Tag: books

This Week’s Releases

Since we remain limited to publishing ten books per week on Amazon, the complete, unabridged set of Eiji Yoshikawa’s epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms will not be available until next Friday. But it was a very productive week nevertheless, since six of the ten books released have never been available in English before; I particularly recommend The Mystery Planet Gan for anyone who enjoys classic science fiction of the Heinlein juvenile variety.

While the focus on published books was heavy on the Japanese this week, don’t be misled into thinking that the released books represent the fullness of our translation efforts, as we’re now increasing the translation rate to up to 30 books per week in preparation for the launch of Castalia Unlimited, our subscription-only, DRM-free epub store that we expect to launch in October with more than 500 titles available by the end of 2026. Please note that everyone who is a paid subscriber to the Castalia Library will have access to it from the start in case you want to avail yourselves of the weekly ebook release in the interlude.

We also will be announcing three print editions of Natsume Soseki novels, Kokoro, Botchan, and Sanshiro in the coming week, and we’re now working on the print edition of a two-volume set of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto by Eiji Yoshikawa, so rest assured that traditional readers will not be left out.

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The Translations List

Someone asked for the complete list of translations by Castalia House, so I’ve added a page on the Library site that will be regularly updated; it can also be accessed from the top of the site by clicking on Translations. I suppose I can probably add a link on the sidebar here as well; I’ll do that shortly. And, of course, you can always flip through the carousel on the sidebar to see the latest additions: today’s were Kojiki: The Record of Ancient Matters and Sangokushin Book 4. And on Saturday’s I’ll provide a list of the ten translations published this week, complete with links.

Please note that not all books that have been translated have been released yet, and not all of them even appear on the list. We have to maintain a few surprises, after all. I’m told we’re still on track to launch the new Unlimited site in October, but, as always, don’t take our initial estimated dates too seriously.

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The Cost of the Codex

A fascinating article on the massive amount of information that was lost as a result of the change from rolled scrolls to bound codices at Fields & Energy:

The codex transformed books from narratives to be read from beginning to end into repositories to be consulted anywhere at will. For science, this shift was revolutionary: theories, proofs, observations, diagrams, and tables could now be located, compared, annotated, and transmitted with unprecedented efficiency, making cumulative scientific progress far more practicable. The medium may not quite be the entire message, but media do shape the course of scholarly research in general and science in particular.

The transition was not without a downside, however [[ix]].

The change from roll to codex involved the gradual but wholesale transference of ancient literature from one form to another. This was the first major bottle-neck through which classical literature had to pass. It must have been somewhat reduced in the process, but the losses are not easily specified or assessed. There was the danger that little-read works would not be transferred to codex form, and in time … would perish.

A scroll not deemed worthy of the labor of copying to expensive parchment in the third through fifth century would not make the transition. By one estimate, “94 per cent of classical Latin literature was lost in the intervening period between Rome’s downfall and Charlemagne’s rise to power” [[x]]. The Catholic Cardinal and scholar, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) claimed that less than 1 per cent of ancient literature survived [[xi]]. While those claims are suspiciously precise and exact numbers may be difficult to establish, the general sense of massive loss is undeniable. According to one analysis of just Latin literature, we know of only 772 authors in all. Subtract 276 for whom not one word remains, and 352 known only in small fragments or quotations. That makes 80 per cent wholly or almost wholly lost [[xii]]. And how many chroniclers and pamphleteers never came to our attention at all?

Most of the 20 per cent or so of “surviving” authors suffered extensive losses, including Cato the Elder (234–149 BC), Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), Livy (59 BC–AD 17), and Pliny the Elder (AD 23/24–79). “Some of the best remains, but four-fifths of our writers, and apparently more than four-fifths of their writings, are beyond our reach” [[xiii]].

One cannot consider these facts without marvelling at the slenderness of the thread on which the fate of the Latin classics hung. In the case of many texts a single copy survived into the Carolingian period, and often a battered one at that. When the great period of the revival was over, some of the great works of Latin literature were still but a single manuscript on a single shelf [[xiv]].

