Lit Crit

Earlier this month, a friend gave me a pile of cozy mysteries featuring a quirky police constable in the north of Scotland named Hamish Macbeth. I’ve been in a kind of escapist mood, so I stacked them in order of publication and ripped through them.

(Fun fact: I’m actually descended from Duncan I, the historical basis for the king murdered by Macbeth in that Scottish Play.)

At any rate, they were amusing and didn’t require a great deal of attention on my part, so mission accomplished. But as I progressed through the series, I found them increasingly irritating, especially Hamish’s various romantic relationships. That guy just cannot stick a landing, and the one he can’t get over, Priscilla—well, I just wanted to bitchslap her.

At one point I even texted my friend, “Please tell me that Priscilla gets murdered.” (Sadly…)

But in the pile of paperbacks, there was also this one, wrapped with a warning:

I’ve put that, still wrapped, in the box with the others for donation.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Killing it

I don’t know what specifically prompted me to put I You We Them - Journeys beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today on hold at the library. The typical process is I’m reading about something that references a source, so if I want more information, I check the Fairfax County system to see if they have it. Could be a book review, could be a tweet, I just put it in the system and pick it up when it’s ready.

Some books take a while, of course—especially if there’s been a book review in WaPo; by the time I hit the catalog, I’m number 347 in the queue. So when I finally get the “it’s here” notice, I’ve forgotten when/why I put it on hold.

That wasn’t the case with this one; I think it might have been a few days between my request and receiving the ready notice. I was delayed for a few days because I wanted to finish Book and Dagger (about academics’ roles in the OSS during World War II) before I launched I You We Them. So when I squeaked into the local branch one day before the hold expired this week, it was a surprise to see this was waiting for me:

All I knew about it was the title and the subject matter, which is “desk killers”. It’s a term (translated from the German Shreibtischtächter) that came up in the wake of Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare in December. The term was initially applied to Nazi bureaucrats and other white collar workers who made the genocide machine run so efficiently, but there have been arguments that we have plenty of desk killers working in enterprises ranging from pharma to oil to auto manufacturers to insurance companies.

Well—let me just say that I was somewhat nonplussed to find something more than 1000 pages long and weighing 1.25kg.

And that it’s only Volume I.

(Imma be a while.)

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Books along the banks

While I was in Lyon a couple of weeks ago, I walked along the embankment of the Saône on Sunday. I was just too late for the food market; that was upping sticks as I arrived. But booksellers were out in force—as they are along the Seine in Paris, where the sellers are called bouquinistes.

Here’s the thing: their “shops” are permanent fixtures. I assume they some kind of rent to store their inventory in these presumably watertight contraptions.

And here are some of their wares:

 

 

Gratitude Monday: reading matters

I “attended” parts of a virtual cyber conference last week. The best sessions were interviews by the company CEO and various speakers. One of the questions the former asked was, “What are you reading these days?”

Paul Nakasone, head of the NSA, recommended Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Fred Kaplan) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation and the Longest Night of the Second World War (Malcolm Gladwell). Sue Gordon, former principal deputy director of national intelligence, had several, but the one I wrote down was American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Pauline Maier).

(Gordon described the members of the Second Continental Congress as “average schmos”. My ex-boss said he agrees with her; “Not all of them were a Hamilton or a Franklin.” My thinking is that—while not all of them were intellectual titans, the very fact that they could afford to spend months in Philadelphia debating political philosophies set them aside from average schmos.)

When I say, “wrote [the titles] down”, I mean that I pulled up the Fairfax County Public Library online catalog and placed holds on the books. For good measure, I also reserved Donna Leon’s and Louise Penny’s latest police procedurals. Friday morning I popped over to the People’s Republic branch and picked up two of the recommendations and Leon’s Transient Desires. I spent most off the weekend polishing off the mystery—such a luxury to spend a Sunday afternoon reading about Venice and eating madeleines (with the occasional break to toss a handful of seed onto the patio for birds and chipmunks).

That’s my gratitude today: the immense resources of the public library and hours of being lost in a book.

