Book List: 900 Books

After finally getting around to giving you the listing for books #701 – #800, I managed to place my brain into a state of suspended animation, going through the motions and going to work, and completely neglecting the fact that I’d also promised to give you the Book List for #801 – #900. So here we are, more than three months after I’d finished reading book #900 (pictured just to the left), and only now am getting around to promulgating the full book list for that last century of reading. In fact, I’ve taken so long that we’re more than halfway through the next 100 books at this point. Ah, life … or whatever it is I’m living while waiting for life to arrive.

I began the last hundred of books with an investigation into the Varieties Of Unbelief by a noted American scholar of Christianity, Martin Marty. Though he makes a few interesting points—especially his comments about medieval accidie—most of what he says of interest is actually something somebody else says; quotations from others express more insight than any Marty shows. Plus, I didn’t like his framing of the whole question (or is it multiple questions?), and the book is more boring than not. But then again, what should I expect, looking to a religious author for judgment of disbelief? (His nomenclature of ‘unbelief’ is only one of the unhelpful quirks he displays in this work.) One might as well look at the works of major atheists for discernment about Christianity.

In this first set of ten (10) books from the past hundred, I read two standout volumes, two of the fantastic Charlie Chan mystery stories by the oddly named Earl Derr Biggers. Both The Chinese Parrot and Behind That Curtain are well worth a read, even nowadays (perhaps especially now) almost a century after they were first published. Besides a view of a Hawaii and a San Francisco that is so lost to time as to be mearly purest fantasy, the characterization of the plump and plodding Chinese detective is almost as distant from the portrayal in the various movies that have made the name of Charlie Chan synonymous with the worst anti-Asian prejudice. Though the actual mysteries may be fairly easy to guess (especially The Chinese Parrot), the lyrical unfolding of these tales of a time when travel to Hawaii meant an ocean voyage will leave you wanting more.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
801 6/11/22 Martin E. Marty Varieties Of Unbelief Philosophy
802 6/13/22 Earl Derr Biggers The Chinese Parrot Mystery
803 6/14/22 Richard S. Prather The Kubla Khan Caper Mystery
804 6/17/22 Jack Vance City of the Chasch SF & Fantasy
805 6/19/22 Earl Derr Biggers Behind That Curtain Mystery
806 6/21/22 Jack Vance Servants of the Wankh SF & Fantasy
807 6/23/22 Jack Vance The Dirdir SF & Fantasy
808 6/24/22 William Watson The Last of the Templars Fiction
809 6/25/22 John R. Pierce An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise Mathematics
810 6/26/22 Kenneth Bulmer / Mack Reynolds The Key To Venudine / Mercenary From Tomorrow [Ace Double H-65] SF & Fantasy

 

To kick off the next ten books, I was lucky enough to enjoy the wonderful Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by the interesting writer Daniel P. Mannix. This wonderful edition from the masters of the outre at RE/Search Publications includes many fascinating photographs (for which I admit a voyeuristic, not to say prurient, fascination) of the aforementioned freaks, many from the author’s personal collection. Mannix writes with humane insight into these outsiders most outside our ‘normal’ society, having spent many obviously happy days with and among them in the various freak shows and carnivals which used to be a staple of the American scene. I knew Mannix from his other, more historical, works upon subjects such as the Hell-Fire Club, gladiators, and (always a favorite) torture. In Freaks, the author is, as ever, an engaging raconteur with a flare for the perfect detail. His intimate knowledge of this now long-gone subculture shines through the book, plus the odd insights into Anton LaVey are an added bonus.

