Our Trip to Puerto Rico - We Go Places and Do Things

I’ve never understood the reluctance of people to identify as tourists, especially when they are, by any objective measure, tourists. I like exploring the little off the beaten track nooks and crannies of the cities we visit and I’m happy to do the things the locals do and discover the small things that make a place interesting that aren’t well known, far away from the madding crowds – especially when it comes to restaurants and other food-related things – but at the end of the day I am what I am and I’m also going to do some of the tourist things because they’re usually fun. That’s how they become tourist things in the first place.

So we spent some time exploring a bit, both in Old San Juan and further afield.

One of the first things we did was go visit the local fort, which was perhaps a ten minute walk from where we were staying. In addition to getting us out into the sunshine and visiting a World Heritage Site, it also meant leaving the apartment vacant so it could be cleaned without us hovering over the person tasked with that mission. Win all around.

El Castillo San Felipe del Morro sits on the headland guarding San Juan’s harbor and as such was a priority for the Spanish when they first colonized the area. The oldest part dates to 1539, and they continued to add to it until 1790. It’s an impressive pile of stone, with outer walls that are about ten feet (three meters) thick in places, and you can see how this would be a rather intimidating sight for an invader. That is the goal of forts, after all.

The fort was a pretty easy walk from where we were staying. You go through the Plaza de San Jose, past the guy selling water ice, down the steps to another plaza (because everything is on a hill of some kind), and along a road that winds alongside the sea for a few minutes until you get to a vast grassy field.

The thing I loved most about the field is that it is a place where people just hang out. It’s part of the neighborhood as well as part of the historical site and on a breezy day like the one we had it’s full of people picnicking and flying kites and you have to love the fact that this place that the tourists go to see because of its historical significance is just another place to hang out for the people who actually live there. I’m glad it’s part of a living community that way.

You walk up the long path toward the main entry, pay your admission (which also gets you into the Castillo San Cristobal, which we will have to go back to see sometime) and in you go. There are a lot of levels that you can climb up or down to see – if you go up you can look out over the harbor, and if you go down you can, eventually, find your way to the sea, and if you stay where you are there’s a gift shop and a chapel as well as a few other miscellaneous spaces that are all neatly labeled and accessible. It took me a while to figure out how to get down to the sea – you can’t get there directly from the fort, but rather you have to go into the grassy moat and down a small set of stairs and then along a rambling path full of tourists like yourself only with about 10% of them carrying the small yappy dogs that appeared to be standard equipment in that place and time. The dogs seemed to be enjoying themselves too.

Occasionally you will find a resident of a different variety hanging out in the fort. They do not care to associate with the visitors, but neither do they cede the field.

My favorite parts of the fort were the little guard pods that line the outside walls. They’re iconic enough that Puerto Rico put them on their most recent quarter design, and you can just walk right up to them and stand inside for as long as you want. They’re actually all over the city walls, not just at the fort, and every time you see one they’re just as fascinating as they were the first time. At least they were to me.

There’s an old cemetery just off to the side, but when Lauren and Sara tried to go visit (they were ahead of me and Kim, being younger and faster) it was already closed for the day. It was pretty impressive, though.

The next day we decided to venture a bit further afield and go to the beach.

The main draw as far as Kim and Lauren were concerned was the chance to go snorkeling with the sea turtles, which is like swimming with the fishes except less threatening. When we got there we found an SUV parked in the lot by the little enclosed area of water and the guys there got everyone who signed up for this trip kitted out and ready to go.

They had a lovely time. There were in fact many sea turtles swimming by – all of them quite used to people so they weren’t skittish. None of the sea life was, which meant that Kim and Lauren also got to hang out with the sea urchins, which they report feel rather like wooly bear caterpillars. At one point Kim noticed a very long fish swimming by and asked the tour leaders what that was. “That’s Lois,” one of them told her. “She’s a barracuda.” So, yeah, they’re pretty much used to people.

Sara and I sat under some nearby trees and had a lovely conversation while all this was going on, though eventually we decided to gather up our bags and walk the quarter mile or so over what appeared to be a bridge of some kind (though entirely over land) to the actual beach on the other side of where we were.

It was a gorgeous little beach, with plenty of coconut trees for shade – it surprised me how many coconuts each tree actually had on them, since for some reason I always thought there were just one or two per tree – and a thumping soundtrack coming from the folks in front of us. Behind us was a large crowd of people playing dominoes and passing around a small tiara to whomever won a hand. There were also vast numbers of absolutely fearless pigeons who would careen at top speed and eyebrow-level through the assembled people, though I never did see them hit anyone. The guy with the paddle in the first picture is actually wearing a Phillies hat, which as a native Philadelphian pleased me inordinately much.

Kim and Lauren caught up to us not long after we got there, and we hung out for a while. Kim, Lauren and Sara enjoyed going into the water, which was apparently pretty warm. One flaw in this plan is that we hadn’t thought to pack any food, thinking that there would be a place to purchase some (don’t all beaches in cities have such places?). This turned out not to be true, but fortunately a guy came by selling small cakes that were enough to tide us over for a while, particularly when combined with ice cream from a different guy pulling a little cart.

We figured we’d hit the hot dog stand by the snorkeling area on the way out, but that turned out not to be a food place either, so once we got back to the apartment and dropped off our stuff we headed back out immediately and found lunch because no matter how gorgeous the scenery is you still have to eat.

We split up again the next day, but only because the rules said we had to.

One of the places that Kim wanted to see while we were down there was Casa Bacardí, the distillery where they make the Puerto Rico’s most famous rum. Unfortunately the drinking age in Puerto Rico is 18 and Sara was a few months short of that and they absolutely will not let anyone in unless they’re of age. Not even with a bracelet that says “Do Not Serve,” which struck me as a bit harsh. I’m not much for rum, to be honest, so Kim and Lauren went while Sara and I visited the Plaza Las Americas, the largest mall in the Caribbean.

It was a very, very large mall. Really, surprisingly large, with no directories of any sort that we ever found so you just kind of wander aimlessly from place to place, never quite knowing where you are or how to get out or even what time it is so it does start to feel like a casino after a while. All of the Christmas shows were still running so every so often we’d stumble into an open area where a feverishly cheerful performer would be trying to entertain a large crowd of children in a space that had the echoing acoustics of a train station. The kids seemed enraptured, though.

We eventually found a place to have lunch, and after some further wandering we came to a store that sold nothing but chocolates, which was kind of fun to see. I have no idea how such a store could make enough to justify the rent on the space, but perhaps people buy more chocolate in San Juan than I think they do.

Meanwhile Kim and Lauren were touring Casa Bacardí.

From all accounts they had a lovely time, and even got to sample some of the exceedingly old rum that they only serve to people who visit the distillery.

When they left they walked for an hour or so to get to the ferry that took them back to our neighborhood. They said that it was an interesting walk that involved more than a few chickens and you just have to love that sort of thing.

