Book Review:  Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Posted on August 22, 2026 by John Walters

I don’t know how this book managed to avoid my radar for all this time. After all, I am a big fan of the surrealistic fantasies of Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, Invisible Cities reminds me of some of the more abstract pieces by Borges than those of any other writer. It is labeled as a novel, but it is not really a novel, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. It consists of a series of dialogs between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo about cities that may or may not exist in Khan’s realm. Polo’s descriptions of the cities are seldom realistic. Instead, after Polo delineates the main attributes of each city, he then presents details that call into question the city’s reality, or makes the city seem to be the opposite of the reader’s initial impression, or hints at all but indiscernible hidden depths that can be glimpsed but not explored. Whether the cities actually exist or not appears to be less important than the conclusions Kublai Khan draws from the descriptions.

As I said, this work reminds me of Borges. However, the best of Borges’s work, despite its slippages into the surreal, always has characters that anchor the story in humankind, while Invisible Cities seems content to remain in abstraction. While reading this I was also reminded of “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of my favorite poems, which beautifully captures the elegance and majestic drama of Khan’s empire.

In the book, Marco Polo is Khan’s employee, his ambassador, but the two seem to have a very special relationship. Khan craves Polo’s stories, almost as if he requires them for self-justification. Although Khan and Polo are the only two characters, each city is presented as unique, with a personality of its own; the vignettes describe the cities almost as if they were human characters, each one starkly different from the last, and each one idiosyncratic to the extreme.

One peculiarity, and an indication that Calvino does not intend for the thirteenth century historical setting to be taken seriously, is that the descriptions of the cities often contain modern props such as postcards, skyscrapers, steamboats, radio antennae, and so on, and these insertions are not explained or questioned; it is as if Khan and Polo have access to the whole of history as they carry on their intellectual exchange. And at one point Khan mentions that there is one city that Polo never speaks of: his native city, Venice. To which Polo replies, “Every time I say something about a city I am saying something about Venice.”

The cities are grouped into categories such as “Cities and Memory,” “Cities and Desire,” “Cities and Signs,” “Trading Cities,” “Cities and the Dead,” and so on. One city called Adelma (the cities all have women’s names) appears to be populated with dead people, and by the end of his vignette Polo questions whether he himself is in fact alive or dead. He observes that “you reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions; on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” The book is full of such profundities.

Overall, Invisible Cities left me mystified, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While contemplating writing this review, I felt concerned that I might not be able to explain it, but really, I don’t have to explain it. Read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

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Book Review:  Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Posted on August 15, 2026 by John Walters

Into Thin Air is a first-person account of a climbing expedition that went horrifically wrong. Krakauer, a journalist, was hired by Outside, an adventure magazine, to join a mountain climbing team whose purpose was to attain the summit of Mount Everest in May 1996. He recounts his journey to Nepal, his hike to Everest Base Camp, his climb to higher altitudes, and his successful ascent to the summit. At the same time, he familiarizes readers with his companions, a host of climbers of diverse nationalities from his and other concurrent expeditions. In fact, there are so many relevant characters in the narrative that it is sometimes difficult to keep track of them, especially since Krakauer alternates between using the first names and the last names of the major players. For the most part, all is well during the weeks of preparation and acclimatization, as they ascend from primary camps to camps at higher altitudes, but the day of the climb turns disastrous when a storm with gale-force winds sweeps the top of the mountain. Although Krakauer himself makes it off the peak successfully, numerous men and women in his and other expeditions do not. In all, eight climbers die in the blizzard-like conditions.

Krakauer was an experienced mountaineer, but he had never attempted to climb at such a high altitude before. His account of the journey and the resultant tragedy is visceral in its intensity. What began as high adventure became a relentless catastrophe for all involved. In gut-wrenching detail we learn the perils of attempting to survive at that altitude. In the face of temperatures far below zero where the lack of oxygen can render climbers imbecilic and sluggish, most of those who could still function responded heroically, but there was a lot of confusion, garbled communications, missed rendezvous, and so on. Krakauer explains that in the aftermath of the disaster there was much controversy about some of the decisions the guides and clients made, and also about his take of what happened in the narrative he shared in his magazine article.

