Hello Readers, Listeners, Friends,

Joselyn and I are heading south for about 10 days, to attend the San Diego Chamber Music Workshop (held at Scripps College, nowhere near San Diego), and a few more days driving back along the California coast (visit friends in Santa Barbara; anniversary dinner in Carmel).

In the meantime, I'm re-recording three shows from the Way Back Machine, so far back that Words on Books was called Bookwaves, and was a bit longer than allowed at present.

You can stop reading here, and I'll send you a new WOB along about the second week of August.

Or, if you have the stamina and morbid curiosity, you might want to read the (slightly updated and refreshed) scripts. Here they are:

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RETRO WOB re-aired July/August 2006

Dinner and a Book

First aired July 11, 2004 (Original WOB)

Every day should be like this one... Daylight hours spent buying books for the fall from a variety of interesting publishers, working with sales rep John Gould, who has become a good friend.

We spent a lot of time talking about families, and politics, before we got down to buying books. We whipped through a dozen publishers in about seven hours, including lunch.

Then we went out to dinner in Mendocino where we talked about books, and families, and politics.

Bread sticks, wine, women, books, and an attentive waiter. Life is good.

John listened to the recorded version of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude while driving across Nevada. He likes the book, and have I read it? It's a novel about growing up tough in Brooklyn.

Well no, I haven't read it, but like all good booksellers I know the author's reputation, his other books, how well they're selling, what customers say about them, and if any local book groups have adopted one. I know the author's more famous book is Motherless Brooklyn, which I also haven't read, and I saw the author once at a trade show and he's very young.

The food arrived, and John's wife Elly asked me if I had any books to recommend.

Well yes, I replied between mouthfuls. Have you heard of a writer named Alan Furst?

Yes, Elly said, I've read him. He doesn't mean THAT Furst, John interrupted. It's amazing how some couples can answer questions for each other that haven't quite been asked yet.

Alan Furst, F-U-R-S-T, I said, writes atmospheric historical novels, or mysteries, or thrillers, or all three actually, set in obscure places around the Baltic or the Mediterranean Sea, places like that, in the tense period before World War II, when people were taking sides, and intelligence operatives were everywhere. Tramp steamers are big in these books, also smoky, secret places.

These books are so atmospheric, I quipped, lamely, that you can just about see coal smoke curling out from between the pages.

The Alan Furst novel I just read is Dark Voyage. One early scene is so masterly it is astonishing.

The Dutch tramp steamer Noordenham is sailing under false colors at night off Algeria in May, 1941.

"There's some damn thing out there," Kees said.

DeHaan stared out into the rain and darkness, saw nothing. But, somewhere out to port, just astern, was the low rumble of an engine.

"Smell it?" Kees said. "Diesel fumes, and no outline I can see."

A ship low to the water, with big engines that ran on diesel. DeHaan swore to himself -- that could only be a submarine...

"He's stalking us," Kees said.

I made the mistake of reading Dark Voyage late one night. I found myself turning the final pages at two in the morning, buzzed, jazzed, and nowhere near nodding off.

It's possible some listeners have forgotten just how thrilling a good novel can be. These books will keep you awake late at night, or listening alertly as you drive the long track between towns in Nevada.

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Retro WOB re-aired July/August 2006

First aired October 23, 1997 (Original WOB)

The episode of Words on Books I'm repeating today first aired in October, 1997, back when Words on Books was titled Bookwaves...

As one of the newest programers on KZYX, I’d like to say I’m proud to be heard on a station that takes issues of free speech seriously. And one that plays so much classical chamber music, but that’s just me.

So far my five-minute Philippics have been about nothing more controversial than children's books, or a new biography of Napoleon Bonaparte.

I have shared precious air time with daily live broadcasts of the Bear Lincoln trial, and with a variety of newsworthy public affairs programs. This kind of programming contains information of great importance to the people who live here.

Journalist A. J. Liebling wrote that "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" and it's still true today. Of all the sources of news, information and entertainment, very few are supported primarily by their readers or listeners. When you support KZYX you are voting with your wallet for freedom of speech -- and for a heck of a lot of great and diverse entertainment.

In this New Age, when great media conglomerates own the major national book publishers as well as most newspapers, when TV sings the seductive song of Buy Me -- Try Me, when most of the things you hear on the air are driven by advertising -- where do you turn to hear your neighbors talking to each other? To hear local news that doesn't focus on car accidents? To alert the community to environmental dangers or neighborhood meetings? To listen to Bach, Mozart and Charlie Parker?

You already know the answer to these questions, because you are listening to it. KZYX has become the best source of unbiased local news and commercial-free programming for many miles around.