I usually try to stay clear of negative mentions of books read (so we won’t speak of what utter garbage The Soft Edge is), and I already told you to check out the Charlie Chan mysteries, but I also try to highlight the actual books as opposed to the comics (and graphic novels et al. blah blah blah) that I’ve read. But really, there are some graphic works which pack as emotional a punch as any ‘great’ literature. The interconnected and disturbing stories by Marc Hempel in Gregory are some of the sweetest, most brutal gutpunches in the black-and-white world of comic art. These tales center about a very difficult child, the titular character, who can only communicate (if that is what he does) by screaming at the top of his lungs, “I, Gregory!” Which he does. I’d read this when it first came out in the late 80s, and it was even better, more poignant, more heartbreaking than I remembered.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
811 6/29/22 Daniel P. Mannix Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others Sociology
812 7/2/22 Boris Akunin Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog Mystery
813 7/6/22 Jorge Cham & Daniel Whiteson We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe Science
814 7/7/22 Earl Derr Biggers The Black Camel Mystery
815 7/9/22 Earl Derr Biggers Charlie Chan Carries On Mystery
7/12/22 Goscinny & Uderzo Asterix In Corsica Comics
816 7/14/22 Otis Adelbert Kline The Port Of Peril [Ace F-294] SF & Fantasy
7/15/22 Ray Willner & Reed Crandall The Adventures Of Robin Hood Book No. 2 Comics
7/16/22 Luis M. Fernandes Hanuman to the Rescue: Retold from the Krittivasa Ramayana Comics
817 7/17/22 Paul Levinson The Soft Edge: a Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution Computers & Internet
7/19/22 Marc Hempel Gregory Comics
818 7/20/22 Åke Edwardson Death Angels Mystery
7/22/22 Russ Cochran, ed. Tales From The Crypt Presents The Haunt Of Fear No. 5 Comics
7/23/22 David Gerstein, ed. Disney Masters: Donald Duck & Co. (Free Comic Book Day 2022 Special Edition) Comics
7/26/22 Roger Slifer, ed. World’s Finest Comics No. 295 Comics
819 7/29/22 John D. MacDonald The Deep Blue Good-By Mystery
8/2/22 Neil Gaiman; Leslie S. Klinger, ed. The Annotated Sandman Vol. 1 Comics
820 8/7/22 Jonathan Eisen Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries Bad Science

 

Note to self (and everyone else who reads this page (so … Note to self)): The Calculus really is drop-dead easy. And Quick Calculus: A Self-Teaching Guide by Daniel Kleppner & Norman Ramsey is the easiest, best guide for quickly learning the basics of the most powerful mathematical tool invented after Pythagoras and Euclid started messing about with plane figures. Sure this self-guided book is short on theory and proofs, but if you just want to learn to really use your basic derivatives and integrals—or just remind yourself what those words mean—you cannot find a better, nor quicker, course anywhere. This is the book I learned calculus from my first time around, later supplementing with the also excellent Schaum’s Outline. Of course, you can go on from here to almost infinite levels of complexity, but the mere fact that this subject can be so simply codified shows its potency in a very persuasive way … as opposed to, say, *shudder* Set Theory.

Among the many excellent books in this third decade of the last hundred (Who knew that L. Frank Baum made gender bending central to an Oz book written in 1904? But there you are.), I feel I really have to give a shout-out to Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, a half dozen mystery vignettes from the pseudonymous H. Bustos Domecq—a fig leaf author behind which are hiding Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares. The conceit is a fascinating one, an idea I’m surprised has not been copied extensively: the detective Don Isidro Parodi is an inmate imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, who solves mysteries while incarcerated, merely from information given him by visitors to his cell. In fact, Parodi sees beyond the specious ‘facts’ given him by his various interlocutors to easily uncover the ‘real’ tales which usually are unrolling before the very eyes of his visitors, though they often are quite clueless as to the actual happenings until and unless Don Parodi deigns to reveal the truth. The language is difficult, though the translation by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni was excellent (to my untutored and un-Spanish-speaking eyes). I came to these tales after reading an essay by Eco praising them, and am very grateful to the Italian academic for his recommendation.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
821 8/8/22 Michael Innes Death at the President’s Lodging Mystery
8/8/22 Cary Bates DC Comics Presents No. 11 Comics
822 8/14/22 Daniel Kleppner & Norman Ramsey Quick Calculus: A Self-Teaching Guide (2nd Edition) Mathematics
823 8/14/22 Earl Derr Biggers Keeper Of The Keys Mystery
824 8/22/22 Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy-Casares [as H. Bustos Domecq] Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi Fiction
825 8/22/22 Louis Relin A Doctor Discusses Narcotics and Drug Addiction Drugs
826 8/25/22 Åke Edwardson The Shadow Woman Mystery
827 8/27/22 Umberto Eco The Limits of Interpretation Linguistics
828 9/1/22 Boris Akunin Murder on the Leviathan Mystery
829 9/1/22 L. Frank Baum The Land Of Oz Children’s
830 9/9/22 E. Kamke Theory of Sets Mathematics

 

