In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

The Great Return by Arthur Machen

An underdeveloped quickie by an otherwise great author

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) is a respected old-school master of the fantasy and horror genres. His novella The Great Return was published in 1915. Because it is quite short, it probably just barely qualifies as a novella. It is so short, in fact, that it’s difficult to summarize the plot without giving away any secrets or surprises.

The narrator, a Welshman, frequently scans the local newspapers for items about “remarkable occurrences.” This man’s profession is unclear, but he has an avid enough interest in the occult to investigate matters that suggest an inkling of the supernatural. Vague mentions in the papers of unusual goings-on lead him to the coastal village of Llantrisant. Some mysterious lights have been seen out at sea, and some folks have heard the peal of a bell from no apparent source. That’s about all I can tell you. Machen draws on a combination of Christian mysticism and old Welsh pagan folklore for this story. This isn’t really horror because it’s not really scary, but it does fit into the Twilight Zone range of spooky fantasy.

The Great Return, unfortunately, reads more like The Mediocre Return. This is more of an idea for a story than an actual story. One can imagine a Stephen King novel based on this premise, and knowing Stephen King, that novel would be way to long. As Machen presents it here, however, it’s way too short. Not much happens in the first three chapters. Some minor rumblings occur in chapters four and five. Then in chapter six it takes a big leap and goes full-on occult fantasy in the seventh and final chapter. The payoff is too little too late. A big problem with this tale is the way it’s narrated. The story is related by a long-winded narrator who’s full of himself and digresses into subjects you don’t want to hear about rather than focusing on the miraculous supernatural events at hand. His personality is obtrusive. A disembodied third-person narration would have been more successful.

I only recently discovered Machen, and I’ve been singing his praises in this blog over the past year. His novels The Great God Pan, The Terror, The Hill of Dreams, and in particular The Three Impostors are all very good. The Great Return is the first piece of writing by Machen that hasn’t impressed me. It’s not going to stop me, however, from continuing to work my way through his corpus of writings. 

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner

An early collection of brain teasing quickies

Martin Gardner was a popular and prolific nonfiction author of the latter half of the twentieth century. Just as Carl Sagan was the great popularizer of science during that time period, Gardner was the great popularizer of mathematics. For over 25 years, he wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he presented all sorts of mathematical curiosities and puzzles and educated readers on the mathematical laws and theories behind them. These columns were collected into over a dozen books that enlarged his audience well beyond the subscription list of Scientific American.

Mathematical Puzzles, an early collection of Gardner’s mathematical writings, was published in 1961 and later rereleased by Dover Publications in 1986 as Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles. The puzzles in this volume are not taken from Gardner’s column in Scientific American. Some of them previously appeared in a magazine called Science World, for which Gardner also wrote a column entitled On the Light Side from 1957 to 1959. These are not the chapter-length mathematical explorations from Mathematical Games but rather what one typically finds in a collection of brain teasers: items of one to two pages, essentially a word problem followed by an explanation of its solution. Altogether, there are about 60 puzzles in this book. They are arranged into ten categories such as money puzzles, speed puzzles, plane and solid geometry puzzles, and probability puzzles.

Compared to his writings for Scientific American, these little brain teasers are not Gardner’s best work. It’s amazing how many of these puzzles conclude with “Nope. It can’t be solved.” You read the first page, wrack your brain to try to come up with a solution, and then turn the page to find out there’s no viable answer. Where’s the fun in that? If it were one or two puzzles, that would be reasonable, but it seems like nearly half the book is unsolvable. Another frustrating aspect of brain teasers in general is that they are essentially mathematics written with words, and if the author isn’t exactly precise and clear in the wording of the problem, then you end up feeling like you’ve been cheated or you wasted your time. Gardner’s guilty of that as well in a number of these riddles. Such occasions call to mind the questions on your old school math tests that no one in the class got right because the teacher worded them poorly.

Nevertheless, there’s still fun to be had here and math to be learned. Every puzzle has its little twist that forces you to think outside the box of straightforward solutions. As the aforementioned list of categories indicates, there are little lessons on geometry, probability, and arithmetic. These are not easy math puzzles, but you don’t need to know algebra or calculus to figure them out. The most unfamiliar area for most will probably be the little section on topology. Gardner also describes some games of the abstract strategy variety (think checkers or tic tac toe, for example) that can be played with pencil and paper, coins, or other everyday items.

The material here may not be Gardner’s most ingenious writings, but this little book still does its job adequately. The next time I download a volume of Gardner’s mathematical puzzles, however, I’ll make sure it’s one of the 15 volumes from his Scientific American series. 