 

 

Digging a hole

A while ago I looked out of my Metro window and saw some of the construction going on in McLean:

I can never see excavators like these without thinking of Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Anne. I always loved the children’s story of their partnership, and how they managed to adapt to new circumstances. (These guys have left a ramp, though.) Here’s a film that HBO produced of the tale about 30 years ago.

You’re welcome.

One for the books

I think we all need this story:

When the owner of an independent bookshop in San Diego unexpectedly had to have open-heart surgery—with his wife in attendance at the hospital and their one employee out sick with the flu—people in the independent bookseller community kept the shop open for a week, until the sick employee was back.

They came from shops around San Diego, and from as far away as LA. To help a competitor. The customers never knew anything at all was wrong. 

And they’re still filling in while the owner’s recovering.

Book people, FTW.

Gratitude Monday: On the books

On this Gratitude Monday, I’m glad I once again have access to the Fairfax County Public Library.

I got my library card a week ago, already finished the first book I checked out, and have a shedload of books on hold.

Aaahhhh…

Gratitude Monday: reading through the weekend

On this Columbus Day, I’m grateful for two things:

It’s a holiday for my employer, so I get another day to sleep in past 0520.

And on Saturday morning I picked up the latest in Louise Penny’s detective series about Chief InspectorArmand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. So I had something to read last night and didn’t have to watch the debate.

Definitely Dahlesque

Tuesday was the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Roald Dahl, a man who used language to both expose and cushion the darkness of childhood experience. In books (many of which became films) like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Fantastic Mr Fox, and James and the Giant Peach, Dahl some very dark environments where children had to pick their way carefully on the path to happiness.

I mean, things always turned out okay. But getting there could be perilous indeed. The worst kind of bullies and monstrous authoritarians populated his characters’ world, so they needed all the cleverness and courage he could give them.

But Dahl also armed his young protagonists with really great words, and this week the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added six of them to their lexicon in his honor. They’re not necessarily words that originated with him—even “scrumdiddlyumptious” was documented as far back as 1942. But they’re phrases that Dahl put on pretty much every tongue.

Like “golden ticket”, from Charlie, which the OED defines as: “Ticket; one that grants the holder a valuable or exclusive prize, experience, opportunity, etc.” Or “Oompa Loompa,” which has actually changed its meaning over the years. It originally meant an industrious worker, but since the 1971 film, it just as often refers to the “Day-Glo effects of some fake tanning products,” according to the OED.

No mention of hand size.

I personally get a kick out of the fact that Dahl was so fearless in painting his language-scapes, especially since one of his school report cards had this comment: “I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.”

One final OED honor to Dahl’s imaginative use of language is the addition of the word “Dahlesque”, an adjective defined as “resembling or characteristic of the words of Roald Dahl.”

Absolutely splendiferous.

Gratitude Monday: Reading mayhem

Oh-boy, oh-boy, oh-boy—I picked up the newest release in the Commissario Brunetti series by Donna Leon Saturday at the library. Then I spent the weekend tearing through the canals and cuisine of Venice, and it’s promising to be one of Leon’s better outings. (The last one, famed around an opera singer, was, como si dice, lame. It happens.)

But I’m also on the waiting list for Tana French’s latest in the Dublin Murder Squad series, and ditto Louise Penny’s newest featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Penny’s is published this week and French’s in October, so I’ll be drip-feeding the mayhem.

I really wish that Penny had chosen a different name for her hero, because I continually “hear” him as ganache, and I get distracted by thoughts of couverture and the like, particularly since, like Leon, she spends a lot of time describing meals the various characters eat. Although I get a little tired of the maple sugar-cured bacon, and I frankly doubt how a small, albeit quirky, village could support both a bistro and a boulangerie. 

(Guilty secret: I'm afraid that when I'm deep in one of these puzzles I don't eat nearly as well as the characters. This weekend I subsided mainly on plain Greek yoghurt, with some granola and blackcurrants mixed in.)

However, even though last year’s Gamache was a disappointment, I know that Penny at her best is worth waiting for. And French frankly writes the hell out of every story she comes up with, and I love the fact that each outing has been from the perspective of a different member of the Murder Squad. Last year’s, The Secret Place, is one of those books that you call in sick to work so you can finish it. (Although you don't spend time in any of her stories on food. Her cops may grab a doughnut or a bag of crisps on their way to the underside of Dublin, and that's about it.)