Too often, it seems, one finally gets around to reading a series that rabid fans have been promoting ad nauseum to such an extent that perhaps one is bound to be disappointed, for nothing could possibly live up to the hype of an army of hype-men and -women. I often disdain almost all book recommendations, in fact, because I have odd tastes (if taste it can be called) and also because I just never know …. How happy I was, then, to discover the ribald wonder of George MacDonald’s Flashman, the first volume of the putative “Flashman Papers”. Somehow this historical fiction of an unrepentant coward and rapist manages to be quite engaging and entirely believable. (Which is perhaps merely an anachronistic view of our more ‘modern’ age gazing at the British disaster that was the retreat from Kabul.) My view of military biography and history will never be the same.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing I mean in the last paragraph. I know that many many people love Inspector Morse, both on the telly and in his original incarnation in the Colin Dexter novels. But … well, he’s always left me a bit cold. I get it that he’s ridiculously smart, that he has had abysmal luck in his love affairs, that he desperately wants to not be non-U and all that, but …. I mean, after all, you don’t actually have to have a reason to be a harsh-talking heavy drinker, so I suppose that’ll do as well as any other. But I persevere, especially if I’ve already stocked up on the books, and so I was happy to find that with The Wench Is Dead I finally found a Morse mystery that I enjoyed thoroughly from start to finish. This is the eight in the series. Caveat lector.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
831 9/10/22 George MacDonald Flashman Fiction
832 9/13/22 Isaac Asimov Tales Of The Black Widowers Mystery
833 9/21/22 Chris Abani The Secret History Of Las Vegas Mystery
834 9/22/22 Willard Van Orman Quine Elementary Logic Philosophy
835 9/24/22 Colin Dexter The Wench Is Dead Mystery
94* 9/28/22 Tony Hillerman Listening Woman Mystery
836 10/2/22 David Dodd, annotator The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics Music
837 10/3/22 Will Cuppy How to Be a Hermit, or a Bachelor Keeps House Humor
838 10/8/22 Manning Coles Drink To Yesterday Mystery
839 10/12/22 Philip Kerr Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem Mystery
840 10/13/22 Georg Cantor Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers Mathematics

* I re-read this book to refresh my memory and persuade myself that the novel was unencumbered by the many problems which plague the AMC miniseries based upon it, Dark Winds.

 

For some time now I’ve been telling you how incredibly good Gavin Black (pseudonym for Oswald Wynd) is. I’m not going to stop now. In The Eyes Around Me, his fourth thriller featuring Paul Harris, the anti-communist businessman who seems to attract trouble just as his boat engines attract customers and competition, Black evokes a long-gone Southeast Asia where mysterious motives hide behind every glance and no one is quite what they seem to be. Once again Mr. Harris finds himself accused of a crime he didn’t commit (I’m beginning to sense a theme here), and has to find the actual killer while avoiding the legal consequences of that other evildoer’s actions. It’s a fun, quick read, and proves once again Joan Kahn’s ability to pick great writers and nurture them. Top marks.

Like me, you probably know Ron Goulart most for his science fiction stories, especially those great (if overly pun-filled) tales in the DAW paperback series. Heck, I think After Things Fell Apart is definitely among the top 10—maybe Top 5—post-apocalyptic California SciFi novels. (Do not confuse with Achebe’s book of almost the same name.) But Goulart also writes mysteries (seems to be what he mostly writes nowadays, when he’s not ghosting for Shatner et al.), and wrote them even back in the wild crazy days of the ’70s. In the case of If Dying Was All, the cover does really tell you most of what you need to know (at least the cover of my version; it’s not all that often that you see a man and a woman modeling the same pants). It’s a perfect little quick read with almost no pretensions save the strange mise en scène of 1972 Los Angeles. Oh, yes, and those puns. Goulart just can’t help himself, I suppose.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
841 10/14/22 Gavin Black The Eyes Around Me Mystery
842 10/15/22 Ron Goulart If Dying Was All Mystery
843 10/17/22 August Derleth The Return Of Solar Pons Mystery
844 10/19/22 R. T. Campbell [Ruthven Todd] Unholy Dying Mystery
845 10/23/22 Robert Barnard A Little Local Murder Mystery
846 10/23/22 Leslie Charteris Enter The Saint Mystery
847 10/24/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Sulky Girl Mystery
848 10/27/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Stuttering Bishop Mystery
849 10/29/22 Josephine Tey The Man In The Queue Mystery
850 10/30/22 Jack Vance Son Of The Tree / The Houses Of Iszm [Ace Double 77525] SF & Fantasy

 

