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Better Read Than Dead

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I know it has been a week and a half since the tents for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Festival were folded up and stored until next year. But a few thoughts have been running through my mind that I wanted to air.

Admittedly, the Festival was a boon for people who love to read. I did not, however, feel that the tens of thousands of people who thronged the fair were necessarily book lovers. Probably there were more people there who wanted their offspring to become book lovers just so long as they themselves did not have to crack open a volume.

What made me feel this way? Perhaps I saw too many people thronging the booths that offered trashy genres such as romance, “cozy” mysteries, and dungeons & dragons type fantasy. The big local bookstores were well represented, but they were so crowded that I couldn’t get close to them. The only exception was Small World Books on the Venice Boardwalk: They were not super-crowded because they dealt mainly in poetry.

As in previous sears, I found the Small World Books Poetry Stage the most comfortable venue in the festival. There was a different poetry reading every twenty minutes, and many of them were top notch. Even some of the poets who weren’t that good were wonderful performers of their poems.

I attended both days of the festival. On the first day, I was appalled by the long lines and high prices at the high-toned food trucks scattered throughout the grounds, so I stepped outside the festival and patronized the Mexican and Central American food vendors by the campus gate. On the next day, I discovered the restaurants outside the grounds of the festival at the University Village, where Martine and I got a tasty lunch without having to wait an hour and were able to sit comfortably at one of the outside picnic tables.

12 Desert Rats

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Saguaro Cacti in the Arizona Desert

As I prepare for our road trip to Tucson this next week, I have been doing a lot of reading in preparation. It struck me that there are a lot of great books about or set in deserts. Here are an even dozen recommendations organized alphabetically by author:

  1. Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. A classic of the growing environmental movement and a threnody for the beauties that have been lost.
  2. Anonymous, Arabian Nights (or A Thousand and One Nights). Great stories about Sinbad, Ali Baba, and others.
  3. Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. The author’s experiences in the Owens Valley along the Eastern Edge of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
  4. Banham, Reyner. Scenes in America Deserta. Delightful essays about travels in the California deserts.
  5. Bissell, Tom. Chasing the Sea. A visit to one of the most desolate places on Earth, namely what used to be the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan.
  6. Bowden, Charles. Desierto. Essays about the desert of Southern Arizona and the State of Sonora in Mexico.
  7. Herbert, Frank. Dune. A great. sci-fi tale of a desert planet caught in the middle between warring factions in a corrupt empire.
  8. Lawrence, T. E. (“Lawrence of Arabia”). The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A British officer convinces Arabs to revolt against their Ottoman oppressors in World War I.
  9. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. Violence on the desert frontier among white settlers and Indians.
  10. Powell, John Wesley. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. The first American to navigate the length of the Colorado River.
  11. Theroux, Paul. On the Plain of Snakes. Unforgettable scenes along the border with Mexico, with chapters on the deserts of the State of Oaxaca.
  12. Thesiger, Wilfred. Arabian Sands. The author’s journeys throughout the Arabian peninsula.

As I write these, I become acutely aware that there are more titles I should include. Perhaps, as I read more, I will re-visit the subject later.

Januarius in March

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Arizona Writer Charles Bowden (1945-2014)

Typically, the only books I read during the month of January are by authors I have not before encountered. I call this my Januarius project. This last January, however, I was too ill to read more than two books—and that at the end of the month. So I decided to hold this year’s Januarius in March.

During this month, I read fifteen books by authors who were new to me:

  1. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song. This was the first (and most popular) volume of a trilogy entitled A Scots Quair. Hard times on a farm near Aberdeen before World War I.
  2. David R. Fideler, Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living. Stoicism is one ancient philosophy applicable to modern times.
  3. Renata Adler, Speedboat. Consisting of seemingly unrelated scenes that manage somehow to hold together and be interesting.
  4. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. A somewhat grim book featuring multiple suicide attempts.
  5. Fyodor Sologub, The Petty Demon. A 19th century Russian novel about an annoying school teacher in a country town.
  6. Martial, Epigrams. Amusing sardonic quips about life in Imperial Rome.
  7. Jean-Paul Clébert, Paris Vagabond. Paris seen from the eyes of a highly intelligent hobo.
  8. Edward Said, Orientalism. Intelligent critique of the whole concept of orientalism as being the result of colonialism.
  9. Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Seven Moons and Seven Serpents. Brazilian Magical Realism that allegorizes the whole South American experience.
  10. Jay Parini, Borges and Me: An Encounter. Imagine having to drive Jorge Luis Borges around the Scottish Highlands without ever having read any of his work.
  11. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance. It’s hard to believe that I’ve never before read any Emerson other than a couple of his poems.
  12. Charles Bowden, Desierto: Memories of the Future. The best book I read this month, about life in the Arizona and Sonora desert, the drug lords, mountain lions, and crooked developer/banker Charles Keating Jr.
  13. Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life. The title says it all.
  14. Alexander Ostrovsky, The Storm. A 19th century Russian play in which the villain is a mother-in-law.
  15. Gao Yuan, Lure the Tiger Out oi the Mountains: The 36 Strategies of Ancient China. A somewhat lame attempt to show how ancient Chinese philosophy can improve your business acumen.

