Tag: books

Based Books Day 1

The first day of the Based Book Sale was won by a man dead for more than a century.

Benito María de los Dolores Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) who was regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Miguel de Cervantes has taken the gold in the first day of the 2026 Summer Based Book Sale. Trafalgar, the first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — sold fifty copies in the first day of the week-long sale.

Closely following in second place with 48 sales and the silver is Sarah Hoyt’s No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).

The rest of the trilogy is available through the Summer Based Book Sale and also stands in fourth place with 40 sales.

Hardcoded: AI and the End of the Scientific Consensus (The Mathematics of Evolution) by Vox Day and his AI associate, Claude Athos, captured the bronze with 46 sales.

It’s wonderful to see people discovering Pérez Galdós, who is a novelist of the first rank despite being nearly unknown to the English-reading public.

I will confess that I don’t quite understand exactly how the rankings are compiled – I assume through the official affiliate links – since I see 10 more sales for Hardcoded than for Trafalgar, but regardless, it’s great to see people checking out Pérez Galdós because there are a lot more volumes of the Episodios Nacionales to come. As you can see, we’ve already got next week’s translation ready to go to the translation subscribers on Monday.

There are a lot of good books available in the Based Books Sale. There are at least four that I’m planning to read myself. And while we’re on the topic of books, the following print editions are now available via NDM Express:

DISCUSS ON SG

THE COURT OF CARLOS IV

The second volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

The Court of Carlos IV plunges young Gabriel Araceli into the treacherous world of Madrid’s theatrical and aristocratic circles on the eve of Spain’s greatest political crisis. It is 1807, and Gabriel, now sixteen, serves as errand boy and general factotum to Pepita González, a spirited actress at the Teatro del Príncipe. Through her, he enters a dazzling and corrupt world: rival actresses, jealous leading men, aristocratic patrons whose drawing rooms double as nests of political conspiracy, and the great tragedian Isidoro Máiquez, whose volcanic temper and ill-fated passions drive much of the novel’s action.

Two women dominate Gabriel’s orbit. Lesbia, a beautiful young duchess with an angelic face and faithless heart, plays men against one another with practiced ease. Amaranta, a noblewoman of striking beauty and genuine moral substance, takes a mysterious interest in Gabriel and draws him into the dangerous intrigues surrounding the royal family. When the Prince of Asturias conspires against his own parents, Carlos IV and Queen María Luisa, Gabriel finds himself carrying secret letters and navigating a labyrinth of espionage, jealousy, and betrayal that he barely understands.

At the novel’s center is a brilliantly staged private theatrical performance of Othello, in which the passions on stage mirror and ignite the real jealousies of the performers. Máiquez, half-mad with love for the inconstant Lesbia, nearly strangles Amaranta during the performance. The theatrical world and the political world collide as the conspiracy of El Escorial unfolds in the background, with Fernando plotting against his father, Napoleon’s agents pulling strings, and every aristocrat in Madrid choosing sides.

Pérez Galdós expertly weaves political history, theatrical comedy, romantic intrigue, and sharp social observation into a panoramic portrait of a Spain sleepwalking toward catastrophe. The novel is at once a comedy of manners, a political thriller, and a coming-of-age story, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.

You can read an excerpt at Castalia Library.

DISCUSS ON SG

Owen on Tucker

Tucker Carlson interviewed Owen Benjamin, nominally about his book, but mostly about the most cancelled man in comedy himself.

Owen Benjamin was probably the smartest, wisest person in Hollywood so of course he got canceled harder than anyone in the history of the entertainment business. That’s when he found the secret to happiness. A classically trained pianist turned comedian, Owen Benjamin weaves sharp-witted satire with deep dives into the complexities of the human condition. His unique blend of musical talent and unfiltered storytelling invites listeners to laugh through the chaos from his farm in North Idaho. His new book, “How to Slay a Wizard,” offers an instruction manual on how to not fall for the current spells that confuse the world. Ladle.tv for his podcast and comedy specials.

