Category: Books

The Wander’s Havamal is a clean, easy read. The language is crisp and contemporary, heads and tails clearer than the public domain translations on the internet.

My only quibble is that they chose to separate the poetry from the explanitory notes. I understand why endnotes are necessary for ebooks, but I hate splitting this information between separate pages in physical books. Ideally, they could have followed John Minford’s Art of War, rendering the translation twice, cleanly and then with commentary.

That said, the commentary is worth reading. Dr. Crawford is a linguist so his notes are centered around the language and the challenges of translation, providing a glimpse into the challenges in bringing us the wisdom of the past.

In all, this is a great translation for a modern reader. I plan on borrowing it again from the library to go through the commentary in detail. However, I don’t think I’ll be picking up my own physical copy until it is reformatted.

Whatever you do, go check out Crawford’s unique rendition of the first 79 stanzas in the Cowboy Havamal.

I have to admit that I haven’t revisited the poem much since I first wrote this post. However, this remains “on the rotation” along with Ecclesiastes, Tao Te Ching, Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, and the I Ching. There is too much to read out there. Of the making of books, there is no end – even if we limit the library to texts older than a millennium!

Conversely, it is terrifying that this poem only survived via one book in Iceland. One rues what wisdom has disappeared through the ages, like tears in rain.

Yet again, we moderns are drowning in knowledge. Fate has placed us in an age with all the world’s wisdom at our fingertips and then gave us the addictive algorithm of social media. The gods show no shame, toying with mortal fools in this technological era.

The Pareto principle states that you get 80% of the value from 20% of the effort. In this case, the book is literally 20% the size of the original and 10% the cost of the full size reproductions.

Yes, you get 80% of the value out of the book. The images cutouts are lovely and paper cutouts are perfectly suited for miniaturization since they aren’t very detailed. Furthermore, Matisse hand wrote his text in a huge script which still looked large in this compact edition. As a book, there was minimal translation in making it a smaller book.

However, art isn’t an 80-20 game.

Something doesn’t feel quite right with the book. It’s partly because the translation was located in a separate section. Even though Matisse claims that the writing was not important, flipping back and forth detracted from the experience. The publisher also reformatted this reprint to be in a landscape format there are four pages visible on each spread. Even worse, the publisher messed around with the spreads and altered the page order.

The biggest problem is that when you are so tantalizingly close to the artist’s original intentions, its impossible to shake the disappointment of not crossing the finish line. In this case the missing 20% is a big deal. Ideally, an English edition would have been printed full size with a slightly expanded page size to include a small typeset translation of the writing on each page.

Then again, we live in a world of limits. This little edition was still a good deal. The full size editions are out of print and cost a few hundred dollars on the secondary market. Jazz is great, but not at that price. I’ll just wait for the next publisher to print a fresh batch of full size copies.

I should note that my edition is now personalized. I was reading Jazz and also sketching my boy playing with his toys in the playroom. It was late at night and I fell asleep on the carpet. He stopped playing, found the pencil, opened up the closest book, and went to work.

In 2020, I decided to purchase only twelve books. I cheated a little and added a few caveats and provisos to skirt around this restriction, but I really didn’t purchase that many books last year.

Halfway in to 2021, I thought it would be interesting to look at my purchases and see how it went. Spoiler alert: my predictions of what “future self” will want to read are quite poor. (No kidding, look at the boxes of books in the garage).

2020, Read

1. Jazz, Henri Matisse. Excellent book, in spite of the small format of the edition that was available.
2. Pearls Goes Hollywood, Stephan Pastis. I always purchase the new Pearl treasuries. I adore Pastis’ warm cynical take on life.
3. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. The novel didn’t hold up very well since it was particularly crass in its dismissal of marginalized groups. The explosion of energy that I experienced on first reading, now feels like a temper tantrum fifteen years later. There are enough classics in noir that I will be a bit choosier for future reading.
4. The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler.
5. Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler. These two novels blend together in my memory. They have both held up better than his Chandler’s novel, even if they include some parts that would offend the touchier sensibilities of contemporary times. I’m glad I did a retrospective of my three favorite novels in the Chandler oeuvre, but I think I’ve outgrown them.
6. Cheddar, Gordon Edgar. An fun exploration of cheese, industrialization, and America. Purchased at deep discount from a big Chelsea Green Publishing House sale.
7. Landfill, Tim Dee. A lively meditation on of birdwatching, science, and its subjects. Purchased on deep discount from a big Chelsea Green Publishing House sale.
8. What’s Michael Fatcat Collection (vol 1), Makoto Kobayashi. I bought this because my daughter had started reading a lot of Peanuts last summer, but I think I’ll wait a little bit before giving it to her.