Meanwhile Sara and I returned from the mall and ended up wandering around Old San Juan for a bit looking for pastries, which we never did find though we did locate some chocolate gelato that was out of the rain. It was tasty and a good replacement for the pastries.

That night we decided to go to an escape room.

If you’ve never tried one of these, you’re missing out. You go into a small room or set of rooms where there are clues to a mystery of some kind, and you figure out the clues within a set period of time so you can unlock the door and get back out. Or you don’t and they come get you, one or the other. They’re a lot of fun.

We walked down to the place and on the way we found an entryway to something that had great neon signs.

I’m not sure what it means that the next sign over was this one:

Maybe we should be afraid of the drinks? Seems like mixed messaging here, though perhaps after the rum distillery I shouldn’t question it.

We found our escape room, waited for our appointment time, and eventually went in.

We had a good time, but we didn’t actually solve the mystery. In our defense a) the lighting was very low which meant that we were unable to tell the difference between the dark green banner and the dark blue banner – a difference that turned out to be important for getting from phase one of the mystery to phase two, and b) there was an important clue on top of something that very clearly said “Do Not Touch” so we figured we should ignore that something. Oh well. It was a fun way to spend time and we got to walk around Old San Juan for a bit as well so an evening well spent.

Our final excursion was perhaps our most ambitious, and the one that got us furthest afield. Not too far from San Juan is El Yunque National Forest, which is the only tropical rainforest in the United States and has been designated as preserved land since 1876 when the Spanish ruled the place. And since we’d already spent a fair amount of time in the city, it seemed appropriate to head out to see some nature.

We signed up for a tour group, and early one morning Isaac pulled up to Plaza de San Jose in a big white passenger van to pick us up. We gathered an older couple a few blocks away, and then drove out toward the forest, stopping at a resort not that far from the forest to pick up a younger couple as well. They were all from California, as I recall, though I never did get their names. They seemed nice enough.

It’s a pretty good ride from San Juan to El Yunque, and the first thing we did was stop at the observation tower to get a view of the place. It’s really very impressive.

We spent some time up at the top of the tower, where it was both windy and significantly cooler than it was at the bottom, and then we headed back down to see the place close up. The guy in the blue shirt is Isaac, for those of you keeping score at home.

Lauren’s Botany and Small Animal Biology classes came in handy during the trip and she spent a fair amount of time explaining things – the structures on the plants we were looking at, for example, and the symptoms and progression of rabies (a problem in Yunque due to the mongoose population there). Isaac was impressed.

 

 

From there Isaac took us to El Baño Grande, which is exactly what it sounds like: a large pool of water with a path you can walk around. It’s pretty.

Our next stop was Coco Falls. Kim and I stayed down at the bottom but Lauren and Sara climbed the rocky path to the side and got close to the actual falls.

You find a lot of flowers in the rainforest.

Our final stop in El Yunque was the Rio Mameyes at the bottom of the Angelito trail. Isaac somehow managed to park the van out of the flow of traffic on the road and we set off on a 20-minute hike down toward the river – down, down, down, past breadfruit trees and candlewood trees and bamboo, until you finally reach the water. There is a stretch there where the water is pretty calm and all the tour guides take their charges down to it so you can go swim in a rain forest. It’s a lovely spot.

We were also visited by a cat, who spent a fair amount of time just wandering around being admired as cats will. There really are cats just everywhere there.

I was the last one to head back up to the van and it was about two-thirds of the way to the top when the true meaning of “rainforest” became clear. It rains there, pretty much every day, at regular intervals. It does that in San Juan too, from my experience. And most of the time it’s just a shower that lasts a few minutes and then you move on. This was not that. It started to sprinkle as I climbed, and by the time I got to the two-thirds mark it was a deluge. Fortunately I had a plastic bag for my camera and the rest of me is not water soluble, but it was a very soggy me who emerged out of the trail – ironically so, given that I didn’t swim in the river. The weather gods are ironical beasts.

By this time we were all hungry, and Isaac took us to a wonderful little roadside stand – he clearly does this with everyone, as they not only knew him on sight but he also pitched in behind the counter – where we found empanadas and, according to Kim, the world’s best smoothies. We ate like kings and played with yet another cat out in the parking lot, and I bought a half gallon of lemonade and drank it all because it had been a thirsty sort of day.

It was quite possibly the best meal we had in Puerto Rico, though we did our best to test that while we were there. And that is another post entirely.

Our Trip to Puerto Rico - We Explore Old San Juan

We spent a lot of time in Old San Juan (the original colonial city, as opposed to the more modern city that has since grown up around it) because there’s a lot to do and see there and, well, that’s where we were. It’s good to do the thing in the place.

Every time we travel we debate whether or not to rent a car and sometimes we do but mostly we don’t and in this case not trying to drive in Old San Juan was precisely the right call. It’s an old city, founded by the Spanish in the early 1500s, and like all cities built before cars it’s compact and designed to be walked rather than driven. The streets are narrow and uneven, and if you’re in a hurry you’re better off on foot. This is particularly true if you’re behind a maintenance vehicle of some kind – a trash truck, for example, or a street cleaning truck, both of which we walked by during our wandering and both of which were leading vast lines of idling vehicles in their wake. Admittedly it’s not New York so nobody was leaning on their horn having an aneurism because of the delay, but still. Uber is pretty much everywhere all the time and it's fast, reliable, and cheap. There’s no reason to have a car if you’re visiting Old San Juan.

Plus it’s just more interesting to walk in a city like that. You see things that you would miss if you were breezing by in a car or creeping along trying not to hit anything. Lauren noticed this scene at one point, and you have to admire the juxtaposition.

You should be prepared to get your exercise in when you’re walking around in a city like this one, though. I’m not entirely sure why the Spanish chose to build their city on the tropical equivalent of San Francisco – maybe it’s just something they did, now that I think about it – but wherever you want to go you can rest assured that there is a steep hill between where you are and where you’re trying to be. It does level out when you get to the modern city, but the colonial heart of San Juan is pitched pretty steeply.

There are also cats pretty much everywhere. They live in the streets – not a punishing place in a tropical climate, at least not compared to winters in Wisconsin – and people seem to like having them around. The ones we saw were fairly well fed and groomed and didn’t seem bothered by people so you know they don’t see us as any real threat. You couldn’t pet them, but if you had a tasty morsel to give them they’d come by pretty close so you could feed them.

 

One night we were eating dinner on a steep road that had been blocked to vehicular traffic and noticed that there was a group of these cats just up the hill that were gathered around someone who was casually feeding them leftovers from some meal. After the person left Lauren wandered up with some tasties of her own and the cats were just as happy to accept them from her. These were well fed cats.

I generally enjoy wandering around in cities. Cities are fascinating places, full of noise and people and interesting places and more history than most people realize. You see a lot just walking around, and San Juan has a lot to see.