So today I’m grateful for having well-written police procedurals to provide respite from the political silly season, and a slight change from my usual heavy-duty history reading. Also—hurrah for libraries!

The best mistakes we know how to make

I recently read How Can We Keep from Singing: Music and the Passionate Life, by Joan Oliver Goldsmith. Goldsmith is a member of the Minnesota Chorale, a truly amateur group in the sense of doing something fine purely for the love of it. She uses various musical concepts as the framework for discussing life itself, and it resonated with me.

In the chapter titled “Creativity’s Compost”, Goldsmith takes on mistakes.

“What kinds of mistakes do you make? Do you err on the side of jumping into possibility when life beckons? Or do you hold back until conditions are definitely favorable? Are you more afraid of not following your heart’s dream or spending your old age bagging groceries?”

From those questions she goes on to discuss how businesses approach mistakes—whether they welcome and learn from them, or fear bagging groceries. The example she chooses, being in Minnesota, is from 3M Corporation:

“A productive mistake is: (1) made in the service of mission and vision; (2) acknowledged as a mistake; (3) learned from; (4) considered valuable; (5) shared for the benefit of all.”

(I have to say that, here in the Valley They Call Silicon, a lot of disruptive game-changing execs talk about innovation a lot, and hit hard on how they want employees to be creative risk-takers. But when you ask them for examples of how they as a company learn from mistakes, you get nothing but caffeine-charged crickets.)

Then she brings it back to the personal level:

“In this life we make the best mistakes we know how to make. Then, with any luck, we go out and make new ones. I don’t make mistakes when I watch TV or take a walk. These activities are pleasant, restful. But I could not make a life of them. After all, the easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.”

I’ve made so many mistakes in my life; you know—the ones that still make you cringe decades later. And I’ve gone through the walking-and-reading retreat periods; I know exactly what Goldsmith is talking about. I know from personal experience that it can be very risky to open your mouth and sing, but worrying about bagging groceries is worse.  

Don't bust my crust, baby

Since I’ve got Keith Richards floating around here, I’ll turn a few thoughts to Life, his memoir, which I read a while ago.

Yes, it was written “with” a journalist (James Fox), so I don’t know how much of it is Richards and how much Fox. However, it was much more engaging than other celeb books, with less ego than Lisa Robinson’s name-dropping and product placement-fest (There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll), and none of the whining of Morrissey’s drama queendom (self-consciously titled just Autobiography). Richards certainly dishes dirt—but consider that in more than 50 years with The Rolling Stones how many hectares of the stuff he’s accumulated.

And—the guy does know how to tell a story.

Richards has very strong opinions on food, and advocates only eating when you feel an appetite, not at set times. It was a habit that drove his band mates a little cuckoo.

He also has useful thoughts on his comfort food, starting with the ever popular Bangers and Mash. (Which I have to say are utterly delish, in a good pub, with friends and a pint of bitter.)

“I’ve been cooking bangers all my life and I only just found out from this lady on TV that you have to put bangers in a cold pan. No preheating. Preheating agitates them, that’s why they’re called bangers. Very slowly, start them off cold. And then just be prepared to have a drink and wait. And it works. It doesn’t shrivel them up; they’re plump. It’s just a matter of patience. Cooking is a matter of patience. When I was cooking Goats Head Soup, I did it very slowly.”

And he gives us the recipe.

“My Recipe for Bangers and Mash

“First off, find a butcher who makes his sausages fresh.

“Fry up a mixture of onions and bacon and seasoning.

“Get the spuds on the boil with a dash of vinegar, some chopped onions and salt (seasoning to taste). Chuck in some peas with the spuds. (Throw in some chopped carrots too, if you like.) Now we’re talking.

“Now, you have a choice of grilling or broiling your bangers or frying. Throw them on low heat with the simmering bacon and onions (or in the cold pan, as the TV lady said, and add the onions and bacon in a bit) and let the fuckers rock gently, turning every few minutes.

“Mash yer spuds and whatever.