This account works as a rousing tale of adventure; as I read, however, I had mixed feelings about the motivations of the characters. After all, I’ve never had the urge to climb mountains, or at least to climb with the sole purpose of attaining the summits of formidable peaks. I’ve hiked through the Olympic Range in Washington State, and I’ve followed unmarked trails into the Himalayan Mountains alone without maps or guide, but I’ve never felt compelled to climb to the top of a mountain just because it is there. The vast majority of the people on this planet, in fact, share this indifference. For a time, therefore, as I was reading, I wondered how to approach this story. Without this motivation, what was the point? I found it difficult to empathize with people who would risk their lives for such a nebulous distinction. But then I realized that we are all mountain climbers in a metaphorical sense; however, instead of climbing physical mountains we reach for other goals that are just as difficult and dangerous to attain. And our efforts do not always lead to success. Often they end in confusion and despair. Into Thin Air, therefore, becomes a parable of striving for near-impossible goals.

Ultimately, the measure of your courage is not whether or not you reach the top, but how you react when faced with human tragedy along the way. Do you stop to assist, or do you continue onward toward your objective, ignoring the needs around you? In the end, it is not so important who makes it to the top of the mountain. A victory won at the expense of others is a hollow victory; in fact, it is a defeat. All of us have different goals in life, and many of us pursue those goals as avidly as mountain climbers attempting to summit Everest. But we should never lose sight of the fact that the decisions we make along the way are just as important, and often even more important, than reaching the end of the line.

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Book Review:  In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

Posted on August 8, 2026 by John Walters

I picked up this book from the library a few years ago but returned it without reading it after realizing that Lahiri had written it in Italian but someone else then translated it into English. I decided to give it another try after I recently wrote an essay called “Language Learning on the Road,” which caused me to consider the value of not just learning a language but immersing oneself in it.

The main reason I initially objected to the book was the high regard I had for Lahiri as an English-language writer. I first became acquainted with her work when I was living in Greece, teaching English and raising a family. I would frequently check out books from the English-language library of the private high school to which my eldest son had obtained a scholarship. On one of my visits, a librarian approached me, put a copy of Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, into my hand, and told me, “I think you’ll like this.” Like it? I loved it. I was blown away by its brilliance. It deals with the juxtaposition and clash of Bengali and American cultures, a theme that Lahiri continued to explore in her subsequent three books: The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowlands.

The Bengali-American experience particularly resonated with me because I lived in Bangladesh and in West Bengal for several years. For awhile I even studied the Bengali language at Dhaka University, and two of my sons were born in Bangladesh, one in Dhaka and one in Chittagong. I was such a fan of Lahiri’s writing that I would do something I did for almost no other authors: purchase the expensive hardcover editions as soon as they were available so I could read them as quickly as possible.

And so I was skeptical when I first came across In Other Words. I wondered: How could a writer who wrote as brilliantly in one language as Lahiri did suddenly switch to another, effectively having to start again from scratch? This book itself provides the answer.

In Other Words has a most unusual format: the Italian original and the English translation are presented on the left and right-hand sides of the pages. Most English readers might see this as a waste of space, but it is of interest to me because, well, I lived in Italy for several years too. Another of my sons was born there. I learned to communicate fairly well in Italian, and though I haven’t practiced it in over thirty years, I enjoyed comparing snippets of the Italian and English texts.

The book consists of short, simple, but heartfelt essays. Most of them are explanations of why Lahiri decided to uproot herself from New York and move with her family to Rome, Italy, adopting a new country and a new language. She describes herself as a person with three languages, none of which completely satisfied her. Her first language, which she grew up with as a child, was Bengali. When she started school in the States, she had to switch to English, which was difficult at first, but when she began to write in it as a young woman, she met with astounding success. Italian, as an adopted language, allowed her to escape her uncertain linguistic past and plunge forward into a grand experiment.

She explains that when it came to translating In Other Words into English, she found the experience exceedingly difficult. She says: “I was reluctant to move back and forth between the two. My impulse at the time was to protect my Italian.” She addresses the concern I had when I first picked up the book: “If I mention that I’m writing in a new language these days, many people react negatively.” And: “A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.”

*     *     *

After further contemplation, I realize that Lahiri’s experiment in groping for significance with Italian is another nail in the coffin for the use of AI in creative partnership. Creativity in the arts is, after all, a deeply human experience. An AI can analyze all the artwork in the known universe and yet still be incapable of individual creativity. All it can do is be an ultra-sophisticated copycat. On the other hand, Lahiri’s is a profoundly emotional journey.

