Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

2025 in Books

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As has become traditional on this blog, the last post of the year recaps my favorite books from the preceding 365 days.  I’ve finished 68 books this year, a little down on my usual pace.  My only excuse is that some of them took me longer to get through than I anticipated they would.  And life doesn’t always afford the time for reading you’d like, even for those of us who are intentional about it.  As for the books, it’s easiest to discuss them by category.  I read quite a few contemplative books this year that I quite needed to read.  They included Katherine May’s Enchantment, Brian Treanor’s excellent Melancholic Joy, Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s Blooming in the Ruins, and Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning.  These books underscore that thinking can be its own reward, and experiencing life is an opportunity for thought.  I should also add The Oxherd Boy by Regina Linke.

For general nonfiction, Ursula K. Leguin’s Steering the Craft was a good start.  Although older, I enjoyed Martin Tropp’s Mary Shelley’s Monster.  Although sobering, Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die was an important read.  The Secret Life of a Cemetery by Benoît Gallot was also informative.  I do think my favorite nonfiction book for the year was J. W. Ocker’s Poe-Land.  Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction was quite informative, a learning experience in its own right.  

The largest category for the year, overall, was fiction.  I’ve been trying to read more novels and most of them this year fit into dark academia.  My favorite among them was Mona Awad’s Bunny.  I see the sequel is out, but I’m waiting for it to be released in paperback.   Others that I quite enjoyed were Katy Hays’ The Cloisters, M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Goldy Moldavsky’s The Mary Shelley Club, and Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte.  These represent quite a diversity of what dark academia can be.  Among the horror novels, The Bad Seed by William March is another older title, but still scary.  Kiersten White’s Hide and Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea were both memorable.  Kanae Minato’s Confessions spanned dark academia and horror.  

None of this is meant to detract from the many other very good books I read this year, some by authors I know.  Looking back is a funny thing; some books seem to stand out for the impression they made.  This is quite individualized for each person, I’m sure.  I’m grateful to have been able to spend another year reading, and to all the authors I’ve read for providing the necessary ingredients.

Booking Time

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Some time back I mentioned that I was compiling a bibliography of this blog.  (It should eventually appear as a separate page on this website.)  I’m in the thick of it and it makes me think that it’s a good exercise to go back over older writings now and again.  For one thing, I’m reminding myself of books I may have forgotten after reading.  And it may actually give me ideas for new writing projects.  One of the problems, however, with blogging about books is that it creates a reluctance to rereading.  I’m guessing that most blog readers are looking for something new, and discussing something you’ve already talked about may not fit the bill.  Besides, my stack of books to read is already rivaling Babel’s tower for height.  I’ve always been a catch as catch can reader, especially since no longer having university libraries to use.

One of the lessons along the way is just how eclectic my reading tends to be.  (And eccentric, as long as we’re using e-words.)  I’ve read some strange stuff, and I’m still only in the first three years or so of this aging blog.  The real issue is the desire to re-read.  The world is full of interesting books.  I’ve read a few thousand of them, and many of them I’d like to read again.  This bibliography exercise underscores just how precious reading time is.  Those I talk to, apart from the retired, never have enough time to read.  I’ve learned to cram it into small spaces in the day, but even as I’m doing so I’m realizing that I’m shortchanging the experience.  And this is from someone who works in the publishing industry.  

I’ve posted about four books in the past week—on those rare days when I don’t have to work and winter prevents outdoor chores (beyond shoveling snow), I read.  It’s always pleasant to finish up books I’ve been dabbling in for a while.  In a couple more days I’ll be doing my annual review of the year in books.  Again, it’s an opportunity to look back and see what I’ve been up to thinking over the past twelve months.  Since this blog has being going for over a decade and a half, there are many books behind it.  I don’t know how many, at least not yet.  As I say elsewhere on this website, I believe the books we read define us, make us who we are.  Making a bibliography is a way to keep them in order.  And I’m one of those people who actually enjoys making them.  Time thinking about books is time well spent.

