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Attack of the Januarius Monsters

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Lobby Card for Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters

On January 2 of this year, I posted a blog entitled Januarius 2026 in which I stated my intention of reading only books written by authors new to me. At that point, I mentioned a number of authors I was planning to attempt. It is my sad task to tell you that I read only two of the books I mentioned: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel.

In all, I read twelve books in January. In addition to the two mentioned above, the list included, in order:

  • Peter Cheyney’s This Man Is Dangerous, introducing the character of Lemmy Caution, which was taken up by Jean-Luc Godard in his film Alphaville
  • Ludvík Vaculík’s Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator, A: The Prague Chronicles of Ludvík Vakulík, a Czech novelette about the last days of Communism in Prague
  • Miklós Vamos’s The Book of Fathers, a fat novel about twelve generations of Magyars surviving (or not surviving) two centuries of Hungarian history
  • Stuart Stevens’s Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China’s Ancient Silk Road, definitely a “Worst Journey” to Western China and the Uighurs
  • Marivaux’s Infidelities, an 18th century French play about true love
  • Patrick Marnham’s So Far from God: A Journey to Central America, including Mexico, another “Worst Journey”
  • Chris Nashawaty’s Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy-Stripe Nurses, an entertaining book about the film career of producer/director Roger Corman
  • Edward John Trelawney’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author by the man who was on hand for the last days of the two great English Romantic poets
  • Yuri Andrukhovych’s The Moscoviad, a humorous 1990s look at life in Moscow by a Ukrainian who didn’t think too much of Russians
  • George Woodcock’s Incas and Other Men: Travels in the Andes about a trip to Peru in 1956 by a Canadian professor and his wife

Three of the books were from Eastern Europe satellite countries, and they were of a higher literary standard than most of my other selections. The only other book I liked a lot was Trelawney’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, which made me resolve to read more poems by Shelley and Byron this year. I also liked the book about Roger Corman’s films: I’ve often thought that Corman was underrated.

So much for this year’s tidal wave of terror.

Januarius 2026

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Me in My Library in 2004

As in previous years, I have decided during this month of January 2026 to read books only by authors I have not previously read. Yesterday, I started with a bang with Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Underground Railroad.

I have code-named this annual project Januarius. If you look at the early January entries on my blog site, you will find numerous references to Januarius. I like the name because it suggests the Roman god Janus as well as the month of January.

Next on my list is a book edited by Keath Fraser entitled Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel. It contains selections from fifty-five authors on the subject of bad trips, including bad flights, bad roads, war, and other events that can wreck the best-planned journey. My intention is to discover new authors of travel books, travel being one of my favorite book categories. I hope to incorporate at least a couple of my finds in books I read later this month.

Tentatively planned are reads from Pierre de Marivaux, Apuleius, Ariel Dorfman, Péter Nádas, Louisa May Alcott, an obscure biography of the Emperor Tiberius (I forget the name of the author), and Valeria Luiselli. Typically, I finish between twelve and sixteen books in one month. (The joys of being retired.)

At the end of the month, I will post a list of the “new” authors I have read and their books. Stay tuned to this spot for the latest developments.

Quai des Orfèvres

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The Quai des Orfèvres, Former HQ of the French Police Judiciaire

Right across the way from the cathedral of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité is the Quai des Orfèvres, former headquarters of the French Police Judiciaire and office of Inspector Jules Maigret, Georges Simenon’s hero in some seventy-five mystery novels.

What better way to end 2025, I thought to myself, than to read a Maigret novel I had never read before. Since I have read most of them by now, that was not an easy decision to make. Fortunately, I dug deep in one of my book piles and came up with Maigret and the Apparition (aka Maigret and the Ghost), published in 1964 as Maigret et le fantôme.

