Articles in “Reading”

And I wish he weren’t leaving Fables.

Now, James Jean isn’t the only reason why I read Fables: he does the covers, which are amazing, but wouldn’t be sufficient reason for me to read the comic every month. If Bill Willingham’s writing and (guest artists aside) Mark Buckingham’s art weren’t also superb, the covers alone wouldn’t make me buy the books.

But they are one reason why I buy the monthly comic instead of, as I usually do, waiting for the trade to come out.

I mean, look at this cover for the eighth trade, which wraps up some of the main storylines from the first fifty issues:

Or the third cover for the Flycatcher story arc, “The Good Prince”:

Poor Fly. I do love you. You’re the Fables version of Ellsworth in Deadwood—the only genuinely decent person in a fairly messed-up environment.

Or how about some of the covers from the most recent story arc?

I don’t actually have much more to say on these; I suspect they either speak for themselves or they don’t.

But, for me, there is a reason why James Jean is the only comic-book artist whose work is hanging in my bedroom.

(I’m going to run out of modifiers if I keep posting random bookshelf weirdness: so far, I’ve used “more,” “yet more,” and “further.” Hmm—I might need to find a thesaurus.)

And I’m blatantly recycling material, here, because I mentioned these Dragonfall 5 covers last time I did random bookshelf weirdness. But I didn’t post pictures, and these covers really deserve immortality.

But I’m going to start with a pretty one: the later ones are all 1980s’ covers (not a great time for the illustrating of children’s science-fiction novels), but this one is a 1970s’ edition, with a gorgeous cartoony cover. It’s only a pity that the paperback is so battered:

Look how fabulous that spaceship is:

Alas, that degree of pretty didn’t last into the next decade. Look, for example, at Dragonfall 5 and the Super Horse:

That is one terrifying super-intelligent cyborg-horse. (Which begs the question of whether there is such a thing as a benign super-intelligent cyborg-horse.)

And the cover to Dragonfall 5 and the Haunted World bemuses me:

Now, I could say that science is not my strong point, but it would be something of an understatement. Nevertheless, I have a haunting suspicion that that rocket-powered hang-glider is actually attempting to travel in two directions at once.

Certainly, it looks as though those engines are going to send it flying backwards, not matter how intensely the pilot stares forwards.

But this? This is hands down my favourite cover of the four, even including the lovely 1970s’ one:

There’s a cow at the end of that rope but, oddly, the cow’s not what I’m interested in here.

In fact, I doubt anyone walking into a bookshop in 1985 and coming face to face with this cover would care about the cow.

And, no, I’m not trying to tiptoe around a crass joke.

I just can’t figure out whether man is a space cowboy or a space rodeo clown. Perhaps in the depths of space there exists a civilisation that has streamlined the two occupations?

That doesn’t explain why he has a weathervane on his head, though.

I’m been on something of an Oz kick, lately, re-reading some of the later books (well, later than The Wizard of Oz and The Marvellous Land of Oz, anyway).

And it’s reminded me how much I enjoy the work of the later Oz illustrator, John. R. Neill.

L. Frank Baum allegedly quarrelled with the original illustrator, W. W. Denslow, after completing the first book; Denslow’s lovely original evocation of Dorothy and her three friends can be seen here, and it is gorgeous. The film version owes more to Denslow’s conception than it does to Neill’s, though Neill illustrated many more books than did Denslow—and despite the fact that Dorothy in the film is apparently ten years older than the six-year-old girl (or so) girl pictured here.

Denslow’s illustrations were also immensely popular, and Neill’s early illustrations show a degree of continuity, especially in the presentation of Dorothy’s closest companions: the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman.

But I was reading, last night, the eleventh book in the series, The Lost Princess of Oz. After this one, Baum wrote only three more Oz books, so by this point the conception of Oz is both fairly complete and relatively stable. Dorothy is no longer moving between America and Oz, but living in the palace with Ozma. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry have been brought in to live in a small cottage outside the Emerald City. Button-Bright, Trot, Betsy, Cap’n Bill, Hank the Mule, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, Tik-Tok, Ojo and Unc Nunkie, the Nome King, the Sawhorse—all the primary characters are established within the boundaries of the fairy kingdom by this point.

But an essential aspect of the Oz universe is the clash between the mundane and the fairylike. This lessens in later books, once all the primary characters are drawn to the Emerald City and Oz itself is cut off from the greater world. But it’s still part of the essential world-building. Dorothy—while brave, clever, and adventurous—is essentially an ordinary little girl who has extraordinary adventures.

Denslow’s illustrations don’t, for me, quite capture this aspect of the books, because of their cartoony nature. They do capture the whimsical feel of Oz, but not the clash of cultures.

But Neill’s do, as an illustration I found in The Lost Princess of Oz made me realise.

Scraps, as I mentioned before, is the Patchwork Girl, created from an old patchwork quilt by Margolotte, wife of the Crooked Magician, Dr Pipt, to act as a servant. Entirely unwilling to serve, she ends up living in Ozma’s castle.

She’s not a realistic figure and, like the Scarecrow who admires her, she isn’t presented realistically:

But there’s a scene in the beginning of The Lost Princess of Oz where Scraps, having fought with the Woozy and had her suspender-button eyes scratched off, is dragged by Button-Bright to Auntie Em for some restorative stitching, and Neill provides this illustration:

This, to me, is an extraordinary encapsulation of the clash of our world and Oz. Denslow’s world of heavy outlines and solid colours is not suited to such an evocation of the way in which Oz embraces the extraordinary, in the sentient, cotton-stuffed Scraps, and the ordinary, in the worn housewife, formerly of Kansas, and somehow manages to make them operate as part of a single kingdom.

This is the post that I’d originally intended to write last night, before I became distracted and a little cranky.

This, though, is less ranty. This is a disconnected (though slightly less disconnected than last night’s effort) run through some of my favourite children’s books—only some, but there isn’t room for all of them.

Some of them, though, are not books that I re-read regularly. This one, for example, I haven’t read in years:

Looking the author up on Wikipedia, I discovered he apparently writes “acclaimed spy thrillers,” which makes this book—a strange fantasy in which a boy living in Cornwall begins to experience memories of living in the advanced, subterranean world of Egon—an even odder addition to his oeuvre.

