were implausible, or even physically impossible.

 

10. craton — area of the earth’s crust and mantle which has remained unchanged by tectonic activity

Diamonds originate in the cratons of the earth and are from 2 to 3 billion years old.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(UK journalism)

red top — tabloid newspaper, from the usual use of red banners atop the front page to highlight the name of the paper

She’d had success writing for the red tops, but found it difficult to transfer those skills to her new position as publicist for Lambent Records.