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The time I spent a year studying French at a Quebecois community college…

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — Leave a comment
November 4, 2023

It’s been over a week now, and anger has subsided. (See the earlier entry.) I’ll probably get even more perspective on this strange year-long adventure as more time passes, but I may as well jot down some notes here and now.

Quebec is a unique and interesting province, and it’s the only jurisdiction in North America where French is the official language. If you don’t live here (or in Canada), chances are you’ll never see any news reports about all the conflicts, reforms, and counter-reforms related to the French language, the pushback against Anglos (that’s the slang term for English speakers such as moi), and so much more. There’s a lot of rich history, and quite a lot of baggage, both historic and cultural.

You can learn the basics of the local francization program over here, but in a nutshell, the government offers free full-time French courses to all the newcomers, be they refugees, Anglo Canadians from other provinces, or immigrants. To sweeten the deal, they also pay $5 CAD ($3.66 USD as of this writing) per hour for attending those classes. That doesn’t sound like much until you remember it’s 40 hours a week, 10 weeks per course, and four courses altogether. With all the breaks and such, that comes out to exactly one year, and approximately $800 CAD ($586 USD) per month, which is pretty neat, actually.

The course was held at the cégep (a uniquely Quebecois type of community college) on the other side of town because, hey, that was the only opening when I finally got the call. Cégeps are used to educate teens right after high school, and train them either in hands-on skills (there were so many bright-eyed and bushy-tailed paramedic hopefuls!) or something more abstract, like philosophy. The entire francization wing was more or less isolated from the local students – in retrospect, kind of a shame.

The class itself was… slow. Very, very slow. To be fair, I’m not an average student: French was my sixth language (or an attempt at one, anyhow), after Russian, English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Just about every other student in our class (the size varied between 15-19 students) was a refugee. Some from Latin America, most from Ukraine. (They didn’t hold the war against me after I made my feelings about Russia clear.) I had to constantly remind myself that they didn’t choose to be here: a couple of years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even imagined moving to the exotic French-speaking land just north of New York. Unlike me, they ended up here involuntarily, due to larger-than-life circumstances outside their control.

That is a very long and polite way of saying that there were multiple students who simply didn’t give a damn, or would do their best to disrupt the class, though sometimes accidentally. There was a young European guy with a raging case of… something, who delighted in yelling out his name and basking in the confused attention of the others. Every three minutes or so. There was a fellow American who had a bad case of ADHD and would constantly interrupt the class to say that “Ahh, and in the US, we do it like this” – stopping any and all progress for at least five minutes. (She’d do that about once an hour.) An elderly woman who loudly complained about each and every little thing, nonstop. A young Ukrainian guy who either deliberately trolled the professor or had a genuine learning disability, asking a question every 30 seconds on those rare occasions when we’d get an interesting presentation about local history.

And then there was the fact that one of our four professors was a power-tripping, emotionally unstable maniac. (Once again, see the earlier entry.) It had been 14 years since my university graduation, and the blatant power abuse (and a “shruggie emoji” reaction from the administration) strongly reminded me why I never continued my formal education.

All in all, the year-long course really helped my French – it was definitely more effective than Duolingo and other apps. But ye gods, it moved so slowly, and we received so little actual hands-on practice with oral comprehension… (Because you can’t exactly turn on the subtitles when the local talks to you and you don’t quite get what they mean.) I’m fairly sure I would’ve gotten the same amount of French (if not more) if I’d just taken a burger-flipping job at the local Tim Hortons for three months or so.

Toward the end of our fourth and final course, the cégep simply wanted to get rid of us as fast as possible. The final exam was a joke: not a carefully curated and strict affair like in the previous module, but a free-for-all where the professor looked the other way, and we were all encouraged to cheat and copy each other’s answers. Everyone passed, and I’m quite certain the low scores got fudged so that all 18 of us would get a passing grade and GTFO. Ho hum.

I’ve made a fair amount of progress, though quite a few others didn’t. A big part of that, I believe, was due to the fact that they never really tried to “francisize.” Each day, and constantly, there would be conversations in either Spanish or Ukrainian all around me, non-stop. That’s fine if there’s an emergency, but if you’re just blabbing on about the weather or what’s for lunch… Try saying it in French, eh? And then your friend will try to understand and reply back, and then before you know it, you’ll both get some much-needed practice! I was alone in my desire to speak exclusively in French, and that did not make me too popular. So it goes.

Some of the things I did while waiting for the particularly slow days of class to end:

  • manually copied (yes, by hand) Wikipedia’s articles on electromagnetism and the underlying formulas thereof;
  • wrote a short fantasy story;
  • wrote poetry;
  • read through my entire pocket English-French dictionary, found the shortest words, and wrote down my own mini-dictionary of said words in my notebook;
  • developed a swing-trading strategy for my stocks;
  • improved my doodling skills;
  • wrote down the full text of a beautiful French poem, then its English translation, and tried to learn the fancy book French by staring intently at the two versions;
  • devoured several science textbooks in an attempt to keep my brain sane;
  • compiled several Kindle e-books on my phone;
  • read multiple lists of quotes by my favourite writers and philosophers, then stashed the best of them into text files on my phone;

There was more, I’m sure, but these are the top ones. That should probably give you some idea how much free (or underutilized) time we all had. Ho hum.

Well… I’m glad this is over. No lifelong friendships had been made, though I did meet my amazing, wonderful, absolutely perfect partner back in March, and she (a native Quebecoise) helped keep me sane throughout all this. That alone means the year wasn’t a waste. We went on so many little adventures…

But I digress. Not every huge adventure ends up particularly fun or exciting, so this year-long project will almost certainly rank near the bottom of my eccentric ideas – but hey, at least now I speak passable French. Or try to, in any case. Salut!

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The Dune – my favourite quotes

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — Leave a comment
October 29, 2023

What a wonderful book. What a fascinating writer. A beautiful brew of unusual life experiences paired with a decade of editing. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

“animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual . . . the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe”

—-

“Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”

—

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

—

“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked. The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen, he nodded. “We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

—

“He straightened, assuming an odd attitude of dignity – as though it were another mask, but this time clothing his entire body.”

—

”Humans are almost always lonely.”

—

“Paul looked up at the grizzled old man who stopped at a corner of the table. Hawat’s eyes were two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.”

—

“Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things . . . ” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “. . . the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing . . . ” She closed her fingers into a fist. “. . . without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

—

”She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.“

—

“I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.“”

—

“Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura.”

—

“His first encounter with the people he had been ordered to betray left Dr. Kynes shaken.”