When I did read, though, I loved it. The Egonians are significantly advanced, physically and mentally, compared to humans, but sometimes bring humans down into their world. When they return them, they replace their memories of Egon with false ones, so when the protagonist’s memories start resurfacing, he can initially make no sense of them.

I remember, too, a strange streak running under the story: the Egonians—whose awareness of their bodies is such that they can immediately sense when something is ceasing to work effectively—cannot feel pain, and their reactions to the inherent fragility of humans disturbed me somewhat as a child.

Perhaps I should re-read this one; it has been quite some years.

Or perhaps Lewis Carroll? But I’ve not included Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass here, though—as a good fantasy fangirl and researcher in Victorian fiction, I love them both.

But this is a far more anarchic work than either:

This, alas, is a cut-down version of Carroll’s original two volumes, Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893).

The novels take place partly in a fairyland called Outland—where a revolution is underway to oust the Warden, Sylvie and Bruno’s father, and replace him with the tyrannical Sub-Warden—and partly in England, where the highly moral young doctor Arthur Forester is more or less successfully wooing Lady Muriel, daughter of the Earl of Ainslie. The two parts are linked by an unnamed narrator, suffering from an unidentified illness that Wikipedia suggests might be narcolepsy. (They don’t give their source, but it’s an interesting idea, given that the narrator regularly drops into dozes, in which he sees the fairy children.)

This cut-down edition only includes the Outland material, which seems distinctly counter to Carroll’s intentions. Unfortunately, the two novels are rarely reprinted, and this seemed a better cover to include than my Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, where I have the two novels in their complete form. Plus, I love the Harry Furness illustration on the front there.

The novels are odd ones; Carroll himself called them “litterature” (no, that’s not a typing error), according to this fascinating article from Tom Christensen’s Right Reading site. The temporal, physical, and narrative shifting from Outland to England; the long, intruded, moralising passages on inherited wealth, the affectations of High Church practice, or alternative ways of organising the animal kingdom; the highly sentimental plot with Arthur and Lady Muriel, their brief marriage, and Arthur’s eventual fate—all these confused me as a child-reader.

But I was fascinated by the books, nevertheless. And I remain fascinated with them, especially now I have a more thorough understanding of how Victorian literature shifts and develops.

Or L. Frank Baum?

I’ve only bought this edition recently, actually, and now want to collect all of them in these facsimile hardbacks: I also have The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918) in this edition.

Ozma of Oz (1907) fascinates me: I’ve heard The Wizard of Oz (1900) called the first American fairytale (though I can’t remember where I heard that: if anyone knows, let me know so I can attribute it correctly), but the books seem to me to be analogous to Carroll’s Alice books, in one significant way: both books take a distinct step back from the standard Victorian model of immature femininity, of the angelic child, Dickens’s Little Nell or Stowe’s Little Eva.

Dorothy Gale—and, gradually, the other child-characters who are shifted from America to Oz, like Button-Bright, Trot, and Betsy—is, like Alice, unwilling to accept adult authority simply because it is adult authority, especially when the Wizard, like so many of the other authority figures, turns out to be a humbug.

Ozma of Oz was one of the books that inspired the 1985 film, Return to Oz and, while I know so many people hold the Judy Garland film dear, I much prefer the sequel, which seems to me truer to the nature of the books: terrifying, often cruel and arbitrary, and ultimately centred on the bravery, intelligence, and tenacity of a young girl.

Ditto George MacDonald:

There’s little, I suspect, that I can say about MacDonald that isn’t covered by the fact that his devotees include C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle.

(Sadly, I haven’t included A Wrinkle in Time in this list, though I should have. Or the Narnia books. Or The Hobbit. There simply isn’t room for everything.)

At the Back of the North Wind seems to be the most frequently reprinted—and perhaps most frequently cited—of MacDonald’s fantasies, where others—such as The Day Boy and Night Girl (1882) or “The Light Princess” from Adela Cathcart (1864)—are rarely reprinted or re-read. But The Princess and the Goblin (1872) is by far and away my favourite, even more so than the sequel, The Princess and Curdie (1883).

On a slightly unrelated note, the other thing that intrigues me about George MacDonald is how much he looked like Rasputin. That’s one intense-looking writer of whimsical Scottish fantasy stories for children.

Do people still read Mary Stewart?

I have another of hers in the same series of reprints: The Little Broomstick (1971). Apparently, this, Ludo and the Star Horse (1974), and A Walk in Wolf Wood (1980) are her only children’s novels. I’ve never read the latter, but I adored the other two, especially Ludo, which tells the story of a young boy living in the Tyrol, who follows the family’s old horse (on which their livelihood depends) out into the snow one night, and ends up travelling with him through the land of the Zodiac.

Nick didn’t care for this book, at all, because it does have a melancholic ending. I still maintain, though, that it’s one of the most unusual fantasies I’ve ever read. (And, yet, part of the reason why I’m so fascinated specifically by children’s fantasy is because it’s often so innovative compared to fantasy novels written for adults.)

But I can’t end without this book:

This picture doesn’t do justice to how battered my poor copy of The Land of Green Ginger is. According to the Wikipedia page, it’s rarely been out of print since it was published in 1937, which doesn’t surprise me, except that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a copy in a bookstore or a booksale. If I had, I would certainly have bought one to sit alongside this beloved paperback, which is more sellotape than anything else.

No one’s bookshelf is complete without the adventures of Abu Ali (son of Aladdin, but too nice to be a satisfactory heir), Silver Bud, Mouse, Boomalaka Wee, and, of course, the Friend of the Master of the Horse.

I wish I had more room here. I haven’t mentioned Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books, or Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series, or Diana Wynne Jones (though no convincing is required there, surely?), or Mary Poppins, or the Wombles, or Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpe Saga, or any of a hundred other fabulous children’s books.

But I have talked myself out of the cranky mood that Harold Bloom and A. S. Byatt put me in yesterday.

After all, I have all these lovely books. And no one can actually prevent me from reading them as often as I wish, whatever opinion they might subsequently entertain about my intelligence or my maturity.

(I’d intended this as a piece on some of my favourite children’s books, but I’m a little cranky, and it ended up a long rant. It also became a little disconnected and rambling, but that’s nothing new. Add in the book pictures, and it would have been longer than the live-blogging posts. So I’m doing this in two parts, with a much calmer piece, with lovely illustrations, to follow this.)

