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Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go To heal my heart and drown my woe. Rain may fall and wind may blow, And many miles be still to go, But under a tall tree, I will lie, And let the clouds go sailing by. Drinking Song from The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien. A while back I embarked on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. My progress has been slower than usual, because of reasons, but as ever I find myself loving this story deeply, and Tolkien’s luminous, lyrical writing continues to astonish and amaze me. I amDown the rabbit hole….

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 It’s been a while since I posted an update on books I’ve been reading, so here’s a bit of catch-up! ::  Edge of Sundown is a noir-mystery set in Chicago, by indie writer Jennifer Worrell. A writer who was once a fixture on the bestseller lists for his genre potboilers has spent the better part of a decade in the creative doldrums, until he starts writing what is a marked departure for him: a dystopian thriller in which alien beings are ridding the city streets of “undesirable” elements. But when real-world events start to mirror those in his novel, our heroDown the rabbit hole….

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 Here’s some recent reading I’ve done! I don’t have pictures of the covers, unfortunately. (Several of them I forgot to snapshot before I whisked them back to the library.) ::  Maybe you didn’t know that you needed a graphic novel about the Bronte sisters, their brother, and the imaginative life they lived in their youth, but you do need that graphic novel, and thankfully for you, it exists! It’s called Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontes, by Isabel Greenberg. Apparently in their younger years, the Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) and their brother Branwell passed the timeDown the rabbit hole….

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 A few more books I’ve read of late: ::  I can’t possibly keep up with the eternal flood of new books that is Star Wars publishing, but I do try to pick and choose the ones that sound good or come with good referrals. Last year, Lucasfilm announced a new project in their Star Wars publishing empire: a new series within the larger overall tale that focuses on life in our favorite galaxy far, far away two hundred years before the rise of the Sith, the fall of the Republic, and the arrival on the scene of a couple generations of Skywalkers.Down the rabbit hole….

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 Here’s some of my recent reading! ::  Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary by John Clubbe is simply superb. I wanted to get this one done in time to blog about it during 2020, but getting it done this year is fine. While not really a “life and works” biography, Clubbe’s book has enough of that within its pages that it would suffice if one was looking for a single-volume account of Beethoven’s life. Clubbe is more interested in tracing through Beethoven’s life and music the influences of late-18th and early-19th century revolutionary history and politics. Beethoven emerges not just as a toweringDown the rabbit hole….

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Today, a passage from one of many books that my mother required me to read in moments when my behavior wasn’t the best. Actually, though–this isn’t from one of those books, but a book downstream in the series that she made me start with Book One. Funny how often those books she made me read were Book One…it’s like she knew what she was doing. This is the closing two paragraphs from Lloyd Alexander’s The High King, itself the final volume in Alexander’s series The Prydain Chronicles, which was my gateway into epic fantasy and adventure stories. I suppose thereDown the rabbit hole….

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I suppose I am hardly unique among Americans in that The Wizard of Oz has been a part of my life almost as long as I can remember. I grew up during that hazy prehistory when the only way to watch Wizard was to wait an entire year for one of CBS’s annual airings of the movie—usually in springtime, as I recall. When you’re a kid that wait is so long that you’re barely aware of it. Suddenly one day it’s spring again, and one day you’re in front of the teevee to watch The Wizard of Oz. I don’tDown the rabbit hole….

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Author Ursula K. Le Guin has died. Calling Le Guin an “author” is true, but it doesn’t do her justice, and that’s coming from one who has not read nearly enough of her work. Not even close. Le Guin was a cultural force, particularly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction where her influence is felt so keenly that her name ranks with the very highest of titans in the fields. Le Guin’s brilliance shone for decades, not just in her fiction but in the examples she set in her interactions with the rest of the field and inDown the rabbit hole….

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So yesterday I saw a New York Times article linked on Twitter in which apparently some members of former European aristocracy are starting to raise the notion that maybe, just maybe, world problems might be helped somewhat by a return to monarchy. I confess I didn’t bother reading the article because…well, the whole notion just sounds goofy. But I did note the name of the first person quoted in the article: one Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who is a member of onetime Russian nobility, a distant cousin of Leo Tolstoy of War and Peace fame, and the writer of a fantasyDown the rabbit hole….