Monday Book Report: The Information Inferno

I Read It So You Don’t Have To Dept.

The Information Inferno, by Whodini™

If it is hard for ‘kids today’ to appreciate what life was like before the advent of cell phones, it is almost as difficult even for those of us who lived through that strange sea change we now just call ‘the Internet’ to fathom the madness of minds great and small who saw the future coming and thought they were surfing a wave of exciting boundless technological change into a glorious Promised Land of scientific marvels and a wholly new era in the very lives of humans on this puny Earth. Even as we first read Mondo 2000 and Wired magazine, some of us must have realized that the vast transformational paradise described in their pages was, as we call it nowadays, ‘vaporware’, a beautiful pipe dream, but like many (if not most) results of hitting too hard the pipe, as evanescent and imaginary as any other hallucinatory fantasy. For all the transhumanist promises of R. U. Sirius of the soon-to-arrive wonders of smart drugs and the revolution of the totally connected world, we now can survey the ruins of the dream and see the decay of new evolutionary cultural spaces of self-publishing and ‘Information Must Be Free’ into ad-supported podcasts controlled by huge behemoths who managed to carve out their own territory just as the railroads managed to make off with most of the (admittedly stolen) lands opened up to settlers throughout the West in 19th Century America. Instead of transfigurational connectivity we have Dark Mode; rather than the (usually dystopian, but still always ‘cool’) weirdly wired world of Neruromancer and Johnny Mnemonic, we have 5G service that still seems to take forever loading the new Kingdom Rush or Township or Candy Crush or Pokemon GO updates; in lieu of acetylcholine-infused cocktails regenerating and improving brain cells, we have battery life issues solved by bigger phones and portable or wireless chargers and still not enough power; instead of a new Golden Age or at least a pleasure world for the hacker elite, we have a new set of millionaires (now called billionaires) who rule because of … well, that’s debatable.

But out of those halcyon days of promise and hope came many ridiculous works of hubris and self-duped professions of faith in the glorious days to come, and among those is this book I’ve just read, The Information Inferno, which promised (in 2001) to be “The Book That Changed The Way Books Look”. Like so many promises of the new millennium, this turned out to be wrong, dead wrong.

It was not supposed to be like this. The Information Inferno from its fiery start—the first chapter uses a new font with flames above each letter—lays out a manifesto for an entirely new New Age, an age of triumph for a new medium blending the best of the old, words and images finally joined as never before through the miracles of computers. Ah, computers! How wonderful they seemed to our ancestors of two decades ago. The incomprehensible sheer power to manipulate text and pictures placed at their fingertips! The connections between thought and science and data that once took generations which would now happen at light speed! As my friend Jim DeVito once said, “People sure were naïve when they were our parents.” Or in this case, us.

Unfortunately, the failure of this book’s program is obvious to any current reader, and should have been obvious to any reader back then. The vaunted font with the flames (you can see it on the cover of the book)—called “Whodinian Fire” and, we are informed, trademarked by “CyberCity Press”—is simply unreadable, and there is much worse to come. The unreadability turns out to be a blessing, because once we manage to comprehend the actual text, we will regret it.

Another hallmark of the Internet Age is shown by the legal fiction of “CyberCity Press”, under whose name the “Design” is copyrighted, with the text itself being copyrighted under the rubric of “CyberCity Publishing”. The copyright page has several notices of trademarks and service marks along with the usual legal boiler plate. We learn there that “The Book That Changed The Way Books Look” is a trademark of the same “CyberCity Press” (though they missed a trick and forgot to grab “The Book That Changes The Way Books Look”), along with a lot of other cute words and phrases. (I might be worried about using this legally protected trademark here if it weren’t for the fact that they (whoever ‘they’ might be) let the trademark lapse back in October of 2002, perhaps the smartest move around this whole publishing venture.) The putative author of this worldchanging opus is one “Whodini”, who (or better, which) also turns out to be a trademark of the legal entity that was created to protect this oh-so-valuable property from the hordes of scammers who, it was feared (by somebody), would rush in to grab all the valuable property and ideas being promulgated by this breathtaking and breathless genius who saw the future of publishing and design long before the rest of us clods. And thus does duality and the infinite expansion of fictive legalities make its appearance in the supposed Garden of Technology Eden, just one of a seemingly infinite number of snakes looking about for actual humans to tempt towards a knowledge of … well, what, exactly?

Well, there we run into some problems, because even if writing has been replaced by ‘content creation’, there are still some poor schmucks (like me, for instance) who have the strange idea that words do matter, that building a fancy high-tech well-designed and beautifully illustrated Website or book with simple repetitions of “lorem ipsum” isn’t quite the same as having something to say. Reading the text of The Information Inferno is not quite the same descent into idiocy that ChatGPT will bring us to, but it ain’t far from it—though we have to assume that this book at least was written at some point by an actual human being. The argument, as far as I can make it out through the dazzle and gee-whilikers whiz-bang of the design, is that long books are stupid, that there’s too much data for the fast-moving folks of the future to bother themselves with, that therefore books should present just small and easily digested bits of text for the reader, and—to top it all off and the great insight of the mythical “Whodini”—text should be combined with images for big impact! Oh, and also the text itself should be in color. Okay.

This short summary doesn’t even begin to capture all that is stupid in both the subject matter and the delivery of this hefty tome. For example, rather than ‘old’ ideas like ‘chapters’ and ‘page numbers’, the author slash designer presents his magnum opus divided into ‘gigabytes’ and ’megabytes’ and ‘soundbytes’. (The only other book published by this nebula of legal entities appears to be one Christ In Color (also called 100 Soundbytes of Christ), where—according to the (now defunct) Webpage breathlessly announcing this new book designed by Whodini—“100 famous soundbytes from the New Testament are set in a rich purple color and placed against a black background.” Ooookay.) Almost all of The Information Inferno consists of text in nearly unreadable fonts laid out (usually poorly) in front of images from old paintings and stock photos—most of which have been simply flipped at the gutter to use the same mirrored image for left and right page. This makes the book read like a gloriously produced (more on that in just a sec) version of the world’s worst PowerPoint presentation.

Van Gogh wonders if he cut off the wrong sensory organ

This use of old out-of-copyright art mirror-flipped at the gutter leads to such monstrosities (many, many times) as this two-page spread from ‘Gigabyte Eight’, featuring a classic image of Van Gogh—though in this case he has no ears, and three eyes, one of which stares out at the reader in horror as if trying to distance himself from the facile and puerile philosophy being presented in his name. Is it true that “Van Gogh taught us that madness need not be a crime, that genius can find refuge in art, and that the most effective bombs explode not in the face but in the heart”? Seriously, read the whole text, and you will know as much as you need to know about the content presented here, which, come to think of it, may not be all that far from ChatGPT quality at that.

