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Book List: 1900 Books

I won’t apologize for how long I’ve taken to get this book listing to you, will only rationalize and make the excuse that September was quite a busy (and hot!) month for me this year. But here anyway is the list that I promised you (with the caveat “Maybe!” (though that applied to the ‘see you soon’ sort of a promise)), my last century of books read in (I’ll have to trademark this phrase) my silly little book tracking project. As mentioned in my original announcement of achieving 1900 books read, the first book of the last hundred was this cool volume of a brightly colored kids’ encyclopedia. Volume III of the Harwyn Picture Encyclopedia was a crazy time capsule from 1958, when Electronics is just about to change … well, everything, and jet Engines are almost brand spanking new. The illustrations are also a blast, though I’ve mentioned how inaccurate they were in that post referenced above.

There were several good books in this first set of ten, but the overwhelming number of comics read will be the initial obvious impression. As I may, or may not, have already mentioned, I’ve been trying to achieve parity in my book intake/outtake, by which I mean that I have been trying for some little time (a quick glance at my data shows I began this in 2024) to have the number of books read at least equal the number of new books I’ve acquired. Thus, when I purchased a hundred comic books at a big sale in May of this year, I had to step up my comic book reading game, with what results you shall see. The book I’m highlighting here, however, is a compendium of four novels from the classic Golden Age of Mysteries, Philo Vance: Four Complete Novels (The Benson Murder Case / The “Canary” Murder Case / The Bishop Murder Case / The Scarab Murder Case), four of the first five novels by the pseudonymous S. S. Van Dine featuring the titular detective. (Sorry for the title page image; my copy has no dust jacket, but you can just imagine the standard Avenel edition made for remainder tables in the ’80s.) These are truly exceptional mysteries and Vance is a detective sui generis. These four mystery novels written in the 1920s (well, The Scarab Murder Case is from 1930) are of the puzzle variety, so will annoy some modern readers, and I have to admit that I figured out 3 of the 4—the first 2 almost within the first few chapters. But even so I found the erudite Philo Vance to be one of the most interesting characters I’ve stumbled over in mystery fiction. Interesting as well is the evolution of the character from a ‘locked room’ specialist in the first books to a master of the psychological aspects of the cases in the later tomes. Now I’m looking forward to reading my next Van Dine novel, and perhaps I’ll learn why they dropped the 3rd in the series from this collection.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1801 5/4/26 Harwyn Publishing Corporation Harwyn Picture Encyclopedia Vol. III Children’s
5/5/26 Mike Baron Badger #49 Comics
5/5/26 Mike Baron Badger #50 Comics
5/5/26 Mike Baron Badger #51 Comics
5/5/26 Mike Baron Badger #52 Comics
5/5/26 Mike Baron Badger #53 Comics
5/5/26 Mike Baron Badger #54 Comics
5/6/26 Mike Baron Badger Goes Berserk #1 Comics
5/7/26 Mike Baron Badger Goes Berserk #2 Comics
5/7/26 Mike Baron Badger Goes Berserk #3 Comics
5/7/26 Mike Baron Badger Goes Berserk #4 Comics
1802 5/9/26 S. S. Van Dine Philo Vance: Four Complete Novels (The Benson Murder Case / The “Canary” Murder Case / The Bishop Murder Case / The Scarab Murder Case) Mystery
5/10/26 Russ Cochran, ed. Tales From The Crypt Presents The Haunt Of Fear No. 1 Comics
5/10/26 Russ Cochran, ed. Tales From The Crypt Presents The Haunt Of Fear No. 2 Comics
5/11/26 Will Eisner The Spirit No. 1: The Origin Years [Kitchen Sink] Comics
5/11/26 Jon Morris The League Of Regrettable Superheroes (The Loot Crate Edition) Comics
5/11/26 Russ Cochran, ed. Tales From The Crypt Presents The Vault Of Horror No. 2 Comics
5/11/26 Michael Jan Friedman Star Trek: The Next Generation #63 Comics
5/11/26 James Waley Power Comics No. 4 Starring the Northern Light Comics
5/11/26 Russ Cochran, ed. Tales From The Crypt Presents The Haunt Of Fear No. 2 Comics
5/12/26 Mike Baron & Steve Rude The Next Nexus #1 Comics
5/12/26 Russ Cochran, pub. The Vault Of Horror No. 1 [Gladstone] Comics
5/12/26 Arn Saba Neil The Horse Comics And Stories No. 4 Comics
5/12/26 Arn Saba Neil The Horse Comics And Stories No. 7 Comics
5/13/26 Max Collins & Terry Beatty Ms. Tree No. 10 Comics
5/13/26 Max Collins & Terry Beatty Ms. Tree No. 11 Comics
5/13/26 Russ Cochran, pub. The Vault Of Horror No. 4 [Gladstone] Comics
5/13/26 Russ Cochran, pub. The Vault Of Horror No. 6 [Gladstone] Comics
1803 5/13/26 Philip Kerr The Lady from Zagreb Mystery
5/13/26 Scott Saavedra It’s Science with Dr. Radium #1 Comics
5/14/26 John Ostrander & Timothy Truman Grimjack No. 11 Comics
1804 5/14/26 Lewis Carroll; Henri Bué, trans. Aventures d’Alice au Pays des Merveilles Foreign Language
5/14/26 John Ostrander & Tom Sutton Grimjack No. 20 Comics
5/14/26 John Ostrander & Flint Henry Grimjack No. 40 Comics
5/14/26 John Ostrander & Flint Henry Grimjack No. 55 Comics
5/14/26 John Ostrander & Flint Henry Grimjack No. 60 Comics
5/15/26 John Ostrander & Flint Henry Grimjack No. 64 Comics
5/16/26 John Ostrander & Steve Pugh Grimjack No. 67 Comics
5/16/26 John Ostrander & Steve Pugh Grimjack No. 68 Comics
5/16/26 John Ostrander & Steve Pugh Grimjack No. 69 Comics
1805 5/16/26 Dorothy L. Sayers Unnatural Death Mystery
5/16/26 John Ostrander & Paul Guinan Grimjack No. 72 Comics
5/16/26 John Ostrander & Flint Henry Grimjack No. 79 Comics
5/16/26 Steve Moncuse Fish Police No. 4 Comics
5/16/26 Chris Claremont & Alan Davis Excalibur No. 4 Comics
5/16/26 Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now #5: I, Robot Comics
5/16/26 Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now #6: After the Siege Comics
1806 5/17/26 Ellis Parker Butler Pigs Is Pigs and Other Favorites Humor
5/17/26 Dave Sim Cerebus Bi-Weekly No. 2 Comics
5/17/26 Cliff Harper Class War Comix No. 1 Comics
5/18/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 50 Comics
5/18/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 51 Comics
1807 5/18/26 Franklin W. Dixon The House on the Cliff Children’s
1808 5/18/26 Terry Jones & Michael Palin Dr. Fegg’s Encyclopedia of All World Knowledge: (Formerly the Nasty Book) Humor
1809 5/19/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Secret of the Old Mill Children’s
5/19/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 56 Comics
1810 5/19/26 Terry Deary The Vicious Vikings Children’s

 

So much good stuff in this next slice of ten, and so many great comics! But besides Cerebus finally cooking with gas, and the awesome reprints of ’50s classic stuff, I have to highlight Peter Bagge’s first solo book, Neat Stuff #1. (Don’t salivate you nerds, this is a 2nd printing, though I did get the artist’s signature on the book back at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015—Ah! How time flies!) Before this series devolved into Buddy’s finally falling apart like so many of us did, Peter Bagge held us spellbound with his ‘slice-of-life’ insights and emotionally abstract art. This issue, like those that followed (and much of Hate as well), showed the artist as a freaking funny demented genius. Good stuff.

Tempting though it is to highlight Patricia Highsmith’s classic Ripley novel, that work needs no approbation from me. If you haven’t read it (I hadn’t), read it. But I’m going to highlight a book which will appeal to an even smaller tranche of the reading public, Three Victorian Detective Novels [The Unknown Weapon / My Lady’s Money / The Big Bow Mystery]. The works (they’re all pretty short, more like novellas in fact) were written respectively by Andrew Forrester, Wilkie Collins and Israel Zangwill, with an introduction by E.F. Bleiler. And perhaps the oldest offering (the Forrester work) is a little flat, but the other two books are excellent (though dry to some modern tastes), full of sparkling writing. Perhaps the ‘mysteries’ may be transparent to those of us who’ve read too many of these things, as the plots that were new to readers in the 19th Century may have been seen dozens of time to current readers. Still, there is plenty of novelty and intrigue here to fascinate. That Zangwill didn’t continue down this path is a shame.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1811 5/19/26 Steven Saylor Last Seen in Massilia Mystery
5/20/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 59 Comics
5/20/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 66 Comics
5/20/26 R. Crumb Mr. Natural #1 Comics
5/20/26 Peter Bagge Neat Stuff #1 Comics
5/20/26 Peter Bagge Neat Stuff #2 Comics
5/20/26 Peter Bagge Neat Stuff #3 Comics
5/20/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 70 Comics
5/20/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 71 Comics
5/20/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 73 Comics
5/20/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 74 Comics
5/21/26 William M. Gaines & A. Feldstein, eds. Panic (EC Classics, Number 10) Comics
1812 5/21/26 Michael Morgan Nine More Lives Mystery
5/21/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 75 Comics
5/21/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 76 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 77 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 78 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 79 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 80 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 81 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 82 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 83 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 84 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 85 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 86 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 87 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 88 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 89 Comics
5/22/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 90 Comics
5/23/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 91 Comics
1813 5/23/26 Andrew Forrester, Wilkie Collins & Israel Zangwill (E.F. Bleiler, ed.) Three Victorian Detective Novels [The Unknown Weapon / My Lady’s Money / The Big Bow Mystery] Mystery
1814 5/23/26 Tasha Tudor Mother Goose Children’s
5/23/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 94 Comics
5/23/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 95 Comics
1815 5/23/26 Chad Nackers, ed. The Onion Vol. 62, Issue 14 – Apr.–May 2026 Humor
5/23/26 Rajendra Sanjay Veer Hammir: The Story of a Famous Rajput Hero Comics
5/23/26 Anand Prakash Singh Vikramaditya Comics
5/23/26 Kamala Chandrakant Vishwamitra Comics
5/24/26 Shankar Sultanpuri Begum Hazrat Mahal Comics
5/24/26 Shankar Sultanpuri Architect of Freedom: Motilal Nehru Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 96 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 97 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 98 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 99 Comics
1816 5/24/26 Wylly Folk St. John The Secrets of the Pirate Inn Children’s
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 100 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 101 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 102 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 103 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 105 Comics
5/24/26 Mike Baron Badger No. 55 Comics
5/24/26 Mike Baron Badger No. 56 Comics
5/24/26 Mike Baron Badger No. 57 Comics
5/24/26 Mike Baron Badger No. 58 Comics
5/24/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 106 Comics
5/25/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 107 Comics
5/25/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 108 Comics
1817 5/25/26 Michael Crichton [as John Lange] Easy Go Mystery
5/25/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 109 Comics
5/25/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 110 Comics
5/25/26 Catherine Yronwode, ed. Mr. Monster’s True Crime #2 Comics
5/26/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 114 Comics
5/26/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 115 Comics
5/26/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 116 Comics
5/26/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 117 Comics
5/26/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 118 Comics
5/26/26 Jerome Siegel & Joe Shuster Famous First Edition Vol. 8 No. C-61 [Superman No. 1] Comics
5/26/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 119 Comics
1818 5/27/26 Patricia Highsmith The Talented Mr. Ripley Mystery
5/27/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 120 Comics
5/27/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 121 Comics
5/27/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 122 Comics
1819 5/27/26 William Gardner Smith The Stone Face Fiction
5/27/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 123 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 124 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 125 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 126 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 127 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 128 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 129 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus No. 132 Comics
5/28/26 Dave Sim Cerebus Jam No. 1 Comics
1820 5/29/26 Michael Innes Hamlet, Revenge!: A Story in Four Parts Mystery