About Books

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I have tried my hand at fiction writing at least since I was ten.  My first attempted novel was at about fourteen.  Fiction has always been a large part of my life.  Now I work in publishing and still struggle to get my fiction published.  I picked up Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin because of another blogger praising his work.  Subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature,  it is an ambitious book.  I learned a lot by reading it but also found myself putting the book down in a huff.  Not because of the author, but because of the subject.  I grew up in the sixties and seventies, before conglomeration took over big fiction.  Conglomeration is simply the practice of companies buying out other companies.  Even I know that diversifying your portfolio is considered good business practice.  So companies buy one another out.  Thing is, that makes a difference as to what is available to read for the general public.

I’m old enough to idealize elements of the past.  I’ve worked in the corporate world for nearly a decade and a half now and I miss the time prior.  Still, this is fascinating history to read.  Currently there are five major fiction publishers (all of which also publish nonfiction).  They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.  How did there come to be only five?  Sinykin will answer that question for you.  He also explores the smaller nonprofit publishers and the independents.  There’s one big independent publisher left, Norton.  Reading through this book I realized how woefully inadequate my knowledge of fiction authors is.  I read a lot, but there were many, many names I didn’t recognize.  Sinykin tells the stories of many people whose individual tastes may very well have decided which authors you’ve read.

Publishing is a vast and sprawling world, but a very small industry.  In these days when self-publishing is widely practiced, and some authors make a living writing, publishing, and promoting their own books, it may seem that big fiction is less relevant.  Still, these publishers stock the shelves of Barnes & Noble as well as your favorite indie bookstore.  A few things stand out for me: all of this development is recent.  Most of it happened during my lifetime.  There are still powerful editors, but they don’t have the power they used to.  And business-speak has become the language of publishers instead of the countercultural impulse that drives many writers.  This book is an education in itself, even for those of us who work in the book business.

Reading Habits

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I keep track of my reading on both this blog and Goodreads.  It’s a little easier to follow the numbers on Goodreads, so I tend to use their stats.  One thing I’ve noticed in tracking my pacing this year is that academic books slow me down.  I desperately hope this isn’t endumbification, but I feel the need to consult the experts even as I try to write for a wider audience.  Having been trained as a professional researcher, it’s difficult to let go and just read the popular books—those with the style I need to learn to emulate.  But academic books take so long to get through.  Maybe it’s because they’re consciously designed not to be fast reading.  They take time and have concepts that require thought as your eyes consume the words.  They’re also the language I spoke for a good few decades.

My nonfiction reading pile constantly grows taller and I can’t seem to keep up.  Largely it’s because many of them are academic books.  I’m aware that in the real world, where books sell more than a couple hundred copies, that those who can’t claim “Ph.D.” after their names make the most successful writers.  A few of my colleagues have broken through to mainstream publishing, but they generally have university jobs, and tenure.  They don’t have a 9-2-5 schedule that holds their feet to the fire for the lion’s share of every day.  There are writers, I’m learning, who hold down jobs and write more successful books.  They generally aren’t academics, however.  Normal people with intense interests that they express beautifully in words.  Then they go to work.

I’m trying to break into that world.  I know that the publishers I’ve resorted to have been academic publishers.  They don’t really compete with the trade world, nor do they really even try.  Their’s is a business model adjusted for scale.  When you can’t sell in volume, you need to jack up the price.  But to have something intelligent to say about a subject, you have to read books.  I guess I need to learn to read non-academic non-fiction.  Kind of like I have to drink decaf when I have coffee (rarely) and have them add oat milk to make it a latte.  This is difficult for an old ex-academic like me.  I want to know how writers know what they do.  What are their sources and how deeply did they dig?  As I set my shovel aside I realize that I’ve begun to dig that academic hole yet again.

