"The Web" (A Choose Your Own Adventure Story)

As well as this week's overdue Fortnightly Footnotes

Image by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Happy Friday everyone,

It’s two weeks late (I know, I know), but here is the “choose your own adventure story” that won the vote in the most recent Fortnightly Footnotes post.

Click the image above (or here) to continue reading on Instagram

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And as a way of making up for lost time, here’s this week’s F¹o²r³t⁴n⁵i⁶g⁷h⁸t⁹l¹⁰y¹¹ Footnotes included with the story. (Don’t forget to vote for next week’s content in footnote #11’s poll!)

1. 📚: Review: The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome by Susan Wise Bauer

I’ve had this book on my TBR list for a couple of years. I decided to use my final Audible credit to purchase the audiobook before canceling my subscription and…I kinda regret the purchase.

The audiobook is read by the usually-excellent John Lee, who has narrated several of the books in my library. But this book, as chock-full as it is with military history, was so boring I fell asleep at least a dozen times while listening. And—here’s the kicker—Susan Wise Bauer uses biblical scripture as source text for what I assumed to be an actual history book. No self-respecting historian would dare speak about biblical events as facts without stating some obvious caveats. And, as it turns out, Bauer isn’t really a bonafide historian—her degrees are in literature.

Oh well…here’s the verdict:

My Rating: ★★✰✰✰

2. 📚: Review: The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima

This novel, book 4 of The Sea of Fertility Tetralogy was completed the day before Mishima’s shocking suicide by seppuku after a failed coup. (His Wikipedia page makes for excellent reading.)

As for The Decay of the Angel…it was perhaps the weakest of the four books in the series. The story concerns Honda—who is now a wealthy old man—and the teenage boy Tōru, whom Honda is convinced is yet another reincarnation of his childhood friend. Honda, rich but childless, adopts Tōru and watches over him, waiting to see if he dies at the age of 20 like the other youths in the previous books.

I found The Sea of Tetralogy to be, for the most part, absolutely masterful. But none of the sequels match the power of the first book, Spring Snow.

My Rating: ★★★✰✰

3. 📚: Review: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Technically, I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m 75% done and that’s all I need to give this incredible collection of poetry a 5-star rating. What can I say about the book that hasn’t already been repeated ad nauseam for the past 100+ years? It’s a masterwork of humanism, an epic cry of solidarity for one’s fellow man. I read somewhere that Whitman has been called the father of free-verse poetry, and he very well may be. I love it.

My Rating: ★★★★★

4. 📺: Do you like Wes Anderson? Nice, me too. Do you like Roald Dahl? Because in case you haven’t noticed, Anderson has released four adaptations of Dahl’s short stories on Netflix. Check ‘em out.

5. 📰: Here’s the September update on

palisatrium

which is transparent about the generous $555.00 payout to its published writers. It’s worth checking out the post just for the free short stories at the bottom.

September Statistics

6. 📰: I read far too many excellent pieces on Substack over the past two weeks to dedicate an entire footnote to each one. So here’s a quick rundown of some of my favorites in the past fortnight:

1. By

   Dr. Kathleen Waller
   : “The Intrinsic Link Between Memory and Novels”

2. By

   Junot Díaz
   : “I WRITE FOR MYSELF, MY FIVE BEST FRIENDS, AND 9 MILLION OTHERS”

3. By

   Anthony Etherin Poetry
   : “Four Poems”

4. By

   Pádraig Ó Tuama
   : “Forming form”

5. By

   Joel J Miller
   : “Books Divide Us, but They Can Also Heal”

7. 📚: The best fairy tales contain a touch of darkness. Here’s a list of ten books that re-imagine classic fairy tales with a twisted retelling.

8. 📚: Did you like Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman? Well here’s a list of seven fantasy books you may also enjoy.

9. 📚: Time magazine recently dropped its list of the “100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time”. Check it out here.

10. 🎞️: Hayao Miyazaki has come out of retirement (not for the first time) to release another film—this one called The Boy and the Heron, which has recently premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Great news for us Studio Ghibli fans.

11. 🗳️: Enough about me—let’s talk about what you’d like to see in your inbox next week.

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