Friday Vocabulary

1. trunnion — one of pair of pivots supporting something; cylindrical projection from cannon supporting same on its carriage

The bearings inside the telescope’s trunnions were manufactured to a previously unheard of precision, allowing the new astronomical wonder unparalleled accuracy in viewing the heavens.

 

2. okta — measurement of cloud cover equal to one eighth of the entire sky

At this time of year satellite imagery becomes quite difficult, as it is very rare that there are ever less than three oktas of clouds over the entire region.

 

3. bodkin — large thick needle for piercing leather or cloth; dagger

The craftsmanship is apparent in every seam of the wallet, the bodkin having been punched through the seams with only just enough force to make the fine overlapping stitches, unlike the gouged holes made by the machine process.

 

4. plash — to splash

The hem of his greatcoat was plashed by the puddle water with each step he made through the treacherous, muddy ground.

 

5. goaf — hayrick when in a barn; waste material of a mine

They hid the body among the goaf in that level, never expecting their crime to be discovered, nor the price to rise so high that it became profitable to work those diggings ever again.

 

6. accouter — to equip, to outfit

And so he set out into the cold desert night, accoutered only with a flashlight, a knife, and a single liter of water.

 

7. cat’s-paw (also cats paw or catspaw) — person used as a tool of another; [nautical] tiny breeze making ripples on a similarly small area of water; [nautical] hitch used to bind tackles to rope

He used Eddie as a cat’s-paw to once again get his nuts out of the fire.

 

8. apricity — [obsolete] light or heat of the sun

The housecat was stretched out upon the porch, endeavoring to absorb into his fur every bit of apricity from the pale winter sun.

 

9. catchment area — [British] area from which water drains into a particular lake or basin; area served by school or other institution

With pretensions of upward mobility, they decided to move across town to be in the best catchment area for their young daughters, though their wages had hardly been enough to pay the lower rent on their old place and besides the girls were only two years old at the time.

 

10. compunction — feeling of conscience

Perhaps the first time, so very many long years ago, he had felt a slight nagging compunction as he demanded the money from the single mother of three who had been his first assignment, but today he would punch a nun without a quiver of conscience, if she owed the boss a fiver.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(drug slang)

candy flip — to ingest LSD with MDMA

Some claim that candy flipping avoids all possibility of a bad trip, but even those proponents admit that there is an inevitable come-down the next day, perhaps not as severe as the hangover produced by alcohol, but somewhat severe nonetheless.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. doryphore — persistent pest, obstinately pedantic critic

And of course Reinhard, the office doryphore, noticed that we’d had to change the printer paper, and that the later pages of the report used 92 brightness paper instead of the 96 bright at the beginning.

 

2. aoudad — Barbary sheep

The hills around Hearst Castle still contain some of the animals the newspaper magnate once housed in his private zoo, including zebras amongst the cattle and the horned aoudads which visitors may see as they ascend to the immense home.

 

3. slut’s wool — [idiom] dust and debris that gathers beneath furniture (in supposed reference to slatternly housekeeping habits)

Looking for the missing contact lens with my flashlight at ground level among the slut’s wool beneath the old armchair in the corner, I realized that even if we found the dropped ophthalmic aid, Shelley would never want to stick it back in her eye, covered as it would be with detritus and dust from the previous millennium.

 

4. pisstake — [UK or Australian slang] parody, pastiche

It really weren’t much of a holiday special, more like a cobbled together pisstake of A Christmas Carol that gave pride of place to our primary sponsor that year, Bevin’s Buttered Hams.

 

5. burrnesha — [Albanian] Balkan sworn virgins, women in parts of western Balkan regions who take an oath of celibacy and gain privileges otherwise available only to men

There never were very many burrnesha in these mountains even at the time of the first reports of the practice, from 19th Century travelers, and today there may be only as few as a dozen ‘sworn virgins’ left living.

 

6. roman-fleuve — long involved novel about lives of intricately connected people; sequence of related novels detailing (for example) lives of a single family across generations; very lengthy and wordy text

And if this biography or memoir or whatever it pretends to be is actually the masterful roman-fleuve its proponents (among them Professor Halders) claim it to be, then this antepenultimate episode in this interminable work is its cloaca, the foul sewer into which this sluggish river of logorrhea finally descends.