The whole book is gloriously produced, as I said before, in that the high-res images are reproduced in striking color on heavy satin finish paper, bound in Skivertext with smyth-sewn signatures, and weighs enough to kill someone with, should the need arise. It seems a shame that such loving care was lavished on such a terrible product, but this was not the only waste of the early Internet Age. I spotted my first typo at page twelve, and gave up counting about the time Whodini gave up using normal page numbers and began labelling pages instead with ‘Megabyte’ numbers. (See the image in the paragraph above for an example.) And don’t get me wrong: proofreading is hard, and even harder in captions and headings and the like—and nearly all the text in this book is of that ilk. But … well, the text is almost unreadable at many places in this tome, which purportedly shows the wonder of the Brave New Book Publishing World, specifically because the ‘designer’ cannot stop using all the features of whatever software he has on his Apple computer. He brags that, believe it or not, he created this whole opus using solely his one computer at home. I, for one, believe it quite easily. And in the closing section of the book, which seems to be a (slightly) more cogent essay grafted on to the series of “soundbytes” that make up the bulk, wherein Whodini™ is making the case that books of the future will have text in color and will have images integrated with the text, will have indeed the text right smack dab on top of the image (Wowzers!) (This, by the way, is the grand revelation of the entire book), there follows a section of supposedly normal text the old way with just black and white text on pages with not pictures at all. The point being, look how bad this looks compared to that fantastic pictures and text combined stuff Whodini™ just showed you. I was struck, however, by the fact that the designer chose a monotype-adjacent typewriter font for this section, that he used ‘dumb quotes’, that he couldn’t even keep his margins or the gutter consistent from the first two pages to the next, and … more oddly … that between each and every sentence there was a period followed by two spaces followed by three periods followed by another space.

That is to say.  … Whodini wrote each sentence of this six-page section of the book with very odd punctuation and spacing.  … As if the normal operation of paragraphs was unknown to Whodini. … Or maybe it was two spaces around each side of the ellipses.  …  And sometimes there would not be the ellipses between sentences. I suppose because they were deemed to be connected in some way? … But mostly it was endless text in a standard but nearly as unreadable font as the bizarre ‘art’ fonts used in the rest of the book, with extra space randomly thrown in at the top of the page, or maybe the bottom, or the gutter, or I just don’t even know anymore.

So, what is the final verdict? Well, the verdict of history has been known for some time now. Even WIRED magazine has given up the crazy almost unreadable typography and design that it was so enamored with in the late ‘90s and early ‘noughts. In spite of its great pretensions and overweening self-confidence, The Information Inferno did not manage to ‘change the ways books look’. Instead, this gorgeously produced overweight tome was harbinger of the coming revolution which is still called today by the misnomer ‘Technology’, as if that explained anything of the last quarter decade. The era upon us now like a panther on our soon-to-be lifeless corpse is one where art and literature and illustration and writing have all been replaced by ‘content’—a catch-all for blather and now AI-generated nonsense which no longer has to actually be good as long as it looks good. And design and style have been swapped for flash and shiny whizzbangs of CGI and production values in service of the anti-revolution. So much effort is put into creating cool logos and fictitious business names and killer apps and viral content, that somewhere along the way the world of arts and letters was abandoned, and printing—which originally sped Luther’s Theses across Europe and continued to spread ideas around the entire world—was itself declared dead and why look into a book or magazine or newspaper when it’s all on your phone anyway? Thus it is that Whodini’s magnum dopus looks striking, is printed wonderfully on the heaviest paper you wish that book of Bosch reproductions had used, but the actual words—if and when you finally are able to read them—are banal beyond belief, the philosophy no better than the nonsense you spouted as a freshman in college sitting around a student lounge high as a kite and discussing Kierkegaard and munchies. Do not drop The Information Inferno on your feet, as it will break your toes, but pick up some other book, almost any other book will do. There’s still plenty of good stuff out there, in the books that haven’t changed the way that books look.

Friday Vocabulary

1. mansuete — mild, gentle, meek

And so, my brother, I implore you to enter this holy season with a mansuete and humble inclination, turning your thoughts away from the recent unpleasantnesses.

 

2. emmet — ant

Consider the lowly emmet, too small to have large thoughts, yet still he has concern for his community and fellows, foraging always to feed the nest, rushing to protect his queen.

 

3. musth — period of heightened aggressiveness and sexual activity in male elephants

The onset of musth is accompanied by secretion from the glands just before the eyes, and its effects can be made much more manageable by providing the afflicted elephant with a mixture of camphor and opium.

 

4. luculent — lucid, clear; brilliant

Halsey was a wonderful minister, known for his luculent exegesis and his inspiring presence.

 

5. cromlech — dolmen, megalithic tomb

Excavations outside the perimeter of the cromlech revealed no other sign of occupation, save for a small deformed needle of bronze which may have been part of a clasp, found some twenty yards from the northernmost stone.

 

6. deciduous — shedding leaves annually; impermanent, transitory

During the breeding season the tufted puffin’s bill is enlarged by deciduous horny plates.

 

7. physic — medicine, esp. a purgative, laxative

Caution must be used in the application of a strong physic, particularly if internal hemorrhage is suspected.

 

8. cathexis — investment of emotional energy upon a specific thing; such energy invested

Thus we see how an object may have an erotic cathexis, but the same object may also have a cathexis of love, which is different, perhaps even very different.

 

9. barnburner — very exciting event; radical wing of New York Democrats in 19th Century

But the opening fight proved to be the real barnburner of the night, going the full fifteen rounds with both gladiators giving as good as they got, with the nod going to Kid Romeo, who won by only a single point.

 

10. diencephalon — back of the forebrain

Only the olfactory senses pass directly to the cerebrum; all other connections between the cerebrum and the nervous system are made through the diencephalon.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(psychiatry, French)

folie à deux — delusion shared by a couple

But most later researchers believed that the lovers’ experiences were merely folie à deux, though only Professor Thornburgh declined to posit a more banal explanation for the reported phenomena.

Friday Vocabulary

1. brangle — to squabble, to noisily dispute

Though I’ve had to contend with many a bothersome neighbor, this Kenneth was the only one I ever had predisposed to brangle over any issue, no matter how small.

 

2. nonage — legal minority; immaturity

Due to this similarity in name he had had judgement passed against him whilst still he was in his nonage, and he spent hundreds in decades of pleadings to have it reversed.

 

3. mulct — to fine, to impose a penalty; to take by fraud, to swindle

The transaction fees were exorbitant, however, and when Peavey sat down and went over the books, he found that his ‘counselor’ had mulcted almost the entire principal of the trust.

 

4. batrachian — of or related to frogs and toads

The gout had given his visage a batrachian form, with his once cheery cheeks now swollen like a toad in heat.

 

5. discerption — pulling or tearing into separate pieces, rending

Just as the soul in Swedenborgian theology can be lost by discerption, so too can the human mind be rent into fractured parts.

