As I’m trying not to procrastinate quite as much as I did last time I finished a tranche of one hundred books, let’s get right down to the listing of all those last books read, from #901 through my thousandth (!) book read since beginning this silly little book tracking project back in the two-thousand-teens. Whereas last time I only completed the listing of books #801 – #900 well after I’d already read another two-thirds of the next century, this time I hope to give you the full listing of the last hundred read before I get out of the low teens in the next hundred. (I just finished #1009 yesterday, so we’ll see where I’m at when I finish writing this out.) I hope to get around to fleshing out this barebones listing with some data—after all, one thousand books seems like there ought to be some ‘statistically significant’ stuff to blather on about—but … well, first things first.
I began the final hundred books of my first thousand with another of the delightful crazy kids’ books by Daniel Pinkwater. Ned Feldman, Space Pirate is another one of Pinkwater’s paeans to creativity, accompanied by his usual barely sketched-out drawings, which is part of his charm. The drawings inspire the reader to think “I could do that!”, which (I think) is exactly what the mischievous author wants us to think, wants us to do. I read a fair number of Pinkwater books in the last 100, such as the fantastic I Was A Second Grade Werewolf, also in this first ten books of the last century—one of the reasons my average page count dropped by about forty pages per book.
One thing to note about this last century of books is that I resolved after reaching Book Read #900 to lay off the mysteries for a while, specifically deciding to forego books in that genre (including so-called ‘thrillers’) for the next hundred books. They had made up almost half of all books read in both of the preceding sets of a hundred, so … well, we can always use a break, see what happens when we mix things up. And what happened was that I read more science fiction and fantasy books, beginning with the truly exceptional fantasy anthology Flashing Swords #5: Demons and Daggers, edited by Lin Carter. Now my taste may not be your taste (like as not you are nowhere near so pitifully bourgeois and arrière-garde as I), but I found these stories simply marvellous, with the possible exception of Tanith Lee’s contribution. But then, I have had my troubles with Lee in the past. But the stories by Zelazny, Cherryh, Craig Shaw Gardner were all excellent, and I found myself weeping at the close of Diane Duane’s contribution, “Parting Gifts”, which was a fantastical vision of old age, a better shorter version of what No Country For Old Men had hoped to be.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 901 | 2/26/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Ned Feldman, Space Pirate | Children’s |
| 902 | 2/28/23 | A. W. Moore | The Infinite | Philosophy |
| 903 | 3/1/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | The Werewolf Club #2: The Lunchroom of Doom | Children’s |
| 904 | 3/3/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | The Werewolf Club #3: The Werewolf Club Meets Dorkula | Children’s |
| 905 | 3/5/23 | Kurt Vonnegut | Jailbird | Fiction |
| 906 | 3/6/23 | Brad Warner | Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master | Spirituality |
| 907 | 3/6/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | I Was a Second Grade Werewolf | Children’s |
| 908 | 3/8/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Fat Men From Space | Children’s |
| 909 | 3/12/23 | Lin Carter, ed. | Flashing Swords #5: Demons and Daggers | SF & Fantasy |
| 910 | 3/17/23 | Barbara Ras | One Hidden Stuff | Poetry |
I see that in my haste to get right into the actual book listing, I’ve forgotten to give you my usual caveats and explanations about books read and numbers and all that, so I’ll just get rid of that here. First off, when I say I’ve read a thousand books, I mean since beginning to track my actual books completely finished, which I started doing away back in June of 2015. I’d been gifted book tracking software by my wife for my birthday two years prior, so that now I’ve had a database of all of my many (many) volumes for nigh on a full decade now. Also, back in 2015, I decided not to count comic books and graphic novels against my total number of books read, so they are exempted from the ‘thousand’ books I’ve completed. (If we add them in, The Lord Of The Rings was Book Read* #1131 … with the asterisk.) Okay, with that business taken care of, back to the book listing.
The first book read of the next ten books was a return to the delights of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the reading of which inspired me to finally finish The Silmarillion and to dive once more into the wonderful Lord Of The Rings. Some books of youth you turn back to with a hint of trepidation, lest your memory play you false and you realize just how juvenile your taste and how misremembered the actual text and how apparent the failings of the work are now to your more mature, wiser eye. The Hobbit is not one of those books. Those who loved it in youth will I daresay always love it, and those who do not love it ever are entitled to their entirely wrong-headed opinion. Re-reading this lyrical work of pastoral fantasy brings home just how far from the tree the apple of Peter Jackson’s film fell. This is a truly wonderful book. The movie makes no sense to me at all.