Sometimes I did that on my own. One morning, for example, before Lauren and Sara woke up and while Kim was eating breakfast, I decided to head out and see what was around. It’s a nice city to do that.

This street impressed me, though.

It’s hard to tell from the photograph but you’re looking down a fairly steep hill. The road is exactly wide enough for one small car if you fold in the side mirror, and the 90-degree turn at the bottom is tricky because of both the unevenness of the road and the lack of any real space for maneuver and it is also more exciting than it probably needs to be because on the other side of those loosely placed concrete blocks is a 40-foot (13-meter) drop. Good luck, motorists!

You do run into some interesting people when you’re out and about like that. At one point I was trying to get a picture of one of the feral cats – a calico with one eye who, frankly, was having none of it – when an older guy came up to me and started talking about cats and the horrors of animal cruelty in general. It turned out he was a Canadian bush pilot and we got to talking about his flying experiences. At one point he got onto the subject of hunting, which he had no particular issues with as long as people were responsible about it, but he said, “I’m sorry to say that you Americans sometimes will just shoot the animals for no reason!” and all I could respond with was, “Well, shit, friend – in the US we do that to people too.” He kind of looked at me for a moment, and then just laughed. What can you do?

Later that morning I went back out to a local bakery and got mallorcas, which are apparently a Puerto Rico thing. They’re about the size and shape of cinnamon buns but they’re just yeasted dough dusted with powdered sugar. They’re good, though rather large.

There are a few general things that you notice when you’re walking around San Juan. For one thing, I really, really need to learn how to speak Spanish. My vague memories of forty-year-old high school classes just don’t cut it. I could usually parse things out in print, but trying to talk to people – some of whom didn’t speak English – was a comedy. It would help me in my job too, come to think of it.

Also, Old San Juan looks a lot like a cross between Rome, with its tiled everything and its narrow cobblestone streets, and New Orleans, with balconies everywhere on the buildings. It’s not hard to figure out why. You know that meme that starts with the fact that pyramids exist in multiple civilizations across history and teases you with the idea that this must be some vast alien conspiracy before pointing out that pyramids are just a really good way to pile rocks without having them fall down? San Jan, New Orleans, and Rome are all hot-weather cities and balconies and tile keep things cooler. They’re also old cities, as noted earlier, long predating automobiles, and the streets in the original parts of town are therefore only wide enough for foot traffic and the occasional horse. It’s fun to see the common threads, though.

We did a lot of general wandering in Old San Juan. The first day there I headed off to the grocery store to stock up on stuff and get the lay of the land, which was mostly successful – I found the grocery store eventually and got a few items for breakfast and such, though I did take the long way around.

There’s art here and there.

And as you walk around you find yourself in all sorts of lovely places.

You can get pretty much anything if you look hard enough, sometimes all in one place.

Although I have to admit I was surprised to find out that you can still buy these. Do the Germans know?

Sara and I walked around a bit while we were waiting for Kim and Lauren to come back from Casa Bacardi (more on that later), and one day when she decided to take a nap Kim, Lauren, and I largely retraced those steps. We found some neat places.

 

If there was one place that kind of stood out it was the Pigeon Park. Located just to the right of the gate pictured above, it’s exactly what it says it is: a small public park full of pigeons who absolutely understand that the tourists will feed them. They may not know much but they do know that. There’s a small stand that will sell you a bag of pigeon food for $2, and if you so much as crinkle the paper they are on you like they’re taking direction from Alfred Hitchcock. It is surprisingly fun if somewhat pokey, even though they have big signs warning you not to feed the pigeons outside of the park as pigeons are disease-ridden filth-producing monsters. Inside the park is okay, though.

We had a grand time exploring the old city.

And then we looked further afield.

Our Trip to Puerto Rico - Life in the Neighborhood

When we woke up the next morning and took stock of our situation, things were looking up. We had supplies waiting for us by the front door and a text message from the Air B&B host promising to take care of everything (a promise promptly kept). We’d triumphed over the forces of Ghost Air and actually made it to Puerto Rico. And we were ready to venture forth to see what we’d gotten ourselves into.

It turned out that we landed in the most hopping neighborhood in Old San Juan. You wouldn’t know this by day. When the sun was out, it was just a gorgeous little street full of colorful houses.

Sometimes it feels like 90% of the houses in the continental US are painted white, with the remainder mostly beige. There are a few rebels here and there with pastels, and once in a while you’ll find a primary color that you know was put on there by the people the neighborhood talks about behind their backs, but for the most part homes in this part of the world are designed to show as little individual character as possible. This is not true in many other places in the world and it makes those places more interesting, really.

Our apartment, for example, was in this building.

You walked in the front door, unlocked the heavy metal inner door, and found yourself in a tiled corridor that had a roof – it went underneath the front apartments – but was otherwise open to the elements. It led to an inner courtyard of similar color, and at the back was the door to our actual apartment.

It was a nice place, really. Two bedrooms, a tiny little kitchen not quite big enough to spread your arms in, a living room, a bathroom, and a short hallway connecting it all together and containing a table that could fit two people if they were friendly enough. It also had access to a couple of small open spaces that seemed mostly designed to provide fresh air and cool the place down. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time there, but it was all we needed it to be.

During the day the street looked like this:

You’ll notice the Christmas decorations overhead. This is because it is still, technically, Christmas in Puerto Rico. They are, according to one person we spoke with while we were there, very proud of having the longest Christmas celebration in the world. It starts at about the same time most such things start in the Western world (i.e. late October for early shopping!), continues in full force through Epiphany and finally winds down around the Feast of San Sebastian, which is tomorrow. It was the 2nd by the time we arrived, right in the middle of all this in other words, which meant that most people had a lot of time off to celebrate, or at least it seemed that way to us.

At night, however, the street looked like this:

The street was lined with bars, clubs, and restaurants, and it was always crowded with what appeared to be a healthy mix of locals and tourists. If you look up “Things to do in San Juan” you’ll find several of the bars on our street listed there as places you should not miss, although in the end we did because while the drinking age in Puerto Rico is 18, the most famous club in the neighborhood (“The Factory,” which was maybe thirty paces down the street and is a popular place to film music videos apparently) had a minimum age requirement of 23 and the bar across the street where we tried to go for dinner one night was both too crowded and too loud for people not actively clubbing. I’m not sure when everything shuts down in that neighborhood – when we arrived from the airport at 3:30am the street was still crowded and festive and I’m too old to be staying up that late every night to investigate that any further – but the only time I ever saw the street even remotely unoccupied was early morning in bright sunshine and even then there were people milling about. It was a fun place to walk around.

The odd part about it was that even with all the noise, you couldn’t hear any of it in the apartment. Other than occasional hammering from the building next door, which was being renovated, the place was dead quiet inside even while outside there were crowds and bands. There was one evening where we’d come back from Touristing and were getting ready to sit still for a while when Lauren and Sara decided they wanted to run an errand of some kind. They left, and about a minute later we got a text from them. “There’s a live band a couple of doors down the street!”