Being Written

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Some books want to be written, no matter what major publishers have to say.  The truth is, being an author is more like being a radio receiver than a transmitter.  Books come to you, begging to be written.  Given our culture, we equate importance with money.  Tomes that earn the most are obviously the most important and erudite.  So the (capitalistic) wisdom goes.  We follow the lucre.  If you read this blog you’ve probably had an experience like this: you find a book that you’ve never heard of that captures your interest.  You read it, transfixed.  When you tell others, nobody seems to have heard of it.  I’d say a number of books I’ve blogged about fall into that category.  The “general reader” follows what the big five publishers suggest they should.  It becomes a feedback loop.

Academic presses—university presses and others that cater to either students or professors as their primary readerships—produce some fascinating books.  Often they’re priced a bit higher than we want to pay.  That’s because they don’t sell at the volume that a big five book does.  The higher the quantity the lower the unit cost, right?  Books that wanted to be written but either price themselves out of sales, or aren’t backed up by a team of marketers and publicists, may be some of the most interesting reading material out there.  You’d never know it, though.  From the point of view of an author, most of my books came begging to me.  I occasionally think of commercial potential because, well, if you’re going to put years of your leisure time into something, you’d like to get at least a little back.  And you’d be glad for feedback, or someone what wanted to ask you about what you’d been begged to write.

Sadly, we have tunnel vision.  It only sees the shining spots crowded with dollar signs.  And since others are willing to pay for it, we have to assume that it’s good.  I’m working on my next set of imploring projects praying to be written.  I can’t handle them all, being gainfully employed helping others who write books that want to be written.  We write them for each other.  I figure that if I’m receiving the signal somebody must be sending it.  And I have a difficult time turning down an idea that pleads with me.  And if someone unexpected picks one of our books up and gives us a like, we show that even receivers can smile.

Spades Are Trump

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Sometimes it feels like the world is against you.  I can imagine that if you’re African American it feels like that much more often than if you’re not.  Racism, systemic and horribly pervasive, should disappear with education and with exposure to other people and cultures.  Still it persists.  Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel Ace of Spades, conveys what it feels like to be singled out because of race.  This it does in a dark academia setting.  Nevius Academy is a private school where typical teen concerns loom large—sex, drinking, getting into a good college.  Chiamaka is a queen bee, a hard-won position that she struggles to keep her senior year.  Devon is also a senior, but from a poor family.  His mother works hard to keep him in the music program there, with the hopes that he’ll make it into a premier program to develop his talent.  Then threatening things start to happen.

Not natural allies, Chiamaka and Devon eventually team up when they realize that Nevius Academy’s secret society, Aces, attempts to destroy the lives of students of color.  The plot runs very deep; a white supremacist faction runs the school and for the pure thrill of it, ruins the chances of the two Black students they admit every ten years.  These two victims fight back.  Added to the racial drama, Devon is also gay.  As the story unfolds, Chiamaka discovers that she is also.  This proves yet another facet of life that leads to ostracism and, in Devon’s case, beatings.  In other words, this isn’t exactly a cheerful story.  Given what has happened politically in the past year it becomes believable that such places might exist.

The darkness of this academia is right there on the surface in this novel.  Our high school years are formative ones and the decision to build up only to destroy during this period is a particularly monstrous one.  In this case the school itself almost becomes a monster.  Fueled by the collective hatred of generations of administrators and alumni, it consumes students of color.  Of course, this story was likely intended as a parable.  Fiction is often where we cry out to be heard.  Àbíké-Íyímídé’s novel became a bestseller a few years back, so hopefully that cry has been heard.  To be effective, however, hearing is nothing without action.  Books can be agents of change.  Our current climate of trying to ban them only perpetuates misplaced hatred.  If only we could encourage reading and understanding instead.