 

I am the hardest person to get books for: either I have it already, or it’s really not my kind of thing. So I was blown away by how much I liked Wright Morris’s Love Among The Cannibals, which my daughter gave me in a random act of bookly kindness. Published under the Bison imprint, methinks this work is not typical of most Morris novels—he seems to write lyrical paeans to the great wide open plains. But this crazed tale, atypical or not, of a pair of L.A. song-makers on an ill-starred trip to Mexico is simply a brilliant tour de force. Stupendous! The language, the impact, this quick read just knocks the socks off and then starts doing strange things to your bare feet. This is a noir novel extraordinaire without murder or gumshoes or anything like that. A raw and sometimes painful tale of existentialism and its opposite in Hollywood.

Hmm. So now I love Barbara Comyns. I know I’m not the first. And Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is such a heavy hitter of a novel. I consumed it in one lengthy sitting and sat absolutely shattered after it finished. I’ve since read Sisters By A River, but I feel I need to ration out Comyn’s works slowly, like I’ve done with Jane Austen; she’s that good. At first I thought the ending too happy, but now I believe that this story does not get told without the change at the end; otherwise, the narrator is simply dying by degrees of dull ache poverty and wretchedness. Trigger warning: talk to a friend who’s read the book before you read it, as it hits very hard at many points.

Okay, I’m breaking my rule of highlighting only two books from each subset of ten that I’m listing, because this third decade of books just had too many super excellent totes amazing books. Though if you include The Poisoned Chocolates Case (which you should) with The Piccadilly Murder—both by Anthony Berkeley—, you have all the very best of this set of ten. Both these Golden Age mysteries feature the self-effacing Mr. Chitterwick, who I admit gives my favorite amateur detective Albert Campion a run for the money. But these are puzzle mysteries by a peak performer who gives us the best of the sub-genre. And The Piccadilly Murder (setting aside the Poisoned Chocolates ’cause it’s really a different kind of duck) is amazing in its brilliance and its ‘fair-play’ trickery. Once again, it was obvious to me how and who dunnit … and then at the end of a sudden it wasn’t. Berkeley is amazing, and—though the actual plot is ludicrous, a fine example of that Golden Age trope where only the leisured and literate rich (or seemingly so) can be trusted to solve actual crimes that don’t involve poor people—he once more smashes the tropes out of the park in this wonderful example of the classic British mystery.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1821 5/31/26 Michael Kurland The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes Mystery
1822 6/1/26 Lee Server Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines: 1896-1953 Books
1823 6/3/26 Wright Morris Love Among the Cannibals Fiction
1824 6/3/26 Philip K. Dick Lies, Inc. SF & Fantasy
1825 6/4/26 Wright Morris In Orbit Fiction
1826 6/5/26 Barbara Comyns Our Spoons Came From Woolworths Fiction
1827 6/6/26 Anthony Berkeley The Poisoned Chocolates Case Mystery
1828 6/9/26 Anthony Berkeley The Piccadilly Murder Mystery
1829 6/9/26 John Steinbeck Flight Fiction
1830 6/9/26 P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves and the Tie That Binds Fiction

 

I have loved E. B. White since high school, when I was blown away by his short stories, essays, and letters. His 1949 book, Here Is New York, though slightly tinged by that nostalgia that laments gently how change has come to the olden days and the olden ways, is simply a beautiful essay full of beautiful sentiment—sentimentality in the highest meaning of the word, a paean to a beloved city, and no words of mine can be better than the very brief original by (as Vonnegut said) one of the best American prose stylists ever.

There really is nobody like Gahan Wilson, and I fear that if AI tries to subsume his style it may become subsumed instead, turned into a heap of monstrously distorted trash that crawls back into an alley to lay down next to a puddle of indeterminate fluid. Of course, he’s a cartoonist, but he was a writer, too, writing books that showed his love of the strange genres that gave him so many of his bizarre ideas. In Eddy Deco’s Last Caper Wilson places the titular detective in the way of some very (very!) strange goings-on. With illustrations drawn from the perspective of our P.I., things start out sinister and take sudden twists into … well, more strange sinister sudden twists. I’m not sure if this is really a mystery, but it’s really a something! Just when you think it’s straight parody or pastiche it turns into Gahan Wilson, and that ain’t bad.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1831 6/10/26 P. G. Wodehouse How Right You Are, Jeeves Fiction
1832 6/11/26 E. B. White Here Is New York Essays
1833 6/12/26 John Babbington Williams Leaves from the Note-Book of a New York Detective: The Private Record of J.B. Mystery
1834 6/13/26 P. G. Wodehouse The Return of Jeeves Fiction
1835 6/14/26 Chad Nackers, ed. The Onion Vol. 62, Issue 18 – May–June 2026 Humor
1836 6/15/26 Gahan Wilson Eddy Deco’s Last Caper Mystery [?]
1837 6/16/26 P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves in the Morning Fiction
1838 6/17/26 P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit Fiction
1839 6/18/26 P. G. Wodehouse Cocktail Time Fiction
1840 6/18/26 P. G. Wodehouse Service With a Smile Fiction

 

The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes is a blast from my past, one of several children’s versions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories (what ever happened to the rest?) that I had as a youth. This one has some slight abridgments to two of the three novels presented here (The Sign Of Four and The Hound Of The Baskervilles), as well as deep cuts to A Study In Scarlet. The savage abridgement of Scarlet is no vice (that Mormon interlude has always been problematic), and the six short stories offered are well-chosen. Hound is great, but the other novels have always been a bit of a mixed bag. Doyle seems to excel in the short stories, and the half dozen here are some of his best. A study of Dr. Bell—the, or a, original for Mr. Holmes—by H. E. Jones rounds out this nice collection.

I really must give y’all a full review of the Carol Schrauzer book, but I’ve been saying that since I read it almost 4 months ago (admittedly I had a fairly intense summer). So instead let me highlight my first experience of Roberto Bolaño, his admittedly experimental novel Antwerp. Likely I’m not intelligent enough to really appreciate these vignettes—somewhat connected, and somewhat disconnected—which almost make up a story, and which I’m told (in ancillary material in this tiny volume) are the seeds from which all his great work grew, but since this is the first I’ve read of him (save some poems I liked in an anthology) and since I am confused, all I’ll say just now is that he’s like (to me) a William Burroughs without the self-indulgence. Striking images and crystals of memory, which may be enough.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1841 6/20/26 P. G. Wodehouse Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin Fiction
1842 6/20/26 Kurt Vonnegut A Man Without a Country Biography
1843 6/21/26 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine August 2025 Music
1844 6/23/26 Arthur Conan Doyle The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes Mystery
1845 6/23/26 Daniel Pinkwater The Afterlife Diet Fiction
1846 6/24/26 Jane Austen Lady Susan / The Watsons / Sanditon Fiction
1847 6/25/26 Catherine Shaw The Library Paradox Mystery
1848 6/26/26 Philip K. Dick Counter-Clock World SF & Fantasy
6/26/26 Anant Pai, ed. Tales From The Hitopadesha Comics
1849 6/27/26 Carol Schrauzer Innocent Creatures Fiction
1850 6/29/26 Roberto Bolaño Antwerp Fiction

 

H. F. Wood’s novel The Passenger From Scotland Yard was originally published in 1888, and has aged so in the nearly 140 years since that it needed E. F. Bleiler’s introduction giving context and perspective to this strangely strange detective tale. Yet I was still surprised by the harshness of the Goodreads reviews, and likely bumped my own rating up in prejudicial response. Yes, this is a difficult read, and the opening is a difficult whitewater rush of characters with little to hang on to; but so is Melville’s Confidence Man. But this is a fully realized mystery novel, where each character is a real person, and the hero has his own flaws and foibles. (The scene where he is struck by memories of his dead child only to be misapprehended by his compeer was particularly well done, and speaks to a very real occurrence in the Victorian or any age.) The writing and plotting was a little tortured and thorny, but really it seems worlds away from Doyle’s first two efforts at a mystery novel. Most very likely will hate it, but I don’t think that is because it is typical of its time; it seems to combine the best of that time with the strange new tropes being born in the nascent mystery novel.

I enjoyed The Hunger, by Alma Katsu, even liked it, up until the ‘Reader’s Guide’ reminded me of all the things about the book that annoyed me. Grafting on the (as my daughter put it) ‘horror lite’ elements to the Donner Party tale seems almost to be covering up the true horror of the story of starvation, and now I’ll have to go back and read about the actual history which is much more interesting. (I can recommend a Scholastic book targeted at middle or high schoolers, The Perilous Journey Of The Donner Party by Marian Calabro, as a surprisingly good history of those events. It’s even very well sourced!) However, it was a well-written well-crafted tale that held my interest when I needed it, fast-paced (I read it in just one day), and obviously well-researched. I could wish that the horror story had been grafted on to some other historical tale that needed the fictional additions more than this American tale which already has enough horror and then some.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1851 6/29/26 Editors of Boys’ Life The Boys’ Life Book of Mystery Stories Children’s
1852 6/30/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Mystery of the Flying Express Children’s
1853 7/1/26 H. F. Wood The Passenger from Scotland Yard: A Victorian Detective Novel Mystery
1854 7/2/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Clue In The Embers Children’s
1855 7/2/26 Carolyn Keene The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion Children’s
1856 7/3/26 Alma Katsu The Hunger Horror
1857 7/4/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Mystery at Devil’s Paw Children’s
1858 7/5/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Mystery of the Desert Giant Children’s
1859 7/6/26 Carolyn Keene The Ghost of Blackwood Hall Children’s
1860 7/7/26 E. C. R. Lorac Bats in the Belfry: A London Mystery Mystery

 

In the case of Alex Michaelides’s mystery-ish book The Silent Patient, maybe I shoulda stayed in bed. ‘Cause I loved the book, and then made the mistake of looking it up on Goodreads, and now … I dunno. Several of the objections to the book seemed valid, though of course this was only in retrospect. But really I just loved the novel, devouring it in only a few hours. I was truly taken by the clever unfolding of the sort of complicated plot. But the Goodreads haters undid that, though my own experience of therapy and people in institutions was closer to the novel than it appeared to most of those online reviewers (who asserted that nothing like the sanitarium in the novel could exist nowadays, though the author says that that part of the book at least was based on his own life experience). And perhaps I was prejudiced in favor because it was the last recommendation of my only work friend. And many of the Goodreaders made cogent points. But what can I say, I still found this a compelling and compulsive book.