And she expresses kinship with my own quest as a perennial nomad when she writes: “Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk.” This reminds me of what I wrote at the conclusion of my continent-traversing memoir World Without Pain: The Story of a Search: “Perhaps the journey itself, the search, was the point of it all. But if it was then there was no end, no goal, no destination. One could not arrive; one could not rest, except intermittently. And home? I couldn’t go home again. Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular phase of the journey, not an absolute.”

Lahiri explains that part of her sense of dislocation in Italy had to do with her appearance. Although she spoke fluent Italian, she did not look Italian; as a result, people she encountered, especially shopkeepers, would attempt to speak with her in English, or would address her husband, who looked more Italian than she did. I empathize. When I wandered the Middle East and South Asia, my appearance starkly differentiated me from local people. Circumstances constantly reminded me that I was a stranger in a strange land. And yet when I returned to the country of my birth, the sense of dislocation did not abate. I still felt like an anomaly, an outlier, because after decades of world travel my perspective was so different from that of the people around me.

In conclusion, I have to say that ultimately it is the writer’s choice concerning what to say and how to say it. This is as it should be. Lahiri felt compelled to immerse herself in Italian, and the questioning of this choice, by readers or critics or whoever the hell else objects is ridiculous. It is her call, not theirs. In retrospect, after reading In Other Words, I would say she made the right call. It is a profound meditation on writing, language, culture, and identity. Highly recommended.

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Book Review:  Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time by Mark Adams

Posted on August 1, 2026 by John Walters

This book is not simply a travelogue set in Peru. It is an attempt to follow in the footsteps of the legendary explorer Hiram Bingham III, who supposedly discovered Machu Picchu in 1911. In his literary quest, Adams alternates between his own forays into the Peruvian wilderness with an eccentric Australian guide named John Leivers; Bingham’s expeditionary adventures as related in his books, especially the famous Lost City of the Incas; the fraud accusations and legal attempts to extract artifacts Bingham appropriated for Yale back to Peru; and the accounts of other explorers and discoverers of lost Inca relics and cities. Adams keeps it all moving with frequent humor and a lighthearted style.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was an era of discovery, and explorers who established a claim to fame by going where no one had gone before, such as the North and South Poles, were adulated as heroes. Bingham made several journeys to South America and rediscovered several important Inca ruins, but though he may not have been the first foreigner to the site, he is best known as the man who brought the jungle-overgrown city of Machu Picchu into the public eye. He also helped to popularize archeology. In fact, Adams delves into Bingham’s influence in the crafting of certain fictional characters that became famous in popular culture. First came a B-movie in 1954 called Secrets of the Incas, starring Charlton Heston. Later, in 1981, the world was introduced to the archeologist-adventurer Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In Turn Right at Machu Picchu, Adams’s travel partner Leivers, an accomplished explorer who spends most of his time in the wilderness, seems more of an Indy type than Adams, who comes across as a man out of his element, an editor plucked from behind his desk and deposited unprepared into a Peruvian jungle. Together they experience one misadventure after another, and along the way, the historical facts that Adams compiles make some of the crazy stuff in the Indy movies seem a little less crazy – or at least more plausible.

What sets this book apart from other travelogues is its depth and scope. In alternating between his story and Bingham’s, Adams gives the tale historical perspective – so that it becomes much more than just a narrative of a collection of misfits stumbling through the jungle.

Nowadays, of course, Machu Picchu is one of South America’s most prominent tourist attractions; thousands of people visit it daily. Still, despite the crowds that he and Leivers had to contend with at the site, Adams manages to evoke a sense of wonder as he describes this amazing complex of ruins set high on a ridge between two mountains. This sense of mystic wonder goes far beyond its historical roots. It reminds us that the fantasy worlds we read of or watch in films actually existed, albeit in other forms, in times past, and that the world, and by extension the universe, is still a place of mystery and wonder and excitement and complexity.

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Book Review:  Finding My Way: A Memoir by Malala Yousafzai

Posted on July 25, 2026 by John Walters

In parts of Finding My Way, Malala sounds like a typical young woman attempting to fit in, have fun, and enjoy new experiences during her college days at Oxford University. However, there is nothing typical about Malala at all. She was born in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan, and despite the conservatism of the local culture, from an early age she became a fervent advocate for the education of girls and young women. When she was only fifteen, she was shot in the face by a Taliban assassin, lapsed into a coma for almost two weeks, and woke up in a hospital in Birmingham, England. As she recovered from her injuries, as an exile in England she continued to speak up for the rights of girls under repressive regimes, and at the age of seventeen she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts; she was the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. This was followed by meetings with world leaders as she traveled internationally to advocate for her cause. This background is covered extensively in the memoir I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.