Bibliography

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For serial readers, my Horror Homeroom piece is now live, here.  Speaking of websites and blogs, you never know where a project might go when you start it.  This blog has a search function, as well as category options, but I know I have a few readers on Facebook and Goodreads who might never set foot here.  The other day someone asked me about a book and I had to do a search myself to see if I’d ever blogged about it.  This project has been going for more than a decade and a half and it’s nearing 6,000 posts.  I can’t remember everything.  Then it occurred to me: I could put together a bibliography for this blog.  This has to be a long-term process, though.  As a test, I scrolled through the first year, writing down the books.  There were about sixty of them.  Since there are over 170 months to go through, well, it’ll be a big bibliography when it’s done.

I’ll need to find a way to note the books I haven’t read.  Sometimes I’ll post on a book, or mention it, without having read the whole thing.  I don’t want to misrepresent myself here.  Other times I mention a book obliquely without actually citing it.  I need to include those as well.  Only, however, if I’ve actually read them.  Then there’s the problem of not remembering if I read a book or not.  After 2013 I can check on Goodreads, but between 2009 and then, I rely on memory.  Those were tumultuous years.  In 2009, just before I started this blog, Gorgias Press let me go.  I made a living for a couple of years as an adjunct professor at both Rutgers and Montclair State Universities, feeling like I was driving at night without the headlights on.  I was reading a lot, but job security was a mere myth.

Then in 2011 Routledge recruited me and my commuting life began.  I started reading about 100 books a year as I commuted my life away.  Most of those got discussed on this blog.  I was still at Routledge when I began my Goodreads account, not aware that there was employer writing on the wall.  I started my current job that same year and commuted to Manhattan for five more years, reading all the while.  It’s going to be a big bibliography when it’s done.  The nice thing is I don’t have to annotate it since that’s what this blog does.  Since I’ve got about a thousand other projects going, and a 9-2-5 job, don’t hold your breath for it.  But the bibliography’s been started and, God willing and the crick don’t rise, it’ll eventually appear here.  That’s the way of ongoing projects.

Dreaming

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To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of NightBorn.  It’s not a bad novel but some of the action isn’t explained enough, leading to a little confusion as to what’s going on.  This is pretty minor, however.  I was enjoying Theresa Cheung’s debut novel but I kept thinking of Dream Scenario and how the premise, at least at first, is so similar.  I was very impressed by the movie Dream Scenario, and wondered if this was going to play out in the same way.  The basic idea is that Alice Sinclair, a professor of psychology, begins appearing in people’s dreams.  The dreams of people who don’t know her.  Then the dreams start to become scary.  If you’ve seen Dream Scenario you’ll recognize the many touchpoints: professor, appearing in strangers’ dreams, dreams becoming nightmares.  Back in the novel, Alice joins forces with her psychic boyfriend, two psychic friends of his, and her dog, to explore why this is happening.

Alice discovers that her absentee father, whom she’s never met, is also a psychology professor and he’s been experimenting with a technology that makes a person go viral in other people’s dreams.  He randomly chose her, not ever knowing Alice as his daughter, or knowing her at all.  The novel deals with synchronicities, and this is one of them.  Her father, who is rather a slime-bag, is working for the government where an unpopular president (this is a novel of its time) is paying to have himself interjected into people’s dreams to get reelected.  Alice was simply a test case to see if it was possible to, well, do a Dream Scenario.  In the movie, of course, a company has been developing the technology for profit, so that advertising can be interjected into dreams.  Another synchronicity.

I won’t spoil the ending of the story.  The ethical concerns of the author come through clearly.  In many ways this is a Trump book—that category of books that, had this particular individual not been elected (or reelected) would likely never have been written.  It’s more, however, about the power of dreams than it is about the power of potentates.  The publisher, 6th Books, prefers paranormal plots, so expect a bit of that when you pick this one up.  Dreams not only feature Alice, they also guide the plot.  In the end, the scenario isn’t the same as that in Dream Scenario, but the vehicle is quite similar.  It may, if viewed from a certain angle, be considered dark academia.