 

6. palmer — religious pilgrim

The other cell was occupied by a palmer who had committed some unknown crime against the seigneur, though he was permitted to keep in his cell the sad branch of palm he had carried since his trek to the Holy Land.

 

7. acromegaly — disease causing growth of head, hands and feet due to disfunction of pituitary gland

The two films which most featured Hatton’s acromegaly were released only after his death from the consequences of his disease.

 

8. definiens — words which define (a dictionary entry)

Though theoretically the words the definiens can be substituted for the definiendum any place where it is used, in practice this may not always make the best logical, grammatical, or stylistic sense.

 

9. pyroclastic — consisting of or related to rocks from a volcano

Microscopic examination reveals the pyroclastic origin of these conglomerates, showing the characteristics of andesitic eruptive rock.

 

10. primogeniture — being the firstborn; inheritance through the eldest child (usu. the male)

He had that natural confidence which is often a consequence of primogeniture.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(legal Latin)

lex talionis — legal principle that the punishment should be commensurate to the crime

But the court ruled that having to stand out in the snow with his tongue affixed to the damaged light pole violated the lex talionis, and removed that part of his sentence.

Friday Vocabulary

1. pooka (also pookah) — malevolent spirit in Irish folklore, often taking the shape of a rabbit or horse or other animal

Sure and now he’s a Rationalist and a deep thinker, he is, but I remember him storming through that door there, wailing that he’d been chased all the way to the pub by a pooka!

 

2. davenport — large sofa, often a sofa bed

Chuck moved from behind his desk and threw himself across the davenport as he sighed a long and exasperated sigh.

 

3. jejune (also jejeune) — boring, uninteresting; lacking content or matter or nutritive substance; immature, juvenile

For our ‘entertainment’ we were forced to sit through a jejune puppet play performed by the family children, whose pretty voices could not hide the banality of the offering which was, if anything, less interesting than a session on the rack or being forced to look at vacation photos.

 

4. dace — small freshwater fish similar to roach or chub

Fishing for dace can be quite a challenge, as they reject most tied flies, and more success may be found with bacon or other meat.

 

5. squelch — to suppress, to put down; to make a sucking sound as of feet attempting to pull themselves from mud

You may protest all you like that this paper has squelched your views by refusing to publish your letter to the editor, but in point of fact you stand in the office of a podiatrist.

 

6. squabash — [Scots] to crush, to squash

Last night’s tempest left the hunter’s hut utterly squabashed.

 

7. rector — clergyman with charge of a parish in Episcopal Church; priest in charge of college or seminary or similar in Roman Catholic Church; parish priest with full rights to the tithes of the parish in Anglican Church

He was a beloved figure, often seen on his long walks for exercise marching across the fields of the county, but the women of the church knew that the real secret of his success was the tireless work of the rector‘s wife.

 

8. gumption — initiative; guts

It took a lot of gumption to request a job interview right after t-boning the industrialist’s Town Car.

 

9. hustings — place where political candidates make speeches; political campaigning

He was a charming wonder on the hustings, and a complete disaster in the legislature.

 

10. lagniappe — small bonus, unexpected trifling gift; extra present given with a purchase by the storeowner

He threw in a few free donut holes as a lagniappe.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. cerement (usu. pl cerements) — cerecloths for wrapping the dead; burial clothes or wrappings

But in the morning when finally we opened the innermost coffin, we discovered only a desiccated pile of cerements, as if the corpse itself had somehow dematerialized from its tomb after burial.

 

2. lour (variant of lower) — to look dark or threatening (esp. of the sky or weather); to glower

Beneath the louring skies our tiny little jeep raced pell-mell towards safety, away from Rickard and his evil minions, hoping against hope to make it to Pauley’s camp before the inevitable storm broke and unleashed its now barely restrained fury.

 

3. bootless — [archaic] useless, ineffectual, without effect or gain

Though my assault on yon ravelin may well be bootless, as you say, I’d rather fall in the attempt that sit here watching you ingest your finely minced snuff.

 

4. chequered — marked by the vicissitudes of fortune

His efforts at romance had had some chequered success, and his third marriage to the Viscountess Brumania was felt by many observers (including myself) to have been marked by real affection on both sides before her tragic death in that mysterious tiger ballooning incident.

 

5. peridromophily — science, art, or love of collecting street car transfers

Loath as I am to claim the ridiculous role of devotee of peridromophily, I still find I cannot steel myself to throw away this bus transfer I kept from a long forgotten ride upon Santa Clara County Transit way back in 1985.

 

6. pereion — [biology] thorax (in a crustacean)

This amphipod resembles nothing so much as a small beetle, with antennae swept back past the pereion in mature exemplars.

 

7. noesis — cognition; use of reason

The Dutch philologist argued that noesis was the singular tool of man alone, perhaps not raising him above animalkind, but certainly placing him somewhat apart from the mass of animate life.

 

8. picayune — trifling, insignificant; petty, carping

I do wonder at times if it is worth the bother of maintaining this picayune blog when there is very little upside to doing so.

 

9. arris — [architecture] sharp edge formed by join of two surfaces

The subtle art of the mason is on hidden display here, as the casual observer will little notice that the arris at the upper edge has been formed by creation of a concave surface for the join so that the top does not seem to loom over the observer; in fact it overhangs the bottom column by almost six feet.

 

10. musette — small knapsack; French bellows-driven bagpipe of the 17th and 18th centuries

Once you have heard the music of the musette your feet will beg to dance every time you remember its entrancing call.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(idiom)

apple scrumping — to steal apples from an orchard, to take fallen apples from another’s grounds

While I’m the last person likely to engage in a bit of apple scrumping, still, the furniture was just sitting there in the alley, needing only a tiny bit of work to make it all right again.

Book List: 800 Books

As I mentioned last week, though I just finished my 900th book (since beginning this fatuous book tracking project in June of 2015), I still owe you a book list—if not the data analysis I never seem to get around to—of the hundred books read up to Book #800, which I finished away back in June of last year (some seven years after starting my book databasing). The following list is that list, that is, Books #701 – #800. We start with a Leslie Charteris book about The Saint (“the modern day Robin Hood of Crime”, as the Vincent Price radio serial had it), and ending with the somewhat disappointing (to me) No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

I started out the eighth hundred of books with a reprint of an early Saint novel by Leslie Charteris, as mentioned above. Entitled Angels Of Doom in both the first American publication (1932) and in the International Polygonics edition I read (pictured at right), the ‘novel’ (really more like three sort-of connected short vignettes) was originally published as She Was A Lady in its initial UK release. Confusingly, it had yet a third title—The Saint Meets His Match—in later US releases, so you have to keep your eyes open to avoid buying the same book under various guises; this appears to be quite a common problem with the Saint books. The book itself is slight, though fairly fun.