Finding My Way begins in England, and most of it takes place during her years studying at Oxford University. As I alluded to above, though, it was impossible for her to completely blend in with the other college students. For one thing, she had two bodyguards assigned to her on a twenty-four-hour basis. Even when she lived in a college dorm, they slept in the room next door; for another, despite her heavy study schedule she traveled extensively to continue her advocacy for education. Because she was an international icon, everything she did made its way onto social media in text and photos, and if any of her activities were judged to be even remotely improper, her accounts would be inundated with abusive comments. She also developed PTSD from the shooting incident, which caused devastating nightmares and severe anxiety attacks.

Out of deference to her parents and apprehension of the rabid online community, she did not date, but she did gain a circle of friends with whom she went out for meals, attended parties, and engaged in a variety of other activities. She eventually met a young Pakistani man to whom she became engaged and then married.

All of this is told in an intimate, elegant style that draws readers in as confidants. One chapter might deal with college pranks, but then in the next Malala might be in New York having facial surgery to restore feeling to the nerves damaged by the Taliban bullet, meeting world leaders at an educational conference, or undergoing trauma brought on by memories of the gunman shooting her.

In a touching chapter near the end of the book, she travels with her new husband to Shangla, in the mountains of Pakistan, to visit a school for girls that the Malala Fund had founded but she had never seen. She writes: “I wanted the school to be a place where students didn’t feel the limitations of the outside world, where they could dream of the future and believe in themselves. I also wanted to see that the deficiencies in my own education, the things lacking for most Pakistani girls, were remedied here.” This is the heart of the book and what sets Malala apart from typical college students: she has devoted her life – indeed, has put her life on the line – to advocate for the rights of others. This fervent dedication continually illuminates her words. Read Finding My Way; you’ll see what I mean.

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Book Review:  Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Posted on July 18, 2026 by John Walters

As a writer who frequently delves into the genres of science fiction and fantasy, I have, in the past, conjured up various types of aliens as story characters. Depending upon the specific parameters and requirements of the tales, I have attempted to make them as realistic as possible, or at least explain them well enough so that readers would be able to accomplish the willing suspension of disbelief that is necessary for consuming and enjoying fiction. However, I’m not a scientist, let alone an astrophysicist. Beyond high school classes, the only science I have learned is from books that I picked up and read on my own. It is helpful, therefore, to have some rudimentary guidelines from someone familiar with the basic details of how the universe is put together.

Tyson expresses his interest in the subject when he declares in the book’s very first sentence: “Ever since childhood I’ve wanted to be abducted by aliens.” What follows is an overview of what aliens might be like if they really do exist out there – based on what we know of basic irrefutable universal truths. Don’t worry: there are not many actual equations or complicated explanations; Tyson keeps his arguments cloaked in terms a layperson would understand. He discusses what aliens might look like to us, what we might look like to aliens with various types of senses apart from the ones we possess, what forms alien technology could possibly take, what powers aliens might have that we don’t, and what evidence there really is that aliens are out there.

Take Me to Your Leader remains lighthearted throughout. To illustrate the concepts he is explaining, Tyson draws numerous examples from popular culture: Star Wars, Star Trek, the DC universe, the Marvel universe, the Alien movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The War of the Worlds, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and many others. These pop culture references not only provide examples with which most people are familiar, but it is also great fun to find out if various superhero abilities and technological capabilities we read about in novels or watch on movie screens are actually scientifically valid. You might be surprised about what can and cannot be accomplished for real (at least theoretically) in this vast intricate universe of ours.

It is a short book, easy to read, and, as I mentioned, Tyson invariably keeps things on the light side. Those of you with scientific training probably know most of this already, but you may nevertheless enjoy reading about how the principles you have learned are correctly or incorrectly utilized in popular books and films. As for me, I am familiar with the basic concepts Tyson discusses, although perhaps not the details. And I don’t really care, when I am reading science fiction and fantasy, whether the author conforms to all the rules. I’ll put up with a lot of deviation from reality for the sake of a good story. The main pleasure for me while reading this book is the trip down nostalgia lane, the recollections of growing up reading and watching the fantastic stories that Tyson uses as examples.

