Tarzan, like Superman, has always existed. At least, that’s how it feels to me… there was never a time in my life when Tarzan didn’t already exist. But once upon a time, someone imagined him, and gave him life on paper. More than a hundred years later, he lives on, though his creator is long gone. It was a strange experience to read the original Tarzan story.
Tag: book log
I read a lot, and I keep a log. Here’s this year’s log and the complete log (which goes back to the beginning of 1999). Read the posts in this section to find out what I thought about these books.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor. He apparently jotted down some philosophical thoughts in a diary as he was marching around on various military campaigns, and these fragmentary thoughts form part of the corpus of texts associated with stoicism, an ancient school of thought that encourages people to take life as it comes, good or bad.
The book is not coherent, and there’s a lot of repetition. It wasn’t written as a thoughtfully organized presentation designed to be consumed by others. And my understanding is that it’s not even complete. Bits of text are lost because the source is old and “corrupt”.
If you want to understand stoicism, I think it’s probably better to read some modern synthesis before or after reading old source texts. Still, I think it’s worth reading source texts like this one, because whoever writes the synthesis is going to put their own spin on whatever was “meant” by the original authors; but the same thing can be said for any English translation! I think it must be impossible to translate philosophy without making some biased assumptions about the author’s intended meaning. Maybe all we can really wrap our heads around is what people today construe stoicism to be. We just have to guess at what it used to be originally; and there may never have been a consensus among thinkers even then.
So anyway, what are some of the ideas to be found in the text?
Continue reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by George Long)
Selected works of Henry James
As part of my ongoing informal free public-domain classic literature self-education program, I decided to tackle the work of Henry James. I chose 2 novellas and 7 novels and read them in chronological order.
- 1878 – Daisy Miller (novella)
- 1880 – Washington Square
- 1881 – The Portrait of a Lady
- 1886 – The Bostonians
- 1897 – What Maisie Knew
- 1898 – The Turn of the Screw (novella)
- 1902 – The Wings of the Dove
1903 – The Ambassadors1904 – The Golden Bowl
I decided to drop the last two; you’ll see why. Below are my thoughts on the others, starting from the most recently read novel, The Wings of the Dove.
Breakout at Stalingrad by Heinrich Gerlach, translated by Peter Lewis
My German colleague recommended this book and lent it to me. It is a semi-autobiographical account of when the 6th German Army was encircled by Soviets at Stalingrad in 1942 and then, due to freezing winter temperatures and lack of supplies as much as actual fighting, was defeated in 1943. The message is, of course, that the human costs of war are tragically high.
The book was interesting in several ways…
Continue reading Breakout at Stalingrad by Heinrich Gerlach, translated by Peter Lewis
How to Write a Book Proposal (3rd edition) by Michael Larsen
This book isn’t about how to write a non-fiction book, but about how to write a proposal, the document that will get a publisher interested in selling it. As author, you have to have a very clear idea about the people who are going to read your book, how many of them there are, and how to get their attention. After all, if you don’t know who you’re writing for, and you can’t guarantee that at least couple thousand people will line up to buy it, why should a publisher be interested in investing resources in your project?
I read this book because I had a specific idea for a non-fiction book that I could write. Unfortunately I think the time to have published it was like the end of 2023, beginning of 2024, and it would also probably have required me to have a collection of followers eager for my opinions specifically on that topic. I think I may have missed the boat.
This is the 3rd edition of this title. I bought in a used bookstore in 2023. It was published in 2004, and says quaint things like, you might want to use a computer to draft your proposal, because word processor software can make it easy for you to move things around; or you can just use 3×5 notecards. It’s very likely the 5th edition is more informative for someone writing in 2026. There’s even an eTextbook.
Books I read in 2025
The best novel I read this year was probably Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore, though I also really enjoyed Ivanhoe, by Walter Scott. I hadn’t read either of them before.
I achieved a major goal for the year: reading an English translation of the hugely long classic Chinese novel, Water Margin, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh.
See below for a complete list, book cover thumbnails, and thoughts on the quantity, length, format, and content of the books I read in 2025.
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
This work, published in 1722 and attributed to Daniel Defoe but set in 1600s England with interludes in Virginia, is a fictional first-person account of the life of the narrator, “Moll Flanders” (not her real name), the daughter of a Newgate prisoner. Although she is penniless as a child, she manages to give herself the appearance of a gentlewoman. Her fortunes and her identity pass through a number of transformations during the course of her life, which is marred by a series of deceptions and misdeeds, which she eventually comes to repent of.
Wikipedia says this novel, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (which I enjoyed very much), is an example of “spiritual autobiography.”
See below for what I thought. (I am not a fan.)
The Maid of Sker by R. D. Blackmore
Wikipedia says, “Blackmore considered The Maid of Sker to be his best novel.” That’s why I read it. But I liked Lorna Doone much better.
(I guess readers can’t be expected to agree with authors about their work; Mark Twain liked Joan of Arc best of his novels, whereas I preferred Connecticut Yankee; E.M. Forster liked The Longest Journey best of all his novels, whereas I preferred A Room with a View.)
This 213,414-word novel is supposedly about a two-year-old high-born girl who mysteriously washes up alone in a boat on the coast of a farm called Sker. However, in actual fact, the book is about the narrator, an old Welsh fisherman and sailor, and could more accurately have been titled David Llewellyn of Newton-Nottage. Old Davy finds the child, who calls herself Bardie, in the summer of 1782, but the tale spans eighteen years, and Davy has spent most of them far away from Bardie. Large swaths of the book are devoted to Davy’s adventures in Devon, which eventually shed some light on Bardie’s origins—but large swaths of the book are also devoted to his adventures in the navy, which do not.
As a narrator, Old Davy suffers greatly in comparison to John Ridd, the narrator of Lorna Doone. Both men profess a commitment to honesty, but Old Davy not only exaggerates (particularly about himself, while pretending to be modest), he lies, and calls his rationalizations honesty! Early on in the novel, he describes to the reader how he tricks people into buying fish he caught that aren’t fresh anymore. That’s disgusting to me for three reasons: I don’t eat fish at all because I don’t like the taste; rotting fish don’t taste good even to people who normally like fish; habitually lying to and running from your customers is the opposite of admirable. He also poaches, smuggles, and simultaneously collects both a pension and a salary from the government. The louder he says he’s not doing something, the more certain you can be that he is (like the duck in the comic at this link). Davy is intended to be funny, and to an extent, he is. But to have this weasely, money-grubbing, boastful man conveying the story is intermittently quite irksome, especially when he says nothing whatsoever related to the maid of Sker for many pages at a time—and all the more when I already read a book by the same author that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Still, the book is a kind of unusually cheerful mystery; everything works out all right in the end, and it was entertaining enough to keep me interested along the way. The story’s origin as a serial publication probably explains the plot tangents.
See below for passages that illustrate the humor of Old Davy.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
Wikipedia says: “Twain was aware of his reputation as a comic writer and he asked that each installment appear anonymously so that readers would treat it seriously.”
This is, indeed, a serious book. It claims to be a translation, but it is historical fiction. My understanding is that the trial of Joan of Arc was so well documented that it gives a surprisingly good picture of life in 1400s France, and this extensive documentation served as the basis for Twain’s novel.
Twain’s narrator (speaking for Twain) says:
“I give you my honor now that I am not going to distort or discolor the facts of this miserable trial. No, I will give them to you honestly, detail by detail, just as Manchon and I set them down daily in the official record of the court, and just as one may read them in the printed histories. There will be only this difference: that in talking familiarly with you, I shall use my right to comment upon the proceedings and explain them as I go along, so that you can understand them better; also, I shall throw in trifles which came under our eyes and have a certain interest for you and me, but were not important enough to go into the official record.”
I misunderstood the title. I thought the title was THE Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which would have made it a memoir told from her point of view. But it’s not, as I learned upon beginning to read the book. It’s someone else’s personal recollections. My bad. It makes much more sense for the story to be told by someone close to her who survived her martyrdom, rather than for the story to be told by Joan herself, even given that it’s a novel.
I don’t think it works as a novel, though, to be frank. Certainly it’s not my favorite Twain novel, though he said it’s his favorite. I liked A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court better than this one. Quite possibly I liked all the books of his that I’ve read better than this one. Why is that?
Continue reading Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
The Consciousness Instinct by Michael S. Gazzaniga
Two ideas that stood out when I read The Consciousness Instinct:
Consciousness does not have a location in the brain
“For sure, the holy grail of science is to find consciousness in the brain, but trust me, it would have been found by now if there were such a thing to find.” (page 134)
“Simply trying to locate the structure that produces consciousness, as Descartes and many of his predecessors have attempted, will not unveil the Holy Grail, because consciousness is inherent throughout the brain. Cutting huge chunks from the cortex does not disrupt consciousness, but only changes its contents.” (pages 230-31)
Brains aren’t like machines, so it’s unlikely machines will ever behave like brains
“[T]he traditional deterministic classical machine analogy for life is exactly backward. Brains aren’t like machines; machines are like brains with something missing…. [H]umans evolved through natural selection, whereas machines are made by humans.” (pages 226-27)
“I now think we humans will never build a machine that mimics our personal consciousness. Inanimate silicon-based machines work one way, and living carbon-based systems work another. One works with a deterministic set of instructions, and the other through symbols that inherently carry some degree of uncertainty. This perspective leads to the view that the human attempt to mimic intelligence and consciousness in machines, a continuing goal in the field of AI, is doomed. If living systems work on the principle of complementarity—the idea that the physical side is mirrored with an arbitrary symbolic side, with symbols that are the result of natural selection—then purely deterministic models of what makes life will always fall short.” (page 236)