—

“Halleck had spoken in Paul’s ear: “Odd sort of fellow. Has a precise way of speaking–clipped off, no fuzzy edges–razor-apt.”
And the Duke, behind them, had said: “Scientist type.””

—

“Kynes stared at him, seeing the water-fat flesh. He spoke coldly: “You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.””

—

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

—

“Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.”

—

“Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.”

—

“And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.”

—

“Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings.”

—

“The absence of a thing,” the Baron said, “this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we’re addicted to.”

—

“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

—

“The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”

—

“Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.”

—

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

—

“It could be only the adab, the demanding memory that comes upon you of itself.”

—

“The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.”

—

“Fear coursed through Paul. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull yellow light within this ring of people. Prescience had fed his knowledge with countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real-now. This was death hanging on an infinite number of minuscule mischances.”

—

“Each day, some time each hour, brings change.”

—

“That which makes a man superhuman is terrifying.”

—

“Walking a thing wire of peace with a measure of happiness.”

—

“The man without emotions is the one to fear. But deep emotions … ah, now, those can be bent to your needs.”

—

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

—

“But the test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.”

—

“He seemed too submissive to Paul, but then the Sardaukar had never been prepared for such happenings as this day. They’d never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself.”

—

“Isn’t it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?”

—

“The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.”

—

“The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”

—

“Before the lectures, though, he had to convince the Fremen. To understand how this came about, you must first understand the enormous single-mindedness, the innocence with which he approached any problem. He was not naive, he merely permitted himself no distractions.”

—

“It became apparent to the Fremen that Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy.”

—

“There is a fifth force which shaped religious belief, but its effect is so universal and profound that it deserves to stand alone. This is, of course, space travel – and in any discussion of religion, it deserves to be written thus:
SPACE TRAVEL!”

—

“Twenty delegates were recalled by their congregations. One committed suicide by stealing a space frigate and diving it into the sun.”

—

“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”

—

“To increase understanding is a laudable goal.”

—

“La, la, la – a Fremen cry of grief (“La” translates as ultimate denial, a “no” from which you cannot appeal.)”

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My first-ever paperback!

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July 30, 2023

I’ve come a long, loooong way from my first awkward e-books. (In fact, I deleted and then completely remastered the very first one: it was frankly embarrassing.) I’ve gone from short-length FAQs to compendiums of public-domain literature to an actual, real-length book, eh.

I used to write about early retirement on my mostly abandoned personal finance blog. Then I turned all of that into an actual e-book with advice on retiring early: Let’s Retire Young. And after remarkably great reception and reactions from multiple people, I did a bunch more formatting work and voila – it’s turned into a paperback! Amazon, as always, takes most of the profits, but still, this is mind-blowing: there will be actual books with actual unique content (none of which is from public domain, for once) bearing my name, spreading my thoughts around the world.

For all our fancy technology, paper books still last a helluva lot longer than their digital counterparts. (Go ahead and try to open a Microsoft Word file from 1983…) This feels rather surreal: I’ve made something that could quite possibly outlive me, and/or gather dust in some library collection for decades and centuries. That is, of course, if people buy it: it’s not a fancy publisher deal, just a print-on-demand operation that’s run by Amazon. (That said: fancy publisher people – feel free to reach out to me!)

To celebrate – and generate a little ranking boost – I’m giving away the e-book version for free for the next three days. The giveaway will end at the end of Tuesday, August 1st. Ditto for most of my other e-books: you can find them over here. As always, feel free to share the links with your friends, and I’d really appreciate it if you left a 5-star review if you like what you see. (Even a single sentence will suffice.)

Thanks in advance, and happy reading, eh!

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You are a story

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July 2, 2023

You are a story, an ongoing story being told by your brain to itself, forever and always. You’re not trusted with most of the controls over you body’s internal machinery, but it’s nice to think you’re in control, even when your thoughts are actually time-delayed ex post facto justifications of something your limbic system had decided on a second ago. To say nothing of pheromones…

You are a story, and your memory is but an echo of faded voices, a kaleidoscope of millions of imperfect pictures taken slightly out of focus. These recollections change, ever so slightly, each time you access them. To say nothing of dreams…

You are a story. Try to be a fun one.

(Amazing how much more effortless my writing can be when I’m just writing a comment to a stranger on Reddit, as opposed to deliberately sitting down to Write.)

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My Oxford French Mini Dictionary

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June 10, 2023

My Oxford French mini dictionary has a vagina but no penis. It has sperm but no menstruation. No fucking, only sex, and a pregnancy without a womb.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has honour without traitors, self-sacrifice without self-doubt.

There is a kangaroo but no platypus. There is God but no Bigfoot or Chupacabra.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has heaven and hell without apocalypse, without utopia, without rapture.

In the world of my Oxford French mini dictionary, there are workaholics but no slackers. There is neither heroism nor apathy, only complacency. Obedience without caricatures.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has knives and guns and bullets but no cotton candy, no colouring books, no dollhouses.

My Oxford French mini dictionary has no serendipity or randomness or rumination, only cold consequences. There is neither hedonism nor stoicism. There is only boredom.

There is no unpredictability.

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What a massive disappointment… (Or why I ended up getting a refund for Diablo-4 after an hour of gameplay)

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June 6, 2023

I did not think the game would be so bad that I’d have to refund it – never did that for a game before, but wow. This is something else… (Also, this whole post is a rant. Sorry, just gotta get it off my chest. Feel free to sound off and/or tell me why I’m wrong.)

I grew up playing Diablo-1 and Diablo-2. Dumped a lot of time into Diablo-3 when that came out, too. I really, really hoped D-4 would be better after the FUBAR they committed with D-3. (Remember when your character was basically a Terminator, walking through the halls of heaven and destroying everything in its path with zero effort? Good times, great worldbuilding, very wow, much impressive.) But JFC, right from the start, D-4 seems to be the least demanding, most ridiculously casual game of the entire franchise.

This is a rant. Feel free to close it. 🙂 If this helps at least one other person avoid purchasing the game, cool.