Groan

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Authors are a peculiar but definite taste.  Some noteworthy voices have vociferated regarding the wonders of Mervyn Peake.  Mine has not been among them, but then, I’m not noteworthy.  Having read somewhere that the famous Gormenghast universe was one of the most gothic in mid-twentieth century literature, I read Titus Groan many years ago.  I understand the linkage between grotesques and the gothic, but this simply didn’t appeal to me.  I never felt interested in moving on to the second book of the trilogy.  At the same time, I held onto it.  Just in case.  Recently, I thought my younger self might’ve been prematurely harsh on the book and so I gave it a second try.  This time through, I appreciated some of Peake’s famous wordplay, but the novel, to me, dragged. The victim, perhaps, of the foreshortening of time, I just couldn’t get into it.

J. R. R. Tolkien once explained that he wrote The Lord of the Rings cycle to see if a really long story could be made interesting.  He succeeded.  I read the trilogy, after The Hobbit, when I was in college.  I really enjoyed it.  Titus Groan isn’t cut from the same fabric.  Peake’s thick description is sometimes a thing of wonder.  It is also very ponderous, to the point of being tedious at times.  The action is interesting enough, what there is of it.  The characters are well drawn, even if overdrawn.  And it’s clear by the end of Titus Groan that to make any sense of any of this you will need to commit yourself to two-plus volumes more.   Peake died before he could finish the fourth volume.  The first three are now solidly referred to as a trilogy, but I fear that if I were to force my way through the other two I’d still be left hanging.  I really do appreciate resolution.

It’s a personal failure, in my opinion.  I mean, Peake was obviously a talented writer.  The question is whether you can stretch a story out for too long.  Part of me wants to know the resolution, but not enough of me to get me through at least two more books like this.  I’m not sure that I’d declare this terribly gothic.  I can see why some would: castle, skulduggery, and one very well drawn villain.  Again, some of the characters are too comical to be effective gothic.  To me it felt like a mismatch between style and vehicle.  I realize that should any of his fans perchance read this, I’ll be declared a Peake imbecile.  I’ll admit that the fault is mine.  It’s a matter of taste.

Author Pages

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It takes me awhile, sometimes.  Maybe it’s a generational thing.  I’ve been blogging for sixteen years now (my blog is a teenager!) and it only just occurred to me that I should be putting links to authors’ pages when I post about their books.  I know links are what makes the web go round but I assumed that anyone whose book I’ve read is already better known than yours truly.  Why would they need my humble help?  Well, I’ve been trying to carve out the time to go back and edit my old posts about books, linking to authors’ pages—there are so many!  In any case, this has led to some observations about writers.  And at least this reader.  Most commercial authors have a website.  Not all, of course.  People my age who had earlier success with writing tend not to have a site since they already have a fan base (I’m guessing).  Most fiction writers in the cohort younger than me have pages, and I’m linking to those.

I’ve noticed, during this exercise, that my reading falls into two main categories: novels and academic books.  I suppose that’s no surprise, although I do read intelligent nonfiction from non-professors as well.  In the nonfiction category, it’s fairly rare to find academics with their own websites.  They probably get the validation they require from work, and being featured on the school webpages.  Or some will use Academia.edu to make a website.  As an editor I know that promoting yourself is important, even for academic authors.  Few do it.  Then I took a look around here and realized, as always, that I fall between categories.  No longer an academic, neither have I had any commercial success with my books.  I’ve fallen between two stools with this here website.  I do pay for it, of course.  Nothing’s free. 

Almost nobody links to my website.  This isn’t self-pity; WordPress informs you when someone links to your site and that hasn’t happened in years.  Links help with discoverability on the web, so my little website sits in a very tiny nook in a low-rent apartment in the part of town where you don’t want to be after dark.  And I thought to myself, maybe other authors feel the same.  Maybe they too need links.  So I’m adding them.  As I do so I hope that I’ll also learn a thing or two.  I’m trying to learn how to be a writer.  It just takes me some time before things dawn.  Maybe it’s just my generation.