You probably noticed in that last set of ten books that I’ve been heavily reading mysteries (9 out of the last ten), and I didn’t stop in this second half of the hundred books. But one of these still sticks and sticks in my mind, and perhaps the mystery is whether it’s a mystery at all. I’m speaking, of course, of Gertrude Stein’s posthumously published Blood On The Dining Room Floor, which is … something. I originally bought it because I was filling out some of the Black Lizard titles I was missing, and I read it because it claimed to be a mystery, and was short, and …. Do I like Gertrude Stein now? Not exactly. But this little set of words is one of the most intriguing befuddling and deep artifacts I’ve immersed myself in in quite some time. She really is a genius, and like many geniuses, I have a hard time understanding her without a guide to dumb it down for my plebian brain and taste. (The afterword by John Herbert Gill is a big help.) I know that I must read this one again, preferably aloud this next time. And so I invite all y’all (ha!) to read this as well, so that you can join me in rereading it some time in the future.

Possibly one of the most fascinating books in the entire last hundred is Confessions Of A Trivialist, by Samuel Rosenberg. Originally published as The Come As You Are Masquerade Party, which terrible name is explained but not expiated in the book itself, this volume is a beguiling and original set of essays by a strange polymath who takes a subject and runs with it to all sorts of interesting places, just as Greil Marcus took punk and delved deep into Dada in his Lipstick Traces. I can do little better to describe the scope of this book than to quote the blurb on the cover, that it consists of “Investigations of Santa Claus, Frankenstein’s monster, Herman Melville, Lot’s wife, Albert Schweitzer, and the world’s greatest peridromphile”. Rosenberg’s ‘investigation’ of Frankenstein is one of the most original pieces I’ve read on Mary Shelley’s creation, save the original itself. And the “peridromophile” essay is one of the most heartbreaking insights into the world of true genius that I’ve ever stumbled upon. Even the weakest essay, that on Schweitzer, manages to bring a fresh perspective to what was once an overdone subject, and all of the other essays are excellent excellent excellent.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
10/30/22 Bob Haney Worlds Finest Comics No. 241 Comics
11/3/22 Edmund Hamilton, Bill Finger, & Dave Wood World’s Finest Comics: Archives Vol. 2 (DC Archives Edition) Comics
851 11/4/22 C. R. Wylie, Jr. 101 Puzzles in Thought and Logic Mathematics
852 11/7/22 Freeman Wills Crofts The Pit-Prop Syndicate Mystery
853 11/9/22 Robert Baden-Powell Rovering To Success Nature
854 11/13/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Roving Bones Mystery
855 11/17/22 Gertrude Stein Blood On The Dining Room Floor Mystery
856 11/18/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Dangerous Dowager Mystery
857 11/20/22 Paul Anthony Jones The Accidental Dictionary: The Remarkable Twists and Turns of English Words Language
858 11/25/22 Stephen King [as Richard Bachman] The Running Man SF & Fantasy
859 11/26/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Lame Canary Mystery
860 12/3/22 Samuel Rosenberg The Confessions Of A Trivialist Essays

 

Though I often say (seriously; it’s exactly the sort of thing that I often say) that I re-read the Alice books every hundred books or so, I recently did the math and realized that in fact I’ve been returning to those most delightful pastoral dreams of youth only every 200 books or thereabouts. All the same, I once again found much joy returning to Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. I suppose if you don’t ‘get’ these books … well, nothing I can say can ever change that. But for those of us who love this best creation of the sorta weird math professor at Oxford, I can only say that I’m already looking forward to reading these books again!

Moving from the sublime to the not quite ridiculous, Doctor No is almost the perfect James Bond book, or as perfect as Fleming’s strange hero is ever likely to be. Although the classic first film in the eternal string of movies replicates much if not quite almost all of the book’s plot and action, I found myself wishing that we had a film of just this version, straight from these pages. The strangely tender chauvinism, the sado-masochist bent, the casual racism (“Chigroes” for Chinese negroes? Seriously?), it’s all here, along with a story devoid of explosions, a pacing that includes two lengthy ocean journeys in a canoe—though one only happens in [spoilers] flashback. Both thumbs up.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
861 12/6/22 Chu Hsi Learning To Be A Sage Philosophy
862 12/8/22 James McNeill Whistler The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies Essays
863 12/11/22 Lawrence Block The Girl With The Long Green Heart Mystery
12/11/22 Bob Kahn, ed. Silver Age Classics Detective Comics 225 Comics
864 12/14/22 Brad Warner Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma Religion & Spirituality
865 12/14/22 Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Fiction
866 12/17/22 Lewis Carroll Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There Fiction
867 12/18/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Substitute Face Mystery
868 12/27/22 Ian Fleming From Russia With Love Mystery
869 12/31/22 Ian Fleming Doctor No Mystery
870 12/31/22 Karen McCosker & Nicholas Albery, eds. A Poem A Day Poetry