2020, Unread

1. Krazy Kat (1916-1918), George Herriman. This series is legendary and I’m debating whether to collect the entire set. I got the first one, but since I haven’t cracked it open in the past year, maybe it is not worth trying to catch them all.
2. The Art of Happiness, Epicurus, George K. Strodach (translator). I was curious about his philosophy, but Epicurus turned out to be heavily focused on his speculations concerning physical physics. I quickly lost interest. I might power through the rest of the book at some point, just to get the feather in the cap.
3. Growing Food in a Drier Hotter Land, Gary Nabhan. I was absolutely smitten by his first book The Desert Smells like Rain, which I discovered via an environmental literature course syllabus. Purchased as part of a big Chelsea Green Publishing House sale.
4. Being Salmon, Being Human, Martin Lee Mueller. The premise sounds interesting and I hope to read this eventually though in spite of my recent turn towards ancient wisdom literature. This was on deep discount as part of a big Chelsea Green Publishing House sale.

2020 Cheats
(not counted against the limit)

1. Mutts Sundays, Patrick McDonnell. With my daughter’s comics obsession I wanted her to read some Mutts to go with her Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes.
2. Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat. An instant classic, I purchased it at the start of the quarantine (having previously read it at the library) but I haven’t referenced it a single time.
3. The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz. I read the a library copy during quarantine and wanted my own copy. I purchased it as part of a big Chelsea Green Publishing House sale, but haven’t referenced it either.

2021 Purchases

1. The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book, James D’Amato. I haven’t done anything with this book beyond wrapping it up as an extra birthday present for my daughter.
2. Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg. I liked the library ebook so much that I immediately bought my own hardcopy. Like the Art of Fermentation, I haven’t cracked the cover a second time.
3. Zhuangzi (inner chapters), Burton Watson (translator). This is universally acclaimed as a translation and I didn’t want to read this on the phone.
4. Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Sunzi, Ralph D. Sawyer (translator). This is a hefty book! I wanted the breadth of classical thought on this matter and by golly I got it. Now I need to read it.
5. The Art of War, Sunzi, John Minford (translator). I didn’t realize that I had already listened to this book on tape. Then again, it’s hard to go wrong with a spare copy of Sunzi.
6. Tao Te Ching, Laozi, John Minford (translator). I read half of this book before being forced to return it to the library. I liked the extensive commentary so I decided to get my own copy.
7. Tao Te Ching, Laozi, Ursula K. Le Guin (translator). I’ve previously written about my theory about accomplished authors as translators. I also wanted a copy that wasn’t dense with commentary. This book has been the inaugural devotional on my regular I Ching practice.
8. I Ching, King Wen, John Minford (translator). I liked Minford so much as a translator on his other two works that I decided to start my I Ching journey with his translation.
9. I Ching, King Wen, Helmut Wilhelm / Cary Baynes (translators). This is the classic that made it a fad in the the artsy circles in the mid-20th century. Since it was good enough for Merce Cunningham and John Cage, I felt I should get my own hardcopy.
10. I Ching, King Wen, Richard Lynn (translator). This translation is well regarded, especially in a very favorable review SJ Marshall of Biroco.com, calling it the yin to the yang of the Wilhem/Baynes translation. Given my big kick, I thought it was worth investing a slot to check it out.
11. China, Hiroji Kubota. His Portrait of America was so good, I had to see how he handled with China just as the nation started its stratospheric ascent into becoming a superpower. I also thought it would be good for the kids to see the nation that their mother came from.
12. Out of the East, Hiroji Kubota. This was a snap amazon algorithm purchase. I fear this may be a lesser work, since the price was so low, but I liked his work enough to take a flier on it.

