I finished just two books during this week, though I read about half of another that I have chosen not to finish, at least at this time. I also read one dialogue of Plato and much of the latest issue of the magazine Cirsova.

1. The Best Cartoons from France, edited by Edna Bennett — This collection, published in 1953, is of middling interest, with a mix of more or less successful cartoons on a variety of topics. I may eventually feature a few here on the blog. Mildly recommended.
2. Graves, I Dig!, by Carter Brown — New York private eye Danny Boyd is hired to ensure that a beauty contest being put on by a swimsuit company is conducted on the level, but his job gets much more complicated when a murderer strikes and he himself is a suspect. There are a fair number of twists before the mystery is wrapped up with a reasonably satisfying conclusion, but the story moves right along with plenty of action and some humor as well. Mildly recommended.

I have chosen not to finish Isaac Asimov’s Casebooks of the Black Widowers, third in the series, after reading about half the collection of puzzle stories, as I tired of Asimov’s style and self-indulgent storytelling. I had enjoyed the first in the series well enough when I reread it back in 2015, but this later collection just wasn’t working for me.

I am rather slowly working my way through all of Plato’s dialogues in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntingon Cairns, reading one every now and then as the mood strikes (sometimes weekly, sometimes less often). This week, I read Lysis, which explores the proper definition of friendship and is a good example of the Socratic approach that clears away presumptions and imprecisions but offers no concluding proposition.

I also continued with the three books that I will be reading throughout the next several months or the whole year:

1. A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, by humorist Irvin S. Cobb — a collection of 366 amusing anecdotes published in 1923 (100 years ago!), which I’ll be reading at the rate of one per day.
2. More Heart Throbs — the sequel to the similar Heart Throbs, an anthology of prose and verse selections, often sentimental in nature, submitted by the general public and famous people, published in 1911; I’ll be reading one or more pages (as needed for the selections) per day throughout the year.
3. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, translated by Sir Richard F. Burton in the late 19th century — I hope to read all ten volumes as well as the six supplemental volumes this year.

In addition, I resumed reading Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, translated by Charles Stanley Ross. I have found the Italian Renaissance epics of this sort a challenge to get through in the past, as my interest usually flags before the poem concludes, but I hope to finish this one this year. The adventures of the various knights and warriors and ladies are entertaining, but the battles get a bit repetitious, and the sizeable cast of characters and interwoven storylines can make the poem a challenge to follow.

On the periodical front, I read much of Vol. 2, No. 13 (Winter 2022) of Cirsova. As is to be expected with any similar assortment of stories, not all were to my taste. In particular, I didn’t much enjoy the cover story, “Sister Winter,” by John Daker, which felt a bit too underwritten. The horror stories “Lights,” by Lou Normann; “Pick Trick,” by Troy Riser; and “Wishing Well,” by Michael Wiesenberg, were competent but unpleasant, and the dark fantasy “The Nighthawk,” by Michael Gallagher, didn’t appeal to me either. More satisfactory were Ken Lizzi’s “House Odds,” with a private eye investigating possible cheating at a new casino and finding more than he expected, and “Moon Magic and the Art of Fencing Doubtful Jewels,” a story by Tais Teng set in Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique but with a rather different atmosphere. John Gradoville’s novelette, “The Gold of Palladias,” is an OK lost-world adventure. Likewise, Michael Ray’s “Take the Sword” was a readable blend of fantasy and world-threatening horror, but the working out of the story didn’t quite succeed. I read with interest “Thunder in the North,” the most recent tale of the Mongoose and Meerkat by Jim Breyfogle, a series I have enjoyed well enough to have backed all three collected volumes on Kickstarter. The final collection is up on Kickstarter now, and various pledge levels will allow those new to the series to catch up, too: Tales of the Mongoose and Meerkat: The Redemption of Alness on Kickstarter. I was again disappointed with the book reviews and will likely skip them in future issues of Cirsova. I did not read any of the serial content, but I will eventually read D. M. Ritzlin’s Vran the Chaos-Warped; I just have to find the summer and fall issues of the magazine so I can read those parts. I do recommend the magazine if horror, dark fantasy, and sword and sorcery are of interest.