 

After the sublimity (if that’s what it has) of Doctor No, a book like Goldfinger makes us realize that Ian Fleming had very little idea of what an actual secret agent actually does. The whole plot bounces from happenstance to coincidence and so on to improbable blind luck. Does the trope of having the villain explain the otherwise inexplicable machinations to our hero originate here? (Dr. No does detail his nefarious scheme, but reluctantly and much more plausibly.) In this story, Bond survives merely because Goldfinger has no trustworthy henchmen with rudimentary secretarial skills. And of course the evil plot is ludicrous, as Sean Connery points out in the movie. (Not to mention that the counterplot, involving wholesale acting by a cast of thousands with even the slightest mistake revealing all to our criminals, is even more implausible, if such a thing can be imagined.) However, Bond is Bond, and the moments of conceited foodie snobbery, or nostalgically quaint sexual fantasizing, or his ‘insights’ into the issue of gays and lesbians, not to mention the mostly interesting golf and card games, make it still worth reading, get it over the middle-of-the-road hump to just barely achieve (for this reader) real likability.

Also during this stretch of reading I finally finished Robert Aitken’s wonderful Taking The Path Of Zen, which to my mind (assuming I have one) is one of the best introductory books on the nuts and bolts of Zen practice, which is to say stupid sitting. I had read the first few chapters many many years ago, when first I attempted to sit stupid for a few minutes each day, only to stop cold once I hit the chapter on sangha. (My current sangha consists of one guy I’ve seen twice, plus the two people on the video call introduction to … ah, sorry to digress.) Aitken’s real mastery is to make simple what is at its core very simple indeed, which sounds so simple as to be tautological, but …. Well, I’ve read quite a few books on Zen, and Buddhism, and some other stuff, and I can say that the lucidity Mr. Aitken brings to the printed page is a very rare commodity indeed.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
871 1/8/23 Ian Fleming Goldfinger Mystery
872 1/12/23 Robert Aitken Taking The Path Of Zen Religion & Spirituality
144* 1/13/23 Camden Benares Zen Without Zen Masters Religion & Spirituality
873 1/13/23 Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club Fiction
874 1/15/23 Chuck Palahniuk Invisible Monsters Fiction
875 1/15/23 Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones Fiction
1/15/23 Mike Baron & Steve Rude Nexus: Two Comics
1/16/23 Mike Baron Badger #5 [First] Comics
1/17/23 Hergé The Shooting Star Comics
876 1/17/23 Chuck Palahniuk Diary Fiction
1/18/23 Hergé The Secret Of The Unicorn Comics
877 1/19/23 Chuck Palahniuk Choke Fiction
878 1/20/23 Sharon Wegscheider Another Chance: Hope & Health for the Alcoholic Family Alcoholism
879 1/21/23 R. T. Campbell [Ruthven Todd] Death For Madame Mystery
880 1/22/23 The Research Department of the White Power Movement China, The Jews, and WWIII Wacko

* I re-read this book not realizing I’d already read it as part of my stupid book-tracking project, and am glad I did, because re-reading it allowed me to part with it forevermore.

 

One of my last year’s projects was to read the Holy Bible from start to finish, mostly so I could say I had done it, but also because the King James Version is not only one of the fundamental sources of our shared literary heritage in English, but also because so much of it is breathtakingly beautiful in its own right. I highly recommend the project for anyone who has even the slightest inclination, though I have to confess that it took me more than a year, reading a few pages each day and then some. As well, I’ll admit that there are long stretches where beauty is in short supply, but I do have a full notebook now of quotes I grabbed along the way. (My favorite Bible quote remains, however, Job 6:6, to wit, “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” Truly a question for the ages.) What strikes me most about the King James Bible, though, is that it must be the most beautiful work in any language which is the product of a large committee. Something must have been magic in the air of early 17th Century England to permit such wonderful language to flow so easily from the pens of earnest academics.