Also read during this first ten books of my penultimate hundred books read was The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was every bit as good as the buzz about this book had made it out to be. Sadistic, violent sex so real you understand why it’s worth committing uncaring murder. Seriously, James M. Cain is truly one of the best craftsmen of … well, there’s the rub. If you call it ‘Noir’ or ‘Thriller’ or ‘Hardboiled’, some will object that Cain’s writing rises to the level of ‘lit-er-ot-tyoor’—and they have a valid point. But to call this ‘American Fiction’ is to underplay just how taut and tense his prose is, how he works in that cold-blooded style that Jack Black (not that Jack Black) gifted to (okay, it was stolen from) William S. Burroughs, how Cain puts into a hundred pages what most writers can’t manage to squeeze into a thousand. Seriously, read James M. Cain.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
701 9/24/21 Leslie Charteris Angels of Doom [orig. She Was A Lady, aka The Saint Meets His Match] Mystery
702 9/25/21 Norman Dodge The Month at Goodspeed’s Book Shop February 1933, Vol. IV No. 6 Books
703 9/25/21 Richard S. Prather Always Leave ‘Em Dying Mystery
704 9/27/21 Kenneth Bulmer City Under the Sea SF & Fantasy
705 9/28/21 Harriet T. Comstock Bible Stories. Retold in Words of One Syllable. Children’s
706 9/30/21 Michael Connelly À Genoux Foreign Language
707 10/1/21 James M. Cain The Postman Always Rings Twice Mystery
708 10/3/21 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Counterfeit Eye Mystery
709 10/7/21 Judith M. Tanur, ed. Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown Reference
710 10/8/21 Otis Adelbert Kline Planet Of Peril [Ace F-211] SF & Fantasy

 

Most jokey ‘spiritual’ books, whether poking fun at the unenlightened or at the seekers themselves, tend to fall pretty flat. (See, for instance, Camden Benares Zen Without Zen Masters, which preserves some of the jokes and/or wisdom of the crowd which spawned much of Robert Anton Wilson’s shtick via Malaclypse the Elder. (The latter’s Principia Discordia is an exception to the rule I’m proposing here.)) But Ram Tzu’s book of ‘spiritual’ poetry is the real deal: choice bits of insight in a mocking nougat of all-too-much awareness, enrobed in a bath of pure chocolate wisdom. Each poem is its own koan and answer. I read each one twice. And still I’m pretty sure that I didn’t really ‘get’ it.

The Tintin books are, of course, a delight, and this clever tale which smacks of The Prisoner of Zenda is one of the best, with the wonderfully illustrated travelogue sections really showing off Hergé’s beautiful lines and his style of detail—to be later earnestly mimicked by the Where’s Waldo? books. I read this (slowly) in French, but I’m sure you can find the English language version if you merely look for it. I would like to say that all of the Tintin books are fantastic, but I’ve recently read The Shooting Star.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
711 10/11/21 E.C. Bentley Trent’s Own Case Mystery
712 10/11/21 Ram Tzu No Way: A Guide for the Spiritually “Advanced” Religion
713 10/13/21 John Dickson Carr Till Death Do Us Part Mystery
10/13/21 Hergé Le Sceptre d’Ottakar Comics
714 10/15/21 Deng Ming-Dao 365 Tao: Daily Meditations Religion
715 10/16/21 G. K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday Mystery
10/16/21 Al Hartley In His Steps Comics
716 10/16/21 Norman Dodge The Month at Goodspeed’s Book Shop March 1933, Vol. IV No. 7 Books
10/16/21 Al Hartley Adventure! With The Brothers: The Cult Escape Comics
717 10/17/21 Michael Shermer How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science Religion
718 10/17/21 Jack Sharkey / Bruce W. Ronald Ultimatum In 2050 A.D. / Our Man In Space [Ace Double M-117] SF & Fantasy
719 10/20/21 Michael Dibdin, ed. The Vintage Book of Classic Crime Mystery
720 10/24/21 Charles Robert Maturin Melmoth the Wanderer Fiction

 

I’m on the fence about Boris Akunin’s series of books featuring his … detective? spy?—let’s just say his hero Fandorin. On the one hand, they present a fascinating window into a long-gone Russia of the late 19th century, the Russia of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, when the Tsar’s secret agents were everywhere, though not as omnipresent as the endless fund of bureaucrats. Akunin’s programme was to create in each novel a different exemplar of the classic thriller and mystery genres: the ratiocinating detective, the devil-may-care spy, the locked door mystery, etc. (You can always check out the author’s Wikipedia page (as I did), if you’re interested in more information.) And not only are they of historical interest, doubly so as a post-Soviet commentary not only on the storied past of Tsarist Russia but also a critique of post-Soviet mystery fiction, they are also very well-written, with tongue-in-cheek irony ladled into the story as generously as sour cream in borshcht. But The Winter Queen—the first in the series and the first I read—disappointed me in the end. Literally. I found it great, really triffic, just up to those final pages where … well, maybe you should read it yourself. You may like it more than I, and it is worth reading even with the ending.

I prefer to use these little mentions of particular books read in a pile of one hundred as a means of highlighting some of the highlights, talking about those volumes which moved me with their excellence, novels and tomes which I believe should be more widely known. Usually. But sometimes I feel I should use this space to give fair warning, which is my sad duty now. I grabbed TV Babylon (at a library book sale, if memory serves) thinking that it might hearken back to some of the wonders of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, or might rise at least to the level of Hollywood Babylon II. (Let’s put aside the fact that nowadays most critics preach that Anger’s original work is almost pure fiction: it’s a gripping read, and I have little doubt that it reflects accurately the stories that were being bandied about at the parties and dinner tables of Tinsel Town. Only nowadays are there efforts to rehabilitate Fatty Arbuckle, after all.) But TV Babylon is … nothing. Instead of digging up dirt, it merely brushes off a light dusting of dandruff. There are a handful of actual scandals here, but most of the gossip seems rehashing of episodes of Where Are They Now? and rewrites of press releases from agents trying to get their aging clients back in the news. Not worth your time.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
721 10/17/21 Mark Earls Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature Business
722 10/28/21 Boris Akunin The Winter Queen Mystery
723 10/30/21 Dudley Barker G. K. Chesterton Biography
724 11/1/21 Jeff Rovin TV Babylon Entertainment
725 11/7/21 Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre Fantômas Mystery
726 11/8/21 Norman Dodge The Month at Goodspeed’s Book Shop April 1933, Vol. IV No. 8 Books
727 11/11/21 Peter Lovesey Wobble To Death Mystery
728 11/14/21 Michael Gilbert Blood and Judgment Mystery
729 11/18/21 Paul Cain Seven Slayers Mystery
730 11/26/21 John Dickson Carr The Corpse in the Waxworks Mystery

 

Strangely enough, I first got into the stories of Damon Runyon—excepting, of course, the Guys And Dolls musical movie, which I guess we’ve all seen—through the medium of radio, or at least through the massaged mp3 files of the old-time radio program The Damon Runyon Theatre, which I listened to on my iPod, which is actually now my iPhone, so go figure. Anyway, the stories on the radio were great, but not as great as the original, and this collection shows off Mr. Runyon’s nameless narrator (he’s given a name on the radio show, for reasons unclear (to me)) and his endless fund of stories comic, tragic, and somewheres in between. Though some of the tales are heartbreaking, and several were familiar to me from the treatments for radio or for film, these stories with the clever monikers and the once hip patois kept me smiling and reading, a sucker for more.