It is almost unnecessary for me to talk about The Scarlet Pimpernel, the all-too-famous novel of the French Revolution by the Baroness Orczy. Even at this late date (the book was originally published in 1905), many are aware of the classic Leslie Howard movie (though it, like most adaptations, also drew from the Pimpernel sequel Eldorado), or perhaps the cartoon mouse thief Savoir Faire. Or at least the many and varied renditions of El Zorro, which was cribbed from Orczy’s work. Or maybe they just have an uncertain association to “they search him here, they search him there” … with nothing more than a vague resonance to the societal Arkashic records. But this tale of adventure was so much better than I expected, and my expectations were high. Most interesting was the main protagonist being a woman. And though I guess I already knew the story, or figured out the parts I didn’t, I was still tensely anticipating every move, every moment, as we moved towards the final clash.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1861 7/8/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Viking Symbol Mystery Children’s
1862 7/8/26 Tabish Khair The Thing About Thugs Fiction
1863 7/9/26 Alex Michaelides The Silent Patient Mystery
1864 7/10/26* Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine May 2023 Music
1865 7/11/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Secret Agent on Flight 101 Children’s
1866 7/12/26 Franklin W. Dixon The Mysterious Caravan Children’s
1867 7/13/26 Julian Symons The Tell-tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe Biography
1868 7/14/26 Baroness Orczy The Scarlet Pimpernel Fiction
1869 7/16/26 Gustave Flaubert The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas Literature
1870 7/17/26 Margaret Cavendish The Blazing World and Other Writings Fiction

* read circa 9/3/2023, but only discovered as not entered correctly in my db at this later date, as I’d decided to track those volumes I read entirely from cover to cover, and only now finally rectified the entries from 2023, egads

 

This next decade of books read found a plethora of bangers, so many I have difficulty choosing just one. I could, for instance, highlight the Kuttner collection (“We must imagine Philip K. Dick happy”), but I won’t, so let’s move on. Instead, let’s talk about Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room Of One’s Own, which I first read as a freshman oh so very many years ago. And what do I find, decades later? That this book is just brilliant, both from the remarkable back-way into her subject Woolf takes as well as the extreme erudition of her reading. But it is her insights that make this little book stand the test of time (nearly a hundred years now!): that it is an admixture of male and female in authors that is present when truly great works are created, and that time and a place for writing is required. (Indeed, her extended quote of Quiller Couch on the so-called ‘poor poet’ is damning of the poverty-stricken artist idea.) Good stuff!

And if I’m jumping on the Woolf bandwagon almost a century too late, I may as well beat the drum for a much more contemporary phenom, the Dungeon Crawler Carl books of Matt Dinniman. Indeed, my only complaint about the series is that I’m reading it at what promises to be only the beginning of a potentially long, very long series. (And even then I’m fortunate in that there’s already 7 or 8 more books already written.) But! unlike the Wheel of Time, for example, the 2nd and 3rd books got even better than the original eponymous novel. Oh, well, the Carl books are great. Really great. Has a heart without getting bleeding heart all over you, funny as hell, and really trifficly written. Amazing conceit pushed up to level 11. Maybe even higher. In Carl’s Doomsday Scenario he manages to keep up a compelling story and make the crazy even crazier. Seriously, I don’t see how Dinniman will be able to maintain this pace, quality, poignancy, and crazy. But I guess I’m gonna keep finding out.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1871 7/18/26 Philip K. Dick & Ray Nelson The Ganymede Takeover SF & Fantasy
1872 7/19/26 Henry Kuttner The Last Mimzy: Stories [aka The Best of Henry Kuttner] SF & Fantasy
1873 7/22/26 Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own Essays
1874 7/24/26 Sebastian Wolfe, ed. The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes Mystery
1875 7/25/26 Barbara Comyns Sisters by a River Fiction
1876 7/27/26 Matt Dinniman Dungeon Crawler Carl SF & Fantasy
1877 7/27/26 Jack Beeching, Harry Guest, & Matthew Mead Penguin Modern Poets 16: Jack Beeching, Harry Guest, Matthew Mead Poetry
7/27/26 Catherine Yronwode, ed. Mr. Monster’s True Crime #1 Comics
7/27/26 Mike Baron Badger #59 Comics
7/27/26 Mike Baron Badger #60 Comics
7/27/26 Mike Baron Badger #61 Comics
1878 7/29/26 Matt Dinniman Carl’s Doomsday Scenario SF & Fantasy
1879 7/29/26 Fredric Brown His Name Was Death Mystery
1880 7/29/26 Daniel M. Pinkwater Young Adults Children’s

 

Even with the mystic mumbo-jumbo at the end, The Curious Mr. Tarrant is a wonderful collection of locked room mysteries—indeed, one could argue that the final, perhaps unsatisfying to some (perusing Goodreads makes me posit that it was unsatisfying to most), story takes place in the one locked room mystery tales never ever venture into: the human mind. I would love to see the return of Mr. Tarrant seven years later; ‘twould be a believable Doctor Strange. But anyway, these tales are fun and interesting and different and amazing, even if sometimes a tad cliché or rather outre. Voodoo?!? But they also show us an emerging world, as the expanding world of psychology met the weird ideas of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. C. Daly King’s Trevis Tarrant is a bit like Philo Vance, though Tarrant’s manservant is more in the club (and a Japanese spy!). Well, bottom line: not for everyone (seriously, check out the hate on Goodreads), but an interesting and (I think) important book in American mystery literature.

Moving from the sublime to the sordid, what can I say about Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Prone Gunman? This neo-noir novel from a lauded French writer is a compelling and fascinating though brutal story, demonstrating the hero’s (Is that the right word?) childishness as well as his frank ability to do a particular job. The unleashed destruction is almost only incidental, and of course the questions raised by the book are not answered, perhaps are not answerable. How like a Frenchman. Seriously, though, this was only one of five other absolute bangers (besides the Mr. Tarrant book above) in the Mystery department in this set of ten. My cup ranneth over.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1881 7/31/26 C. Daly King The Curious Mr. Tarrant: 8 Detective Stories Mystery
7/31/26 Vic Torry Mr. Monster’s Hi-Voltage Super Science #1 Comics
1882 7/31/26 Agatha Christie Mrs. McGinty’s Dead Mystery
1883 7/31/26 Louis L’Amour Conagher Western
7/31/26 Mike Baron Badger #62 Comics
1884 8/2/26 C. Daly King Obelists Fly High Mystery
1885 8/4/26 Erle Stanley Gardner Ellery Queen Presents: Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith Mystery
1886 8/6/26 T. S. Stribling Clues of the Caribbees: Being Certain Criminal Investigations of Henry Poggioli, Ph.D. Mystery
1887 8/7/26 Ronald A. Knox The Footsteps at the Lock Mystery
1888 8/8/26 Jean-Patrick Manchette; James Brook, trans. The Prone Gunman Mystery
1889 8/8/26 Joanna Cannan The Taste of Murder Mystery
1890 8/9/26 Matt Dinniman The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook SF & Fantasy

 

Well, I’ve already waxed prolix over The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings, and I spoke more briefly about how much I enjoyed The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, so let me use this last preface to this last set of ten books read to offer for your consideration a collection of Tim Powers short stories and like that, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. I liked each of these stories for different reasons, found them wonderfully imaginative, and sometimes (often) disturbing. Can’t even really choose a favorite, ’cause as I think of each I like it more. The title tale is great, and the pizza place story is another (somewhat deranged) banger, but I thought longest perhaps after reading the final piece about Edward Trelawny. In reviewing my notes I learned that that last is a coda of sorts to Powers’s novel The Stress Of Her Regard, which I have not yet read. Another future addition to a pile which already is overlarge, just like me.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1891 8/10/26 Chad Nackers, ed. The Onion Vol. 62, Issue 27 – July–Aug. 2026 Humor
1892 8/11/26 Erle Stanley Gardner The Casebook of Sidney Zoom Mystery
1893 8/13/26 E. E. Cummings The Enormous Room Biography
1894 8/14/26 I. U. Tarchetti Fantastic Tales Fiction
1895 8/16/26 Rudyard Kipling Kipling’s Fantasy Stories Fiction
1896 8/18/26 G. K. Chesterton Thirteen Detectives Mystery
1897 8/19/26 Hesiod; Stanley Lombardo, trans. Works and Days and Theogony Poetry
1898 8/20/26 Tim Powers The Bible Repairman and Other Stories SF & Fantasy
1899 8/22/26 G. K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill Fiction
8/22/26 Robyn Chapman, ed. American Cult: A Graphic History of Religious Cults in America from the Colonial Era to Today Comics
1900 8/23/26 Kenneth Grahame The Wind In The Willows Children’s

 

And so, almost (but not quite!) two months after reading that 1800th book, another set of a hundred books is offered to y’all in fancily formatted tables. (Well, not that fancy.) In the meantime I’m halfway to the next milestone, which will be a big’un. Though my average book length actually increased in this last hundred (from 215 to over 222-1/2 pages per book), it will be obvious that I’m reading lots and lots of short books. And though this is due in some part to the reasons of I/O parity, I realize looking at the dominance of mysteries in this last set that I’m also trying to make room on my shelves for books I’ve purchased that have nowhere yet to live. Ah, well; there are worse problems. I have yet to see a significant effect on either my total number of books nor on shelf space, so I fear that more drastic action may be needed, and in any event I may have to take myself in hand and just read a few big old books to keep my hand in and prove to myself that I can. We shall see. And so until next time, Happy Reading!

 

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

Friday Vocabulary

1. inguinal — of or related to the groin

As I stood panting on the path, trying to espy something in the dim trees to either side, a sudden blow to my inguinal region laid me out, and I nearly passed out as I heard someone or something running heavily away through the dark woods.

 

2. mirliton — musical instrument played by humming through tube with a sounding membrane, kazoo, eunuch flute; chayote vegetable

Though the lowly kazoo was supposedly invented in Macon, Georgia, the mirliton has a much older history and was found around the world.

 

3. babbitt (also babbitt metal) — anti-friction alloy used to diminish heat in bearings

This formula for babbitt only produces twenty pounds at a time, so may not be best for high demand uses such as a busy railroad.

 

4. rocket — arugula

For lunch we had a rocket salad garnished with curried chicken and grapes.

 

5. adiabatic — of or related to a process closed to heat transfer

As the air rises it cools in an adiabatic process, which may cause clouds to reach the dew point temperature, causing rains on the windward sides of mountain ranges.

 

6. coryza — inflammation of nasal mucous membranes

Afflicted by his coryza, he couldn’t smell the poison in his coffee—indeed it is surprising that he was drinking coffee at all.