“Bangers are now fat free (as possible!).

“Gravy if desired.

“HP sauce, every man to his own.”

Another culinary gem is his recommendation for shepherd’s pie: just before you top the meat-and-veg mixture with the mashed potatoes, add a layer of chopped (raw) onions. This tip came from Big Joe Seabrook, one of Richards’s “minders”, “and he was damn right—it just gives you that extra je ne sais quoi.”

I’ve tried it and Seabrook and Richards are indeed damn right.

Richards is religious about his shepherd’s pie—one gets delivered before every performance, even though he doesn’t eat before a show. But no one—no one—is permitted to cut into the pie. “Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby. It’s written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards’s room and he’s got a shepherd’s pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it’s still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy motherfuckers, they’ll come in and just scoop up anything.”

This is a book that should have come with a CD, DVD or link to online playlist. I had to haul out some of my own and queue them up. Like this one:

But as for his Life, I really wonder how Richards remembered enough of it to produce more than 500 pages about it.

The library mystery

I do a lot of my library borrowing based on book reviews and recommendations for books and movies from friends. Since my days haunting the Reston branch of the Fairfax County Library system, my habit is to read a review, reach for the laptop and put whatever it is on hold. This obviates the need for checking that I have a fistful of little scribbled-on scraps of paper when I go to the actual facility.

I place holds even if a library near me has the material on its shelves. Because—see above about scraps of paper. Plus, I reckon it keeps library people in employment.

Anyhow, often by the time a book or movie is ready for pickup, I’ve forgotten all about it. Especially if it’s a new material and I’m number 245 in the queue for the 43 copies (as I was for The Grand Budapest Hotel). So it’s a little like opening a Christmas gift when you’ve passed around a wish list. You’re not entirely surprised, but you’re still glad to see it.

However, a few weeks ago I was completely nonplussed to go to the reserve shelves at the Cupertino Library and find...this:

Because it’s a historical novel, set in the 12^th Century, during the war between the Empress Matilda/Maude and King Stephen in England.

The thing is, I have no earthly notion why I put it on reserve. If I’d passed it in a bookstore I’d never have picked it up, much less bought it. I don’t read novels except for detective fiction; I don’t even read any of the latter except for police procedurals. I did, in fact, read the series of mysteries about Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters, which are set in that period. But that was in the last century and I’ve moved on from then.

Also, I don’t know the authors, and I can’t imagine what possessed me to go after it. Someone must have recommended it to me, but who? And why did I think I wanted to read it? Was it the protagonist being a 12-year-old redheaded archer? Was it because it was billed somewhere as a mystery (even though everything was predictable)? I just do not know.

As it happens, it was an okay read—I mean, it was interesting and all, until we got to the last act. Then the plot was resolved in a completely manipulative and inorganic way so quickly that I thought maybe they’d lost the lease on their writing space and had to get the hell out before the bailiffs showed up.

So that’s my novel for the year out of the way. Normal service has resumed, as I’m starting Peter Longerich’s biography of Heinrich Himmler. I don’t have to worry about any plot twists here because this stuff is way weirder than any novelist can cook up.

Library resources

The Santa Clara County Library District (SCCLD) is apparently performing a system software upgrade, which is taking four days. Starting Sunday, 31 May, and going through Wednesday, 3 June, you can’t do anything online (which includes my major activity: putting materials on hold).

You can walk into the actual libraries and physically get books and stuff, but evidently checking them out involves handing your card over to a staff member for some sort of quasi-manual process.

Everything’s closed/non-operational on Wednesday. Normal services are slated to resume on Thursday.

So I made sure to go in on Saturday to pick up some holds and stock up on extra books to tide me over the four days of famine. I went home with seven items, but these two ought to keep me going.

Four cups and five Haggadot

In addition to Good Friday, today also brings us (at sundown) the beginning of Passover. If you’re in need of an extra Haggadah, it turns out that I have five of them:

They all have the Seder story in Hebrew, of course, but two of them are also in English, two in French (including one with commentary by Elie Wiesel) and one—Haggadah from the Four Corners of the Earth—has English, French, Spanish and Russian wrapped around the Hebrew on each page.

