… and thanks for your service.

Posted on September 16, 2022 by The Old Wolf

This post is essentially copypasta from a comment I made over at Facebook, with a little embellishment.

One of my friends is a bus driver in San Francisco, and he posted this little exchange:

And I thought this was very interesting, and I started thinking about it. (A dangerous pasttime.)

A lot of things have combined over the last decade, including the political Chernobyl of the Dildo Braggins-MAGA era, the pandemic, and my long-awaited retirement. All of these things, but most especially leaving the workforce, has made me keenly aware that just about everyone I interact with these days is serving me in some way. All of them are out there busting their chops to buy food and pay rent and afford daycare, and every person I encounter in public from the gal behind the car rental counter to the fella bagging my groceries is serving my needs. Me. If they weren’t there doing the wage-slave tango, I’d have more to do than I could handle, and a lot of stuff I needed simply wouldn’t get done, and a lot of stuff I wanted would simply not be available.

For a long time, even before this gentle epiphany, I have been in the habit of thanking service veterans for their sacrifices for our nation. Now, Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station – a veteran himself – wrote an interesting essay on this subject, and while I understand and appreciate his point of view, I am grateful for their service. I lotteried out of the draft in 1972, and thus never had the obligation of either being shipped off to ‘Nam or joining the Navy; half of me is grateful, and the other half wistful that I didn’t have the chance of serving my country in that way. So when I see one of these hats or one like it,

I make sure to tell the wearer that I appreciate what they did for all of us.

By extension, I’ve made it a little personal habit to tell people I encounter in the course of the day, “… and thanks for being here for us.”¹ I don’t do it to feel wholesome, I do it because I mean it from the bottom of my heart. Oddly enough, most of them don’t know how to handle this and I get a lot of bluescreen moments. But I mean it sincerely and somehow it seems indecent not to say something. Perhaps, at the very least, it brings a bit of warmth to someone’s otherwise dreary or retail-hell day.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, even cops. These folks usually get “Thanks for keeping us all safe.” While there are far too many problems with bad peace officers and bad police procedures in our nation, I don’t ascribe to the reddit/Imgur ACAB-echo chamber and I’d rather err on the side of decency than resentment.

Taco Bell’s Crispy Chicken Sandwich – Easy Come, Easy Go

Posted on October 29, 2021 by The Old Wolf

Well, Taco Bell’s entry in the Chicken Sandwich wars only lasted a month. And I suspect I know why.

From an article in Baking Business:

Taco Bell’s new Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco is “not quite a sandwich, not quite a taco,” the Yum! Brands, Inc. subsidiary said. The taco features all-white meat crispy chicken marinated in jalapeño buttermilk, seasoned with Mexican spices and rolled in a crunchy tortilla chip coating. The chicken is served on a warm flatbread folded into a taco form and flavored with Taco Bell’s creamy chipotle sauce. The taco may be ordered regular or spicy with the addition of crunchy jalapeño slices.

This is what they are supposed to look like

I love chicken sandwiches, and I’ve long enjoyed Chick-fil-A’s offering but I’m not in favor of their social policies, so I’ve kept my antenna up for alternatives. Apparently Popeye’s has a relatively good one, but we live in the northeast so I’m out of luck until I can manage to get south of the Mason-Dixon line.

So when Taco Bell started offering these, I had to try one. We went twice, and my wife liked hers; then we went to another location and this is what happened:

I ordered from their online menu and customized the item with tomatoes and onions – but what I got was light-years from what they advertised. Instead of a puffy flatbread, they used a standard flour tortilla, and instead of three chicken tenders, there was only one, with a piddling amount of plain cheese sauce. Bitterly disappointed, to say the least.

Others had similar experiences, but at least theirs came in the advertised flatbread and looked a lot better than the one I was served.

Next time I swung past Taco Bell, I noticed that the item had vanished from the menu. If franchises were having difficulty consistently preparing this item in a satisfactory manner, it’s no wonder they pulled it. According to a Taco Bell spokesperson,

“The Crispy Chicken Sandwich Taco was a limited time menu offering. Innovation is core to Taco Bell and offering some menu items as limited time offers allows room on menus for even more new, craveable creations for fans. Like all great limited time menu items from Taco Bell, there’s always a chance we can see it return to menus.”

If they bring it back, they are going to have to make sure their stores can get the right ingredients and know how to prepare it properly, or else this will happen with greater frequency, the result of a little feedback to Corporate Headquarters:

Don’t get me wrong, I know that fast food is a challenging business, and consistency and quality across franchises can be a bedeviling task – but it’s probably one of the most important thing any national chain can focus on.

I still love Taco Bell for a fast, cheap, filling, and tasty meal. And it’s not like they haven’t weathered storms before.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

New York’s Chinatown Fair and the Animated Dragon

Posted on October 5, 2021 by The Old Wolf

I grew up in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s. Much has gone since that time, but my memories include hings I deeply miss about New York in my early days:

The myriad small businesses instead of brass-and-glass
Little Italy full of Italians, and the Feasts of San Antonio and San Gennaro
Yellow Cabs with huge back seats and those little jumpseats (Yes, unsafe, but they were so fun)
Air-conditioned movie theaters with giant screens and velvet curtains where you could stay all day for 50¢ and watch a cartoon, a short subject, a newsreel, and the main feature over and over again
the 42nd Street Subway Stations with Red and Blue lights guiding you to your line of choice, IRT, BMT, or IND, or the Shuttle
Underground OJ bars and other odd little shops in the subways such as Al Stevenson’s magic store (otherwise known as the Wizard’s Workshop)
Hole-in-the-wall pizza joints where you could order pizza by the “Slice!” for 15¢.
The Staten Island ferry for a nickel
Christmas trees up and down Park Avenue, and the stars that would twinkle on the 666 building
the Lord and Taylor Christmas windows
And so many more…

But one of my most indelible memories is from Chinatown, where my mother would take me on occasion. There were myriad stores and restaurants selling the ubiquitous Chinese back-scratchers, finger traps, and wonderful puzzle boxes, some of which I wish I still had.

Alamy stock photo of a Chinese puzzle box, very similar to one I once owned.

But the most wondrous thing to my young eyes was the Chinatown Fair.

Before it became an electronic game arcade, it featured dancing chickens, tic-tac-toe chickens (you can read about these at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York), and the amazing animatronic dragon.

*8 Mott Street, Chinatown, New York, New York, USA — Performing Chicken in New York Arcade — Image by © Adam Woolfitt/CORBIS*

Sadly, no photos of the latter wonder appear to have been saved to the Internet as of this moment, but who knows? Perhaps someone will come across a picture in their old archives and post it in the future. If you happen to stumble across this blog post and have such a photo, please let me know; I would love to feature it here.

At any rate, you would walk up to this row of little windows, each with a coin slot for quarters; drop one in and your window would open, and below you was this most amazing animated dragon which would move and roar at you. Commenter “Donald” at the website Scouting New York had this to say, which syncs with my own memories perfectly:

Yes!! The dragon peep show…. why doesn’t anybody ever mention the dragon peep show? I thought that was the most bizarre “game” I ever saw… you’d drop a quarter in and a sliding plastic window would rise, exposing a glass window underneath (similar to a peep show booth) and literally laying on the basement floor – you’d see this huge animatronic dragon moving it’s head and tail – and from a speaker would blare the soundtrack from an old Godzilla movie… that familiar Godzilla roar. Now the dragon you were looking at and the Godzilla you were hearing of course had nothing to do with each other – but that just added to the cheezy entertainment value of the whole thing. I thought it was great… but nobody ever mentions it. I ALWAYS hear about the Tic Tac Toe Chicken… but never my old dragon friend.

A later photo of The Chinatown Fair at night, from The Chinatown Fair Archive.