All in all, it was a good month with some writers I would like to revisit—particularly Charles Bowden. Next week, Martine and I are going to Tucson, Bowden’s home turf, where I plan to read some more of his work.

Quid hoc ad Iphycli boves?

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Old School Card Showing Cattle Farming in the Roman Forum

Roughly translated, the title of today’s post is “What has this to do with the cattle of Iphyclus?” or, more loosely, “Let us return tom the subject at hand.”

I am currently reading Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821). Scott is famous for starting his novels slowly. I have just read fifty pages of densely packed plotting as Edmund Tressilian gets lost fleeing Cumnor and his horse throws a shoe. He meets up with an old scholar named Erasmus Holiday who converses mostly in Latin and who is delighted to meet anyone with even an imperfect knowledge of the old Romish tongue.

What Tressilian wants, quite simply, is the directions to the nearest blacksmith so he can continue on his way, but Erasmus is not willing to let go of him that easily. Finally, after numerous quotes from Latin classics, he deputes Hobgoblin (aka Flibbertigibbet), the son of his washerwoman, to show him the way to Wayland Smith, the local farrier.

And here we are detained still more by the rumors of said farrier being a tool of the devil as a result of his former association with a local mountebank.

Eventually Tressilian gets to his destination accompanied by Smith, who is now his servant.

There was a time when I would have been upset at the slow development of the story in Kenilworth, but now I am delighted. This is definitely a slow read, requiring frequent consultation with the notes and (yes) a detailed glossary.

In my old age, I now appreciate Scott’s divergence from the subject at hand. He is so damnably erudite and enjoys sharing it with us. Will Tressilian ever rescue the lovely Amy Robsart from the clutches of the evil Richard Varney? Eventually, I’ll find out; but, in the meantime, whether or not the cattle of Iphyclus enter the fray, I will enjoy every minute of this long and painstaking read.

Winding Down

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If you know anything about me, you know that I read a lot of books, something around 160 per year. This month, to date, I have not read anything. I just didn’t feel good enough.

To make matters worse, my apartment will be inspected by the City of Los Angeles a week from today. Not only did I not read anything, but Martine and I have been preparing to donate upward of a thousand books by January 29.

It breaks my heart to donate books that I had spent big bucks collecting, including Folio Society, Library of America, and other premium hardbound editions.

I only hope that the people who get these books appreciate their quality. In the end, it’s probably best that I don’t think too much about this. It would be even more grim if I were given a warning by the city to gut my personal library.

Clarice Lispector in the U.S.

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The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

If Clarice Lispector were alive today, she would be celebrating her 104th birthday. The strikingly beautiful author with the high cheekbones and wild Scythian eyes was one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century, joining such titans as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, and Wislawa Szymborska.

In my e-mail today was a message from New Directions Publishing, which publishes some twenty titles by Lispector in English translation. It contained a link to a video entitled “Dias de Clarice em Washington.” It is 29 minutes long in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

During the 1950s, Clarice was married to a Brazilian diplomat named Maury Gurgel Valente who was posted to the embassy in Washington. From her house in Bethesda, Maryland, she took part in diplomatic social functions and raised a family, as well as writing a number of books and short stories … until it all became too much for her, and she filed for divorce, after which she returned to Brazil.

I urge you to see this video and see what a great writer must do when she is pulled between her marriage and her art:

Clarice Lispector (R) and Sons

The End of the Tether

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This is a difficult subject to treat because I myself am reaching the age at which one can pay most grievously for mistakes made earlier in life. I have just finished re-reading Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, about a British sea captain in Malayan waters who has passed up a peaceful retirement to help out his daughter, who had married unwisely.

Although Captain Whalley in his youth was one of the most brilliant sea captains in the South Seas, he has grown old and forced himself to take on a rickety steamship in need of repair. The owner is a nervous former lottery winner who serves as the ship’s engineer. While he spends every spare hour evaluating possible winning lottery numbers, Captain Whalley, with the help of a native serang, handles the sailing of the vessel.

Unknown at the outset is that Captain Whalley is going blind, and it is primarily the Malay serang who is responsible for captaining the ship. As one can guess, things do not end well.

As I approach eighty years of life on earth, I see many of my friends in their retirement years similarly afflicted as a result of difficult situations that over time have gone critical. I earnestly hope that I will not be one of them.

For one thing, I did not save up enough money for retirement, having spent obscene amounts of money on books. Today I have a fantastic library of five or six thousand volumes. But what happens if I should suddenly die? That would leave Martine in the position of trying to find out how to turn my library into cash, if possible. This at a time when there are precious few bookstores around that could buy hundreds of books at a time.

