As I told you over two months ago, I recently finished my twelve hundredth book in my little silly book tracking project. So—though we won’t be talking about the silly book pictured here (if you must know more about this awful and boring religious book masquerading as a science fiction slash fantasy novel, check out the link (And who am I to judge? It’s worked before….)), I will be giving you the full list of this last ‘century’ of books read, picking out a few highlights and (one hopes) even fewer lowlights. (Though the percentage of worse books is increasing, as I seek to divest myself of some of the poorer stock in my book portfolio.)
At least this last hundred began well, as I finally got around to reading Walker Percy’s critically acclaimed (and it damn well ought to be) novel, Love In The Ruins. Strangely enough, I’d read its sorta sequel, The Thanatos Syndrome—and loved it—’way back in my days working in the bookstore at the Stanford Mall. But between one thing and another (the ‘another’ being the fact that I truly have a difficult time reading Southern authors, as they tend to make me cry), I had never actually opened the pages of this tale of crazy times (the 60s) in the segregated South. Percy’s story is freaking brilliant. And so very prescient. It all happened, just as he told it. Only we don’t ever realize these things, even as they happen all around us. And yes, it made me cry.
Dick King-Smith (you know him, if you know him at all, as the author of the book from which the movie Babe was derived) provided another little piece of perfection in this first set of ten books read in this last hundred, with the amazing tale of The Mouse Butcher. This is a wonderfully brutal fairy tale, the story of a boy from the working class who makes good, a children’s story which may not be for all children—especially oversensitive adults. The narration remains blissfully oblivious to the central anthropomorphic question of the book: What happened to the humans on the island? But you will not care, as the action doesn’t need those guys one bit. From the very first page we know we’re in for a treat. “Black death dropped from the top of the broken garden wall and white teeth cut off his final squeak.” Did I mention that it is wonderfully brutal?
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1101 | 3/8/24 | Walker Percy | Love In The Ruins | Fiction |
| 1102 | 3/9/24 | George Baxt | The Neon Graveyard | Mystery |
| 1103 | 3/9/24 | Robert van Gulik | The Chinese Lake Murders | Mystery |
| 1104 | 3/15/24 | China Miéville | Perdido Street Station | SF & Fantasy |
| 1105 | 3/16/24 | Dick King-Smith | The Mouse Butcher | Children’s |
| 1106 | 3/19/24 | Sarah Caudwell | Thus Was Adonis Murdered | Mystery |
| 1107 | 3/19/24 | Leonard Austin | Around The World In San Francisco: A Guide to the Unexplored San Francisco | Travel |
| 1108 | 3/21/24 | Piers Anthony | Blue Adept | SF & Fantasy |
| 1109 | 3/21/24 | Olga Tokarczuk | Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead | Fiction |
| 1110 | 3/22/24 | Daniel Pinkwater | Looking For Bobwicz: A Hoboken Chicken Story | Children’s |
Another children’s book made the grade in the next set of ten, achieving that rarest of things, making me cry. The Scholastic Book Club edition of That Dog Tarr (originally titled Tarr of Belway Smith) by Nan Hayden Agle was, yes, a quick read, but oh, so much action packed into its 95 pages! Agle tells the story from the perspective of the much put-upon dog, and there is incident and misery and heroism and … yes, Virgina … a happy ending. (I like to cry, but not too much.) Just like the more famous Mr. King-Smith, I’ll be looking for more books by Mrs. Agle. [Trigger warning: Dog kills a bunny.]
