Books Acquired:
Fogtown, Peter Plate

Books Offloaded:
The Caltraps of Time, David I. Masson

Progress Made:
The White Album, Joan Didion
Fogtown, Peter Plate
And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields
A Soviet Heretic, Yevgeny Zamyatin

Books Finished:
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
The Caltraps of Time, David I. Masson
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Messages from a Lost World, Stefan Zweig

It was a good reading month, with some long sunny days to work with. Also these are the dog days of media, which means that though the fascism continues apace (evil takes no vacations), there was less content to consume, leaving more mental bandwidth available. (For Colbert and The Daily Show to take multiple weeks off in the middle of all this seems like dereliction of duty, but I guess they’re entitled to their R and R.)

I finally got around to Kingsley Amis’s most famous book, which was a lark from start to finish, the kind of book where you keep saying “Well, just one more chapter….” As with his other books, the setting — in this case a provincial English university — is foreign and sometimes disorienting, with a complex set of customs and mores. But it doesn’t matter; the main character (referred to throughout, for some reason, by his last name, “Dixon”) is a relatable misfit whose personal and professional misadventures are highly entertaining.

Lucky Jim is less alcohol-focused than the other Amis books I’ve read, which is not to say that booze isn’t an important character. And no one writes about hangovers like Sir Kingsley:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by a small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

After reading a story I liked by David I. Masson in an old sci-fi mag, I sought out his only book of stories, The Caltraps of Time. Maybe it should have been a warning that I had to look up what a “caltrap” was; it turned out to be an exasperating read. Half the stories were completely incomprehensible to me; the other half seemed to be leading up to some big twist or reveal that never arrived, leaving me scratching my head and wondering what the point had been.

Apparently Masson was a brainiac from a long line of brainiacs; says the Wikipedia,

Born in Edinburgh, Masson came from a distinguished family of academics and thinkers. His father, Sir Irvine Masson, was a professor of chemistry at Durham and vice-chancellor at Sheffield, his grandfather, Sir David O. Masson, emigrated to Australia and became professor of chemistry at Melbourne while his great-grandfather David M. Masson was professor of English literature at Edinburgh, wrote a biography of John Milton and was a friend of Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill.

So possibly he was writing at some genius level that my monkey brain cannot grasp. In any case, Caltraps is going into the free box; maybe it will find its way into the hands of someone capable of appreciating it.

Slaughterhouse-Five was of course a delight. I am constantly surprised at how much of these books that I’ve supposedly read multiple times seems new and fresh to me. One of the benefits of having a brain like a sieve, I guess.

For instance, I had forgotten that Howard Campbell from Mother Night is a minor character in S5. And of course Kilgore Trout makes an appearance. One pleasure of reading these Vonnegut books in sequence is watching him slowly build his universe. I’m excited for Breakfast of Champions, which got me detention in high school for laughing during Silent Reading.

I used the momentum from all that fiction to retackle Messages from a Lost World, which I got halfway through in (checks notes) June 2023. It was a bit dry and maybe a little over my head, but Zweig is always worthwhile.

Finally, I used that momentum to begin to grapple with A Soviet Heretic, also abandoned two years ago. If I can get through that it may finally be time to mount another assault on The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. With Indian Summer, a glorious time of year here in the Northern Lands, just beginning, optimism is running high and all things seem possible.