The first work of the comic arts that I read in that last hundred books was another delightful adventure of that ace boy reporter Tintin, Red Rackham’s Treasure. The story itself is a fairly thin tale, true … and little is made of the escape of the arch-criminal from the prequel. But the lush drawings of underwater exploration more than make up for the bare bones of the plot, and that skeleton is hung with all the ebullience and incident we love from the books of Hergé.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 911 | 3/18/23 | J. R. R. Tolkien | The Hobbit | SF & Fantasy |
| 912 | 3/18/23 | John Daishin Buksbazen | Zen Meditation In Plain English | Spirituality |
| 913 | 3/21/23 | Florence King | With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look At Misanthropy | Essays |
| 914 | 3/24/23 | Sergei Lukyanenko | Night Watch | SF & Fantasy |
| 915 | 3/25/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Spaceburger: A Kevin Spoon and Mason Mintz Story | Children’s |
| 3/26/23 | Hergé | Red Rackham’s Treasure | Comics | |
| 916 | 3/27/23 | Neil Patrick Harris | Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography | Biography |
| 917 | 3/27/23 | Joey Green, Tony Dierckins, & Tim Nyberg | The Warning Label Book: Warning: Reading This Book May Cause Spontaneous, Uncontrollable Laughter | Humor |
| 918 | 3/28/23 | André Maurois | Disraeli | Biography |
| 919 | 3/29/23 | Barbara Ras | Bite Every Sorrow | Poetry |
| 920 | 3/30/23 | Richard Armour | The Medical Muse, or What to Do … Until the Patient Comes | Humor |
Okay, you know how I said I wasn’t reading any mysteries in this set of a hundred books? Well, I made an exception for this, The Big Book of the Continental Op, because I was in the midst of reading it when I hit Book Read #900. This volume, edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett, brings together all of the stories of the corporate private eye working for the nationwide Continental Detective Agency, just as they were published originally in Black Mask (and a few other locales). And how do these stories hold up, after nearly a hundred years? They are amazing, fantastic, and all those other superlatives. Sure, not every story is a smash hit winner—The Dain Curse isn’t all that, though it has a great tête-à-tête between the Op and the dame—but for sheer brilliance over the long haul you won’t find many competitors to the Op stories. The charm of ‘20s San Francisco is nothing to sneeze at either, as the current ‘20s seem like to put paid to that old City by the Bay. The footnotes range from mildly interesting to pointless, but Dashiell Hammett’s taut prose obviates that and other design defects of this collection.
I find myself sneaking up to Robert E. Howard’s best-known fantasy hero, having long ago pledged my allegience to Solomon Kane and puzzling whether any figure could ever oust that strange battling puritan from his position as my favorite. So I have yet to read any of the Conan tales, saving that for a future pleasure or disappointment. But I did condescend to read Bran Mak Morn, this paperback collection of tales about the eponymous last king of the Picts. I use the word ‘about’ in double sense here, as Bran Mak Morn is often only a peripheral figure in these tales, not quite a bit player, but only rarely the primary protagonist. But Howard’s prose is vivid and bracing, though we so very enlightened moderns may find issues with some of the racial material intrinsic to these tales (along with so much fantasy and science fiction of the ’20s and ’30s of the last century). The doom of being the last of a once mighty race among the degraded remnants of humanity, however, conjures up resonances with a much more modern champion—though admittedly aging now—, that of Moorcock’s albino prince Elric of Melniboné.
(Special shoutout to Too Long A Sacrifice by Mildred Downey Broxon, a fairly mediocre tale of Irish fantasy superimposed upon ‘The Troubles’ in that country. But it’s not the story I wish to call to your attention, but the truly awful cover art, at least on this the book club edition. The dust jacket art wraps entirely around the back of the book, and the back is ten times worse than the front, shown here. And that front cover drawing is terrible. Truly terrible.)