I’m not sure what made me think of this at this moment, but it’s always annoyed me when the discussion about what adults gain from reading children’s books starts up again.

The keenest example of this recently has been the Harry Potter series, of course: Harold Bloom and A. S. Byatt both criticised these books, and both articles irritated me immensely.

(On a sidenote, I’m also bewildered by this comment in Bloom’s article: “It is much better to see the movie, ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision.” I wish he had qualified this statement. The Wizard of Oz, the book, is a gorgeous fantasy, as are most of the sequels, though some, notably the fourth book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, are somewhat mean-spirited. This statement, positioned as an inarguable fact, thoroughly confuses me: I can’t find the justification for it.)

I’m partly irritated, of course, by the way in which criticism of these books in these articles is collapsed into a distaste for cultural studies: Bloom casually employs the term “dumbing down” in discussion of “the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study,” while Byatt talks about “the days before dumbing down and cultural studies.” I’m not even a cultural-studies practitioner, and this frustrates me. I don’t see the necessity for anger when, firstly, cultural studies is a well-established discipline that, like every other discipline, produces extraordinary and insightful criticism and, secondly, when cultural studies exists alongside literary studies, rather than being the latter’s replacement. But that’s another argument for another time.

Do I think the Harry Potter series is flawless? Of course not. But I enjoyed them.

And I recognised, as I read them, that they were written for children. J. K. Rowling has never claimed to be writing for adults, nor has she claimed that the books works on more than one level as, for example, Alice in Wonderland and The Simpsons are often described as doing.

But this entry isn’t about Rowling. I’ve mentioned before—probably ad nauseum, if I know myself—how my own appreciation of the Harry Potter books is filtered through the experience of giving them to a group of children highly uninterested in reading at all. No amount of criticism (no matter how cogent) can influence me more than that group of absorbed children.

No, my response here is to whether adults who read Rowling—and, by extension, other children’s fiction—are “childish adults,” as Byatt’s article puts it.

Well, I wouldn’t have thought so. But I’m not a disinterested party here.

I have shelves crammed with children’s books, and I buy more regularly. Some of them, admittedly, are books that I read as a child, so my reading of them now is a re-reading, with all the nostalgia that such a process implies. But I also regularly buy new children’s books. Gath Nix, for example, I didn’t discover until I was an adult and, in fact, his first book—excluding the Very Clever Baby series, which is too young even for me—wasn’t published until I was fourteen.

And Garth Nix is coded “young adult.” The books are shelved in the “young adult” section of bookstores and libraries, and the assumption is that they will be read by young adults—and, apparently, I no longer count as one, now I’m in my thirties.

(And that’s fair enough. I suppose. I should never have admitted to turning thirty.)

I bought my sister—six years my senior—two young adult fantasy novels for her birthday last year, having them sent to her directly through Dymocks. One of them, Garth Nix, was fine. But the other—I’ve forgotten the title, now—wasn’t available, and the lovely girl in the store rang me to suggest some alternatives, which led to the following conversation:

LOVELY SALES ASSISTANT: Well, I’ve heard good things about this book [also now forgotten], but it might be a little younger than the Nix. It’s aimed at seven to eight year olds.
ME: Oh, yes, that might be a little young.
LOVELY SALES ASSISTANT: How old is your sister?
ME: Thirty-seven.
LOVELY SALES ASSISTANT: Pardon?

I can understand the lovely sales assistant’s confusion: she legitimately assumed, given my selection, that I was buying for a younger sister.

But I don’t understand the disdain and, sometimes, outright scorn and anger that often accompanies diatribes about adults enjoying children’s books, or the same diatribes that always arise about genre fiction.

I don’t understand the rebranding of the Potter books in “adult” covers. I just bought the colourful children’s ones.

I don’t understand Byatt’s assumption that to enjoy children’s books, one must have a childish brain or be immature.

And, above all, I don’t understand why it matters.

I understand why books are coded “children’s” or “young adult.” (I’m less certain by the bookstore distinction between “literature” and “literary fiction.”)

But I don’t understand why people should feel pressured into saying, “Oh, I know it’s a children’s book [detective novel, romance, fantasy novel], but . . .”

I discovered an interesting fact today, while reading an Encyclopaedia of English Literature during a quick lunch.

Arthur had a sword called Excalibur.

No, that’s not the interesting fact I’m trying to impart here. I’m just establishing the well-known details first.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, Excalibur was called “Caliburn.”

Arthur also, in this account, had a shield called Pridwen, on which was painted an image of the Virgin Mary.

He also carried, in his right hand, a spear.

Called Ron.

Don’t believe me? Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account is quoted here, which is convenient, because I can’t find my copy:

Arthur himself put on a leather jerkin worthy of so great a king. On his head he placed a golden helmet, with a crest carved in the shape of a dragon; and across his shoulders a circular shield called Pridwen, on which there was painted a likeness of the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, which forced him to be thinking perpetually of her. He girded on his peerless sword, called Caliburn, which was forged in the Isle of Avalon. A spear called Ron graced his right hand; long, broad in the blade, and thirsty of slaughter.

Now, I don’t know the etymology of the word “Ron.” If anyone does, I’d be thrilled to hear it. At the moment, I’m too busy giggling to look it up.

I do know that if I were Pridwen, I’d be pretty annoyed that Excalibur hogs all the glory while no one remembers my name.

But if I were Ron?

Ooh, I’d be furious with whoever named me.

This is one of my smallest bookcases, so this is only a brief pitstop on the tour. Although it is worth noting (continuing my current obsession with anything to do with my camera) that I kept the camera settings on Portrait this time, so rather than normalising the light, it’s keep that yellowy sunset light that’s filtering in through the living-room windows, which is rather a nice effect.

The top shelf is my beloved reference shelf:

I can’t fit all my references books on here, despite the large gap: that’s for my copy of The Oxford Concise Australian Dictionary, which, since I’ve been marking, is currently on my desk. (Ideally, I should have a dictionary on my desk permanently, but there’s no room for one. My Oxford Concise English Dictionary, however, is on my desk at work.)

But there are lovely books here, including four companions to literature: The Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, and The Feminist Companion to Literature, which I bought for $4 at a Brisbane City Council Library book sale, and adore.

I know all this information can also be found on the Internet, but at least these books are written by recognised figures in the field.

