Reading report

How I end up at night:

I don’t usually sleep with a Nutella jar. One of my sons added that prop.

I call this photo “Living High & Letting Die.”

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Our new pastor invited me out for coffee and asked what I’d been reading (besides the Bible). To his dismay, I told him I’d been making a special effort this season to get through various Gothic and horror classics.

What do you like about them, he asked.

The weather, I said.

It’s the truth!

Then I said something about “sins of the past.” That’s true, too.

Here are some items, a few of which I’ve already mentioned in this blog:

(1) Julia (Peter Straub; very Iris Murdochian)

(2) If You Could See Me Now (Straub)

(3) Ghost Story (Straub)

They’ve just been re-issued by the Library of America, although I’ve been reading them in other editions. Straub is the editor of the LOA’s two volumes of “American Fantastic Tales.”

(1)–(3) aren’t bad, but I wouldn’t have canonized them.

(4) The Greater Trumps (Charles Williams; introduced by William Lindsay Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley I might read, too)

(5) All Hallows’ Eve (Williams)

(6) Ortranto (Horace Walpole; ridiculous)

(7) The Haunted Looking Glass (compiled and illustrated by Edward Gorey)

(8) A Gothic Treasure Trove (Reader’s Digest Condensed Books)

(9) The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins; my fifth or sixth – and, thus far, most successful – attempt)

(10) Fludd (Hilary Mantel; there is a “Mrs. Fludd” in Straub’s Julia)

(11) Beyond Black (Mantel)

(12) Stories by Ray Bradbury, Elizabeth Gaskell, and M. R. James

“Every flat-earth person needs a globe”

We recently acquired a globe, courtesy of the abuelos (tireless Goodwill shoppers).

Samuel: “Every flat-earth person needs a globe.”

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There are very few living writers whose every new book I look out for. One is Michael Lewis. I have added his name to my St. Joe County Public Library “author alerts” list.

The library did not alert me that Lewis had just published Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, his third book showcasing the invaluable contributions of unheralded civil servants (its predecessors are The Fifth Risk and Who Is Government?; other books – The Big Short, The Premonition, and Going Infinite – touch on similar issues).

All ten hard copies of Blockers are checked out.

Well, I thought, I can at least find out the body-text font.

I could not. Only e-versions are previewable online, and they use other fonts.

On Faustian impulse, I turned to A.I. Would this demon supply the desired knowledge?

No.

Too Small; Didn’t Enlarge:

AI Overview:

The exact body text typeface for the hardcover edition of Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis (published by W. W. Norton & Company) is not publicly specified or documented in available records.

While W. W. Norton books typically include a colophon page at the very back of the hardcover detailing the typeface and composition history, this specific typographical information hasn’t been indexed online.

Uh, huh.

Might someone have uploaded some pages’ images to eBay? I checked. The closest specimen I could find was of the UK edition (Allen Lane). It appears to have been set in Dante.

This copy is being sold as a “signed”:

Were I the buyer, I’d ask for a little more John Hancock for my buck (quid, whatever).

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Happy October 12. Some names for this day:

Día de la Raza, i.e. Race Day (Latin America, superannuated)

Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural, i.e. Respect for Cultural Diversity Day (Argentina)

Día del Encuentro de Dos Mundos, i.e. Two Worlds’ Meeting Day (Chile)

Día de la Nación Pluricultural, i.e. Multicultural Nation’s Day (Mexico)

Día de la Descolonización, i.e. Decolonization Day (Bolivia)

Día de la Resistencia Indígena, i.e. Indians’ Resistance Day (Venezuela)

Día de la Resistencia Indígena, Negra y Popular, i.e. Indians’, Blacks’, and Proles’ Resistance Day (Nicaragua)

Día de los Pueblos Originarios y del Diálogo Intercultural, i.e. First Peoples’ and Intercultural Dialog Day (Peru)

Día de la Interculturalidad y la Plurinacionalidad, i.e. D.E.I. Bandwagon Day (Ecuador)

Fiesta Nacional de España, i.e. Spain Nation Fest, and Día de la Hispanidad, Spanishness Day (Spain)

Discovery Day (Bahamas)

Columbus Day (USA)

Thanksgiving Day (Canada)

Etc.