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 921 | 3/30/23 | Mildred Downey Broxon | Too Long A Sacrifice | SF & Fantasy |
| 922 | 3/31/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Uncle Melvin | Children’s |
| 923 | 4/2/23 | Dashiell Hammett | The Big Book of the Continental Op | Mystery |
| 924 | 4/6/23 | Tony Hillerman | Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir | Biography |
| 925 | 4/7/23 | Sigmund Freud | Beyond The Pleasure Principle | Psychology |
| 926 | 4/10/23 | Robert E. Howard | Bran Mak Morn | SF & Fantasy |
| 927 | 4/12/23 | Whodini | The Information Inferno | Computers & Internet |
| 928 | 4/12/23 | Neil Postman | Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business | Essays |
| 929 | 4/20/23 | Frank X. Gaspar | A Field Guide to the Heavens | Poetry |
| 4/20/23 | Carl Barks | The Best Of Walt Disney Comics: From the Year 1947 | Comics | |
| 930 | 4/20/23 | Richard W. De Haan | Look Up! Christ Is Coming | Spirituality |
I’m sure other people can tell you better than I about Pogo, Walt Kelly’s masterful possum and his long-running comic strip. Heck, a friend of mine even wrote a whole book on the subject. And I have to confess I didn’t care for the cartoons when I was a kid, looking over my grandfather’s shoulder as he read them avidly. Even now, some of the contemporary allusions would probably need footnotes for me to understand the intricacies of Kelly’s plots and kookiness. But Pogo’s Double Sundae—which republishes two collections of Pogo sunday strips—is a delight, no critical apparatus needed. I’m not entirely enamored of the ‘poetry’, but the comics themselves are very surreal, and very funny.
Speaking of poetry: I’ve been trying to dip my toe into the waters of current poetry, under the gentle guidance of my aunt, who is sort of an expert at this sort of thing, but I have to admit that I’ve yet to find any poetry of the past forty years that moved me as much as these strange little verses from a quasi-anonymous poet of long ago China, Han-shan. The translations by Burton Watson are spare (and I’m guessing fairly literal, given a Watson translation of Chuang Tzu I’ve read), but a poignant aloneness of the aging poet comes through in Cold Mountain, this tiny little collection of some of this perhaps fictional poet’s best work. Any pretence to enlightened wisdom is undercut by the plaintive all-too-human cries in other poems, and it is this very humanity that makes the verse work so well and so hard.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4/20/23 | Walt Kelly | Pogo’s Double Sundae | Comics | |
| 931 | 4/21/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Aunt Lulu | Children’s |
| 932 | 4/21/23 | Richard Moyer, Lucy Daniel, Jay Hackett, H. Prentice Baptiste, Pamela Stryker, & JoAnne Vasquez | McGraw-Hill Science Grade 1 Student Edition | Children’s |
| 933 | 4/22/23 | Omori Sogen | An Introduction to Zen Training: A Translation of Sanzen Nyumon | Spirituality |
| 4/22/23 | Subba Rao | The Pandavas In Hiding: Retold from The Mahabharata | Comics | |
| 934 | 4/22/23 | Bhagat Singh | Krishna | Children’s |
| 935 | 4/23/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | The Hoboken Chicken Emergency | Children’s |
| 936 | 4/23/23 | Edward Gorey | The Utter Zoo | Humor |
| 937 | 5/1/23 | Truman Smith; Robert Hessen, ed. & intro. | Berlin Alert: The Memoirs and Reports of Truman Smith | History |
| 938 | 5/2/23 | Gerald Speedy | The Den Mother’s Den-Book | Outdoors & Nature |
| 939 | 5/4/23 | Han-shan; Burton Watson, trans. | Cold Mountain | Poetry |
| 940 | 5/8/23 | Will Carleton | City Ballads | Poetry |
Reading Thomas Pynchon reminded me why I love this most mysterious of American authors (putting aside for the moment the assertion that B. Traven was born in Chicago): imaginative reworking of immensely broad stretches of history as seen through the kaleidoscope of coexistent countercultures and just hinted at overarching dark forces behind the overt facts printed in the newspapers and textbooks. It also reminded me why Pynchon can be so frustrating. Against The Day has so many many many themes and characters and events and parallel plots and counterplots and fictions and facts that you feel you need to take a hit of meth just to keep pace. (Don’t try it, kids. Speed kills.) But I was hooked by the opening pages as surely as a swordfish on the line of Anthony Quinn. If you don’t get the reference, then you know how it feels to read Pynchon without a guide; sometimes the allusions are almost entirely personal, too idiosyncratic. Reading the various online helps was as frustrating as it was helpful, sort of like the annotations to Grateful Dead lyrics I was reading a while back. And so, just as with Ulysses, the reader begins to wonder if the candle is worth the prize, or something like that. But I read it, and I loved it, and I wished that there’d been some sort of tying up of all the loose ends, or something. But then, what did I expect? Too much, I’m sure.