 

7. Transoxania — region beyond the Oxus River, northeast of the historical Persian province of Khorasan

His commitment to the arts was well known, and the distinctive style of Timurid miniature painting is still one of the glories of Transoxania.

 

8. ecru — very light beige, color of unbleached linen; dark greyish yellow

On the train north to the summer retreat, Liesl was so proud of her ecru veil that she refused to remove it even when biscuits were bought from the treats cart.

 

9. holus bolus — all together, all at once, entirely

The urchin tried to eat all the food on his plate holus bolus and I had to gently remind him that he had loads of time to eat, and that all the food was his and his alone.

 

10. dramaturge — adviser to theater company about repertoire and public relations

Strangely enough, even though the director and the entire company knew that “Ms.” Patton was far too old to play Juliet, it was only Travers, our poor put-upon dramaturge, who dared to speak the unspeakable directly to her face.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(UK informal)

bog standard — just ordinary (with derogatory connotation)

He showed up in that bog standard Fiesta of his wearing the same clothes she’d seen him in earlier that day at work, and he’s wondering now why she doesn’t return his calls?

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. lithotomy — removal of stone by surgery from organ or vessel

The display of 19th-Century surgical implements, especially the lithotomy tools, frightened him viscerally, almost causing nausea and vertigo.

 

2. plus fours — baggy trousers gathered below the knee

Inspired by Gert Fröbe’s golf attire in Goldfinger, Jeremy started wearing plus fours everywhere, raving about how comfortable they were and declaring that they should be the male fashion trend to complement women’s ubiquitous yoga pants.

 

3. behoof — [archaic] benefit, advantage

“Using my lancers may be to Cedric’s behoof, but it certainly isn’t to mine!”

 

4. duplicity — deceitfulness; [archaic] state of being doubled

But even this was not the height—I should say rather the depth—of his duplicity, for he had also arranged for the two lovely women to meet at the lawyer’s office in the aftermath of his fictitious murder, only there discovering the bigamous nature of their marriage to (as they thought) the decedent.

 

5. balliwick — area of expertise; jurisdiction district for a bailiff

“Well, of course, it’s not really my balliwick, but I suppose I could try a runner, eh?”

 

6. mettlesome — possessing marked vigor and courage

You must remember that my troops at this point were mere lads, untrained farmboys most of them, not the mettlesome warriors that many of them were later to become.

 

7. accidence — [grammar] study of word inflections, the basics of grammar; rudiments of a subject

If you study the examples in any basic Latin accidence, you should have no problem with the entrance examination.

 

8. solideme — undivided unhyphenated compound word

And then there is an entire class of solidemes which have so lost their compound nature that we forget, for example, that once upon a time the word was written “to-day”.

 

9. sardonic — sneeringly cynical, bitterly derisive

I realized then that his mocking, sardonic manner concealed a vast reservoir of irresolution and doubt as to his own ability.

 

10. goozle — [slang] Adam’s apple, throat

I would have taken him out there and then, but he caught me a fist right in my goozle, and I fell wheezing and gasping to the floor.

 

10% (Ten Percent)

Anyone with a large library will frequently be asked the same tiresome question: “Have you read all of these books?” As if books were objects merely to be read, and not treasures to be savored, to be stored up against the (seemingly) inevitable collapse of all that is good and holy in this world. Now, Umberto Eco has written a great essay addressing this very question, and there’s no way I’m going to top—or even add a minuscule portion to—what that noted author said, so I will not try.

I do, however, have a very large library, of which I am too proud to be able to humblebrag about, and I have often, very often, been asked that apparently all-too-obvious question. (The writer Eco naturally surpasses me here as well, having been the owner of two libraries (one in his vacation home) of 30,000 and of 20,000 volumes.) To be sure, I am also asked which are my favorites, and how they are organized, and other queries of what I consider to be a more germane nature. But still, the most frequent question I am asked about my books is still: “Have you read all of these books?”

