by Henry Hoke

The narrator is a displaced mountain lion in California. It was certainly interesting, and nicely brief. I like books that try to capture an animal’s perspective. It really lost me though when the girl takes him to Disney World.

Oh, and it came with stickers.

by Louise Aronson

First, the negatives. I am so glad to be done with this 300-page book. Did this woman have any editor whatsoever? She must have put down every single thought on the subject of elderliness that ever entered her mind.

Now the positives. I liked learning about geriatrics. I feel a geriatrician is exactly what my mother-in-law needs – a whole-person doctor. (If only I could get her out of the house to see one.)

And I did feel inspired to bookmark one thing. Why do we all hesitate to call ourselves “old”? “Imagine a forty- or fifty-year-old saying, ‘I don’t like to think of myself as an adult. I’m just a kid who’s been around a few extra years.'” Well, actually, I can and do know at least one person who’s said something to that effect, so, not so shocking… “Or a children’s hospital that eschews the term ‘child’ because of its association with immaturity, and instead markets itself as serving short, unemployed people.” OK, that part is funny to imagine.

by Latanya Mapp Frett

Was at its best when it spotlighted feminist activists around the world and let them speak of their own experiences in their own words. Was at its second best when Mapp Frett spoke directly of her own experiences. Was not at its best when she spoke in general terms,

by Ben McKenzie & Jacob Silverman

An antic-crypto screed in which Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and the implosion of FTX figures heavily. I spent most of my 2020 workyear researching cryptocurrency, blockchains, stablecoins, etc., so I have an interest. I also have been a follower of the Effective Altruism movement, with which SBF was associated, so that’s given me a double-interest in the FTX story. I read this with glee. It’s not bad; while unabashedly anti-crypto, it doesn’t come off like a bone to pick, but rather one person’s not unreasonable opinion. Ben McKenzie does make constant references to his being an actor, a somewhat famous actor in his day, but I never saw anything with him in it so I didn’t care. (His biggest role was on a show called the O.C. which was for people younger than me.) For an actor, he’s damn smart.

He’s got lots to share firsthand about SBF because he actually once scored an interview with him as well as something of a Twitter relationship. He found the guy to be really weird (no surprise there), intrinsically; and also, it just felt so weird that SBF wanted to talk to him at all – not only that, but really seemed to want him to LIKE him. McKenzie shares some insight he got form a former FBI agent: Just listen. “Tell the suspect you know he is a good person, but you need help understanding what happened…” Bad actors, all of us, need to see ourselves as good people.

So, the FTX story. I remember it well (it wasn’t even a year ago). Binance, a rival crypto exchange, held tons of FTX tokens (FTT). When they announced that “concerns” about FTX’s balance sheet had led to them to decide to liquidate all their FTT tokens, that was the end. The CEO of Binance, “CZ”, had gotten into some kind of bicker-war with SBF, Well, all it took was the announcement of intent to sell a major quantity of FTT, and “Voila, bank run.” “CZ had played his hand well.”

McKenzie’s problem with crypto is that it has no use case, nothing for the here and now – use cases are always presented as “Someday it could…” His fundamental problem is that it seems to misunderstand the nature of money. Money has value because we TRUST the government to back it. We TRUST that other parties will accept it as legal tender because it has the government of the USA backing it. Crypto is “trustless” – that’s allegedly a feature, not a bug. But he doesn’t think that the necessary trust that could make it ever be anything more than a speculative gamble can be conjured out of thin air, or out of trusting the code – code is written by people. I could see having some good arguments with the guy.

Volumes 1, 3, 7, and 9

Yes, I’m counting these as four books; wanna make something of it?

I got these off of Paperback Swap. These were the only volumes available.

When I was a kid I had two or three “Charlie Brown’s Super Book(s) of Questions & Answers” – which contained some of the same content as these. So it was a walk down memory lane as well as a chance to spend some time with Snoopy.

by Italo Calvino

Connected short stories that grew on me. The title character is basically a schlemiel, but it’s not just about schlemielitude. Calvino surrealism is present. Marcovaldo is a poverty-stricken father of six in poverty-stricken northern Italy in the 1950s-1960s. First living in a basement room and then in a garret, he and his complaining wife and mischievous troublesome children make discoveries and get into pickles and end up on hospital cots or afoul of the law or the landlady. And life goes on to the next story.

by Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrated by Maurice Sendak

A collection of very Jewish children’s stories with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. The title and final story was the best. Young Aaron must take the old family goat, Zlateh, to the butcher’s in the next town. They get caught in a blizzard and survive for 3 days inside a haystack. Aaron lives on the goat’s milk and the goat of course lives off the hay. They return home after the storm, and the life-saving goat is then forever after welcome in the house and treated like a sibling. “Maaaa,” is all she says. Yes, I loved her.

by Mary Roach

The unifying theme is supposed to be “when nature breaks the law.” This loose idea combines stories of investigating wild animal attacks, deterring birds from eating sunflower seed fields, controlling monkeys in India, controlling rodents in your own home, and myriad other digressions. Mary Roach is funny, so it’s all good.