I really did not like all that very much most of the books I read in this particular set of ten, I must confess. Except for the Fletcher Pratt and this comic from Amar Chitra Katha, Panna and Handi Rani: Two Tales of Self-Sacrifice, in fact, not one other volume got better than three stars on my 5-star scale, and more than half of this set of ten found their way into boxes heading out the door for donation or sale. Otherwise, I might not have called out this work from the best publisher of comic books devoted to Indian subjects, because …. Well, let’s just put it this way: The tales presented here turned out to be two of the most fucked up stories I’ve read outside of the Bible.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 941 | 5/8/23 | Thomas Pynchon | Against The Day | Fiction |
| 942 | 5/10/23 | Marion Nestle | Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism | Politics |
| 943 | 5/12/23 | George Sarton | Galen of Peramon | Medicine |
| 944 | 5/12/23 | Fletcher Pratt | Alien Planet | SF & Fantasy |
| 945 | 5/14/23 | Will Carleton | City Legends | Poetry |
| 946 | 5/14/23 | James William Coleman | The Criminal Elite: Understanding White Collar Crime | True Crime |
| 947 | 5/15/23 | Robert Silverberg / William F. Temple | The Silent Invaders / Battle On Venus [Ace Double F-195] | SF & Fantasy |
| 948 | 5/16/23 | Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi; James Cowan, intro. & versions | Rumi’s Divan of Shems of Tabriz: Selected Odes | Spirituality |
| 5/17/23 | Meera Ugra & Dinanath Dube | Panna and Hadi Rani: Two Tales of Self-Sacrifice | Comics | |
| 949 | 5/22/23 | Richard Dawkins | The God Delusion | Spirituality |
| 950 | 5/23/23 | Robert Saffron | Is The United States Ready for Self-Government | Fiction |
Doubtless you already know the fine work of H. R. Ellis Davidson, and you’ve probably already read Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. But this book, one of the fine Pelican Originals published by Penguin during one of those infrequent attacks that afflict the print industry of the strange idea that the ‘masses’ might be interested in something besides bomb threats and bodice rippers. I am grateful, so very grateful. This very well written book of Norse and adjacent mythologies turned out to live up to its reputation, which is very high. Davidson’s work was excellent, not only for its clear elucidation of what we know (and what we don’t) about the original Scandinavian beliefs, nor just its deep understanding of the whole gamut of German etc. mythology, but also for the fine glossary of names and sources at the rear of the book. Of course, the book is nearly sixty years old now, so caveat lector and all that.
It is always a delight to find the sophomore effort in a series as good as the first, and even moreso when the author is Jack Vance. The second book in his rightly vaunted Demon Princes series, The Killing Machine, lives up to the high expectations created by the excellent series opener, Star King. In this brilliant space opera tale of breath-taking revenge, the excitement builds and the action accelerates as …. Well, I reallly do not want to say anything that might give away the surprises in store for a first time reader of this teriffic tale.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5/24/23 | Russ Cochran, ed. | Weird Fantasy No. 9 | Comics | |
| 951 | 5/27/23 | Eihei Dogen; Kazuaki Tanahashi, ed. | Moon In a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen | Spirituality |
| 952 | 5/27/23 | Niels Mulder | Mysticism in Java: Ideology in Indonesia | Sociology |
| 5/27/23 | Subba Rao | Paurava and Alexander: The Story of the Encounter Between a Great Conqueror from the West and a Brave King from the East | Comics | |
| 953 | 5/28/23 | Knock Knock | In My Humble Opinion | Humor |
| 954 | 5/31/23 | Malcolm Green | Book of Lies | Humor |
| 955 | 6/1/23 | Frank X. Gaspar | Late Rapturous | Poetry |
| 956 | 6/1/23 | M. Vassiliev | Sputnik Into Space | Science |
| 957 | 6/6/23 | R. B. Thieme, Jr. | Demonism | Spirituality |
| 958 | 6/7/23 | H. R. Ellis Davidson | Gods and Myths of Northern Europe | Mythology |
| 959 | 6/9/23 | Jack Vance | The Brave Free Men | SF & Fantasy |
| 960 | 6/12/23 | Jack Vance | The Killing Machine | SF & Fantasy |
Another wonderful set of tales of the best barbarian & thief pair extant, Swords Against Wizardry glues together a couple of longer stories with some newer writing (this was published in 1968) to make a chronological narrative out of what were originally just standalone adventures written by Fritz Leiber for the digests, as is usual in the book editions of these short stories. The two primary tales—“Stardock” and “The Lords Of Quarmall”—show Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in finest form. The first demonstrates the wide scope of fantasy, as it’s basically The Eiger Sanction without the boring bits (apologies to Trevannian; I speak only of the movie), while the Quarmall tale is redolent with the chill musty air of ancient stone inhabited by dark sorceries and the memories of the eldest, evil gods.