 

7. anile — of or related to an old woman or crone

Normally, of course—but pent up as we were by Trelawny’s ravings and our lack of sleep and our exhaustion from the climb out of that benighted ditch … well, the sudden apparition of that crazed, anile witch made my heart jump, I can tell you.

 

8. stanhope — two- or four-wheeled horse-drawn buggy

Wilks offered the use of his stanhope and we happily accepted, promising to return both gig and horse on the morrow.

 

9. scrumpy — strong cider

He’s most all right, Will is, long as he only has the one or maybe two pulls of scrumpy, but any more’n that and he’s not a fellow you’ll want to know.

 

10. braw — [Scots] handsome

He was a braw man, a captain of the guards, and she thought he looked so fine in his uniform and so she was undone.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(US slang, from holes punched in such tickets supposed to resemble shooting tricks performed by the legendary performer of the same name)

Annie Oakley — complimentary ticket

Just leave a couple of Annie Oakleys at the box office and I’ll bring her ’round to see tonight’s show.

 

1900 Books

I finished my 19th century of books two-and-a-half weeks ago, but haven’t taken time to tell you about it until now because of reasons. Book #1900 in my silly book tracking project was The Wind In The Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, in an Everyman’s Library Children’s Classic edition with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Somehow I’d never gotten around to reading it as a child, and I thought it best if I read it before I entered my second childhood. And I learned what thousands before me already knew, that it is an exceptional work, a lyrical and lissome tale of perhaps a land of Never Was, but of a perfect tone to captivate and fascinate children of a certain type. The madness of Toad, the wiles and frank friendship offered by Rat, these ring true and could make us maudlin for this Never Was were we to project children’s tales onto the so-called real world. But this beautiful work of pastoral romance and adventure, this paean to a golden age (translation: ‘never existed’) of nature in pleasant village surroundings, shows its wisdom in the growing friendship between Mole and Badger, as well as the final awakening of Toad to maturity.

All the usual caveats apply with this announcement of my reading milestone: I’ve been tracking these only since the middle of 2015; I don’t count comics towards my ‘total’ of Books Read, but I do count all sorts of other things (magazines, children’s books, The Onion or Weekly World News newspapers); and like that and so forth and so on.

I’ll be posting the full list of this last hundred books read shortly, I hope. Though given how long it took me to get to this simple announcement, I wonder.

My pace of reading was slightly slower this century than last, 1.11 days per book versus the previous 1.06 dy/bk. Page count showed an uptick, at over 222 average pages per book, though the pages read per day dropped to about 200 pages per day. Additionally, there were 128 books read which I categorized as Comics—the result of a huge comics buy in Arizona—, meaning that I don’t count them towards my grand ‘Books Read’ total, though I obviously track of them somehow in my database mania. Including those give a reading pace of 2.05 books per day (which is why I don’t include comics in the master count), or 0.49 days per book, and 116.5 avg. pages per book; those 32-pagers drop the average page count drastically.

As I’ve said in previous posts, this ridiculous pace is due to a self-imposed stricture to keep my reading pace on at least parity with my book acquisition pace. I have been successful, mostly … though at what cost?

Book #1801, which kicked off this last century of books, was a volume (the only one I apparently own) of the Harwyn Picture Encyclopedia, an excellent children’s reference work, though hopelessly dated. The illustrations are bright and fun, though the artist was very flattering to both Queen Elizabeth and Adolf Hitler. I almost wish I had the whole set, but I’m trying to have fewer books rather than more just now.

In this last set of 100 books I read 31 Mysteries, 26 Fiction, 8 Science Fiction, and 19 Children’s books. (The Fiction number includes a Western and one book purporting to be Horror.)

   1 Book per 1.11 Days   

See you soon with the complete Book List! Maybe!

Monday Book Report: The Enormous Room

The Enormous Room, by E. E. Cummings

You will probably hate it. Or at least feel towards it that disdain nurtured by the forced reading of so-called ‘classics’ while you were enjoying or enduring the company of your fellow students during your teenage years. That seems to be the judgment of those reviews on Goodreads which bubble up to the top—at least in my feed. There are many who cannot stand the book, the prose, the high falutin’ stylistic nonsense, the upper-class airs of the narrator, the simpering patronizing of the sold black man in the entire novel (and there’s that word again). Some readers spoke of liking even loving his poetry, but found this autobiographical novel (Is it really that?) to be a bridge too far; some alluded to his politics in later life, his reactionary views. (It’s true. Look it up, if that’s what you need to judge an author’s work.) Of course, I knew none of this before reading The Enormous Room, so why am I bringing it up now?

Had I, at this moment and in the city of New York, the complete confidence of one-twentieth as many human beings I should not be so inclined to consider The Great American Public as the most æsthetically incapable organization ever created for the purpose of perpetuating defunct ideals and ideas.

In which our narrator shows off that high falutin’ stylistic nonsense

Because, by gum, I absolutely love love love this book. And I was surprised by the animosity, stunned at the misreadings evident on the Goodreads pages. Yes, I expected the prose might be difficult for some, and I know for a fact that my poor knowledge of French was at least sufficient—with a few instances of looking up this or that term (Who knew poêle meant stove as well as frying pan? Oh, right, everybody who actually speaks French)—to keep me engrossed in the tale told and not annoyingly distracted by the pretensions of this Harvard-educated upper-class child of privilege, playing at being a tourist among the proletariat who ended up getting his fingers burned because he didn’t know enough to keep his mouth shut when he should have kept his mouth shut.

The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings tells the tale of the horrid and strange adventure that befell two white boys from New England who, whilst hieing off to volunteer duties with an ambulance corp during World War I, met each other aboard a ship and fell deeply in friendship. Perhaps this is the first off-putting idea in Cumming’s narrative, as the bond between the narrator (Cummings) and ‘B.’ (as he is called in the book) is so strong that when one is accused of anti-war sentiment the other insists on being jailed alongside his friend. Our ‘modern’ cynical not to say sneering simplistic suspicious age sees only the ‘love which dare not speak its name’ behind any deeply abiding relationship between two men, and the age also, in its secret blackened godless heart where it occasionally knows that something fundamental has been lost, somewhere, the age also labels any such relationship as ‘not truly love’, as lust or something even more base than that. And were the author and B. gay sexy time partners? (Whatever that might mean in 1917.) Who knows, and more importantly, what difference does it make? Can a person deeply admire and care for another without having to want to stick some thing into another thing? Ah, me.

Be that howsomever it may (or may not) be, the book is the story of two young men who volunteer to support the Allies in World War I by working for an ambulance service near the front lines in northeastern France. Both our American buddies speak French pretty darn well, and find themselves enjoying the company of their French compeers, the ‘poilus‘, rather than that of the other American, Mr. A, who leads their particular ambulance battalion, and who insists (impotently) that our narrator and B. stop fraternizing with the dirty poilus and act more like ‘real Americans’—i.e., shave more often and affect that holier-than-thou we’ve-come-to-save-you attitude that apparently Mr. A thought important. Of course, Mr. A can’t speak French, and has an unfortunately all too common disdain for the smelly Frenchmen he is forced to endure. Mr. A doesn’t like these bohemian college boy poseurs with their obvious contempt for the glories of American save-the-world culture, and so when the French authorities arrest B. on charges of treason—because B. has written anti-war statements in letters read by the French military censors—Mr. A does nothing to intervene, and, the narrator suspects, may have actively conspired in the kangaroo proceeding by which B. loses his liberty, hoping to get rid of a troublemaker or two. The ‘hearing’ on the charges then summons our narrator, who has only to disavow his friend to avoid facing the same imprisonment in durance vile; but Cummings refuses to betray his friend, indeed he insists on joining his fate to that of the obviously criminal B.

From this small acorn grows the beautiful narrative of what in another writer’s hands might have been a nightmarish Kafkaesque tale of what really is one of the vilest of durances. But, as B. tells our writer when he finally arrives in the concentration camp located far to the west of Paris, after an exhausting journey into mindless imprisonment, “Cummings, I tell you this is the finest place on earth!” And Cummings agrees. Agrees even though he and B. are confined to a large church-like room surrounded by stone walls and barbed wire, a room with filthy floors, six buckets to piss into (and around which a muddy morass of urine-soaked earth lingers), another to shit in, boarded up windows, and dozens of other potential ‘traitors’ awaiting their final judgment. For our two Americans have ended up in La Ferté Macé, a transit point for suspects awaiting a panel of ‘Three Wise Men’ who will decide whether or not they must be imprisoned “for the duration”. Simply put, their prison is a hellhole.

So why do these two strange Americans consider La Macé “the finest place on earth”?!? Because here once again we see the passion for life and living that made Cummings and B. fraternize with their fellow ambulance crewmen even though the latter were dirty Frenchmen. And perhaps both of these callow Americans are simply overjoyed to experience a world unknown to them, they with their upper-class protected upbringings and book learning of French (and Latin and Greek, at least in E. E. Cummings’s case). Everywhere he looks, our narrator is overwhelmed and overjoyed at the vibrant action and power and zest for life that goes on even here, in this strange Limbo of missed connections and inhumanity. To tell you of the strange characters he meets would be to deprive you of his wonderfully odd prose. Which you may hate. Sometimes Gertrude Stein grates on my nerves, too. But he is a wonderful reporter, and limns as strange a set of characters as ever did John Kennedy Toole or (another child of doubtful privilege) John Irving. Four of these personages he calls the “Delectable Mountains”, by which he means supremely vibrant men who are not defeated—though some are undone—by their time in this very minor branch office of Hell.

He is, of all the indescribables I have known, definitely the most completely or entirely indescribable. Then (quoth my reader) you will not attempt to describe him, I trust.—Alas, in the medium which I am now using a certain amount or at least quality of description is disgustingly necessary. Were I free with a canvas and some colors … but I am not free. And so I will buck the impossible to the best of my ability. Which, after all, is one way of wasting your time.

Cummings wastes some ambiguous person’s time

For hellish it certainly is. He writes of the events which lead up and into La Ferté Macé in fairly regular chronological order, if in an idiosyncratic style. But chronology and linear narrative are seemingly lost after he re-encounters B. and is initiated into the strange sordid confinement that will be his ‘home’ for the next few months. (Is it only months? Only those who have gone through unremitting oppressive daily unending torment can appreciate just how debilitating and mind-shattering such events can be, especially if, as in his case, there seems to be no defined terminus date post quem such ordeal will end.) Though the rest of the 20th Century—and what we’ve seen so far of the 21st—demonstrates that man’s inhumanity to himself seems to have no bottom, no depth beyond which he will not reach a further execrable horror, Cummings certainly experienced a trial which would bend and leave bereft most of us, especially we children of privilege who have not (yet) been subject to inconscient arbitrary injustice for what amounts to no reason at all. The horrors endured by the female prisoners, in particular, who are confined just adjacent to the men’s chamber, make Cummings pause and reflect and confess that the women are stronger, much stronger than he or any other man will ever be.