Plus, they look impressive.

This is also the shelf where I keep my two primary go-to reference books: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopaedia. If it isn’t in Brewer’s, then it’ll be in Benet’s, and the latter, at least, has a comprehensible indexing pattern.

(I’ve never quite recovered from the time I tried to look up a simile in Brewer’s. A student wanted to know where the phrase “as dead as a doornail” originated, so I looked up “doornail.” Plausible, right? But Brewer’s told me to “See under AS.” Who indexes similes under their conjunction? That makes no sense!)

I could spend the rest of this post raving about reference books, so I’d best restrain myself now. But I will point out that English Through The Ages is a chronological dictionary, listing words under their earliest-known use in the language (cool, huh?) and the battered-looking volume on the left is my lovely Victorian dictionary, in a crumbling leather binding.

(My parents bought that for my birthday a couple of years ago. But it was part of a job lot, so my birthday that year also brought me a dozen other books, a pair of matched, khaki-coloured flower vases (which are now in the spare room, holding up a green bob with a pirate skullcap on top of it and a baseball hat with a propeller attached to the top), and a set of brass canisters, battered but with a lovely patina. My parents are a little like that, now they’ve discovered the joy of auctions. It’s analogous to the time they bought me a gorgeous brass-bound trunk for Christmas, discovered it had three dozen items stacked inside it, and wrapped those up for Christmas, as well. One of them was a ceramic elephant. Enough said, really.)

(I keep the ceramic elephant in the living room. Next to the Dalek.)

(Ahem.)

The second shelf in that picture is almost all mid-twentieth century Everyman reprints of Victorian novelists who might have been read from the 1920s to the 1950s, but are a little hard to track down now. There’s some Charles Reade, some Clara Reeve (though she was eighteenth century) and Edward Bulwer Lytton.

I must own three dozen Lytton. I’m not sure why, but it does mean I own a copy of Paul Clifford—which I’ve just found in the study with a stuffed Snoopy figure in front of it, which would be hilarious if it had been intentional. And that means I own a copy of the worst opening sentence in English literature.

People know Paul Clifford starts “It was a dark and stormy night,” but do they know it actually gets worse from there?

It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Nice comma splice, Sir Edward. It also looks to me as though someone pointed out to him at some point that places other than London also have streets.

But leaving Lytton behind for a moment, the next shelf is yet another of the dozen or so places in the house where I keep my detective fiction:

This, at least, is the only place where I keep my Rex Stouts. I can’t explain how fabulous Stout is (with the proviso, of course, that you actually like detective fiction). And one of the great joys of my life is the fact that the Canadian adaptations were both fabulous and accurate. I know that does happen (the BBC Pride and Prejudice springs to mind, and their Vanity Fair was good, too), but it doesn’t happen often enough.

Yes, I’m looking at you, recent adaptations of Agatha Christie novels.

I’m also rather enamoured of how all the Harry Potter novels look lined up together. I also like the books (really, though, would it have hurt for the last book to have a little less whingy, rainy summer holiday and a little more of what the fabulous and lovely Neville was doing at Hogwarts?) but I’m happier when a book I enjoy also has a pretty cover.

On that note, that is the ugliest of the four or five copies of Dracula that I own.

Sadly, my verbosity is running to an end (convenient, since I still have to cook dinner), because the last shelf is mostly Nick’s books.

Iain Banks (and Iain M. Banks), Lois McMaster Bujold, Julian May, and Bruce Sterling: all are Nick’s.

That is my hardback copy of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, though—well, the original four volumes of the trilogy, anyway. I’ve been trying to forget the fifth book: so depressing. Even Adams admitted it was a bit much. But Nick tells me someone is planning on writing a sixth addition to the series; since that person obviously isn’t Adams, I have no interest in such a project.

We’re all sad that there’ll be no more Douglas Adams books, but if you bring in someone else to write them, then there still won’t be any more Douglas Adams books.

Am I being too cranky about this?

Never mind me: I’ll solace myself with my copy of “City of Death”: “What a wonderful butler! He’s so violent.”

Every time I look at the bookshelves in the living room, I wonder whether or not I should arrange them so that the most intellectually impressive books are in there (why, yes, I am secretly pretentious) or, at least, the books that I read most often.

But, then, I suspect that the Magical Mystery Bookshelf Tour has, if nothing else, revealed the fact that my bookshelves have absolutely no organising principle behind them, at all.

But I do have a reason for showing the top shelf of this bookcase:

A reason apart from the fact that it shows a number of books, that is.

I feel my poor little donkey, over there on the far right, deserves his own picture on the blog. Yes, his legs are actually kept on with packing tape. I bought him twenty-two years ago (well, at that age, I had him bought for me by my parents) in a shop in Jerusalem: he’s made of olive wood. He’s lovely—a little naive in style, perhaps, but a lovely donkey. But his legs are highly fragile: they’ve been glued back on more times than I can remember. Eventually, I just gave up: hence the packing tape. One day, I fully intend to actually take that tape off and glue his legs back on. Again.

In the interim, I think he deserves a small degree of Internet celebrity.

What? Oh, the actual books.

This top shelf, actually, is a straightforward mix of the absolutely essential (Douglas Adams); the unread and occasionally embarrassing, if seminal (Brian Aldiss); Nick’s books, which he keep bullying me to read, but I never seem to get around to it (Steven Brust); and the fascinating series that I started and enjoyed, but gave up because I became inappropriately fond of the brainwashed rapist, could see his eventual fate coming, and didn’t really think I could face it (Lois McMaster Bujold).

That last category is, I grant you, rather specific.

Ooh, speaking of books that are seminal and yet rather embarrassing since I’ve never actually read them:

There’s C. J. Cherryh! My sister is something of a devotee of Cherryh’s work, and I myself have to admire the the fact that she became irritated with the way in which her strong heroines were always depicted on the covers in gold bikinis, and wrote a series about giant cat people as a way of saying, “Right. Stick that in a gold bikini.”

(I bet there’s an edition of the Chanur series somewhere where the characters are depicted in gold bikinis.)

But I find her books incomprehensible. And I say that in an admiring way: she throws the reader in the deep end of an entirely fictitious world, complete with plausibly alien language patterns, and you have to struggle to the surface before you can even figure out the plot.

Well, I’m not a good swimmer, apparently.