Perhaps my favorite Daniel Pinkwater story of all—and that’s really saying something, when you think of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency or Lizard Music—is this slim volume that I used to read over and over to my own daughter, The Big Orange Splot. Though the story is quickly told of a happenstance (the titular Splot) which becomes the impetus for real creativity and self-expression, any words I might offer cannot compare with the words and (especially) the crude drawings of Mr. Pinkwater, whose childish pictures are the perfect way to tell this tale. Any person who has been subject to an HOA will truly appreciate this little fable.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6/12/23 | Amamt Pai, ed. | Paramahansa Yogananda: A Saint for East and West | Comics | |
| 961 | 6/14/23 | Theodore Sturgeon | The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon | SF & Fantasy |
| 962 | 6/15/23 | Emmet Fox | The Sermon on the Mount: The Key to Success in Life & The Lord’s Prayer: An Interpretation | Christian |
| 963 | 6/15/23 | R. B. Thieme, Jr. | Satanic Plot | Christian |
| 964 | 6/17/23 | Pamela Paul | Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families | Pornography |
| 6/17/23 | Mike Baron | Badger [First] #6 | Comics | |
| 965 | 6/18/23 | Randy Petersen | Beliefs to Beware Of: Straight Answers about Cults | Christian |
| 966 | 6/20/23 | J. R. R. Tolkien | The Silmarillion | SF & Fantasy |
| 967 | 6/22/23 | Frank L. Britton | Behind Communism | Wacko |
| 968 | 6/22/23 | Ed Strosser & Michael Prince | Stupid Wars: A Citizen’s Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions | Militaria |
| 969 | 6/25/23 | Fritz Leiber | Swrods Against Wizardry | SF & Fantasy |
| 6/26/23 | Russ Cochran, ed. | Weird Fantasy No. 4 | Comics | |
| 970 | 6/26/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | The Big Orange Splot | Children’s |
I think Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is my favorite Philip K. Dick novel, though it is not perfect: he never wrote perfect. (Did the snitch leave Kathy’s lair on p. 27 or not? I guess not, but it sure seems like he did.) But for a few hours, I’m transported to a place where thoughts and words have power both beyond and of everyday life, with internal monologues and dialogues that are both impossibly unlike actual human thinking and speaking and also exactly like that. Dick’s neuroses and failings are right there on the page, and there’s a reason for Jason Taverner’s ultimate fate, but perhaps psychological failings are a small price to pay for even a small grasp upon reality and identity. You can make a case for other novels; heck, I may plump for Confessions or Scanner or even the High Castle when next I read them. But in Flow My Tears PKD does what he does best: take a staggeringly simple and yet potent conceit—What if one of the elites had to live like the rest of us schlubs for just one day?—and turns it into a deceptively simple rumination on the flaws of society and psychology, a catalog of moral failings where transcendence is only another way to get over it and back to work.