The Fair later became a video arcade, but closed in 2011. Some other great memories are archived at Scouting New York, The Gothamist, Ganker, and Huffpost; apparently the arcade featured in a 2015 documentary called The Lost Arcade; in its later years it “the arcade became a shelter to a community as diverse as the city surrounding it and changed lives in doing so.” (IMDB)

According to The Verge, the arcade re-opened in 2012, but the reviews were mixed. Apparently it’s still there, but without that amazing dragon it will never be the same for me.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

A reading list of great books

Posted on July 11, 2021 by The Old Wolf

The next time you want something of substance to read, here’s a list of 876 books compiled from a couple of lists I found on the Internet – one a list of librarian’s recommendations, another of 500 great books, and a few I have added myself. I only deleted one because I thought it was trash, and was not sure what it was doing on any list of good literature.

As for the rest, you get to judge; but while compiling this, I certainly saw a good number that I have read, and many that I am ashamed I have not yet read and would like to.

Enjoy.

Edit: I will link back here to another list I published a couple of years ago, “Fifteen Titles.” You will find many duplicates on that list, but it was compiled with a different set of criteria. Nevertheless, it contains many worthwhile and impactful works.

1984	George Orwell
2666	Roberto Bolano
$2.00 a Day	Kathryn Edin
12 Million Black Voices	Richard Wright
1Q84	Haruki Murakami
84, Charing Cross Road	Helene Hanff
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The	Sherman Alexie
Accidental Tourist, The	Anne Tyler
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The	Mark Twain
Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, The	Cuthbert Bede
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The	Mark Twain
Aeneid, The	Virgil
Age of Innocence, The	Edith Wharton
Agnes Grey	Anne Brontë
Alchemist, The	Paulo Coelho
Alexander Hamilton	Ron Chernow
Alice in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll
All Creatures Great and Small (Series)	James Herriot
All of a Kind Family	Sidney Taylor
All Passion Spent	Vita Sackville-West
All Quiet on the Western Front	Erich Maria
All the King’s Men	Robert Penn Warren
All the Light We Cannot See	Anthony Doerr
Along Came a Spider	James Patterson
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The	Michael Charon
American Born Chinese	Gene Luen Yang
American Gods	Neil Gaiman
American Pastoral	Philip Roth
Americanah	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An American Tragedy	Theodore Dreiser
An Ember in the Ashes	Sabaa Tahir
An Old-Fashioned Girl	Louisa May Alcott
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman	P. D. James
Ancillary Justice	Ann Leckie
And the Band Played On	Randy Shilts
And Then All Hell Broke Loose	Richard Engel
And Then There Were None	By Agatha Christie
Angela’s Ashes	Frank McCourt
Animal Dreams	Barbara Kingsolver
Animal Farm	George Orwell
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy
Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank
Anne of Green Gables	L.M. Montgomery
Antony and Cleopatra	William Shakespeare
Arabian Nights	Tahir Shah
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.	New Jersey
Ariel	Sylvia Plath
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe	Benjamin Alire Saenz
Around the World in Eighty Days	Jules Verne
Art of Fielding, The	Chad Harbach
Art of Hearing Heartbeats, The	Jan-Philippe Sendker
As I Lay Dying	William Faulkner
As You Like It	William Shakespeare
Assistant, The	Bernard Malamud
Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, The	Matthew Tobin Anderson
Atlas Shrugged	Ayn Rand
Atonement	Ian Mcewan
Attachments	Rainbow Rowell
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, The	Gertrude Stein
Autobiography of Malcolm X, The	Malcolm X
Awakening, The	Kate Chopin
Babe: The Gallant Pig	Dick King-Smith
Bad Beginning, The	Lemony Snicket
Bad Feminist	Roxane Gay
Bad News for Outlaws	Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress	Dai Sijie
Bastard Out of Carolina	Dorothy Allison
Beautiful and Damned, The	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Beautiful Ruins	Jess Walter
Because of Winn Dixie	Kate diCamillo
Becoming	Michelle Obama
Beekeeper’s Apprentice, The	Laurie R. King
Bel Canto	Ann Patchett
Bell Jar, The	Sylvia Plath
Beloved	Toni Morrison
Beowulf	The Beowulf Poet
Between the World and Me	Ta-Nehisi Coates
Big Sleep, The	Raymond Chandler
Binti	Nnedi Okorafor
Birds of America	John James Audubon
Birdsong	Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty	Anna Sewell
Black Boy	Richard Wright
Black Leopard, Red Wolf	Marlon James
Bleak House	Charles Dickens
Bless Me, Ultima	Rudolpho Anaya
Blind Assassin, The	Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy
Blue Castle, The	L.M. Montgomery
Blue Sword / the Hero and the Crown, The	Robin McKinley
Bluest Eye, The	Toni Morrison
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe	Tom Wolfe
Book of Lost Things, The	John Connolly
Book of Three, The	Lloyd Alexander
Book Thief, The	Markus Zusak
Borderlands	Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Born Confused	Tanuja Desai Hidier
Born to Run	Christopher McDougall
Bossypants	Tina Fey
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi	Helen Oyeyemi
Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, The	Daniel James Brown
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley
Breakfast at Tiffany’s	Truman Capote
Breakfast of Champions	Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Brick Lane	Monica Ali
Brideshead Revisited	Evelyn Waugh
Bridge to Terabithia	Katherine Paterson
Bridget Jones’s Diary	Helen Fielding
Brief History of Seven Killings, A	Marlon James
Brief History of Time, A	Stephen Hawking
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The	Junot Diaz
Brokeback Mountain	Annie Proulx
Brothers Karamazov, The	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee	Dee Brown
Call of the Wild, The	Jack London
Candide	Voltaire
Canterbury Tales, The	Geoffrey Chaucer
Canterville Ghost, The	Oscar Wilde
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin	Louis de Berniere
Carry on	Rainbow Rowell
Casino Royale	Ian Fleming
Casual Vacancy, The	J.K. Rowling
Catch-22	Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye, The	J.D. Salinger
Catherine, Called Birdy	Karen Cushman
Cat’s Cradle	Kurt Vonnegut
Change of Climate, A	Hilary Mantel
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Roald Dahl
Charlotte’s Web	E.B. White
Children of Blood and Bone	Tomi Adyemi
Chocolate War, The	Robert Cormier
Christmas Carol, A	Charles Dickens
Cinder	Marissa Meyer
Clarissa	Samuel Richardson
Clear Light of Day	Anita Desai
Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell
Code of the Woosters, The	Wodehouse
Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons
Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons
Cold Mountain	Charles Frasier
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, The	Langston Hughes
Collected Stories of Eudora Welty	Eudora Welty
Color of Magic, The	Terry Pratchett
Color of Water, The	James McBride
Color Purple, The	Alice Walker
Comedy of Errors, The	William Shakespeare
Common Sense	Thomas Paine
Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, The	Brothers Grimm
Complete Stories, The	Flannery O’Connor
Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, The	Edgar Allan Poe
Confederacy of Dunces, A	John Kennedy Toole
Confessions of a Shopaholic	Sophie Kinsella
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A	Mark Twain
Constellation of Vital Phenomena, A	Anthony Marra
Corrections, The	Jonathan Franzen
Count of Monte Cristo, The	Alexandre Duman
Cow-Tail Switch, and Other West African Stories, The	Harold Courlander
Cranford	Elizabeth Gaskell
Crank	Ellen Hopkins
Crazy Rich Asians	Kevin Kwan
Cricket in Times Qquare, A	George Selden
Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crocodile on the Sandbank	Elizabeth Peters
Crucible, The	Arthur Miller
Crying of Lot 49, The	Robert E. Kohn
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The	Mark Haddon
Cutting for Stone	Abraham Verghese
Da Vinci Code, The	Dan Brown
Daisy Jones & the Six	Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy Miller	Henry James
Daniel Deronda	George Eliot
Dark Is Rising, The	Susan Cooper
Darkly Dreaming Dexter	Jeff Lindsay
David Copperfield	Charles Dickens
Day of the Triffids, The	John Wyndham
Dead Wake	Erik Larson
Death at an Early Age	Jonathan Kozol
Death Comes for the Archbishop	Willa Cather
Death in the Family, A	James Agee
Death in Venice	Thomas Mann
Death of a Salesman	Arthur Miller
Death of the Heart, The	Elizabeth Bowen
Decameron, The	Giovanni Boccaccio
Decline and Fall	Evelyn Waugh
Dept. of Speculation	Jenny Offill