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part III: 1844–1849

Treasures are few in this batch

This year I set out to read the compete short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. To make this task manageable, I have broken these 65 tales into three sizable portions. The first and second installments in this series followed Poe’s published output chronologically. This, the third of such reviews, covers the last five or six years of Poe’s career.

In this third batch of short fiction, you won’t find much of what is considered classic Poe. “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story every American reads in school, is the headliner here. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” about a mesmerist who hypnotizes a dying man to see if the trance will survive the transition to the afterlife, is another skillful tale of horror and suspense. “The Purloined Letter,” is the third and final mystery starring Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin. It’s a familiar title in Poe collections, but a bit overrated. It’s the least ingenious and satisfying of Dupin’s trio of adventures.

A few other tales of horror, suspense, or science fiction include “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Sphinx,” and “Von Kempelen and His Experiment”—all capable efforts, but none of them earth-shattering. As with the previous two batches of Poe tales, a good portion of these 24 works are humorous stories, or at least intended to be. Such titles as “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.,” “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” and “X-ing a Paragrab” give some indication of what you’re in for. In most cases, Poe’s comedy has not held up well over the intervening century and a three-quarters. “Some Words with a Mummy,” however, really is quite a funny piece of social satire.

Another interest of Poe’s was gardening. “The Domain of Arnheim” is an expanded retread of his 1842 story “The Landscape Garden.” Neither of these are really stories but rather essays in which Poe pontificates on what makes a good landscape garden. Poe’s final published story, “Landor’s Cottage,” is also devoted to this subject. Poe describes his perfect landscape, perfect house, perfect furnishings, even his perfect woman. None of these three “tales” have any plot, they’re all quite boring, and when it comes to nature, Poe is no Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman. His natural descriptions read as surprisingly geometric rather than poetic.

Overall, reading Poe’s complete stories has proved rather disappointing. If you buy any collection of Poe’s tales of mystery, horror, and/or suspense, you’re probably going to get twelve to fifteen stories that are the cream of the crop. Most of Poe’s comedic attempts won’t be included in such collections, as they have deservedly faded into obscurity. On the whole, I would say Poe missed more than he hit, at least for a 21st-century audience, but the same could probably be said for his contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. At least Poe did leave us with some masterpieces­—like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Cask of Amontillado”—that are among America’s best works of short fiction.

Stories in this collection

The Spectacles

A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

The Premature Burial

Mesmeric Revelation

The Oblong Box

The Angel of the Odd

Thou Art the Man

The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.

The Purloined Letter

The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade

Some Words with a Mummy

The Power of Words

The Imp of the Perverse

The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

The Sphinx

The Cask of Amontillado

The Domain of Arnheim

Mellonta Tauta

Hop-Frog

Von Kempelen and His Experiment

X-ing a Paragrab

Landor’s Cottage

The Lighthouse (a fragment left unfinished)

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

A long haul through 18th-century Polish Jewish history

The Books of Jacob is a novel by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a historical novel of deliberately epic proportions (about 1,000 pages), based on real lives and events. The novel opens in the 1750s. The story jumps back and forth quite a bit between Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), and Germany (the Habsburg Monarchy). At that time, all of those political units were larger in land area and shared common borders with each other.

Jacob Frank (1726–1791) is Polish-born but seems to have been raised as a Turk within the Ottoman Empire. He is discovered by a group of Polish Jews, including some of his relatives, who think he is a new messiah for the Jewish people—a mantle that Jacob is ready and willing to adopt. His sect of followers—known as Sabbatians, anti-Talmudists, or Frankists—breaks from the orthodox beliefs of Judaism. They practice mysterious rites, some of them sexual, that just about everyone else finds sacrilegious. Jacob has heretical ideas of a holy trinity that includes himself. For their unorthodox views, the Frankists are violently persecuted by orthodox Jews and driven from town to town, country to country. To ensure their own safety, they court the protection of the Catholic Church, essentially striking a deal that they will all convert to Christianity (a big baptism bonanza for the Catholics) in exchange for the ability to settle and live peacefully. This provides a bit of a respite from their troubles, but not an end. (It’s a complicated history, and my summary is unavoidably an oversimplification for brevity’s sake.)

With historical novels, there is such a thing as being too faithful to real life. Tokarczuk goes into far more detail than necessary and drags this story out much longer than called for. She has obviously done much research, and perhaps in doing so she felt the need to cram every name, date, and note of correspondence she encountered into this book, when really some abridgment would have been welcome. Much of the plot is meeting after meeting and meal after meal with these characters, who talk about the same things over and over again, or write letters arguing the same points repeatedly. If ever a novel needed one of those cast-of-characters lists, it’s this one. New characters are constantly introduced who don’t seem to serve much purpose in the story. Other than three or four main characters, everyone else is difficult to tell apart. They all have at least two names, a Jewish name and a Christian name, and it’s hard to keep track of just how everyone is related.

