What Now? What Next?

Well, well. The last day of 2025. I've felt all morning that perhaps I should post something special, but all ideas that occurred to me seemed too ... too much like work. Perhaps I should just note my efforts at losing weight, efforts that need to be renewed after New Year. I might recall my unusual expenditure on gadgets, like a blood pressure cuff, a new glucometer, and a camera for my computer (not to mention the fleeting indulgence in a printer/scanner). The two big events that will overshadow most memories of 2025 will be the birth of my grand-neice Julia and the flood in July. I've had two or three interesting falls that have set my bones to rattling and seem to mark a new and annoying epoch in my health. And I've had many life-sustaining Movie Nights with my brother John and my nephews.

As far as New Year's Resolutions go, besides dieting (which should include more financial responsibilty) I hope to finish my work on LOTR notes, perhaps trying to get back to finishing a chapter a week. It would be so disappointing if I never got to the end of it. My writing project of The Wizard, The Prince, The Warrior and His Son needs to be brought to some satisfying point of development. It occurs to me that I should concentrate on not being such a sadsack and a grump, to adding more value to the lives around me. I want there to be more to my legacy than a mound of books and a vague feeling of relief. I try, "but I really should try harder."

And so, a Happy New Year's Eve. Cue the fireworks. See you on the other side.

2025 Acquisitions

The Mills of the Gods by Tim Powers

The Bovadium Fragments by J. R. R. Tolkien

The War of the Rohirrim (DVD)

Rackham's Color Illustrations for Wagner's "Ring" by Arthur Rackham

Reframe Your Brain by Scott Adams

The BBC Tudors Collection (DVD)

The Devil Rides Out [Blu-ray]

There Would Always Be a Fairy Tale by Verlyn Flieger

The Poem of the Cid: Dual Language Edition

The Burl Ives Song Book 10

The Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume I

The Gulag Archipelago Three by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Anatomy of Puck by K. M. (Katharine) Briggs

Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings

The Invisible Woman by James P. Blaylock

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

In Search of Dracula, by Florescu & McNally

The Romance of the Rose, tr. Frances Horgan

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald A. Mackenzie 20

Myths of China and Japan by DonaldA. Mackenzie

Myths of Greece and Rome by H. A. Guerber

East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon by George Webbe Dasent

The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner

The Saga of the Volsungs, tr. Jesse L. Byock

The Tain, tr. Ciaran Carson

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis

Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges 30

The History of the Church by Eusebius

The Shakespeare Apocrypha by ‘William Shakespeare’

The Life of Sir John Falstaff by Robert Barnabas Brough

Early Christian Writings, tr. Maxwell Staniforth

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Lysistrata/The Archarnians/The Clouds by Aristophanes

The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Huckleberry Finn, Classics Illustrated 40

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald

The Best of Jules Verne

Selected Works of H. G. Wells

The Obesity Code by Timothy Noakes

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain by Mark Twain 

Hollywood Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller Jr. and Ronald L. Davis

Urban Legends by Richard Roeper 

The Grand Miracle: Daily Reflections for the Season of Advent

The Giant Garden of Oz by Eric Shanower 50

A Man for All Seasons: by Robert Bolt 

The Uses of Enchantment  by Bettelheim, Bruno

Letters To Young Churches by J. B. Phillips 53

Only three Tolkien and Tolkien-related items (well, 7 if you count War of the Rohirrim Action figures – and you know we don’t!). Sixteen ‘returns’ from the Shadow Library. Two ‘self-help’ books. Three ‘visual’ (DVD and Blu-ray) additions.  Three new fantasies, by Powers and Blaylock and Clarke. Three C. S. Lewis and Lewis-related items.  A surprising 5 Mark Twain books. Thirteen classics. One new art book. Seven books about myths, legends, and fairy tales.  Five ‘celebrity’ productions. Where would I put Borges Collected Fictions or The Giant Garden of Oz – they’re not new fantasies produced this year, though they're new to me. Again, there is some overlap in all these categories; it’s as scatter-shot as my interests. I've even read some of them. So that’s 53 items for the year, almost one for every week (although many came in clumps, as it were). Barring a visit to the library bookstore, that should be it for 2025.

Book, Yeah!: The Books of 2025 (So Far)

Well, thinking about how much reading I have awaiting me peaked my curiosity about how many new books I’ve got since the New Year, heightened by the thought that the year is already more than half over. So I embarked on one of those pointless but (to me) endlessly fascinating tasks that grab my compulsive attention now and then and went back over the Niche in quest of the answer.

I’ve been thinking lately (since the flood) about how risky it is to have so much of my equity bound up in ‘paper ephemera’, if it can be put that way. One’s imagination leaps immediately (thanks to the fabled end of the Library of Alexandria) to fire as the enemy of such an archive, but water could be equally disastrous; I remember how a roof leak at Loop Drive during another flood almost drove me to despair. Fortunately, I lost nothing then, but ‘the horror of the moment I shall never forget.’ Even if not completely dissolved into a mushy brick, a book could possibly be warped into a useless, corrugated relic.

A heap of books is a pain to care for: onerous to transport, tedious to dust, difficult to organize, voluminous (tee-hee) in their space-taking capacity. “But I love ‘em; I LOVE ‘em; I LOVE ‘EM!” “Thank you, ma’am, I’ll have another!” “I'm sorry. But I love [books] ... I've always wanted [books]. To handle. To touch. T[o] smell.” And to read, of course. But I feel for books, all books, whether I want to read their contents or no. A sloppy shelf or a tumbled heap of books invokes my sympathy, and I feel the urge to re-arrange and sort them. I always have the sneaking suspicion that there will always be at least one book there that will elicit my cupidity.

Anyway, here is a list of the books of 2025 so far. There are 33 of them. They go from the most recent to the first one of January. Now that I’ve finished with the list, I can go and read one.

2025 Book List

The Anatomy of Puck by K. M. (Katharine) Briggs

Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings

The Invisible Woman by James P. Blaylock

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

In Search of Dracula, by Florescu & McNally

The Romance of the Rose, tr. Frances Horgan

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald A. Mackenzie

Myths of China and Japan by DonaldA. Mackenzie

Myths of Greece and Rome by H. A. Guerber

East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon by George Webbe Dasent

The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner

The Saga of the Volsungs, tr. Jesse L. Byock

The Tain, tr. Ciaran Carson

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis

Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

The History of the Church by Eusebius

The Shakespeare Apocrypha by ‘William Shakespeare’

The Life of Sir John Falstaff by Robert Barnabas Brough

Early Christian Writings, tr. Maxwell Staniforth

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Lysistrata/The Archarnians/The Clouds by Aristophanes

The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Huckleberry Finn, Classics Illustrated

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald

The Best of Jules Verne

Selected Works of H. G. Wells

The Obesity Code by Timothy Noakes

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

Here We Go Again

I recently posted about my memories about the flood of 1972, and here we go yet again. After a period of heavy downpour we are once more facing a flash flood warning in the area. Not only do I have bad memories of that old flood when I was a child but there was also the time we had to move Mom (who was in a wheelchair at the time) over to Susan and Andy's old house. 

The childhood flood had a definite psychological effect on my creative history. First of all on an old swinging 'playing' John and I had about the Peanuts gang being isolated at camp and escaping on a raft/houseboat. Years later that became adapted into the plot for one of the 'Fellowfeel' books, The Sundering Flood. It reached it's final apotheosis in the chapter 'The Flood' from Elf & Bear. That outline and chapter are both published here on this blog.

Snow Days 2025

 

We don't get so much snow in Texas (especially at our latitude; it's much more common up in the Panhandle), so whenever it comes down, no matter how scanty, it's an event. We woke up yesterday morning to a light powdering, and today there was still some in the shady protected areas. It's going fast, though. The sort of bluish picture was taken in the early hours Tuesday, and those are tracks (cat? raccoon? both hang around in the area, but probably cat) going right by my door. Those with the bird baths were taken today, when most of the snow was already melted.