Recently, bookstores and libraries celebrated National Banned Books Week. Maybe you didn't know that all sorts of books still are being challenged or banned from school and library shelves.

Among the most frequently challenged books are Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and books by Maya Angelou, J. D. Salinger, Alice Walker, Judy Blume and others.

According to the people who track censorship, sex, profanity, violence, and racism were the primary targets, but challenges also were directed at books considered "dreary" (that would be Shel Silverstein's A Light in the Attic), books that contained "armpit farts" (Bruce Coville's My Teacher Glows in the Dark), books some believed handled suicide inappropriately (Judith Guest's Ordinary People), and books which depicted teen smoking (Ryan White: My Own Story).

In Lindale, Texas, classics such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Herman Melville's Moby Dick were removed from the high school's reading list because they "conflicted with the values of the community."

In many parts of the world simply reporting the news can be dangerous. In 1993 Reuters photo-journalist Dan Eldon was stoned to death by a Somali mob reacting against a UN bombing. His journals are the subject of a new book titled The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon. In Algeria's civil war journalists are targeted for death. And in many other places writers are intimidated or silenced.

In Mendocino county, life proceeds in its serene and beautiful way. The native Americans here know it was not always thus, and may not be thus in the future. We have to protect and nurture our liberties, or we will lose them.

Radio stations as interesting and useful as this one can only survive when their tiny operating budgets are solidly and fully supported by listeners. That's you, and that's me, and now is always the best time to help KZYX continue to exist and improve.

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RETRO WOB -- re-aired in July/August 2006

Always Reading

First Aired Friday November 26, 1999 (Original WOB)

I'm always reading, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for work, sometimes just because I'm compulsive.

I find I can't eat without a newspaper, or at the very least a printed paper napkin with some words on it. If I don't have that I'll read the orange juice carton. I'll read the label on the espresso machine. What does REG US PAT OFF mean, anyway?

I read menus, the fine print on warranty cards, any old thing, the wrapping on toilet paper rolls. I can't help it. My wife reads road signs out loud while we're driving -- it's kind of soothing. There's that old Bartley Pump sign! Airport Road! Merging Traffic! In Europe she said things like Ospedale! and Office de Tourisme! ... I married a talking odometer.

Yes, I'm a compulsive reader. I'm also a concurrent reader. No doubt many of you also have between four and fourteen novels and other books going at the same time.

Right now I am on page 41 of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious new novel, Sick Puppy. I'm also on page 27 of Terry Pratchett's hilarious new novel, The Fifth Elephant. I'm all the way through Brendan O'Carroll's hilarious new novel, The Chiselers. It was so good I wish I could read it again and will. I'm also reading Used and Rare, Travels in the Book World by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. According to my tattered bookmark I'm on page 59.

Those are the books I'm currently reading. Other books lean on shelves or sit in stacks all over the house.

Then there's back issues of The New Yorker, two digital camera magazines, a PC magazine, news of a writing contest, clothing catalogs, suitcase catalogs, running shoe catalogs, running shoe socks catalogs, and so forth.

Here's a book I first planned to read in 1985, the year it was published. It's California Currents, An Exploration of the Ocean's Pleasures, Mysteries and Dilemmas by Marie De Santis, who used to work on fishing boats out of Noyo Harbor, back when there actually were a lot of small fishing boats working out of Noyo Harbor.

A copy of California Currents arrived in the mail this week from Alden Books in State College, PA. They acquired the book as a discard from the Mifflin County Library, and now I have it again. Book collecting is another great addiction to have, by the way. It's not fattening and doesn't give you cancer. For weeks I've been planning to read The Lighthouse Stevensons. It's about Robert Louis Stevenson's Scotch forebears -- who built most of the lighthouses around Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Stevenson didn't go into civil engineering. He followed a woman to America instead and the rest is history -- and Treasure Island and A Child's Garden of Verses and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped ...

The Home Town Advantage by Stacy Mitchell, subtitled, "How to Defend Your Main Street Against Chain Stores... And Why It Matters" came free from my industry trade group, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Members voted some years ago to add "independent" to the association's name, so you can imagine why this book interests us.

A stack of books about a foot high sits on the desk in front of me. I plan to savor each, then tell you about it. Right now, however, I'm about to read a couple of music CD inserts, then look through half a dozen cookbooks for the best pumpkin soup recipe.

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Congratulations! You read all the way down to here! Now, go out and read a REALLY GOOD book, why don't you?

Best, Tony

Aired Sunday July 23, 2006 at 10:55 am and Wednesday July26, 2006 at 1:00 pm