To start, the graphics were amazing. That first cut scene? Wow. Also, the character customization window was excellent. As for the rest…

  1. The sorceress starts the game with zero spells. Her only weapon is a stick that also doesn’t cast spells. 🙂 That’s not a sorceress – that’s an over-confident applicant to the mage school. (Compare and contrast D-2 at least giving you a rudimentary magic staff from the start.)
  2. No option to chat or even listen to the mysterious delirious stranger whose very presence kicked off a quest. Why? Just…. why? At least let me hang out and listen to his ravings. But nah, zero freedom.
  3. Can’t loot any of the animals I killed. (Killing a goddamn bear with one shot was pretty funny.) Can’t harvest their hide, or blood, or horns (that deer had so much potential), or souls, or teeth. Lame. Wasteful, even.
  4. Novice-level spells cost zero mana and can be fired non-stop. O_o That turns the dynamic into a plain old “point and click.” There’s zero tactics involved – and I made sure to play on the “experienced” difficulty level, not the newbie level. Remember how in D-2 you had to run around and conserve your mana while a bunch of mobs chased you? Yeah, so there’s an infinite source of basic-level magic now, apparently.
  5. Speaking of running around: no stamina bar anymore, either. Every character is now a marathon runner, woot!
  6. Somewhere after Diablo-3, the world lost the belt technology. 🙂 Shame, really: I guess they all wear suspenders and/or togas now. You can carry a ridiculous amount of gear in your inventory now, but gods help you if you decide to carry more than 4 potions on your person.
  7. The first big boss (X’Fer or some similar cliché fantasy name, all X’s and apostrophes) got defeated just by clicking on him, holding down the button for a couple of minutes, and occasionally stepping aside. Smooooth. Compare and contrast with the horror that was the Butcher in D-1, or how ridiculously difficult it was to kill Blood Raven in D-2.
  8. Accidentally clicked on the non-obvious exit right after killing the boss. The game wouldn’t let me to climb back inside the tower to pick up the loot. Why? Just… why? Skyrim came out 11.5 years ago, and even that gave you the freedom to backtrack, unless you specifically jumped off a ledge. Seems like the future gameplay will also be straight and one-sided like you’re a one-dimensional character.
  9. Again, the cut scenes make for nice eye candy, but that’s wayyyy too much cut-scene material for just the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay. (Compare and contrast: in the TV show Heroes, it took 9 episodes of build-up before they even showed the face of the villain Sylar. Here, we have the big bad monologuing at the very beginning.)
  10. Speaking of monologuing: the British accents in the intro cut scene (three looters and a scholar) were kind of amusing, though kind of cliché. But what was up with everrrryone in that village trrrying theirrrr best to do a strrrrronk Easterrrrn-Eurrropean accent? It felt so damn cringy, almost like watching “Orange is the New Black” again. Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don’t recall such an overabundance of thick ethnic accents in any of the previous games. Characters had foreign names, yes, and each NPC’s voice conveyed some aspect of their personality, but can you imagine the inhabitants of D-2’s Lut Gholein doing super-thick Middle-Eastern accents just for the fun of it? JFC…
  11. The leveling is way, wayyyyyy too fast. Five levels just for clearing out a ridiculously easy boss and a few skeletons?.. I logged out in disgust and got my refund ASAP, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I also scored 10 achievements along the way. (“Newwww achievement! Your character met their FitBit goal for the day by walking 50 steps!”)

tl;dr – shoddy writing, poor gameplay design and worldbuilding, zero challenge or tactics involved, and the dev team probably had fewer RPG players than the dev team that created D-3. 😦

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New e-book! And a giveaway! :) “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE”

Filed under: writing — 2 Comments
June 1, 2023

Okay, so the title is a bit of a mouthful, but you gotta be thorough with those things. Also, there are zero other e-books that have “lean-FIRE” in their title, and that’s just a damn shame, eh. (For the uninitiated: “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is the frugal version of that movement.) You can download my shiny new e-book over here. It’ll stay free until the end of Friday, June 2. I may do another giveaway in the coming weeks… If you like the e-book, please leave a 5-star review so others would be able to find it too!

As for what the book is about, I’m just going to shamelessly plagiarize my own e-book description here…

I retired at 34. I can teach you how.

My story doesn’t involve huge inheritances, rich relatives, or cushy jobs obtained through the Good Ol’ Boy Network. I’m a double immigrant: from Russia to the US when I was 16, from the US to Canada when I was 32. I never made six figures, never got huge scholarships, and my first job after college was as a box packer at an Amazon warehouse. (Thanks, recession!) Over the years, and by necessity, I mastered the art of frugal living and taught myself how to earn more, spend less, and invest the rest.

This book grew out of my personal finance blog, with a few extra chapters thrown in. Consider it your instruction manual for achieving frugal early retirement, aka lean-FIRE. (FIRE is a financial movement: it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.”)

This book is written in a conversational and informal (sometimes too informal) style, and it has something for everyone who wants to improve their financial situation. Even if you don’t replicate my journey entirely, you’ll still be able to avoid some huge mistakes and boost your savings rate.

This e-book is hands down the most book-like e-book I’ve ever written: for one thing, it’s long (317 pages, woot!), and consists entirely of my own writing, unlike so many of the public-domain e-books I’ve spliced together. In theory, I could’ve tried to pitch it to publishing houses to get it printed like an actual real-life book, but from what I understand about the industry, nowadays they prefer authors with huge social media platforms, and that’s not something I care to maintain. (You, dear reader, are part of a small and exclusive club!) So e-book format it is, then.

This e-book has a lot of rather personal information that average people never really share with one another: money permeates so many aspects of our lives, yet it’s considered faux pas to bring it up, especially so when you’re doing better than those around you. Not gonna lie, I had some doubts about releasing it, even as I cleaned up all my old blog posts and wrote a couple of new chapters.

I ended up clicking that “Publish” button anyway, and that’s due to two simple reasons. First, no one will remember any of us 150 years from now: our internal struggle, shame, or awkwardness don’t matter one bit in the grand scale of things. And secondly, if my e-book can help at least one person (and ideally, many more) streamline their financial situation and retire earlier, then all of this will be worth it. In fact, one of my PCT hiking buddies has already thanked me profusely: he’s a lawyer, but he never got a chance to learn the ins and outs of personal finance – until now. Looks like I’ve already accomplished my absolute-minimum goal – let’s see how many more I can help, eh?

And so, without further ado, head over here if you’d like to download the e-book for free, and please feel free to share the link with all your friends: my e-book has something for everyone. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope even more to get a shiny 5-star review from you afterwards. Have fun!

P.S.: To celebrate my e-book’s release, I’m also doing a two-day giveaway on most of my other e-books over here. Personally, I highly recommend 50 shades of yay: great thinkers on happiness. It contains useful perspectives on happiness from great thinkers across the millennia. (We could all use that in this stressful time!)

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What Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail Taught Me About Money (a book excerpt)

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May 28, 2023

It was eye-opening in more ways than one.

(This is a chapter from my upcoming personal finance e-book. Stay tuned for details!)

Unlike most of this book’s content, this chapter isn’t on my personal finance blog. I’m writing this in 2023, having returned from the Pacific Crest Trail, a giant 2,653-mile hike from Mexico to Canada.