Deptford Trilogy, The	Robertson Davies
Devil in a Blue Dress	Walter Mosley
Devil in the White City, The	Erik Larson
Diary of Anne Frank, The	Anne Frank
Dirty Job, A	Christopher Moore
Divergent (Series)	Veronica Roth
Divine Comedy, The	Dante Alighieri
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Philip K. Dick
Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Zhivago	Boris Pasternak
Don Quixote	Miguel De Cervantes
Dracula	Bram Stoker
Dream of the Red Chamber, The	Cao Xueqin
Dreaming in Cuban	Cristina Garcia
Dreamland	Sam Quinones
Dune	Frank Herbert
East of Eden	John Steinbeck
Eat Pray Love	Elizabeth Gilbert
Edwardians, The	Vita Sack-Ville West
Egypt Game, The	Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Eight, The	Katherine Neville
Eleanor & Park	Rainbow Rowell
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine	Gail Honeyman
Elegance of the Hedgehog, The	Muriel Barberry
Ella Enchanted	Gail Carson Levine
Emperor of All Maladies, The: A Biography of Cancer	Siddhartha Mukhe
Empire Falls	Richard Russo
Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card
English Patient, The	Michael Ondaatje
Epic of Gilgamesh, The	Unknown
Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton
Everything I Never Told You	Celeste Ng
Everything Is Illuminated	Jonathan Saffron Foer
Evicted	Matthew Desmond
Excellent Women	Barbara Pym
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close	Jonathan Saffron Foer
Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury
Fairie Queen, The	Edmund Spenser
Fall of the House of Usher, The	Edgar Allan Poe
Fangirl	Rainbow Rowell
Far From the Madding Crowd	Thomas Hardy
Farewell to Arms, A	Ernest Hemingway
Farmer Boy	Laura Ingalls Wilder
Fault in Our Stars, The	John Green
Faust	Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas	Hunter S. Thompson
Female Brain, The	Louann Brizendine
Fifth Season, The	N. K. Jemisin
Fight Club	Chuck Palahniuk
Fine Balance, A	Rohinton Mistry
Fingersmith	Sarah Waters
Fire Next Time, The	James Baldwin
Five People You Meet in Heaven, The	Mitch Albom
Flowers for Algernon	Daniel Keyes
For Whom the Bell Tolls	Ernest Hemingway
Forgotten Garden	Kate Morton
Forsyte Saga, The	John Galsworthy
Foundation (Entire Series)	Isaac Asimov
Frankenstein	Mary Shelley
Franny and Zooey	J.D. Salinger
Freak the Mighty	Rodman Philbrick
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe	Fannie Flagg
From Russia With Love	Ian Fleming
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler	E. L. Konigsburg
Fun Home	Alison Bechdel
Game of Thrones, A (Series)	George R. R. Martin
Garden of Earthly Delights, A	Joyce Carol Oates
General in His Labyrinth, The	Marquez
Gentleman in Moscow, A	Amor Towles
Germinal	Émile Zola
Gilda Stories, The	Jewelle Gomez
Gilead	Marilynne Robinson
Girl Could Stand Up, A	Leslie Marshall
Girl on the Train, The	Paula Hawkins
Girl With a Pearl Earring	Tracy Chevalier
Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, The	Stieg Larson
Giver, The	Lois Lowry
Glass Castle, The	Jeannette Walls
Glass Menagerie, The	Tennessee Williams
Go Tell It on the Mountain	James Baldwin
God of Small Things, The	Arundhati Roy
Golden Bowl, The	Henry James
Golden Compass, The	Phillip Pullman
Golden Notebook, The	Doris Lessing
Goldfinch, The	Donna Tartt
Goldfinch, The	Donna Tartt
Golem and the Djinni, The	Helene Wecker
Gone Girl	Gillian Flynn
Gone With the Wind	Margaret Mitchell
Good Earth, The	Pearl S. Buck
Good Man Is Hard to Find, A	Flannery O’Connor
Good Master, The	Kate Seredy
Good Omens	Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Good Soldier, The	Ford Madox Ford
Good Talk	Mira Jacob
Good Wives	Louisa May Alcott
Grapes of Wrath, The	John Steinbeck
Grave Talent, A	Laurie R. King
Gravity’s Rainbow	Thomas Pinchon
Great Expectations	Charles Dickens
Great Gatsby, The	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grendel	John Gardner
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The	Mary Ann Shaffer; ‎Annie Barrows
Gulag Archipelago, The	Aleksandr Slozhenitsyn
Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift
Gunslinger, The	Stephen King
Half of a Yellow Sun	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Hamlet	William Shakespeare
Handmaid’s Tale, The	Margaret Atwood
Hangsaman	Jackson
Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales	Hans Christian Anderson
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Haruki Murakami	Haruki Murakami
Haroun & the Sea of Stories	Salman Rushdie/Paul BirkbeckIllus
Harriet the Spy	Louise Fitzhugh
Harry Potter (Series)	J. K. Rowling
Hatchet	Gary Paulsen
Haunting of Hill House, The	Shirley Jackson
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The	Carson McCullers
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, A	Dave Eggers
Heartburn	Nora Ephron
Help, The	Kathryn Stockett
Henry IV, Part I	William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part II	William Shakespeare
Henry V	William Shakespeare
Herzog	Saul Bellow
High Fidelity	Nick Hornby
Hillbilly Elegy	JD Vance
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman	Philip Pullman
Historian, The	Elizabeth Kostova
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The	Douglas Adams
Hobbit, The	J.R.R. Tolkien
Holes	Louis Sachar
Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi
Hopscotch	Julio Cortázar
Hot Zone, The	Richard Preston
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet	Jamie Ford
Hound of the Baskervilles, The	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Hour of the Star, The	Clarice Lispector
Hours, The	Michael Cunningham
House Made of Dawn	N. Scott Momaday
House of Leaves	Mark Z. Danielewski
House of Mirth, The	Edith Wharton
House of Sand and Fog	Andre Dubus III
House of the Scorpion	Nancy Farmer
House of the Seven Gables	Nathaniel Hawthorne
House of the Spirits, The	Isabel Allende
House on Mango Street, The	Sandra Cisneros
Housekeeping	Marilynne Robinson
How Green Was My Valley	Richard Llewellyn
How I Live Now	Meg Rosoff
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents	Julia Alvarez
How the Other Half Lives	Jacob Riis
How to Be a Victorian	Ruth Goodman
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe	Charles Yu
Howards End	E.M. Forster
Howl	Allen Ginsberg
Howl’s Moving Castle	Diana Wynne Jones
Human Comedy, The	William Saroyan
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The	Victor Hugo
Hunger Games, The (Series)	Suzanne Collins
Husband’s Secret, The	Liane Moriarty
I Am Malala	Malala Yousafzai
I Am the Cheese	Robert Cormier
I Am the Messenger	Marcus Zusak
I Capture the Castle	Dodie Smith
I Know This Much Is True	Wally Lamb
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	Maya Angelou
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden	Joanne Greenberg
If on a Winters Night a Traveller	Vintage Calvino
Iliad, The	Homer
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The	Rebecca Skloot
Importance of Being Earnest, The	Oscar Wilde
In Cold Blood	Truman Capote
In the Time of the Butterflies	Julia Alvarez
In the Woods	Tara French
Infinite Jest	David Foster Wallace
Inheritance of Loss, The	Kiran Dasai
Interestings, The	Meg Wolitzer
Internment	Samira Ahmed
Interpreter of Maladies	Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies	Jhumpa Lahiri
Interview With the Vampire	Anne Rice
Invention of Wings, The	Sue Monk Kidd
Invisible Circus, The	Jennifer Egan
Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison
Ironweed	William Kennedy
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?	And Other Concerns
Island of the Blue Dolphins	Scott O’Dell
It	Stephen King
Ivanhoe	Walter Scott
Jamaica Inn	Daphne Du Maurier
James and the Giant Peach	Roald Dahl
Jane Eyre	Charlotte Brontë
Japanese Lover, The	Isabel Allende
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke
Journey to the Center of the Earth	Jules Verne
Joy Luck Club, The	Amy Tan
Jude the Obscure	Thomas Hardy
Julie and Julia	Julie Powell
Julie of the Wolves	Jean Craighead George
Julius Caesar	William Shakespeare
Jungle Book, The	Rudyard Kipling
Jungle, The	Upton Sinclair
Kafka on the Shore	Haruki Murakami
Kidnapped	Robert Louis Stevenson
Killers of the Flower Moon	Grann
Kim	Rudyard Kipling
Kindred	Octavia E. Butler
King Lear	William Shakespeare
Kiss Before Dying, A	Ira Levin
Kiss Quotient, The	Helen Hoang
Kitchen Confidential	Anthony Bourdain
Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini
Lais of Marie De France, The	Marie De France
Language of Flowers	Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Last Samurai, The	Helen DeWaitt
Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman
Left Hand of Darkness, The	Ursula K. LeGuin
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The	Washington Irving
Les Miserables	Victor Hugo
Less	Andrew Sean Greer
Lesson Before Dying, A	Ernest J. Gaines
Letter From Birmingham City Jail	Martin Luther King Jr
Letters to a Young Poet	Rainer Maria Rilke
Liars’ Club: A Memoir, The	Mary Karr
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The	Laurence Sterne
Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, The	Marie Kondo
Life of Pi	Yann Martel
Light Between Oceans: A Novel, The	M.L. Stedman
Like Water for Chocolate	Laura Esquivel
Lincoln in the Bardo	George Saunders
Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The	C.S. Lewis
Little Bee	Chris Cleave
Little Fires Everywhere	Celeste Ng
Little House on the Prairie (Series)	Laura Ingalls Wilder
Little Men	Louisa May Alcott
Little Prince, The	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Little Princess, A	Frances Hodgson Burnett
Little Stranger, The	Sarah Waters
Little Women	Louisa May Alcott
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The	Sherman Alexie
Long Fatal Love Chase, A	Louisa May Alcott
Long Goodbye, The	Raymond Chandler
Long Way Down, A	Nick Hornsby
Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, A	Ishmael Beah
Look at Me	Jennifer Egan
Looking for Alaska	John Green
Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, The	Lawrence Wright
Lord Jim	Joseph Conrad
Lord of the Flies	William Golding
Lord of the Rings, The (Trilogy)	J.R.R. Tolkien
Lottery, The	Shirley Jackson
Love in a Cold Climate	Nancy Freeman-Mitford
Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love Medicine	Louise Erdrich
Lovely Bones, The	Alice Sebold
Lover, The	Marguerite Duras
Luckiest Girl Alive	Jessica Knoll
Lucky Jim	Jim Dixon
Lucy	Jamaica Kincaid
Luminaries, The	Eleanor Catton
Macbeth	William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert
Main Street	Sinclair Lewis
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand	Helen Simonson
Maltese Falcon, The	Dashiell Hammett
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The	Oscar Hijuelos
Man Called Ove, A	Fredrik Backman
Man of the People, A	Chinua Achebe
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat	Oliver Sacks
Man Who Was Thursday, The	G.K. Chesterton
Maniac Magee	Jerry Spinelli
Mansfield Park	Jane Austen
Manual for Cleaning Women, A	Lucia Berlin
March: Book One	John Lewis
Martian, The	Andy Weir
Mary Poppins	P.L. Travers
Matilda	Roald Dahl
Maurice	E.M. Forster
Maus: The Complete Maus	Art Spiegelman
Mayor of Casterbridge, The	Thomas Hardy
Me Before You	Jojo Moyes
Medea	Euripides
Memoirs of a Geisha	Arthur Golden
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood	Mary McCarthy
Merchant of Venice, The	William Shakespeare
Metamorphosis and Other Stories	Franz Kafka
Metamorphosis, The	Franz Kafka
Middlemarch	George Eliot
Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil	John Berendt
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A	William Shakespeare
Milk and Honey	Rupi Kaur
Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, The	Kate Dicamillo
Miseducation of Cameron Post, The	Emily M. Danforth
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children	Ransom Riggs
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day	Winifred Watson
Misty of Chincoteague	Marguerite Henry
Moby Dick	Herman Melville
Moll Flanders	Daniel Defoe
Moloka’i	Alan Brennert
Monkey’s Paw, The	W. W. Jacobs
Moonstone, The	Wilkie Collins
Mr. Popper’s Penguins	Richard and Florence Atwater
Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH	Robert C. O’Brien
Much Ado About Nothing	William Shakespeare
Murder on the Orient Express	Agatha Christie
My Antonia	Willa Cather
My Bondage and My Freedom	Frederick Douglass
My Brilliant Friend	Elena Ferrante
My Side of the Mountain	Jean Craighead George
My Sister, the Serial Killer	Oyinkan Braithwaite
My Sister’s Keeper	Jodi Picoult
Mystic River	Dennis Lehane
Name of the Rose, The	Umberto Eco
Namesake, The	Jhumpa Lahiri
Narrative of Sojourner Truth	Sojourner Truth
Native Son	Richard Wright
Naya Nuki	Ken Thomasma
Nectar in a Sieve	Kamala Markandaya
Neuromancer	William Gibson
Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro
Neverwhere	Neil Gaiman
New Grub Street	George Gissing
Nickel and Dimed	Barbara Ehrenreich
Night	Elie Wiesel
Night Circus, The	Erin Morgenstern
Nightingale, The	Kristin Hannah
Nights at the Circus	Angela Carter
No Exit (Huis Clos)	Jean-Paul Sartre
No Future Without Forgiveness	Desmond Tutu
No One Belongs Here More Than You	Miranda July
No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The	Alexander McCall Smith
North and South	Elizabeth Gaskell
Northanger Abbey	Jane Austen
Northern Light, A	Jennifer Donnelly
Norwegian Wood	Haruki Murakami
Notes From a Small Island	Bill Bryson
Now We are Six	A. A. Milne
Number the Stars	Lois Lowry
NW	Zadie Smith
Ocean at the End of the Lane, The	Neil Gaiman
Odyssey, The	Homer
Of Human Bondage	W. Somerset Maugham
Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck
Old Man and the Sea, The	Ernest Hemingway
Olive Kitteridge	Elizabeth Strout
Oliver Twist	Charles Dickens
Omnivore’s Dilemma, The	Michael Pollan
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous	Ocean Vuong
On Immunity: An Inoculation	Eula Biss
On the Road	Jack Kerouac
Once and Future King, The	T.H. White
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest	Ken Kesey
One for the Money	Janet Evanovic
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Optimists Daughter, The	Eudora Welty
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit	Jeanette Winterson
Orchardist, The	Amanda Coplin
Orlando	Virginia Woolf
Orphan Master’s Son, The	Adam Johnson
Orphan Train	Christina Baker Kline
Oryx and Crake	Margaret Atwood
Oscar and Lucinda	Peter Carey
Othello	William Shakespeare
Other Boleyn Girl, The	Philippa Gregory
Our Town	Thornton Wilder
Out of Africa	Karen Blixen
Outlander	Diana Gabaldon
Pact, The	Jodi Picoult
Palace Walk	Naguib Mahfouz
Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov
Passage to India, A	E.M. Forster
Passing	Nella Larson
Pastoralia	George Saunders
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus	Orson Scott Card
Pearl, The	John Steinbeck
Pentateuch, The	I. Thomas Holdcroft
People in the Trees, The	Hanya Yanagihara
People of the Book	Geraldine Brooks
People’s History of the United States, A	Howard Zinn
Percy Jackson Series	Rick Riordan
Perfume	Patrick Suskind
Perks of Being a Wallflower, The	Stephen Chbosky
Persepolis	Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi	Marlene Satrapi
Personal Matter, A	Kanzaburō Ōe
Persuasion	Jane Austen
Pet Sematary	Stephen King
Peter Pan	James Barrie
Phantom of the Opera, The	Gaston Leroux
Phantom Tollbooth, The	Norton Juster
Phantom Toolbooth, The	Jules Feiffer
Pickwick Papers, The	Charles Dickens
Picture of Dorian Grey, The	Oscar Wilde
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek	Annie Dillard
Pillars of the Earth, The	Ken Follett
Pippi Longstocking	Astred Lindgren
Plague, The (La peste)	Albert Camus
Play It as It Lays	Joan Didion
Poems of Emily Dickinson, The	Emily Dickinson
Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay	Edna St. Vincent Millay
Poisonwood Bible, The	Barbara Kingsolver
Portrait of a Lady	Henry James
Possession	Byatt
Post Office	Charles Bukowski
Prayer for Owen Meany, A	John Irving
Price of Salt, or Carol, The	Patricia Highsmith
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The	Muriel Spark
Princess Academy	Shannon Hale
Princess Bride, The	William Goldman
Princess Saves Herself in This One, The	Amanda Lovelace
Priory of the Orange Tree, The	Samantha Shannon
Private Peaceful	Michael Morpurgo
Pulphead Essays	John Jeremiah Sullivan
Purple Hisbiscus	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Pygmalion	George Bernard Shaw
Queen of the Night	Alexander Chee
Queenie	Candice Carty-Williams
Quiet	Susan Cain
Quiet American, The	Graham Greene
Rabbit at Rest	John Updike
Rabbit Is Rich	John Updike
Rabbit, Run	John Updike
Ragtime	E.L. Doctorow
Raisin in the Sun, A	Lorraine Hansberry
Ramayana, The	Valmiki
Ramona the Pest	Beverly Cleary
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx	Adrian Nicole Leblanc
Reader, The	Bernhard Schlink
Reading Lolita in Tehran	Azar Nafisi
Ready Player One	Ernest Cline
Rebecca	Daphne Du Maurier
Red and the Black, The	Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie
Red Badge of Courage, The	Stephen Crane
Red Tent, The	Anita Diamant
Red, White & Royal Blue	Casey Mcquiston
Redefining Realness	Janet Mock
Redwall	Brian Jacques
Reef, The	Edith Wharton
Remains of the Day, The	Kazuo Ishiguro
Return of Sherlock Holmes, The	Arthur Conan Doyle
Return of the Native	Thomas Hardy
Return of the Soldier, The	Rebecca West
Revolutionary Road	Vintage Yates
River Between, The	Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Road, The	Cormac McCarthy
Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry	Mildred D. Taylor
Romance of the Three Kingdoms	Luo Guanzhong
Romeo and Juliet	William Shakespeare
Romola	George Eliot
Room	Emma Donoghue
Room of One’s Own, A	Virginia Woolf
Room With a View, A	E. M. Forster
Roots	Alex Haley
Rosie Project, The	Graeme Simsion
Round House, The	Louise Erdrich
Rubyfruit Jungle	Rita Mae Brown