I find it interesting that German isn’t one of the languages of the four corners of the earth.

Also, one of the English ones has really beautiful illustrations, almost illuminations:

What these books remind me of (in addition to Seders I have been part of) is a long weekend in Paris and buying so many books that I had to take a taxi back to the Gare du Nord to get home. (Yes, I bought all of the Haggadot—including the English ones—in France. Along with a shedload of other books.) Because if I’d gone via the Métro, I’d have had to change lines and lug the damned things through long corridors and up and down steps.

I always forget about logistics when it comes to buying books, and looking at these beautiful things, I’m glad I didn’t when they crossed my path.

And if you need a Haggadah for the next few days, I've got some to spare.

Hangul & hokey

I just finished reading a couple of books on the English language: Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story, by Michael Rosen, and The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal.

And I know I don’t have to tell you why I’d be reading a couple of books on language, do I?

The latter picks out words that have appeared in our language over time and discusses various aspects of each one. It starts with “roe” in the 5^th Century, which is related to an archaeological find of the ankle bone of a roe deer with some runic letters carved into it. Transformed into Latin letters, they spelled RAIHAN, which linguists concluded was most likely to refer to the animal on whose bone the letters were etched.

The entry on “Doublespeak” (originating in George Orwell’s novel 1984) was interesting to me not so much because of its beginnings. It’s pretty much standard I should think and doesn’t require much of a discussion.

But it turns out that there’s an organization called the National Council of Teachers of English, which gives out an annual award for doublespeak. “Winners” include individuals, organizations and just general words. For example, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announcing his plan to close 54 elementary schools in the city on account of their “underutilization” or space. Or the term “aspirational goal”, the concatenation of two words that mean the same thing (aspirations/goals). But when you combine them you produce “a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire all that much’.”

Immediately following Doublespeak is “Doobry”, which is a variant of dewberry, meaning something-or-other. My preferred version of this term is “duflunkio”, which I picked up from one of my classmates in the seventh grade.

(If you’re interested, but not enough to actually check out the book, numbers 99 and 100 are “Unfriend” and “Twittersphere”. Duh.)

Rosen’s book takes a different approach, using the building block of words, the 26-letter alphabet, to examine a number of elements of our language. One in particular I enjoyed was the letter K, in which he discussed the alphabet that was created by (or under the auspices of) King Sejong in the 15^th Century for the Korean people. A couple of interesting things to me:

There are actually two (very similar) alphabets in use today—“Hangul” in South Korea, “Chosun” gul in North Korea. I’ve always thought of it as the Hangul alphabet, but then I learned it in Seoul, so…

But here’s why Sejong either invented the alphabet or caused it to be invented. The only alphabet in use came from China, but spoken Korean didn’t match up with Chinese letters. Sejong saw this as a barrier to illiterate people ever learning to write. “[E]ven if illiterate people want to communicate in writing, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have had 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that this will turn out to be convenient for daily use.”

In other words—everyone in the country basically had the right to communicate their concerns in writing, and it was his duty as the king to create the means for them to do this.

As I understand it, the Hangul alphabet (now comprising 24 vowels and consonants) is a highly efficient method of building words through syllables and sounds. It runs rings around English in this regard. (Think “thought”, “through” and “though”, just for starters.) What an amazing gift for a ruler to give his people.

On the whole, Rosen really entertains with his approach. But I had to take issue with one of his statements.

“In Britain people do the ‘hokey-cokey’ but in the US they do the ‘cokey-cokey.’”

I don’t know where he got that last part, but I have never heard of a “cokey-cokey”. Surely he meant “hokey-pokey”?

Matters of the heart

Today being Valentine’s Day, I know you’re awash with pressure to produce demonstrations of undying passion for your significant (or even your somewhat-interesting) other. Flowers (better have a damned good explanation for that bouquet not being a fistful of red roses, at five times the going rate for other times of the year), chocolates (possibly more leeway there) and/or jewelry.

You do know that every kiss begins with Kay, right?

Well, forget about all that. Because I have something so much better than industrially-extruded conspicuous consumption that has the same ephemeral effect on the economy that it does on your social life.