Aristotle’s analysis of the Constitution of Athens was only recovered from a first-century Egyptian papyrus in 1890 [[xv]]. Aristotle’s Dialogues were widely read, “a golden stream of eloquence,” according to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) [[xvi]]. Today, only fragments survive [[xvii]]. Strabo (c. 64/63 BC–c. AD 24) reported that Aristotle’s library disappeared from public view for generations after passing to his student Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 BC), only to be rediscovered in the first century BC. The bibliophile Apellikon of Teos (d. 84 BC) acquired and recopied the neglected, moldy, and worm-eaten manuscripts [[xviii]]. While modern scholars question parts of the story, it illustrates the precarious survival of ancient literature and how even Aristotle’s works relied upon fortunate rediscovery and continued copying.

It was not only pagan works that suffered the culling, but also Christian classics as well. The Didache: The Teachings of the Twelve Apostles [[xx]], one of the earliest surviving Christian writings outside the New Testament, endured only because on Tuesday, 11 June AD 1056 “Leon the scribe and sinner” completed a copy, and signed and dated it. This single eleventh-century copy was preserved in an Orthodox monastery, and in 1873, a Greek Orthodox Metropolitan named Philotheos Bryennios (1833–1917) rediscovered it.

So for the next 1,500 years, Western scholars knew the Didache the way you might know a famous book you’ve never read—by reputation, by quotation, by the references others made to it. Some suspected it was a legend. Others assumed that what survived in fragments was all there was. Then Bryennios found Leon the monk’s careful 11th century copy sitting in a library in Constantinople… When the first English translation reached New York bookstores on 20 March 1884, 5,000 copies sold in a single day [[xxi]].

We may be seeing a modern version of this with the move from the physical book to the ebook. The problem with the latter, of course, is that while they are easily and inexpensively propagated, they hold no value and they are temporally ephemeral, being wholly dependent upon the availability of the technology to read them. Here the insidious evils of copyright can be seen, as the digital rights management most publishers install on their books virtually assure their inability to survive over time.

It’s interesting to contrast the distinction between the historical interest in the Didache and the relative lack of interest in the hitherto unavailable books that we’ve been translating. Of course, I imagine the media coverage of the English translation of the Didache was considerably greater than it has been of the first-ever English translations of various works of Eiji Yoshikawa and Benito Perez Galdos, among others, despite the massive popularity of the latter in their own cultures.

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A Deep and Natural Antipathy

The fact that Castalia House is actively embracing the development of literary AI while the traditional distribution proudly talks about their “deep, natural antipathy” to it is why we’re going to continue to grow as they inevitably decline. Consider this interview with the CEO of Barnes & Noble:

I have to believe that you’re increasingly seeing books that are at least partially written by AI. How is bookselling and reading going to change, and what role are you going to play in it, with this AI revolution in writing and publishing.

It’s going to be very interesting. We are fortunate in not being the first line of defense, if that’s what it is. Publishers publish the books, they edit the books, they decide what to publish and what not to publish. We then cxurat from amongst those. We have a deep, natural antipathy to anything that isn’t by a real author, and definitely go to great efforts to exclude, both from our online catalog, it probably happens in our stores naturally because we’re selecting and curating, but online, we need to put in a lot of filters to keep the AI rubbish out. There is going to come a time when these books come through. We would ask publishers, to the extent that they know, that they indicate if the books are AI-assisted or AI-written completely so we can pass that on to our customers. I think transparency is important.

It’s all such nonsense. First, transparency is totally unimportant, because if you can’t even tell if a book is AI written or not, then obviously it doesn’t matter and you don’t actually care. Second, keep in mind that these are the people who have been publishing terrible books for sixty years and pushing things like Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray on readers while completely refusing to translate and publish everything from Solzenheitsyn to Perez Galdos, Unno, and Yoshikawa.