(How was that metaphor? Too tortured? Also, don’t tell the people whom I want to award me a Ph.D. in English Literature what I just said. Okay?)

At least, I can’t seem to stick with the books long enough to slip into their mode of thinking. But I want to, so I keep buying them. Hence the huge number of unread, secondhand paperbacks on that shelf.

Actually, speaking of just plain embarrassing, there are some Michael Crichton books.

Can I get away with blaming those on Nick? Nope, didn’t think so. They definitely shouldn’t be out in plain sight. (Though, I have to say, the Jurassic Park ones are miles better than the movies, especially in terms of strong female characters.)

I do like those Diane Duane young adult books, though: the So You Want To Be A Wizard series. Unfortunately, Duane suffers from similar-name syndrome, probably because she writes Star Trek novelisations, and so does Diane Carey, whose work is not nearly as good.

Another example of similar-name syndrome is Elizabeth Moon (good) as opposed to Elizabeth Lynn (not so good). There’s another example, but I’ve forgotten it. And Nick’s not helping:

ME: Can you think of that other example of authors with similar-name syndrome? I’ve forgotten.
NICK: Male or female?
ME: I’ve forgotten!

The Philip Jose Farmer books are others that I haven’t read in years, and may never read again. I’m keeping them, though, because the concept of the Riverworld fascinates me. As far as I can remember, though, they went a bit pear-shaped at the end. Maybe there were dinosaurs? And Hitler showed up at one point, I seem to remember. Odd. But clever world-building.

In my defense, I should point out that the Laurell K. Hamilton books actually are Nick’s. No, seriously: I’m not trying to blame him for something embarrassing that’s actually mine. I have read most of those, though: I think I gave up before Obsidian Butterfly. We both gave up: they started shakily, with an interesting premise but a tendency to info-dump in a frustrating fashion, then steadied up for a little while, then took an entirely unexpected (unexpected by me, anyway) turn into out-and-out porn. At least the Merry Gentry books started out as porn.

Still, at least there’s nothing to be ashamed about with Ursula K. Le Guin.

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy Garth Nix’s books, perhaps during the spare-room portion of the tour, which is where my copies of the Keys to the Kingdom series are.

And then we just slide straight into Terry Pratchett, and there’s not much I can say about him that I didn’t cover in my post about how much I hope to grow up to be Granny Weatherwax.

The next shelf, though, is almost al Nick’s, including the E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith (already canvassed over at Smithology more comprehensively than I could manage here), the S. P. Somtow, and the Vernor Vinge.

Those are my Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, though. Ah, Cimmorene: you were a proper princess, but I never did figure out how you worked out the age imbalance at the end of the last book. (How’s not for an entirely obscure non-spoiler?)

I also loved Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: Being the Correspondence of Two Young Ladies of Quality Regarding Various Magical Scandals in London and the Country (now that’s a good title), which she wrote turn and turn about with Caroline Stevermer (whose A College of Magics I have somewhere, but, surprisingly, haven’t read yet.)

That reminds me: I have the sequel to Sorcery and Cecilia—I must (no, you know how this goes) get around to reading that.

And then there’s nothing left but Diana Wynne Jones:

Well, Diana Wynne Jones and Phillip Pullman. I had a (friendly and intellectual) disagreement with my sister about these. She felt that the His Dark Materials trilogy was anti-humanist, if I haven’t misrepresented her: that, essentially, he didn’t seem to like people. Similarly, she couldn’t read further than The Ruby in the Smoke in the Sally Lockheart series, because she disliked the way in which he constantly tore down and devastated the heroine.

Now, I’m not going to touch the argument about His Dark Materials, but I can’t say that I entirely disagree with the one about Sally Lockheart.

And yet, to a certain degree, that’s why I liked them. True, I had to stop reading halfway through The Tiger in the Well because my entire body was crunched up into an agonising ball at the thought of what horrible thing could happen next.

But isn’t that something extraordinary?

I read. I read an enormous amount. And few of the books I read inspire that sort of visceral response (though that may have something to do with the books that I select).

Basically, I’d sum the Sally Lockheart Mysteries up this way:

I’ve spent three years reading and researching penny-weekly serials. And most penny-weekly serials are bad.

Awesome, yes. But bad. Because they’re written under enormous time constraints for little remuneration.

Even when they’re doing something intriguing with the conventions of the form, they’re often bad: verbose, implausible, and silly.

The Sally Lockheart Mysteries are penny-weekly serials (not penny dreadfuls: chronologically, they take place between the great days of the penny dreadfuls and the late, boys’-own-adventure-style penny bloods) written by someone who can actually write.

And when that happens, you can’t giggle at the travails of the heroine, once again kidnapped by her own father who doesn’t know who she is and has already failed (twice) to seduce her. (This doesn’t happen in any Pullman novel, but does happen in Eliza Winstanley’s “The Strollers.”)

When that happens, you’re forced into accepting that the heroine’s travails are terrifying.

That doesn’t mean they’re easy to read, though.

On a lighter note, those tiny little figures on the shelves are, in fact, Warhammer figurines.

That’s really just an excuse to exploit the macro function on my camera again.

No shelf is complete with dwarfs wielding fearsome weapons.

This post is brought to you by the difficulties of marking while Nick is holding a shouted video-cam conversation with my father a metre away: mind, I’m not blaming him for the shouting. It’s just distracting.

But if my obsessive reading and watching of television has taught me anything, it’s that some rules can be broken, and some are inviolable. These are the inviolable rules, as far as I know them.

1. Never go shopping with Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan.

2. Never mess with Veronica Mars.

3. If in doubt, nuke the planet from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

4. Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

5. Don’t go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

6. Always take a banana to a party.

7. Don’t wear a T-shirt reading “Clone” around Captain Jack.

8. There can only be one.*

9. Don’t forget your towel.

Have I missed anything important?

*(I have no idea why I’m currently obsessed with Highlander; I haven’t seen it in years, and I was never thrilled with the “rape as an object lesson” sub-plot. Yet I keep making jokes about it recently.)

Photographing the bookcases in the spare room brought these two books to my attention, again.

Firstly, the book I mentioned briefly in the last post: Dragonfall 5 and the Hijackers.

I think we all have the same question, here: why is that otter wearing a crown?