Runaway	Alice Munro
Sacre Bleu	Christopher Moore
Salvage the Bones	Jesmyn Ward
Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood	Benjamin Alire Saenz
Savage Detectives, The	Roberto Bolano
Scarlet Letter, The	Nathaniel Hawthorne
Scarlett Pimpernel, The	Baroness Emmuska Orcey
Schindler’s Ark	Thomas Keneally
Scoop	Evelyn Waugh
Sea, the Sea, The	Irish Murdoch
Secret Garden, The	Frances Hodgson Burnett
Secret History, The	Donna Tartt
Secret Keeper, The	Kate Morton
Secret Life of Bees, The	Sue Monk Kidd
Selection, The	Kiera Cass
Sellout, The	Paul Beatty
Sense and Sensibility	Jane Austen
Sense of an Ending, The	Julian Barnes
Separate Peace, A	John Knowles
Shadow of the Wind, The	Carlos Ruiz Zafon
She’s Come Undone	Wally Lamb
Shining, The	Stephen King
Shipping News, The	E. Annie Proulx
Shirley	Charlotte Brontë
Shoemaker’s Wife, The	Adriana Trigiani
Short History of Nearly Everything, A	Bill Bryson
Siddhartha	Hermann Hesse
Sign of the Beaver, The	Elizabeth George Speare
Sign of the Four, The	Arthur Conan Doyle
Silas Marner	George Eliot
Sing, Unburied, Sing	Jesmyn Ward
Singing Tree, The	Kate Seredy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	Simon Armitage
Sister Outsider	Audre Lorde
Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, The	Ann Brashares
Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut
Slouching Towards Bethlehem	Joan Didion
Small Island	Andrea Levy
Snow Child, The	Eowyn Ivey
Snow Crash	Neal Stephenson
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan	Lisa See
So Long a Letter	Mariama Bâ
Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, The	Madeline Miller
Songs of the Humpback Whale	Jodi Picoult
Sons and Lovers	D.H. Lawrence
Sophie’s Choice	Stephen King
Sound and the Fury, The	Leslie Feinberg
Sparrow, The	Mary Doria Russell
Speak	Laurie Halse Anderson
Speaker for the Dead	Orson Scott Card
Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The	John Le Carré
Stand, The	Stephen King
Stargirl	Jerry Spinelli
Station Eleven	Emily St John Mandel
Still Alice	Lisa Genova
Stone Butch Blues	Leslie Feinberg
Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, The	Gabrielle Zevin
Story of My Life, The	Helen Keller
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The	Robert Louis Stevenson
Stranger, The (L’étranger)	Albert Camus
Streetcar Named Desire, A	Tennessee Williams
Stuart Little	E.B. White
Study in Scarlet, A	Arthur Conan Doyle
Suitable Boy, A	Vikram Seth
Summer Book, The	Tove Jansson
Sun Also Rises, The	Ernest Hemingway
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, A	David Foster Wallace
Swallows and Amazons	Arthur Ransome
Swamplandia	Karen Russell
Swann’s Way	Marcel Proust
Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, The	Alan Bradley
Swiss Family Robinson, The	Johann David Wyss
Sympathizer, The	Viet Thanh Nguyen
Tale for the Time Being, A	Ruth Ozeki
Tale of Genji, The	Murasaki Shikibu
Tale of Two Cities, A	Charles Dickens
Talented Mr. Ripley, The	Patricia Highsmith
Tales of the City	Armistead Maupin
Taming of the Shrew, The	William Shakespeare
Tempest, The	William Shakespeare
Ten Thousand Doors of January, The	Alix E. Harrow
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The	Anne Brontë
Tender Is the Night	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tenderness	Robert Cormier
Tess of the D’urbervilles	Thomas Hardy
Thank You, Jeeves	P.G. Wodehouse
The Chosen	Chaim Potok
The Complete Stories	Flannery O’Connor
Theban Plays, The	Sophocles
Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston
There There	Tommy Orange
Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe
Things They Carried, The	Tim O’Brien
Thirteen Reasons Why	Jay Asher
Thirteenth Tale, The	Diane Setterfield
This Is How You Lose the Time War	Amal El-Mohtar
This Side of Paradise	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Thorn Birds, The	Colleen McCullough
Thousand Acres, A	Jane Smiley
Thousand Splendid Suns, A	Khaled Hosseini
Three Musketeers, The	Alexandre Dumas
Throne of the Crescent Moon	Saladin Ahmed
Through the Looking Glass	Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass	Lewis Carroll
Time Machine, The	H.G. Wells
Time to Kill, A	John Grisham
Time Traveler’s Wife, The	Audrey Niffenegger
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy	John Le Carré
Tipping Point, The	Malcom Gladwell
Tipping the Velvet	Sarah Waters
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
Tobacco Road	Erskine Caldwell
Tortilla Flat	John Steinbeck
Town Like Alice, A	Nevil Shute
Treasure Island	Robert Louis Stevenson
Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A	Betty Smith
Trial and Death of Socrates, The	Socrates
Trial, The	Franz Kafka
Tristram Shandy	Laurence Sterne
True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, The	Avi
Trumpet of the Swan, The	E.B. White
Tuck Everlasting	Natalie Babbitt
Tuesdays With Morrie	Mitch Albom
Turn of the Screw, The	Henry James
Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The	Ayana Mathis
Twelve Years a Slave	Solomon Northup
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea	Jules Verne
Twilight	Stephenie Meyer
Ulysses	James Joyce
Unbearable Lightness of Being, The	Milan Kundera
Unbroken	Laura Hillenbrand
Uncle Tom’s Cabin	Harriet Beecher Stowe
Under the Udala Trees	Chinelo Okparanta
Under the Volcano	Malcom Lowry
Underground Railroad, The	Colson Whitehead
Underworld	Don Delillo
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven	Susan Jane Gilman
Universe in a Single Atom, The	Dalai Lama
Uprooted	Naomi Novik
Utopia	Thomas More
Valley of Fear, The	Arthur Conan Doyle
Valley of the Dolls	Jacqueline Susann
Vanity Fair	William Thackeray
Vegetarian, The	Han Kang
Velveteen Rabbit, The	Margery Williams
Vendor of Sweets, The	R.K. Narayan
Villette	Charlotte Bronte
Virgin Suicides, The	Jeffrey Eugenides
Visit From the Goon Squad, A	Jennifer Egan
Volcano Lover, The	Susan Sontag
Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett
Waiting for the Barbarians	J. M. Coetzee
Walden	Henry David Thoreau
Walk in the Woods, A	Bill Bryson
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy
Warmth of Other Suns, The	Isabel Wilkerson
Waste Land and Other Poems, The	T. S. Eliot
Watchers	Dean Koontz
Watchmen	Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Water for Elephants	Sara Gruen
Water-Babies, The	Charles Kingsley
Watership Down	Richard Adams
Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, The	Christopher Paul Curtis
Waves, The	Virginia Woolf
Way We Live Now, The	Anthony Trollope
We Have Always Lived in the Castle	Shirley Jackson
We Need to Talk About Kevin	Lionel Shriver
Wedding Date, The	Jasmine Guillory
Wedding, The	Dorothy West
Weight of Water, The	Anita Shreve
Westing Game, The	Ellen Raskin
What Maisie Knew	Henry James
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love	Raymond Carver
When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi
When We Were Orphans	Kazuo Ishiguro
When We Were Very Young	A. A. Milne
When You Reach Me	Rebecca Stead
Where the Red Fern Grows	Wilson Rawls
Where’d You Go, Bernadette	Maria Semple
White Noise	Don DeLillo
White Teeth	Zadie Smith
White Tiger, The	Aravind Adiga
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead	Barbara Comyns
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?	Edward Albee
Whose Body?	Dorothy L. Sayers
Wicked	Gregory Maguire
Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys
Wild Sheep Chase, A	Haruki Murakami
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China	Jung Chang
Wind in the Willows, The	Kenneth Grahame
Wind Up Bird Chronicle, The	Haruki Murakami
Winesburg, Ohio	Sherwood Anderson
Winnie-The-Pooh	A. A. Milne
Winter Sea, The	The Slains #1
Witch of Blackbird Pond, The	Elizabeth George Spear
Witches, The	Roald Dahl
Wittgenstein’s Mistress	David Markson
Wives and Daughters	Elizabeth Gaskell
Wizard of Earthsea, A	Ursula K. LeGuin
Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel
Woman in the Dunes, The	Kobo Abe
Woman in White, The	Wilkie Collins
Woman Warrior, The	Maxine Wong Kingston
Women in Love	D.H. Lawrence
Women of Brewster Place, The	Gloria Naylor
Wonder	R.J. Palacio
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The	L. Frank Baum
World According to Garp, The	John Irving
World War Z	Max Brooks
Wrath and the Dawn, The	Renee Ahdieh
Wrinkle in Time, A	Madeleine L’engle
Wuthering Heights	Emily Brontë
Xenocide	Orson Scott Card
Year of Magical Thinking, The	Joan Didion
Yellow Wallpaper, The	Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Yes Please	Amy Poehler
Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The	Michael Chabon
Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, The	Anton DiSclafani
You Shall Know Our Velocity	Dave Eggers
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name	Audre Lorde
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	Robert Pirsig
Zlata’s Diary	Zlata Filipović
Zorro	Isabel Allende

