Just before I was born in 1960, my parents purchased a complete set of hardbound Compton’s Encyclopedia and subscribed to the annual yearbook supplements. I believe the year 1959 was the first.
My earliest childhood memories pertaining to books date to my looking at the photos and drawings in these encyclopedias and yearbooks, and trying to dope out the words.
Strangely, another distant recollection about books and reading centers on a Catholic publication about the lives of the saints, with quite a few of the illustrations depicting the various means of torture deployed to make the case for future sainthood. As no doubt intended, they gave me nightmares. Somehow I’ve escaped a fetish for masochism.
Following is my reading list for 2022. As is commonly the case with me, the subject matter skews heavily toward European history and travel, whether fiction or nonfiction. It’s who I am and what I do, and there’ll be no apologies. In my view the stork was drunk, and in his muddled ineptitude he mistook New Albany on the Ohio for Neuburg an der Donau. My lifetime as a Hoosier is an accident of cosmik debris.
A major exception in recent years has been Kurt Vonnegut, one of the only...Read more