It was… amazing. Larger than life. Glorious. I am definitely not the same person I was when I started the trail in April 2022. I could talk (and write, and reminisce) about the trail for a long time, but this isn’t what this book is about. If you’re curious, you can read my daily trail journal: the very first entry is over here, and the first entry where I actually started hiking (after a great deal of planning and training) is over here. I hope this inspires at least one of you!

The PCT took me five months to finish: that included taking two weeks off for an injured ankle, as well as having to skip a couple of wildfires in Oregon. If all goes as planned (but when does it ever? Heh), I’ll return to it in 2026 for a do-over, after finishing the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

When I returned to civilization, I was 31 pounds lighter, a bit more intense, a lot more feral, and much, much more radical in my financial views. Since then, I’ve regained the lost weight and most of my upper-body muscle, I’ve gotten a bit less feral (I no longer stare in awe at running faucets), but I haven’t abandoned my newfound financial views. Here they are, in no particular order.

Declutter. Declutter hard. I used to be a hoarder. I became a minimalist over the years. (That is, if you disregard my collections of vintage cameras, art, and gems and minerals.) The less stuff you have, the more freedom you have if you decide to move. To quote Tylen Durden, “The things you own end up owning you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.” Even so, even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine the sheer sense of freedom and simplicity that comes when everything you have, everything you need, fits into a single hiking backpack and stays on your back as you hike 2,653 miles. 

At any given moment on my hike, I could give you a fairly short list of all the items in my backpack: a tiny camping stove, a sleeping bag, a very basic first aid kit, my trusty spork, etc. Losing or breaking any of them would’ve been a minor tragedy (rest in peace, Sporky), but I knew where everything was, I knew what I could or could not accomplish with my resources at any given moment, and I never had to worry about consumerism for consumerism’s sake. If I bought something non-edible, it had to justify its weight and utility. For example, a replacement spork, or a pair of shorts for hiking in July, or a new pair of pants when the old ones didn’t survive my glissading adventures in the Sierra mountains.

Coming back to my spacious apartment was strange: it’s far from cluttered, but it has thousands of little items, most of which (like, say, a hammer) I use rather rarely. It’s been almost nine months since my return, and that vague feeling of unease, of guilty exuberance, still hasn’t faded. I doubt it ever will.

Find and use available free services. This advice comes with a huge caveat: don’t be a jerk and don’t steal the services designated for others. For example, if you have a sizable investing account, don’t barge into soup kitchens that are set up for those who have nothing. If, however, there are specific free services designed to help somebody just like you, go for it. Maybe it’s a free tutoring service at your college when you decide to go back to school. Maybe it’s a free (or heavily discounted) cooking class for adults that want to eat healthier. Maybe it’s a free photography workshop for anyone who has a good camera. Search. Find. Use. (And, as always, don’t be a jerk.)

Being a PCT thru-hiker was physically, emotionally, and financially challenging: there were good days and there were bad ones. Whenever I found something that was deliberately and explicitly designated for hikers, it felt disproportionately amazing. Sometimes it was a rural bar that invited dirty, smelly thru-hikers to its annual chili cook-off. (Joshua Inn & Bar, I salute you.) Sometimes it was a local business whose owner made it a point to give each thru-hiker a free scoop of ice cream and a piece of pie. (Mom’s Pie House in Julian, we shall meet again! Toy Store in Quincy, ditto!) Sometimes it was a ski resort that gave a free 40-oz bottle of beer if you showed them your PCT permit. (Donner Ski Ranch, keep up the great work!) Sometimes, you’d find a local church that allowed thru-hikers to sleep inside. (Thank you, Word of Life Church of Burney, CA.)

All of those things were free. All of them were for us – the smelly and rowdy tribe of 4,000 thru-hikers on a strange quest, relentlessly walking north across thousands of miles. Not all of these free services were openly advertised: there’d always be some thru-hikers who walked past without ever partaking in that kindness of strangers. If you did your research before the hike, or paid very careful attention to thru-hiker messages posted in the FarOut app (aka GutHook), then you’d be able to find all of that – and more. Sometimes, the universe actively wants to help you, but you still need to take that last step on your own.

Slow and steady always wins. I was hiking through the windy mountains near Tehachapi when I learned that important lesson – and, more importantly, took it to heart. I’d hiked 600 miles by then, and I averaged about 27 miles on a good day. My hiking style was sporadic: I would use a burst of energy to hike fast for a mile or two, then slow down, take a quick break, and rush again. Then I met two older guys – Hal from Houston and Kevin from London. Their strategy was radically different: they’d just keep walking, slowly but inevitably, even despite the powerful wind bursts that threatened to tip you over. They were, in short, like a pair of 60-year-old Terminators: they simply didn’t stop.

They passed by me during one of my many breaks. A few minutes later, I raced past them and thought I wouldn’t see them again for a long, long while. Lo and behold, they hiked past me again on my next break. It went on like that all day long: I’d use up way more energy but in the end, I’d always fall behind. (Not unlike that story about the tortoise and the hare.)

I learned a lot that day, and I adjusted my pace afterwards. That made me a better hiker, and the parallel with personal finance is obvious: slow-and-steady investors who go with stable and reliable index funds will almost certainly outpace those who try to jump from one lucrative-seeming investment to another. You’ll never set a speed record if you follow Hal’s and Kevin’s example, but chances are, you’ll outpace your competition.

When the bell rings, run. It was the opening night at the Vermillion Valley Resort, deep in the Sierra mountains. There were dozens of thru-hikers, all of us waiting for the dinner bell in the large dining room. The routine was simple: hear the bell, walk up to the counter, get your giant serving of meat and veggies and mashed potatoes. (They cooked in bulk. It was delicious.)

And then the long-awaited bell finally rang. You’d think that all the hungry hungry hikers would follow their Pavlovian conditioning and run for it. You’d think wrong. There were a few seconds of silence. There was the slow stretching of limbs as other hikers slowly (ever so slowly) started to get up from their benches. And then there was me, nonchalantly speed-walking to the counter the moment I heard the bell. I was in the back of the room, and yet I was among the first 10 hikers in that line. The three cooks did their best, but the line still moved slowly. I inhaled all of my food and got back in line for seconds (hiker hunger is real!) while 30 or so hikers were still in line, waiting for their first serving.

In the end, we all got plenty of food. Nobody went to bed hungry that night. And yet, the sequence matters: if I took all your food from you and then returned it (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all the in-between snacks) at the very end of the day, you probably wouldn’t be very happy with me, even if your caloric intake for the day ended up the same. It’s similar in personal finance and in life overall: even though you’ll eventually get what you’re after, you can make things a lot easier for yourself if you pounce on that opportunity as soon as possible.