TUCKER: This is an organized effort against you. This is not organic. Who was organizing it? Do you know?

OWEN: I mean I have some theories…

TUCKER: But you don’t actually know for sure?

OWEN: I know the motivations. Every time I think I know for sure it switches a little. So now I try to not it’s not because I’m like worried to, I can’t really figure it out. It’s almost like a swarm.

TUCKER: Yes.

OWEN: It’s like a behavior where they’re signaling. That sounds even crazier, but

TUCKER: No, I’ve seen it.

OWEN: It’s like a It’s like a like a a behavior like a fractal.

TUCKER: Yes.

OWEN: And there’s no one really in charge, right?

TUCKER: It’s like a conspiracy of like-minded temperament.

OWEN: Cuz like from my background, I’m like, “Who did this to me?”

TUCKER: Yes.

OWEN: There’s no one there because who would really do that? It’s like a collective evil.

Big Bear even did me the favor of mentioning my book during the interview.

OWEN: A lot of people, they’re like I might be lying but I’m not wrong!

TUCKER: Right.

OWEN: Cuz they’re like, oh, no, it turns out that was all wrong, but I was still right because it’s me. Like I saw that in physics because I had a physics podcast at Calltech with my buddy who’s a nuclear physicist and dark matter. I couldn’t stop laughing when I realized it. So, they have these gravitational equations and when it wasn’t matching anything, they said, “Oh, there’s dark matter.” And I’m like, “What’s that?” They’re like, “95% of the universe you can’t see or measure and it’s like most of the gravity.” And I’m like, “How do you know it exists?” They’re like, “Swear to God.” They’re like, “Cuz if not, we’d be wrong!” And I’m like, “So, you can’t measure it?” They’re like, “No, that dark matter, but it’s there.” I’m like, “How do you know?” They’re like, “Cuz if not, then this is wrong.” Like Vox Day who published that book. He published a book breaking down how the math of evolution is so bad because he’s like one of those super geniuses. Vox is great guy, and it’s so bad, the actual math of it, just read the book Probability Zero. It’s like how long would it take for things to permeate, like a mutation, to permeate through the actual population. And when you see how completely ridiculous it is, I think they have trauma where they’re like, “Well, it can’t be that! I put a square on my head and brag to everyone and my life is a lie!”

You can also watch the video on YouTube. It’s doing numbers.

DISCUSS ON SG

OOTS Now in Print

Count the fingers. That’s right, the cover of OUT OF THE SHADOWS now features the lovely Sophia with an appropriate number of fingers. More importantly, it’s the cover of the print edition of OUT OF THE SHADOWS, now in hardcover for the first time. We’re not planning to do a paperback; the signed first edition with original illustrations is being laid out now.

From the reviews:

  • It was interesting reading this right after finishing the original Dracula for the first time. I could not put this down and finished it in a single weekend. The characters were engaging and there were many points where you are sort of rooting for the vampires to succeed and have to remind yourself, wait they’re not the “good guys.” Added some interesting perspectives to the typical vampire mythology with some chilling modern parallels when you stop to think through the implications.
  • Thrilling and a bit scary. I really enjoyed this book. It was exciting, addictive, and incredibly hard to put down. Every time I finished a chapter, I wanted to keep going just to see what happens next. The story kept me engaged the entire time.
  • The quality of the text is amazing, with a tight plot that combines vivid details with lots of action in the surface, but it hides a story of a modern day Faust that so likely becomes a monster.
  • This was a fast paced tale of corporate research finding out something that draws the attention from those who have long hidden in the shadows. Vampires are real and they make an offer that can’t be refused. A tale that takes place on several levels from the board room to old Italian villas with enough easter eggs to keep any history buff happy. The most interesting part is the slow transformation from idealistic human to amoral monster. The effects of religious belief and practice on blood quality for vampire consumption purposes was both interesting and something I look forward to being developed in future novels. Worth the time for any reader who likes corporate thrillers with a twist.
  • I’m not a vampire afficionado, so I don’t know what the normal stories are like, but I remember the movie “Nosferatu”. Yeah, “Out of the Shadows” isn’t like that at all. No gloomy castles, no dark crypts, no gory, bloodsucking details. It’s more like the tale of a business venture, but involves serious moral as well as financial choices. I’m not a fan of the genre at all, yet I found this story compelling. Well-told, with hints of humour and touching on serious and challenging moral questions. I will probably never read another vampire story again, and I’m unlikely to read one that I enjoyed more than this.

