After two months of sloppy record keeping (and few books finished), I aim to do better this month.
- Claudius the God. "[T]he God who inflicted the vengeance on him was not one of the urbane Olympian community: he was perhaps the oddest deity that you could find anywhere in my extensive dominions, or out of them, for that matter, a God of whom no image is in existence, whose name his devout worshippers are forbidden to pronounce (though in his honour they clip their foreskins and practise many other curious and barbarous rites) and who is said to live alone, at Jerusalem, in an ancient cedar chest lined with badger-skins dyed blue and to refuse to have anything to do with any other deities in the world or even to acknowledge the existence of such."
- Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. Great God Pan redux.
- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Why that? Narrator calls herself "I who" many things, including "I who never speakbecause there is no one to hear me."
- Clown Town by Mick Herron. Extended action scene in which all agents, including those doomed to meet their end, converge on the action. Cuts from person to person, each taking a different route. Louisa Guy's route follows continuing ellipses, each passage trailing off and picking back up, until she is shot and after much hand-wringing, revives.
- Heavy Metal Movies:Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos, and Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big Scream Films Ever by Mike "McBreardo" McPadden.
- Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas. Is the fact that late period BD songs interpolate ancient Roman texts the reason he matters? Or even that he was broadly intertextual all along, going so far as to quote (without attribution, of course) the same yakuza novel twice in every song on Modern Times? I don't think so, but still an interesting read focusing on lesser covered work of an artist who definitely does matter.
- NYer of 12/22/25. Puzzle issue. Most NYer article of the year was a review of Stephen Sondheim's work as a puzzle-master (he solved crosswords in his head and was rumored to do solid white jigsaw puzzles).
- NYer of 10/20/25. Internet millionaire goes all in to discover to discover brother's killer in Australia. Did his millions drum up a conviction of a mentally ill man?