When you hear the bell, or the signal, or whatever it is you’re waiting for, don’t wait. Don’t try to appear cool or sophisticated by taking things easy. Run, speed-walk, pounce – do whatever you must, but seize the opportunity when you can, while you can. And then, of course, go back for seconds.

Act early to avoid huge expenses. The PCT goes through dozens of tiny towns, standalone gas stations, and resorts. Some of them were friendly and welcoming. Some of them treated PCT thru-hikers as if we were just wallets with legs attached. There was quite a lot of shameless profiteering. There were tiny gas stations or towns that wouldn’t just charge you $4.50 for a 20-oz bottle of soda – they wouldn’t even put up price stickers, and would seemingly make up the prices on the spot. Let’s just say those places weren’t too popular with the thru-hiking crowd, but if you had no other choice for your food resupply, and if the next store was 50-80 miles away, what else was there to do – hike on an empty stomach? (In philosophy and economics, this is known as Hobson’s choice: an illusion of choice where only one thing is actually offered.)

I’d done a lot of research before the PCT, and I sent a few food packages to my future self along the trail, but I hadn’t expected those levels of price-gouging. (That remains one of the very few things I didn’t like about the trail.) If I could go back in time (or if I’d researched better), I would’ve sent out many more food packages ahead of time to all those tiny towns, all those little resorts, all those borderline-illegal tiny stores with no price tags. That would’ve saved me a lot of time and money, not to mention anguish.

It’s similar in personal finance. Perhaps there’s a recurring event or an annual holiday: you can save 70% or more if you buy all the decorations and accessories on sale after the holiday, and they’ll be just as good a year later. (Well, maybe not the Easter Bunny chocolates, but you get the point.) If you buy your plane tickets at the last moment, you’ll pay a high premium. If you shop for them months in advance, you’ll be able to take advantage of price glitches, ticket sales, etc. If you plan on getting to the airport early, bring some snacks and save a ton of money on overpriced airport restaurants. The list goes on: there’s almost always some advantage, some way to stack the deck, or to at least minimize the damage if you act early enough, if you do more research, if you think ahead.

There were many, many more lessons learned, but these are the main ones. I’ve returned from my thru-hike a lot more radical than I’d ever been before, and I don’t see that going away. That’s an interesting change in perspective, if nothing else. At this point, I view shopping malls as profligate temples of mindless consumerism. Fancy cars are still aesthetically pleasing, but they’re also hilarious: they get stuck in traffic just like all the clunkers around them. My own consumer footprint became almost non-existent: I’ve just double-checked my online order history, and the only non-edible things I’ve bought over the past nine months were a few books, a new pair of jeans ($12 USD on sale), and an otamatone, a hilarious miniature synthesizer that cost $51 USD but brings me a lot of joy. (Can’t say the same for my neighbors. Heh.)

You don’t need to go on a gigantic cross-country through-hike to gain your own financial insights – you can learn from just about any situation, if you’re so inclined. These are just a few of my own

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Advice for future Pacific Crest Trail hikers

Filed under: wanderlust — Leave a comment
February 10, 2023

I’ve decided to post something useful for all the future PCT hikers: the sum total of my PCT advice. This isn’t gospel, just one hiker’s take on stuff. I hope this helps, and happy hiking!!

  1. If your trail name is just one word, and if it’s a common noun, be aware that others will probably have the same one. I encountered tons of Turtles and Chefs. 🙂 It’s okay to shop around for a trail name. It’s also okay to have no trail name at all. It’s your hike, and no one else’s.

2. You will not survive off hiker boxes alone. It’s a worthwhile goal, but some towns have no trail boxes at all. Also, your diet would be limited to mysterious Ziploc baggies full of unidentifiable powders. Either way, not nearly enough calories.

3. Eat a lot. I promise you won’t gain weight by the time your thru-hike is over. I devoured 4K calories a day, and still ended up losing 18% of my body weight by the end. O_o

4. If you spend a zero day in a campground/resort, you won’t have as much fun as you would with a town zero. There’s just… not a whole lot to do. That’s something I wish I’d changed on my hike.

5. A lot of resorts/stores, especially starting in the Sierra, will not have price tags… VVR is the worst offender – they don’t quite tell you their tiny beers are $6 each. O_o Don’t be afraid to ask for prices.

6. Don’t chug olive oil if your digestive tract isn’t used to it. Yes, that’s the most efficient way to get your calories, but… At least one hiker shat his pants after he started chugging oil. (He will remain nameless hahaha) As life hacks go, this one may have some severe consequences.

7. Send resupply boxes to tiny towns along the trail. After South Lake Tahoe, and basically for the rest of the trail, there’ll be a ton of tiny towns with tiny stores: even when they have price tags, it’ll be ridiculously expensive to resupply. If you’re not sure about a town, look it up with the Google Maps street view, and you’ll see if it has a Safeway or just one tiny-looking store.

8. Send yourself a variety of supplies. A lot of hikers get tired of the food they’d sent themselves in resupply boxes. (I ended up hating peanut butter pretty fast lol)

9. Take tons of pictures and videos. 🙂 Also, this will sound elementary, but use a microfiber cloth on your phone/camera lens. If you forget to do that once in a while, your pics will come out duller than they should be.

10. Don’t carry $50 or $100 bills. (This is especially applicable to foreign hikers.) Most stores on the trail are small, and they usually wouldn’t be able to break you a big bill. Carry an assortment of $1, $5, and $10 bills.

11. Have a secret cash stash in your backpack in case you really need it. Some places (like Hikertown) accept only cash, and there aren’t a lot of ATMs.

12. This one is just my personal opinion, but Platypus-brand water bladders are poorly designed. You can accidentally yank out the main water tube, or they could develop a micro-leak because of all the friction in your backpack… I ended up carrying my water in SmartWater bottles instead.

13. Dudes, this one is for you (women already know this stuff haha) – after you put sunscreen on your face, wash it off before going to sleep… I miiiight have ended up with 4 days of sunscreen slowly getting inside my eyes and irritating the hell out of my eyes for 2 days in the Sierra. Zero stars, would not recommend.

14. Outside your face, sunscreen generally stays on for several days. You can make it last, and still get enough protection from the sun. (If your skin starts turning pink, reapply as needed.) If you sweat a lot, this tip might not work for you, but in my experience, all the trail dust combined with the sunscreen to form a nice protective layer around my legs.

15. Trail magic is amazing, but don’t rely on it or expect it. Less disappointment that way, and you’ll appreciate any and all unexpected trail magic that much more. 🙂

16. If you’re going through the bear country and don’t have your bear can yet (or anymore), hang your food off a tree branch. It’ll take just a few minutes, and you won’t end up with just a can of Pringles (bears *hate* Pringles!) to last you to the next town.

