This is a strange old book. It’s a Nancy Drew style mystery but the main character is a teen-aged Shirley Temple. Characters in the book recognize her as the famous entertainer and then it’s never mentioned again. There’s one instance in the book where, in order to escape a desperate situation, she needs to utilize skills she had learned sitting in the make-up chair. This is just weird concept. The mystery itself is not that deep and Shirley isn’t even the one who solves it. The whole plot about a haunted lake might have been the impetus of her investigation, but it’s soon forgotten. What the book does have is some wonderful line illustrations by E. Joseph Dreany.

The title of this one is a bit deceptive. The book is actually a history of British wood engraving. It starts out at the very beginnings of art history by making the tenuous claim that European cave art was actually a form of engraving. There are some nods to Chinese works, then quite a bit about the woodcuts of the Albrecht Dürer and other formschneider print makers (again, not wood engraving!). The author then breezes past the many decades of the golden era of commercial wood engraving only to spend chapter after chapter gushing over Eric Gill and works of the early 20th Century. Eric Gill is fine and all, and Gill Sans is a lovely typeface, but can Lynd Ward or Fritz Eichenburg get a little love here? Still, even if the writing is rather dull and the scope somewhat limited, the book is filled with plenty of examples of fantastic engravings in all different styles.

As a bit of a side note, the layout of the illustrations in this book sucks. Not once was the picture on the same page as the passages that covered it. Most of the time I would have to flip back 30–40 pages to find the relevant engraving, then flip back losing my place in the text. Were all my old college art history books this poorly organized and I’m just forgetting?

Penn details his weight-loss journey and his wacky diet. It’s an interesting take on how we view food and there are elements of his diet that might make sense for me to try. He keeps it entertaining and informative, but I miss crazy junk-food Penn. Snackers need a hero now that the Go-Nuts are no more.

I primarily have this book because I am interested in the spectacular Gustave Doré wood engravings. The text is a deep and thoughtful meditation on the divine yadda, yadda. To be honest, most of it was over my head. I would be reading and finally think I had a grasp on what he was talking about, then he’d slip into the medieval Florentine pop-culture references and I would be lost again. By the third book I was just reading the overviews, skimming the poem and spending most of my time in awe of the illustrations.

The final book the The Tripods trilogy delivers a satisfying conclusion to the story. I picture the aliens looking like Sigmund the Sea Monster and it all just works. I don’t think I’ve torn through a series of books this fast in a long time. Just squeaking in to 2019.

Having read her other books, I felt obliged to read this novella. It’s a fairly literal take on individualism that would have benefited from a little world-building and character development. The sci-fi premise is that the world has regressed back into a primitive technological state. The collective is all-important. People are known only by numbers and their preferred pronoun is we. As expected, the hero is the character who begins to view himself as an individual only to be shunned by his peers. This idea would go on to be fleshed-out within the vastly superior novel, The Fountainhead. Anthem just reads like a episode of The Twilight Zone rather than the deep philosophical meditation Objectivists probably think it is.