Category: Notes

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Unfortunately, my daughter got my genes for nearsightedness. In her teenage years, my wife managed to avoid getting glasses by doing a regular exercise of staring into a pitch black room.

Try getting a seven year old to do that regularly!

Now that I’ve broken forty and my eyesight seems to be on a second round of degeneration, I’ve been assigned this task, to sit in a dark room with the girl for twenty minutes a night.

Fortunately, technology.

We have been listening to audiobooks, courtesy of the library, and she has been plowing through the Magic Treehouse series. Having listened to several of these books, I have two notes.

First, it seems quite negligent for Merlin and Morgan le Fay to send the two children to gratuitously dangerous quests. For example, Jack and Annie were sent to Pompeii the morning before the volcano erupts. If Morgan was going to ship them back in time, couldn’t she have set the dial back a couple days?

Second, it is awfully convenient that the kids are able to communicate with whoever they come across. Obviously, such a conceit is necessary for the stories to work, but I wonder if an immigrant would have written these books. It requires a certain centeredness (or lack of otherness) from being part of the majority culture to have the imagination to ignore such a plot hole. At least the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had the Babelfish.

I should add a third note since these books aren’t for me. My daughter loves these books. She’d (visually) read them all in an afternoon, if we let her, but the whole point is to go through them in these night time sessions. Plus there are plenty of other books for her to read – including the non-fiction “Magic Treehouse Fact Checkers” which accompany many of these books.

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I should add a fourth note several months later, having completed the series. These books truly aren’t for adults. The plotlines were so cringeworthy that I had to start listening to my own podcasts during these sessions. That said, my daughter still loved the books and they exposed her to plenty of moments in history that she wouldn’t have known otherwise.

She’ll still occasionally revisit the ebooks on her reader, so I think that ultimately remains an endorsement for the series. Fortunately, we’ve now moved on to Newbery Award books and that is much more palatable for me.

After finishing The Magic Treehouse series, I borrowing several Newbery Award winners for our audiobook listening sessions. My daughter read the synopses of these books and was intrigued with the idea of someone who could talk to animals. I was a little surprised by her choice, since she strongly prefers girls as her main characters. Then again, the other books with female protagonists were too scary for her preference (she doesn’t care for tense plots), and she sure does love animals.

At first, it was quite a bit of a shock to go from Mary Pope Osborne’s clear voice to the sounds of a deep, gravelly British man. However our ears caught on quickly and we both enjoyed the story. It was a wide ranging adventure, both in town and out in the world. Given its age, I was worried it would dabble with unsavory stereotypes, but Hugh Lofting managed to avoid such traps. In all, a good time.

My daughter certainly thought so, she borrowed all the Dolittle books from the library (there are quite a few) and plowed through them, even ones that without the illustrations. This book was a wholesome, delightful romp and I see why the Voyages of Dr. Dolittle continues to hold sway a century after its initial publication. The Magic Treehouse introduced our girl to chapter books, but this was her first true excursion into the deeper world of books. Not a bad way to start.

Any child who is not given the opportunity to [meet Doctor Dolittle] and all of his animal friends will miss out on something important.

Jane Goodall