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Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Fiction

Word Games, Moscow, and the Secret Life of a Librarian

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I may have just found a book I must read this year.

Joel Miller asks, “If you lived in a society that was strictly and officially materialist in which the state and its officers vetoed disagreement, what would you do if you still recognized the transcendent and dissented from the party line?”

One option would be to “write a surrealist satire that mocked the materialists and dropped the devil and his entourage in Moscow to bend the party line well past breaking.”

That’s what Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov did in his posthumously published work The Master and Margarita (1970). Miller explains one of the author’s themes this way. “For all their anti-capitalistic propaganda, Muscovites were every bit as covetous and grasping as anyone, maybe worse. And as far as the Soviet insistence on strict atheism, Bulgakov replies: Fine, if you won’t have God, you can have the devil—and the devil will have you.”

Word Games: Merrium-Webster shelled out an undisclosed 7-figure amount to purchase Quordle, the word-guessing game that gives you four target words at once. I played many times last year and have gotten away from it for a while. Returning to it this week has not been easy. I want to blame Wordle’s hard mode. You can’t guess four words at once while using all your current hints. Maybe the dictionary has placed harder words.

Quordle is a different challenge than Daily Sectordle, which gives you 32 words at once.

Are word games actually good for your brain? If it’s a challenge, if you aren’t running through them on auto pilot, then yes.

Librarian: There’s a novelization of Belle da Costa Greene, the woman who built J. P. Morgan’s personal library, by Alexandra Lapierre. Gina Dalfonzo writes, “Lapierre is the kind of writer who can make a rare book auction into a thrilling action scene, and make a reader yearn to hold a copy of the bejeweled 8th-century Lindau Gospels. She gets you so caught up in Belle’s untiring passion for her work, it tears at your heart to think that Belle would have been barred from that work if her heritage had been known.”

Finding a Good Home for Books: Steve Donoghue says being a “book person” tends to attract orphan books. “I’m talking about squalling little orphans furtively deposited at the back door of the rectory by tearful (or grateful) parents who have decided that their babies will have a better chance for happiness if cast onto the mercy of a rude stream than if they stay neglected and underfed at home.”

Apocalypse Next Door: Russian sci-fi novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky says his apocalyptic novel set in the Moscow metro system is selling well after his government condemned him for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Coffee: At least among customers of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, iced coffee has overtaken hot coffee orders by three to one. Next month, Starbucks is changing its rewards program to make getting free hot coffee or tea 100 stars (not 50) and free iced coffee or tea 100 stars (not 150). Fans are upset, maybe because handcrafted drinks cost 50 stars more, maybe because change of any kind upsets people.

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Big Publishers, Writer’s Complaints, and Blogroll

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Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, who took up writing as a career after losing his respect and position at Dabney Oil in 1932, read a laudatory profile on Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker and said, “I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.”

Well, someone should have told Chandler he had his own genius as well as his own version of the good life, which needed amending.

Mark Twain vented his spleen on the writing skill of James Fennimore Cooper with many accurate complaints like this one:

For several years, Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some “females” — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy?

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895

What are other people saying about books?

Big Publishers: There are five powerhouses in U.S. publishing today: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. If judges approve a currently contested merger, Penguin Random House would be allowed to buy Simon & Schuster, reducing the big publishers to four. This would make German media group Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House and is already the world’s largest trade book publisher, in an Amazon-sized company. (via ArtsJournal)

Today is St. George’s Day in England, a day celebrated on par with Christmas at one time.

We fairly hope … that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
To cry “Amen” to that, thus we appear.
You English princes all, I do salute you.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 5

Birthday: It is also Shakespeare’s birthday. He was born April 23, 1564, which is a date deduced by the record of his baptism in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. 

Block Party: Thoughts of Shakespeare naturally turn one’s mind to Brooklyn and “a timeless block party that could be 400 years old,” notes the NY Daily News.

Word Game: And when you think about block parties, you think about the word guessing games that are all the rage amongst the hip kids. The Folger Shakespeare Library has their own version called Prattle. This one is new to me. I’ve been playing Wordle and Quordle for several weeks now.