I don’t know Tokarczuk’s religious views, but she is clearly fascinated by the history of this unusual religious sect. As a nonbeliever in any of the big-three theisms, however, I really couldn’t see why anyone considered Jacob a messiah in the first place. He has a natural charisma but doesn’t come across as particularly holy, miraculous, or even good. He reminds one of David Koresh. As messiah, he grants himself the right to take his followers’ wives, daughters, and in some cases sons, for his own pleasure. I kept hoping the congregation would wake up and realize Jacob’s a huckster and a rapist and take their revenge on him.

I do have an interest in Polish history and culture. I’ve read quite a bit of Polish literature and history books on Poland. I would have enjoyed a textbook chapter on Jacob Frank, however, more than I enjoyed Tokarczuk’s tedious rendering of this story. If you read a page at random, you’d find the writing quite adept and beautiful, but as a whole, this novel numbs the mind with hundreds of pages in which not much happens. The last 25% of the book, to be fair, is quite a bit more interesting and eventful than the three quarters that preceded it. In the end, however, I couldn’t help thinking I wasted an inordinate amount of time on a book that kept asking me to sympathize with a self-serving Tartuffe and his gullible disciples. I’ve previously read Tokarczuk’s Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; both are better than this. 

Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers by Joseph Mazur

Disorderly presentation of a complex subject

My attraction to arcane knowledge sometimes leads me to read a book that’s somewhat over my head. Such is the case with Joseph Mazur’s Enlightening Symbols, published in 2014. Mazur is a mathematician and considers himself a “mathematics journalist.” He has published several books on mathematics that appear to be aimed at a general trade audience, but this book may be for a more specialized audience.

Enlightening Symbols is a history of mathematics, in particular the history of how symbols have been created and adopted for various mathematical operations, functions, and concepts. As the subtitle indicates, much of the book is concerned with notation—such as, where did we get +, -, ×, and ÷—but that’s not the whole story. In the early portions of the book, Mazur talks about counting with fingers, sticks, and stones, and the use of the abacus. Ancient mathematicians didn’t even have numerals, at least not widely accepted ones. Early math texts, such as Euclid’s Elements, are written entirely in words. Mazur details how Arabic numerals spread and came to be accepted in Europe—except they’re not really Arabic numerals; they’re of Indian or Hindu origin. The book then goes into the history of algebra and how certain Greek and Latin letters came to be used in equations. Who was the first to decide the mathematical meaning of pi (π), for example?

I read quite a few books on the history of science, which has led to an interest in the history of mathematics. I’m also quite interested in different written languages, to which the subject of mathematical notation pertains. I wish this book would have stuck a little closer to its subtitle and focused more on notation. Mazur, however, keeps venturing into symbology and semiotics—how we process and interpret symbols. Towards the end of the book, he summarizes various psychological experiments concerning mathematical thought, and he gives his own epistemological theories about how the mind works. It’s a subject that clearly fascinates him, but that psychological content was far less interesting to me than the math history.

As a history, however, Enlightening Symbols does have its problems. While the table of contents indicates the book is organized roughly chronologically, Mazur jumps all over the place temporally. No matter what century he’s talking about, he constantly flashes back to earlier figures like Brahmagupta (c. 598–c. 668) and Al-Khwarizmi (c. 789–c. 850), creating a tangled narrative that’s really difficult to follow. In examining who was the first to introduce Indian numerals to Western Europe, Mazur seems to propose about 17 answers to that question. Some he disproves, but I couldn’t even tell you whom he finally settled on. I kept hoping for a chart, but when I finally got one, halfway through the book, it was still confusing. A simple timeline in list or table form would have been most helpful.

You don’t really need to know a whole lot of math to appreciate the history in Enlightening Symbols. I’m not up on calculus, but I could still roughly follow what Mazur had to say about the history of calculus notation. Some interest in linguistics helps. I’ll admit that I’m probably not qualified to review this book. If you’re reading this review at my blog, however, rather than reading a review in the Journal of Mathematics, then you’re probably in the same boat I am. I provide my layman’s perspective of the book, for what it’s worth, to help you decide if you want to read it.

Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

The unentertaining oxymoron of the gentleman pirate

Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) was an Italian-British writer of adventure novels. His books often feature swashbuckling heroes who would go on to be played by the likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and Stewart Granger in Hollywood film adaptations. One such novel (and a film role for Flynn) is Captain Blood, published in 1922.