One of Richard Armour’s best, Twisted Tales From Shakespeare brings to bear not only the author’s raucous sense of pun-filled humor, but also an abiding knowledge and love for Shakespeare and all things Bardical. Not only are the puns quite witty (in itself almost a small miracle), but the usual silliness is always in pursuit of humor and deep appreciation for the source material. Of course it’s better if you know the plays well, but even with the most basic acquaintance you’ll find plenty to laugh about in these ‘twisted’ transfigurations.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1111 | 3/23/24 | Nan Hayden Agle | That Dog Tarr | Children’s |
| 1112 | 3/24/24 | Edward de Bono | The Use Of Lateral Thinking | Psychology |
| 1113 | 3/25/24 | Michael Bonner, ed. | Uncut Magazine October 2023 | Music |
| 1114 | 3/25/24 | Christopher Andrew | For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush | History |
| 3/26/24 | Jean-Claude Mézières & Pierre Christin | Valerian: The New Future Trilogy | Comics | |
| 1115 | 3/26/24 | Shane Ivey, Bret Kramer, & Dennis Detwiller | Delta Green: Need to Know – Quickstart Rulebook | D&D |
| 1116 | 3/26/24 | Doug Kelly | Sunshine State Mafia: A History of Florida’s Mobsters, Hit Men, and Wise Guys | True Crime |
| 1117 | 3/26/24 | Orhan Pamuk | My Name Is Red | Mystery |
| 3/27/24 | Mike Baron | Badger #10 | Comics | |
| 3/27/24 | Mike Baron | Badger #11 | Comics | |
| 3/27/24 | Mike Baron | Badger #12 | Comics | |
| 3/27/24 | Lopamudra | Jakata Tales: Nandi Vishala and other stories | Comics | |
| 1118 | 3/27/24 | Thaddeus Golas | The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment | Spirituality |
| 3/27/24 | Luis M. Fernandes | Jakata Tales: Stories of Wisdom | Comics | |
| 3/29/24 | Dolly Rizvi | Kabir | Comics | |
| 1119 | 3/28/24 | Gil Morales | Dupie: The life and times of a college student as seen through the pen of campus cartoonist, Gil Morales | Humor |
| 1120 | 3/28/24 | Richard Armour | Twisted Tales From Shakespeare | Humor |
I confess, I’m a sucker for books like this, throwaway paperback parodies of … well, in the case of Comfort Station, the works being parodied are the ludicrously popular and overthick (in at least two senses of the word) potboilers of Arthur Hailey, the author of the bestsellers Hotel and Airport. Not to be confused with Alex Haley (though inevitably he will be), the Canadian author is little read nowadays, though I suppose you might accidentally stumble upon the movie made of Airport, or one of its three [!] sequels, or perhaps know at least the trivia that the staggeringly successful and popular Airplane! that made the Zucker brothers such a success was based on that series of films. This book, then, is the high-tension tale of men (mostly) trying to get out of the rain in a New York bathrom—the titular comfort station—whilst intrigue and … ah, skip it. The book itself is a pretty good parody of Haley’s style, with occasional flashes of brilliance. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this tome is that it turns out to have been written by Donald Westlake, using the pen name J. Morgan Cunningham.
Most of the better books in this particular tranche were the mysteries I read. The Allingham, the Charteris, and the Edmund Crispin books were all quite excellent. But I’m highlighting the Maigret novel by the obscenely prolific Georges Simenon because Maigret At The Crossroads shows a strange dark world which has almost certainly passed away into fading memory, a time of lonely towns made up of car garages competing with stables, of gangsters and a sordid lack of crimes passionnels. This is an early one for the stolid French detective, originally published in 1931. As is usually the case with Maigret, it is as much a sense of mood and place as the murder itself which is on display, though the Maigret’s easy revelation of the inextricably dark crime is also one of his laudable hallmarks.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3/28/24 | Mike Baron | Badger #13 | Comics | |
| 1121 | 3/28/24 | Margery Allingham | The Fashion In Shrouds | Mystery |
| 3/29/24 | Kamala Chandrakant | Kacha: The Boy Who Placed Duty Above All Else | Comics | |
| 1122 | 3/29/24 | Michel Politzer & Annie Politzer | Playhouses, Cabins, And Tents | Home & Garden |
| 1123 | 3/29/24 | Georges Simenon | Maigret At The Crossroads | Mystery |
| 1124 | 3/29/24 | J. Morgan Cunningham [Donald Westlake] | Comfort Station | Humor |
| 1125 | 3/30/24 | Isaac Asimov | More Tales Of The Black Widowers | Mystery |
| 1126 | 3/30/24 | Luqman Keele & Daniel Pinkwater | Java Jack | Children’s |
| 3/30/24 | Mike Baron | Badger #14 | Comics | |
| 3/30/24 | Mike Baron | Badger #15 | Comics | |
| 1127 | 4/3/24 | Leslie Charteris | The Brighter Buccaneer | Mystery |
| 1128 | 4/4/24 | Frederic Bastiat et al. | The Law & Clichés of Socialism | Politics & Social Sciences |
| 1129 | 4/6/24 | Edmund Crispin | The Case Of The Gilded Fly | Mystery |
| 1130 | 4/10/24 | Stephen Potter | Supermanship or, How to Continue to Stay Top without Actually Falling Apart | Humor |
I’ve always loved the Amar Chitra Katha series of comic books. Heck, if I’m honest about it, likely my best understanding of Hindu mythology and most of the Vedas come from these comics … not to mention my knowledge of other figures important in Indian history, such as Paramahansa Yogananda or Guru Tegh Bahadur. And almost all of the Amar Chitra Katha books about and around the Mahabharata are excellent, including and especially the full set going through the entirety of the epic tale. But this particular issue, Karna: One of the Most Important Characters of the Mahabharata, was truly a stunner. Though the art tended to become a bit frenetic at times, it turns out that viewing the story of the Mahabharata through Karna’s perspective an interesting and fresh take on the classic tale.
