Car Books

JWise Life

Reading in the car

I’ve known that Caroline tracks the books she’s been reading and listening to and has been doing so for years. She started the list back in 2012 when she was endeavoring to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction and needed to track which ones she read; this was also part of her goal to read more novels as the two of us both share a passion for non-fiction. Tonight, I learned that she’s also been keeping track of books we’ve completed while out driving. For those who don’t know, Caroline doesn’t like driving, and most of the time, when we are both in the car, she reads to me. I’d like to share when this started, but we are both relatively uncertain; while I thought it was while we were in Germany, she insists it wasn’t until we were in America [In my memory, our first shared book experience was Moby Dick  – Caroline].

Had you asked me a day ago, I might have guessed that Caroline has read a dozen or so books to us in the past nearly ten years. This would have been based on feeling like it takes us months to get through a book, for example, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson clocks in at 1024 pages. I could easily see us needing nearly a year for a tome that big, but nope, according to Caroline, we started it on July 10, 2014, and finished it on December 13 of the same year. So, not only do we read books faster than I thought, but they are read incredibly fast. From early 2012 to October 14, 2021, or about 9.5 years, we shared 49 books we can account for. There are a number of titles we spent a day to a week trying to find a groove with that didn’t work out; those are not listed, only the books we’ve finished while driving around America. The idea that we’ve jointly read five books a year on average in the car is mind-blowing, but as I started going through the list, every one of those books came back to me.

Note regarding the first book below titled The Plum in the Golden Vase (real author unknown although it is listed as Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, which translates to “the Scoffing Scholar of Lanlin” according to Wikipedia), this massive work arrives in 5 volumes (estimated 850,000 words) with nearly 3,800 pages of dense text and a wide cast of characters. Caroline and I have used this tome as a kind of commercial interlude between other books we are reading. After a number of chapters from other titles, we’ll return to this 400-year-old Chinese novel to pull in a chapter or two before returning to the primary book we’re reading through. As of this post, we have finished the first four volumes and are about to start on the final book. This 10-year journey into the life and death of Ximen Qing will leave a gap after we’re done, but we are heading into The Water Margin, a.k.a. Outlaws of the Marsh and The Plum in the Golden Vase is a kind of spin-off from that novel, so we are not straying far.

The Water Margin by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong comes in just below the 850,000 words of The Plum in the Golden Vase and will be read simultaneously with In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust at 1.27 million words that we started recently. I find this arrangement interesting because we’ll be dividing our time between these monumental Chinese and French novels interspersed with other books about science or history. This doesn’t take into account what we read at home.

Anyway, without further adieu, here’s that list covering early 2012 to October 2021:

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 1 – Read between 2012 to 2015

The River of Doubt by Candice Millart – Unknown to April 2012

Victorian London by  – Unknown to October 2012

Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal- October 2012 to November 2012

Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson – November 2012 to January 2013

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt – January 2013 to April 2013

The Vikings: A History by Robert Ferguson – May 2013 to August 2013

How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman – August 2013 to Feb 2014

The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg – Unknown to August 2014

The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg – September 2014 to November 2014

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby – February 2014 to March 2014

Humboldt by Gerard Helferich – April 2014 to May 2014

Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms by Richard Fortey – May 2014 to July 2014

The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson – July 2014 to December 2014

Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall – January 2015 to March 2015

Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco – March 2015 to April 2015

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 2 – 2015 to 2017

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – April 2015 to May 2015

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo – May 2015 to June 2015

Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey – June 2015 to August 2015

Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth by Chris Stringer – July 2015 to September 2015

The Social Conquest of Earth by E.O. Wilson – September 2015 to October 2015

East of Eden by John Steinbeck – October 2015 to November 2015

The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire by A.H. Sayce – December 2015 to Unknown

The Root of Wild Madder by Brian Murphy – Unknown to July 2016

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder –  August 2017 to October 2017

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 3 – December 2017 to August 2019

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – January 2018 to February 2018

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan – February 2018 to May 2018

The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization by Nicholas P. Money – June 2018 to July 2018

The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson – July 2018 to October 2018

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett – November 2018 to November 2018

Handywoman: A Creative Life, Post-stroke by Kate Davies – November 2018 to November 2018

Rising Out of Hatred by Eli Saslow – December 2018 to December 2018

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman – December 2018 to August 2019

Kabloona by Gontran de Poncin – January 2019 – February 2019

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis – June 2019 to July 2019

Barons of the Sea by Steven Ujifusa – August 2019 to October 2019

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 4 – September 2019 to October 2021

Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti – October 2019 to December 2019

Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan – January 2020 to February 2020

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann – February 2020 to August 2020

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard – August 2020 to January 2021

The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria by Annie Gray – January 2021 to April 2021

Tales from the Ant World by E.O. Wilson – April 2021 to April 2021

The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson – April 2021 to July 2021

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey Smith – July 2021 to August 2021

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – September 2021 to (currently reading)

Jin Ping Mei – English title: The Plum in the Golden Vase Pt. 5 – October 2021 to (currently reading)*

*Edit: Part 5 of The Plum In The Golden Vase pulled us in hard, and its 420 pages were zipped through in just a few weeks. We closed out this incredible journey on November 5, 2021.

Scottish Farmer Ruins Our Adventure

JWise Photo of the Day

Caroline and John Wise with William Mather in Flagstaff Arizona

On this beautiful Saturday, we were tricked into bringing this Scotsman to Flagstaff, Arizona, after he flew in via Canada from his farm in Scotland. We don’t normally offer Uber services, but this guy convinced us via email that he was a descendent of William Wallace and had recently come into his inheritance. He was inviting us to raft the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon at his expense if we’d take him up north. We took the scenic road from Phoenix via Payson which I originally thought was so we could dip into one of his bottles of whiskey while underway, but apparently, he was nervous about an encounter with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement which makes sense now that I think about it, as Europeans are not allowed in America yet due to the pandemic. When I asked about that, he said that Post Brexit he was no longer part of that filthy horde of barbarians and so was allowed to be on our shores. By that time I was just drunk enough to believe him. Pulling into Flagstaff, we stopped at a local Haggis Shop where he was going to grab a couple of haggises and a pack of oatcakes, one haggis for this evening and one while we are out rafting the Colorado. Well, this was the last we saw of this crafty Scots outlaw as he must have left through a back door. Without hotel reservations and proof that we were booked for a Grand Canyon adventure, all we could do was head back to Phoenix looking like the rubes we are.

The truth is far more mundane as Flagstaff doesn’t even have a Haggis Shop nor did we drink a bottle of whiskey while on the road. This is our friend Willy whom we met years ago on a different rafting trip and we were simply bringing him to Flagstaff for his own adventure rafting through the canyon, without haggis and without us. We did enjoy our scenic drive through the largest stand of Ponderosa pines in the world and all the conversations that entailed.

Stupidity Top To Bottom

JWise Thoughts

Prince William

Either we humans are stupid from top to bottom, or I’m gaslighting myself by believing what I interpret from the things I read, hear, and see. Just this morning, I’m reading from (potential future billionaire) Prince William that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson should focus their wealth not on inhabiting space but set to work trying to fix our planetary problems. To be fair, it’s not only U.K. royalty that I’ve read this from, but by now, I’m starting to feel abused by this line of thinking. Since when is wealth supposed to take a leadership position in situations that must be directed by political means?

This followed in the footsteps of a server where I took breakfast telling me that Biden in the White House correlates with the current rise in prices and, therefore, must be a causation factor. While maybe I made it clear enough to them that this was a global issue, not an isolated one, where supply chains and manufacturing that were put on hold due to the pandemic are all coming back to life just as pent-up demand is surging while the fear of pandemic resurgence is tempering confidence. But this line of thinking requires thought and solid backing information that delves into complexity while missing a political narrative that serves particular constituencies; so, would the person consider my points or gravitate towards the simple explanation?

The anti-vaxxer crowd would have everyone believe that they’ve found the unicorn of truth living right here in the United States. Laypeople masquerading as experts in the medical sciences claim special knowledge of a vast conspiracy to trick professionals in 194 other countries to go along with some nefarious plot to take control of the planet, using COVID  to reach their goals because controlling production, distribution, currency, resources, global travel is not enough for the powerful cabal of overlords who must also control what vaccines we’re forced to take.

Where You Been John?

JWise Moments

Sunrise in Phoenix, Arizona

There are nearly three weeks between my last post and taking the time to sit down for some small talk with myself: the gravity of change that comes with traveling needed a longer moment to settle. That part of me thriving in constant stimulation must allow expectation to fade as I return to a routine and a culture from which I feel increasingly alienated. But this is my life at this time in Phoenix, Arizona, one of bearing witness to the mendacity of a population trying to buy happiness.

Well, the fact of the matter is, I really never stopped writing as I have three documents on my desktop representing some 2,400 words of observations that linger in the realm of uncertainty, meaning that maybe they find their way to the blog, and maybe they don’t. Not that this was all I wrote, but I was also busy dragging some ancient memories out in the writing about Caroline’s adventure at Yarn School in Harveyville, Kansas, back in September 2007. That was triggered by my ongoing attempt to account for every travel day Caroline and I’ve taken since the advent of consumer digital photography.

If you look to the right column of this blog (or near the bottom if you are viewing this on a smartphone), you will see a block with the heading “Other Pages.” At the top of that section is a link to a page titled “Travels In The Digital Age” which is my attempt to eat all of your bandwidth; just kidding. Seriously though, as of today, there are 540 records (images and links) that track our adventures away from home, starting at 9.9.99. I found our oldest digital image, and from there, I’ve tried posting a photo from each day out on the road. So far, I’ve caught up to October 1, 2007. During that time, it appears we were traveling on average 67 days per year, which seems like a lot of vacation, but more precisely, we vacationed 5½ days per month, which doesn’t sound like that much. Ultimately, I think I’ll be adding about another 1,000 images before I catch up to where we are today, but at that time, I’ll probably never recommend someone clicking the link because it will download hundreds of megabytes in imagery. And that moment won’t be very soon as I’m nearly two solid years into trying to bring this effort together.

What’s taking so long to assemble this massive post? As I move from year to year, ensuring I’ve grabbed at least one image from every day we were traveling, I stumble into trips that have never been documented, so I review the photos and try to write something to those. In other cases, I posted only one photo of a trip as bandwidth limitations in those days wouldn’t support the posting of 30 of my favorite images from the 200 – 500 I could shoot in a day. So those posts get updated too, and, luckily, Caroline hunted through a bunch of our old notebooks, discovering travel diaries that came in super handy in fleshing out some of our forgotten stories.

While we were in Germany, I hit a new milestone: 1,500,000 words published here at JohnWise.com. Back in July 2020, I wrote that I’d shared a little more than 1.1 million words, so having written nearly 400,000 between then and now, I’m pretty happy. What does this number mean? Really, nothing at all, though it is a good metric assuring me that I’ve been diligent in exercising my nascent skills. Sadly, my next bragging milestone requires a half-million more words to be written, so after a bit more than another year out, I’ll be posting an entry with the simple title: Two Million.

But does any of this answer “Where I’ve been?” No, it goes into some small details of what I’ve been doing, and the snarky answer of where I’ve been could simply be stated as I’ve been in the milieu. This has become a question that is stymying me as I scan the last couple of weeks trying to discover if there’s been an overarching theme tracing through my mind, and, other than generalized malaise, I can’t put a finger on anything particular. Yet, I have this nagging feeling that just beyond my conscious view there is something preoccupying me and that if I just posed the question of where I’ve been to myself, I’d ponder and then answer this. Nope, not coming up with anything, so I must have been nowhere.