Books on Deck

1. The next Pearls Before Swine treasury. I’m not going to count it against the limit next time, since it is a regular purchase every 18 months.
2. What’s Michael Fatcat Collection, Volume 2. It would be ridiculous not to complete the omnibus pairing. This will also not count against my limit.
3. Calvin and Hobbes, complete box set. I have the first half of Bill Watterson’s run in trade paperback format. I think Christmas will be when I buy the series (and I suspect Christmas 2022 will be when I pick up the Far Side Collection).
4. Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino. Depending on how generous I’m feeling towards myself, I’m thinking about also buying the Visconti and Marseilles Tarot decks to go with the book. Maybe as a self-Christmas Present.
5. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, Will Buckingham. He wrote a great article about the I Ching, and as a fellow fan of Calvino, I’m curious to read his work. However, I’m going to wait till I’ve caught up to the calendar and see if I’m still into the I Ching before making such a purchase (same goes for Changing, a book of I Ching related poetry Richard Berengarten).
6. Bhagavad Gita. I’ve been going through everything that is available at the library that discusses this book. Once I’ve completed project, I may purchase a hardcopy (though my lack of use for previous “follow up” purchases gives me pause). I’m eyeballing the Easwaran translation, based on a recommendation on a podcast. If I get frisky, maybe I’ll check out Easwaran’s 3 volume detailed commentary.

In all, I have plenty of reading to do, just from this list. This list highlights why I must stop purchasing books “on spec” and only buy one at a time. When I go beyond the immediate future, I’m stuck with a great book among boxes of books in the garage that haven’t been read.

After writing this draft, Libby stopped syncing across my iOS devices so I reset the devices. I had multiple tagged items that weren’t synced, and the only way to rescue the tags were to export them and then manually re-tag them after fixing the glitch. This exercise highlighted how much my interests had drifted just over a few months. All these tags carried the lingering aura of past desire, but I’ve already lost interest in almost all of them.

Given my fondness for organizing things, I followed up that exercise with sorting out my Amazon lists. These lists go back a decade, so this was an exercise in reliving the past on steroids. I’m certain all the books I listed are worthy of my time, but I’m also realizing that I’ll most likely never read any of them. The next step would be to fully relinquish and delete their entries. I’m not ready to do that just yet, but time is not my friend. I need to come to grips with the fact that there are only about 441 books left in my lifetime (12 x 36.75).

I picked up the first book of this two volume omnibus early last year, but I only got around to reading it at the start of this summer. As implied in the title, the series is built upon Michael, a striped tabby who simultaneously inhabits multiple lives. His main world includes a wife and child, but different episodes has him living other households. It isn’t that Michael jumps from place to place, this is a manga of of parallel universes that don’t interact with each other.

Along with Michael are other recurring characters, including a big, fat nemesis named Catzilla, a yakuza boss who is scared that his cat fancy will be outed and his primary rival from the other gang who is cat-phobic, a veterinarian who is on the lam (falsely accused of murder), and a dude-bro who is trying to train his cat to play fetch.

With multiple settings to play with, Kobayashi will occasionally dip into absurdist sequences in alternate realities, including a memorable episode where one of Michael’s owner speculates about Michael’s dreams (spun into a yarn about getting scammed at a nightclub). This series works because of the balance of mundane slices of life with pets and such absurdist moments.

Over the years, I had picked up a couple random thin What’s Michael collections but never read them in sequence. Since each of these shorter books are themselves collections of short vignettes, I didn’t realize that Kobayshi was developing a continuity over the progress of this series. Reading this first volume made me aware of my oversight and it has been delightful to see him slowly populate this world. I’ll be curious what he will do with these multiple threads in the second volume of this omnibus.

Aside from a couple panels, the book generally is appropriate for kids except for our However, I can’t help my American squeamishness about such subjects, so I’ll hold off on giving her this book for maybe another couple years, partly because she has plenty of other comics. Even so, I’ll most likely pick up the second volume of this omnibus (coming out in late August). I ant to complete the pairing to see how he ties up the loose ends with this manga’s run.

After reading this novel, I have to admit that I’m good on Chandler for a bit. He’s stylish and enjoyable, but my current woke self can only handle so many offensive passages from seven decades ago. Plus, I’ve had enough plot twists and turns to keep me satisfied for a while. The gratuitousness of the plot twists are feel especially over the top because Phillip Marlowe is a Mary Sue; he’s a little too perfect underneath his gruff exterior.

Even so, this book holds up for what it is. The Big Sleep is a blast of energy, the Long Goodbye is a bit of an forelorn meditation, and Farewell my Lovely is beautiful ode to a long lost Los Angeles.