Somehow I’d managed to miss the very first appearance of the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot up to this point. My loss. Because The Mysterious Affair At Styles is an absolute corker, a brilliant mystery that presents M. Poirot as a fully realized genius detective from the first moment he appears on the world’s stage. The whole book is a stellar affair, written by Agatha Christie in 1916 (so I’m reliably informed by Wikipedia) and first published in 1920. And it’s not only Poirot who steps off these pages so perfectly from the get-go. Captain Hastings makes himself useful as the dullard who highlights and augments Poirot’s genius (and everyone else’s, for that matter).
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1131 | 4/10/24 | Michael Sims, ed. | The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries | Mystery |
| 1132 | 4/11/24 | August Derleth | The Casebook of Solar Pons | Mystery |
| 1133 | 4/12/24 | Ian Fleming | The Spy Who Loved Me | Mystery | 4/13/24 | Karna: One of the Most Important Characters of the Mahabharata | Comics |
| 1134 | 4/14/24 | Elizabeth Linington | No Evil Angel | Mystery | 4/15/24 | R. Crumb | Zap Comix No. 0 | Comics |
| 1135 | 4/16/24 | John Dickson Carr | He Who Whispers | Mystery |
| 1136 | 4/16/24 | Peter A. Levine | Walking The Tiger: Healing Trauma | Self-Help |
| 1137 | 4/17/24 | Kingsley Amis, Dom Moraes, & Peter Porter | Penguin Modern Poets 2: Amis Moraes Porter | Poetry |
| 1138 | 4/17/24 | Agatha Christie | The Mysterious Affair At Styles | Mystery |
| 1139 | 4/18/24 | Kenneth Bulmer / John Glasby | The Hunters of Jundagai / Project Jove [Ace Double 68310] | SF & Fantasy |
| 1140 | 4/19/24 | Manning Coles | A Toast To Tomorrow | Mystery |
It is doubtful, of course, that Orson Welles actually penned Mr. Arkadin: Aka Confidential Report: The Secret Sordid Life of an International Tycoon—the introduction asserts that it was written by his assistant Mauric Bessy. But in that case, who wrote the translation from French? Like so much of this tale, and the tale itself, some things must remain shrouded in mystery, and we must be prepared to endure our nescience. Whatever the source, I did not expect to read such a well-written tale of the cosmopolitan underworld. The slow-building tale grows more and more compelling until the big reveal when Guy looks at the police photograph in Munich on Christmas Eve. Ah, me! There are echoes (of course) of Citizen Kane, but also The Mask Of Dimitrios, in this absorbing tale, whoever may have written it.