“I have read the 1978 paper by researchers… who tried to warn away white-tailed deer by erecting roadside plywood cutouts of deer rear ends with tails a-flagging. On some… an actual deer tail had been nailed in place. Sadly, because who wouldn’t want to see our nation’s highways lined with plywood deer asses with decomposing tails, none of it worked.”

Then the story of “fecal bags” attached to goat butts (no, she’s not always scatological, but, well, she often is)… a harness was designed with no fewer than 19 leather straps that allowed goats to rear up on their hind legs. “In a minor setback, several of the nonharnessed goats, being goats, ate the leather straps off their pals.” I had to include that quote.

I’m pro-wildlife but I find a little tiresome heroic efforts to get vermin out of your home without actually harming any critters. I do not wish to inflict cruelty. When she says glue traps ought to be banned, because “a professional pest control person should be checking the traps daily and humanely killing any rodent that’s been caught… what homeowner is going to tackle that?” We do, actually. We use glue traps because they work, and my husband, bless him, humanely dispatches anything we catch, always within half a day. She admits herself that snap traps very often fail to kill immediately and humanely, so what’s the diff? But the complaints about have-a-heart style traps where you release the critters somewhere far away – well, then they don’t know the territory and they get eaten. OK, as if in their own territory, they live to a ripe old age enjoying Lawrence Welk and complaining their children never call. It’s a thing-kill-thing world out there, people!

I was pretty disgusted to hear how Big Sunflower kept trying to kill blackbirds that would feast in their sunflower fields. They said blackbirds were responsible for the loss of about 2% of their crop. 2%? You can’t give 2% for wildlife? You have to kill and bomb and poison and kill myriad other inoffensive birds too in the process? 2% of your crop, for a healthy blackbird population and all the other little tweeters too. Cmon!

Back about getting pests out of your home. (It’s a sore spot with me.) She had a rat in her walls. A rat! So instead of doing anything lethal, she so virtuously had the pest guy come over, figure out where he was getting in, and plug all the entrances with steel wool. Problem solved! Sure! Oh, it’s so simple! Sure, just go around putting a little steel wool here and there. I wish it were that easy to keep things out.

by Peggy Hickman

Some food-related quotes from Jane Austen’s correspondence and novels, interspersed with commentary about the housekeeping of the period, and copious recipes copied down by Jane’s close friend Martha Lloyd.

Were I ever transported to Jane Austen’s time and seated at her table, I am afraid I’d have to ask for a cup of weak tea and make do with that, as I might have a hard time finding among the many removes anything not stomach-turning. Between the calf-feet jelly, fricasee of turnips, mutton, cabbage pudding, and hashed calves’ head, I would not know what to make of the “brown soup” or “duck ragoo” or “walnut catchup.” Just the tea, please.

by Dodie Smith

I had been a fan of Dodie Smith’s novel for (sort-of) adults, I CAPTURE THE CASTLE. And in grade school I remember reading THE STARLIGHT BARKING, the sequel to the famous 101 DALMATIANS. I also loved the movie when I was a kid; I must have been 10, since I see in Wikipedia that 1979 was the year of one of the theater re-issues. I remember going through a bit of a ‘dog phase’ afterwards.

But I don’t believe I had ever read this, the original first book, till now. I was able to call out most of the changes that the movie made – such as getting rid of an entire dog (they upped the number of puppies to make 101). In the book the dog couple are named Pongo and Missis; and since Missis can’t nurse 15 puppies, another dog, Perdita, is brought in to take on seven of them. The whole wet-nursing thing was probably deemed too graphic for Disney. They named the couple Pongo and Perdita, with no third dog brought in, and didn’t go into how an animal with eight nipples could nurse 15 puppies. Which is all well enough! Anyway…

This book was written in 1956, by a woman, and I was startled by the sexism – yes, sexism, in Dogdom! Missis is kind of an airhead who literally can’t tell her left paw from her right. Pongo is the leader, who figures out everything and has all the great ideas. I was raised on 1970s Girl Power. Girls were always the clever ones in fiction by the time I came along. Once the censors get a hold of this one, it’s going to be Missis who is figuring everything out. Oh – also it’s the GIRL puppies who are too weak to make the journey without riding in a cart. Not the later-born or weaker puppies – the girls. Craziness.

Back to the clever Pongo. Male chauvinism aside, he’s a clever pooch, all right! When his 15 kids go missing, he knows what’s going down. “All through the long December night, he put two and two together and made four. Once or twice he almost made five.” For although he had little Latin beyond “Cave canem,” “he had, as a young dog, devoured Shakespeare (in a tasty leather binding).”

I was honestly riveted by the climax, as our hundred dalmatians (only 100 at this point – there’s a surprise twist at the end) are racing down a road with Cruella di Vil bearing down on them, with wire netting on either side of the road making escape impossible! Drat those humans and their fences!

All turns out well.