At least I don’t buy books any more. The Los Angeles Library and my Amazon Kindle account for most of the books I read.

I owe it to the people I love to whittle away at my library, however it pains me. Alas, I am mortal. I have made mistakes. I will pay for those mistakes.

Books I Won’t Be Reading Any Time Soon

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Dreck

On most days, I check the “Deals” section of the Amazon Kindle Store for titles I want to read and can get cheap. As I go through the list of titles, I encounter mostly dreck. I thought I would present a list of the most revolting titles from today’s deals. As they were obviously written with little attention to care, I thought it would be best not to italicize or boldface the titles. They barely even deserve upper case letters.

  • That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon by Kimberly [the] Lemming
  • The Perfect Marriage: A Completely Gripping Psychological Suspense [Gripping where?]
  • The Healer’s Way (Book 1): A Portal Progression Fantasy Series [Huh?]
  • Future Proof: The Time Travel Novel That Everyone’s Talking About. [I sincerely doubt that]
  • Stranded: The Bestselling Psychological Thriller with a Jaw-Dropping Twist, Perfect for Summer [of 1953?]
  • Heat of the Moment: A Billionaire Romance [Must be self love]
  • The Patriot: A Second Chance, Fake Relationship Romance [What?]
  • Forge Master: A LitRPG Adventure [When I found out that LitRPG meant literary role playing game, I yawned and thought “greasy kid stuff”]
  • The Hero She Needs by Anna [the] Hack[ett]
  • Come Back for Me: A Small Town Second Chance Romance [Jeez, that must be a whole genre]
  • Fury: A Fake Dating Workplace Romance [So, is fake dating a thing now?]
  • The Silent Wife: A Gripping Emotional Page Turner with a Twist That Will Take Your Breath Away [I’m choking already]
  • Wielder of Shadows: An Enemies to Lovers Fantasy Romance
  • This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Young Doctor [Ouch!]
  • The Awe of God: The Astounding Way a Healthy Fear of God Transforms Your Life [About the same way an unhealthy fear of everything would]

I know that most of these titles are destined for women readers; and I know that there is a male equivalent which is just as off-putting. It’s just that Amazon doesn’t feature them in their store deals page.

Survival Mechanism

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My father was a semi-professional athlete both in Czechoslovakia and in Cleveland, where he played in the 1930s in a nationality-based soccer league. As his firstborn, I was something of a disappointment to him. I was a bit of a shrimp, later ballooning into a short tubby boy with a broad spectrum of allergies. Plus, around the age of ten, I started getting severe frontal headaches almost daily that were constantly misdiagnosed by the physicians we saw. (It turned out to be a pituitary tumor, which was successfully operated on after I graduated from college.)

What unpromising material!

When my brother was born, my father must have breathed a sigh of relief. Dan was tall and an athlete in my father’s mold.

Where did that leave me?

Thanks to my mother’s genius for story-telling—what with dark forests and witches and princesses—I turned to books as soon as I learned to read. There was a period of adjustment of several years during which I had to switch from being an American kid who spoke only Hungarian to an English-speaker. Those dark forests and witches and princesses, luckily, could also be found in books, together with a lot of other interesting stuff.

Although I always had friends, I was left out of school sports because I was frankly somewhat sickly. That turned out to be all right in the end, as my friends were interested in the same sort of things that I was. With Richard Nelson, who was an astronomy freak, I collaborated in writing an illustrated hand-printed study of our solar system and galaxy. Richard later became a meteorologist. Then there was James Anthony, who became a gynecologist.

While I was physically weak, books made me strong in every other way. I never became a famous author or a college professor, but I held down some interesting jobs that help finance my love of books. And I always read a lot. Even today, as I approach my ninth decade, I read anywhere from twelve to sixteen books a month.

What started out as a survival mechanism has brought happiness to my life. I have no children (because I no longer have a pituitary gland), but my retirement years have been mostly contented.

I know that there will be bad times to come as Martine and I age, but I retain a mostly sunny view of life. And in an election year in which Donald Trump is running, that’s a major accomplishment.

My Annual Book Orgy

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Where I Will Be This Weekend

What with bookstores becoming rarer than hen’s teeth and the average American seemingly unable to read anything more daunting than the label of a beer can, I am becoming ever more determined to support books and reading. Therefore, I shall be spending the weekend looking at books, buying books, and attending talks by authors as well as poetry readings, My next post will be on Monday, April 22.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has become a huge event that brings together readers of all stripes. I even forego my usual sneering at readers of bodice-ripper romances: They, too, are readers—like me in one way, unlike in all others.

When I am not scanning book titles, I go for rest to the Poetry Pavilion, where there is a new poet every twenty minutes during the day. The pavilion never fills up like some of the other stages with big name celebrities, but it is (1) more comfortable and (2) more rewarding. Although I don’t read as much poetry as I should, it is always interesting to hear poets reading their own work.

Next week, I will write posts about those poets that interested me the most.