A shameful confession: most of what I know or recall about Hindu mythology comes from reading Amar Chitra Katha comic books. I first learned of these Indian comics at one of the several used bookstores I used to work at. I grabbed a couple that came in and I was hooked. Unfortunately, like everything else in this Age of Tenuous Reality, they’ve gone digital, and the new editions (almost all reprints of the original striking series from decades ago by this point) have glossy covers, so that new readers will not experience that wonder that comes from holding (very carefully!) cheap paper stock with old school color printing to learn of stories of Hinduism as well as Indian history. The Hanuman issue is a classic, with some of the basic stories of the man-monkey-deity (maybe?), king of the monkey men.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
11/29/21 Urmila Sinha Gopal The Jester: The Clever Barber of Krishnanagar Comics
11/29/21 Mike Baron Badger #3 Comics
731 12/1/21 Otis Adelbert Kline Prince Of Peril [Ace F-259] SF & Fantasy
12/5/21 Ram Krishna Sudhakar Guru Tegh Bahadur: The Story of The Ninth Guru of the Sikhs Comics
12/6/21 Mike Baron Badger #4 Comics
732 12/7/21 Alan Burt Akers Legions of Antares SF & Fantasy
733 12/9/21 Alan Burt Akers Allies of Antares SF & Fantasy
734 12/12/21 Richard S. Prather Take A Murder, Darling Mystery
735 12/16/21 Damon Runyon Guys and Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon Fiction
736 12/17/21 Michael Crichton Congo Mystery
737 12/20/21 Jack Vance The Faceless Man SF & Fantasy
12/21/21 Anant Pai Jataka Tales: Tales of Misers Comics
12/21/21 Luis Fernandes & Ram Waeerar Tinkle: Just Like Suppandi! Comics
12/21/21 Meena Khanna Jataka Tales: Monkey Stories Comics
12/21/21 Anant Pai Panchatantra: The Brahmin and the Goat and other Stories Comics
738 12/23/21 Gavin Black Dead Man Calling Mystery
12/23/21 Anant Pai Hitopadesha Choice of Friends Comics
12/25/21 Anant Pai Birbal the Clever Comics
12/25/21 Hergé The Crab with the Golden Claws Comics
12/26/21 Anant Pai Noor Jahan Comics
12/26/21 Hanuman Comics
12/29/21 Anant Pai More Tales from the Jatakas Comics
739 12/30/21 Michael Francis Gilbert Petrella at Q Mystery
740 1/1/22 Poul Anderson Flandry Of Terra SF & Fantasy

 

One of the joys of reading old, forgotten books of so-called popular literature (As Steve Martin might once have said, “If it’s forgotten then it couldn’t have been very popular, could it?”) is finding a startling treasure of original thought. Now of course there are no original thoughts, as somebody said, and likely every think we think we think has been thunk before, and we’re just copy and pasting from the original ur-code of human brain stuff we pretend to call consciousness. But even just mixing up the elements in an interesting and novel way makes for a good read—if it’s combined with good writing. King Of The World’s Edge is just such a well-written, intriguingly clever take on an old idea: the lost legion, the alternate history or explanatory speculative fiction of lost history. In this case, a strange near-fantasy North American continent is discovered by the last British legionary who proceeds to build an empire that just might have been the progenitor of what we now call archaeological fact. Maybe. In any event, the story holds up and kept me reading to learn more of just what new craziness the author—or perhaps the putative ancient Roman narrator—could dream up next. You can pick up your own copy from around 7 bucks, if I’m reading Amazon aright. Check it out.

Murder Up My Sleeve is one of Gardner’s ‘other’ series, about the quondam adventurer Terry Clane who passed some sort of time in the Far East—as it was back then—only to be either kicked, pushed, or self-propelled out of paradise because, as he tells it, he couldn’t learn to concentrate for “more than thirty seconds”. And it’s not really a series, because there’s only one other book. Oh, and also, for today’s sensitivities it’s probably as racist as you care to make it in its depictions of the ‘Orient’ and the ‘oriental mind’. But it was a book I remembered liking when I read it in passing whilst passing time at a used book store job, and so I had to read it again. It was, if anything, much better than I remembered. I suppose I wasn’t expecting modern sensibilities from a work published in 1937, and I liked it for what it was: a fast-paced story of San Francisco’s Chinatown, which neighborhood itself in all its versions and histories and reincarnations seems to me a true work of fiction. Gardner disclaims the title of ‘novelist’ in his afterword, but this book kept me reading long past my bedtime.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
741 1/3/22 John Dickson Carr Hag’s Nook Mystery
742 1/5/22 Oscar London Doctor Generic Will See You Now : 33 Rules for Surviving Managed Care Medicine
743 1/9/22 Susanna Gregory A Plague on Both Your Houses Mystery
744 1/15/22 John Le Carré Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Mystery
745 1/16/22 Oscar London Kill as Few Patients as Possible: And 56 Other Essays on How to Be the World’s Best Doctor Medicine
746 1/23/22 H. Warner Munn King Of The World’s Edge [Ace M-512] SF & Fantasy
747 1/30/22 Oscar London From Voodoo to Viagra: The Magic of Medicine: 37 Uplifting Essays from a Doctor’s Bag of Tricks Medicine
748 1/31/22 Earl Derr Biggers The House Without a Key Mystery
749 2/1/22 Erle Stanley Gardner Murder Up My Sleeve Mystery
750 2/4/22 Anne Hillerman Spider Woman’s Daughter Mystery

 

Though Swords In The Mist is now placed 3rd in the official listings, it is—like almost all of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story collections—an assemblage of tales written over many decades, and though these are supposed to be presented in some sort of roughly ‘chronological’ (in terms of the characters’ time) order, there are often jumps back and forth in both original publication order and quality. Also as usual with the ‘Swords’ series of books, Leiber has penned new frame stories to connect the disparate tales one to each other. That said, the stories in this collection, another book I read with trepidation lest the loves of youth be shown to be follies, grow better and better the deeper one gets into the compilation. The final tale, “Adept’s Gambit”, was the earliest written of this volume, from 1947, and still posits a possible historical world for our two heroes, with the ancient city of Tyre standing in for the later fantasy city-state of Lankhmar. Though the tale doesn’t always get a lot of love from the fanboys, I found this novella to be the best of a very good collection, which combines great fun with a staggering ending.