A true work of genius, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is brilliant, and perhaps worth the drugs and alcohol needed for its completion. Kerouac’s style seems so effortless (and apparently was just one huge torrential flow), but that easy style hides just how difficult it is to move from the brain to paper. The story itself could be read many ways, a thousand ways, the characters of Sal and Dean and all the others as roman à clef or as primeval forces or literary history, and you can fall all over yourself lapping up the insights into friendship and its fragile nature, and that final sadness is very real, and never quite final. I know that others know and grok this book much better than I. It is the image of a parallel America that both never was and is now gone forever. The collapse of the frontier and the setting out for somewhere new is all here. That such giants lived, or at least were dreamed of, and now … but there I digress, and we regress.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1141 | 4/22/24 | Orson Welles | Mr. Arkadin: Aka Confidential Report: The Secret Sordid Life of an International Tycoon | Fiction |
| 1142 | 4/23/24 | John W. Campbell, ed. | Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction: March 1963 | SF & Fantasy |
| 1143 | 4/23/24 | Gerald Sussman, ed. | National Lampoon: March 1982 | Humor |
| 1144 | 4/24/24 | Richard Hull | Excellent Intention | Mystery |
| 1145 | 4/25/24 | Gertrude Behn | Exercises After Childbirth | Health |
| 1146 | 4/26/24 | Gérard Emptoz & Valérie Marchal | Aux sources de la propiété industrielle : Guide des archives de l’INPI | Foreign Language |
| 1147 | 4/27/24 | Wilkie Collins | Basil | Fiction |
| 4/27/24 | Jay Kinney, ed. | Young Lust #5 | Comics | |
| 1148 | 4/29/24 | Jack Kerouac | On The Road | Fiction |
| 4/29/24 | Bill Griffith, ed. | Young Lust #2 | Comics | |
| 1149 | 4/30/24 | Lloyd Alexander | The Foundling and Other Tales of Pyrdain | Children’s |
| 1150 | 4/30/24 | Vincent P. Collins | Grief: How To Live With Sorrow | Self-Help |
The wonderful translations by Eunice Clark of Selected Fables of Jean de la Fontaine so inspired me that I rushed up my library ladder to grab a volume containing the originals in their 17th-Century French. Alas, my comprehension en français fails me, as I am more suited to read late 18th-Century political speeches. (Though I’m still muddling through the originals.) Be that as it may, these wonderful version by Ms. Clark inspire, delight, and—as perhaps Fontaine intended—teach us something if we’re not careful. The dreamlike line drawings by Alexander Calder complement the tales very well, being poems for the eyes as you read the poetic fables.
Alas … this book saddened me, or at least the primary tale, the novella The Land Of Mist, made my heart ache. When The World Screamed & Other Stories collects the late Professor Challenger tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, a character known to most (if at all) from his first and best appearance in 1912, in The Lost World, which has been made into numerous movies and which inspired many other ‘lost world’ tales (as well as the very subgenre of such SF/Fantasy works). A second novel published the next year, The Poison Belt, was not as good, but passable, and there Professor Challenger could have stayed in comfortable retirement, but—alas!—Doyle could not leave well enough alone. This volume gives us the terrible novella mentioned above, as well as two more passable short stories, the titular “When The World Screamed” (which has its moments) and the viciously pleasant “The Disintegration Machine”, both of which appeared a few years after the awful 1926 novel The Land Of Mist. Why is it terrible? Let me count the ways. Actually, I won’t do that; it deserves a fuller write-up than I’ll give it here. Suffice to say that the tale is an excuse for a pro-spiritualist polemic (the chapter wherein the ‘real’ spiritual medium bemoans the lack of understanding of the public is particulary cringe-inducing), and that Professor Challenger, one of Doyle’s best character ideas, hardly appears in the work at all. Sad that Challenger did not leave the ourvre of a Holmes or a Brigadier Gerard, but … we don’t always get the heroes we want.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1151 | 4/30/24 | Jean de La Fontaine; Eunice Clark, trans.; Alexander Calder, illus. | Selected Fables | Poetry |
| 1152 | 4/30/24 | Vincent P. Collins | Acceptance | Self-Help |
| 1153 | 4/30/24 | Kenneth Bulmer / Mack Reynolds | Behold the Stars / Planetary Agent X [Ace Double M-131] | SF & Fantasy |
| 1154 | 5/1/24 | David Inglish | W. B. Bugg’s Change of Heart | Fiction |
| 1155 | 5/2/24 | Iain Pears | The Immaculate Deception | Mystery |
| 1156 | 5/3/24 | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | When The World Screamed & Other Stories | SF & Fantasy |
| 1157 | 5/4/24 | Fritz Leiber | Swords And Ice Magic | SF & Fantasy |
| 1158 | 5/5/24 | Rita Emmett | The Procrastinator’s Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now | Self-Help |
| 1159 | 5/5/24 | Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson | The One Minute Manager | Bidness |
| 1160 | 5/6/24 | George Barker, Martin Bell, & Charles Causley | Penguin Modern Poets 3: Barker Bell Causley | Poetry |
Louis L’Amour really is an excellent writer, if you like taut action, well-constructed plots, and nicely delineated if nostalgically good or otherwise characters. And The High Graders is a perfect exemplar of his mastery: a perfect story akin to Yojimbo, or The Glass Key, somehow transplanted to the West. Yes, I’m well aware that a western was already made of Yojimbo, and that Sergio Leone was even sued over the resemblance. But this book was not exactly either of those classic plots, but a unique tale all its own, a compelling story of vengeance and money politics that grabs the reader from the first scene in the rain-soaked graveyard and never lets go. Dashiel Hammett would have been proud.