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Book Review:  Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard

Posted on July 11, 2026 by John Walters

I first encountered Annie Dillard while raising a family in Greece. I started with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and then moved on to Holy the Firm, The Writing Life, and Teaching a Stone to Talk. I liked her blend of descriptions of forays into the outdoors or travel to distant lands juxtaposed with incidents from her life, philosophical observations, and occasional surrealistic flights of fancy. What provoked me to reread this book was a personal reflection on old age: how it seems to speed up time. Days, weeks, months, seasons, and years go by much quicker, in my perception, than they used to. And this insight caused me to recall a passage I once read in a Dillard essay in which she is vacationing with a nine-year-old child near a river, and the child riding a bike up and down a hill made her realize that when you are young, life appears to stretch on endlessly, like an uphill slope, and milestones take forever to achieve. When you are older, though, it is as if you are cycling downhill: the ride goes faster and faster until it is over. It turns out that this essay, “Aces and Eights,” is the last one in the book, and the section I was looking for takes up but a few paragraphs. Still, it contrasts the outlooks of young and old effectively. She describes the impatience and boredom of youth and then adds: “But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons?” This is what I read Annie Dillard to discover: the transition from the simple to the sublime.

I did not only read the final essay, though; to warm up to it I read the rest of the book first. Some pieces initiate with walks near her home on an island in Puget Sound, while others take place in remote locations such as the Galapagos Islands and the Arctic and Antarctic. One of the longer essays, “An Expedition to the Pole,” mixes descriptions of attending a Catholic mass and the tragic history of polar exploration. It closes with a comedic dreamlike sequence involving Dillard, famous polar explorers, a bevy of clowns, a priest, and Jesus Christ himself. Most of the essays do not veer this far astray from reality, but several of them involve a connection or comparison between seemingly disparate subjects.

Dillard has a clear, clean writing style that is elegant but easy to follow. Reading her essays is like undertaking a journey that begins in familiar territory but then gets stranger and stranger the farther you get away from home. If you have never read Dillard before, you might want to start with the classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. But her other books, including Teaching a Stone to Talk, are well worth reading too, for their cadenced prose and insightful commentary on the natural world, travel, creativity, philosophy, and spirituality.

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A Summertime Gift for My Blog Followers

Posted on July 8, 2026 by John Walters

As a summer gift to readers, I have enrolled digital editions of some of my books and stories in the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale, which runs through the month of July. (It is called the Summer/Winter Sale because it is summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.) Complete books are half price, marked down from $3.99 to $1.99. Short stories are available to download for free. Take advantage of this sale to stock up on some great reading material.

The complete listing of discounted or free books is here. The available books include:

Road Signs: Tales of the Surreal and Fantastic

When a hitchhiker returning from an extended trip abroad in the early 1970s crosses the United States, he plunges into a dark, surrealistic, frightening landscape from which there seems to be no escape.

After a worldwide plague has decimated their city, four children searching for sustenance enter a seemingly deserted mansion, only to find out that its owner, a madman seeking the alchemical secret to immortality, has modeled it after an elaborate ancient torture chamber.

In the aftermath of the official cancellation of Medicare, Social Security, and other government welfare programs, a destitute senior is relegated to an internment camp for old folks. There he discovers that all is not as it seems, and the recalcitrant elders have some tricks up their sleeves that they can use to deal with the pitiless system that has banished them from its midst.

In these and other provocative, mind-bending tales you’ll find alternative realities, future battlefields, enraged poltergeists, mythological mischief-makers, and freedom fighters on a far planet.

A Glimpse of the Cosmic Dance and Other Stories

In a world whose inhabitants routinely visit famous historical events, two jaded road-weary tourists take a holiday in an isolated retrograde enclave where time travel is forbidden.

Humankind is plunged into chaos as the recently deceased reappear and take up residency in their former homes.

As the result of an expensive technique that restores their youthful vigor, wealthy old people gallivant from place to place adventure-seeking and partying. However, their newfound energy comes at a terrible cost.

In these and other tales you’ll find heart-pounding excitement, deadly perils, baffling perplexities, complex conundrums, dread mysteries, deceptive hallucinations, fantasy landscapes, far planets, distant futures, evil menaces, and unlikely heroes.

