There has been drama lately about a book site that rhymes with FoodNeeds, and how it is now not what many readers want: useful book reviews and recommendation, without a bunch of ads. We independent bloggers and the Open Library can help fill that need.

So, here is a start of a list of books that I like.

The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson. This is a large set of books, published in both three and seven volume versions.  Get the hardbound three volume version if you can (perhaps from your local library), as it has maps in color that help you orient to the complex, far ranging story lines. Alchemy, cryptography, mechanical computers, monads, freeing of slaves, economic and monetary theory (who ever would have thought that could be an entertaining plot element?), a pirate queen, natural (and unnatural) philosophy, sword fights, the invention of The Calculus, religious intolerance and freedom, useful words like mephitic and sizar, it has everything in the 3000+ pages. Events that seem to be small details in early chapters loom large in the end. It is also essential to the Stephenson Universe, as you will find allusions in this later works, such as the Waterhouse Computer in "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" (Hmm, that ambiguity of death theme keeps popping up...)

Fewterer: a handler of large dogs, such as greyhounds. This led me to the discovery of The Arcana Wiki and their list of Medieval Occupations ^[1].

Pocillovy: the hobby of collecting egg cups. This led me to the discovery of World Wide Words ^[2].

A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among amateur websites. ^[1]

Back to the '90s, theepdinker has joined geekring. Does theepdinker count as educational, social, or amateur?

To what end are the words that I write,
if they fade away into the night?

Everyone hates a "404" message when they click on a dead link.

The technology does not yet address this automatically, so your poor blogger is left with doing work-arounds to combat this link rot.

So, I will endeavor to include footnotes with archived versions of sites that I link to, and to archive them if they are not already archived.

For example, Verbomania ^[1] has an interesting collection of non-english and border-line english words.

And here is this post ^[2] on the waybackmachine

Werdrobe: badger excrement (OK, let us go there).

Spitchock: To split an eel length-wise in order to cook it.

Poonch: a kind of catfish from India.