This we had to see.

By the time Kim and I got outside, however, the band was on a break, so we sat in the Plaza de San Jose for a bit just enjoying the evening. It’s a nice little plaza, a few steps from our front door in the opposite direction from The Factory, with benches around the outside and a little kiosk that sold pastries during the day. There’s a statue of a conquistador or someone similar right in the middle of it and a church that is older than the United States on one side, and there is always a crowd of people there just milling about. One night there was a quinciñera. It’s a lovely place, really, and since it’s easier to drive to the Plaza than to our apartment it became our Uber pickup point. We spent a fair amount of time there, in other words.

So we sat on one of the benches enjoying the night air, and then it started to rain. It does that in tropical climates – usually for not more than a few minutes at a time, though sometimes it can get heavy. That night was kind of drizzly, and sitting on a bench under a tree was plenty of protection for us. The Plaza emptied out, though.

And then the rain lifted, the band came back from break, and within ten minutes the entire street was packed with people singing along.

It was someone’s birthday, it turned out.

I have no idea what they were singing – a birthday song of some sort no doubt – but pretty much everyone in the crowd except us and the small scattering of other tourists knew the words and the accompanying hand gestures and were merrily serenading the birthday girl, who stood on the sidewalk in front of the band and encouraged them.

So a good time was had by all.

Also in our neighborhood were the wings. I’m not sure whether they counted as “hopping” but they were interesting and eventually we did get over to take our pictures with them. You might as well.

Our Trip to Puerto Rico - The Journey There

We actually had two trips planned for our holiday break.

The first one, our visit to family for Christmas in Tennessee, didn’t work out as we’d hoped. Between the blizzard that swept through the middle of the country just before Christmas and the Covid that hit Lauren right afterward, we stayed home. We’ll get there soon for a visit, we hope.

By the end of December, however, Lauren was fully recovered and the snow had mostly melted away, so the second trip was on.

For a long time we weren’t sure about where we’d be going on this trip, or who actually would be attending. Sicily was a possibility – Kim and I would like to go back to Italy sometime soon, and my family roots are there. It would have been fun to explore. Plus it’s got both beaches and skiing, which made it attractive to Kim and Lauren. But with other commitments hemming us in for time, we decided to save this trip for another day when we could spend the time there that it deserved. Montreal was briefly a possibility – Oliver and I liked the idea of visiting a cold-weather city, but the cold was precisely why Lauren wasn’t interested. In the end we decided to try visiting San Juan, Puerto Rico, a place I knew precisely nothing about other than that it was tropical and I didn’t need a passport to go there.

In the end Oliver decided to stay home. Dustin was coming up from Texas to visit at about that time, and this way they could have the house to themselves for a bit. On the other hand, our niece Sara was able to join us, so we’d be four for the trip.

We drove down to O’Hare Airport in a dense fog on Sunday – New Year’s morning – for our flight, which would connect in Orlando and get us to San Juan around 7:45pm local time (5:45pm Wisconsin time). Sara would be flying direct from New York and would get in around 10pm – we’d meet her there and take her back to the Air B&B where we would be staying, have a nice few days together exploring a new place, and then head home on Friday.

That was the plan. It worked out, but there were times when we weren’t sure it would.

Let me just say now that under no circumstances will I be flying on what I will, for legal purposes, be referring to Ghost Air, ever again. They were disorganized, uninterested, and generally not up to the challenge of either delivering what they promised or making up the difference between that and the reality of the situation in any coherent way. We did have one leg of our journey on the way home on what I will refer to as Wild West Airlines and that was fine, if rather basic. I’ve flown on RyanAir, after all, and like them WWA promised only to get us from Point A to Point B safely and on time, and they delivered. There was nothing promised about comfort, food, or extra anything, and nothing of the sort materialized. But they held up their end for what they promised. Ghost Air, however, should be dismantled and sold for parts.

Our flight out of Chicago was delayed an hour because of the weather. This wasn’t too much of a problem – Kim, Lauren, and I are adults and expert packers and each of us brought only a backpack for the week, so we didn’t need to check any luggage or sit near each other on the plane.

The problem came when we arrived at Orlando. We actually arrived at our gate with 20 minutes to spare to catch our connecting flight, but we sat there waiting for Ghost Air to find a gate crew for more than half an hour while we watched our flight depart from the next gate over, promptly at 4pm as advertised – the only flight in Ghost Air’s entire schedule that left on time that day, as near as I could tell.

Eventually they let us into the airport and we got in line at the Ghost Air “service” counter to try to get rebooked. This, it turned out, was an experience. For one thing, there was the group in front of us, who got so irate at how poorly their concerns were being handled that the attendant simply walked off, which didn’t help any. It probably wasn’t an accident that about an hour later when I walked by the counter there was a fully armed Orlando police officer sitting there, biding his time. Kim ended up speaking to the other attendant at the counter who tried to tell us that since this wasn’t their fault – it was the weather –they might be able to get us there on Tuesday. Kim then explained that a) no, it wasn’t the weather’s fault, it was Ghost Air’s fault for leaving us on the plane to watch our flight take off, since they knew very well when it was arriving and didn’t see fit to have a crew there, and b) we had our niece flying into San Juan on her own so unless they planned to pay someone to find her, take her to a hotel, and pay for her stay there, we would be flying out that day. There was a short pause, and then the guy set about getting us onto the last three seats that were left on a flight leaving about four hours later, around 8pm Florida time.

Meanwhile Sara’s flight was boarding and we’re on the phone with my brother trying to determine if she should get on or just go home, all in real time.

We got the boarding passes, told Sara to board her flight, and settled in to wait.

Have you ever been to Orlando’s airport? It’s a dump. This is especially true on New Year’s Day, since this is apparently a big travel day for the House of Mouse and the place was absolutely mobbed with Disney traffic – there were precious few places to sit, for example. For a while we ended up sitting on the window ledge of a ramp between the gates and the food court, and if you tried to look down the terminal all you saw were bodies.

Lauren and I debated whether this counted as me having “been to Florida” or not.

I was indubitably standing on Florida ground. I even ate a meal there – we eventually found dinner at a French sandwich place that was reasonably tasty. But I never left the airport and my only purpose was to pass through and be gone.

Eventually we decided that this did not count. In order to say you’ve “been to” a place, you need to leave the airport and have a meal while not in motion (which rules out driving through and eating takeout in the car). Otherwise it’s a separate liminal category that is neither here nor there, one that in my experience now includes Kansas, Florida, Switzerland, and Germany (all airports) as well as Rhode Island and New Hampshire (drive-throughs with no meal while not in motion).

I am happy to have my streak of never being in Florida intact, if only on a technicality.