Chandler painted a complete portrait of a city. You feel the heat of the sidewalk, the cold of the beach, the muggy air of Downtown before air conditioning. It’s not just Chandler of course, his words are mixed in the mind’s eye with all the iconic Hollywood images from that era. But still, its his book and he’s placed you in a unified total environment.

I suspect I’ll be revisiting this book at some point, if only for nostalgia’s sake. A nostalgia for world that came and went thirty years before my birth.

After rereading these books and writing this post months ago, I’ve kept my threat in the first paragraph. I’ve avoided mysteries by slipping into an esoteric spiritual bent. Then again, philosophy encapsulates just as many counterintuitive twists and turns as a detective novel. Its just at a logical-cosmic level. I wonder when the wheel will turn and I’m back to reading some Agatha Christie.

When I started rereading this book, I was prepared to dislike the experience, thinking that the new me was out of sync with the old me.

The first time I read the Big Sleep, it felt like an explosion of energy, but a passage of a decade made it feel like the spazmatic tantrums of a frustrated man. Even though there are still some problematic passages in The Long Goodbye, and this book takes a while to get rolling, I found that it held up to my high regard over the past decade.

This book is a powerful, scathing indictment of the wealthy folks in “Idle Valley”. However, it also holds a certain charm. Chandler took an elegiac tone, musing upon the debasement of the upper class, mirrored in Phillip Marlowe’s relationship with Terry Lennox. In portraying the rottenness of the residents of Idle Valley, Chandler paints them as actors trapped within the circumstances of their making, birds of their own gilded cages. The players in the novel have created a dysfunctional microcosm within wealthy Los Angeles of mid-century America.

The book is a critique of our corrupt nation, the dynamics of our high society, and the individuals who create it. Chandler carefully walks the fine line between being sympathetic and judgmental towards the plights of his characters. As with much great art, the ambivalence is what makes this book such a lovely read.

While editing this post, I was reminded of the Robert Altman movie adaptation that I watched around the time I first read these books (rest in peace, Blockbuster). While I can’t remember any details except for one particularly violent scene, I recall that it was an intriguing counter-intuitive take on noir. I’m not surprised it did poorly in the box office. The movie was a slow burn that didn’t feel like it took you anywhere. Such moodiness made it feel all the more brilliant for a wannabe auteur like me.

The publisher Chelsea Green had a huge sale at the end of fall last year. My main goals were The Art of Fermentation and the Growing Things to Eat in a Hotter Drier Land, but I also picked up a few deeply discounted books that caught my eye.

While big books are naturally the publisher’s flagships, it was the selection of interesting quirky books like Cheddar and Landfill that cemented my admiration of Chelsea Green. I am normally quick to unsubscribe from newsletters, but I’ve kept my subscription because their catalog comfortably inhabits the intersection of ecology and personal activity, with their emphasis on cookbooks, natural building, and agriculture.

As in boardgaming, big publishers gobble up the industry but the niche publishers have a brand because they hold a point of view. Their imprint stands for something. Even though I don’t read their blog posts, I stay subscribed because I don’t want to miss hearing about a sale.

As for the book itself, my first thought is that the author was the perfect person to write this book. His role is to be a better version of a reader who would be interested in a book solely about one type of cheese. Like me, he comes from the city but really knows his knows cheese. He’s a professional but not totally divorced from agriculture. A foodie but renowned enough to be judging food competitions. He is interested in the world around us but isn’t a snob. He has opinions but is not dogmatic. His anecdotes nicely captures in the Bay Area, the fun, the cost, the tensions.

His writing style was bit more casual than I expected, but after getting comfortable with his voice, Cheddar was a fun quick read.

The book is highly recommended if you are interested in our society’s tense personal relationship with food. His ruminations on cheddar follow the journey of our nation, from its agricultural origins through factory development into pure full blown mechanization, and then back to the new pastoral agricultural foodie myth.

As with many good non-fiction books, Cheddar is ultimately a story about us.

The last paragraph in my first draft was, “Sure would be nice to get my hands on a cloth wrapped cheddar, but that would involve going into a grocery store right in the midst of a nasty pandemic.” Now that the vaccine has rolled out en masse in America, this statement would no longer be applicable for most folks. However my wife wants to stay in the cave until the kids gets their vaccines, pushing us to the end of the year. So my wait continues.