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.

“Bleak Shore”

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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

I’m starting the New Year by quoting a poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Sonnet IV-X

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.
I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

I know it’s sad, but it is at the same time beautiful.

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..

Bardotlatry

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French Actress Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025)

What can one say when the most beautiful woman in the world grows old and dies a divisive figure at the age of 91? When I was a young man, I thought that Brigitte Bardot could do no wrong. She was Venus de Milo personified. I saw her films And God Created Woman (1956) and Contempt (1963) multiple times.

But Brigitte was far from perfect. In her later years, she espoused rightist causes, campaigning for the LePens in French elections and reviling Muslims and even calling the residents of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, “savages.”

Okay, she wasn’t perfect—except in the way she looked in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, she was a goddess. As a young film freak in Los Angeles, I worshiped the ground she walked on.

Then I heard she was a big animal rights activist. “That’s all right,” I thought. But then I started hearing uglier things. By then, Brigitte was a hermit of sorts living on the French Riviera.

There’s a lesson to be learned there. We are all human, we are all likely to err, we will all eventually lose our looks and die.

Easy Breakfast Quesadillas

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Rajas de Jalapeño

This is perhaps my most common breakfast, which I have with my morning tea. It contains only three ingredients: (1) Good quality flour tortillas; (2) Monterey Jack cheese; and (3) Pickled jalapeño peppers.

If you can’t tolerate chile peppers, I suppose you could try something mild like Ortega chiles, but I can’t imagine that would taste good. I use either canned Mexican rajas de jalapeño, which may also include pickled carrots, onion, and even pieces of cauliflower or else any pickled jalapeños.

For the cheese, I always prefer Monterey Jack. A particularly good brand on the West Coast comes from Joseph Farms and is available at Ralphs supermarkets (owned by Kroger).

Of primary importance are the flour tortillas. My brand of choice is El Comal or La Banderita. Avoid cheap flour torts that tear easily along the edges or that taste like cardboard. Unfortunately, most of the popular supermarket brands fall into this category.

To prepare the quesadillas, I preheat the oven to 350° Fahrenheit ( 175° Celsius). I take a quarter cup of jalapeños and chop them up fine. Then with a cheese slicer, I cut four slices of Monterey Jack cheese. I take two flour tortillas and on the upper half of each place two slices of cheese and half the chopped jalapeños, Then I fold the torts in two, being careful that they not tear in the process. (This is one way of learning whether you’ve bought the right flour tortillas.) Place them in the oven and cook them until the edges of the tortillas begin to turn dark brown.

It is very likely that some of the cheese will drip, so I always place a sheet of foil underneath.

The result is a bit spicy, but a very pleasant way to start your day.

The World at Night

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A Video You Must See (Click on Link Below)

One of my favorite websites is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive. Rarely do I dip into it without coming up with a gem. In this particular case, we follow the rotation of the earth at night. Highlighted are the bright lights of urban concentrations and the strobes of widespread lightning strikes.

The overall effect is of watching a planet that is alive. And that’s just night: Imagine if we could also see the swirling winds, the tides, and storms at sea.

Don’t click on the image above: It’s just there as an illustration. To watch the video, click here.

It’s my belated Christmas gift to all of you, wherever you may be.

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.

Zoophilomania

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I have been reading Norman Douglas’s travel classic Old Calabria, which was written in 1915. Here he talks about the Southern Italians’ attitude toward pets. I include the footnote, which discusses how the ancient Greeks treated their animals.

To say that our English zoophilomania—our cult of lap-dogs—smacks of degeneracy does not mean that I sympathize with the ill-treatment of beasts which annoys many visitors to these parts and has been attributed to “Saracenic” influences. Wrongly, of course; one might as well attribute it to the old Greeks.‡ Poor Saracens! They are a sort of whipping-boy, all over the country. The chief sinner in this respect is the Vatican, which has authorized cruelty to animals by its official teaching. When Lord Odo Russell enquired of the Pope regarding the foundation of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Italy, the papal answer was: “Such an association could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any duties to animals.” This language has the inestimable and rather unusual merit of being perspicuous. Nevertheless, Ouida’s flaming letters to “The Times” inaugurated an era of truer humanity. . . .

Here follows the footnote:

‡Whose attitude towards animals, by the way, was as far removed from callousness as from sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic oxen fared who had laboured to draw up heavy blocks for the building of a temple—how, on the completion of their task, they were led into green fields, there to pasture unmolested for the rest of their lives. We know that the Greeks were appreciative of the graces and virtues of canine nature—is not the Homeric Argo still the finest dog-type in literature? Yet to them the dog, even he of the tender Anthology, remained what he is: a tamed beast. The Greeks, sitting at dinner, resented the insolence of a creature that, watching every morsel as it disappeared into the mouth of its master, plainly discovered by its physiognomy the desire, the presumed right, to devour what he considered fit only for himself. Whence that profound word [Greek: kunopes]—dog-eyed, shameless. In contrast to this sanity, observe what an Englishman can read into a dog’s eye:

                That liquid, melancholy eye,
                From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
                Seemed surging the Virgilian cry—
                The sense of tears in mortal things. . . .

That is how Matthew Arnold interprets the feelings of Fido, watching his master at work upon a tender beefsteak.

Norman Douglas’s work contains surprises on virtually every page. If I have time, I will quote him about the flying monk, Saint Nicholas of Cosentino.

“Winter: A Dirge”

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Scottish Poet Robert Burns (1759-1796)

His poems are written in a difficult-to-read Scottish Lowland dialect, but somehow the intensity shines through. Here the poet expresses his disdain for the horrors of a Scottish winter, ending with a comic proposal to the deity.

Winter: A Dirge

The wintry west extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While tumbling brown, the burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.

The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,
The joyless winter-day,
Let others fear, to me more dear
Than all the pride of May:
The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,
My griefs it seems to join;
The leafless trees my fancy please,
Their fate resembles mine!

Thou Pow’r Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here, firm, I rest, they must be best,
Because they are Thy will!
Then all I want (O, do Thou grant
This one request of mine!)
Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,
Assist me to resign.