Silent Interviews and Other Tales of the Telepathic Guild

Long have the clandestine members of the Telepathic Guild assisted individuals, corporations, and governments by means of their unique skills. Guild Home functions as a headquarters and a refuge, and its strict regulations foster unity and discipline.

In this linked series of stories, a guild member falls in love with an outsider and is faced with a life-changing decision; a group of young people rebel against the guild’s stringent rules; a famous sports star discovers he is telepathic and must choose between his wealth and celebrity status and a chance to change the world; a renegade telepath establishes affinity with a wolf pack in the arctic wastes; a talented telepathic detective attempts to solve a brutal murder at a chaotic science fiction convention.

These and other tales explore the fascinating, enigmatic, and often dangerous lives of those who have sacrificed everything to join the guild and use their extraordinary abilities for the betterment of humankind.

Thoughts from the Aerie: Memoirs and Essays

After living abroad for thirty-five years in India, Bangladesh, Italy, Greece, and other countries, John Walters returned to his home country, the United States, with his sons. When the youngest moved out, he found himself alone in a fourth floor apartment with a spectacular view. He dubbed his new home the aerie.

For some people solitude can be devastating, but for others it can provide a unique opportunity to maximize the creative experience. These scintillating and captivating essays trace the roots of artistic destiny, follow the intricate patterns of past relationships, and offer fascinating observations about writing, travel, literature, perseverance amidst adversity, optimism during a pandemic, and other topics.

Reviews and Reflections on Books, Literature, and Writing: Volume Four

From the author’s introduction:

Picture a book as a gateway to a new land and a book review as a tantalizing glimpse of it, a brief travel memoir of someone who has been there and come back. A large part of what makes life so thrilling is our appreciation of the interpretations of experiences that we find in books. So sit back in your favorite chair or couch or lie down on your bed or chaise lounge and dive in. Allow these reviews to assist you in your own literary explorations by guiding you to new worlds of imagination and adventure.

The stories available for free include some of my personal favorites such as “The Hospice,” “Sink or Swim,” and “Memory Shack.”

So head on over to Smashwords and pick up some thrilling and thoughtful books, short stories, memoirs, and essays at deep discounts and even free.

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MoPOP: The Museum of Pop Culture

Posted on July 4, 2026 by John Walters

I decided to take a bus to the Seattle Center, the former site of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, to visit the Museum of Pop Culture, commonly known as MoPOP. When Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, founded it in 2000, it was called the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, or the EMP Museum.

When I first heard about the EMP Museum, I was living in Greece, but a longing to visit it immediately erupted in me. After a long hiatus, I had begun to write again, and the stories that naturally burst into my mind were tales of science fiction and fantasy.

I had read some works of speculative fiction when I was a teen; on one Christmas my maternal grandmother gave me a boxed set of Robert Heinlein novels, and on another Christmas she gave me a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. These were some of the basics, of course, but I never truly understood how dynamic the field was in the early seventies until on a whim, while attending the University of Santa Clara for my first and only year, I enrolled in a course devoted to science fiction as literature. I didn’t really understand what I was getting into. I spent most of my time in those days stoned on marijuana and/or psychedelics, and I thought that it would be trippy to get college credits to read science fiction. The text was The Mirror of Infinity: A Critic’s Anthology of Science Fiction edited by Robert Silverberg, and it was brimming with brilliant, cutting-edge stories by old masters and also rising stars in the so-called New Wave, which was sweeping the field at the time. Many of the stories devastated me with their originality, acumen, depth, contemporary relevance, and linguistic precision, but the one that hit me the hardest was “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison. Before I even finished reading that story I knew – I was fully convinced – that there was nothing else on Earth for me but to be a writer.

When I returned to Seattle, I haunted the public library nearest our house searching for more science fiction, and that’s when I came across anthologies showcasing the Nebula Awards presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America. From these volumes I became acquainted with the works of Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delaney, and numerous other writers that were breaking through traditional genre constraints and writing literary works using elements of science fiction and fantasy as lenses to analyze contemporary society. I too wrote stories and submitted them to magazines, but in those days of yore I never had any success selling them. Later I became interested in memoir-like novels such as On the Road and Tropic of Cancer, and I put science fiction aside. Still, when my Greek wife and I settled in Thessaloniki to raise our family and I resumed writing, it seemed natural to turn to science fiction and fantasy for inspiration. And I had matured, and I had a better idea of what I wanted to say, and I began selling those stories, and they began to appear in magazines and anthologies. I joined Science Fiction Writers of America (now known as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association), which became a link to the field in my faraway location.