Star King, the first book in Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series, shows Vance doing what he does best: crafting believable well-detailed worlds with all the politics, economics, history, social forces, or what-have-you that anyone could want from Science Fiction or Fantasy. Though some of the later books tended to drag for me (I believe; I still have yet to reread the series after my first experience with these in my twenties), this first book is a compelling vengeance tale, with the mystery of just how our hero will be able to revenge himself against his parents’ murderers, and indeed the added mystery of just which of the suspects is the guilty party is crucial to the intricate plot. A more immoral protagonist would have just shot them all and let God sort them out, but of course where’s the fun in that?

 

# Read Author Title Genre
751 2/6/22 John D. MacDonald Nightmare in Pink Mystery
752 2/7/22 Otto Bond Aucassin et Nicolette book II Foreign Language
753 2/14/22 Mack Reynolds The Five Way Secret Agent & Mercenary from Tomorrow SF & Fantasy
754 2/20/22 Sax Rohmer The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (aka The Mystery of Fu Manchu) Mystery
755 2/22/22 Eugene F. Krause Taxicab Geometry: An Adventure in Non-Euclidean Geometry Mathematics
756 2/26/22 Peter Tremayne Act of Mercy Mystery
2/27/22 Al Feldstein, ed. Shock SuspenStories (EC Classics #4) Comics
757 2/27/22 Murray R. Spiegel Schaum’s Outline of Theory and Problems of Statistics Mathematics
758 2/28/22 George C. Daughan If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy—From the Revolution to the War of 1812 Militaria
759 3/5/22 Fritz Leiber Swords in the Mist SF & Fantasy
760 3/8/22 Jack Vance Star King SF & Fantasy

 

Ross Macdonald’s first mystery novel under half of that name (previously he’d been using his birth name Kenneth Millar; The Moving Target (the original title for this book that I’m gonna get around to discussing here in just a sec) was published under the pseudonym John Macdonald—and yes, there’s an entirely different writer John D. MacDonald … well, it can be confusing: one’s stuff is set in California, the other in Florida)—before eventually settling on Ross Macdonald for the Lew Archer series) sees his hard-boiled detective traipsing around the fictional town of Santa Teresa in the late ’40s. It is a taut and sparse novel of an almost empty post-war southern California. I read the movie tie-in edition, which was retitled without permission (according to the all-knowing Wikipedia) Harper, a double travesty in that, of course, Macdonald’s hero is named Archer and Harper is only the name for Paul Newman’s character in the film based on the novel. It’s an excellent movie, by the way. But the book is excellenter.

Back a couple of lifetimes ago, I used to have a friendly argument with my old boss Paul at the used bookstore I worked at for maybe the longest, about whether The Anubis Gates or Dinner At Deviant’s Palace was the better Tim Powers book. Now don’t get me wrong: almost anything by Powers is terrific, and both of those two novels are some of his best. But … well, time passes, and memory fades (at least mine does), and I found myself talking about these books, but realized that I couldn’t quite be sure if I was speaking truth or not, having forgotten most everything from those long-ago days of youth. So I made up my mind to reread them both, starting with Anubis Gates. And … you know? … I misremembered so much that it was almost like reading a brand new work. And what a tremendous work it is. I think my daughter will like it a lot, and I wonder what she’ll think of Deviant’s Palace. But anyway, this is a staggering book, a tour de force, as they say. Its only flaw—if flaw it has—is that it’s just a tetch too arch, a little too good for its own good. Oh, and I have now reread the other book. I was right; Paul was wrong. (He also preferred V For Vendetta to The Watchmen, so … What’re ya gonna do?)

 

# Read Author Title Genre
761 3/9/22 Ross Macdonald Harper (aka The Moving Target) Mystery
762 3/12/22 Steven Saylor The Venus Throw Mystery
763 3/13/22 Iain Pears Giotto’s Hand Mystery
764 3/16/22 Robert van Gulik The Chinese Bell Murders Mystery
765 3/20/22 Dorothy L. Sayers Clouds of Witness Mystery
3/21/22 Mike Baron & Steve Rude Nexus: One Comics
766 3/26/22 Donna Leon A Noble Radiance Mystery
767 3/27/22 Tim Powers The Anubis Gates SF & Fantasy
768 3/27/22 Robin Heath Stonehenge History
769 3/28/22 Phoebe Atwood Taylor Spring Harrowing Mystery
770 4/3/22 Susanna Gregory An Unholy Alliance Mystery

 

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises to me of this century of books, Silver Metal Lover is the kind of book I don’t like by an author who has disappointed me before. I was only reading it prior to getting rid of it, as I’d already done with Lycanthia, and … I loved it! It’s basically a silly little tale about a teenaged girl who gets her own robot or android simulacrum and falls in love with it and—surprise!—the robot falls in love with her, too. But it is pitch perfect. At every point along the sometimes painful, sometimes romantic coming-of-age story, Ms. Lee manages flawlessly to relate the pain and effervescent wildness of an adolescent on the verge of womanhood in the not-so-bizarre future where the haves have more and the have nots have hardly even hope.

Since I brought up The Anubis Gates earlier, it’s only fitting that I highlight Dinner At Deviant’s Palace, which I read as a follow-up. And it really is the best post-apocalyptic Los Angeles novel, hands down. At least until I get around to re-reading Dr. Adder. I was blessed to have forgotten much of the specific incidents of the book, so that I once more could experience the harrowing journey of Gregorio Rivas into the very heart of the bizarre cult-kingdom of … well, you really should read the book. With a rock ‘n’ roll world weariness that hearkens back more to the late ’70s than to the cyberpunk ’80s when Tim Powers wrote this work, the failed lands of neo-California are a frightening and treacherous place, well worth a visit.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
771 4/9/22 Boris Akunin The Turkish Gambit Mystery
772 4/17/22 E. C. Tubb / Juanita Coulson The Winds Of Gath / Crisis On Cheiron [Ace Double H-27] SF & Fantasy
773 4/18/22 Miguel De Cervantes Don Quijote Fiction
774 4/18/22 Alexander Chancellor Some Times in America: And a Life in a Year at the New Yorker Biography
775 4/19/22 Karen Elizabeth Gordon Torn Wings and Faux Pas: A Flashbook of Style, a Beastly Guide Through the Writer’s Labyrinth Language
776 4/23/22 Tanith Lee Silver Metal Lover SF & Fantasy
4/24/22 Anant Pai Mahabharata: The Victorious Pandavas (Karna In Command / The Kurus Routed / After The War) Comics
777 4/26/22 Baroness Orczy The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Classic Detective Stories Mystery
4/29/22 William M. Gaines, ed. Weird Science (EC Classics, #12) Comics
778 4/30/22 Tim Powers Dinner At Deviant’s Palace SF & Fantasy
779 4/30/22 Melissa Rossi What Every American Should Know About Who’s Really Running the World Social Science
780 4/30/22 Seymour Lipschutz Set Theory: Schaum’s Outline Series Mathematics

 

Charles Martin provides immense insight into Catullus in a volume from the Hermes Books series on notable ancient authors from the Yale University Press. Balancing extreme erudition with truly poetic sensibility, Martin shows the oft castigated poet to be a true ancestor of our supposedly modern interior world view, and shows as well why literary criticism when well done is perhaps the finest branch of nonfiction writing. (With apologies to natural history.) His analysis of the Lesbia poems and their author, while perhaps less titillating than Steven Saylor’s reading in the historical mystery The Venus Throw (which I must shamefacedly admit was the impetus for reading Martin’s Catullus), is perceptive and humane. I cannot comment on his argument for the nested ordering of the various poems themselves, being an uneducated bumpkin at best in this department, and knowing no Latin, but Martin presents his case with all the vigor that either academia or this most vigorous Roman poet could require.