The dirty little secret of the publishing industry is that the best AI-assisted books are much better than the average human-written book. Yes, there is a lot of AI rubbish out there, but there is far more human rubbish.

We expect to unleash Castalia Unlimited and the Castalia Reader in October. We’ve already reached our launch goal of 100 books and Amazon’s limit of 10 books per week only limits the number of books we can publish on Amazon, not the number we can produce and publish on our own platform.

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The Three Kingdoms of Eiji Yoshikawa

This is the initial volume of the first complete English translation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Sangokushi. The reason his retelling of the Chinese classic tale of the Three Kingdoms has taken so long to appear in English in its entirety despite its massive popularity in Japan is an accident of publishing economics, not any lack of literary merit.

Yoshikawa is the most widely read novelist in Japanese history. His Musashi has sold an estimated 120 million copies. His Sangokushi, which has sold over 80 million copies, not only shaped how modern Japan understands the classic Chinese story, but also, through the various manga, anime, and games derived from it, how much of the world sees it. The video game franchise from Koei that introduced most Westerners to these characters draws more on Yoshikawa than on Luo Guanzhong. You have almost certainly encountered his influence without even knowing it.

And yet, this book not actually a part of the well-known Romance of the Three Kingdoms in its original form. It is something decidedly different than that. To put it in terms that most modern readers will comprehend, the difference between Sanguo Yanyi and Sangokushi is the difference between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

The Chinese classic that Westerners know through the Moss Roberts translation and the Dynasty Warriors games, Luo Guanzhong’s fourteenth-century Sanguo Yanyi, is a chronicle. A great chronicle, one of the four pillars of Chinese literature, it consists of eight hundred thousand words of war and statecraft and betrayal. But it is not a story in the conventional sense, rather, it is chronicle in which an omniscient narrator moves through events in sequence, characters are introduced by their attributes and then perform accordingly, and every few pages a poet inserts a verse that serves as commentary to inform the reader how he should feel about what he just read.

It is magnificent literary edifice. What it is not, in any modern sense, is a novel.

In Sangokushi, serialized in the Chūgai Shōgyō Shinpō, the predecessor of today’s Nikkei, from August 26, 1939 to September 5, 1943, Eiji Yoshikawa took the skeleton of that chronicle and did something fundamentally different with it. He transformed it from a historical document into a story. What he did was more than a translation and more than an adaptation. He turned the chronicle into a novel, with all that implies: interiority, psychological development, scenes that reveal character instead of advancing the plot, and a narrator whose relationship to his material is more that of an author who creates his characters than a historian who records their deeds.

The difference is visible from the start. Luo Guanzhong’s Sanguo Yanyi opens with the Yellow Turban Rebellion and moves swiftly to the Peach Garden Oath. Yoshikawa, on the other hand, begins with a young man named Liu Bei walking to the city to buy medicine for his sick mother. He sells the family sword to pay for it. And when his mother learns what her son sacrificed for her, she throws the medicine into the river. This scene does not exist in the Chinese original. Yoshikawa invented it because he understood something that did not concern Luo Guanzhong: the reader has to know a man before he cares about that man saving the empire. Likewise, the girl Furong, whom Liu Bei meets on the riverboat, does not exist in the Chinese original. The encounter with bandits on that same journey does not exist. The village school where Liu Bei studies does not exist. Yoshikawa constructed all of it from his imagination because he needed his readers to arrive at the Peach Garden Oath already invested in the man who is taking the vow. Luo Guanzhong could simply announce that Liu Bei was a virtuous descendant of the imperial house and expect his audience to accept it. Yoshikawa could not.

This pattern runs through the entire work. Where the Yanyi externalizes; Yoshikawa internalizes. Where the Chinese original informs you that Cao Cao was cunning, Yoshikawa shows you a man with a devious mind who calculates as easily as other men breathe. Where the original describes Guan Yu’s loyalty as a fixed attribute, Yoshikawa shows you a man who keeps faith because he has decided that he will not betray another, even at great personal cost, not because he is incapable of betrayal.

Cao Cao is the most dramatic beneficiary of this method. In the Chinese tradition he is largely a brilliant villain, the usurper who perverts the mandate of Heaven and whose dynasty is rightly displaced those more worthy. Yoshikawa’s Cao Cao is far more dangerous and seductive; he is a man you can understand and with whom you can sympathize. You know why his subordinates follow him. You can see the genuine poetry in his soul alongside his ruthlessness. You will even find yourself, at times, preferring his company to the hero’s, and Yoshikawa knows you will. In doing so, he transforms what was a great historical chronicle into a great novel.

And so I hope it is with pleasure that you, the English reader can at last read Eiji Yoshikawa’s great work, Sangokushin, in its entirety.

There are two new releases today, the first being the aforementioned Yoshikawa work, the second being all 795 poems from The Tale of Genji. For more information on both, including excerpts, visit Castalia Library.

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For Those With Literary Taste

Castalia House would appreciate your assistance in expressing your preference in a comparison of three different translations of Narziss und Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. One is our new and original translation from the German. One is the most popular translation from 1968. And one is the newer, elite translation from 1994. And none of them are identified, so please read all three translations of the same scene and then express your preference in the poll at the bottom.

We’re not operating under any illusions that our translations are always going to be the best ones, or the ones with the most fidelity to the original text. But it is important for us to repeatedly confirm that they are reasonably competitive with the best ones available to the English-reading world.

UPDATE: Translation 1 was Vennewitz (1992), Translation 2 was Molinaro (1968) and Translation 3 was Castalia (2026). The results of the 124-reader poll can be seen on Castalia Library.

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Slow Your Roll

So, this morning I discovered that Amazon actually has a limit on how many ebooks you can publish in a week. I learned that this morning when my attempt to publish a frankly astonishing science fiction novel for young men entitled The Phantom of the Underground Tank by Juza Unno ran into the ten book per week barrier. So there won’t be any new ebooks published on Amazon until Monday, when we will launch something big, in both textual and historical terms.

The subject of the yet-to-be-published Unno book will be fascinating to conspiracy theorists, for reasons that the book description should make clear. Note that this book was published in Japan 86 years ago and has never before been translated into English.

In 1940, a Japanese electrical engineer who wrote science fiction imagined the year 1950: an American cargo ship fighting through an Antarctic blizzard, a secret military installation buried beneath the ice, and a fleet of underground tanks that could bore through solid rock. He called it The Phantom of the Underground Tank. When the cargo ship Ark runs aground on an uncharted Antarctic shore, young Okishima and his American friend Pete discover something impossible beneath the ice: a vast subterranean fortress stocked with machines unlike anything in any nation’s arsenal. Captured by a rogue commander with plans that could reshape the balance of power across the Pacific, the two boys must escape a prison buried a thousand meters underground, survive the frozen wasteland above, and find a way to warn the outside world before the phantom fleet launches.

A secret military installation buried beneath the ice of Antarctica… now, where have I heard that before?

I would also highly recommend Unno’s The Midnight Mayor, which I’ve been reading and very much reminds me of two of China Mieville’s better works, Un Lun Dun and The City and the City. I’m also intent on tracking down a copy of Mushitaro Oguri’s Perfect Crime 完全犯罪, as it’s not in the main public domain archive, and I’d like to translate his entire ouvre as he may actually one day rival Haruki Murakami for my favorite Japanese author. So, if you’re in Japan and find yourself in Jimbocho, please see if you can find anything by him; I’d very much like to get my hands on a first edition Kokushikan Satsujinjiken 黒死館殺人事件 and have it bound in leather.

Anyhow, here is the weekly summary of translations Castalia House published last week. If you want a daily notification, subscribe to the Castalia Library substack.

That may well be the highest-quality, most diverse list of books ever published in English in less than one week. Next week will introduce our first German release as well as major works by Eiji Yoshikawa. While I have requested an increase to the weekly limit, until Amazon approves one, we’ll stick to a Monday through Friday release schedule.

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Do Try to Keep Up, Dennis

Dennis McCarthy has absolutely no idea how absolutely hopeless the case has gotten for evolution by natural selection. Believing in evolution is now much more far-fetched and implausible than believing the Earth is flat or that it is held up by a turtle supporting four elephants.

[This was one of my more popular efforts, and I think it provides a nice intro to the evidence supporting evolution:]

I believe this is one of my more important posts—not only because it explains evolution in simple, intuitive terms, making clear why it must be true, but because it directly refutes the core claims of Vox Day’s best-selling book Probability Zero: The Mathematical Possibility of Evolution by Natural Selection. Day’s adherents are now aggressively pushing its claims across the internet, declaring evolution falsified. As far as I am aware, this post is the only thorough and effective rebuttal to its mathematical analyses currently available….

Here is the problem: What Vox Day calculated—(1/20,000)20,000,000 —are the odds that a particular group or a pre-specified list of 20 million mutations (or 20 million mutations in a row) would all become fixed. In other words, his calculation would only be accurate if the human race experienced only 20 million mutations in total over the last 9 million years—and every one of them then became fixed. And, yes, hitting a lottery (with odds 1/20,000) 20 million times in a row would indeed essentially be probability zero.

But our evolutionary history does not require that an exact group of 20 million mutations become fixed—only that some 20 million out of an enormous pool of candidate mutations become fixed.

Here’s the correct analysis. Using Vox Day’s numbers, in a population of 10,000 humans, we would expect, on average, 50,000 new mutations per year. And over the course of 9 million years, this means we would expect:

50,000 x 9 million = 450 billion new mutations altogether.

So out of 450 billion mutations, how many mutations may we expect to achieve fixation? Well, as Vox Day noted, each mutation has a probability of 1/20,000 in becoming fixed.
450 billion x 1/20,000 = 22.5 million fixed mutations.

And that is a pretty close approximation to the 20 million fixed mutations that have been observed. Change the assumptions¹ and the estimate moves. But under Vox’s own assumptions, the result is the opposite of “probability zero”: it’s basically what you’d predict.

First, Dennis was completely, absolutely, and hopelessly wrong about literally everything he said in that original post, because he doesn’t understand big numbers, genetic drift, or how probability works. That’s not his fault, not very many people do. Including, as it turns out, the population geneticists.

But what is his fault is that he didn’t even notice that I had to release a new edition of Probability Zero because it turned out that the “complete mapping of the human and chimpanzee genomes” completed in 2005, and upon which all of the numbers in the book were based, was not, in fact, the complete mapping of the human genome or the chimpanzee genome, neither of which were published until 2025.

And when Yoo et al published the genuinely complete mappings of all the great apes, that 35 million difference between the two species was considerably expanded. This is from the Introduction to the Second Edition.

In fact, the genetic difference between chimps and humans turned out to be 13.8 percent, with 410 million base pairs separating the two lineages since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor. This 10x increase in the number of observed differences between the two genomes has had, as you might expect, a tremendous impact on the arguments I presented in the first edition of this book. In fact, it made them approximately ten times more conclusive.

Not only that, but subsequent work on Kimura’s substitution equation rendered McCarthy’s attempt to escape to Neutral Theory and genetic drift not only highly improbable to the point of effective impossibility, but flatly impossible. I was wrong. Genetic drift in humanity didn’t stop relatively recently, as I calculated in The Frozen Gene. In fact, it hasn’t occurred in humans for millions of years, because no genetic drift can take place in any population that has exceeded 10,000 individuals at any point in its existence.

You can read more about that in my paper The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift, which was written a few months ago after discovering a Portuguese mathematician’s analysis of Kimura’s equation and his identification of the way in which that equation has been systematically misunderstood and misapplied by Kimura and others for the last sixty years.

Kimura’s neutral substitution rate, k = μ, is a steady-state identity: it holds only after a population has held one size for the roughly 4Nₑ generations a neutral allele needs to drift from a single copy to fixation. That transit has never been checked against the number of generations that species lineages have actually had. Checking them yields a hard ceiling on population size, X = (Vₖ + 2)·G/16 — reproductive variance and lineage generations alone, with no mutation rate, no coalescent quantity, and no fitted constant. For a large, long-lived vertebrate the effective ceiling falls to about ten thousand individuals. Above it, a neutral allele’s chance of fixing within the generations its lineage will ever have is not merely small but exponentially small, of order exp(−π²Nₑ/G) — for humans at current size, about one in ten to the seventy-eight-millionth. Humans number more than eight billion, the better part of a million times over the line; the African elephant, endangered at four hundred thousand and falling, is still forty times too abundant for drift to complete to fixation. No vertebrate population is simultaneously large enough to persist as a species and small enough to fix a neutral allele by drift. What substitution these abundant populations show is not produced at their current size; it is residual drainage from the smaller populations they descend from. The domain of k = μ is confined to demographic conditions that no non-endangered species is capable of meeting.

Evolution isn’t just dead, it is absolutely, hopelessly, and completely mathematically impossible. It’s absolutely and observably retarded to continue to believe in evolution, as that is tantamount to admitting that you can’t comprehend basic multiplication or grasp the concept of a number larger than ten thousand. It is more reasonable by far to believe that a black pygmy woman wrote the entire Shakespeare canon in Africa than to believe that evolution by natural selection or genetic drift ever produced one single vertebrate species in the entire history of the planet Earth.

What part of “mathematically impossible” is so hard to understand?

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THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH

I’m very, very pleased to be finally releasing this translation of an esoteric murder mystery by Oguri Mushitarō. I’ve been working on this one on and off for six months. Even figuring out a proper title for it was difficult. The print edition will be even harder to produce, due to the need to recreate all of the drawings that were not included in the ebook, as they are not necessary due to their detailed descriptions in the text. Of all the translations I’ve done to date, this is still the one that was of the most interest to me from the start.

THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH

Half a century before Umberto Eco sealed monks inside an abbey with a serial killer and a poisoned Aristotle, Oguri Mushitarō locked a detective inside a Gothic castle with a grimoire, a glowing corpse, and a prophecy of six murders written in the hand of a dead man. Serialized in 1934, The Book of the Black Death is the novel Eco might have written had he been born in Tokyo and raised on Charcot, Cagliostro, and the Kabbalistic Exegesis rather than Aquinas and Borges. Its detective, Norizumi Rintarō, is William of Baskerville’s mad Japanese twin, a polymath who deploys heraldry, toxicology, and medieval sorcery with equal fluency, and whose erudition is both the instrument of his investigation and the source of its deepest dangers. Recognized in Japan as one of the four greatest mystery novels ever written in the language, it has never before appeared in English.

In the Celtic Renaissance château known as the Hall of Black Death, a family descended from the Medici through the sorceress-consort Bianca Capello has kept four foreign musicians sealed within its walls for forty years. When the first violinist is found dead with her corpse glowing with an unearthly phosphorescence and the locked room undisturbed, a document surfaces in the hand of the mansion’s long-dead patriarch. It is a prophecy naming six members of the household and the method by which each will be slain.

As Norizumi races to prevent the next murder, he finds himself contending not only with a killer of extraordinary cunning but with the accumulated sorcery and science of four centuries, encrypted in a grimoire that was old when the Inquisition was young. The translation, by Vox Day, is the first-ever English translation of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken. Now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.

You can probably see why I was so interested in making it available to the English-reading world after reading this description from Athos, which it produced when I first started delving into Japan’s library of untranslated texts for books that would be particularly interesting for me to read. At that time, I had not really thought about Castalia putting out translations into English, I was just in search of something new and different to read.