For besides the remarkable fellow prisoners he enjoys the company of, the polyglot set of supposedly treasonous ‘suspects’ dumped into this unholy melting ground of despair and disease (the man upon whom B. was based succumbed to scurvy), Cummings is most concerned to show his hatred of and scorn for ‘le gouvernement Français‘ and by extension all governments that would engender this and similar places, that would condone nay even create the creatures who build and populate these terrifying structures of stricture and nightmare. Thus he calls le Directeur of this instrument of mental oppression disguised as a transit prison camp by the name ‘Apollyon’, Greek for the Destroyer, the evil angel of the bottomless pit of hell. Just the sort of mindless adherence to meaningless rules and ideals that would allow Mr. A to consign his fellow Americans to prison for writing what many many believed (i.e., that the Great War was a useless waste of hundreds of thousands of lives for little or no purpose) is to Cummings’s mind as great a betrayal of humanity as is the active evil of the debased prison guards when they, for instance, try to silence a group of four female prisoners by filling the small ‘cabinet’ they are confined within with smoke from burning straw. The indomitable spirit of the four ‘putains‘ after they are nearly extinguished before the fire is doused inspires Cummings once more to both admire these unbreakable women and to despise the men and the social machine that gives them power over others.

it takes a good and great government perfectly to negate mercy.

Who will judge the judges?

There is much wonder in Cummings’s words as he portrays his fellow prisoners, the petty traitors (or suspected traitors; note as well ‘petty treason’ was the term old English law used for murder of a ‘social superior’) whose actual crimes seem to be being of German parentage, or overstaying a visa by a single day, or—in one instance—stealing three tins of sardines. For such crimes the mass of Dutchmen and Poles, Belgians and a Mexican, gypsies and Germans, all have been condemned to an indefinite sentence of servitude at the pleasure of the French government. But Cummings sees rather a group of men without the influence granted by money and position, the pimps with cash given more favors than those without the ready. But for a wonder, the petty and grinding and deadening sameness of each oppressive day do not break these men. Some do bend, and some are even folded or spindled or mutilated, or at least beaten—though the worst beatings are from fellow prisoners rather than from the guards, most of whom seem frightened to almost paralysis by the inmates in their keeping.

Among the battered and bent rejects is our author himself, or at least the narrator. Cummings shows this at two points, first at the scission between the chronological introductory part of his narration and the more impressionistic body of his work, where he points out that one’s existence in prison where each day is the same, where the hours of existence are reduced to exercise, food, exercise, food, roll call, sleep, where the numbing sameness of each day makes of each day a nonentity of timelessness, breaking the usual ideas of narration and ‘this then that and then this other thing’ that makes up most fiction. This decisive split in the structure of his ‘novel’ is parallel to the rupture at the heart of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” where Salinger’s sudden shift into 3rd person shows the ineffability of severely traumatic experiences—perhaps most unspeakable to the very persons who undergo such events.

The second breakdown of the narrative is shown during the increasingly fractured conclusion of the work, where Cummings admits that he quite lost himself when his compatriot B. was sent to ‘actual’ prison for his manifestly criminal treason of writing anti-war statements in personal letters. The episodic account gives way, our tale teller barely able to fix upon fact and incident, seeming to lose his grasp as the tale stumbles to its conclusion, a strange vision of a big city that has become forever changed.

Well, as I said, you probably won’t like it. Not only is it avant-garde in that way that only words created during the strange interregnum between the two ‘Great Wars’ of the 20th Century can be (viz. Dada, Stein), it is also arty itself, only words on paper from an artist who was not yet the poet sometimes known as e. e. cummings. The Harvard graduate thought he might perhaps become a painter, but so wanted to gain ‘real’ knowledge of the ‘real’ world he’d signed up to aid the wounded in the ambulance corps, just like another famous American writer. And, as I also said before, this prison stay is not of the worst type, not a taste of those camps that burned thousands of better men women and children than you or I shall ever be, nor yet the infamous gulags run by criminals that Solzhenitsyn described, now was it even the even earlier concentration camps of the English in South Africa where tens of thousands of Boers and blacks perished from disease, starvation, and neglect. No, the ‘Enormous Room’ wherein these dozens of unlucky men were confined was a small antechamber to the horrors of Hell, “not so bad” many might say who doubt not that they would be unchanged and unbroken by a few months sojourn in such a facility. Hell, at this very moment many putative non-Americans are suffering far more greatly in ICE ‘detention centers’, as we style our own more modern more efficient constructions of hell. And perhaps it is because La Ferté Macé was “not so bad” that Cummings was able to write about it at all. (I’m told that he never commented further on these experiences, told by those same shallow sources that gave me any number of reasons to discount his work, his views, his life. (Though you needn’t search Wikipedia for that; the chapter about “Jean Le Nègre” will provide you all the ammunition you need, so long as you ignore that a real man was being described, by another man who likely had had zero interaction with a black man who was not a porter.))

But this book is over a century old, the events it relates about a decade older than that, and …. Well, to quote a line I use often in daily conversation: Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Or, to put it in the context of E. E. Cummings The Enormous Room: Did we learn nothing from World War One? Or, again, to reflect upon the America that I seem now to be imprisoned within with no hope of parole: Did we learn nothing from The Civil War? And the answer is the same, always the same in every case.

No. No, we did not. We learn nothing.

Book List: 1800 Books

After far too long a wait (I first told you I’d read my 1800th book back in April), here is the promised list of the last hundred books read in my silly little book tracking project. I’ve already spoken of the first book in that century of book reading—the December 1964 issue of Fantastic which contained the first appearance of Philip K. Dick’s novella “The Unteleported Man”—and since I’ve recently read the most ‘complete’ version of the expanded novel (in my reading as Book #1824 (I said I’d made you wait too long)), and since after reading that version I’ve determined to go back and read the other two ‘complete’ versions released (in the ’80s, I believe), we’ll postpone more discussion of that PKD story until the next set of 100 books.

The first 10 books of the last 100 saw me reading a lot of comics, trying to balance my books (so to speak) in another little aspect of my OCD-hoarding-anal-what-have-you book acquisition problem/joy/neuroticism. That is, though I do not count comic books and that ilk towards my official ‘Books Read’ number, I do (of course) keep track of all the things I read, and I also maintain (for about two years now) a spreadsheet detailing what is called in the health profession my ‘I/O’ for my library; that is to say, I now track and compare how many books I buy and try to maintain at least parity with the books I read. (I came to this when I realized that I might possibly read all the books I already have within my lifetime only if I never got another new book. Now that I’ve been tracking my ‘diet and intake’ (so to speak) of my library, I believe that I should be able to finish all my books—assuming I can live for another century.) And for that systemic tracking project, I include comics in the overall count, as they are a volume bought or read. Soooo…… this is a long way ’round to say that I was reading a lot of comics in January of this year because I’d gotten not only some excellent books for Christmas but also because I scored a number of great books at a few estate sales nearby. (Not as great as I’d hoped, as I discovered the copy of Farwell’s Prisoners Of The Madhi was missing its first dozen or so pages.) Sooo… long way ’round almost completed now, this is just to say that I’ve been going systematically through my entire comics collection, and so reread my copies of Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman, and they’re great! Surrealist violence to give even Zippy a run for the money, and a warm lovable character if you might find Bukowski warm and lovable. Excelsior!

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1701 1/13/26 Philip K. Dick; Norman M. Lobsenz, ed. Fantastic Vol. 13 No. 12 December 1964 SF & Fantasy
1702 1/16/26 Joyce Godsey Book Repair for Booksellers: A handy guide for booksellers and book collectors offering practical advice on how to improve the quality and look of your books and ephemera Books
1703 1/17/26 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine April 2025 Music
1/17/26 S. K. Ramachandra Rao & Subba Rao Tales of Buddha: Buddha, Angulimala, Amrapali Comics
1/17/26 Pradeep Paul, Meera Ugra, Luis M. Fernandes Tales of Hanuman: Hanuman, Mahiravana, Hanuman To The Rescue Comics
1/17/26 Subba Rao Tales of Shiva Comics
1/17/26 Subba Rao Tales of Yudhishthira (retold from the Mahabharata) Comics
1/18/26 Meena Talim Tanaji: The Great Maratha Warrior Comics
1/18/26 Dolly Rizvi Tansen: The Musician of the Court of Akbar Comics
1/18/26 David Boswell Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman Vol. 2, #1 Comics
1/18/26 David Boswell Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman Vol. 2, #3 Comics
1/18/26 David Boswell Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman Vol. 2, #4 Comics
1/19/26 Peter Bagge Neat Stuff #15 Comics
1704 1/19/26 H. L. A. Hart Law, Liberty, And Morality Law
1/19/26 Mike Baron Badger #43 Comics
1/19/26 Mike Baron Badger #44 Comics
1705 1/20/26 Rainer Maria Rilke Auguste Rodin Art
1706 1/20/26 Wilkie Collins Armadale Fiction
1707 1/21/26 John D. MacDonald A Bullet for Cinderella Mystery
1708 1/21/26 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Silent Partner Mystery
1/22/26 Mike Baron Badger #45 Comics
1709 1/22/26 A. E. Van Vogt The Universe Maker SF & Fantasy
1710 1/22/26 Edwin A. Abbott Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions Fiction

 

I have been a huge fan of C. M. Kornbluth since first I read “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” as an impressionable teenager. Here he teams up with Judith Merrill to create the story of Gunner Cade, military Science Fiction from the time before Dorsai and whatever current war SF is thrilling the kids today. The story of soldier Cade is a fascinating one, where Kornbluth and Merrill (writing as Cyril Judd) create a rigidly segmented far-future society with sparkling imaginative touches. The novel shows how ’50s sci-fi could pummel the reader with amazing ideas and trenchant commentary all while telling a terrific story. Sure there are some silly points, but that’s true of most books. And that headlong rush to the plot’s denouement is a wild and quite enjoyable ride.

One thing I’ve been engaged in over the last few time periods is a re-read (so far) of the Philip K. Dick novels in publication order, and thus I came to Clans Of The Alphane Moon. I loved this the first time I read it and I loved it this time around. It’s an excellent working out of another of PKD’s unusual conceits, the mental hospital that forms its own strange government and special interest groups. (Sort of like San Francisco politics, perhaps.) A crazy SF use of psychology, true, and the wish fulfillment ending and other points shows once again how little Dick seemed to understand women or at least some of their aspects (most?), but the kooky story of how the domestic squabbles of two not-very-nice people turn the grinding wheels of two space empires is very enjoyable and well worked out. And of course the slime mold is a winning character.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1711 1/23/26 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Empty Tin Mystery
1712 1/23/26 Wallace Fowlie Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet Literary Criticism
1713 1/24/26 C.M. Kornbluth & Judith Merril (as Cyril Judd) Gunner Cade SF & Fantasy
1714 1/25/26 William S. Burroughs Nova Express Fiction
1715 1/25/26 Philip K. Dick Clans of the Alphane Moon SF & Fantasy
1/25/26 Mike Baron Badger #46 Comics
1/25/26 Mike Baron Badger #47 Comics
1/25/26 Mike Baron Badger #48 Comics
1716 1/27/26 John Farman The Very Bloody History of Britain (Without the Boring Bits!) History
1717 1/27/26 Carolyn Keene The Secret of the Old Clock Children’s
1718 1/27/26 Raymond Chandler & Robert B. Parker Poodle Springs Mystery
1719 1/28/26 Carolyn Keene The Secret at the Hermitage Carolyn Keene
1720 1/28/26 Carolyn Keene The Hidden Staircase Children’s

 

I loved these strange mysteries from the so-called ‘golden age’ of detective fiction, though Ernest Bramah—the creator of Max Carrados, perhaps fiction’s first blind detective—was a literary polymath, writing humor and political and supernatural fiction in addition to crime stories, as well as creating the (possibly problematic to this age full of problems) character Kai Lung. In Max Carrados Mysteries, my biggest problem is one other readers may also have, that I am not convinced that the titular detective is in fact blind. Still and all, these are craftily crafty crafted tales of wonder, and I found all but one to be very well thought out mystery stories and liked them very much. The one exception, “The Strange Case of Cyril Bycourt”, I found to be a bit much, but my tastes rarely run to supernature especially as an explanation in mysteries, though on the other hand the low frequency explanation for ghosts shows that perhaps it is I who have the closed mind.