Unwritten

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It has been clear to me for some time now that I won’t live long enough to finish all the books I’m writing in my head.  A good number of them have a head start on my hard disc, but as Morpheus says, “Time is always against us.”  The largest culprit in the 9-2-5 job.  Eight hours is a huge amount of time to devote each day, no matter how you slice it.  Since eight hours are required for sleep, or trying to sleep, that means work is half of each day’s waking hours.  The other half includes things like making meals, washing clothes, family time, paying bills, running the vacuum, exercising because you sit in front of a screen all day, and, of course, yard work.  Plants don’t have the same constraints that humans do and can get to the business of growing larger 24/7, as long as the weather cooperates.

Some days I grow reflective about this.  My daughter often asks why I don’t draw or paint more.  I love doing both.  The answer is time.  Even weekends are eaten up with shopping for the food you need to get through the week, and yes, the yard was bigger than I realized, and the house needed more repair work than anticipated.  You see, writing well requires a lot of practice.  And even more reading.  Any successful writer (which I am not yet) will tell you that reading is essential.  I do read a lot.  A friend recently sent me an article about a writer whose heirs calculated he’d read at least 4,000 books.  I know that I’ve read about 1,200 since 2013.  I also know that I can’t count them all before that time.  I went through our living room shelves and counted 500 I’d read there, and that’s only one room.  

Ironically, as a professor reading time is limited.  Unless you have a research only post.  I read a lot as a kid and a ton as a student.  When I started teaching I had less time, except on semester breaks and I tried to read as many books as possible during those interludes.  Then the 9-2-5 began.  My current pace of reading began when trying to live as an adjunct between Rutgers and Montclair State.  Montclair was a 70-mile drive, so between classes I started reading voraciously.  Ironically, the commute to my 9-2-5 spurred me to start writing books again.  By then I was practically fifty.  Since my nonfiction books take about five years to write, well, the math’s not in my favor.  Time to stop my musing, because the 9-2-5 begins shortly.

Banning Books

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For many years I’ve celebrated Banned Books Week by reading a banned book.  What with Republicans wanting only white, hetero, history-denying titles approved, I’m pretty sure that most books I read are banned somewhere.  Banned books, of course, see sales bumps and benefit the publisher and author.  So instead of reading a noted banned book, this year I’ll hang out my shingle here with but shallow hopes that it will be read.  I’m pretty sure, any agents out there, that at least one of my novels would be a banned book.  Maybe all of them.  You see, in my fiction I’m not the mild-mannered, inoffensive person who blogs here everyday for free.  There’s a reason that I keep my pen name secret.  I’m pretty sure that most people who know me would be surprised, if not shocked, by what appears in my fiction.

Writing, you see, is where we express the ideas in our heads.  I may seem to yak about everything on this blog, but in reality, I’m quite guarded.  Many of the horror movies I discuss, for instance, have ideas or scenes that I simply leave unaddressed.  I’m trying not to offend anyone here.  (A friend of mine who does publish fiction mentioned recently that a significant other in her family suggested that her writing wasn’t controversial enough to be picked up by publishers.  I think there could be something to that.)  While my mother was alive, I took special care that she wouldn’t discover any of my fiction.  Now that she’s gone these two years, I still protect her name with my own nom de guerre.  I really don’t want to hurt anybody.  I do, however, need to express myself.

Some of my fiction is horror.  Some is just plain weird.  The novels are well written, I think, and I’m open to editing.  (Agents, I am an editor—I know how this game works!)  As long as we’re stuck in a morass of banning books, why not look at a writer who’s more controversial than you might believe?  I’ve been writing daily for going on half-a-century now.  Think about that.  Think about the sheer number of controversial thoughts one might have in that amount of time!  Add graphomania to the recipe, with just a squeeze of talent and you’ve got banned books to last a lifetime!  I’m not sure any of the books I’m currently reading (five actively, at this point) formally appear on a  banned list.  But if you want to find one that almost certainly will be, well, my shingle’s out there if you care to take a look.

