I recalled an experience from adolescence the other day, and the “me” in that recollection seemed more unreal than a dream or a character in a novel I’d read. It was a disconcerting moment.

Such a thought seems autumnal to me, though not just because it’s early November and the leaves on the trees outside my study have turned deep gold and red. I rather believe such thoughts are only possible at a certain age, when enough time has passed for memory to conflate with dreams.

And that memory—I mean the personal narrative of the remembered me, the narrative of Christopher Cook—has assumed another quality, as well. It is no longer an unbroken thread. Instead, what I experience when looking back is a formless shape, a perplexing and murky jumble, and I have to carefully pick my way through it to find a particular event. Along the way, while dredging up something that occurred when I was 15 or 21 or 30, I stumble onto other events long forgotten.

In truth, memory in this stage of life, the middle or late-middle years, becomes something of a labyrinth. If I spend much time in it, I inevitably get confused, and often become lost. That would have happened to Theseus, too, if his thread had broken. I sometimes find myself avoiding the maze altogether.

I don’t recall doing that when I was younger. But then, I didn’t have such a long story to keep straight in those days. I wonder if it would be easier if I had stayed in one place instead of roaming the world. Would staying in a particular location have provided me a sturdy spindle upon which to roll the thread of my journey, giving it a sense of continuity and order? Can space provide what time does not? I’ll never know. But I suspect not.

Time is a mysterious phenomenon. It is, as someone once noted, much like life: just one damn thing after another. Its passage is both mundane and somehow incomprehensible. We know it is happening yet we cannot understand it. When we try to grasp it, the notion squirts away from us, ever elusive.

So what was the experience remembered from my early years that set off this chain of thoughts? I don’t recall. And I’m not sure I succeeded in unraveling it from the rest of the past so that I could see it very clearly. Most likely not. At best, I probably caught a brief glimpse of it, a fleeting picture that came together then dissolved almost immediately.

The ancient wisdom we are told is surely true: all we have for certain is this moment. And I would add this: the past seems no more certain than the future. In the end, both must be taken on faith.

That is, no doubt, another autumnal thought. Well, it’s that time of year. So it seems only right to share it. While it’s fresh, you know.

On that note, I better go. But I’ll see you on down the road. Until then, I wish you an unbroken thread of lovely moments. And may you not get lost.

I was recently advised by a friend that to increase the exposure of my website, I should devote some blog entries to writing about famous people who frequently appear in web searches. Elvis Presley, for example, and Paris Hilton. Also, folks like Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, Julia Roberts, Hilary Clinton, Brad Pitt, Sarah Palin. Throw in a couple of well known writers, say Stephen King and John Grisham. Plus some historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Davy Crockett. Maybe even Moses and Jesus. Then add a couple of popular places, such as Las Vegas and Branson, Missouri, maybe Cancun…

And voila! Suddenly my website will be as popular as Dancing With the Stars, and garner as many viewers as American Idol.

This is hard to believe. But I know someone who wrote a blog entry on the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud in Kentucky and he said his website was suddenly flooded with unexpected traffic. Well, the World Wide Web is a very strange place, as we know. Especially given it’s not even a real place. Maybe that’s why weird things happen so often in it, like getting visitors from strangers when you just mention something by accident.

This name-dropping strategy for website promotion apparently has to do with search engine algorithms and other such things I care to know little about. It also seems like a bad idea. I hardly ever think about those people or places, and I don’t watch TV. What could I say about them that would interest anyone?

In fact, this morning my thoughts have mostly been devoted to the abundance of tasty fresh fruits that have been on sale at our neighborhood produce stand here in Prague. It’s mid-summer and the pickings are great: raspberries, blueberries, cherries, peaches, apples. And juicy grapes and nectarines trucked up from Spain. And choice bananas from… wherever bananas come from.

So for breakfast I had a big bowl of fruit—whole berries and the other things sliced—covered with plain white yogurt. It was delicious. And healthy. And while eating this manna from heaven I never once thought about Elvis or Moses or TV or even Cancun.

I did think about Italy. I recently returned from Piacenza, a friendly little city on the Po River near Milan, where I participated in the annual literary/music festival called Dal Mississippi al Po. The music part of the festival is mainly blues and R&B, and the festival’s name connects the Po River with the Mississippi River delta, home of the blues. My duties there at the festival were pretty low key. I did a public question and answer session on stage (“How does your writing connect with music?”) and I introduced a musician, Alain Apaloo, from Togo in Africa, when he appeared on stage for his concert. For this labor I got five days of great Italian food, wine and hospitality. The pay was lucrative, I’d say. Surely more than I deserved.

In any case, I was thinking about all that this morning while eating my fresh fruit and yoghurt and this phrase suddenly leaped to mind: “I wonder what the Po folks are doing right now?”

I thought the line was funny and smiled and chuckled out loud. The only downer was there wasn’t anyone else to tell it to at that moment. So now I’m telling it to you. I hope you don’t mind.

Anyway, that’s my report for now. In a few minutes, I’m walking down to the produce stand to see if they have any new kinds of fruit. The local strawberry season is done but I’m thinking about blackcurrants. Have you ever eaten fresh blackcurrants? Last year at the cottage I had two bushes full of blackcurrants and red currants (why “blackcurrants” is one word and “red currants” is usually two words, I don’t know; but that’s correct because I checked). Blackcurrants have an unusual taste that I had to get used to, but I learned to enjoy them and would like some now. So that’s my next immediate goal in life. Blackcurrants.

The casual celebrity name-dropping, however advisable, will just have to wait for another time.

When I started this website and put a blog on it, I promised myself (and the readers) not to pester folks by blogging too often. About once a month, I said.

Well, I’ve been good on the first promise but remiss on the latter. Still, I really do want to stay in touch a bit more. And what better way than to talk a bit about books worth reading? So that’s what I’ll do this time around.

I routinely keep a list of books I’ve read, with a short comment on each. Looking at my list, I see that I’ve read 72 books since January 1 of this year. Yes, I do read a lot. But I promise to not tell you about all 72 books. And I won’t bother you with a list of the stinkers (and some were truly awful). Instead, I’ll mention some of those I enjoyed most.

On the fiction side, I particularly enjoyed reading through the novels of John le Carré, the nom de plume of British writer David John Moore Cornwell. I began with his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961) and worked my way forward through his body of work, 22 novels in all, the last being Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Many of his books have become well known movies and, in the UK, television series.

Le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) was made into a movie starring Richard Burton in 1965, and le Carré has been on a roll ever since. He’s 80 years old and still writing, an encouraging thought to someone like me.

I especially enjoyed what’s called his Karla Trilogy (named after Russian spymaster Karla): Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People. But many of his stand-alone novels are terrific reads, as well. I recommend A Perfect Spy, The Russia House, and The Night Manager, all outstanding. Some of his most recent books (The Constant Gardener, for example) have focused more on the corrupting power of multinational corporate interests.

Otherwise in fiction, I’ve bumped around a bit in the entertainment section, those mysteries and thrillers and suspense novels we read for the sheer fun of it. Among those I recommend:

Michael Dibdin’s Dead Lagoon and Ratking. Dibdin, born in England and raised in Ireland, sets both these mystery/crime novels in Italy. They feature Aurelio Zen, the anti-heroic protagonist and detective who appears in many of Dibdin’s books.

Josef Škvorecký’s The End of Lieutenant Boruvka. Set in Prague, Czech Republic, this novel gives the reader a taste of what life was like during the late 1960s and the heady days of the Prague Spring when, at least for a while, the oppressive communist regime loosened its grip. And then it hammered back down with a vengeance. The police sleuth Boruvka is a good man caught in the middle.

On the non-fiction side of reading, I spent a month involved with the life and philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, also known as Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677). Born in Amsterdam of Jewish parents, Spinoza is in my view one of the most important philosophers in western history, hands down. Perhaps more than any other single thinker, he laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment. Yet he lived out his short life earning a living as a lens grinder.

Steven Nadler’s biography of the philosopher (Spinoza, A Life) is a must read for anyone wanting to understand Spinoza. Jonathan Israel’s A Revolution of the Mind, Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origin of Modern Democracy, meanwhile, is important for understanding the historical and cultural background for Spinoza’s work. Another book by Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell, Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, is a lively exposition on the courageous book by Spinoza that was banned and almost sent him to prison. And Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic is simply an adventure and a joy to read. This latter book will please anyone even remotely interested in Spinoza, philosophy, or the Enlightenment period. It is truly a lively and entertaining read (trust me).

Also in non-fiction, I recommend two books by the always enjoyable Bill Bryson: At Home and Shakespeare, The World as a Stage. Anyone who’s read anything by Bryson knows he can make any subject sing. At Home is a hard book to describe succinctly; suffice to say it uses the author’s own home, an old rectory in the English countryside, as a pivot to explore the history of human dwellings. Written with a hundred intriguing asides, the book is often wry and always amusing. As for the Shakespeare book, well, it’s a short biography. But short is good because we really don’t know that much about the playwright, do we? But Bryson makes what we do know (and why we don’t know more) a wonderful little Elizabethan voyage.

Finally, I want to mention two other non-fiction books that are extremely well done, and extremely sobering to read: Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA. The Klein book will make you angry but you come away understanding why you’re angry, and why you were already angry anyhow at the way the powers-that-be use economics as a way to induce crises and exploit the rest of us. As for the Weiner book, it is informative in surprising ways. We are programmed by Hollywood to think of spies as larger-than-life characters. Who’d have guessed they are often such small and ugly creatures? Who’d have guessed that the CIA is more accomplished at failure than success, and actually at its best in promoting its own image? Well then, there you are. Read it and weep.

And on that note, I’ll mosey along and get some work done. Then maybe read a book. So many to read, so little time. Know what I mean?