To be fair, I didn’t have high hopes for The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, edited by Lawrence Rainey. I mostly wanted to reacquaint myself with T. S. Eliot’s deathless poem, which I’d not really immersed myself in since long ago days in college. I am certainly no critic, no person capable of scintillating insights into literature; no, I’m a rather pedestrian example of the worst sort of bourgeoisie poser, garnering all his comments on prose or poetry from others. So I’d hoped at best to get some bon mots from the material surrounding Eliot’s groundbreaking poem. But, in this case, the literary apparatus drags down the poem, rather than raising it in our consciousness. Oh, it’s good enough, and helpful at many points. And the literary articles Eliot penned at this time show off his erudite, snobbish, insightful intellect. But Rainey doesn’t add all that much to the main feature, which is as always “The Waste Land”, which is still great, but a bit bogged down among all this churned up detritus.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 971 | 6/27/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Roger’s Umbrella | Children’s |
| 972 | 6/28/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Blue Moose | Children’s |
| 973 | 7/1/23 | Fritjof Capra | The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism | Bad Science |
| 974 | 7/3/23 | Philip K. Dick | Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said | SF & Fantasy |
| 975 | 7/3/23 | Richard Brautigan | The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster | Poetry |
| 976 | 7/4/23 | Louise V. Gore & Marcy Heathman | Meet the Pug: For Years of Happiness | Outdoors & Nature |
| 977 | 7/5/23 | Kurt Vonnegut | Timequake | Fiction |
| 978 | 7/6/23 | T. S. Eliot; Lawrence Rainey, ed. | The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose | Poetry |
| 7/6/23 | Russ Cochran, ed. | Weird Fantasy No. 1 | Comics | |
| 979 | 7/7/23 | Kenneth Bulmer / Poul Anderson | The Wizard Of Starship Poseidon / Let The Spacemen Beware! [Ace Double F-209] | SF & Fantasy |
| 980 | 7/8/23 | Daniel Pinkwater | Guys From Space | Children’s |
My first time reading B. Traven ensures that it won’t be my last. What a voice! Though I told myself during the middle section of The Cotton Pickers that the book was beginning to drag, I should have known, even at that time, after that simply perfect first opening section, that my mysterious author was simply setting things up for the simply perfect ending. Wow. For all the hype about who and whether B. Traven really was, it all boils down to the writing, which is inimitable. (Though perhaps I should be careful saying that: I would have though Jack Black’s You Just Can’t Win was inimitable, too, and we all know how that turned out.) Besides the engaging reality of Traven’s story, there is a singular lack of bitterness to the bitter taste left in the narrator’s mouth, and that last page perhaps sums up how the author himself felt about all the tales that others wanted to tell about him. On the other hand, this is his first book, so I may be full of it.
Roger Zelazny uses the tried and true hook of the amnesiac protagonist to build slowly to the final confrontation in Nine Princes In Amber, only to fake us out as the story keeps unspinning after the putative hero lies blinded and hopeless in a forgotten dungeon. But of course the tale’s not over, not even at the end of this, the first in the pentalogy. I was pleased by Zelazny’s ability to keep me on tenterhooks until the very end, after that grabber of an opening. Now I’ve read these books before, some of Zelazny’s best work (well, we all have a soft spot for Jack Of Shadows, don’t we?), but am agreeably unsurprised to find this premier novel in the series as good as I remember.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 981 | 7/11/23 | B. Traven | The Cotton Pickers | Fiction |
| 982 | 7/11/23 | E.C. Tubb / Alex Dain | Kalin / The Bane Of Kanthos | SF & Fantasy |
| 983 | 7/15/23 | Immanuel Velikovsky | Worlds In Collision | Bad Science |
| 984 | 7/17/23 | Jordan Spencer | Small Town You/SA | Other |
| 7/17/23 | Russ Cochran, ed. | Tales From The Crypt Presents The Vault Of Horror No. 4 | Comics | |
| 985 | 7/17/23 | Martin Olson | The Adventure Time Encyclopædia: Inhabitants, Lore, Spells, and Ancient Crypt Warnings of the Land of Ooo Circa 19.56 B.G.E. – 501 A.G.E. | Humor |
| 986 | 7/18/23 | Lewis F. Presnall | Search For Serenity | Spirituality |
| 987 | 7/19/23 | Roger Zelazny | Nine Princes In Amber | SF & Fantasy |
| 7/24/23 | Harvey Kurtzman | The Nostalgic Mad #3 | Comics | |
| 988 | 7/25/23 | David Edmonds & John Eidinow | Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers | Philosophy |
| 989 | 7/28/23 | Constance Cumbey | The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism | Wacko |
| 990 | 7/29/23 | Billy Collins | Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems | Poetry |
After reading the sparse straight translation of Nagarjuna’s classic Buddhist treatise, The Fundamental Wisdom Of The Middle Way, I feared that the expanded notated and commented treatment of that text that followed was going to suffer from a pedantic know-it-all-ness of the admittedly Western philosophically focused translator. I was wrong to worry. Though the notes of Jay L. Garfield are certainly very academic at times, and may put off readers not used to that formal style of writing, he is an honest academic, being sure to bring out contrary interpretations even as he makes his strongest case for his own interpretation. His particular focus upon the four-fold logic of Nagarjuna (‘not this, nor not-this, neither both, nor neither neither’) hammers home the skillful means with which the powerful teaching of this sage from the 2nd Century of the Common Era eludicates the inner teachings of Buddhism. And Garfield’s background in regular old Western philosophy enables him to bring up the important parallels and contrasts in that canon, from Kant to Wittgenstein. Definitely worth deep study.