The blurb makes it a little clearer:

Tim and Sanchez and Old Elias dislike the planet of the Waterworld intensely; it’s cold and wet and dark, and the sea otters who live there are bossy. But the vintage spaceship, Dragonfall 5, has been hired by the sea otters to transport their Princess, and the family crew badly need the money. As if matters weren’t bad enough, just after the starship finally takes off, a strange noise comes from the hold and the Dragonfall family find themselves looking at a band of very large and unfriendly hijackers!

Oh no!

Actually, the only way this book could be cooler is if the large and unfriendly hijackers are also crown-wearing sea otters.

Then there’s this one:

In this case, the blurb doesn’t really help at all:

“Moon serpents!” Astronaut Bud Barclay gasps into the microphone of his space suit. Tom Swift Jr.‘s investigation of the phenomenon reveals that the giant, writhing reptilian forms are caused by gas vapours. When Tom captures a sample of the gas in a metal flask for analysis, he shoots up from the moon’s surface into space! Through quick thinking the young scientist-inventor rescues himself and realizes that he has discovered a new powerful energy, which he calls Serpentilium.

At this time, a large railway network is in the market for an advance method of rail travel. A contract will go either to Swift Enterprises or to a rival firm, Cosmosprises—whichever designs the best super-speed train.

How Tom, using Serpentilium, develops his invention and defeats Cosmosprises’ evil attempts to win the prized contract makes exciting reading for all Tom Swift Jr, fans.

Well, it might have made exciting reading, if you hadn’t given away all the key plot points, blurb.

Mind, the back cover describes this as a “series of jet-paced Science Adventures featuring the amazing Tom Swift. Racy, exciting and futuristic—these stories are specially written for young science fiction fans.”

Racy? Really? Hmmm.

The fact that they’re “racy” does make me more inclined to read Tom Swift and His Megascope Space Prober, Tom Swift and His 3-D Telejector, and Tom Swift and The Captive Planetoid.

I imagine it’ll turn out to be much like the time I read the novelisation of the 1980 Flash Gordon film by Arthur Byron Cover and found out not only that Ming the Merciless was sleeping with his daughter, but also that Dale Arden had broken up with her boyfriend because she was tired of participating in the threesomes he insisted on.

I don’t remember that from the film.

I don’t know why I always feel compelled to apologise for these posts, but I shan’t this time. This ends the tour of the spare room, which means we’re on the home stretch (only the living room and the study to go! And, frankly, I’m not sure about the study.).

Plus, it will probably be another two months before I get around to another such post.

Besides, this should be a short stop, because these are mostly Nick’s books. (Warning: Robotech novelisations ahead!)

To be honest, there’s not much I can say about these first two shelves:

Because they’re almost entirely Nick’s Doctor Who New Adventures and Missing Adventures. I can’t honestly remember ever reading one of the New Adventures, though I do find the idea of the Bernice Summerfield novels (a former companion of the Doctor’s, who became the main protagonist of the series when Virgin Books lost the right to publish Doctor Who novels, after the BBC decided they wanted to publish them in-house) rather fascinating, since it’s one of the few instances of a companion being shown to have their own exciting, adventurous life after separating from the Doctor.

I did, however, read a few of the Missing Adventures: I gave up after three, if I recall correctly. (And gave up almost as quickly on Star Trek novelisations.)

I did read Christopher Bulis’s State of Change, with the sixth Doctor, Peri, and the Rani in an ancient Rome in which Cleopatra and Anthony had beaten Augustus at the Battle of Actium. Or something along those lines—I forget the details, now.

And I read Stephen Marley’s Managra (an anagram of anagram), with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, but, sadly, I remember almost nothing of the plot—except that Sarah loses her memory at some point.

And I’m sure I read Paul Cornell’s Goth Opera, with the fifth Doctor and his standard companions, but it thoroughly confused me. It was a sequel to Blood Harvest, which I hadn’t read, and, though they do say you could read them independently, I’m not sure that’s the case. It did involve a vampire Nyssa, though.

And none of that is as geeky as this next shelf:

Robotech novelisations: yep, that’s geeky. (They’re not mine. Honestly.)

On the plus side, lying on its side in front of the Robotech books is one of Nick’s Dragonfall 5 books: he’s been picking these up occasionally for nostalgic reasons—apparently, he read them and loved them when he was younger.

And I probably shouldn’t be quite so snooty about Robotech since I once bought a book, also on these shelves, called Shakespearean Detectives. Apparently, it’s a sequel to a book called Shakespearean Whodunnits, which I don’t own. On the other hand, I do own one of Simon Hawke’s Shakespeare and Smythe mysteries, in which Shakespeare, oddly enough, solves mysteries in his spare time.

(I am a little embarrassed about Shakespearean Detectives, though.)

On the other hand, if anyone could tell me how I came to own a collection of Sven Birkerts’s reviews, I’d be grateful for the information. It’s not even as though it’s The Gutenberg Elegies (although I am a little sick of people suggesting that the Internet is responsible for the decline of reading, especially since the word “reading” is often so unnuanced in these debates. I mean, pornography aside, the Internet is largely a textual medium, not a visual one. But I don’t mean to start a rant here.)

At least this next shelf redeems things a little:

Look: there’s some Terry Eagleton, and Deny All Knowledge (a book of critical readings of The X-Files), and Nick’s copy of J. C. Herz’s Joystick Nation. So we’re not just a household filled to the rafters with Robotech novelisations—we do have some more serious books lying around.

The serious books just happen to be out-numbered by Robotech novelisations. And, really, doesn’t that make life more fun?

On that note, let’s play spot the Paul Cornell novel that was made into two of the better episodes from season three of Doctor Who!

I was listening to Tripod’s “Astronaut,” a song about the lack of a Japanese space programme, and heard these lyrics:

Because you can’t carry out a ninja style assassination dressed as an astronaut,
It’s the luminous fabric (Too visible.)
And they don’t let you (Ooo-ooo)
Use a samurai sword when you’re an astronaut,
You might puncture the suit.
You might depressurise, like a Gremlin in a microwave.

And then my thoughts ran roughly along these lines:

Hee!

No, wait.

What happens to Gremlins when you put them in microwaves? They explode, don’t they?

But they don’t explode because they depressurise, do they? It’s more of a . . . boiling effect.

Ew.