I’m already working on the sequel, A Merciless Night.

DISCUSS ON SG

Confirmed

Fandom Pulse is extremely enthusiastic about the Library’s foray into Spanish literature. One wonders why…

Castalia Library built its reputation translating Japanese literature into English. Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro, Botchan, and Kokoro. Six volumes of Eiji Yoshikawa’s secret scroll cycle. Nine translations into a catalog that has established Castalia as the most serious independent literary translation operation in the English-speaking world.

Their tenth translation is not Japanese. It is Spanish. And it is one of the most overdue introductions in the history of European literature reaching English readers. The expansion into Spanish literature signals something about what Castalia is building. Their translation subscription has run on Japanese literature since launch. A single pivot to Pérez Galdós announces that the project is broader than a specialty press, that the mission is recovery of major world literature that English publishing has ignored rather than Japanese literature specifically. Forty-five more volumes of the Episodios Nacionales exist. If Castalia follows through, they will have done something no major publisher has attempted in the history of English-language literary translation.

Fandom Pulse reached out to Vox Day asking if they would be translating the entire series, and he told us, “Yes, we are translating the entire 46-volume series.”

I’m pleased to say that not only have more people joined to support Castalia’s translation efforts, but Trafalgar is already the #1 New Release in Spanish literature. One subscriber expressed his opinion after receiving this week’s book:

One of the best rewards on Substack is receiving copies of these historic treasures with new compelling translations, some never having been previously translated to English at all!

DISCUSS ON SG

TRAFALGAR

TRAFALGAR is the first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

October 1805. Off the coast of Cádiz, the combined fleets of Spain and France sail out to meet the British under Nelson. By nightfall, the Spanish navy will have ceased to exist as a fighting force, and an empire that has ruled the seas for three centuries will have lost them forever.

Gabriel Araceli is fourteen years old. An orphan from the slums of Cádiz, he has been taken into the household of Don Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, a retired naval officer who cannot bear to miss the coming battle. When Don Alonso slips away from his furious wife to join the fleet, Gabriel goes with him, and eventually finds himself aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world, on the morning of the most catastrophic day in Spanish naval history.

What follows is one of the great battle sequences in European literature: the four-decker as living giant, the sand spread on the planks for the blood, the smoke that swallows the line, the slow agony of a ship that will not surrender and cannot be saved. Pérez Galdós, writing seventy years after the event with the aid of the testimony from the survivors of the battle, gives us a view of Trafalgar from the losing side, not as a British triumph but as a Spanish tragedy, narrated by an old man who was a boy in the rigging and has carried the day with him for the rest of his life.

Trafalgar is the first of forty-six novels in the Episodios Nacionales, Pérez Galdós’s vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain, a literary project on the scale of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and one of the supreme achievements of European realism. Published in 1873, it has remained continuously in print in Spanish for over 150 years. Trafalgar is for readers of Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell who are interested in seeing war in the age of sail from the other side of the line, and for readers of Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Hugo to encounter one of Spain’s greatest novelists for the first time.

Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers. The book is already #1 in the Spanish Literature category.

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of the 46 volumes have been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.