Since we’re already had a shoutout to Lord of the Rings, let me take a moment to speak of the incomparable French prose of Jules Michelet. I’m not sure where I picked up this slim volume of extracts from the historian’s works, Pages Choisies II, and I have to confess that I mainly wanted to test whether I remembered even a smidgen of my French language skills, but I was staggered to read the words of this author, one of the most powerful voices in French historical writing. Certainly his vignettes from the French Revolution truly bring those days to life, and of course when he was writing he could still speak to eyewitnesses to some of those earth-shaking events. But even his other work, his odd asides about the Renaissance, for example, have verve and power—even if perhaps some of his conclusions are a bit, let’s just say, wrong. But Michelet sees always the poetry in history and personages, and much more besides. The pieces pulled from his natural history of the sea, or his bizarre but affecting anthropomorphising of moutains and weather, these words show an author who is able to do that most impossible thing: make us see the world in a wholly new light.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 991 | 7/29/23 | John Scalzi | The Android’s Dream | SF & Fantasy |
| 992 | 7/30/23 | Nagarjuna; Jay L. Garfield, trans. & commentary | The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā | Spirituality |
| 993 | 8/4/23 | Bob Shaccochis | The Immaculate Invasion | Militaria |
| 994 | 8/8/23 | Sergei Lukyanenko | Day Watch | SF & Fantasy |
| 995 | 8/8/23 | Mike Capozzola | Self Defense For Time Travelers | Humor |
| 996 | 8/9/23 | Martin Amis | Time’s Arrow | Fiction |
| 997 | 8/10/23 | Jules Michelet | Pages Choisies II | Foreign Language |
| 998 | 8/11/23 | A. Merritt | Seven Footprints To Satan | SF & Fantasy |
| 999 | 8/12/23 | Karen Wynn Fonstad | The Atlas of Middle-Earth | SF & Fantasy |
| 1000 | 8/12/23 | J. R. R. Tolkien | The Lord Of The Rings | SF & Fantasy |
One last apologia here at the end. I’ve told you that I resolved not to read any mysteries in this last set of one hundred books (save for the Continental Op volume we’ve already discussed, but some of you purists may question the presence of Seven Footprints To Satan in that last set of ten books. True, the even-more-pure may reasonably say that it’s not exactly a mystery, more of an adventure story. And I confess that I’m not entirely sure just where to put A. Merritt’s books, nor am I entirely consistent in my own classification into this or that genre. For example, I put the Fu Manchu books into my mystery shelves, and Doc Savage within the Science Fiction & Fantasy—though both series have attributes associated with the other genre; as I say, I struggle for no petty consistency. And certainly in the case of Seven Footprints the fantastical elements are at a minimum, more trappings than actuality. And though I can plead that it’s merely an old-fashioned adventure yarn, those I usually place within the Mystery domain (hence the full title of the genre in my own classification system, ‘Mystery & Thriller’). But … well, let’s just let it be, shall we? I’m happy to have finally reached one thousand books no matter what petty and silly foibles I’ve inserted into the process, and look forward to reading more mysteries, of whatever stripe, in the next set of one hundred books. (Though, truth be told, I have reached Book Read #1016 as I finish this listing, and only two of those are in the ‘Mystery & Thriller’ genre, and the only pure mystery is actually a re-read of Book Read #95!) Ah, me. More will be revealed, I’m sure. Until then, ciao, and good reading.
The lists of previously read books may be found by following the links:
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