Photo: Bus Depot, angle view, Bond Street, Bend, Oregon 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

War, Words, and the Best Book in Scandinavia

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Ukraine is still under siege. NATO allies are sending ammunition, weapons, and food to Ukraine, but they will not close Ukrainian airspace to Russian aircraft. That would mean acknowledging World War III. I understand the hesitation, but I don’t understand, given everything Putin has said and done, how this isn’t a world war already.

Putin will not stop until Ukraine falls, and Ukraine must not fall. The only way out of this apart from NATO taking an active role in the conflict is either Ukrainian surrender or an uprising of the Russian people. The latter may happen anyway.

In Ukraine, civilians are being targeted despite a ceasefire agreed upon by both sides.

Mindy Belz has this piece on the Christianity of Ukrainians and how Putin is seen as a Christian despite his brutal oppression of them.

In related research, the Cato Institute has released its fourth annual Arms Sales Risk Index. “Selling weapons to governments that treat their citizens poorly increases the power of the state at the expense of its citizens, allowing them to respond to unrest and political challenges with violence.”

But I don’t want to talk about this here. What else do we have?

Word games: Based on under 200,000 tweets of game results, U.S. players rank 18th in the world of Wordle. Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are the top three. Among U.S. players, those in St. Paul, Minn. are #1.

Have you played Wordle? It’s fun, and you don’t have to stay with only one version of it. There’s Dordle, a two-up Wordle, and Quordle, a four-up version. Worldle is a geography version that tells you how far away in what direction is the correct answer. Heardle revives Name That Tune with six guess for sixteen seconds of music. I’ve enjoyed both Wordle and Quordle for a few weeks now.

Shout Down: Ilya Shapiro couldn’t address a college class because the students wouldn’t have it.

Best books in Scandinavia? The list of this year’s potential winners of the Nordic Council Literature Prize has been announced.

Amazon closing bookstores. Apparently, people buy food in physical stores, but books not so much.

Photo: Merced Theater, marquee detail, Merced, California. 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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Screams in the REalm of Impossibility

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Collaborative games are something of a niche market in computer and board games. Perhaps it’s just easier to design a game around only one player.

In 1984, Electronic Arts released a cool, run-for-your-life game called Realm of Impossibility. Players had no weapons against hoards of zombies, orbs, and spiders. They could only drop crosses to block them temporarily and collect defensive spells to divert them for a few seconds. The main weapon they had was speed.

You can see the gameplay in this video review. About half of the dungeons have features similar to optical illusions, so beginners could run down dead ends that don’t look like it at first. That and the running like mad are two parts of the joy of this game. The third part is being able to play with someone else.

I remember playing this game with other people, yelling in mock fear of the terrors chasing us, getting separated, blocked, or killed, reviving each other, and booking it for the side of the screen.

“I’ll draw them away. You grab the thing.”

“Run, run! AHH!”

Playing by yourself was fun enough the first couple times, but it was a short game that didn’t change. It didn’t have the replayable nature of Pitfall, which seems odd given that Pitfall was just the Gen-X version of Temple Run. (Maybe it isn’t odd at all. People play Temple Run for hours.) But as a two-player game, both of you running to escape the hoards, Realm of Impossibility was great fun.

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Simple War Games and How I Was Accused of Cheating

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I mentioned before that one of my high school friends enjoyed realistic war games like Avalon Hill’s Tobruk and Squad Leader. Those are games with many numbers and complicated mechanics for building defense and attack strength. At least, they were complicated enough for me–a guy who tends to send one tank or team out to shoot up the enemy and takes too long to realize it’s a pretty dumb move.

That’s many steps away from games like Risk that just ask you to roll the dice to see how many enemies you kill. Risk limits your strategy options to piling up troops in Indonesia or North Africa to bottleneck incoming attacks. Squad Leader, according to BoardGameGeek, “utilizes programmed instruction to guide you through 12 scenarios of increasing realism and complexity. The scenarios run the gamut from street fighting in Stalingrad to armored advances across snow covered roads in the Ardennes.”

It’s not so much a game as it is “a game system which can be used to portray any WWII infantry action.” Measure the fun accordingly.