17. Get a small compass, learn how to use it. Phone apps can get accidentally deleted, electronics can run out of power or drown, but it’d take physical force to smash a compass. There are quite a few confusing spots along the trail.

18. Speaking of backups: National Geographic maps are awesome. 🙂 I actually navigated with one (and my compass!) after I fell into Bear Creek just ahead of VVR. It’s a good idea to have non-electronic backups like that.

19. If your phone drowns and stops working, keep it in a ziploc filled with dry rice. That stuff really works! (But not on DSLR cameras. I’m so sorry, Great Dingleberry…)

20. Don’t pack your fears. I’ve seen a hiker who carried a hatchet (he claimed he saw a lot of violent people in news clips about California…), another hiker with a pistol, etc. In the entire history of the PCT, no one died of human violence or animal attack. Leave the fear (and extra weight) at home.

21. Don’t be an asshole – pack out your toilet paper. There was quite a lot of it along the trail… Just yeet it into a ziploc, and into another ziploc, and put it deep into an outside pocket where it won’t touch anything else. It’s as simple as that.

22. Glissading is awesome, but it tends to randomize your gear. Everything that’s not secured to your backpack can fall off – and even if it’s secured, who knows. One guy hiking next to me ended up losing his sock (it was hanging and drying) but found a bottle of water instead. :))

23**. Don’t glissade in short-shorts…** One girl ended up getting named “Road Rash” – apparently, there was quite a lot of damage.

24. After you get a hitch, always – **always** – make sure you don’t forget your electronics and your hiking poles. Those were the top items folks forgot, from what I’ve seen. (Hell, I forgot my own poles at Kennedy Meadows South. 😛 )

25. Don’t start political debates, and don’t join them if some other idiot starts them. Leave the drama and the politics at home. Enjoy the beautiful nature instead. 🙂

26. A small mylar emergency blanket can be super useful. It can protect your exposed skin from mosquitoes when you’re filtering water next to their natural habitat. It can also keep you warmer at night if you wrap yourself in the emergency blanket while inside the sleeping bag. (It retains a lot of the heat your body radiates.)

27. Try to journal. Days will merge into weeks into months, and a lot of small things (and hiker names!) will be forgotten.

28. If you order Altra Lone Peak shoes from their site, keep in mind that they don’t deliver to post office buildings. (Ask me how I know!) They ship by Fedex, so that won’t work out. You can try shipping them to a local trail angel’s house instead.

29. Your feet will expand. Probably by a lot. If you put new shoes in your resupply boxes, plan accordingly, or you might not fit in them.

30. If you have large (and flat) feet like myself, don’t buy synthetic socks. Wool socks expand relatively well, but synthetic socks… My feet went from size 13 to size 16 (yes, really), and when I switched out my wool DarnTough socks for synthetic ones in Bishop, the synthetic socks started biting into the ankle so much that I ended up with so-called “hiker inflammation” aka fluid build-up in the ankle. Keeping it iced and elevated helped fix it, but I still ended up missing quite a few days of hiking. So, either stick with wool socks only, or keep rolling your synthetic socks up/down throughout the day. Keep them from staying in one place.

31. PCT is a very expensive adventure. Plan accordingly. In my experience, by mid-point, a lot of hikers were walking more miles than they were comfortable with because a) they were tight on cash, or b) they had minor injuries and wanted to reach the finish line before they became **major** injuries, or c) both.

32. Don’t be too cool for an ice axe/microspikes. They can save your life, or prevent a major injury. It’s better to have them and not need them… (I ended up using my ice axe when I started sliding off the hard packed snow on the damn Mather Pass. Best investment ever!)

33. Please don’t try trail-running up a mountain in the dark and/or when there’s ice.

34. You’re gonna have to get good at math, or become comfortable using a calculator. When shopping for food in town, you’ll end up doing tons of math to find the best “calories per $” deal.

35. Make sure you have some food variety when you buy food for the next few days of hiking. It can be **very** tempting to just buy a ton of peanuts (800 calories for $1, wooo!) but you’ll hate yourself afterwards. 😛

36. It’s okay if your hiking routine is different than other people’s. Maybe you like waking up at 3:30am and stopping at 5pm, or maybe you’ll get up after dawn and walk till dark. Maybe you want to take 2-hour siestas in the afternoon. Totally up to you.

37. There’ll be **a lot** of fallen trees (aka blowbacks) along the trail. Just mentally brace yourself ahead of time. 🙂 The hike into Idyllwild was basically an obstacle course, and then there were roughly 50-70 miles of blowdowns on the way to Etna… Quite a few in Washington, too. They’ll slow you down, and there’s no escaping them, so just make peace with that fact.

38. There will be loooong stretches without any cellphone reception, especially in the Sierra. Tell your friends/family not to worry. If you use a Garmin GPS thingy, make sure the folks back home know how to see your location.

39. No internet means you won’t be able to do a lot of time-sensitive online stuff. This is a very niche tip, I know 🙂 but if you decide to sell monthly covered calls to nonchalantly sponsor your hike, you’re gonna miss out on a week or two because, again, no internet. Or if you’re selling your house, maybe. Or negotiating with your crappy accountant. Plan accordingly.

40. Be nice. For a lot of regular people you encounter, you might be the first and last PCT hikers they’ll ever meet. You’re a PCT ambassador. Try to leave a good impression.

41. For fuck’s sake, don’t run off without paying. At least one NorCal hostel shut down in 2021 because the owner was heartbroken that hikers kept slipping away in the morning instead of paying for their bed + dinner. According to Guthook, at one point 15 hikers did that as a group in September 2021. Your actions affect not just this current hiking season, but future years as well.

42. When you’re in town, the most efficient calories = buying a bucket of ice cream. 🙂 a 1.5-liter bucket of ice cream = 1,800 calories. I used to just buy it and eat it with a spork on the nearest flat surface. 🙂

43. Trust your intuition. If all of a sudden, you notice that the path looks kinda faint and not very PCT-like, stop and check Guthook. I’m positive that every PCT hiker got turned around at some point. There’s lots of tiny forks you might not notice. It takes just a few seconds to double-check your location, and if you ignore your intuition, you might spend an hour or more heading completely the wrong way lol

44. Learn to use Guthook’s features – especially the altitude display that shows what ups and downs are ahead of you.

45. If you have doubts… You don’t need to be a super-experienced veteran hiker to do the PCT. I sure as hell wasn’t. 🙂 I’d never spent a night outdoors of my own accord (aside from Search & Rescue training earlier), and never hiked for fun, but I picked it up fast and finished the PCT in one piece. Just pay attention and don’t do dumb stuff, that’s all there is to it.