You likely are quite tired of me telling you just how splendid and well written the works of Michael Gilbert are. And I almost expect too much excellence whenever I pick up one of his thrillers or mysteries, because they are all so fantastically good. But my high expectations are almost always met and surpassed. And this book, The Etruscan Net, is splendidly good. Give Gilbert a try; I think you will like him. And if you do, you’re in luck: he’s written dozens of superior novels for you to enjoy.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
781 5/1/22 Erma Bombeck The Grass Is Always Greener Over The Septic Tank Humor
782 5/4/22 Michael Gregorio Critique of Criminal Reason Mystery
5/4/22 Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., ed. Seduction of the Innocent #4 Comics
783 5/6/22 Edward Packard The Cave of Time (Choose Your Own Adventure #1) Children’s
784 5/6/22 Charles Martin Catullus Literary Criticism
785 5/7/22 Carlton Joyce Coeds Three Erotica
5/7/22 William M. Gaines, ed. Weird Fantasy (EC Classics #5) Comics
786 5/7/22 Jon & Robin Valencic The Complete Whale Watchers Guide Nature
787 5/8/22 Max Brand The Legend of Thunder Moon Western
788 5/14/22 Michael Gilbert The Etruscan Net [aka The Family Tomb] Mystery
789 5/15/22 Kenneth Anger Hollywood Babylon Entertainment
790 5/19/22 John Maddox Roberts The King’s Gambit Mystery

 

I plucked this volume down from the shelf because I needed to remind myself just what the original tale of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” consisted of, after having watched—more or less—the movie with most of that name with Johnny Depp playing the role of Inspector Gadget, I mean Mr. Magoo, I mean … oh, what do I mean? In any event, ’twas a felicitous film in spite of the fact that once again Depp didn’t have much chemistry even with himself, for I found myself enthralled at the feet of one of the original literary giants of our nation. I could rhapsodize over the beauties of the Hudson Valley as portrayed in “Sleepy Hollow” or “Rip Van Winkle”, or sigh over the long lost treasures of the Alhambra as reported by Washington Irving. But our author had the happy misfortune to have his first work be his best: Knickerbocker’s History of New York, which is contained in its entirety in this Modern Library book, Selected Writings of Washington Irving. I could go on for days, weeks, months quoting this funny book, would almost declaim the entire work from one end to the other, just to hear the delicious, sharp, droll, wry, caustic, and dry language of Mr. Irving. Perhaps not everyone will enjoy it as much as I did, but I have hardly found any funnier book from start to finish in the English language.

We’ll end this listing with a shout-out to Mike Davis, whose history of the city of Angels, Los Angeles, City of Quartz, was the penultimate book in the 8th hundred set of books I read since I started keeping track. An inimitable sociologist with a keen eye and a clear view of political reality, the late Mr. Davis turns his eye to one of the weirder cities on the planet in this grouping of extended essays focusing on various aspects of LA and its … worldview? ethos? gestalt? I especially appreciated the opening section, with its history of the prehistory of the current (up to the early ’90s that is, when this book appeared) state of the city that is its own state of mind. From the boosters to the movie magicians to the strange contortions of the wartime and warring city, Mike Davis brings to his polemic something rare nowadays in belles lettres in America: sources, and consideration of opposing viewpoints. His prose is tight, his arguments are fair, and his understanding is deep. Sadly, Davis passed away only recently, ending a long battle with cancer, leaving the fight unwillingly, but having given it his all.

 

# Read Author Title Genre
791 5/20/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat Mystery
792 5/21/22 Erle Stanley Gardner The Case Of The Sleepwalker’s Niece Mystery
793 5/21/22 Washington Irving Selected Writings of Washington Irving Fiction
794 5/22/22 Ellis Peters An Excellent Mystery Mystery
795 5/25/22 Volker Kutscher Babylon Berlin Mystery
796 5/28/22 Karin Fossum He Who Fears The Wolf Mystery
797 6/3/22 Sax Rohmer Fu Manchu [The Hand of Fu Manchu / The Return of Fu Manchu / The Yellow Claw / Dope] Mystery
798 6/6/22 Paul Lieberman Gangster Squad: Covert Cop, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles True Crime
799 6/7/22 Mike Davis City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles Social Science
800 6/9/22 Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men Fiction

 

This set of a hundred books found me reading more and more mysteries: almost half of the books (non-comics) that I read. Still, I found time to read a few other works in a few other genres, including this ‘novel’ which pretended to be a dirty book but was more Nancy Drew gets lucky than Peyton Place. Coeds Three is one of many typical books of its ilk from the ’60s, promising more on its cover than it really could ever deliver. It wasn’t the only turkey in this set of 100, but it does have one of the sexier covers.

 

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

Friday Vocabulary

1. confusticate — [slang] to perplex, to bother, to confuse

With fourteen voices clamoring at him all at once demanding this and that and the other, Kip was so confusticated that he put the towels in the microwave and the sausages in the sink.

 

2. umbel — [botany] inflorescence of short flower stalks radiating from a common center

Poison hemlock produces quite lovely umbels of white flowers.

 

3. barouche — four-wheeled horse carriage with facing seats for two couples, having a collapsible top over the rear seat and a separate bench seat for the driver

In the back of the barouche with the top down I beheld two of the most gorgeous women in matching green satin dresses and hats.

 

4. gall — to chafe, to make sore by rubbing; to vex, to harass

Young Russell wore new boots more appropriate for a riding party than for climbing, and by the end of the first day the skin over his Achilles’ tendon was badly galled.

 

5. primeval — of or related to the first age of the world; ancient; primitive

And there they lived in this primeval glade, unsullied by the modern contrivances of modesty and sin.

 

6. Hatti-sherif — Turkish government decree bearing Sultanic mark making it irrevocable

Serbian independence was first granted official recognition in the Hatti-sherif of 1829, a concession by Turkey in consequence of the Treaty of Adrianople.