A banned book, in some districts

Missing Books

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I’ve written before about what we call “the flood.”  Just over seven years ago, we moved into our house.  The movers, complaining every inch of the way, lamented the number of boxes and the lateness of the hour.  Since their truck was just outside our garage, we told them that they could stack about 100 of the boxes in there and we’d haul them to the house ourselves.  This they did.  Torrential rains came a day or two later but being new to the house we didn’t realize the garage flooded in heavy rain.  Many, many books were ruined.  I started a list but haven’t had the time or heart to finish it.  Insurance didn’t cover it and most of the books were never replaced.  That’s not what I’m writing about, though.  I am writing about other missing books.  Often associated with moving.  And perhaps proof of an alternate universe.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, and if you know anything at all about me you know that I’m careful with books.  I never leave any behind.  And yet… yet some manage to disappear.  The first one I recall was my personally annotated copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.  It disappeared between Boston and Ann Arbor, Michigan, when, no exaggeration, all of my worldly goods fit into the back of a rental car.  I unpacked, wondering where it’d gone.  Then moving back to the United States from Edinburgh, our annotated copy of Historic Scotland, the booklet describing all their sites, in which we’d written notes from when we visited, was gone.  Moving from Somerville, New Jersey to our current house, Godwired, by Rachel Wagner, disappeared.  Also, a new translation of The Odyssey that I’d received at work.

Now on this latest move there was nothing left in our Somerville apartment.  And despite the griping movers, there were no boxes left in the truck.  Every box has been opened and sorted and yet, Godwired and The Odyssey aren’t here.  The other day I was looking for Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.  I’m pretty sure it was lost in the flood (but it’s not on my list).  I distinctly remember buying it at a used bookstore to replace the one I purchased at Watchung Booksellers in New Jersey.  And it is not here.  I keep careful track of my books, and if one goes missing it’s like the parable of the lost sheep.  I can’t rest until I find it.  None of this helps me if there is an alternate universe that’s sucking select books every now and again.  If so, I’m sure it’s got one of the most amazing libraries in the multiverse.

Ancient Asherah

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It seems like ancient history.  Actually, it is ancient history.  Ancient history with a new angle.  A Reassessment of Asherah is finally available in paperback.  Although my research has moved in a different direction, an author cares for all of their books and Asherah is my firstborn.  My doctoral dissertation originally, what separates it from many proposals I now see as an editor, is that it has a broad topic and some native sense of writing.  I have always eschewed technical jargon.  Academese obfuscates.  And is boring to read.  In any case, being young and naive, at the instruction of one of my doctoral supervisors, I sent it to the distinguished series AOAT (Alter Orient und Altes Testament), published in Germany.  It came out as an expensive hardcover and sold through its only print run.

Years later, evicted from academia, I found a foothold in publishing at Gorgias Press.  The owner of the press did something that even Eisenbrauns couldn’t, he talked what was then Ugarit Verlag into granting Gorgias the rights to republish my out-of-print book.  But he decided to do it in hardcover, so it was still too expensive for most potential readers.  Also, to make this a proper second edition, I added all of the articles I’d written about Asherah as well as the original text of the AOAT version.  If I recall correctly, it sold pretty well for Gorgias.  I moved on to other things.  Weathering the Psalms had been written before my career malfunction, but publishing that made me realize I could still write expensive books with low sales.

Four books further along, all on aspects of horror, a friend did the impossible.  He talked Gorgias Press into publishing a paperback of A Reassessment of Asherah, without my prompting.  For the first time in the thirty-plus years that the book has been available, it is now “individually priced.”  Please keep in mind, though, before emptying out your bank account, that “individually priced” here is still in the academic realm.  It seems the minimum price for books in this category is around $40, which is a bit steep for most of us.  But still, it is a new thing in the academic world.  I do hope that someone more persuasive than me might talk to Bloomsbury about a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That has been, as far as I can tell, the poorest performing of all my expensive books.  It’s also the one that, I suspect, would have some individual readers.