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  "description": "Letter No. 133: Includes mention of a book discussed here last month, books not written, and some Zen, because we all could use a little Zen.",
  "path": "/book-report-for-january-2026/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-09T17:37:41.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.dalekeiger.net",
  "tags": [
    "Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque",
    "** _There Is No Antimemetics Division_ , Qtnm (Sam Hughes)**",
    "**_The Library of the Unwritten_ , A.J. Hackwith.**",
    "**_The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life_ , John Daido Loori.**",
    "This Idea Will Self-Destruct in 30 Milliseconds; You Will Remember Nothing",
    "What Does Not Cometh from the Gods",
    "An Addendum toWhat the Gods Do Not Confer",
    "The Sound of One Hand Packing"
  ],
  "textContent": "**It was a cold month in the mid-Atlantic,** so Dr Essai turned a lot of pages. Books purchased from Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque earn the doctor a bit of gin money through commissions, important during a cold winter and these trying times.\n\n##### Completed\n\n  * ** _There Is No Antimemetics Division_ , Qtnm (Sam Hughes)****.** There is no way to write an adequate précis of this novel. The book first lived on a website, where its author wrote as “qntm,” before he rewrote it for print publication. It posits globally destructive entities loose in our world, entities that we are vulnerable to because when we encounter them, we forget them before they register in our consciousness. There’s more going on here, about the spread of toxic ideas enabled by our inability to remember how bad they are, all conveyed through a complicated but engrossing plot. I loved both versions.\n\n\n\n  * **_No Less Strange or Wonderful_ , A. Kendra Greene.** Uneven collection of essays, many about paying attention to nature. A few pieces consist of only a few hundred words, and they are the best. The longer ones tend to end up running on empty.\n  * **_The Library of the Unwritten_ , A.J. Hackwith.** The central conceit of this novel is that unwritten stories, either unfinished by authors living or dead, or existing for now only as characters in a writer’s mind, exist as actual volumes in the eponymous library, which happens to be housed in Hell. Why it’s in Hell is complicated, so never mind. Hackwith populates her tongue-in-cheek tale with a heroic librarian, an embodied muse, characters who have escaped their unfinished books and are wandering loose among the stacks, corporeal demons, a fallen angel, an archangel, and a gargoyle. I was entertained.\n\n\n\n  * **_The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life_ , John Daido Loori.** Much profound thinking on the Zen approach to making art. Like any Buddhist or Taoist text, Loori’s book contains its share of inscrutable passages, but it’s a mind-expanding read, well written and illustrated.\n\n\n\n##### In progress\n\n  *  _The Big Bang of Numbers_ , Manil Suri\n\n\n\n##### Purchased\n\n  *  _Opera Wars_ , Caitlin Vincent\n  *  _An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter_ , César Aira\n  *  _Ice_ , Anna Kavan\n  *  _A Poetry Handbook_ , Mary Oliver\n  *  _The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century_ , Alex Ross\n\n\n\nAs always, Dear Jogglers, thank you for reading. Blessed are the read.\n\n* * *\n\n**Coda:** _There Is No Antimemetics Division_ prompted Joggle No. 131, “This Idea Will Self-Destruct in 30 Milliseconds; You Will Remember Nothing”\n\nThe good doctor has penned previous Joggles on creativity:\n\n  * “What Does Not Cometh from the Gods”\n  * “An Addendum toWhat the Gods Do Not Confer”\n  * “The Sound of One Hand Packing”\n\n",
  "title": "Book report for January 2026",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-09T17:37:41.000Z"
}