The answer, of course, is No. Not only have I not read all of these books, in fact many if not most of the books that I have read no longer reside in my library, as there are all sorts of reasons to get rid of a volume once you’ve read it, and only a few reasons to keep a book once read. (Though I have lots of those, too.) I have an unofficial notation in my database of books that I’ve read before I started explicitly tracking them in the db, but I don’t have a listing of all the tons and tons of science fiction I read as a teenager that I no longer own, nor of the many many books I’d borrow from the various used bookstores I worked at and read during my lunch breaks. And the list goes on. I have a flag for ‘Yes, I read this book’ in the database, as I say, but I try to be cautious of marking the various tomes, as I’m not always sure if I read this or that story, or if I read it in that particular edition with that particular introduction. And so on.

But, as my two readers of this blog know, I’ve been tracking my actual books read in that selfsame database since about June of 2015. And, since I now have each and every single book in my library catalogued (although I did find just last week a dozen books in my Werewolves & Vampires section that I’d somehow neglected to enter), I can announce with all sorts of flourishes and whatever else one does with sackbuts and other medieval stage instruments, that I can now state with absolute certainty* (* but see below) that I have read a significant portion of my library, viz., the titular Ten Percent (10%).

The actual calculation is as follows: As of today, I have 11,727 entries in my database for my own book collection—the last entry being the Montague Summers book The Werewolf. And, just this morning, while waiting for my chance to buy tickets for next years Comic-Con (which I did not succeed at doing, btw), I finished my Total Books Read #1173, the marvelous translation by Helen Waddell of some of the various lives and sayings of The Desert Fathers. Now I will point out that I usually put caveats around the books I say I’ve read, not counting comic books and graphic novels, but for this 10% figure I’m using the Total Books Read number, which includes comics, because I am looking at the library as a whole (that’s the 11,727 number). (For those of you really obsessed with stats and numbers, I can tell you that I have 11,186 books in my library excluding the comics, so I passed the 10% mark a while back, though I can’t just pluck out Total Books Read #1119 (Wittgenstein’s Poker), because I’ve acquired many books since reading that one back in July, never mind the fact that I just added those vampire and werewolf books recently that were sitting on the shelves for years now.) (And actually, horrifying thought, I just realized that three of my books read were not technically in my own library, but were books in my wife’s and my daughter’s own personal stock, the last being a James Bond book that my girl had but that I’d somehow never gotten around to grabbing before. So … aargh, maybe I haven’t read so many books as I thought and need another three books to get up to a full 10%, not including those books I’ve read twice since starting this tracking (another three books, so maybe it’s a wash), but now I’m so upset I can’t even remember how many parentheses I need to close now so I’ll just throw one out here.)

In any case (darn numbers and statistics and spreadsheets!), The Desert Fathers turned out to be a very delightful book, the stories being reminiscent of many of the Zen tales told of the early patriarchs of that weird little thing that might be a religion. Of course, Helen Waddell stacks the decks in favor of delight and humble wisdom, but that’s not really such a bad thing. One doesn’t always need to read the highlights of medieval hagiographic literature and find disgusting abasement and almost vicious self-mortification; though there’s a little bit of that here as well. But many, most, of the stories are uplifting and ennobling, and the beautiful (unconsciously so) story of St. Pelagia the Harlot is a triumphant fulfillment of this entire little volume. Check it out.

Friday Vocabulary

1. gallipot — small glazed jar used by an apothecary

Between the two of them they left hardly one gallipot of the sweet German wine given us by the count.

 

2. galipot — unrefined turpentine found on some European pines

Though the galipot is of better quality than the dried barras more often found, neither are suitable for distillation, at least not using the DeSalvo method.

 

3. garabance (also garavance) — chickpea similar to (if not identical with) garbanzo beans

Though some natives make a paste from the garabance which they appear to enjoy with their habitual spices, the majority of these peas are used as fodder for swine.

 

4. confirmand — candidate for confirmation or baptism

In the case of an adult confirmand, of course, this issue does not arise, and deeper theological questions may be broached if the priest so deems.

 

5. onomastic — of or related to personal or geographical names

The derivation of ‘Whitehill’ from ‘Whip Hell’ seemed a bit of onomastic legerdemain to our young scholar, a philologist of the old school.