Right up front I should give warning to prospective readers of Sadness by Donald Barthelme. If you love Barthelme, you’ll find much to love here. If you like him only some of the time, you’ll only find some of these stories to your liking. And if you haven’t read him at all … well, I’m not sure if this is the collection to start with. Me, I loved these perfect little stories of affecting disaffection and fascinating ennui. I think Barthelme is hot stuff, and this set of tales has a lot of fire, especially the first (perhaps highly autobiographical) story, the weird Paul Klee piece, and the “Rise of Capitalism”. Your mileage may vary. (I know mine does.)

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1721 1/29/26 Rex Stout Three Men Out Mystery & Thriller
1722 1/29/26 Ernest Bramah Max Carrados Mysteries Mystery & Thriller
1723 1/29/26 Carolyn Keene The Bungalow Mystery Children’s
1724 1/29/26 Donald Barthelme Sadness Fiction
1725 1/30/26 Georges Simenon Sunday Mystery
1726 1/30/26 Carolyn Keene The Secret of Shadow Ranch Children’s
1727 1/30/26 Carolyn Keene The Secret of Red Gate Farm Children’s
1728 1/31/26 Carolyn Keene The Clue in the Diary Children’s
1729 1/31/26 Arthur William Upfield The Mountains Have a Secret Mystery
1730 1/31/26 Carolyn Keene The Message in the Hollow Oak Children’s

 

In this slim volume (144 pages) are a plethora of the strangest ‘inventions’ to come from the mind of man. The Best of Rube Goldberg lives up to its title, and may be too much to read all in one sitting. Not only does Mr. Goldberg point out in his kindly way how much effort we will go to just in order not to get up from the chair to shut the window, for example, but he also slyly notes well the ‘accepted ideas’ of our time (well, his time) just as Flaubert did for the bourgeois ideas of his time. Readers will also notice actual objects and inventions which have disappeared in our oh-so-modern world, such as the (apparently) ever-present expanding hat rack. True, the humor can be dated, and will offend some, but I found it funny. Of course, I offend some.

Boy these are perfect little tales. In Cosmicomics, the justifiably famous Italo Calvino writes like Gamow if that science writer had been a litterateur … and a much better writer. The science is good—as good as Calvino’s contemporary sources at least—but the magic is how he takes the tiniest kernel of science fact and spins insightful stories about age-old human habits and longings and regrets and life. I particularly liked “The Aquatic Uncle”—about our aging relatives with their old prejudices that we misunderstand at our peril—and “The Dinosaurs”—how perspective changes with time and our own presence in the past now being critiqued by the now—, but almost all of these stories are powerful stuff.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1731 2/1/26 June-Alison Gibbons The Pepsi Cola Addict Fiction
1732 2/2/26 Carolyn Keene The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes Children’s
1733 2/3/26 Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson Starchild SF & Fantasy
2/4/26 Rube Goldberg The Best of Rube Goldberg Humor
1734 2/4/26 Victor E. Kappeler, Mark Blumberg, & Gary W. Potter The Mythology of Crime and Criminal Justice Law
1735 2/5/26 Dashiell Hammett The Dain Curse Mystery
1736 2/6/26 Italo Calvino Cosmicomics Fiction
1737 2/7/26 Walpola Rahula What the Buddha Taught Religion & Spirituality
2/8/26 Suresh Chandra Sharma Tulsidas Comics
2/8/26 Kamala Chandrakant Uloopi (from the Mahabharata) Comics
2/9/26 Subba Rao / Anand Prakash Singh / Kamlesh Pandey Valiant Kings of Ancient India: Paurava / Vikramaditya / Baladitya & Yashodharma Comics
2/9/26 Kamala Chandrakant Vasantasena: An Adaptation of the Famous Sanskrit Play, Mrichchakatikam Comics
1738 2/11/26 Talbot Mundy Tros Of Samothrace: Tros Fiction
1739 2/16/26 Julian Symons The Blackheath Poisonings Mystery
1740 2/17/26 Carolyn Keene The Quest of the Missing Map Children’s

 

I picked up Daddy Cool by Donald Goines at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and I’ve rarely gotten more bang for my eight bucks. The blurb on the back of this edition calls the tale Shakespearean, but it’s more—to my mind—Jacobean crossed with Greek tragedy. Daddy Cool is a larger-than-life character trying to escape a world always getting smaller. Some readers will find this powerful book unreadable, and there’s at least one wholly horrific scene. At least one. Really, if trigger warnings mean anything to you, best give this one a pass. But the dénouement unrolls with the inevitability of ancient tragedy or an Icelandic saga.

I’ve had the movie version of The Night of the Generals on my TiVo queue for some time now, waiting until I’d re-read the book before re-watching that classic story of murder amidst murder and madness on a massive scale. And I’m glad I returned to the Hans Helmut Kirst novel with a fairly fresh mind, for this amazing book spoke to me on so many levels, as Kirst no doubt intended it to do. Yes, the book’s ending may be flawed to a certain extent, but the fraught tale demonstrated only too well how memory and history and all that change under the pressure of time and new events and politics, how evil becomes duty becomes creditable action and back again. Doubtless such tales will be needed again in the future, or even in the now.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1741 2/17/26 Julian Symons The Detling Secret Mystery
1742 2/17/26 Donald Goines Daddy Cool Mystery
1743 2/18/26 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine May 2025 Music
1744 2/18/26 John D. MacDonald The Green Ripper Mystery
1745 2/19/26 John D. MacDonald The Dreadful Lemon Sky Mystery
1746 2/21/26 John D. MacDonald The Beach Girls Mystery
1747 2/24/26 John D. MacDonald Ballroom of the Skies SF & Fantasy
1748 2/27/26 Andrew J. Offutt The Iron Lords SF & Fantasy
1749 2/28/26 Hans Hellmut Kirst The Night Of The Generals Mystery
1750 2/28/26 C. M. Kornbluth The Marching Morons and other famous science fiction tales SF & Fantasy

 

I can hardly speak highly enough of the excellent short stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, and this collection of Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt proves himself a master of the art form with these sly, wry, and sometimes heartrending tales written in the final years of the American 19th Century, and the decades after Reconstruction’s tragic failure. The first dialect stories are great, and his ear is perfect (tho’ I had to read some passages out loud to get the sense—at which point I could hear the voices perfectly). The others are ‘straight’ fictions, and are also amazing, a message from a POV otherwise lost to us, and stories such as “The Sheriff’s Children” and “The Bouquet” show a terrible insight. All but one of these stories are about race, though that one (“Baxter’s Procrustes”) shows the same deviously brilliant mind at work.

Continuing my re-read of Philip K. Dick’s novels in publication order, I did not expect to be so affected by Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb, but the conclusion swept me along and lifted my up and what a nice ending, for a change. Surprised to see PKD being the voice of hope in overwhelming and dire circumstances but the end of this sometimes vicious story really tied everything together nicely, and the kooky elements (Hoppy, and the dead twin, and … well, did Dr. Bluthgeld really control those bombs, hmm?) were used in what for Dick was a deft and almost light touch.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1751 3/4/26 Richard Kadrey Metrophage SF & Fantasy
1752 3/6/26 Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus Fiction
1753 3/6/26 A. E. Van Vogt Pendulum SF & Fantasy
1754 3/8/26 Charles W. Chesnutt Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line Fiction
1755 3/11/26 Edwin Newman Sunday Punch Fiction
1756 3/12/26 Philip K. Dick Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb SF & Fantasy
1757 3/12/26 Alan Bold, Edward Brathwaite, & Edwin Morgan Penguin Modern Poets 15: Bold Brathwaite Morgan Poetry
1758 3/13/26 Ryunosuke Akutagawa Japanese Short Stories Fiction
1759 3/13/26 Stephen King The Colorado Kid Mystery
1760 3/14/26 Harry Harrison A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born SF & Fantasy

 

I was surprised by The Invisible Flag, by the pseudonymous Peter Bamm, a Penguin paperback from the ’60s (originally published in 1956), which is a sort of roman à clef about a military surgeon during World War II, sort of a M*A*S*H on the Eastern Front. This tale of a Wehrmacht doctor is really engaging, despite the fact that it acts as apologia for some complicity in the heinous acts of the German Army in WWII—though it is true that the worst offenses were committed by the Waffen SS, not the army per se. (The author never writes the word ‘Nazi’, speaking instead of “the Others”.) And the ‘invisible flag’ trope (of humanity, the writer explains) seems a bit heavy-handed. Still, a fascinating inside look at a strange fraction of a small slice of war from a man who really is a good writer, and lived in those times, in those places.

I was tempted to speak of the fantastic Philip K. Dick novel in this next set of 10 books read, or the sprightly little Daniel Pinkwater tale; but I couldn’t bring myself to highlight PKD for the third time (not yet!) in this list of a hundred books, and my notes are sparse on the Snarkout Boys (something about a delightfully walkable affordable city with great goings-on after dark). And the Jim Thompson TV tie-in book Ironside is really just 3rd rate, with creepy musings to boot. So let’s talk instead about Hammond Innes’s The Doomed Oasis.
       This is actually a very good novel, a very interesting story of small Arabian sheikhdoms under the influence of big oil and geopolitics writ both large and small. But mostly Innes give us a thrilling story (told almost in a Heart Of Darkness manner) of miscommunication and misunderstandings between a father and son, as well as just about every damn body else. Crazy and brutal with plenty of romance of the desert, as well as the dangers of going native and some insights into just how world commodity markets are made at the ground level. Superseded by time and passing events, but aren’t we all?

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1761 3/15/26 Office of Civil Defense In Time of Emergency: A Citizen’s Handbook on … Nuclear Attack … Natural Disasters Militaria
1762 3/17/26 Joseph Koenig False Negative Mystery
1763 3/19/26 Peter Bamm The Invisible Flag Fiction
1764 3/20/26 Peter Dickinson The Lively Dead Mystery
1765 3/21/26 Joe Haldeman All My Sins Remembered SF & Fantasy
3/24/26 Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster Superman – Archives, Volume 3 (DC Archive Editions) Comics
1766 3/24/26 Philip K. Dick Now Wait For Last Year SF & Fantasy
1767 3/24/26 Calvin M. Knox [Robert Silverberg] / A. E. Van Vogt One Of Our Asteroids Is Missing / The Twisted Men [Ace Double F-253] SF & Fantasy
1768 3/25/26 Daniel Pinkwater The Snarkout Boys & The Avocado of Death Children’s
1769 3/26/26 Jim Thompson Ironside Mystery
1770 3/28/26 Hammond Innes The Doomed Oasis Thriller

 

Now we come to one of those works which we already know, just like I knew about Rosebud long before I finally saw Citizen Kane. I mean, besides the Hitchcock silent movie, there were two other talkies in black and white, all of which I’ve seen. Not to mention the two separate radio adaptations on Suspense (both of which I’ve heard; seriously, check out all the Suspense episodes—they’re great!) There was even a Doctor Who episode based loosely on the novel. Heck, I’ve even seen my daughter in the play, which I hadn’t even mentioned yet. All of which means that when I came to read The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes (and yes, she was Hilaire Belloc’s sister), I thought I knew the story every which way. And indeed, I did know the plot, and the pacing, and the primary focus on Ellen Bunting and her ‘Is he? Isn’t he?’ worry throughout the story. (The novel is a 1913 expansion of Lowndes’s original short story of 1911.) What I wasn’t expecting was just how darkly oppressive and ever-tightening this suspense book proved to be, strangely compelling for a hundred-year-old work. I also never expected what appears to be the primary difference from the plays and movies, in what I suppose we’re still calling Stockholm Syndrome though that like all else is discredited and no more heroes anymore.

Unexpected as well was the cornucopia of poetic wonders in Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, an old anthology (50 years old now) of poets more unknown then than perhaps they are now—which shows perhaps that this collection has done its job. Thus Milosz and Paz and Cortázar and even Pessoa are fairly familiar to the 1% of people who read poetry (if I’m being generous), with Milosz perhaps already past his ‘sell by’ date for some. And I was already a huge fan of Amichai, having been introduced to his work by a co-worker back before the first tech bubble burst. But authors such as Parra, Ritsos, Ponge, Celan, and (especially!) de Andrade were sheer revelation, and have been added to my list of people to search for when haunting bookstores. True, my tastes run to the more surrealist side of writing, at least this sort of writing, and the works may seem dated to some, all ‘cis-gendered’ and male and like that, but the anthology was important enough to be reissued thirty years after its first publication, and there aren’t a lot of books that rate that anymore, certainly not poetry books. Check it out!

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1771 3/29/26 Daniel J. Pinkwater The Snarkout Boys & the Baconburg Horror Children’s
1772 3/30/26 Tarthang Tulku Gesture of Balance: A Guide to Awareness, Self-Healing, & Meditation Religion & Spirituality
1773 3/30/26 Marinos of Neapolis Marinos of Neapolis, the Extant Works: or, the Life of Proclus and the Commentary on the Dedomena of Euclid Philosophy
1774 3/31/26 John Lennon In His Own Write & A Spaniard In The Works Poetry
1775 3/31/26 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine June 2025 Music
1776 4/2/26 Glenn B. Infield Secrets of the SS History
1777 4/3/26 Marie Belloc Lowndes The Lodger Mystery
1778 4/4/26 Robert van Gulik The Red Pavilion Mystery
1779 4/5/26 Charles Simic & Mark Strand, eds. Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers Poetry
1780 4/6/26 Robert Linssen La Méditation véritable – Etude des pulsions pré-mentales Foreign Language

 

Surprised to see that, though I’ve had several of the Judge Dee mysteries in my Book Lists before (They even appear in my first 100!), I don’t seem to have called them out before. And these historical mysteries by Robert van Gulik definitely should be mentioned, because they are great. So we’ll let The Lacquer Screen stand for all these marvelous tales, and it’s a great story—or stories, rather, because as usual Judge Dee is faced with three different cases (it’s almost always three) in each book. This time Dee has to go ‘undercover’ as they say today and enter the demimonde, well the actual criminal underworld. The underclass and underworld are often subjects of the fictional ancient China of van Gulik, and in this novel I was fascinated by Judge Dee’s ability to travel in and through multiple worlds whilst keeping his integrity intact. Though perhaps the series’s frequent trips to these strange outskirts of civilization show something about Gulik’s own taste for The Strange.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1781 4/7/26 Robert van Gulik The Lacquer Screen Mystery
1782 4/8/26 Ian Fleming The Man With The Golden Gun Thriller
1783 4/9/26 Steven Saylor Rubicon Mystery
1784 4/10/26 Robert van Gulik The Emperor’s Pearl Mystery
1785 4/11/26 Clifford D. Simak City SF & Fantasy
1786 4/11/26 Sax Rohmer The Trail of Fu Manchu Thriller
1787 4/13/26 Michael Bonner, ed. Uncut Magazine July 2025 Music
1788 4/13/26 John Dickson Carr The House At Satan’s Elbow Mystery
1789 4/14/26 Mack Reynolds / Claude Nunes Dawnman Planet / Inherit The Earth [Ace Double G-580] SF & Fantasy
1790 4/16/26 Margaret Frazer The Clerk’s Tale Mystery

 

Over a thousand books later (I read Charles Martin’s Catullus as Book #784) I read another of the works about this poet recommended by Steven Saylor (whom I didn’t highlight in the last tranche of books solely because I’ve mentioned him time and time again), the very fine Catullus & His World: A Reappraisal by T. P. Wiseman. I found it to be another excellent work on a poet who I must admit I know very little about and likely—being somewhat of a cracker philistine—understand even less. But it is always a pleasure to read a good writer who knows expertly his subject. While I might doubt the identification of the poet Catullus with the mime playwright, Wiseman makes his case well and boldly, in every field. I even found myself tearing up when reading the David Vessey lines on Lesbia that Wiseman quotes in his closing section on the afterlife of Catullus and his poetry up to our time.

Too big perhaps to read twice in paperback, but the end of this last century of books saw me finish my 3rd read-through of the magisterial The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer. This tome is simply one of the best histories of all time, its depth and insight made possible only by the fortunate capture of so many Nazi documents after World War II. Indeed, some of the revelations make one wonder how many other secrets lie beneath our ‘common knowledge’ of other historical events. But Shirer is very good at what he does, keeping this huge book on track even as he has to make drastic choices as to what to cover (the futile tales of military ‘resistance’ to Hitler) and what he does not (much military history (esp. the naval), and almost all of the War in the Pacific). The sad truth is that far too many people who read this or other histories of the rise and fall of Hitler will take the wrong lesson: instead of ‘maybe one person can never know everything’ they always seem to think, “Well, if it had been me, I wouldn’t have made those mistakes; I’m much too smart for that!” Very very well worth reading, and very readable.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
1791 4/17/26 T. P. Wiseman Catullus and his World: A Reappraisal Literary Criticism
1792 4/17/26 Crockett Johnson Harold and the Purple Crayon Children’s
1793 4/19/26 Willam L. Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich History
1794 4/22/26 Terry Carr, ed. Universe 12 SF & Fantasy
1795 4/23/26 Carter Dickson [John Dickson Carr] The Plague Court Murders Mystery
1796 4/24/26 Basil Copper The Further Adventures of Solar Pons Mystery
1797 4/25/26 Nigel Pennick The Complete Illustrated Guide to Runes Magic & Witchcraft
1798 4/26/26 Andrew J. Offutt Shadows Out Of Hell SF & Fantasy
4/27/26 Jon Morris The Legion Of Regrettable Supervillains Comics
1799 4/27/26 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Laurel Poetry Series: Longfellow Poetry
1800 4/28/26 Philip K. Dick The Crack in Space SF & Fantasy

 

And so another book list of 100 Books Read comes to an end, several months after I finished the PKD novel that ended up being Book #1800. Due to my unconscionable delay, I am already halfway through the next century of books, which began with a cheery read of the kids’ encyclopedia volume pictured here. I’m still tending to read too many short books, though I did maintain an average book length (excluding comics and the ilk) of 215 pages … though that may have something to do with the enormous history of Nazi Germany by Shirer. The next set of 100 will see me reading far too many comics, the result of a silly purchase made while on vacation. Until I finish this next hundred, hope all your books are good books!

 
 
 

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

Friday Vocabulary

1. rannygazoo — nonsense; silliness

We had left early for our ride to the abbey, and so missed all the rannygazoo with the disappearing and reappearing silver ewer which terribly upset Mother.

 

2. kakorrhaphiophobia — fear of failure

To confront and defeat his paralyzing kakorrhaphiophobia, Edward began a strenuous program of skydiving, karaoke, ballroom dancing, and slam poetry.

 

3. parasang — historical Persian unit of distance, approximately 3-1/2 miles

The foul but wise man informed us we were still at least a day’s march from the temple, but added that he would be happy to accompany us for a few parasangs, so we controlled our instinctive response and thanked him for gracing us with his redolent presence.

 

4. indomptable (also indomptible) — indomitable, uncontrollable

Much as I’ve always respected Perkins for his indomptable courage (as shown in the incident with the Major’s horse), I never thought much of his racing tips.

 

5. swayback — animal (esp. a horse) with a sagging spine

Finally he understood why his father had been at such pains to purchase the swayback nag.

 

6. gas and gaiters — [slang] the cat’s pajamas, good times

“Now if we can only find Captain Braddock’s artificial leg it’ll be gas and gaiters for us!”

 

7. lich-wake (also lyke-wake) — [obsolete] the ritual vigil over a corpse before burial

Soaked by the rain, my boots and trousers bespattered with mud, I was glad to see the three gloomy watchers at the lich-wake, and I approached the bier with candles at each end knowing that I was not too late.

 

8. gadroon – raised decorative curves on silverware or other objets d’art

Sitting next to Sir Feldrow meant hours of listening to discussion of gadroons and ogees, and the merits of paktong versus German silver, so I steeled myself for the ordeal ahead and tried on my best “Oh, isn’t that interesting?” visage.

 

9. botheration — annoyance, effort

The old hound was a joy and a true help on the hunt but this new puppy is a botheration only and I’m thinking of giving him to Jessie, over to the Stewarts.

 

10. bellwether — predictor or herald of future trends; belled lead sheep of a flock

But that first illness, though it proved not to be fatal for Emily, was a bellwether of the nightmare that was to wrack our community throughout the long, hot summer.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. rep — ribbed fabric of silk or wool

Each of the small alcoves—really nothing more than cubbyholes—had a curtain of silk rep across it, save the one at eye level holding Winthrop’s blue and pink slippers.

 

2. petronel — muzzle-loading firearm of the 16th and 17th Centuries, midway in size between a pistol and a carbine

Assisted by two stout horsemen armed with petronels, Claxton rode into the muttering mob to quell the rumors of famine and civil war.

 

3. philogynist — admirer or lover of women

One needn’t be a rank philogynist to concede that women have contributed much more to society and civilization than their mere generative power.