46. Yes, the Timberline buffet really is as awesome as everyone says it is. 🙂 Their strawberry smoothies were amazing!! Don’t skip the buffet, is what I’m saying, or you’ll miss out on an amazing experience.

47. In the Sierra, most bridges are located in the JMT section. Before and after it, not so much. Be **very** careful when crossing creeks and streams. Even a relatively small creek can kick your ass if it’s strong enough. (Damn you, Bear Creek!) Use caution and common sense.

48. Gloves vs mittens. Gloves give you more dexterity (good for setting up/taking down your tent, etc) but mittens are warmer since your fingers are together and share the warmth.

49. If there’s stuff (water bottles, etc) in your backpack’s outside pockets, at some point it might fall off and get lost. If your stuff is secured by a strap, that strap might fail – for example, if you’re navigating a lot of branches while climbing over blowdowns. To make sure you don’t lose, say, your tent poles – secure your stuff using 2 straps. It might still fall off and get lost, but much less likely that way.

50. Carry an emergency tampon. Human bodies can get weird on a giant endurance hike like that: at a tiny highway rest stop, I met a hiker whose period started wayyy earlier than expected. She always used to buy tampons just in time, and none of the other PCT hikers had a spare… She ended up asking all the locals that hiked by. Fun fact: most women who go out for a day hike on a weekday morning are on the older side, so they don’t have spares either. I used to pride myself in being able to help almost anyone, but I was completely useless in that situation.

51. The JetBoil cooking pot&stove combo is more expensive than generic pots, but it’s wayyy more efficient. It really does boil water faster than your basic aluminum/titanium no-name pots. Just make sure you have a lighter or matches to start the flame – it’s not piezoelectric.

52. Nothing wrong with taking multiple consecutive zeroes, but after about 2-3 zeroes in a row, your body will have to readjust to the hiking mode. Keep that in mind if you take a long detour to Vegas, San Francisco, Portland, etc. 🙂

53. Your water filter will **not** help you if the water is chemically contaminated. (Fertilizers, industrial runoff, etc.) If the water source looks/smells funny, try to wait until the next water source.

54. Wildfires in Cali/Oregon start in August. Keep that in mind if you have a late start.

55. If you plan on night-hiking, be aware that you’re sharing the territory with predatory critters. One time, a dude woke me up at 4am because he was **convinced** he was being stalked by a mountain lion. (“Too insistent for a deer, too small for a bear.”) He was just so damn happy to have some human company – I had a quick breakfast and we hiked together until dawn. 🙂 (His strategy was to nap during the day, then walk at night – that was during the heatwave.)

56. You probably won’t finish that large pizza you order in town. 😛 You’ll be hungry, yeah, but those large-sized pizzas are HUGE, y’all. Order a medium, or be prepared to walk around town with a to-go box full of cold slices hahaha

57. Bagels are awesome. ❤ Each bagel is about 220 calories, has 10 grams of protein, and they don’t really go bad. Bagels were my must-have carryout food in every town.

58. New to hiking? Or never hiked in the desert? I did a 3-day “rehearsal hike” and I highly recommend it! I rented a cheap campspot in Potrero through AirBnB, just 5 miles or so west of the South Terminus. (There’s a bus from San Diego that goes there.) It was a really laid-back way to make sure my body adjusted to the climate, humidity, altitude, etc. Also, a great way to get last-minute practice with all your shiny new gear. 🙂

59. Don’t carry huge knives. A small folding knife and/or a tiny flat one-piece metal multi-tool will do just fine.

60. There are many trail angel groups in towns along the PCT. You can find them either through the main trail angel group on Facebook, or if you search for the town name + trail angels. Not every town has them, but it’s a great way to find a free (or cheap) place to crash when you’re in town.

61. Cowboy-camping is indescribably awesome. Hands down one of my favourite parts of the trail. Waking up in the middle of the night, looking up at the stars (and the Milky Way, if you’re lucky) amid the velvet-black background of the universe… There is nothing like it. ❤

62. Leave no trace – carry out all your trash. Yes, that means you’ll have a tons of plastic packaging and food wrappers by the time you reach the next town in 3-5 days, but if all 4,500 hikers started throwing their trash around… Just don’t do that.

63. Electrolytes are your friends, especially during heatwaves. You will sweat **a lot**, and you’ll need to replenish the salt you sweat out. Experiment with different electrolyte powders. Include them in your resupply boxes because PCT-adjacent stores often sell out.

64. Yes, Oregon mosquitoes are as terrible as everyone says. There are literal swarms of them. Pack a head-net: it weighs just a few grams, and you won’t regret it.

65. Take a few minutes to google, read, and understand the symptoms (and treatment) of heatstroke and frostbite. You may end up needing that information in the desert, in the Sierra, and during heatwaves. It could save your life. (Or somebody else’s.)

66. When you’re in town and all the electric outlets are already taken, check the back of the building! Always check the perimeter, y’all. 😉 More often than you’d think, there’s an empty outlet (or more than one!) in the back, out of sight and all yours to use.

67. I already mentioned the blowdowns – mentally prepare yourself for some really frustrating days. There’s a section (near mile 200) where the trail got swept away by annual flooding, so you’ll spend 15 or so miles wandering from one tiny stone cairn to another – no trail, no signposts. 🙂 In the Sierra, especially along the JMT, there’ll be virtually no PCT signage, no way to tell where exactly the path to the summit lies under all that snow. You can’t change that, but you can change your attitude. Just keep in mind that it really is wilderness out there, and not every stretch is easy to navigate.

68. The farther you get from the PCT, the fewer people will know what that is, and hitchhiking might get difficult. When I had to leave the trail to nurse my ankle, I got a ride from KMN all the way to Modesto. (2 hours away.) Coming back, the locals all thought I was a homeless person and not a thru-hiker. 😦 I tried and failed to hitchhike, and ended up spending roughly $150 on Uber and Lyft to get from Modesto to Sonora, and from Sonora back to the trail near KMN. Keep that in mind if you plan to hitch back to the trail from a city 50+ miles away.

69. Have fun out there. 🙂

(Crossposted on my PCT-2022 trail journal)

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New e-book! The Banned Books Compendium: 32 Classic Forbidden Books

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment

Short version:

I’ve created a new e-book. It’ll be available for free on Kindle from February 10th through February 14th. You can download it over here. You can also download the 59Mb PDF version over here. (And please, share it as much as you can/want.)