 

7. contradistinction — distinguishing by contrast or opposition

In contradistinction to most dancing at raves, which really can be done without any other person present, slam dancing is a joint activity, requiring, if not an actual partner, at least another dancer (one hopes!) to slam against.

 

8. maar — crater-shaped landform caused by volcanic explosion

Though it is easy to confuse a maar with an impact crater, the former are usually fairly small features, no wider than half a mile in most instances.

 

9. marish — marsh

The owner of the marish refused all culpability for the lost animals, claiming that if the shepherds could not keep their charges from his treacherous land it was not his fault.

 

10. prosopagnosia — inability to recognize faces, esp. of familiar people

Some view Capgras syndrome as similar to prosopagnosia, though of course actual physical trauma—lesion to the minor occipital lobe—is present in many if not most cases of the latter.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. luthier — maker of stringed instruments

In addition to being a talented songwriter in her own right, Shelsea is also a trained luthier, having learned the craft from her uncle who crafted guitars and mandolins for the greats of the Grand Ol’ Opry.

 

2. nard — scented balsam derived from the Himalayan spikenard

In the cramped room the aromas of cedar and nard lifted the young apprentice’s spirits, seeming to take him away from Pinchbeck Alley to distant cities of the east and far markets of mysterious spices and unknown fruits.

 

3. prank — to dress up, to bedeck

She so pranked herself with flowers and ribbons that the other passengers hardly recognized the timid maid who had first appeared before them in homespun dresses.

 

4. justle — variant of jostle

Here you can behold the various clerks justling for a place closest to the teller window, hoping to have their actions entered in the record first, and thus gaining credit with their respective houses.

 

5. deciduous tooth — mammalian tooth later replaced by a permanent tooth, milk tooth

After appearance the deciduous teeth continue to change, losing their roots and becoming thin and small until their bottom becomes only a point.

 

6. pard — [archaic] leopard

He moved with the dark feline grace of the pard on the hunt, with an economy of movement that gave no sign of the tense strength bound within his loins.

 

7. diegetic — of a narration or narrative, told by a narrator; of events or objects within the world of a story

You have to remember that every time dad revealed to me these fascinating stories of his youth, he was compelled to interrupt them with diegetic criticism of his own stupidity and callow foolishness at each juncture of what to me was a miraculously interesting life.

 

8. duppy — malevolent spirit

All of the bedclothes and clothes of the dearly departed were burned outside the house, so that a returning duppy would not feel welcome in his former abode.

 

9. hyphema — accumulation of blood within the front of the eyeball

After the fight he suffered a serious hyphema in his left eye and the doctor prescribed complete bed rest for a week.

 

10. percept — object of perception; mental ‘thing’ resulting from perception

You can argue that I experience the percept ‘orange’ when looking at that fruit, but I am only convinced I want to taste it instead of just looking at it.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Irish)

make a hames of — to spoil or ruin through clumsiness, make a mess of

If you forget the keys tomorrow you’ll make a hames of the whole job, so see that you don’t.

Friday Vocabulary

1. soubise — onion sauce

For this delicate filet an equally delicate soubise is the perfect accompaniment, the sauce also serving to highlight the flavor of the fresh leeks.

 

2. prescind — to cut off; to separate in thought, to consider apart

But as Peirce points out, one cannot prescind color from space or objects, a consideration which had troubled the ancient School of Names in the time of Confucius.

 

3. cerise — bright red

For their trip he affected the same nautical look so beloved of L. Ron Hubbard, donning a captain’s cap, blue blazer, and an cerise ascot.

 

4. avaunt — [archaic] begone, go away

Avaunt thee, vile dog!

 

5. draughts — [British] checkers

To relieve some of the boredom while we waited for the rescue party to arrive, we fashioned a board and pieces from the ruined suitcase and played game after game of draughts.

 

6. ladybird — variant for ladybug

Just before I knocked at the door a ladybird alighted on my already outstretched hand, which I took as a sign of good favor for my endeavors.

 

7. scabrid — rough surfaced

The touch of his scabrid forefinger upon my cheek was almost more than I could stand.

 

8. susurration — whisper; rustling

Finally the savage fury of the storm abated and the rains ceased, leaving behind an eerie quiet made only more uncanny by the gentle susurration of the dying winds through the eucalyptus overhead.

 

9. pareidolia — misperception of meaningful patterns where none exist

It’s one thing to see a duck or a rabbit in the clouds, but it’s near lunatic pareidolia to find a message in Morse Code in the random abrasions on your old blue jeans.

 

10. fetiparous (also foetiparous) — [biology] giving birth before the young are fully developed

One of the advantages of fetiparous marsupials is the reduction of harm to the mother caused by long pregnancies during seasons bereft of food.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British)

curate’s egg — something asserted to be both bad and good, but which is entirely awful

Much though I would like to proclaim this volume of short stories to be a mixed bag, a curate’s egg of fiction, my duty as a reviewer compels me to confess that it is a terrible collection of some of the worst ‘writing’ I have suffered through in years.

900 Books

Yesterday I finished my 900th book, counting back from the time when my wife gave me a barcode scanner and a book database and I started keeping track of such things, back in 2015.

My 900th book (as usual discounting comic books and graphic novels from my ‘official’ count, of which I’ve read some 118 (at last count)) was an early (almost her earliest) book of poetry from the acclaimed poet of Decatur, Athens, and Athens, A. E. Stallings: Hapax. I’ve liked Stallings’s work since I stumbled upon her poem “Alice, Bewildered” at the Poetry Foundation website—they no longer ‘carry’ it, but you can read it (as of today, 25 February 2023) here. Alice, of course, is one of my favorite characters from literature, and shows up as a guise of the poet in several of her works. (Her initial initial ‘A.’ hides the name Alicia, which is cognate, I suppose. I have no idea if she keeps the initials in homage to Housman, or for the usual reason, or if she just likes Russian style.) The book Hapax is a mixed bag, showing the poet trying to find her punctilious style. I liked the autobiographical section in the beginning the best, though I may just be prejudiced by my own foolish fulsome nostalgia for the South that is no more and likely never was. It’s a good book of poetry all through however; Joe Bob says check it out.

In this last set of a hundred books, once again, I’ve been reading a lot—a whole lot—of mysteries. Almost half of these books (as usual, setting aside the comic books and graphic novels I read) were in the Mystery & Thriller genre. Partly this is acause I’m reading most of my books at work, during my lunch, and that means light reading. Partly it’s because the deeper books take longer to read, maybe. [All of this paragraph up to now was simply copied from my last report on reading my 800th book.]

My reading pace was about the same as for the previous century of books: 258 days to read this last hundred, compared to 259 days for the set before. I see upon examination that I have not only not done any analysis of my previous set of hundred books read, I haven’t even given you the list! I’ll try to make that up to you over my weekend, which will start tomorrow

   1 Book per 2.58 Days   

Hoping to hit you soon with some real data, some real book lists….