I’d prefer “Race Day,” “Discovery Day,” “Two Worlds’ Meeting Day,” or “Columbus Day.” (Columbus was a flawed man, but some flaws are worth remembering.) “Thanksgiving” is a nice sentiment, but giving thanks on this day is unseemly.

Kudos to Spain for bravado.

October’s poem

Previewing Autobiography of Red by this year’s Nobel laureate, Anne Carson.

Spare, ironical, mostly beyond me.

Begins with Emily Dickinson’s no. 1748:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The reticent volcano keeps

His never slumbering plan –

Confided are his projects pink

To no precarious man.

If nature will not tell the tale

Jehovah told to her

Can human nature not survive

Without a listener?

Admonished by her buckled lips

Let every babbler be

The only secret people keep

Is Immortality.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Carson – a Canadian – moved to Iceland, obtained citizenship there, and has been painting volcanoes.

She is the second Icelandic laureate. (Halldór Laxness was first.)

I like to think the Nobel judges viewed, or couldn’t avoid hearing about, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey; read Emily Wilson’s grousing about that movie; and decided, Let’s reward a more elliptical classicist.

The writer I know best who writes like Carson is Maggie Nelson.

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R.I.P. Mike Ditka.

A rough-and-ready distinction

Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Samuel:

He’s interested in, of all things, its physics – e.g., why a person (or an Oompa-Loompa), having drunk a “fizzy lifting drink,” should rise in the air.

Why does an ice-cube rise in a glass of water?, Samuel asks. It’s the right sort question. I’m impressed.

What blows Samuel’s mind is that, in Charlie, chewing a stick of gum produces the same sensory/​nutritive effect as eating a three-course meal. I’m not sure he realizes it isn’t possible.

And the detail that really gets him is that, at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should impress Samuel so much, I don’t know.

That the gum turns Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry interests him less.

That she could be de-juiced back to near-normalcy interests him somewhat more.

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I once knew a college student who was very interested in The Lord of the Rings – for its metaphysics (her word).

Like, why Elves and Men differ as to mortality?, I asked.

Yes, she said.

That strikes me as the wrong approach.

Could this be one way to distinguish fantasy from science fiction? I.e., is physical or metaphysical inquiry appropriate for science fiction but not for fantasy?

Authors/​works you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):

Homer

Hamlet

Gulliver

M. R. James

Jekyll & Hyde (but see this paper, which I don’t disparage)

Alice

The Curdie books

Narnia (I haven’t read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia)

Harry Potter (too many ad hoc creatures and spells)

The Borrowers

Charlotte’s Web

And, I’d say – despite all the “world-building” – The Lord of the Rings.

By contrast, Lewis’s “space” books more readily invite physical/​metaphysical scrutiny. So does Slaughterhouse-Five. So does A Wrinkle in Time. So too, perhaps, might Watership Down, which I haven’t read.

So does Dante; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed.

And it’s possible to go further down this path with H. P. Lovecraft than one might expect.

The Charlie books are an interesting case. There are physical explanations for some of the phenomena. These explanations don’t hold up for very long, and they’re articulated with the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out the underlying laws – if you’re a child. Not so much if you’re grown up.

Happy birthday, Sweetie

Abel, Daniel, and Samuel are thrilled with Karin’s gifts:

See Daniel peering over the boxes. He climbed to the top. “I love heights!”

They’re just car parts. Karin’s bumper got smashed up some months ago.

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Terrible things in the news:

(1) Manchester City’s illicit financial dealings (see, in Wikipedia, links to reports by the Guardian, the NYT, etc.).

Briefly: the English Premier League’s results since 2009 appear to have been massively distorted by one club’s cheating.

Some say it’s shaping up to be the worst sports scandal of all time. I don’t even think it’s the worst soccer scandal of 2026.

(2) The failed execution of Christa Pike.

“How does that happen?” Trump asks. “Should be easy to do. It shouldn’t be very difficult.”

For once, I agree with the POTUS.

To paraphrase Simon & Garfunkel, there must be fifty better ways to do it. People have been executing each other for thousands of years.

(3) Alleged gang-rape at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity.