Loved it, spent most of my spare time since I started it with it, will miss it, probably missed a lot in it.

18th book of the year: “SPQR”, by Mary Beard

Wanted to read some history after the last few things. Kept seeing Beard press over the years, saw she has a new book out and grabbed a used copy of her old stuff instead.

lotta “assassinated for tyranny after proposing social and/or land use reforms” Kermit-confused-face.bmp

lotta good stuff on how normal people lived

The story I enjoyed in Black Water 2 was an excerpt from “The Palm-Wine Drinkard” (which is subtitled “and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town)

I preferred the drinkard because more of the stories in it seem like little self-contained myths. And of course I’m glad to now have a connection back to the Byrne/Eno album that I love.

“Black Water 2, More Tales of the Fantastic” loved it, full of surprises and delights from authors I’ve never heard of and authors most have — Arthur Conan Doyle, F Scott Fitzgerald, E B White, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margret Atwood, George Bernard Shaw , Arthur C Lark) — and stories too , like Melville’s Bartleby.

"The Complete Gentleman” turned me onto Amos Tutuola, who I’m now reading in full.

And a story from Isabell Allende?! Nice.

Egan again. I knew I’d have a 10 hours of plane time, so I brought “Oceanic” and it delivered.

Egan’s political and hard science (the bulk of this set) stories are my favorites while the atheist ones like the title story “Oceanic” are probably more interesting to previously religious people, which I never was. I’ve always found faith to be entirely inscrutable, so exploring losing it is kinda just more of that to me?