The book starts with the shooting of a detective inspector from the 18th Arrondissement who was a friend of Maigret’s. At first, nothing seems to make sense; and there are no Sherlockian clues that give the crime away. Simenon’s Maigret novels are not tales of ratiocination à la Edgar Allan Poe. This is not the Anglo-Saxon world of crime: What Maigret adheres to is a Gallic combination of thoroughness and intuition. The solution eventually emerges only when he has looked hard at every detail in the case.

Famously, Maigret does not come up with any theories as he follows through on the investigation. The active principle here is not ratiocination, but se débruillier, to, in effect, “defog” the mass of evidence and suspects. As Google’s artificial intelligence summary has it:

Débrouiller (reflexive: se débrouiller) is a versatile French verb meaning to manage, cope, get by, sort out, or figure things out, especially when facing challenges, implying resourcefulness to overcome obstacles and find solutions, like “I can manage” (Je me débrouille) or “to sort out a situation” (débrouiller une situation). 

Apparently, it worked for Simenon, whose works continue to enthrall after many decades..

The Man Who Invented Christmas

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Scrooge and the Ghost of Marley

It is actually hard to imagine what Christmas would be like today in England and the United States if Charles Dickens had never written A Christmas Carol. There have been countless film versions of the story; and, today, virtually everyone over the age of twelve knows the story.

In this age of Trump, there have even been stories justifying Ebenezer Scrooge’s meanness as being somehow praiseworthy. Go figure!

The message of benevolence toward the poor and general loving kindness is something new in literature. While being guided by the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge sees two gaunt children clinging to him:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye!
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

This little scene casts a long shadow into our own time.

I have read Dickens’s novella perhaps a dozen times, always around Christmas time. The last reading was completed not an hour ago.

Edward & Henry

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Writer and Naturalist Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

I’ve always loved Henry David Thoreau, and I’ve always loved Edward Abbey. Today I came across a longish essay by Abbey on Thoreau that was by far and away the best thing I ever read about the man from Concord. The first essay in his collection Down the River is entitled “Down the River with Henry Thoreau.” It is at the same time a love letter and a critique.

Writing his thoughts on Thoreau while rafting down the Green River in Utah to where it joins the Colorado, Abbey recognizes the greatness of Thoreau—as well as the fact that he is something of a stick-in-the-mud. Always sociable, he had few real friends other than Ralph Waldo Emerson; Nathaniel Hawthorne thought he was something of a bore. And although he proposed to two local women, he was rejected by both, and very likely died a virgin.

Abbey writes:

Poor Thoreau. But he could also write, in the late essay “Walking,” “The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” Ferity—now there’s a word. What could it have meant to Thoreau? Our greatest nature lover did not have a loving nature. A woman acquaintance of Henry’s said she’d sooner take the arm of an elm tree than that of Thoreau.

It is possible that we might not have a good time if we encountered Thoreau in the flesh. But then, I wonder if I would like hanging with Honoré de Balzac or Marcel Proust, hoisting a brewski with Charles Bukowski, drinking tea with Emily Dickinson, or chatting with G. K. Chesterton. What each of this figures created was an edifice more than a personality. One honors the edifice while acknowledging that we might think the personality to be a bit yucky, perhaps even slightly repellent.

“A Great Earthquake”

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In his novel Dombey and Son (1848), Charles Dickens had a striking passage about the effect that railroad construction was having on parts of London. I remember this passage vividly from when I first read the book decades ago.

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.

But as yet, the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So, the Excavators’ House of Call had sprung up from a beer-shop; and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House, with a roast leg of pork daily, through interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description. Lodging-house keepers were favourable in like manner; and for the like reasons were not to be trusted. The general belief was very slow. There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation, stared it out of countenance. Nothing was the better for it, or thought of being so. If the miserable waste ground lying near it could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of the miserable neighbours.