It’s a great story in the New York Times, about photographer Lauren Fleishman, who was inspired by love letters between her maternal grandparents to embark on a project to photograph couples who’ve been together for at least 50 years.

Her grandparents married in 1944, and were together for 59 years.

Fleishman spent six years discovering and photographing the couples; her resulting book The Lovers was published last month.

The Lovers presents the intimate ties, of course. But the couples talk also about the much more problematic issues of long relationships—getting through rough patches, and overcoming those times when s/he just pisses you off beyond belief, without storming out for good.

That’s one of the characteristics of love that lasts beyond passion. Anyone can be in love, especially when you’re in your 20s or 30s (ish). It’s like one extended adrenaline rush, so you just power through the little hitches because you’ve got the incentive of the next romp to entice you. Fleishman focuses her lens and her interviews on how these couples managed to transcend the rush and turn it into a bond that has lasted for decades.

 Eric Marcoux and Eugene Woodworth. Portland, Ore. 

Fred and Fran Futterman, Brooklyn

 Yevgeniy and Lyubov Kissin , Brooklyn

I love the comment by Karam Chand, married since 11 December 1925 to Kartari in an arranged marriage. “My trick is to make. Kartari laugh... Being funny is my way of being romantic. I have been told laughing makes you live longer—my wife is still alive, so it must have worked. I love her, and I want to spend another 80 years by her side.”

Well—if that ain’t romance then I’m Maria of Romania.

The Baroness of Holland Park

One of my early heroes of detective fiction has died. P.D. James was 94 and had amassed multiple honors for her highly successful novels, most featuring policeman-poet Adam Dalgliesh.

I didn’t find her stories entirely comfortable; they were heavily laced with psychopathology, and so many of the characters were so disagreeable that I really wanted to throttle most of them and toss them in roadside ditches. But I admired James’s ability to craft a story and provide a compelling atmosphere, whether it be in a hospital, a publishing house, a nuclear power plant or a monastery.

James did not start publishing until she was in her forties, after a career as a civil servant, and raising her family. I really like that notion, of the second act being writing.

I confess that I thought she jumped the shark a bit when she wrote Death Comes to Pemberley in 2011. It tosses characters from Pride and Prejudice into a murder mystery, which I didn’t find as carefully plotted or as cohesive as James’s other works. But I respect the hell out of her trying something so different at age 91.

Something to aspire to, perhaps.

Literary matters

There’s this thing going around Facebook—you’re supposed to list ten books that have “mattered” to you. No specification on how they matter, but of course the challenge is to pare the list down to just ten.

Well, here’s mine:

Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, John Ellis.

This was my introduction to the First World War. I don’t even know why I read it that summer, but it was my WTF moment, such a vivid description of the ghastly life in the trenches that it sparked my concentration in New Military History, with a particular focus on mass warfare of the first half of the 20^th Century. When people ask me for recommendations on what they should read to “learn” about that war, Eye Deep in Hell is it.

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi.

This is the book that goes with me if I’m ever sent into exile. It’s possibly the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Levi was a chemist in Turin; in 1943 his life was interrupted when the Germans occupied the part of Italy not held by the Allies, and he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was a slave laborer in I.G. Farben's Buna plant. He wrote many books, novels, essays, etc., but The Periodic Table is the one I keep returning to. It’s a series of autobiographical short stories, each one tagged to one of the chemical elements. The one I love the most is “Iron”; Levi’s friend Sandro is my ideal of how a good life is lived.

The Odyssey, Homer.

I read The Odyssey in high school, and we basically jumped joyfully into the whole sea-cruise-from-hell thing. It seemed so full of panache, and adventure, and had that happy ending where Odysseus shoots all those sons-of-bitches suitors. And his dog remembers him. After 20 years, which made the dog about 25 and remarkably long-lived. TO was my introduction-in-depth to Greek mythology, and archetypes and all that stuff; I enjoyed it. But by the time I got to college and read The Iliad, I was considerably less inclined to put up with chapter after freaking chapter of a monumental testosterone-powered whizzing contest, amongst both the mortals and the gods, especially when the butcher’s bill is so high. I could hardly wait to move on to Aeschylus, where Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon. Good riddance, I say.