I’ve read Poetry Comics before, away back in the Before Time, whilst I was in college (the first time), and the world seemed an oyster. Alas, too much hot sauce and not enough poetry was to pass before picking up this wonderful compilation illustrated by the strange meta-poet Dave Morice once again. He really was on to something here; the cheeky illustrations manage both to add and to not detract from the words of these … erm … wordsmiths. I was overjoyed to rediscover that it was just as remarkable a book as it seemed lo those many years ago when first I acquired it. I was a bit flummoxed, however, to learn that one of my favorite poems from this anthology, the weirdly enthralling “Ubble Snop”, putatively by Joyce Holland, was in fact penned by Mr. Morice himself, as part of his strange literary hoax using this fictitious poet’s persona. I’m not entirely sure how I feel after learning of this creative deception, but have reread the poem a couple of times since gaining this knowledge, and find that I still love it and like it. A lot. Certainly it’s not the first instance of an anthologist placing his own work in a collection.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1161 | 5/6/24 | Susan Watson Emery | Blood On The Old Well | Wacko |
| 1162 | 5/7/24 | Louis L’Amour | The High Graders | Western |
| 1163 | 5/8/24 | James M. Cain | Love’s Lovely Counterfeit | Mystery |
| 1164 | 5/8/24 | Johann David Wyss | The Swiss Family Robinson | Fiction |
| * | 5/9/24 | Dave Morice | Poetry Comics | Poetry |
| 1165 | 5/10/24 | Margery Allingham | Mr. Campion and Others | Mystery |
| 1166 | 5/11/24 | Harold Lamb | Tamerlane: Conqueror of the Earth | History |
| 1167 | 5/12/24 | Louis L’Amour | Down The Long Hills | Western |
| 1168 | 5/13/24 | Jean-Patrick Manchette | The Mad And The Bad | Mystery |
| 1169 | 5/13/24 | Eric Nakamura, ed. | Giant Robot No. 1 | Zine |
| 1170 | 5/14/24 | Eric Nakamura, ed. | Giant Robot No. 2 | Zine |
* I count Poetry Comics as a ‘Comic Book’ for the purposes of the running totals
I had read The Stranger by Albert Camus before, but not in French, had not read L’Etranger. (Strangely enough, I’m learning that I never have read The Plague in either language, though I’m trying to rectify this oversight.) And it turned out that it is an easy read, even for someone with as poor comprehension of the French language as I have. And it seemed even more persuasive in the original, though what that suasion was is perhaps an exercise best left up to the reader, n’est-ce pas? Certainly it seemed less ‘existential’ (whatever that term might mean; I’m also very ignorant of philosophy, though perhaps not so much as I am of French) and more simply annoyed—or perhaps just plain bored, à votre guise. Camus’s novel is a powerful, difficult work, and well worth reading in any language.
Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, as related by Frank B. Linderman, is the autobiography of a Indian woman Mr. Linderman got to know at the reservation to where she was restricted at the end of her days. He transcribed her life story over many days as she told it to him. He could follow along in sign language, which he knew, but used a native translator as well. This book is a companion piece to his earlier autobiography of the Crow chief Plenty Coups, and the narrative is remarkable as being one of the few pieces we have which details the daily lives of Native American women and girls. Indeed, I was struck by the playful memories of Pretty-Shield as a little girl, when they would make their dolls ride upon the tribe’s dogs in emulation of the horse-riding warriors. The work is an amazing history, life, and self-revelation. Every section is interesting, though I have to admit that the presence of a transgender Crow at the greater battle around Little Bighorn came as a real surprise.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1171 | 5/15/24 | Andrea Penrose | Sweet Revenge | Mystery |
| 1172 | 5/16/24 | Agatha Christie | Uncut Magazine November 2023 | Music |
| 1173 | 5/16/24 | Edith Pargeter | The Dragon At Noonday | Fiction |
| 1174 | 5/17/24 | Albert Camus | L’Etranger | Foreign Language |
| 1175 | 5/18/24 | Richard Hugo | Death And The Good Life | Mystery |
| 1176 | 5/19/24 | Shepard Rifkin | The Murderer Vine | Mystery |
| 1177 | 5/20/24 | David Holbrook, Christopher Middleton, & David Wevill | Penguin Modern Poets 4: Holbrook Middleton Wevill | Poetry |
| 1178 | 5/21/24 | Josephine Tey | The Franchise Affair | Mystery |
| 1179 | 5/22/24 | Frank B. Linderman | Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows | History |
| 1180 | 5/23/24 | Sam Pilger & Leo Moynihan | Unsolved Enigmas: Incredible Events That Have Puzzled The Greatest Minds | History |
As part of my side-project of revisiting books of my youth, I re-read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America, and … boy does it hold up. May have even gotten better with age. After all the disasters and broken promises and human failures and our constant blaming others for all of those, Brautigan’s brilliant book reads like a lyrical message from the Before Time, which of course it is and was. Though published in 1967, he wrote it in 1961 in a series of genius scribblings, before hippies had even been taxonomically distinguished from Beats, before things got all tangled up and people started dying, when the promise still had some shiny patina of potential reality and the outsiders lived outside and went fishing.
Christopher Andrews followed up his first book on the wonders of the Mitrokhin Archive—the raft of handwritten notes on KGB secrets smuggled out of the Soviet Union by Vasily Mitrokhin—with The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for The Third World. Now, a lot of people have a lot of problems with the original source material, but then, not a lot of people actually have access to the original source material. Andrews, who is usually identified as a ‘Cambridge historian’ but is also the official historian of MI5, is one of these, and says he worked closely with Mitrokhin in producing this second volume, focused on KGB operations in the so-called Third World from the 50s to the 80s. And, well, sure it’s filled with lots of secrets, I suppose, but the constant drumbeat of codenames reveals the beat of the music the Geheimnisträger want us to listen to, the silly rhythm of spies and counterspies that has fascinated us so since WWII. But what is most revealing here is the folly of self-serving bureaucracy (How many times does the author say that this or that residency claimed more credit than it deserved?) and the ultimate failure of most KGB plans, save only for the forgery and technical intelligence departments. Otherwise, one can say only, What a waste. Of course, this book also acts as an apologia for the CIA and such, but that’s the price you pay, I suppose, for gaining access to the underlying documentation.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1181 | 5/24/24 | Richard Brautigan | Trout Fishing In America | Fiction |
| 5/25/24 | R. Crumb | XYZ Comics #1 | Comics | |
| 1182 | 5/26/24 | Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin | The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for The Third World | Spies |
| 1183 | 5/26/24 | John W. Campbell, ed. | Analog Science Fact–Science Fiction April 1963 | SF & Fantasy |
| 5/27/24 | Art Spiegelman & Françoise Mouly, eds. | The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics | Comics | |
| 1184 | 5/28/24 | Edwin C. Bliss | Getting Things Done: The ABCs of Time Management | Psychology |
| 1185 | 5/29/24 | Gary Allen | The Rockefeller File | Wacko |
| 1186 | 5/30/24 | Margery Allingham | Traitor’s Purse | Mystery |
| 1187 | 5/31/24 | John D. MacDonald | The Empty Copper Sea | Mystery |
| 1188 | 6/3/24 | Vernard Eller | The MAD Morality or the Ten Commandments Revisited | Religion & Spirituality |
| 1189 | 6/4/24 | David Vigilante | (Out)Law & Order: The Code of the West Meets the Code of the Street in the Classroom | History |
| 1190 | 6/4/24 | A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada | Coming Back: The Science of Reincarnation | Religion & Spirituality |
I may have to move Molière up on my ‘must read’ list, because this translation of Le Malade Imaginaire (The Would-Be Invalid) was just hilarious. My French certainly isn’t good enough to read it in the original (see above), and in any case my understanding of 17th-Century French is even worse, but this version by Morris Bishop was wonderful, growing funnier and funnier as the play went along, and finally surpassing all other nonsense with that masterful final faux-Latin doctoral award ceremony at the end. Bishop offers a fine translation, making even the Latin flow seamlessly into the Englished nonsense. Brilliant. The play is great, of course, with the ironic twist being that Molière himself perished during (well, began to perish, as he lingered on for a while after) the fourth performance of this final work of his, in which he was playing the lead role. Unlike his character, the author didn’t believe in doctors, and they likely wouldn’t have done him any good anyway, which is sort of the point of the play as well.
Though the history of Napoleon’s Russia Campaign by Talty was interesting for its content, if not its style, the deservedly famous history of the Dreyfus Affair by Nicholas Halasz was the standout of this last tranche of books in the last hundred read. Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria is a brilliant analysis of the material and events, and though other works have massaged this information in different directions (focusing more upon the antisemitism inherent in French culture, or the French army, for instance), this well-documented narrative of the whole ‘Affair’ is a truly excellent, remarkable history. Halasz spins a compelling story, though it ends up being more than a tad depressing (his ending to Part Three still gives me chills). Unfortunately, his book has more than a little to say about our own odd situation in history.
| # | Read | Author | Title | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1191 | 6/6/24 | William Shakespeare | The Tempest | Drama |
| 1192 | 6/7/24 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets | Business |
| 1193 | 6/8/24 | Piers Anthony | The Source Of Magic | SF & Fantasy |
| 1194 | 6/10/24 | C. G. Jung & C. Kerényi | Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis | Mythology |
| 1195 | 6/11/24 | Stephan Talty | The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army | History |
| 1196 | 6/12/24 | Molière | The Would-Be Invalid (Le Malade Imaginaire) | Drama |
| 1197 | 6/12/24 | G. K. Chesterton | Manalive | Fiction |
| 1198 | 6/13/24 | Nicholas Halasz | Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria | History |
| 1199 | 6/15/24 | Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö | The Man Who Went Up In Smoke | Mystery |
| 1200 | 6/15/24 | James Robert Hawkins | Sword Of Power | SF & Fantasy |
I’ve already told you about the mishegas around the book I thought I’d completed this last set of a hundred books with, so I won’t go into that here, save to say that, yes, of course, that Vonnegut book will be Book #1201 when I eventually get around to producing that list for y’all, after completing the next 100 books. Which might not be all that long, seeing as how I’m already up to something like Book #1262 (again, not counting the comics). Once again, the Mystery category dominated this last set, with 29 books read, followed by 10 SF & Fantasy books (well, one of ’em was a magazine) and 8 books of Fiction (plus the 2 Westerns, which you might count as Fiction, since the line gets blurry sometimes). Surprisingly, I read something like 9 books on or about Health & Psychology, and 7 of Poetry and Drama. However, it was Comic Books that turned in a strong second place, with 17 appearances on the list of the last hundred read (though, as I’ve explained ad nauseam, they don’t count towards the hundred read) (also, as I also explained, the Poetry Comics I’m counting as a Comic Book for those summation totals, though I counted it as a Poetry book just above (and didn’t count it as one of those 17 comics (which shows how deep the rot goes when you try to be consistent))). Anyway, enough of this madness—See you next time!
The lists of previously read books may be found by following the links: