Books Completed July 2024

The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett - After finishing Pratchett's biography a few months ago, I decided to round out my Discworld collection. This is one of the ones I hadn't read, and I picked it up one day when I was feeling kind of down and wanted some comfort food. It's supposed to be a book for children or young adults, but with Pratchett's approach to his readers, it's anything but simple or saccharin. It was a timely read, too, because we're dealing with a rat surge in the neighborhood this summer. Our methods have been less elegant than hiring a piper though, I'm afraid. Really enjoyed this one, and looking forward to when my niblings get a little older and I can share it with them.

Jungle Tales of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs - Found this one in a little free library. It was printed in 1919 and in really good shape, with some great (unattributed) pen-and-ink illustrations, so that was an exciting discovery. I hadn't read any original Tarzan stories before somehow, despite reading a lot of John Carter over the years. I went in expecting some amount of racism, given it was written over 100 years ago by a white American about Africa, but I was not prepared. If we put that aside for a moment, the writing is really quite thrilling and you can see how Tarzan became the cultural icon he is. My favorite story in here was probably the last one, "Tarzan Rescues the Moon". But I've gone and done some research on Burroughs since, and learned he was an outspoken eugenicist and proponent of scientific racism, which the Tarzan stories were explicitly supposed to convey, so yeah. I can see why we generally encounter Bowdlerized versions now.

The Snouters, by "Harald Stümpke" - I do not remember how I got this little book. It might have spontaneously formed on a shelf, because it's so extremely weird that I can barely imagine someone sitting down to write it, yet here it is in my hands. Published in 1967, it's an absolutely straight-faced scientific recounting of a small island chain where a whole new order of mammals has evolved, the rhinogrades, who all have exceptionally developed noses that allow them to fill every matter of ecological niche. It should be a two page joke, but it keeps going, with an entire fake bibliography, invented scientific rivalries, and anthropological notes about the islands' original inhabitants (who were all wiped out by a common cold carried by the Swedish prisoner of war who escaped and swam to the shore). It's also fully illustrated with these outlandish beasts. In a terse epilogue, the whole island chain is destroyed by an errant test nuclear explosion. Simply one of the weirdest books I own.

Hey what the fuck.

Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 1, by Kamome Shirahama - My wife got this for me for my birthday, because she is nice. I think it does a pretty good job of establishing the fantasy setting without info-dumping, though it skims dangerously close a couple of times. Having the main character be a student at a magic school is a classic storytelling device for a reason, I guess. The art somehow reminded me of early 1900s American comics, particularly Little Nemo, though Shriahama draws jaws particularly expressively. I will probably pick up a couple more volumes since I've gotten past the "here's how magic works in this world" portion of the story.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage - A little free library find, though one that had been soaked in something weirdly fragrant at some point, so I could only read a few warped pages at a time before I got kind of woozy. It's a global history of humanity that uses six different drinks as a lens: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola. Sometimes it could lose its thesis in the author's excitement to share some bit of trivia he'd learned along the way, but it's not the worst example of that I've ever read. The shape of the history is pretty American middle school, just a general kind of "march of progress", with a treatment of the European Dark Ages that has the Levant serving as some kind of battery of knowledge waiting to be rediscovered. Also there's a random picture of George Washington in the spirits chapters, like we don't know what George Washington looks like. Anyway, I learned a few things and it was enjoyable enough, but it's heading back to the little free library for someone else to smell.

Deserter, by Junji Ito - Another birthday gift from my wife. Somehow I haven't read very much Ito, so having a collection of some of his early stories is a probably a good start to reading more. What can you say, it's Ito. Take a simple concept, play it straight and horrifying, lean on it, iterate, end abruptly on a shocker page. "Unendurable Labyrinth" was my favorite overall, but "Bullied" had the best last page. I'm going to seek out some more, I think.

Army Food and Messing, by Military Service Publishing Company - Another little free library find. This one took a couple months to get through, and was almost certainly never intended to be read cover-to-cover, but that's what I did. This is a practical guide to all aspects of food and mess management in the Army of 1942, with only a few dozen pages actually devoted to recipes, all for 100 men. There's menu planning, mess management, how to build a field stove, pages and pages of supply inspection guidelines, how to store supplies, how to bake at scale... just weirdly fascinating stuff. The inspection guidelines in particular had a weird poetry to them, trying to describe how good apples or bread or coffee should taste. The recipes looked generally fine, and economical, but I did notice there's beef broth in everything.