The Old Wolf has Spoken

Please be very careful with promoted posts on Facebook

Posted on April 1, 2021 by The Old Wolf

Edit: Went back to check and as of 4/29/2021, the “wewinns” shop was nowhere to be seen.

For “promoted post,” read “advertisement.”

I’m using as an example one that showed up in my newsfeed yesterday, from a company which calls itself “wewinns.”

They are offering a complete date set of Morgan silver dollars for $199.99 (reduced from ~~$699.99~~!)

Beautiful, right? The Morgan really is a gorgeous piece, especially in uncirculated condition. Notice the first description:

Morgan Silver Dollars are an excellent way to own a piece of history, while concurrently investing in the physical precious metal silver. Morgan Silver Dollars are composed of 90% silver and 10% copper. They weigh 26.73 grams. This equates to approximately .7734 Troy ounces of silver and approximately .1 ounce of copper per coin. Uncirculated collectible coins.

Next, we have coin highlights:

Coin Highlights:

Arrives inside of a protective plastic slab courtesy of the NGC or PCGS!
• Struck from 1878 to 1904!
• Contains .77344 Troy oz of actual silver content.
• Bears a face value of $1 (USD) backed by the federal government.
• Issued a Grade of Mint State 66 by the Professional Coin Grading Service or Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.
• Obverse features the effigy of Liberty.
• Reverse includes the American bald eagle.

When I was a kid, collecting coins was much less complex. Coin grades were:

Cull
Fair (F)
Good (G)
Very Good (VG)
Fine (F)
Very Fine (VF)
Extra Fine (XF)
Almost Uncirculated (AU)
Uncirculated (Unc)
Brilliant Uncirculated (BU)
Proof (P)

“Cull” was a damaged coin with no value, and “Proof” – as today – are specially-created strikes for collector. In between, coins were graded largely based on the subjective opinions of countless coin dealers.

Now, things are a lot more complicated, but a lot more formalized. The PCGS that this advertisement invokes has a very detailed designation and a numerical grading system by which coins are qualified. According to their website, MS66 is defined as “Well struck with a few marks or hairlines not in focal areas.” In other words, a pretty, uncirculated coin.

The next statement from the “wewinns” website reiterates the condition of the coins you will supposedly get:

Each of the Morgan Silver Dollar Coins offered by us in this product listing is available to you in Mint State 66 condition from either the PCGS or NGC. Coins in Mint State 66 condition are five grades below the perfect grade of 70 on the Sheldon numeric scale. A coin with an MS66 certification has minimal, but apparent, detracting marks or hairlines.

Following more generic information about Morgan dollars, the sales website goes on to say:

In this product listing, we guarantee you a Mint State 66 condition Morgan Silver Dollar.

Now things get interesting. After some more description of the beauty and rarity of the Morgan dollars, we see this:

Each Morgan Silver Dollar is presented in circulated condition with most major design details visible, and is protected in an archival crystal-clear case that allows for easy and safe viewing of both sides.

“Most major design details visible.” To me, that sounds like an F-12: “About half of detail now worn flat. All lettering remains visible.”

But then in the next bit, we go right back to the shiny new coins you thing you’ll be getting:

Year: 1878 to 1921
Grade: Choice BU
Strike Type: Business
Denomination: $1.00
Mint Location: “S” – San Francisco
Metal Content: 0.7734 troy oz
Purity: .900
Manufacturer: US Mint
Thickness: 3.1 mm
Diameter: 38.1 mm

I have no idea what “Strike type: business” means, unless it just implies general circulation coins and not a proof.

I was curious enough to click the “Contact Us” link on the bottom of the page:

Email:[support@wewinns.com]
Phone: +86 181 2462 2758

Is anyone suprised that country code 86 is China? My email to the support staff read as follows:

I am interested in your offer, but I am confused.
Your ad says the following things:
“Uncirculated collectible coins.”
“Issued a Grade of Mint State 66 by the Professional Coin Grading Service or Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.”
“Each of the Morgan Silver Dollar Coins offered by us in this product listing is available to you in Mint State 66 condition from either the PCGS or NGC.”
“In this product listing, we guarantee you a Mint State 66 condition Morgan Silver Dollar.”
“Each Morgan Silver Dollar is presented in circulated condition with most major design details visible.”
“Grade: Choice BU”
So, are these coins that you are offering uncirculated, with a grade of 66, or are they circulated and in generally poor condition? You are aware, are you not, that a full set of Morgan dollars in grade 66 typically sells for over $125,000?
I look forward to your speedy response.

But I will be surprised if there is any response at all. [Edit: there was not] If you get anything at all from this outfit, I’m pretty safe in thinking it will be a collection of very poor-quality coins, and that their website will be gone – only to resurface the next day with a different name.

Now I won’t go so far as to say that every advertisement promoted by Facebook is painfully deceptive or outright dishonestly false… but in my experience, a vast preponderance of them are just that, and a large percentage of them come from China. And Facebook continues to happily take their advertising dollars, and countless people are defrauded by unscrupulous enterprises.

It is worth noticing that the current PCGS quoted price for a complete date set of Morgan dollars in MS-66 condition is $165,605.00, and a complete date set in F-12 condition (Fair) is quoted at $1,272.00.

At one point, the Danbury Mint was offering a 28-coin date set for $2,238.60, but that was a limited-time offer and is sold out. [While Danbury is a legitimate company, please be aware that – like the Franklin Mint and other specialty “Mints” – what they sell is fairly overpriced and unsuitable for investment, but they do have pretty things. Just expect that you or your heirs will probably not even recoup what you paid for them if they ever try to sell.]

So heaven only knows what you might get if you drop $200.00 into this Chinese bank account; most likely a bunch of counterfeit coins, or nothing at all.

Be very careful with these ads. Discuss this with vulnerable loved ones, particularly the elderly who might be more susceptible to greasy advertising techniques like this.

Edit: Another, very similar ad page is found at
https://www.silver-ccoins.com/products/1878-1921-morgan-dollar-silver-coin-lx-1, and it uses almost identical wording, with a lot of additional promotional fluff added. The company behind this one is Vankin Co. Ltd. in London. Beware.

Edit 2: This report focuses on an individual who was conned into buying counterfeit silver dollars (made of steel); the report ends by indicating that these bogus dollars were likely mass-produced in China. One more red flag that this particular deal and ones like it should be run away from at great speed.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

You want to do what to that duck?

Posted on March 14, 2021 by The Old Wolf

Warning: NSFW Language

In an earlier post, I offered up an explanation (by smarter people than I) of how a sign in a Chinese hotel offered “smallpox” as an option for guests.

This one popped up in a feed somewhere today, and though I had seen it before I never took the time to find out how such an awful translation could have taken place.

In traditional Chinese, “乾爆鴨子” (gān bào yāzi) means dry fried duck, or duck cooked in very little oil which causes the skin to pop and crackle more than usual.

When written in simplified Chinese characters used in the People’s Republic of China, this becomes 干爆鸭子, pronounced the same way.

However, simplified Chinese often reduced more than one character in traditional writing to the same character, hence 干 (gān) means “to interfere, to concern,” 乾 (gān) means “dry” as in dried food, and 幹 (or 榦) (gàn) means “tree trunk, capable, to do.” In simplified characters, all of these are written 干, and there are many, many other meanings of gān or gàn as well.

The last character also means something entirely different, as in the phrase “I’d love to do him/her.”

For some odd reason, this last meaning was very popular with a poorly-designed automated translator:

“Notoriously, the 2002 edition of the widespread Jinshan Ciba Chinese-to-English dictionary for the Jinshan Kuaiyi translation software rendered every occurrence of 干 as “fuck”, resulting in a large number of signs with irritating English translations throughout China, often mistranslating 乾 (gān) “dried” as in 干果 “dried fruit” in supermarkets as “fuck the fruits” or similar.
(Wikipedia, “Radical 51”)

The software was later corrected, but the embarrassing results are still seen in many places, as China seems heavily dependent on machine translation.

Amazing to me is that companies don’t understand the importance of using professional translators when dealing with other countries, at least if they want to be taken seriously.

老狼說話了。

The “Lonely Hearts” scam

Posted on February 8, 2021 by The Old Wolf

Messages like this may pop up in your Facebook messenger feed, or on any other social media channel. People who are lonely might actually respond, in which case they will be groomed for personal information or asked for money once a “relationship” is established.

Hallmarks of this particular scam are bad grammar and formatting, flattery, and requests for assistance.

These are not people looking for love, they are scammers and criminals. They want your money or your personal information. Shun them. Delete their messages. Never answer.

A more detailed explanation of this type of scam can be found at Pathways Financial Credit Union.

HELLO DEAR.
My name is Miss Marvis Gaasu.
I am glad to meet you here; Please, write me in this email id.(obfuscated@yahoo.com).
It very important.i wait your reply fast,Or you send me your email address,i will send you my photos and details your email address. Thanks.

If you respond, those photos they send you will most likely be stock pictures lifted from the internet.

Hello dear friend i am Kate Brown by name,i am interested to be your true friend.please I will like you to reply me with my email (katebrown4@yahoo.com ) so that i can send you my own information for us to know each other very well. Thanks bye. obfuscated@yahoo.com ❤ ❤

Interesting that all these scammers are using yahoo addresses. That’s another red flag.

Hello new friend,
greeting to you. How was your days and health? Hope all is well with you. My name is Miss Favour Mercy, I am a female. I am interested in you after going through your profile on facebook, and i decided to contact you. I would like to get acquaint with you, As well to know you better. Please write me back through this email address: (obfuscated@yahoo .com) so that i can send you my picture and let you know more about me. Write me on my email address, because i do not use facebook very often, If you contact me on facebook, you may not probably get any reply from me. I am eager to hear from you soonest! Thanks for your answer: Yours new friend Miss Favour Mercy.

If you contact the scammer on Facebook, it’s very likely that their profile has already been deleted as being fraudulent.

Protect your vulnerable loved ones from this sort of thermonuclear douchebaggery.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Lessons from a Danish Hearing

Posted on February 8, 2021 by The Old Wolf

We could learn from other nations… if we were willing to listen. It seems that’s what a “hearing” is supposed to be about.

The following text is from a Twitter thread written by Michael Grunwald (@MichaelGrunwald), and I thought it was important enough to share here in a more readable format. I originally saw it posted on Imgur and then a friend of mine on Facebook shared the same link with me. If something shows up a few times in succession in my life, I take it as a sign that it’s worth looking at, and this one definitely is.

I went to an obscure hearing today in the Danish Parliament. It blew my mind, not because of the substance, but because the US Congress has totally warped my view of hearings. And I’m just dorky enough to do a thread about it.

First of all, there was a dais in the hearing room, just like any congressional hearing, except the politicians weren’t on the dais. The six experts who were testifying were on the dais. Can you imagine? As if the hearing was about them and not the politicians?

The politicians were sitting in the front row of the audience. They all stayed in their seats for the entire hearing. And do you know what they did? They listened! I was in the second row and I didn’t see any of them look at a phone or talk to an aide at any time.

Actually, there was one politician on stage, the committee chair. She welcomed everyone, told the witnesses they would each have 10 minutes, then didn’t say anything until one witness asked for an extra minute. She said no. I swooned. ❤

Oh, did I mention this obscure hearing was simultaneously translated into English? They gave me cool high-tech headphones. I think everyone else in the audience spoke Danish but they take this stuff seriously.

Anyway, when the witnesses were done the politicians got their turn to speak. And none of them made speeches! They asked questions! Not leading questions designed to make a point. Thoughtful questions designed to get information!

This part really got me: The pols had to ask all their questions first, which took maybe 5 minutes, and then all the witnesses got to answer all of them, which took 20 minutes. The experts did the talking and the pols did the hearing. Is that how these things got their name?

I couldn’t tell which pols were in which party or what biases any of them had about the topic being discussed. It really seemed like they were there to learn. And by the end it was clear they had.

This thread is really about process, not substance, but I will say the topic was related to climate change, and everyone there took it seriously. One legislator told me only 4 or 5 of her 178 colleagues are deniers.

Anyway, the weirdest thing about this mostly banal experience was how weird it seemed. The lack of speechifying, grandstanding, partisanship or fake umbrage. How seriously they all took their responsibilities. The absence of bullshit.

In conclusion, we suck. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded how much we suck, and how it’s possible to suck less.
A Twitter thread by @MikeGrundwald.

I agree with every single word of this mini-essay, but I would like to add a bit of my own additional perspective on Mr. Grunwald’s conclusion.

As a nation, we don’t suck. Despite the fact that over the last 50 years or so we have lost our way in some areas and owe it to ourselves and to our global neighbors to improve¹, there are a lot of things that America has gotten right since its inception.
Our Constitution is unmatched in the history of the world. In 1835, French diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville toured America with a view to seeing if our democracy was worth of emulation by the French. In his book Democracy in America, he declared that our Constitution was “the most perfect federal constitution that ever existed,” but also warned that it would be “profitless in other hands.” In other words, the guarantees and protections and checks and balances written into our Constitution only work if the people desire democracy; any piece of parchment can be trodden down by the feet of a lawless mob.
We are still a welcoming nation. The growing xenophobic right-wing movement in our country still accounts for a minority of our population, and most people understand that America has always been a nation of immigrants. It is the exquisite blending and adapting of countless cultures that makes the United States a vibrant, thriving place.
The citizens of our country are, in the grand scheme of things, a very giving people. In many parts of the country – even those who tend to be politically conservative – people will reach out to neighbors and even strangers and literally give them the shirt off their backs. As the song Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival says, “If you come down to the river, Bet you gonna find some people who live; You don’t have to worry cause you have no money, People on the river are happy to give.”
Bagels. Blueberries. Hot dogs. Pizza. Jazz. Lobster rolls. NASA. Our National parks. Rolling plains and prairies, purple mountain majesties, redwood forests, beaches, fireflies, public libraries, road trips (at least, when there’s not a pandemic going on), Jewish deli sandwiches, Hollywood, Broadway, musea, and countless other things that make me grateful to be a citizen of this nation.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes

¹ The things that need work in our country (areas in which we do suck) are also many, but they are subjects for other discussions. In the meantime, this is something good to remember as we contemplate ways to make our country better:

A new day dawns in America

Posted on January 21, 2021 by The Old Wolf

For the first time in over five years, I awoke this morning without a crushing sense of dread to read the news and find out what indignities our former administration had inflicted upon our country and upon the world. It was a literal sense of physical relief, and I still revel in it as I write this.

Over the last half-decade, political cartoonists have had a literal heyday. Never in my life has there been a president or an administration that was more thoroughly or more deservedly pilloried. If anyone wanted to anthologize all the cartoons that were done about the Orange Screechweasel and his abortive presidency, I suspect it would look like this (Volume 1): ¹

I collected a few of these over the years, more as a pressure valve than anything else and to reassure myself that it was not just me that felt these things, but I think the one that impacted me the most was this one that appeared on the morning after the 2016 election:

David Rowe of the Australian Financial Review

The eyes said it all. And although Mr. Rowe caught a lot of flak from American Trump Cultists among others, here on the morning of January 21, 2021, when the White House is occupied by President Joseph Biden, Jr., and Vice-President Kamala Harris, and a fresh, clean breeze of hope is blowing over our nation for the first time in far too long, it becomes clear that – as the saying goes – we had no idea. Mr. Rowe’s cartoon was spot-on, but dramatically understated. The horror would be far worse than anything any of us could have imagined.

There are a handful of online comics that I follow, less than a dozen and far fewer than in days past (I was always a fan of the daily funnies from my earliest days of reading The Herald Tribune in New York City), and one of the is “The New Adventures of Queen Victoria” by Pab Sungenis. The writer’s political satire has always been a favorite of mine, but the last two days of his strip pretty much say it all:

We survived. Sadly, some 400,000 of us did not – and counting – and while not all of those deaths from the Novel Coronavirus could have been avoided, a significant percentage could have been had there been functioning adults in the White House.

Well, now there are. And while no administration of either party is perfect, I feel more hope for the future now than even I did with the election of Barack Obama, whose campaign slogan was Hope and Change. He began the trend, and with this unwanted and hideous interlude behind us, I look forward to the reparation of as much damage as possible and forward motion to a nation that works for all of us, with no one left out, and a nation that can re-assume its position at the global table as a functioning, adult equal.

The inauguration yesterday morning was breathtaking in its honesty, in its beauty, and in its hopefulness. I literally wept tears of joy and release as I listened to the speeches, the poetry, and the music. It was exhilarating and cathartic.

May the 46th Administration of our great but suffering nation bring healing and progress. May we undertake effective new steps to protect our populace from the depredations of the current pandemics, one of a new and relatively unknown virus, and a second of ignorance and brainwashing by 50 years of spite and disinformation.

Our nation awakens to a fresh, new morning of hope. May we see that hope fulfilled more abundantly than our previous fears were.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Footnotes:

¹ Not to mention all the wonderful video parodies by people such as Randy Rainbow, late-night segments by John Oliver and Stephen Colbert and so many like them, and serious critical essays by the likes of John Pavlovitz, Heather Cox Richardson, Dan Rather, Jim Wright, and countless others. Just had to add this because they shouldn’t be forgotten.

No, I haven’t been hacked

Posted on November 11, 2020 by The Old Wolf

My last post (The Cat Scan) was just an entry in my personal journal that I put there for my own future reference. I password-protected it because “too much information” that would not be interesting for anyone but me.

My blog’s integrity has not been compromised.

-Wolfington X. Analemma

Playing in the World Game

As One

Category Archives: Uncategorized

… and thanks for your service.

Taco Bell’s Crispy Chicken Sandwich – Easy Come, Easy Go

New York’s Chinatown Fair and the Animated Dragon

A reading list of great books

Please be very careful with promoted posts on Facebook

You want to do what to that duck?

The “Lonely Hearts” scam

No, I haven’t been hacked