In Japan, Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken occupies a position for which there is no precise Western equivalent. It is counted as one of the three great “strange books” — the sandai kisho — in the entire history of Japanese detective fiction. The designation is less an honorific than a warning: these are the novels said to “cause mental disturbance upon reading,” works so structurally peculiar and intellectually dense that they have generated their own mythology. The novel is often described as the only true Gothic romance ever written in Japan, and Edogawa Ranpo, the father of Japanese mystery fiction, publicly praised it — writing an introduction to the 1935 first edition that helped establish its reputation as a landmark.

The novel’s defining characteristic is its gengaku shumi — pedantry elevated to an architectural principle. The disciplines deployed across its pages include theology, demonology, pharmacology, astrology, botany, cosmology, religious studies, physics, medicine, heraldry, psychology, criminology, cryptography, and history. Japanese critics describe the effect not as decoration but as structural inversion: the vast pedantic apparatus overwhelms the mystery itself, producing what one reviewer called a “reversal of subject and object” — the erudition becomes the point, and the murders become its occasion. It has been called a “grand temple of detective fiction,” a novel that satisfies not only the mystery reader’s appetite but a voracious intellectual hunger across every field it touches.

That Shinchōsha, a publisher not especially known for detective fiction, issued the first edition in 1935 speaks to how much attention Oguri commanded at the time in the Japanese publishing world. The novel has been continuously republished since the end of the Pacific War, appearing from Kōdansha, Chikuma Shobō, Shakai Shisōsha, Tōkyō Sōgensha, Kawade Shobō, and Kadokawa in editions spanning seven decades, a publishing record that testifies to its enduring hold on Japanese literary culture. It remains famous as the novel most readers abandon after the first chapter, and the one that those who finish it never forget.

There is a very good chance that THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH will one day be a Library book. It certainly deserves a place next to THE NAME OF THE ROSE, FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, and THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE. It’s the sort of book that you either never finish reading, or that you read repeatedly, again and again, and never entirely put down.

You can read an excerpt on the Library site, which won’t tell you anything that I haven’t told you already, but will let you see the cover as well as today’s other release, a very well-regarded Italian work of psychological fiction by Luigi Capuana.

A word of warning: there WILL be formatting issues, without any shadow of a doubt. A book of this size and complexity needs many eyes upon it to catch all of the issues; it wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up beating the record set by A THRONE OF BONES with 10 digital versions. So you know the drill, keep a list and send it to me if and when you finish the book.

UPDATE: THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH is the #1 bestseller in Japanese language fiction.

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A Book a Day

Keeps the freaks, creeps, and Zero Historians at bay. Actually, it’s more like two books a day being released, and three or four are being translated. Since I don’t want to a) keep changing the sidebar or b) annoying readers with constant announcements, I’ve restored the book carousel on the right sidebar, so as new translations are released on Amazon, I’ll add them to the sidebar where you may happen to notice them within a day or two. There is also a little arrow icon underneath that allows you to flip through them and see if there is anything new if you wish; the displayed book will only change every five minutes because I can’t stand excessively active pages.

Now, here’s the question. Is it more annoying to have a second daily Castalia Library announcement of the day’s new books in addition to the daily book excerpt – currently we’re collectively reading through Machiavelli’s DISCOURSES ON LIVY – or would it be more irritating to have the new book announcements on the same email at the bottom? I’m just curious to see what people’s general preferences are.

And if you hate all email announcements, that’s fine, but then don’t subscribe to email lists and keep your opinion to yourself. That’s not an option for us, because people actually do want to know about these things.

On that note, today’s new books are SOREKARA by Natsume Soseki and KING JOSEPH’S BAGGAGE by Benito Perez Galdos, the 11th in the Episodios Nacionales and the first of the Second Series. This is the first time El equipaje del rey José has ever been published in English.

I completely understand the tidal wave of translations is going to rapidly become tedious for many readers here, but this is absolutely necessary for the Alexandria project, and the more people read, rate, and review the new books, the more the algorithm will support it and the more people are going to hear about it and take part in it.

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