About the translation: This is the second English translation of Trafalgar. The first one was in 1884, by Clara Bell, and it is both outdated and a significant departure from Pérez Galdós’s literary style. For an excerpt, please visit Castalia Library. One reader notes: “These translated books have been absolutely amazing, some of the best work that has come out of Castalia House.”

DISCUSS ON SG

A Review of KILLING COMMENDATORE

Fandom Pulse has an excellent, in-depth review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, a book I like very much, albeit a review with which I don’t entirely agree even when it’s about the book:

I want to praise one specific thing about the translation as a whole, because it has been under-discussed and it is magnificent. The Commendatore’s voice.

The Commendatore in the Japanese speaks in a way that is instantly recognizable and deeply strange. He uses atashi for “I” — a first-person pronoun associated with women and with a certain old-fashioned formality. He addresses the narrator as shokun, “gentlemen,” in the plural. He says de wa aranai instead of the standard de wa nai for negation — an archaic, almost ceremonial form. He is funny. He is imperious. He is two feet tall and he sounds like a retired general who has been shrunk in the wash and is not entirely displeased about it.

This voice is, in principle, untranslatable. There is no English pronoun that does what atashi does. There is no English form of address that does what shokun does. There is no English negation that does what de wa aranai does. And yet Gabriel and Goossen — and I assume Bloom deserves credit here too — found an English for the Commendatore that works. The Commendatore in English is formal without being stiff, archaic without being ridiculous, funny without trying to be funny. He calls the narrator “my friends.” He speaks in complete, slightly ornate sentences. He has dignity. He is the best thing in the translation and I would read seven hundred pages of him alone.

I said at the beginning of this review that Killing Commendatore is one of the three peaks of Murakami’s career. I want to end by saying what I mean by that, because it is the kind of claim that requires defense.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the peak of Murakami the storyteller — the novel in which his ability to pull a reader into an impossible world and keep them there for six hundred pages reaches its fullest expression. 1Q84 is the peak of Murakami the architect — the novel in which his ability to construct parallel narratives and hold them in tension over a thousand pages is most fully achieved. Killing Commendatore is the peak of Murakami the artist — the novel in which his lifelong preoccupation with what it means to make things, to create something from nothing, to open a door in a wall that has no door, is most directly and most movingly addressed.

It is also the most personal of the three, and the most vulnerable. There is a passage near the end in which the narrator realizes that the painting he has been working on throughout the novel is finished, and that it is good, and that it is the first good thing he has ever made.

While I can’t really testify to the lack of the sense of oku in the second half of the novel, I did notice that the translator’s voice had changed the one and only time I read it. Now I feel as if I’ve got to read it again. I also think that it’s a bit strange to complain about the lack of depth of the female characters when the female characters are, in this particular book, entirely beside the point; a book that dedicates sufficient space to fully-developing the painter’s faithless wife is not going to be a book about painting, and besides, the book is already 700 pages.

But it is an excellent review, particularly in how it says so much about the novel without giving away anything at all. And I really can’t expect to entirely agree with a review by a reviewer whose favorite Murakami novel is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since mine is A Wild Sheep’s Chase.

Anyhow, I’m going to see if we can get a copy of my translation of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto reviewed at some point in the future.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Retraction and a Revision

Unlike the mainstream science orthodoxy, I don’t feel any need to avoid admitting when I got something fundamentally wrong, fixing the problem, and revising my conclusions. Which, of course, is why I’m working on the new appendices for the second edition of Probability Zero rather than trying to defend, rationalize, and justify the various mistakes I made in the first edition, which were mostly the result of relying upon the consensus numbers produced in 2005 rather than the 2025 update of them.