“Come On, Tough Guy”

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I had never read any of Sherman Alexie’s poems before, Wedged in between the short stories in his collection War Games were a number of poems, the most interesting of which is this one at the start of the book:

The Limited

I saw a man swerve his car
And try to hit a stray dog,
But the quick mutt dodged
Between two parked cars

And made his escape.
God, I thought, did I just see
What I think I saw?
At the next red light,

I pulled up beside the man
And stared hard at him.
He knew that’d I seen
His murder attempt,

But he didn’t care.
He smiled and yelled loud
Enough for me to hear him
Through our closed windows:

“Don’t give me that face
Unless you’re going to do
Something about it.
Come on tough guy,

What are you going to do?”
I didn’t do anything
I turned right on the green
He turned left against traffic.

I don’t know what happened
To that man or the dog,
But I drove home
And wrote this poem.

Why do poets think
They can change the world?
The only life I can save
Is my own.

Vacationing in Oz

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Original Covers of Three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz Books

It’s all well and good to read serious literature, but every once in a while it is good to return to the land of childhood. Why? It is a place where imagination rules, and we can all use a little childlike imagination to see us through the consequences of our bad decisions.

After reading a serious Russian novel (Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator), I decided to read the sequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, namely: The Marvelous Land of Oz. In all, Baum wrote some fourteen books set in the Land of Oz, and I intend to read all of them—even the ones I have read some decades ago.

In this second book of the series, there is no Wizard, no Dorothy, no Toto, and no Kansas. We do, however, encounter the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and even the Good Witch Glinda. As Baum was no slave to precedent, he introduces several new characters: the boy Tip, Jack Pumpkinhead, an animated sawhorse, and others. There are in addition the moderately bad witch Mombi, the feminist General Jinjur, the Gump (an animated flying machine made of inanimate spare parts), and H. M. Woggle-Bug, T. E. (The H. M. is short for Highly Magnified, and T. E. refers to his being Thoroughly Educated.)

The closest thing to a villain is Mombi, who is allied with General Jinjur and his all-girl army to rule Oz after the Scarecrow and his friends are driven out. Jinjur’s army does not come across as much of a threat, as they are armed only with knitting needles.

I plan to read one Oz book per month until I have finished the series, which I have complete on my Kindle.

Throwing Down the Glove

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Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

As I read today for the first time a play by French Writer Honoré de Balzac, I was reminded of the last scene in his great novel Père Goriot as Eugène de Rastignac attended the poor funeral of his old neighbor Goriot..

But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages, with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen, arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o’clock Goriot’s coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters’ servants standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest and lackeys disappeared at once. The two grave diggers flung in several spadefuls of earth, and then stopped and asked Rastignac for their fee. Eugene felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to borrow five francs of Christophe. This thing, so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible pang of distress. It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his nerves; he gazed down into the grave and the tears he shed were drawn from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. When such tears fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. And with that tear that fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene Rastignac’s youth ended. He folded his arms and gazed at the clouded sky; and Christophe, after a glance at him, turned and went—Rastignac was left alone.

He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently:

“Henceforth there is war between us.”

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.

My Halloween Reading

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At the end of September, I set myself a program for reading several appropriate ghoulish, ghastly, and horrifying titles in honor of my favorite holiday, Halloween. You can read about my intentions here.

Of the ten books I ended up reading last month, five were appropriate for the season:

  • Ann Radcliffe: The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents
  • Joyce Carol Oates: Cardiff, by the Sea
  • Thomas Ligotti: The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales
  • Edgar Allan Poe: The Portable Poe
  • Ray Bradbury: The Halloween Tree

They were all pretty good. Not surprisingly, I thought the Poe was best, followed by the Bradbury. That was a surprise, as it was written for the juvenile market, but I enjoyed every minute of it. The Ann Radcliffe was a hoot, as the British tended to think that nothing was spookier than Catholicism, (Maybe it was that thing about the Holy Ghost.)

I liked the Ligotti book because it was a fun way to revisit all the high points of the genre. Cardiff, by the Sea wasn’t technically a Halloween novel, except for the fact that everything Joyce Carol Oates is a bit on the spooky side.