But, then, you do explode when you depressurise, yes? (Wait, wasn’t there a Mythbusters episode about that? No, that’s not important.)

So is that a sufficient similarity to make that an effective simile? After all, they both explode.

No, but they explicitly suggest that Gremlins in microwaves depressurise, and I’m fairly certain that’s not what happens.

You know, I really don’t think that’s the best simile.

No wonder my students think I’m overly pedantic.

Great song, though.

This is still the spare room, but this bookcase is overloaded to within an inch of its life. Really, I need to stop complaining about this and do something. But it’s no longer a matter of not wanting to buy any new bookcases: now I’ve genuinely run out of walls to put them against.

I could move to a bigger house, I suppose, but that seems like going too far.

I’m not serious. Really. The situation’s not that bad—but I would love a room where I could have floor-to-ceiling bookcases. With glass doors, to keep the dust down. And maybe cupboards underneath, to store magazines and so forth.

A library, basically. One day, I shall have a room in my house that I can legitimately call the library. One day.

In the meantime, I have a bookcase that’s carrying three times the load of books that it should be:

Actually, this shelf’s not so bad. (Ooh, pretend that you can’t see that collection of Walt Disney’s Annette at the back there—I genuinely have no idea why I bought those. They’re funky, though. Could they qualify as retro decorating items, do you suppose? No, didn’t think so.)

But what annoys me every time I look at this shelf is that I don’t have room for a dedicated detective-fiction bookcase. I’d really like that, because I have a fair number of mysteries (some blended with other genres, some classic), and they’re scattered all over the house: Reginald Hill here, along with Val McDermid (only the Kate Brannigan stuff, which I rather enjoy but don’t actively seek out: I stay away from the Lindsay Gordon mysteries, because they’re a little nasty for me), P. D. James on a lower shelf (I went through a P. D. James phase about a year ago, but I stopped after a while because I realised that Adam Dalgliesh inspired almost homicidal feelings in me. Once I realised that I was shouting, “Why would you propose to her, you daft twat?! She’s leaving because you’ve never even made time to have dinner with her, and you’ve only met her half a dozen times!” at the book while reading, I understood that they weren’t great for my blood pressure), Agatha Christie in the hallway along with my classic Victorian detective fiction, and poor old Rex Stout (bless you, Rex! You were the greatest of them all!) and Dorothy L. Sayers in the living room.

And that’s not even including the various one-offs and minor authors scattered around the place, or the genre-bending detective fiction, such as Simon R. Green’s Hawk and Fisher books on the next shelf down, or Glen Cook’s Garrett, P. I. series and Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which are in the hallway.

Sigh. One day. When I have my library, which I’ve just decided will have a skylight. A lead-light skylight. And one of those ladders on wheels—although Nick will never use one of those. I might need to rethink this fantasy.

But I’ve just noticed that this second shelf also has my copies of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong books. I don’t have a full collection—in fact, I was horrified to find out how many of them there are after I’d bought half a dozen; it was like buying a fantasy novel and then realising the cover indicates “Book One of the Twenty-Seven Book Cycle of the Mist Queen,” and thinking “Dang.” But I’d never read them, and I felt that having grown up in Australia, I should have read them.

I still haven’t read them. Naturally. But I will one day.

I like the new covers for Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, there in the middle of the shelf under Kim Wilkins’s The Resurrectionists—that’s another book I haven’t read. I did start it, and I’ve read (and loved) the Gina Champion Mysteries (over to the left on the same shelf) because she’s an excellent writer. That’s the problem; she’s too good at writing scary stories. I read the first fifty-odd pages and decided there was no way I could use this as bedtime reading. (Actually, the first Gina Champion book, Bloodlace, terrified me, and they’re written for teenagers.) But I do mean to read the trilogy written around European folklore and, in fact, have the second one, Giants of the Frost, somewhere on this shelf.

And, hey, Garth Nix! That’s the Keys to the Kingdom series (I have the Abhorsen trilogy, in the living room), but I haven’t—surprise, surprise—read them yet. But I have a reason this time! I mean, a good reason. I bought these ones secondhand, and they only had volumes two and three: Grim Tuesday and Drowned Wednesday. So until I bother to buy the first one, Mister Monday, there’s not much point reading these two. Actually, it would probably be counter-productive.

I love the look of those Trixie Beldens, though. I think that’s a complete set: a complete set of the 1970s’ versions, anyway. I had to pick them up piecemeal, but I think I’ve found them all. And those books in front of them are the Dana Girls Mysteries, by the same “author.” Although, now I look closely, that’s only my paperback Dana Girls books. I wonder where I put the half-a-dozen 1970s’ hardbacks that I have?

Oh, who knows where anything is in this completely anarchic cataloguing system?

I see that that’s where I’ve put my Kim Harrison books, though. I was rather enjoying the first one, because the world-building was quite fascinating: essentially, when a genetically modified virus devastates the human population, the vampires, werewolves, witches, and so forth have to come forward in order to help keep basic systems operating (and thus ensure their own survival). But then I became distracted in the middle of the second one, put it down, and then never picked it up again.

I do like the titles, though: they’re all based on Westerns (in fact, I think they’re all Clint Eastwood Westerns): titles such as A Fistful of Charms and For A Few Demons More. I was rather irritated when The Outlaw Demon Wails—best title ever!—was renamed Where Demons Dare in the U. K. People in the U. K. are still going to get a joke based on The Outlaw Josey Wales, surely? I did!

Okay, this post has become far more verbose than intended. But the point of the next two photographs is to show that each of these overloaded shelves:

Also has a whole set of books behind the ones visible at the front of the shelves:

Oh, and perhaps you’d be kind enough to ignore the fact that I own four Pollyanna books, not just the original? Even though the later ones are written by different authors? I don’t quite know why I own four Pollyanna books—especially since all I can think about these days is that scene in the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen where she points out that even though she’s been ravished by a demon, she’s determined to remain optimistic.

Seriously, though, there has to be something going on behind those books. No-one is that cheerful all the time without some reason. Perhaps she has a secret Lithium habit. Or is bonking the gardener (television has taught me that that’s a traditional way of alleviating boredom for upper-class housewives. Television can’t be wrong!). Or she has a carefully hidden gambling addiction and is over-compensating for the fact that she’s sold all the plate.

There has to be something, though.