The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer.

Long before there was the Internet to ‘splain the fine points of roasting lamb or making meringues, The Joy of Cooking was my go-to reference. In retrospect, I think I may not have actually made a whole lot of the recipes in the book, but I certainly consulted the daylights out of it when I was looking for technique. Eventually it was superseded to some extent by Julia Child. And then, of course, YouTube. But it goes with me everywhere, because—hey, it’s just the classic.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

TWITW is the prototypical buddy story; Rat and Mole are about as good a pair of friends as you’re ever going to find, inside and outside the pages of a book. Yes, they have to deal with that whackjob Toad, and with the Weasels—don’t we all? Rat and Mole make me think it would be a good thing to go messing around with boats, even though even the thought of being on the water renders me queasy. Every year at Christmas I reread “Dulce Domum”, because this is what the spirit of the season is.

Pictures of Perfection, Reginald Hill.

I’ve already told you how much I love Reg Hill’s police procedurals about Dalziel and Pascoe; this is my favorite. It’s so…daft, so delicate, so delicious. And watch out for the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten.

My BFF gave me this, and I read almost the entire book on my flights back to LA from Seoul. I loved the wit, earthiness and perseverance Rosten described in the Jewish peoples. The understanding it gave me proved foundational when I was studying 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Century European history, and it was also helpful in navigating the executive stratum in film and television production. I read, reread and consulted JOY until my copy literally fell apart. I sort of felt I should give it a Viking funeral, because it gave heroic service to my careers. However, I don't like the idea of burning books.

Lives of the Noble Romans, Plutarch.

This is a holdover from a college humanities class on Ancient Rome. The thing that impressed me about Plutarch was that he wrote about his subjects with a certain degree of honesty. The one I remember was Cato the Elder, whom Plutarch held up as an example of a man dedicated to the civitas; even though he was really tight with a denarius, and when his slaves became too old to work, he turned them out to fend for themselves. I carry it around in my car in case of breakdown, or for doctors’ waiting rooms where the only entertainment they have is a TV set to daytime talk shows or sporting events. Plutarch is way better than anything on TV.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

I laugh every time some ninja rockstar self-styled techno-business-innovator next-big-thing guru spouts some sound bite and attributes it to Sun Tzu. As opposed to them, I’ve actually read this book, and understand its implications for a lot of arenas. I’ve also read Clauswitz’s On War, which has applications to the business world as well, but for some reason the gururati haven’t latched onto that one yet. One of the big challenges for implementing some of the precepts in TAOW is that they’re predicated on understanding yourself, understanding your surroundings and understanding your enemy. Most people can’t manage that first step.

The Long Good-bye, Raymond Chandler.

It’s not the first Chandler I ever read, but it’s my favorite. (Okay, there’s a line from his short story “Red Wind” that pretty well blows away everything ever written about LA, but this is the best of his novels.) I bought my copy for 90p at a news stand in Gatwick Airport the night before returning to the US from my bicycle trip through France and Spain. I had no money and nothing to do until the Laker Air flight to LA the next day; TLGB got me through. Look, Chandler had me at the opening line: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

What's on your list?

Looking for drink in all the wrong places

The software teams that develop search engines must be such a puckish lot. At least the ones that build out that whole autosuggest “were you looking for” element. You know, the part that implies that you could not possibly have been searching for what you told it you were searching for.

And it’s not just limited to Google or Bing.

I was looking through the catalogs of several library systems here in the Valley they call Silicon, trying to find a book called The Kentucky Mint Julep. None of the systems has it; here’s what I was given by way of hopeful suggestions:

San José Public Library suggested:

Yeah, I get that. At least we were still in the Commonwealth.

Sunnyvale Public Library went a little farther afield with:

Mmm, well, at least the right initial letters for each word.

But Mountain View Public Library just ran off the rails:

What the hell—I’ll just have a glass of Macallan.

UPDATE: Santa Clara County Library tweets that only 65 libraries in the US have this book, so I can try an inter-library loan request. Which I'll do. I also think I should find out what this Nantucket Diet is, and why it's murderous.