You can see, then, why I became so excited when I heard of MoPOP.

As I wandered about this latest time, my mood was a bit melancholy. After all, in the past I had usually gone with one or more of my sons, and their thrilled appreciation and sense of wonder amplified the experience for me.

The first vivid memory I have of exploring the museum and perusing the exhibits is from shortly after I moved back to Seattle with my youngest son, who was in middle school at the time. I still have a picture from that visit of him sitting in the mock bridge of the Starship Enterprise. On that occasion we focused on the science fiction and fantasy sections and gave only cursory glances to the displays in the music section. On another occasion, my son and one of his uncles became enthralled and spent an inordinate amount of time in the newly opened horror section while my sister and I waited nearby. On yet another foray to MoPOP we discovered the room in which visitors could play various indie video games, and my son wanted to spend a lot of time in there trying out the multitudinous options.

During this latest tour, my solo visit, I meandered through the fantasy section and the science fiction section. The horror section was closed for renovations, but I didn’t miss it that much; horror is more my son’s thing than mine. I then walked through the Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana exhibits and the rest of the rooms in the music culture wing, and finally I took a look at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

I hadn’t been there for years, but nothing much had changed, which contributed to my feeling of melancholy and nostalgia. Despite the futuristic appearances of the items on display, it was like a personal journey into the past.

Nearby MoPOP are the Space Needle and the Seattle Center terminal for the monorail, which was built for the World’s Fair but is still operational. These landmarks caused me to remember visiting the World’s Fair with my family back in 1962; I would have been nine years old. A blast from the more distant past.

*     *     *

I returned to MoPOP recently, but this time my intention was to focus on the pop culture and music side of the museum, which I had usually neglected on past visits. My kids and relatives and I would spend a long time exploring the realms of science fiction and fantasy and give a cursory glance at the other side at the end. This time, I never even made it to the science fiction and fantasy side.

I started out by visiting the exhibit called “Massive: The Power of Pop Culture.” It offers far more than a mere collection of objects; in fact, it is an attempt to explain the origins, importance, appeal, and fandom of pop culture through not only displays but also multimedia presentations. One of my favorites involves a chair with a panel on one arm that allows you to choose a year, and an enormous video display opposite shows the pop culture highlights from the selected year. For instance, when I clicked on 1969, the display showed video clips from the Apollo moon landing and from the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.

I then entered the exhibition space called “Nirvana: Bringing Punk to the Masses,” but this time I spent more time therein than I had in the past. In particular, I paused to watch a video about the grunge movement. Nirvana’s brief but brilliant ascendancy to fame and Seattle’s emergence as an important oasis for grunge music happened while I was living overseas, first on the Indian Subcontinent and then in Europe, and as a result I had known little about Nirvana’s impact on pop culture. From the Nirvana exhibit I moved next door to the Jimi Hendrix room. This exhibit mainly consists of posters, guitars, and a few items of memorabilia, but it offers a unique opportunity to listen to Hendrix’s idiosyncratic guitar play in an enclosed soundproof space.

I think that I did the right thing in concentrating on one wing of the museum instead of spreading out my attention too thinly. In the future, I may take this approach with other massive museums I have previously visited; that is, to first focus on the areas I usually leave until last.

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On Rereading The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur by Arthur Hoyle

Posted on June 27, 2026 by John Walters

Before I begin this review, I have a confession to make: When I picked this book off the shelf on one of my rare forays to the Seattle Central Library downtown, it slipped my mind that I had already read it several years ago. Considering how many books I read (as of this writing I’ve already published four thick volumes of reviews) it’s not surprising that I might forget one now and then, although admittedly this rarely happens. It is one of several Miller biographies I have read, others being Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller by Mary V. Dearborn and Henry Miller: The Paris Years by Brassai. No biography I have read so far comes close to Miller’s own accounts of his adventures in his autobiographical novels, but then in these it is difficult to know what actually happened and what is hyperbole or surrealistic riffing.

A Seeker in Big Sur, in fact, is not straightforward biography; it is mainly commentary and synopses of his books and letters. It is slow going in parts as it goes on for page after page summarizing books that I have already read and reread. I persisted, though, because I found the story of Miller’s sojourn at Big Sur fascinating, especially his dysfunctional relationships and his decades-long battle with the American censors, which prevented the publication of his most important works: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. He eventually prevailed, with the assistance of a multitude of powerful admirers of his work, but fame and fortune only confused and discombobulated him. He was happier by far as a mendicant in Paris back in the 1930s than he was in the sixties when he became a literary icon.

Miller’s is another example of writers who have created great books, but their personal lives, in contrast, are confused and unfocused. As Hoyle points out, Miller had several wives at various times, who would function as muses and provide some stability in his otherwise chaotic life, but after he would finish a stretch of important work, he would abandon them and move on to something and someone else. He was also terrible at practical matters such as money management, which reminded me of the pecuniary shortcomings of another writer who was also one of my profound influences, Jack London. This emphasized, or perhaps I should say re-emphasized, the often jarring difference between artists and their work. Artistic inspiration exists apart from everyday well-being and comfort. Often deep dark experiences bring forth the greatest masterpieces. You would think that Miller’s artistic exuberance as displayed in his best work would have carried on in his personal life, but instead, as time went on his life got increasingly confusing and stressful.

In his books, Miller makes himself an invulnerable, larger than life character, but this vision does not translate to reality. He was in truth very insecure and self-centered. There is much to admire in his artistry but much to criticize in his day to day life – as is true with many of us. Still, his story is of a man determined to go his own way and break new ground in literature, and in this he succeeded. His works, once let loose on the world, inspired many other fledgling writers to remain dissatisfied with imitation and instead seek their own voices. And that includes yours truly.

*     *     *

As a postscript, I would like to mention that pondering Henry Miller’s life while reading this book caused me to meditate on the differences in the way I approached reading when I was young with the way I read now. Back in the early 1970s, after I had realized that I was first and foremost a writer, I attacked new books with the passion of a starving predator. As Irving Stone relates of the struggling author in Jack London: Sailor on Horseback (one of my significant early reading experiences): “Jack London about to tackle a new volume upon which he had stumbled in a wilderness trail was like an abysmal brute, a starving wolf poised to spring. He sank his teeth into the throat of the book, shook it fiercely until it was subdued, then lapped up its blood, devoured its flesh, and crunched its bones until every fiber and muscle of that book was part of him, feeding him its strength.” Often I didn’t even know what I was looking for as I groped my way through the literary wilderness, but first subconsciously and then more and more with purpose, I devoured books I came across that, whether fiction or nonfiction, rang with truths that I needed to hear to light my own unique literary pathway. So it was with Walden by Henry David Thoreau, the individualist and free thinker; so it was with On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the ode to the open highway that leads to unknown destiny; and so it was with Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, which exploded upon my consciousness like no other book ever had. At that stage of my life I was not interested in the authors themselves and their imperfections and foibles – except for the decisions they made and the adventures they had that directly contributed to the outflow of their art. Each of these writers – London, Thoreau, Kerouac, Miller – plunged into life and lived it robustly, and then used their experiences to fuel the flames of their artistic passions, displaying life with all its fervor, pleasures, pains, beauty, ugliness, raunchiness, honesty, deceit, violence, love, hatred – in short, whatever raw emotional truth they encountered on their various odysseys. I was desperately hungry too, when I set out on my decades-long road journey, to discover these truths for myself so that I could convert them into art through my writing. The books I read during this time were part of the process.

Now, having lived life for over seventy years and having written almost forty books, over one hundred fifty short stories, and countless essays and book reviews, I approach my reading with a more nuanced perspective. I am no longer a hungry young wolf in the wilderness. I am still hungry, but my hunger manifests in different ways. Not long ago, I reread Tropic of Cancer for the fourth or fifth time, but it did not strike me as viscerally as it had before. As I wrote in my review: “To be honest, I found it somewhat disappointing, but in all fairness, Miller’s words have not changed, I have.” When I was young, I virtually idolized the authors who helped shape my own literary vision, but as I grew more accomplished and mature as a writer, I realized that though the works for which they are known are splendid, the writers themselves have feet of clay. And even the works, when viewed from various stages of life, evolve in significance. They will never lose their importance as milestones, but I will also never be able to approach them again from the same standpoint as when I was young, lean, and ravenous for inspiration.

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