Of course the flight was delayed until 10:38pm.

So we sat there, in the airport, holding our precious paper boarding passes, reading our books, taking short walks, charging our phones, and generally looking forward to arriving in San Juan. Meanwhile Sara’s flight took off, flew down, and landed even before we boarded.

Our flight didn’t actually take off for another half hour after we left the gate. Don’t ask me why. At that point it didn’t matter.

We got to San Juan around 3am local time, and after some searching we located Sara. I texted proof of this to her parents so they could actually go to sleep that night, and we jumped into our waiting Uber ride to get to the Air B&B.

We arrived at around 3:30am to find that the place had not been cleaned from the last people there. Eventually we discovered that there was a legitimate reason for this and the hosts were very quick to make amends – by the time we woke up the next morning there was a bag with towels and toiletries by the front door, a cleaner came after we left to be tourists for the day and left the place in perfect shape, they refunded us some of the cost of the place (they offered to refund it all, but that seemed excessive to us given the prompt and thorough response) and in the end we would happily stay there again – but having to make the beds with fresh sheets at 4am after a very long day of travel was a bit of a drag.

We also didn’t figure out how the AC worked until the next day, which made that night rather warm. After that, however, it was nice.

Eventually we fell asleep.

It has to be said that the rest of the trip went much more smoothly, and we had a grand time while we were there.

Books Read in 2022 - Part 3

Books: the final installment!

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Oreo (Fran Ross)

Christine Clark – “Oreo” to her family, though originally it was supposed to be “Oriole” – is a teenager in 1970s Philadelphia (when the book was originally published) and she is on a mission. She has only ever known her mother’s side of the family – African Americans who moved up to Philadelphia from the South not long before she was born – but would very much like to find her father, a white Jewish man. Oreo embodies both sides of her heritage – her speech is full of both Southern rhythms and Yiddish exclamations and terms – and she is both self-assured and intelligent enough to figure out what needs to happen. This is a ridiculous book – smart, funny, deeply odd, playful in its episodic structures and characters, and wonderfully memorable, and if I were perhaps more of a classicist I’d have picked up on the fact that it’s basically a retelling of the Greek myth of Theseus as Oreo heads from Philadelphia to New York City and faces off against a host of opponents before finally finding her father in perhaps the most unexpected way possible. But mostly I just enjoyed the story and the various locales and experiences that I remember from growing up in a largely Jewish area just outside of Philadelphia in the 1970s. This is a book that Lauren had to read for her African American Literature class and she thought I’d enjoy it. She was absolutely right about that. As you’d expect from a book assigned in a university class, the novel is bracketed by two short scholarly essays, the first of which was interesting and the second of which reminded me why I don’t read scholarly essays on literature, but the novel itself rises above them and remains a joy to read.

Ways of Seeing (John Berger)

I read this book because a friend really loves Berger’s ideas, and it was an interesting experience. Berger writes about art and how it is seen and what that seeing means in a larger cultural context, but he wrote this in the early 1970s and it is very much a product of its time itself, a way that the 1970s saw things. There are seven chapters – three simply images, one after another, arranged to tell a story that Berger wanted to tell though without any particular guidance for the reader, and four fairly detailed examinations of how things are seen. The chapter on publicity (what today would probably be called advertising) was probably the most grounded, while the one on oil paintings was the most theoretical. It’s an interesting look at a time and place and how one can see art. It’s also an interesting object in itself – the book is short (166pp) and slightly larger than a standard paperback, but it is printed on heavy stock glossy paper that gives it a literal weight that one suspects Berger would have approved of. It’s also printed in a bold-face sans-serif font and studded liberally with small black and white reproductions of artwork (the concept of reproducing art being the main subject of one of the essays), most of which really should have been larger and in color to get his points across but that would have been prohibitively expensive in the early 1970s. So in an odd sort of way it works on two levels. 

The Secret Apartment: Vet Stadium, a Surreal Memoir (Tom Garvey)

If you are a Philadelphia sports fan of a certain age this is a book you must read. Tom Garvey was a Vietnam vet at loose ends in the 1970s – he’d served in combat, came back and graduated from college, and then the wheels fell off his life. He bounced around to a few different things and then got a job with Nilon Brothers, who handled all of the food and parking at the Philadelphia sports complex (Veterans Stadium, JFK Stadium, and the Spectrum) in its various incarnations from the 1950s through the early 1980s. The Nilons were his uncles. Through what could charitably be described as a series of improbable events, Garvey a) becomes the head of the parking division, a job he had no interest in taking but which when presented became something of an inevitability, and b) carves an apartment out of an unused concession stand on the 200-level of Veterans Stadium, way out in left field. He lived in that apartment for two years – 1979-1981 – and met pretty much everyone who was anyone who came to the stadium. This is him telling that story, and the names and places were a marvelous walk down memory lane for me. I was in high school when the Phillies won the Series in the fall of 1980 and the Eagles lost the Super Bowl a couple of months later, and I had a grand time with this book. It helps that Garvey is an engaging storyteller with a gift for getting himself into just the damndest places and situations. There is a certain melancholy to it, a report from a vanished age in many ways, but it’s a fun ride while it lasts.

Where’s Me Plaid? A Scottish Roots Odyssey (Scott Crawford)

Sometime in the early 21st century, Scott Crawford made two discoveries. First, that the next vacation he and his wife Katrina would take from their home in the British Virgin Islands would be to Scotland, and second, that Crawford was a Scottish name and therefore he could visit ancestral sites while he was there. Out of such realizations came this book, which is a jaunty and well told story of two tourists – Crawford is originally from Ohio – on the prowl in Scotland, alternately being vaguely disappointed to discover their ancestors didn’t get the credit for things that Crawford felt they should, and being absolutely enthralled by the breathtaking beauty and blood curdling history of the place. They visit all sorts of places, meet interesting and occasionally incomprehensible people, and generally have a grand time careening around Scotland from site to site. I’ve spent the last few years focusing on the Italian side of my heritage in my genealogical researches, but perhaps it is time to get back to the Scottish side.

The Brief History of the Dead (Kevin Brockmeier)

The city of the dead is not set in stone. It awaits all of humanity after their deaths, and it expands and contracts to suit the need. How you get there varies, as everyone’s path is different after they die, but eventually the last person who remembers you will die and then you will move on, though nobody knows where. It’s a pleasant existence, with nice apartments and restaurants and leafy parks. It is, in fact, a much more pleasant existence than the one Laura Byrd is having back in the land of the living. She works for Coca Cola in a world where a few corporations essentially run everything, where the megafauna have largely died out but there is still ice in the Antarctic. She was in fact chosen to go the Antarctic as a researcher for some corporate project – pure PR, she knows, but she had too much seniority to go unnoticed and not enough to refuse, so off she went. But there is a plague in the world – a virulent, deadly disease colloquially known as The Blinks since it starts as a headache that causes people to blink rapidly before killing them hours later. By midway through the novel she is alone in the Antarctic, unable to reach anyone back in warmer climes and abandoned by her companions who left to find help and never returned, so she sets out for the base near the ocean to see if she can find help. Meanwhile the city of the dead is contracting, and everyone there eventually realizes that they all have one person in common: Laura Byrd. How many people does one person remember? What happens when they die too? This is a melancholy, at times lyrical, and generally thoughtful book about the communities that people create and the ripples those communities have. Written long before the COVID-19 pandemic, it resonates with the present in insightful ways.