On the other hand, now I look at exactly which books are hidden behind the front rows, I’m starting to see the benefits of double-stacking the bookcase.

I don’t intend to get rid of my David Eddings books, because they were gateway fantasy for me. (I first read them with my best friend when we stayed at her father’s house in Sydney for a week. She’d been reading them there and was on book two or three, so I started with book one, and we read through them together, pointing out the bits we especially liked.

But I don’t re-read them: I find the politics—including gender politics and racial issues, especially the fact that the crueler, evil races of this world are apparently Asian, while everyone else is happily Caucasian—questionable.

(It reminds me of when they filmed Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea for the Sci-Fi Channel and cast Shaun Ashmore as Ged. Really, you only needed to have skimmed the books to realise they were some of the least white books around! Le Guin herself rants, and quite rightly, about it here, if you haven’t come across this debate before.)

And on the shallowest level possible, I’m happier having Steven Brust and Charles Stross evident in the living room and hallway and these ones tucked away at the back of a bottom shelf in the spare room.

I’ve been neglecting the Magical Mystery Bookshelf Tour recently: I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m worried about boring people.

Or perhaps it’s that we’re heading into the thoroughly chaotic bookshelves, which are going to confuse people and give them a poor opinion of my organisational skills. (For the record, I labour under a combination of fairly poor spacial-organisation skills—all those years of just shoving everything under my bed, I suppose—and a partner who won’t throw anything, and I mean anything, away.)

Or perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that I’ve been busy and sick, and trying to concentrate on formal publications rather than on taking photographs of my bookshelves.

But in the rundown to mid-semester break—one more class!—I think I can spare some time for photographing my lovely, lovely books.

(Also? I love my camera. These photographs are so much clearer than the earlier ones.)

I’m not showing what’s on the top of these bookcases, because it’s old stuffed toys: not many in total, but including my childhood toy, who now looks less like the beloved companion of a young child and more like the survivor of a horrific accident that included fire and traumatic amputation—he’s homemade, and while he once had little denim boots, they were made to cover his original red-felt boots, which wore away. Since his denim boots have worn away as well, he now has what look like mangled stumps on the ends of his legs, complete with dangling red strands of felt. Poor thing: I led him a hell of a life, I think. He came everywhere. And was frequently left behind, as well. I think he’s earned a nice, quiet retirement on top of a bookshelf in my spare room.

This bookshelf, though, has largely been made over to Nick’s books. Nick, being a science-fiction geek and artist, has an enormous collection of tall hardbacks—and I’m quite pleased about that, frankly, because modern bookshelves aren’t really constructed to take ordinary books. It seems to me that if you want bookshelves that will take standard paperbacks/those slightly larger paperbacks we get now/trade paperbacks, you actually have to make one yourself.

And if you do buy them, and deal with these absurdly large shelves, then the temptation is to cram more and more books on top of the existing books, to fill up the gaps—as you’ll see on a slightly lower shelf.

Actually, I probably didn’t need to mention that these are mostly Nick’s books: the fact that one of them is called The Cult of Mac probably gives it away. And, mind, he bought that book before he got his iPhone, which is the point at which he really drank the Kool-Aid. Before that, he spent so much time with his iMac that I used to called it his iMistress, but now—now it might actually be time for deprogramming.

(I kid, honey. Now, go with the nice man.)

But on these shelves you can really see the chaos that is my idea of organising bookshelves. I can see there my Beverly Cleary (Ramona! Ramona used to annoy me, somewhat—she was a brat—but they were books that showed clearly, and without the abject sentiment of, say, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, how a family could have two working parents and yet struggle financially, often in quite minor ways, it seemed, that nevertheless added up to serious difficulties. I don’t remember that being prevalent in the other fiction that I read at the time.)

I can also see some Colin Watson (one of the Inspector Purbright mysteries, not a Lucy Teatime novel) and some E. Nesbit on the far left (so that’s where I put those! I was wondering), but behind those is an entire shelf of books that hasn’t seen the light of days in years, probably. No wonder I keep forgetting what I have and rebuying at book sales.

But it’s this last shelf that really, to me, encapsulates one of the problems with spending thirteen years in academia: we just generate so much paper.

The homogenous pile of paper on the left is all the course readers that Nick and I have required either as students ourselves or for the various courses that we’ve taught over the years. We can’t bring ourselves to throw them away, because there’s valuable material in there: photocopies of articles and books chapters, and even some primary texts, that we’d otherwise have to go and gather again if we ever need to re-consult them.

But the truth is that, without some sort of indexing project, we tend to forget what’s in there. And so we never do consult them. But we won’t throw them out, either. The same is true of the files on my desk and on the various bookshelves in the study and for the archive boxes full of the side effects of the research process that we both have stored under our desks.

Of course, the fact that I’m someone to whom reading is roughly analogous to breathing and who prefers to buy than to borrow books doesn’t help matters.

But I’d be remiss to leave this bookcase without pointing out that it is perhaps the geekiest case in the house.

Not only is this where we store RPG manuals (and, sadly, those White Wolf books are mine, though Nick’s the one who bought the Dungeons and Dragons set at an Alumni booksale, despite the fact that we don’t play that version of D&D):

But Nick’s Doctor Who books themselves take up half a shelf.

I’m not even going to go into the manga books. Really, how many books on how to draw robots (and alluring manga-style women) does one man need?

I’ve just been searching on Wikipedia, hoping to find a list of writers who died accidental deaths.

Okay, that sounds ghoulish, but . . . well, no. It’s ghoulish. But it was prompted by the fact that I found out—through a long series of links on other subjects, the rationale for which I’ve forgotten now—that Tennessee Williams choked to death on the lid of an eye-drop bottle.

(I also found out that Robert E. Howard shot himself, which I’d never heard. And that the poet Hart Crane threw himself off a cruise boat into the Gulf of Mexico after being beaten up by a male crew member to whom he’d made advances. Poor bastard.)

I had no idea that that was how Williams died.

Hence the ghoulish searching.

But Wikipedia, while normally good on esoteric lists, had no such list.

Interestingly, though, when you search for “list of accidental deaths of writers,” the fourth item that comes up is “List of The Dick Van Dyke Show Episodes.”

Now, some might say this is simply because the search engine is pulling up key terms such as “list of” and “writers.”

I prefer to think it’s because Wikipedia knows dead when it sees it.