An advantage to board games, regardless the complexity, is the analog natural of the mechanics. You have a paper rulebook and cardboard pieces with numbers. There’s no programming to open the door to someone accusing you of fiddled with it to win, which is what happened to me while playing Lords of Conquest as a teenager on my Commodore 128.

Lords of Conquest was fairly simple. It allowed you to choose one of several world maps or create one of your own. You took turns selecting your territory or have the computer do it for you. Then you moved troops, controlled resources, and other things I no longer remember. The main thing I remember is the risk factor.

You could play with one of three levels of risk.

  1. Low: An attacker with equal force to the defender will always win.
  2. Medium: An attacker with greater force than the defender will always win. Maybe equal force would result in a draw without damage to either side.
  3. High: All attacks were based on percentages. An attacker with equal force to the defender would have a 50 percent chance of winning.

Playing with high risk was the only fun way to play, and it helped me understand simple odds. If I had a 40 percent chance of winning without any risk of losing my own forces, then I might as well attack on my turn and see what comes of it. My smaller or equal forces conquered larger ones many times. That’s how I won and earned accusations of cheating via programming. I was simply willing to take the chance of winning. If losing an attack meant losing my own territory, it would have been different, though maybe you could draw an enemy power into a vulnerable position with a feinted loss.

People don’t understand simple odds like this. They think if a die rolled three, two, and three, then I must turn up five or six next. But each side as a 1/6 chance of being rolled. Sure, it’s unusual for the same number to be rolled four times, but each roll has the same odds. And in a game that only rewards you for getting the right number, there’s nothing to lose.

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Playing Board Games as a Kid

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I’ve always enjoyed table top games, and my family were not gamers. We played games occasionally, and I think I largely encouraged what we played.

I could be wrong. On vacations, my extended family played Canasta, Spades, and “The Dictionary Game” long before it ever was published as Balderdash. Perhaps my older siblings brought some board games into the house, because we had an old edition of Parcheesi and an art masterpiece game long before I was old enough to show interest in them. In the early years, I was interested in PayDay, a silly, pun-filled game about making it to the end of the month. (I think that’s where I learned of the classic book Running to the Outhouse, by Will E. Makit.)

We played harder games in a gifted program in which I was placed for grades 4-6, games like Avalon Hill’s TUF, a dice game that asked you to make the longest working equation you could from the roll you made. You always had an equals sign and some kind of math symbol with the numbers, maybe eight dice total. It was hard. Other games I remember were Word Power and The Stock Market Game. Avalon Hill made great games back in the day. I wasn’t good at Word Power btw.

One of the project choices in that class was to design a game. I think I worked up two of them, neither entirely successful. One was an adventure. I vaguely recall a board that resembled a Narnian map with a sea serpent in watery sections. There was some kind of Sasquatch and a UFO too. Players could move in any direction on the grid in search of treasure, which was hidden by someone controlling the enemies.

The thing I remember most about this is working with my dad on how to design the game pieces. He cut up a broom handle to make each piece. The rounded tip of the handle was the UFO. Dad made smoothly sanded player pieces in different colors. I don’t remember how we handled the two monsters. I think the other kids liked it. It didn’t totally work as a game, but it was good project.

As a teenager, I wanted to play more complicated games but didn’t have a regular group to do it with. My sister married a guy who played chess with us often and enjoyed large games like Kingmaker, with a four-hour play time that probably begins after you study the rulebook for an hour or so. Diplomacy was another one we started and never finished (six-hour play time?!). I wasn’t good at these games. How could I be without playing a single full game?

I think I did play a single game of Squad Leader. That’s the kind of game my best friend in high school enjoyed. Military tactics was one of his strengths, and this was a complicated game that could be expanded into many more tiers of complication. He destroyed me. And I enjoyed it, I think.

Winning is not the main thing in a game. I want to enjoy the challenge of it, even if I lose, which is certainly a strength, seeing that I have had only marginal success in my life. Enjoying the challenge with some good people makes for a fun evening.

If you can tolerate it, I’ll write more about games in upcoming posts.