Escape from Yokai Land (Charles Stross)

The Laundry Files continue to chug along and we’re all better off for it. You forget, after a while, just how good Charles Stross is at the simple act of putting sentences together. This slim novella fits into the timeline somewhere shortly after Bob Howard became the Eater of Souls, earlier in the series, and it describes a mission he undertook in Japan. Like all shorter stories it alludes to more than it covers – this is apparently the latest in a sequence of such missions, though the first since Bob took over from Angleton who used to do these and who left a rather poor impression on his Japanese hosts that Bob has to overcome. He flies to Japan. He meets his hosts – notably Dr. Suzuki, who is not quite human – and he spends the first part of the story proving himself with little jobs before being given the main task, which goes sideways quickly and messily as you would expect. You’ll never quite look at Hello Kitty the same way again.

Dead Lies Dreaming (Charles Stross)

Continuing my theme of “oh, there’s a sequel, I’d better read the previous one,” this is the first of a subseries within the Laundry Files – one that takes place in the same world at about the same time, but which does not actually involve any of the Laundry characters (at least so far). Jeremy Starkey – Imp, to his misfit friends Del, Game Boy, and Doc – is a wannabe filmmaker who funds his efforts by using his gang’s transhuman powers to commit crimes. His sister Eve is the personal assistant of Rupert de Montfort Bigge, a power player in the England of the occult rule of the New Management, a time of dark arts and blood. Their worlds will collide when Rupert orders Eve to retrieve a book – a cursed object that was destroyed in WWII but which still exists in an alternate dreamworld version of Whitehall in 1888 and can be accessed through a door in the long-abandoned Starkey family home that Imp and his friends are currently squatting in. Throw in a family curse, a number of heavily armed professional men on various sides (not always different ones, though often at cross-purposes), a rent-a-cop named Wendy with powers of her own, and Stross’ ability to string sentences together like jewels and you have yourself a story. There are more than a few twists and turns and eventually you reach, if not a conclusion, then at least a stopping point, and then it is off to the next installment.

Quantum of Nightmares (Charles Stross)

Things are getting grim for Imp and his crew, though as the story progresses they get relegated further and further into the background and Imp’s sister Eve becomes more and more of a main character – “a combat sorceress in full this end toward the enemy mode” as Stross memorably describes her at one point in this book. There are three stories here that eventually converge at the end and provide a springboard into the next book. In the first, Eve – now Baroness of Skaro, an island off the coast of England which is both an independent sovereignty and a place that hasn’t revised its legal code since the medieval period, as well as a nod by Stross toward the home planet of the Daleks – is working her way through cleansing both Skaro and the Bigge Organization of their infestation by the followers of the Cult of the Mute Poet, a bloodthirsty eldritch horror that Rupert, Eve’s former boss, served as bishop. In the second, there are evil doings down at the FlavrSmart supermarket in the Chickentown neighborhood of London (an homage to an old punk song, according to Stross’ note afterward) where neither the meat products nor the employees are what they seem and it is no coincidence that the HR person in charge of that is a devotee of the Mute Poet nor is it a coincidence that the Bigge Organization is in the process of a corporate takeover of the FlavrSmart chain. And in the third, a criminal named Mary McCandless is economically blackmailed into kidnapping the children of two transhumans (the superheroes of this world) and keeping them occupied and out of the way while her superiors work out larger plots – a task immeasurably complicated when it turns out that all four children have powers of their own. Stross keeps all of these balls in the air nicely and then drops the story off at a good place to move onto the next volume.

Base Notes (Lara Elena Donnelly)

This is a book about horrible people doing horrible things to people who are (mostly) even more horrible than they are, and while it is well written it is therefore something of a chore. I picked this up because I loved Donnelly’s Amberlough series and her talents as a writer continue to shine here but it was a seriously depressing book to read. Vic Fowler – whom Donnelly painstakingly never genders throughout the book – is a perfumer with an exceedingly particular skill. Vic can create perfumes that make the wearer relive old memories – not just remember them, but actually relive them. The down side to this is that they require the distilled essence of someone else who was there, and in the pursuit of this art Vic has already become a serial murderer even before the story opens. Vic is being blackmailed by Eisner, a client who wants Vic to develop a scent that can recreate a memory that Eisner wasn’t present for, a task that will require at least three other murders. To do this, Vic ropes Jane, Beau, and Giovanni into the project as assistants, and this will eventually unravel in the only way it ever could. There’s a McGuffin of a private investigator and a few other side characters weaving in and out, but mostly this is an exploration of how violence once started is very difficult to stop, and it is very much in the noir tradition that way. Told entirely from Vic’s first person viewpoint, it is well done but not something you’d recommend to most people.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman)

Anne Fadiman reads books. It’s what she does and what she has always done. It’s what her family taught her to love doing when she was growing up and what her husband does with her now. In this collection of essays you can follow along with her as she explores a life spent with books – books as objects, books as information, books as part of a relationship. She talks about the big step of merging her book collection with that of her husband, something she didn’t do until they’d been married for several years and already had a child together (and, to be honest, something Kim and I haven't done either). She goes over her family’s habit of proofreading menus and engaging in competitive wordplay. She describes the thrill of reading about a place in the place described. And so on – there are a bunch of short essays here, all of which started out as magazine columns and all of which are worth reading if you are a book lover.

It’s a Slippery Slope (Spaulding Gray)

Spaulding Gray was a professional narcissist, a man who made a living performing confessional monologues about his own life, and while he was a very entertaining sort of narcissist, it is the nature of such people to be destructive to themselves and others. This monologue starts with him learning to ski – a painful process because of his neuroses rather than any physical injuries – and then slides through his admittedly shabby treatment of his girlfriend before returning to skiing. I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to think about him after reading this, but it was an interesting ride.


Books Read: 43
Pages Read: 12,627
Pages per day: 34.6

Happy Reading!

Books Read in 2022 - Part 2

More books!