Why is it that sociologists (with some rare exceptions who go on to become giants (viz. Durkheim, Mauss, etc.)) as a group are some of the worst writers ever? Why is there no sociological study of this? Alas, this sociological study of drunk driving sucks in many of the usual ways, though also in some ways of its own. Take, for example, the neologism Joseph R. Gusfield coins to cover the act his book is about with a veneer of objectivity, seen in the title (or is it the subtitle?), Drinking-Driving And The Symbolic Order. Gusfield then spends hours of our time telling us about the ‘themes’ of the work, and also has pretensions to being ‘literary’. The entire last section claims to be homage to Kenneth Burke (may his name be ever blessed), but instead is a very defensive attempt to define ‘irony’. Oh, the irony. Certainly the idea of … well, whatever is meant by ‘drinking-driving’ … has changed since this book was released in 1984, and a study could certainly be made of how we as a society have made the idea of driving even after just ‘one for the road’ strictly taboo. That study, however, is not this book.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
881 1/22/23 Joseph R. Gusfield The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order Sociology
882 1/25/23 Åke Edwardson Sun And Shadow Mystery
883 1/26/23 August Derleth The Reminiscenses of Solar Pons Mystery
884 1/26/23 The Holy Bible in Giant Print – King James Version, Red Letter Edition Bibles
885 1/27/23 Chuck Palahniuk Lullaby Fiction
886 1/29/23 Chuck Palahniuk Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread Fiction
887 1/30/23 Hodding Carter Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor Children’s
888 1/31/23 Raymond Chandler Marlowe [The Little Sister] Mystery
2/1/23 Andrew Galitzer Torah Comics: Comic Strips Summariaing the Weekly Parsha Comics
889 2/2/23 Åke Edwardson Never End Mystery
890 2/3/23 Elizabeth Linington Greenmask! Mystery

 

Well, I’ve already recommended a James Bond book in this listing, though For Your Eyes Only, one of Ian Fleming’s collections of short stories, was more literate and literary than most other Bond tales. And I’ve also mentioned the Gavin Black thrillers about Paul Harris, the businessman in southeast Asia who keeps getting into trouble. So I won’t go on about the 898th book in this list, A Wind Of Death, which sees my favorite anti-communist in another excellent adventure. So once again I find myself breaking my rule of calling out only the ‘good’ books I’ve read, and will instead implore you not to read Starship Orpheus #1: Return from the Dead, by the pseudonymous Symon Jade [Michael Eckstrom]. I would love to give you some delicious cutting remarks about its many (I’m sure) failings, but all I find in my notes is the following comment: “Just not very good.”

Terrible in quite a different way is Changed, a self-published (and distributed) tract about how one Jewish man found escape from degradation through his encounter with a good Christian woman. To call it a Christian tract may be bending the language a bit far, because I’m not so sure how doctrinally sound some of his musings are. But then again, the great tragedy in his life is that his wife-to-be was assaulted before they met. The book was mailed anonymously to me, and … well, I can’t pass up reading something like this, and … it exceeded my (extremely low) expectations immeasurably. If you get a copy (you can actually read the whole thing online, though it seems as if somebody with some skills in using English as an actual language has cleaned up and edited some of the most egregious errors in syntax et cetera), you might want to read it alone, else you’ll find yourself importuning your friends with this or that terrible extract, and likely end up just reading almost the whole thing out loud. It belongs in that “So Bad It Almosts Becomes Good” category. I laughed very hard and very often, especially at the end—though likely that’s just me—which end I totally did not see coming.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
891 2/3/23 Symon Jade Starship Orpheus #1: Return from the Dead SF & Fantasy
892 2/5/23 Dick Francis Smokescreen Mystery
893 2/8/23 Dick Francis Knockdown Mystery
894 2/8/23 Ian Fleming For Your Eyes Only Mystery
895 2/10/23 Chaung Tzu; Burton Watson, trans. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings Religion & Spirituality
896 2/12/23 Tom Cantor Changed Christian
897 2/15/23 Michael Crichton The Venom Business Mystery
898 2/17/23 Gavin Black A Wind Of Death Mystery
899 2/18/23 Robin Williams The PC Is Not A Typewriter Computers
2/18/23 Sergio Cariello, illus. The Action Bible: God’s Redemptive Story Christian
900 2/24/23 A. E. Stallings Hapax: Poems Poetry

 


One last book before I go, a favorite, A Doctor Discusses Narcotics And Drug Addiction, a work I’ve carried with me close to my heart since I was first given it by my father in the early ’70s. Reading this over-the-top work as a pre-teen sparked a lifelong interest in the world of dangerous drugs. So to speak. My favorite part of the book is the Glossary at the back of common drug slang. Keep an eye out for the B-dacs until my next listing when I finally finish my next hundred books—which won’t be that long now, as I only have sixteen books left to go!

 

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

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