The auspiciously named Peter Blood is a middle-aged Irish-born ex-soldier and -adventurer who now plies the gentler trade of physician in the English town of Bridgewater. In the 1680s, when rebels supporting James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, rose up against the English King James II, Blood could care less about the politics, but one of his neighbors, a Monmouth rebel, is injured in the fighting, and Blood dutifully tends his wounds. For this service, Blood is arrested by royal forces for aiding and abetting the rebellion. Under normal circumstances, he would be hanged, but instead James sentences a number of prisoners, Blood included, to slavery on the English plantations of Barbados. Even as a slave, Blood manages to gain a reputation as a physician in Barbados, but needless to say, slavery is not to his liking. He escapes his captors, commandeers a ship, and assumes the role of a pirate.

As a pirate story, Captain Blood has its enjoyable moments. The scenes of naval battles and sword duels are well-done and exciting but few and far between. The problem with Captain Blood is that Sabatini constantly wants to emphasize that Blood is a gentleman and only a reluctant pirate. This preoccupation with gentlemanliness, so common to English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, takes almost all the fun out of the story. One might hope for a Han Solo-type scoundrel-with-a-heart-of-gold, but no, that’s not what you’re getting here. Instead, Captain Blood is a dull, smug, self-righteous prig.

Sabatini clearly wants to hold Blood up as the exemplar of manhood, and in doing so he makes the character practically flawless. Blood is the smartest mind in every argument, the most skillful sword in every fight, and the wiliest strategician in every naval engagement. When you think about memorable heroes, they often lose before they can win. We like to see them struggle to earn their victories, but Blood never struggles for anything because he’s perfection incarnate. The only area in which Sabatini allows the character any vulnerability is his heart. Blood develops an unwise and unrealistic infatuation for a beautiful young woman who happens to be the daughter of the slavemaster who owns him. Contrary to his martial heroics, in emotional matters Blood is an absolute milquetoast, and it’s difficult to admire his abjectly submissive way with women.

In between the few action scenes, Captain Blood consists mostly of conversations in which honor is debated at length. Each character asserts: I live by a code of honor. My actions are honorable; yours are not. These are the qualities of a gentleman; you sir, are not a gentleman. In addition, there are the familiar tropes of sworn enemies who “give their word” that they won’t attack their adversaries or try to escape captivity—as usual, that comes across as unrealistic and silly. Again, this English obsession with nobility and gentlemanliness. Credit to the French where it’s due: you won’t find these tedious debates in The Three Musketeers. Instead of wasting so many words on honor, just show us the definition of honor through your character’s behaviors. Alas, Captain Blood could have been a much more compelling book without all this sanctimonious posing. The plot of this novel would have made a good adventure novel along the lines of Alexandre Dumas’s or Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, but the telling is tiresome and reduces this story to a middling pirate tale at best.

Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Like reading a glossary for another book

Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, though he was a philosopher, mathematician, and public intellectual, not a literary writer. (I suppose any nonfiction, however, could be considered essays.) As near as I can tell, Russell explained his mathematical system of philosophy in three works: In The Principles of Mathematics, published in 1903, he spelled out the fundamentals of his system of thought. He then built upon that foundation to create his magnum opus, together with Alfred North Whitehead, entitled Principia Mathematica, which was published in three volumes from 1910 to 1913. Neither of those books is intended for a general audience. Presumably one would need a PhD in mathematics to understand them. Russell did write many books for general readers, however, and in 1919 he released Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, a book intended for lay readers (like myself).

Most of us, when we do math, take for granted the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 or 2 x 2 = 4. As a philosopher, however, Russell takes nothing for granted. Like Rene Descartes or Baruch Spinoza, he starts with first principles, assuming nothing, and systematically builds his argument from the ground up. It’s not enough to accept that 1 + 1 = 2 , one must ask WHY 1 + 1 = 2. Indeed, what exactly is addition, or for that matter, what is a number? That is what this book is about. Russell essentially defines the basic terms and functions of mathematics from a foundation of pure logical reasoning. Entire chapters are devoted to defining terms like rational numbers, real numbers, cardinal numbers, or differentiating between finite and infinite series. Reading this Introduction is much like reading an appendix or glossary to some other book, and Russell even admits as much. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy merely provides the basic Rosetta Stone for understanding more advanced Russell books, like The Principles of Mathematics or the Principia.