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Noir (Christopher Moore)

Christopher Moore did an interview during the first wave of the pandemic where his publisher hooked him up to a remote camera and he talked about his books, and one of the things he said was that if he were going to do a sequel to any of the books that were out there at the time he’d probably write it for this one. And he did. So to get myself back into the story I decided to read this again, because there is never a bad time to read a Christopher Moore novel. This is an odd combination of genres set in 1947 San Francisco – a “perky noir” in Moore’s own words – and it features all of the things that make Moore’s books fun to read: tight plots, interesting characters, a general sense of melancholy underneath it all, and laugh-out-loud-funny dialogue. Nobody does dialogue like Christopher Moore. This is the story of Sammy, a bartender at a dive bar run by Sal (a lowlife). He has a good friend in Chinatown (Eddie Moo Shoes) and another (Lone Jones) in the black neighborhood of San Francisco at the time, and if the cultural attitudes are more 1947 than 2022 well that’s the story isn’t it? Into Sammy’s life walks a dame – Stilton, otherwise known as The Cheese – and from there the story spirals out into Bohemian Grove, federal Men In Black, and the subject, which is where it really gets weird. It moves along quickly and while Moore is never afraid to do bad things to characters it ends mostly if not entirely well, as you know it will. If you haven’t read Moore, you need to.

Razzmatazz (Christopher Moore)

This story follows the continuing adventures of Sammy and the Cheese, though she is given more agency here and Moore widens his world out to show off some of the minor characters from Noir. Uncle Ho (“Catfucker”) has his backstory told here, for example – an immigrant from a poor Chinese village, he ends up as a member of the fighting tongs in San Francisco (“Big Town”) in 1906 but eventually he gives that up to protect an enslaved prostitute (who, it turns out, is surprisingly handy with a hatchet). Meanwhile Sammy, Lone, and Eddie are joined by Mabel (a brothel owner), Jimmy Vasco (who owns the drag king bar frequented by lesbians such as Stilton’s friend Myrtle – the variety of sexual orientations of the people in Sammy’s life is a running theme throughout both of these novels), and a host of others. There are three plots in this book. One centers on the efforts of the new head of the SFPD Vice Squad to shut down all of the drag queen/king bars. The second is a string of murders that are happening around those bars, which somehow gets Sammy into the private eye business. And the third – a much larger story – involves both Uncle Ho and the Rain Dragon as well as the subject from Noir and a very large metal contraption welded together by Stilton, Myrtle, and Doris. All of this comes together at a Christmas party at a hospital for physically and mentally disabled children (mostly), and how you get to that point is an entertaining story indeed. This is full of Moore’s trademark snappy dialogue (the word “mook” actually does appear in this one) and melancholy undertones, and it is a darker story in many ways than the first book though not quite noir dark. It is a worthwhile follow up to Noir.

The Last Dragonslayer (Jasper Fforde)

Continuing with my theme of “oh, look, there’s a sequel that I have just acquired so I need to go back and reread the first book(s) so I know what’s going on,” this is the first book in the story of Jennifer Strange – foundling, almost-sixteen-year-old, manager of the Kazam Mystical Arts Management company in the absence of the Great Zambini, and, eventually, the Last Dragonslayer of the title. Jennifer lives in a Britain that is divided into any number of states and referred to as “the Ununited Kingdom” and resides in the Kingdom of Hereford, which is near Wales. In this Britain magic is just a skilled trade and a declining one at that. King Snodd IV is a greedy, grasping twit eager to make war on his neighbor, and the impending demise of the last dragon on his border between them – and the land rush this will create once the Dragonland is opened for human settlement – is his opportunity. Jennifer must navigate the perfidy of the adult political world while dealing with the prickly personalities of Kazam’s wizards and sorcerers, the burdens of being a foundling apprenticed out with no real rights or recourses, and the responsibilities given to her by her new position. As always Fforde populates the book with wordplay, throwaway ideas, and a rather skewed but infectious sense of fun. It’s a YA novel and as such focuses on the coming of age of the protagonist, but in Jennifer Strange Fforde has created a strong, intelligent, and humane character who can handle it. Mostly. And it is that “mostly” that makes her such a great character.

The Song of the Quarkbeast (Jasper Fforde)

Every victory leads to the next crisis as Jennifer Strange and Kazam will find out in their continuing adventures. She has Kazam moving into the field of civil engineering in order to make some money, but their foes at iMagic and in the royal palace are not going to make that easy. At the beginning of the story the wizards find a missing ring for a client that Jennifer does not trust, a ring that ultimately comes back at the end as a key part of the story. In between there is a magical challenge between the Amazing Blix and iMagic on the one hand – aided by the perfidy of King Snodd – and Kazam on the other. The quarkbeasts figure into this in odd ways, and the Great Zambini remains just as out of reach as before. At the center of it all, as always, is beleaguered, resourceful Jennifer Strange, who just might make it to the end of her indentured servitude if all goes well.

The Eye of Zoltar (Jasper Fforde)

Picking up pretty much exactly when The Song of the Quarkbeast finished, the story of Jennifer Strange takes a rather darker turn in the third installment of The Chronicles of Kazam. Two threads intertwine, the first of which being a visit to the Royal Palace where the heir to the throne – Princess Shazza, the very definition of a spoiled brat – gets transferred by the Queen into the body of a serving girl named Laura Scrubb and sent into Jennifer’s service as a handmaiden in order to learn humility and responsibility. It turns out that the princess also has a remarkable aptitude for high finance, a skill that becomes useful in the second thread. The Mighty Shandar – the world’s most powerful wizard and a genuine nightmare of a person – demands that Jennifer find the Eye of Zoltar, a powerful magic talisman in the shape of a jewel, or he will slaughter the only two remaining dragons in the world and all of Kazam with them. The Eye, it turns out, was last seen in the Cambrian Empire (southern Wales in our world), where “jeopardy tourism” and a curiously civilized kidnapping industry are the main sources of income despite the high (and openly advertised) mortality rates of the former. Into this go Jennifer, Perkins (the new wizard from The Song of the Quarkbeast), and Laura. Along the way they meet Addie (their tour guide), Wilson (an ornithologist), Gabby (who is much harder to explain), Curtis and Ignatius (assholes), Ralph (the hapless companion of Curtis and Ignatius), and any number of threats, dangers, and legendary or semi-legendary creatures. When the story ends all is in chaos, and there is much restoration to be done. It’s a wild ride, as anyone who has read Jasper Fforde’s books would expect, but a fun one.

