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What I'm Currently Reading

The Complete Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton

  G. K. Chesterton was a rather interesting figure, and it shows in his Father Brown stories.  Ostensibly mystery stories, he would use them to explore various cliches and ideas that seem contrary to peoples' expectations, especially in religion.  As mystery stories, only a few are truly exceptional.  The others are good, but Chesterton went too far in diverting the reader for me to consider these to be fair play.  Still, they remain enjoyable stories to read, especially with Chesterton's concern for describing mood and style, often evoking colors and unusual impressions. 


Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, by Ludwig von Mises

    A rather thick book, Human Action is considered to be Mises "magnum opus".  Mises himself is considered to be the leading figure in the school of Austrian economics.  I've read An Introduction to  Austrian Economics on the Mises Institute's website, but I wanted to read what Mises himself had to say.  While Mises certainly seems to have been well-read and quite informed on philosophy and politics and such, he wasn't without his faults.  One interesting and frustrating point is that Mises seems to have been conservative, like Ayn Rand, favoring a limited government and criticizing anarchy.  Modern Austrian economist types seem to lean towards anarcho-capitalism like me, and make a strong distinction between the Austrian economists and the Chicago school of economics, of which Milton Friedman is the best-known.
    Mises goes to great lengths at the beginning of the book to lay the proper foundation for what he calls praxeology, or the science of human action or choice.  Economics itself is only a subset of praxeology, concentrating on market phenomena.  He also stresses the a priori nature of praxeology, and the premise of its logical deductions is that every human action is motivated by the urge to remove a felt uneasiness.  Any greater analysis of the psychology, reasons, goals, or motivations of humans is unnecessary for praxeology. 
    I'll probably have to do a separate web page on Mises and Austrian Economics so I can go into more detail, once I finish the book.

Recently Read

The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle

    I've read all the original Holmes stories before, but this particular volume reprints the stories as they originally appeared in The Strand magazine, including the illustrations by Sydney Paget.  Paget was the first artist to give readers an idea as to what Holmes and Watson looked like, and the pictures certainly add to the atmosphere of the stories. 
    Well worth reading.  And re-reading.

Henry Reed's Think Tank, by Keith Robertson
    One of my favorite books when I was a pre-teen was Henry Reed's Babysitting Service.   Very funny book.  I read it every summer for about four or five years.  I also found out that there were a few other books in the series.  Henry Reed's Think Tank is the last book in the series.  I didn't even know about it until recently, because it was written in the mid-1980s, much later than the other books, which came out in the 1960s.
    They're all pretty similar though.  Henry Reed spends the summers with his aunt and uncle in Grover's Corner, New Jersey.  He joins up with a girl close to his age, Midge Glass, and the two of them have some rather wacky adventures as they try to pass the summer. The kids that Henry and Midge deal with are usually odd characters in one way or another.  Henry is played as an intelligent but naive kid, but the stories have a way of spoofing adult behaviors as well, either through Henry's viewpoint or the comments of Henry's Uncle Al or some other occasional adult.  Henry Reed's Think Tank has all the hallmarks of the series, but I think that Henry Reed's Babysitting Service is still my favorite of the bunch.  Altogether, there are five books in the series. 

The Beasts of Tarzan, by Edgar Rice BurroughsBeasts of Tarzan cover

    This is the third book in the Tarzan series, originally published in 1914.  Burroughs is actually a pretty enjoyable writer, in spite of his flaws, and Tarzan is one of the great icons of popular culture for good reason.  The Beasts of Tarzan continues the series with Lord Greystoke's enemy, the Russian Nikolas Rokoff, escaping prison and seeking revenge against Tarzan by kidnapping his son and wife.
  The story starts rather abruptly and continues at a fast pace, full of ERB's unexpected plot twists and a degree of coincidence bordering upon ironic. 
  One weak point of this particular novel is the ending.  Burroughs didn't seem to know how to wrap things up.  Instead, the reader is presented with a series of loose ends being tied up, each one less climactic than the previous one.  And then he just stops.  I don't remember other Burroughs novels having such a weak ending.  Perhaps it's because this is one of his earlier novels, or maybe it was just this particular story that was giving him problems.
  In any case, this is still worth reading, especially if you want to know the "real" Tarzan.

  More on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his work.


The Yellow Claw, by Sax Rohmer

  Best known for his Fu Manchu series, The Yellow Claw is part of the Gaston Max series.  While not as fantastic or outre as the Fu Manchu books, this one continues to expound on the threat of the "Yellow Peril", with the corruption of the Orient and opium upon "respectable" British society. 
  Alas, it just seems to drag on and on, although it does have some moments of interest.  It doesn't help that the author keeps jumping around between different characters and sets of characters, creating a rather disjointed sense of continuity and losing track of the time element. 

More on Sax Rohmer and his work.

Books I've Never Finished

There are some books that I haven't or couldn't finish reading for some reason or other, and I'm not just talking about textbooks!
The Grey Mane of Morning, by Joy Chant

  This was supposed to be a fantasy, but it was so realistically realized that it was just mundane.  That might have been okay if something had been happening, but very little seems to have occurred, even after a few chapters into the book.  One of the few books that I gave up out of sheer frustration and boredom. 





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