 

4. Belinograph — early mechanism for sending photographs over telephone lines

Zhang Zuolin, the Manchurian warlord, invited the inventor of the Balinograph to visit China in hopes that his invention could facilitate the transmission of Chinese writing over phone lines.

 

5. lackaday — expression of grief or regret

“Lackaday!” Van Houten cried, “that we should arrive only hours too late to save Sophie from these brigands!”

 

6. culet — flat bottom cut onto gemstone; armor plate layered to protect the buttocks of the wearer

True it was that his culets prevented the mighty sweep of that broadsword from severing his leg, but the bruise upon his arse was only slightly smaller than the one upon his ego.

 

7. saponaceous — of or resembling or containing soap; evasive, sly

He assented in that servile yet saponaceous manner I had come to expect from Sir Gerald’s factotum.

 

8. felo de se (also felo-de-se) — [Latin] crime against the self; in particular, suicide

“Before you hasten to your felo de se, allow me to point out what seem to be the missing keys suspended from your vest pocket watch chain.”

 

9. vici — soft treated leather used primarily for shoe uppers

In her vici kid button-up shoes she had nothing to fear from the misting rain that had left her cousin’s feet sodden.

 

10. tosh — nonsense, rubbish

“Don’t hand me such tosh, Seymour,” said Hazlitt as he tamped his briar. “We know you saw Phenny at the bank last Tuesday, so it just won’t do.”

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(informal idiomatic phrase, used imperatively)

wake up and die right — come to one’s senses, get a grip

We had better wake up and die right in the face of these new adversities and changing circumstances, or else we can just resign ourselves to obsolescence and desuetude.

 

1800 Books

Just as the end of my 17th century of books found me reading a Philip K. Dick novel, as I make my meandering way through his books in quasi-chronological order of publication, so Book #1800 turns out to be—and yes, I obviously have some say in the matter—PKD’s 1966 science fiction novel The Crack In Space. This tale of a future world where finally the U.S.A. may be about to get a black president—this is set in 2079 or 2080 (is that right?), so it’s not entirely implausible—has the usual set of characters just trying to get on with their lives as car salesmen (well, people use Jiffi-scuttlers now, but don’t let that throw you), a presidential candidate and his advisers, a two-bodied one-headed owner of a pleasure satellite with five thousand (5000!!) girls all waiting for the next businessman to arrive, and a host of others. Meanwhile, a defective piece of equipment may enable the nation and world to divest itself of the growing hordes of people who’ve chosen to simply sleep their lives away, to be frozen in time in hopes that rampant overpopulation and lack of jobs and food and space will magically be resolved at some point in the future. Will those sleeping millions be able to use the titular ‘Crack in Space’ to blow this taco stand? Will careers be made? Will opportunities be squandered? Will we learn anything at all, this time?

Since it’s Philip K. Dick, the answers to all those questions, save perhaps the last one, may not become entirely clear. The Crack In Space was written in 1966 (though I read the 1974 edition pictured here), and issues of race relations are highlighted throughout. But the novel is crazy good with so many wild ideas that I can’t even keep up. Example? The throwaway reflections on abortion in the middle of the book where the anti- side is given perhaps its most persuasive case in the moral relief of the abortion consultant character … with neither topic nor character mentioned again. The ideas of “Mozart In Mirrorshades” are offered here in extremely moving and perhaps more believable form. And … and … seriously, the hits keep coming, and the basic story of men running for office and trying to sell cars (or squibbles, or whatever they are this time) uses cosmically unique occurences as mere background to their brooding hopes and fears and whatever that perpetual Dickian musing really is. And ’tis even a fable about counting chickens, and also race prejudice, and socio-economics of overpopulation, and … like I said, I could go on, but read the book instead.

I’ll be posting the full list of this last hundred books read shortly, likely in the merry month upcoming.

My pace of reading was faster this century than last, 1.06 days per book versus the previous 1.28 dy/bk. Page count showed an uptick, at just under 216 average pages per book, or about 204 pages per day. Additionally, there were 23 books read which I categorized as Comics, meaning that I don’t count them towards my grand ‘Books Read’ total, though I obviously keep track of them in some sort of database mania. Including those give a reading pace of 0.86 days per book (which is part of the reason I don’t use these in the ‘official’ count), and 186-3/4 avg. pages per book; those 32-pagers drop the average page count quite a bit.

As I’ve been reiterating in these occasional reports, the heavy reading pace is an effort to keep my ‘Books Read’ greater or at least equal to my ‘Books Acquired’. I have yet to see a noticeable decline in the overall trend line, but at least there seems to be a plateau. For instance, over the same period I read this last hundred books, I managed to buy or be gifted 89, giving me a net improvement in my read books of … 11 books. If we throw in all the comics-related stuff read or bought, we get 123 vs. 91, for a net of 32. Hmm, noticeable but still not even a dent to my shelves.

The first book of this last set of one hundred books saw me reading another PKD work, the next novel in chronological order in fact, though Book #1701 was the SF digest Fantastic from December 1964, which carried the first appearance of the novella “The Unteleported Man”, later published in 1966 as one half of an Ace Double book. The history of that novel or novella or what-have-you is an interesting bibliographic tale, as Dick greatly expanded the story but those pages were lost, then found, then found in a different format once again. At this point, there are three different versions of this novel, which—truth be told—may not be all that worthy of so much attention. (It’s a bit of a hodgepodge in the first two versions, which I have read. But!) But I’ve gotten a copy of a 2003 edition of Lies, Inc. (the expanded book’s new title), where new discoveries made in 1985 supposedly allow the publishers to stick the new material in the places that Philip K. Dick originally wanted them to be. So we shall see, as that’s my next PKD read, given that I recently read the 1966 version (same as the 1964 digest publication), and it’s also next on my fuzzy little list. Can’t wait to discover whether it holds up better than the first two renditions.

Mystery books regained their status as the plurality of books read in this set of 100, beating out Science Fiction & Fantasy which had been the dominant genre in the previous 2 tranches of one hundred books read. 32 books—almost a third!—of this last set were in the Mystery & Thriller category. But SF&F had 20 books to its credit, a quarter of which were Philip K. Dick novels. The 13 Children’s books were more than the 11 Fiction titles, with no other subject achieving double digits..

Those good at math have already calculated the 106 days to read these last 100 books, about 20% less than the length of time for the previous hundred. If we include the comics, the pace was a ludicrously fast 0.86 days per book read. Of course we don’t, so … moving on.

   1 Book per 1..06 Days   

See you soon with the complete Book List next month!

Friday Vocabulary

1. steppe-witch — any of the easily dislodged round plants of the Russian steppes which roll with the wind after dying off, tumbleweed

The children will tell you that a steppe-witch brings you luck, but this dried monster lodged beneath the staff car had brought us only ill fortune.

 

2. Pelmanism — memory training system using duplicate images which the trainee repeatedly reveals in order to recall location of the second duplicate image

Abigail searched the roll-top desk as if playing at some demented form of Pelmanism, opening first this drawer then that, closing the first and then the second, riffling through the inbox then the outbox, opening a third drawer then the first again, until finally fixating on the small drawer inset between the black and red inkwells.

 

3. buckra — [slang] white person

“So I’m supposed to stop everything to attend to any buckra who blesses my shop with his presence?”

 

4. clodpole — stupid fellow

We knew Mr. Evan’s new driver from school, a real clodpole who’d failed eighth grade so many times they finally let him have a diploma before the army called him up to serve in Korea.

 

5. whistlepig — woodchuck

Avery claimed that he had once dug a whistlepig out of his hole, and I believed that no more than this fresh nonsense he was purveying.

 

6. dispreader — [archaic] one who spreads or disseminates (something)

Brother Hawthorn was hailed as a great dispreader of the Holy Word, which was why it was all the more surprising that he’d been asked to leave Bayswater.

 

7. blandish — cajole, convince someone through flattery; butter up, sycophantically praise

With murmured approval of the barmaid’s eyes and, erm, other features, followed by seemingly offhand questions, Miles blandished the well-worn tankard tosser into telling us what we needed to know.

 

8. riancy — gaiety, joviality

Preston, however, heard this devastating news with aplomb, and, not wishing to cast a shadow over his daughter’s event, affected a marvelous air of riancy and bonhomie during the party until the last guests had departed for their carriages or bedrooms.

 

9. osetra (also ossetra) — caviar from the eponymous Russian sturgeon

I have always preferred the nuttiness of osetra, and I left the beluga to the others.

 

10. fulminatory — thundering, booming; censorious

But in the middle of his fulminatory peroration Higgins paused, as if struck by a sudden surprising thought, and backtracked once more to the image of the young boy left bereft of father and mother by the actions of the woman in the dock.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British & Anzac kid’s game)

French cricket — informal game using cricket bat (or any such stick) and soft ball (e.g., a tennis ball) with no wickets where batsman tries to fend off ball thrown at or between his legs

Uncle Harry managed to distract the cousins and their friend Lester by introducing them to the ‘sport’ of French cricket and soon had all five of them haring off into the woods and down to the lake in search of the ball which he pelted one-handed hither and yon all while holding a Foster’s in his other fist.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. septimanal — weekly; of or related to periods of seven days

Truly you’ll find it no more difficult to write for the daily papers than for those septimanal sheets you work for now.

 

2. blinkard — [obsolete] person with poor vision; idjut

Perhaps I’ve been such a blinkard as to overlook their nascent romance, but I can hardly fail to take action now that cognizance of the situation has been forced upon me.

 

3. epos — epic

The eldest Indian eposes are found in the Vedic texts which may be reliably dated to at least 1500 BCE, though much within them is almost certainly even much older than that.

 

4. thentofore — [obsolete] until that time; before then

The family had had no settled address thentofore, but were never to move from this new mansion until the tragic events which followed the scandal of the missing pastries over a century later.

 

5. besprent — [archaic] besprinkled

Just as in the poem the nursery floor was besprent with blood, and nowhere could the babe be found.

 

6. nun buoy — [nautical] cone-shaped buoy (in fact, usu. a double cone with only the top cone visible)

We found her green rope sweater atop a nun buoy at the harbor entrance, but that was the only sign we had of Heather for the next three years.

 

7. terraqueous — made up of land and water

All ’round the terraqueous globe the very air seemed hushed in anticipation.

 

8. factotum — doer of all sorts of work, general handyman, odd-job worker

Somehow I’d evolved from being just a paying tenant to being her all-around factotum and jack of all trades, starting with ‘just a little’ gardening on the weekends, until now I had hardly any time of my own anymore.

 

9. hirundine — swallow or martin

I sighed in pleasure, listening to the songs of the hirundines as they darted through the trees teasing each other in joyful ecstasy of flight.

 

10. condole — to express sympathy

We cannot help but condole with you during this trying hour of loss, and pray you to remember that we stand ready to provide any assistance we can.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British historical)

potwaller — householder (person entitled to vote in borough elections by virtue of sufficient income to “keep their pot [of water] boiling”)

The fifty-three ‘open boroughs’ of the time may be reasonably divided into those where so-called ‘potwallers‘ had the franchise and the ‘scot-and-lot’ boroughs where the right to vote belonged to all who paid in full the local imposts.