The Great Troll War (Jasper Fforde)

Things are looking grim in the Ununited Kingdoms. At the start of this final installment of The Chronicles of Kazam, the Trolls have invaded and have rolled largely unopposed through most of the UK, with the help of the Mighty Shandar. The kingdoms have fallen, most of the wizards of Kazam are dead, and humans have been pushed into the far reaches of Cornwall to mount a desperate defense behind a trench full of buttons, which apparently the Trolls cannot bear. Princess Shazza, Jennifer Strange, Tiger Prawns, and the Quarkbeast have at their disposal a force of Marksmen (who paint marks on roads) and Worriers (sometimes spells have typos and you can’t always get warriors), two juvenile dragons, and a vegetarian Troll. Shandar’s plans are greater and more malevolent than they think, however, and when all is revealed their situation will grow even more dire. There is a real melancholy behind this story, one that squarely acknowledges the fact that the good guys don’t always win and even if they do the costs may be higher than anyone could dare predict. Characters meet their fates in this book, and while there are funny bits – Fforde himself makes a couple of uncredited appearances as a random science fiction author tasked with figuring out what the strangest possibilities facing Jennifer and her crew could be, for example, and one of those appearances is laugh out loud funny if you have followed Fforde’s career and his bouts of writer’s block – the overall tone of this story is one of bittersweet defiance and plans long laid coming to fruition at the expense of dreams long held. Jennifer does find out who she really is and who her family was, though. At least Fforde gave her that. It’s a thoughtful and worthwhile end to the series, if not quite the comic one that might have been predicted.

Bone (Jeff Smith)

     Out from Boneville

     The Great Cow Race

     Eyes of the Storm

     The Dragonslayer

     Rock Jaw: Master of the Eastern Border

     Old Man’s Cave

     Ghost Circles

     Treasure Hunters

     Crown of Horns

When Lauren was in early elementary school she developed a fondness for graphic novels, which seemed like a good thing to encourage. She loved the BabyMouse books, for example. So when I saw the complete Bone series at the Scholastic Book Fair I figured it was something she’d enjoy. Turns out it is really a YA series rather than a series for younger kids so she never quite got into it, and when she cleaned out her room to go to college I ended up with the series. It’s a lot of fun. At the very beginning the three Bone cousins – Fone Bone, Phoncibal (Phoney) Phone, and Smiley Bone, who all look like the ghosts of Pogo in a less detailed and more rounded kind of way – have been thrown out of Boneville thanks to one of Phoney’s inevitable scams and are wandering in exile. Eventually they find themselves in the Valley, where they meet Thorn, Gran’ma Ben, Lucius, Ted the bug, the Red Dragon, and many other folks. For long and complicated reasons their arrival sets off the final battle of a long war between the Valley folk and the dragons on the one side and the Rat Creatures (sometimes referred to as the Hairy Men), the Lord of the Locusts, and possibly (it’s unclear) a giant mountain lion named Roque Ja on the other. Smith keeps his cast of characters clear and distinct – each has their own personality – and the artwork is lovely. But the story is the most compelling part, and he tells it well.

Bone: Rose (Jeff Smith)

The problem with prequels is that you know they’re not going to end well, because if they did the plot of the main series wouldn’t exist. This prequel tells the story of Rose – Gran’ma Ben – and how things got to where they were in the Valley when the Bone cousins stumbled into it. It’s the story of Briar and the Lord of the Locusts, of the Red Dragon and the River Dragon, and how choices made out of compassion can go awry in the long run. In the end it drops you off some time before the events of the main series, but the gaps are fairly easy to bridge. The storytelling and art are up to the high standards of the Bone series, but the lettering is in a slightly different and significantly less readable font.

Bone: Tall Tales (Jeff Smith)

This is an origin story in a way, though sufficiently far before the main story that the connections aren’t really obvious. It’s told as a campfire story, with Smiley Bone and Bartleby leading a small group of campers into the woods and then telling the tall tales of the title. The tales center around Big Johnson Bone, the root’n’est, toot’n’est Bone in the land, and they have a general flavor of Daniel Boone or similar tall tale heroes of the Old American West. There’s a tale covering Big Johnson’s birth, wherein he fights Old Man Winter within the day. There’s another covering an eating contest. But the longest story is how he fought the Rat Creatures and founded the trading post that eventually became Boneville – the town that Fone, Phoncibal, and Smiley got thrown out of at the beginning of the main story. It’s a story of outsized deeds, over the top narration, derring do, improbable acts, and ultimate victory, as such tall tales generally are, and you can see it being told over a campfire.

The Sandman (Neil Gaiman)

     Books 1 through 4

Many years ago my mother gave me a literary biography of Neil Gaiman for my birthday, which I started to read but quickly put down again when it became clear that none of it would make sense to someone who hadn’t read The Sandman. But I have never been much for graphic novels – I read the words and skim lightly over the art and that always struck me as a waste – and even if I wanted to read the entire collection, all 75 issues of it, it was neither within my price range nor at my library. So I stuck the book on a shelf and resigned myself to keeping it as a memento. But when Netflix came out with a television series based on the comic I figured they’d publish a new and affordable collection, and my sense of the opportunism of American capitalism was right on the button here. This is the story of Morpheus, the Lord of the Dream, one of the seven Endless along with his siblings Death, Delirium, Despair, Destiny, Destruction, and Desire. Originally a minor DC Comic character, Gaiman was given free rein to reinvent him for a new series and the end result was one of the landmarks of the genre, a long and often phantasmagorical swirl of a story of death, dreams, power, and madness, and perhaps above all the power of story. It took me a while to get into it – the first arc is not an easy introduction and it lasts for nine issues – but it gets clearer as you go, and it builds on itself as former characters and events return to new prominence and meaning. My favorite stories were the arc of the Worlds’ End, where travelers stranded at an otherworldly inn by a reality storm trade stories to pass the time, and the occasional issues involving Hob Gadling who becomes immortal, especially the epilogue story of Wake, where Hob muses on death and history having no small knowledge of both. The Sandman is not a series for the faint of heart – it deals squarely with disturbing and mature themes and has a lot to say about identity and our place in the cosmos if you are open to seeing it – but it is astonishingly well done. I can see why this was so popular and it was definitely worth reading, though now that I have finished this and the Bone series I suspect I will return to the world of words rather than images.

Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, & Stephen Bissette, with a Foreward by Terry Pratchett)

There is a fine line between a literary biography and a fanzine and this book pretty much straddles it. The authors are perhaps Gaiman’s biggest fans – rather an achievement, given the devotion that Gaiman’s fans have for him – and their adoration permeates every page. On the one hand they had an incredible amount of access to their hero and they filled this rather long book with pretty much every story they could find about everything he ever wrote, thought about writing, or tried to write but got dissuaded out of somehow. On the other hand, it does get uncomfortably fawning at times. But there is a lot of useful information in here, for all that. This is the book mentioned above, the one my mother gave me as a birthday present back in 2008 when it was published, and the first thing I figured out about it was that if I hadn’t yet read The Sandman I really shouldn’t read it as it gave detailed synopses of every issue. So having now read The Sandman, in I plunged. Those synopses were in fact very helpful it turns out, as I discovered many things about The Sandman stories that I had missed. There’s stuff in here about every comic book or series Gaiman wrote, most of his short stories, all of the novels up to that point, and a surprisingly detailed account of some legal battles he fought over the rights to a particular comic character, as well as some biographical material and a lengthy and fascinating interview with the man himself. It’s a book designed for fans who are more hardcore than I am, but it was a gift and I wanted to finish it. And now I have.