Long version:

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

Oscar Wilde

This collection of banned books was inspired by Florida’s House Bill 1467, which aims to police which books would be allowed in public schools. Schools in Manatee and Duval counties are hiding, removing, or covering up all of their books just to be on the safe side. A teacher charged with distributing “obscene” books to minors could be charged with a third-degree felony. Since no one knows what precisely would qualify as obscene, there are entire schools with empty shelves.

A “media specialist” (and not a teacher) would be tasked with deciding what’s allowed and what isn’t: by default, everything is banned, and books would be approved on an individual basis. If that doesn’t make you confused, bewildered, and perhaps a little angry – well, maybe this collection of banned books (and the introductions I prepared for them) will show why censorship has always been a losing game, a coward’s last defense.

I was born in the Soviet Union. My grandma spent seven years in Stalin’s Gulag camp. My home country, which I haven’t visited since 2003 and likely never will, kills journalists for sport. Let’s just say I have low tolerance for censors and bullies. I always low-key wondered how I could help, what – if anything – I could contribute, and I got this idea after reading a few too many accounts of the consequences of Florida’s book ban. (They aren’t setting up book bonfires just yet, but we live in an age where the unthinkable becomes improbable becomes news.)

If I were the pretentious kind, I’d say that I’m a friend of freedom, a lover of libraries, a keeper of knowledge – but I’m not, so I won’t, though I sort of did. Heh. I’m just a guy with a computer and a little too much time on my hands. I’m good at editing huge volumes of information, and my sole accomplishment here is meta-compiling old books using publicly available resources. If I could do it, so can you.

At first, I thought this banned book compendium would take just one all-nighter: find the most famous public domain books that had been banned in the past, splice them all together, add some formatting, a few words about each book, etc… That was idealistic of me: I suddenly understood why the only other collection I found stopped at 18 books. I went with 32. Working nights and weekends, this project took well over a week, even though Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia had already done all the heavy lifting. Still – worth it.

There are two often-banned pieces of literature I couldn’t fit in: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare’s plays. They require so many footnotes (which would have to be very carefully interlinked) that adding them here was beyond my capacity. Fortunately, you can find them for free right here, on Project Gutenberg: Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare.

Each banned book in this 8,622-page monster of an anthology is preceded by a short text: a summary of the book, why it was controversial, and who tried (or succeeded in) banning it. That’s followed by a link or two that will lead you to sites with other relevant information on the topic.

Incidentally, it’s quite disturbing how much information is hidden behind the paywalls of academic journals. The research published (presumably) for the public good, often in taxpayer-funded universities, gets locked away where an average reader can’t read it without paying $25 or more. (Good luck finding anything useful and accessible on Nicholas I’s “terror of censorship.”) Some of the links I’ve included lead to hobbyist blogs that have remarkably useful and in-depth information. Those sites were created by average people like you and I, and they dispense their knowledge freely. Some food for thought…

I’ve learned a fair bit while assembling this collection. Before I started this project, I had no idea just how much influence Anthony Comstock (he of the 1873 Comstock Act) had with all his puritanical purges. I didn’t know that his successor, John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), kept the work going until 1950, which is still within living memory. And I certainly had no clue that Boston remained a hotbed of censorship well into the 20th century, to the point where “Banned in Boston” was a coveted distinction that was almost guaranteed to boost a book’s sales.

Some of the incidents I describe in those mini-introductions sound ridiculous. For example, the time Oklahoma’s Mothers United for Decency couldn’t explain why their Smut Mobile featured the Mad magazine. Or the time Australia kept banning and un-banning James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or the time Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland got banned in China because “animals should not use human language.” We can condescendingly chuckle at those displays of idiocy, but each of them is a canary in the coal mine of literacy.

There always were, and are, and will remain authoritarian despots, power-drunk bureaucrats, puritanical activists, and others like them who hate unusual books, who think they know better than you, who try to dam the flow of progress. Ironically, their efforts often bring even more attention to the books they seek to hide.

There are some who would argue that e-books will end censorship once and for all. Well… That’s true if you manually pass them around as EPUB files. If, however, you download them directly on Kindle (or Nook, or elsewhere), the same centralized system can delete your e-books just as fast, just as easily. That already happened once: in 2009, Amazon realized it didn’t have the right to sell George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm in the US. It proceeded to immediately delete those e-books from all their customers’ Kindles and Kindle apps. The irony of that Orwellian move is overwhelming, and though Amazon apologized profusely and promised not to do that again (unless they must), that showed just how easy it would be to censor an e-book if the push came to shove.

Ergo this file: I’m uploading the whole collection on Kindle as a cheap e-book because that’s the fastest way to ensure wide distribution. ($2.99 was the lowest price they allowed me to set.) You can download the Kindle version here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV96DX8R I’ll also try to spread the free PDF version all over the web. Save it, make a copy, send it to your friends – and read it yourself: the books within may not be your cup of tea, but once upon a time they were bestsellers, and they pissed off The Powers That Be so much that they continued to be banned centuries and even millennia after they were published. Books that inspire so much angst across eons make for some interesting reading. Besides, Lysistrata is hilarious and Mark Twain is a national treasure.

One could argue that we as a culture can be defined not by what we permit but by what we prohibit. Banned books, banned art, banned objects: they’re the negative space in the self-portrait that is our civilization. One of my favourite authors, Claire North, had this insightful gem in her Notes from the Burning Age: “Before the burning, it was considered heretical for women to behave in a manner considered male. Then these words changed – ‘female’, ‘male’. They have changed again since that time. What is our new morality? What is our new heresy?” What indeed.

Next time there’s a book ban (or a Nazi-like book bonfire), there’s a good chance something from this collection will be included. Save it. Pass it on. Historically speaking, literacy is a rare privilege. Public libraries have existed for just a couple of centuries. Public schools, even less than that. Knowledge is fragile, and critical thinking is powerful. There are those who would love for them both to go away, and fast. Read. Resist. Rage.

If you want to help, go to this Project Gutenberg page and start there. I’m not affiliated with them, but they fight the good fight as they digitize thousands of public domain texts. If you want to do more, start stockpiling controversial books (modern or classic) for safekeeping. Build a little lending library on your streetcorner. Pay very close attention to proposed book bans in your area, and protest like hell if they happen. As you will see below, quite a few bans were overturned when the appalling apparatchiks got overwhelmed by their community’s outrage. Shame still works, if only for the time being.

If there’s a large-scale book ban in progress in some other part of the world, get involved by mailing books to students and local activists. Send money. Send emails. Send the good vibes and share social media articles, if that’s all you have the time and the inclination for. Just don’t be silent.

If you have an idea for other public domain digitization projects, and if you’d like my help, you can reach me here: https://grigorylukin.com/contact-me/ So long, and happy reading.

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