 

6. deixis — use of context-dependent words, referring to something by use of such words

Is Gödel’s encoding some sort of magical deixis smuggled into the heart of mathematics which destroys the foundations of logic by shifting the ‘meaning’ of a number, say, to some farflung proposition which may or may not be true, may or may not be provable?

 

7. inspissated — thickened, congealed, dried by evaporation; condensed

Thus Gandhi started upon his fateful confrontation with the British Empire by presenting the powers-that-were the material fact of this inspissated salt.

 

8. ounce — snow lepoard; lynx or cougar

Sir Billibotham’s expedition was the first to explicitly hunt for the breeding grounds of the ounce, though of course the tragedy of the jeweled puttees stopped the search almost before it began.

 

9. scullion — menial kitchen servant; base person

Theresa was hardly fit to be even the lowest scullion in the main kitchen, so vile were her manners and language after her years in the Levant.

 

10. crambo — guessing game involving rhyming words; word that rhymes with another

You can play at crambo all you want, but all that jive went out with blank verse.

 

11. quaternion — four double-folded sheets of paper gathered together for binding; group of four things; hypercomplex number with one real and four imaginary components

One of the legendary Tales of the Desert Fathers speaks of a monk so obedient that though he had just began to write the first letter of a work he was copying onto a new quaternion, he came so quickly at his master’s call that he did not hesitate even long enough to complete the full circle of the initial letter ‘O’.

 

12. continent — having or displaying restraint in bodily functions or appetites

T. E. Lawrence spoke of how lack of opportunity can make a man, a people, continent in their actions and passion, but even in the desert the lieutenant could not find it in himself to bridle his fierce urges.

 

13. tergiversate — to hem and haw, to equivocate; to change one’s mind, to be apostate

Though pressed upon by both sides, Hanquin managed to tergiversate so long that the question became moot when the hordes of angry monks broke into the chamber.

 

14. jakes — [idiom] outhouse

And so they caught him, as the saying goes, with his pants down in the jakes, and as tragic as his death was, it was the comic elements that were repeated and retold in The Lay of The Last Sit.

 

15. ayah — nanny or nurse (usu. native) working for Europeans in Southeast Asia

“We couldn’t even trust Billy’s ayah,” said the colonel, “who—though she’d seen my older child Jenny from diapers to gowns—turned out to be a communist.”

 

16. pseudopod — temporary protoplasmic protrusion of cells or unicellular organisms

From the maddened protesters there now struck a frenzied mass of the angry mob through the line of police and directly into the marble building, as if a pseudopod of hate had wrenched itself from the heart of dark rage to strike at the machine that had caused its ire.

 

17. schnorrer — [slang, fr. Yiddish] one who sponges off of others, moocher

“No more of this ‘He promised to pay the rest next week’ crap; he’s a schnorrer who’s outstayed his welcome in my life.”

 

18. accumb — to recline while dining as did the ancient Romans

Due to the consequences of this horrific accident, Petrov was forced to accumb at table in order for digestion to proceed, so we all tried to make light of the situation and pretend we were all ancient philosophers or something.

 

19. spikenard — aromatic ointment derived from plant of the valerian family; such a plant

Keeping his eyes averted the young page presented the golden chalice of spikenard to the lady, almost stumbling over the stairs and spilling the precious balm of the east.

 

20. goetic — of or related to dark magic or necromancy

Most Wednesdays Roger could be found practicing goetic conjurations or, if in straitened circumstances, performing tarot readings for paying customers at the local coffee shop.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(colloquial)

natter — to prate

Do you two have to natter on about batting runs earned and stolen averages while we’re waiting for the doctor’s verdict?

 

(informal British)

bumph — useless papers or documents

I hardly see the point in reading through all this bumph when we still don’t even know if Leslie has found the missing skillet.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. lamella — gill of a mushroom; plate or scale of bone or other tissue

The secondary lamellae arise within the spaces between the primary or earlier gills as those latter grow away from the stem.

 

2. syntagma (also syntagm [linguistics]) — syntactic component; arrangement of components producing meaning or a greater whole; phalanx of Macedonian spearmen

But of course he was known best for the three syntagmata detailing all that was known at his era of the vagaries and nuances of Akkadian law and custom.

 

3. thrombus — blood clot formed within an organism’s blood vessels

If the antidote is not received quickly, thrombi will appear in the lungs with the consequent fatal effects.

 

4. keimelia (more commonly cimelia) — stored up or hidden treasure

Thorsten permitted me to peruse this rare volume, opening up his keimelia of rare books to me in an extremely generous gesture.

 

5. whipster — know-it-all, smart aleck

And then your cousin, that blithe whipster, had the audacity to lecture my father on the proper way to harvest our melons.

 

6. Kufic (also Cufic) — of or related to the Iraqi city of Kufa; of or related to Arabic characters used in originally writing the Koran

Though the Kufic characters were used in manuscripts for only three hundred years, they may be seen in inscriptions for far longer, well into the Fifteenth Century of the Common Era, and indeed the takbir on the present-day Iraqi flag uses the Kufic script.

 

7. hidalgo — gentleman or lesser nobility in Spain or Hispanophone regions

He dropped the reins into the hands of the shoeless peasant with all the foolish pride of the landless hidalgo.

 

8. pensile — hanging down

The Red-wing Oriole generally builds its pensile nest from long meadow grasses if these are available.

 

9. manciple — steward in charge of supplies for a college, monastery, or law offices

Our table was always excellent, for we had that best of all manciples, not looking askance at sharp dealing, but never to the detriment of the house.

 

10. palinode — ode or other poem retracting views of an earlier poem; recantation

Once upon a time, changing one’s view necessitated at least the artistic endeavor of a palinode, whilst today one merely screams “reverse ferret” and goes on as if nothing had ever been said differently.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(UK newspaper term)

reverse ferret — sudden change of editorial position, esp. with no recognition of previous view

While Orwell’s 1984 posited a severe system of psychological shocks to induce one to give up previously held tenets, nowadays merely searching for more clicks is enough to induce a reverse ferret.

Friday Vocabulary

1. gubbins — [British informal] odds and ends; thing of no value

“You don’t have time to worry about that gubbins,” Sheila said, “our packs are full enough already.”

 

2. nomothetic — based upon law; of or related to universal laws

Dr. Hardwithe’s success stemmed ultimately from his misapprehension of the fundamental divide in clinical psychology, in which he contrasted the nomothetic position with the idiopathic, instead of the usual idiographic.

 

3. alexithymia — inability or deficiency in experiencing or grasping emotions

As is often the case with patients such as these, Mr. A suffered from severe alexithymia, which was both a defense from and a progenitor of much of the social difficulties that had brought him to our clinic.

 

4. subduction — movement of tectonic plate below and aside under the force of another crustal plate

Though the connection of boninite with subduction is certain, the mechanism by which the mineral is produced is a matter of some debate.

 

5. illation — conclusion, inference, deduction

But Safire’s eccentric illation went much farther than this, positing (correctly, as it turned out, but—as Wittens noted—with insufficient evidence) the existence of at least three men behind the attempt, all from this selfsame button and broken shoestring.

 

6. frore — [archaic] frozen, extremely cold

My painful breath seemed the only sound in the frore and murky wood.

 

7. overmantel — panel or decoration above a mantel

The famous overmantel was designed by Fleming himself, though it is believed that much of the carving was the product of Locksley, who also constructed most of the furniture in this room.

 

8. fenugreek — legume native to western Asia; seeds of this plant which are used in cooking and medicine

For this curry, the perfume of the fenugreek leaves contrasts with the gaminess of the meat, so you’ll want to use fresh rather than dried fenugreek.

 

9. hemiplegia — paralysis of one side of the body

But he ignored his own moral hemiplegia, saving his charity only for the weaker sex.

 

10. muddlehead — stupid person

Discussing the ‘ideas’ of this muddlehead is like discussing the mountain climbing ability of freshwater fish.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. azote — nitrogen

Azote is necessary for most plants, though the form in which it can be absorbed varies; beets, for example, require nitrates for an abundant crop.