You may not need a PhD in mathematics to read this Introduction, but you might very well need a master’s degree. Even if you’re good with numbers, however, that may not help you here. Leaning towards the philosopher rather than the mathematician, Russell writes all the mathematical formulae in paragraph prose, often using confusing, serpentine syntax. In order to express these concepts in textual form, Russell has to give new mathematical definitions to everyday words, which requires you to learn and memorize this new complex vocabulary.

Around chapter 14 (out of 18), however, the book finally turns in the direction of what I expected when I chose to read it; that is, how we use all these mathematical foundations to make logical deductions. From this point onward, the book is really quite interesting and can actually be understood by non-mathematicians. I question, however, whether I really needed to know many of those definitions that Russell spent so much time on. Once you get past chapter 13, many of those terms aren’t even used, and the text reads more like common sense.

What’s the point of all this? I suspect that Russell is a modern version of Pythagoras. He thinks mathematics is not merely a part of reality; mathematics is reality. Or rather, the logical rules that govern mathematics are the same that govern the movements of atoms or the thoughts in our heads. Russell sees no separation between mathematics and logic; they both operate on the same principles, whether the propositions are expressed through number or word. I believe Russell would assert that all human thought is fundamentally mathematical. We collect empirical sensory data, group it together in a complicated system of set theory, and then assess and organize that data with logical principles to create knowledge.

I was lost for much of the first half of this book, but I did find the latter half rewarding. Overall, I don’t think this Introduction is very effective in accomplishing what Russell set out to do, which is to provide the general public with an on-ramp to his school of thought. To get a handle on this subject, you’d be better off reading a Logic 101 textbook for college undergrads.

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part 1: 1832–1839

Off to a slow start

Unlike other A-list names in the history of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe is not known for his novels. He only published one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and it wasn’t a hit. Other than his poem “The Raven,” we know Poe primarily for his short stories. Counts vary, based on what’s considered a short story, but I’m going to go with Wikipedia and the Delphi Classics and say he published 65 stories, plus one unfinished at the time of his death. These stories, or “tales” as they are often called in Poe’s case, have been selected and shuffled like a deck of cards into thousands of published volumes. I’m going to review these 65 and a half stories in chronological order, in three chunks of about 20 stories each.

Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” happens to be a horror story, and a pretty good one, but very few of the tales published in these first seven or eight years of his career could be considered classic Poe horror stories. Another early entry, the nautical ghost story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” is also a step in the right direction. “Ligeia,” from 1838, seems like a turning point in Poe’s career. This is the first story to really epitomize the mix of gothic romance and terrifying horror that we usually think of when we think of Poe. “William Wilson,” a horror story about a man tormented by his doppelganger, is another strong entry from this period. The only selection from this chunk of stories that can truly be considered a Poe masterpiece, however, is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe is also remembered for mystery stories and, to a lesser extent, science fiction. None of the former category are here, but sci-fi is represented by the postapocalyptic “The Conversation Between Eiros and Charmion,” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” which shows us Poe operating in Jules Verne mode, with only partial success.

In this first act of Poe’s career, he wrote just as many humor stories as horror stories. In most cases, the humor has not survived the past nine decades very well. A couple of these comedic efforts remain moderately funny, however, like “Devil in the Belfry” and “A Predicament.” In “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe satirizes the typical fare from the English literary periodical Blackwood’s Magazine. Many of the literary pretensions Poe pokes fun at in this piece, however, are sins he is frequently guilty of committing himself. In these early writings, his biggest fault as a writer is his uncontrollable desire to show of his erudition by loading his prose with gratuitous references to classical poetry, mythology, opera, or other high-brow literature. He also loves to throw in untranslated phrases in French, Latin, Greek, and maybe even German. There’s no need for any of this, and it’s just Poe showing off how well-read he is. In this regard, he’s more pretentious than Melville or Hawthorne. Thankfully, Poe seems to gradually cure himself of this annoying habit towards the end of the 1830s.

I had read “greatest hits” collections of Poe’s horror stories in the past and liked them well enough, but I have to admit that this first foray into his complete works was a disappointment. As previously mentioned, there’s just too much laughless humor and too much effort to impress with high-falutin allusions. His writing did improve over the course of these years, however, and I am confident that the second round of his stories that I dive into will be superior to the first.

Stories in this collection

Metzengerstein

The Duc de l’Omelette

A Tale of Jerusalem

Loss of Breath

Bon-Bon

MS. Found in a Bottle

The Assignation

Berenice

Morella

Lionizing

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

King Pest

Shadow

Four Beasts in One

Mystification

Silence

Ligeia

How to Write a Blackwood Article

A Predicament

The Devil in the Belfry

The Man That Was Used Up

The Fall of the House of Usher

William Wilson

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion