Hot Stuff and Sundry Sunday

Posted on August 9, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

“Explore the world’s only complete guide to the hot sauce types of the world. Hot sauces have been around for millennia, as Aztecs and other people of Mexico and Central America ground chile peppers, water and spices, adding heat and flavor to the earliest cuisines of Latin America. But today, heat in a bottle has spread around the world, and with each culture comes vibrant, tasty and unusual takes on spicy sauces. I sketch some of my favorite brands to illustrate my guide to the world’s hot sauce types.” at Hot Sauces of the World

I have been a customer and a bookseller at AbeBooks for most of its 30 years. 30 Years of Extraordinary Sales, highlights from Abebooks.com.

Have a free day, why not checkout 20 Brilliant Books You Can Read in a Day.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. —Sylvia Plath

I can still recall reading H.P. Lovecraft’s iconic tale The Call of Cthulhu as a 10 year-old and being frightened to my core. Here are some chilling stories that kept authors awake at night.  Horror Writers on the Scariest Stories They’ve Ever Read

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.
From BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen

 

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Southern Gothic

Posted on August 8, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.” ― Flannery O’Connor , Wise Blood

 

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How to write like Ian Fleming

Posted on August 7, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Continue reading →

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Bugging Out

Posted on August 6, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

If you need another reason not to visit the United States this year maybe this will do it. Fortunately, I have not been bitten by bedbugs since I was an adolescent, but I have heard enough horror stories from travelers who recently have, sometimes even right here in the good old U.S. of A.. This Orkin report for 2026 lays out the U.S. cities with the most bedbug reports and Chicago tops the list for the sixth year in a row. Ohio is a bad state overall and other cities ranking highly were L.A, Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. The report links to helpful advice on how to check your hotel room. I know many travelers who  leave their luggage in the tub or shower, never on the floor or even the bed.

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we move another summer closer to our last summer together

Posted on August 5, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

THE ORDINARY WEATHER OF SUMMER

In the ordinary weather of summer
with storms rumbling from west to east
like so many freight trains hauling
their cargo of heat and rain,
the dogs sprawl on the back steps, panting,
insects assemble at every window,
and we quarrel again, bombarding
each other with small grievances,
our tempers flashing on and off
in bursts of heat lightning.
In the cooler air of morning,
we drink our coffee amicably enough
and walk down to the sea
which seems to tremble with meaning
and into which we plunge again and again.
The days continue hot.
At dusk the shadows are as blue
as the lips of the children stained
with berries or with the chill
of too much swimming.
So we move another summer closer
to our last summer together –
a time as real and implacable as the sea
out of which we come walking
on wobbly legs as if for the first time,
drying ourselves with rough towels,
shaking the water out of our blinded eyes.

– Linda Pastan
Carnival Evening

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Tourists, Go Home

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Travelers who want to avoid other tourists and interact with the people who actually live there, should probably avoid Monaco and Malta. According to this chart, the first has 9 tourists for every local, while the second has 6.3 to 1. Naturally there are a lot of islands and tiny nations on the list, but some that I found rather surprising were low-population countries in Europe like Albania (4.8 to 1), Croatia (4 to 1), Austria (2.9 to 1), and Portugal (2.7 to 1).

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Summer Reading

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

President Barack Obama has released his summer reading list. On social media, he wrote, “It’s that time of year again: here are some of the books I’ve enjoyed this summer. If you’ve read any good ones, let me know!…. And if you’re in Chicago, be sure to stop by the new Chicago Public Library branch at the Obama Presidential Center to check out some of my favorites!”

Obama’s list:
Kin by Tayari Jones
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Whistler by Ann Patchett
This Land Is Your Land by Beverly Gage
Vigil by George Saunders
One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu
Data Empire by Roopika Risam
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

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Long, Long List

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

The 13-title longlist for the £50,000 (about $66,485) 2026 Booker Prize has been released and includes authors representing seven countries and three continents. A shortlist will be announced September 22, with the authors each receiving £2,500 (about $3,325). The winner will be named on November 9 during a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. This year’s longlisted Booker titles are:

The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis
Switzy by Emma Cline
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
John of John by Douglas Stuart
All Them Dogs by Djamel White
The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

Chair of judges Mary Beard said: “Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock. And they are set anywhere and everywhere: Ireland and Italy, Mexico and Massachusetts, Jamaica and the Hebrides, universities, private planes and pubs, past, present and future. But there’s one thing they all share. Every writer on our longlist brilliantly musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds.

“Books are not mirrors: they don’t simply reflect ourselves back to us. One of the many important things about fiction is that it helps us see what it might be like not to be us, to begin to understand the perspectives of others, and to imagine what it might be like to see the world differently. Great books are not cozy. In their various ways, the novels we have chosen are (we hope) dynamite.”

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Be Kind, Please Rewind

Posted on August 1, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Inspired by Little Free Libraries, public boxes and mini-houses where people can donate or borrow books, Free Blockbuster allows folks to exchange films in a similar spirit. The organization — which was founded in Los Angeles in 2019 by Brian Morrison, a former Blockbuster employee and film producer who sought to give old media collections new life within local communities — has made it’s way across North America and even to the United Kingdom.

Blockbuster redux allows any film lover to “franchise” locations free of charge, the organization expanded internationally, starting with a Canadian box in 2021 and now boasts more than 200 locations.

Morrison, LA-based president and secretary of Free Blockbuster, said he created the very first Free Blockbuster box after noticing that people were doing away with their DVD and physical media collections. They said some people donated them to Goodwill, but they would end up in dumpsters because the organization did not see them as valuable.

“The overarching thought was, ‘Instead of throwing these things away, how can we share them?’” he said.

Morrison said he came across an abandoned LA Weekly newspaper box after the news organization terminated their printing and distribution program, which prompted him to think about repurposing the boxes to to benefit the community.

“When I built the first one, I certainly hoped that people would see it and be inspired to create their own,” Morrison said. “I think anytime you start a thing that’s a crazy, silly idea, and you hope that it will resonate with other people. There’s always the chance that you’re just, you know, being crazy. But in this case, it worked, and I’m happy that it did.”

He said anyone can create a new location by finding an old newspaper box, cabinet or vessel of one’s choosing, placing VHS tapes or DVDs inside of it, decorating the box however they’d like, making it available for the community and informing the Free Blockbuster organization of its creation via their website.

“This is not a job,” Morrison said. “This is a gift you’re giving to your community.”

 

 

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Eventide

Posted on July 31, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Mary Ruefle erasure of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Carl Jung once wrote: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as before. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

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