 

2. phlegm — sticky mucus from throat and lungs; one of the four humors of medieval medical theory, causing sluggish temperament; composure, calmness, apathy

Funds are allotted in the latest state budget for removal of stains from the assembly floor carpet, caused by the habit of certain members to display insouciance towards respiratory health, usually in the form of hawking phlegm at the opposite side of chambers when discomfited.

 

3. tenebrescence — reversible change in color upon exposure to sunlight

Most sodalite will exhibit tenebrescence, especially under strong ultraviolet light.

 

4. argosy — large merchant ship; merchant fleet; large supply

Word reached the pirates in their hidden cove of an argosy returning heavy-laden through the nearby strait.

 

5. helve — handle of a tool, esp. of an axe or hammer

Though my strange companion wielded only an old helve against our armored foes, he tore into them like an iceberg through the Titanic.

 

6. obsequy — funeral rite

Once more we found ourselves foregathered at the bar for the obsequy of his political career.

 

7. mCi — [abbreviation] millicurie

Federal regulations restrict the amount of tritium used in wristwatches to 25 mCi.

 

8. cate — food delicacy

From the locker beneath his bed he pulled a selection of cates and even a small bottle of wine, surprising us with his unwonted generosity.

 

9. exegesis — critical or interpretative explanation of a text, esp. of The Bible

As important as the faculties for vigorous exegesis are, they mean nothing without a dedication to live a truly Christian life.

 

10. fauteuil — wooden armchair with open sides

The vast hall was almost empty save for those dark nacreous pillars, but as we walked down the long aisle, we spied a lone figure sitting at the far end in a gold and white fauteuil before what appeared to be a black or navy curtain.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(outdated nomenclature abandoned during World War I)

German Ocean — North Sea

Keeping the route open between the German Ocean and the Baltic Sea was of critical importance to Lord Utherson’s plan.

Friday Vocabulary

1. raptus — seizure; ravishing, rape; medieval form of marriage by abduction

Of course the most famous person accused of raptus is last week’s featured poet, Geoffrey Chaucer.

 

2. posture chair — office chair designed to support and conform to natural human form

Ryback leaned back in the dark wooden posture chair which was as emblematic of his new rank as the words “Editor In Chief” upon his frosted glass door.

 

3. scotophilic — of or related to that which thrives in darkness

Renny turned his back upon family, friends, church, in fact all society he had heretofore known, and allowed himself to fall prey to his most vile scotophilic impulses towards perversion, fascism, and narcissistic misanthropy.

 

4. bund — causeway, embankment; secondary retaining wall surrounding tank for fluid

Though the bund was well-constructed and of an evening one could see locals promenading along it in the cooling air, still the judge observed that the structure had caused hardship to several towns downstream, and he ordered it cut or opened.

 

5. flash spoon — spoon-shaped metal fishing lure designed to attract through visual action

I prefer a trusty flash spoon to a rattle spoon in most cases, especially in clear water.

 

6. azan (also adhan) — Muslim call to prayer

We reached the abandoned pavilion just as the azan sounded from a distant minaret.

 

7. whoozit (also whosit) — thing, whatchamacallit; person

“Hand me that whoozit over there, that’s right, the one with the weird gray tendrils still dangling from the blade.”

 

8. prepotent — superior in power or authority; possessing genetic material more likely to predominate

Here in this stuffy chamber, finally before the prepotent minister, I found my anxiety and paralyzing abasement replaced by a firm conviction in the rightness of the action I proposed.

 

9. proctalgia — rectal pain

The third morning I almost hesitated before the troop when getting in the saddle, so vivid were my memories of my proctalgia from yesterday’s ride.

 

10. tarmac — Tarmacadam; asphalt; airport runway

The petrol gave out just as we cleared the last obstruction and we hit the tarmac with a bone-crunching bang.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(US slang, from Fr. for mackerel = pimp)

mack daddy — successful pimp; playa with the ladies

“You wouldn’t think it to look at him now,” Tony said, pointing to the shuffling janitor, “but he was a real mack daddy back in the day.”

Book List: 1000 Books

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: