Books Acquired:
The Beast Must Die, Nicholas Blake
The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
Dr. Bloodmoney, Philip K. Dick
Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick
The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Valley of Fear, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Seven Per Cent Solution, Nicholas Meyer
Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, Nicholas Meyer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

Progress Made:
Shogun, James Clavell
When the Game Was War, Rich Cohen
The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, Richie Unterberger

Books Finished:
The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis

I fell off the book-acquisition wagon pretty hard this month, though as always there were Reasons. Once I started looking around for old Philip K. Dick books they were everywhere, including a lovely pair at Pegasus Books in Berkeley — forever beloved as the place that used to let me turn lead into gold, trading computer books for CDs. And, OK, some of them were on eBay, but I am a weak man.

As with Shogun, it was harder than I thought to find a suitable copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has been seeming disturbingly relevant in recent months — though a little less so now, thank you Joe and Kamala. The weighty tome remains uncracked and may for some time; I find I am suddenly in the mood for uplift, not doom and gloom.

This is what prompted me to dig into When the Game Was War, a wonderfully anodyne volume about 1980s basketball. From it I have gleaned all sorts of diverting factoids — for instance, that at the old Pontiac Silverdome, an oil company promotion gifted fans with two gallons of gasoline. Right there at the arena, which would then be teeming with fumes. Only in America.

As for all the Sherlock Holmes books, my darling wife and I have been reading aloud from Volume 1 of The Complete Novels and Stories for some time now. Rather than continue on to Volume 2 I decided to track down the individual books, which accounts for the three SACD titles. Then, as I was walking out of the other Pegasus books on Shattuck Ave., I spotted a publisher’s advance copy of Nick Meyer’s brand-new (copyright 2024) Holmes book Telegram from Hell. It was hot as hell in Berkeley that day, and after a long walk down to Half-Price Books I felt like I deserved the cheap copy of The Seven Per Cent Solution, Meyer’s earlier Holmes book, which I have seen the movie of but never read.

This hole will take a while to dig out of. Literature is long and life is short and catching up is always very far off. But the struggle continues.

In a scattered reading month involving lots of travel the only book I managed to finish was The Rachel Papers, which in the end turned out to be less about Rachel than the papers. One senses the specter of Martin’s father Sir Kingsley looming over this debut novel, which is entertaining if at times baffling to the non-British. But check the box and let’s move on — it’s the 5th already and I’m due at the courthouse for jury duty in 45 minutes.