Claude Athos and I are now revising the Kimura’s Calculator paper from last week because our subsequent empirical work has identified a category error in how the selection-cost binding constraint was being used in it. The original paper presents the Calculator as a three-term framework in which the realized substitution rate equals the minimum of three serial constraints: the corrected input flux (Term 1), the polymorphism throughput ceiling (Term 2), and the selection-cost limit (Term 3). For sexual eukaryotes, Term 3 binds at approximately 10⁻¹², two to four orders of magnitude below Terms 1 and 2, which made it the headline result and drove the framework’s most dramatic predictions. The new validation work which uses Bergeron et al. (2023) on pedigree mutation rates and fossil-calibrated substitution rates for 55 vertebrate species exposed a fundamental problem that three-term construction.

The category error is this: Term 3 is derived from Haldane’s cost-of-substitution argument, which bounds the rate at which selection can drive adaptive fixations through a population given finite reproductive capacity. It is a constraint on selectively driven substitutions alone, not on total substitutions. The original Calculator paper treats Term 3 as a bound on total substitution rate and compares it against observed substitution rates from sequence divergence, but observed substitution rates include both neutral fixations (which are the great majority) and adaptive fixations (which are comparatively rare). Comparing Term 3 against total observed k is therefore comparing a bound on adaptive substitutions against a quantity that is mostly comprised of neutral substitutions. The two simply aren’t measuring the same thing. While the math of Term 3 is correct for the quantity to which it actually applies; my error was in interpreting its output as a constraint on total k. Once corrected, Term 3 still limits adaptive substitution rate at ~10⁻¹², but total substitution rate is only governed by Terms 1 and 2, which now falls in the 10⁻⁷ to 10⁻⁸ range that is consistent with the empirically observed rates.

The ramifications for our conclusions are significant but not catastrophic, and the revised picture is in some ways stronger than the original because it survives empirical scrutiny that the original would not. The textbook k = μ identity is still falsified — both directly (pedigree μ and phylogenetic k disagree by a median factor of 25 across 55 vertebrates) and structurally (the polymorphism throughput ceiling is exceeded by textbook μ for 95.4% of 173 animal species). The cancellation step in Kimura’s derivation still fails because N ≠ Nₑ in real populations, as Frankham cataloged thirty years ago. What has to be revised is the magnitude of the resulting recalibrations to molecular-clock divergence dates. The corrected framework predicts factor 10 corrections rather than factor 100,000 corrections, which still places significant divergences in substantially different time ranges than the textbook gives but doesn’t compress the entirety of evolutionary deep time the way the original Term 3 framing implied.

To put this in context, it means that the CHLCA event falls somewhere in the 250 kya to 1.3 Mya range rather than the 6.3 Mya presently assumed. But it cannot be as recent as the lower end of the 68 kya to 330 kya range that had orginally been calculated on the basis of the erroneous calculator.

The result of this retraction and revision is that the central critique of neutral theory survives and is now backed by two methodologically independent empirical tests rather than a theoretical framework with a contested parameter. Kimura’s identity is still wrong, the molecular clock as currently calibrated still overstates divergence times, and the Neo-Darwinian accounting of sequence evolution still rests on a Wright-Fisher idealization that doesn’t describe real populations. The fix is more conceptual than catastrophic and will require properly labeling what each constraint measures, accepting more modest recalibration magnitudes than Term 3 originally suggested, and grounding the falsification more solidly in the empirical evidence rather than theoretical derivation.

We did the best we could with what we had at the time of the original paper; the addition of the empirical data allows us to refine the framework and make the case stronger and more conclusive.

DISCUSS ON SG

If You Want DRACULA

If you’re not a subscriber and you’re interested in acquiring a copy of Castalia Library’s DRACULA, or you’re a subscriber who wants to pick up an additional one, they are exclusively available from these two. The usual subscriber’s discount code applies on the Arkhaven store.

One more thing that should be mentioned. We didn’t have enough black cowhide for the entire print run, so there is about a one-in-six chance that you’ll be getting Dracula in black pigskin. Unfortunately, we’re not set up to deal with requests for one or the other material; the pictures on the Library stack are all of the cowhide or the goatskin.

DISCUSS ON SG