It's a Bargain.

If you know me at all, in real life or even just through reading this space, it won't be long before I start talking about some book I've read. Not only do I read a lot, I also have what today is called an eidetic memory: it's near photographic. So, I remember what I read and through some perverse vagary of fate, or a dark malign curse, I can relate what I read to things that are happening today. Books seem like natural parts of conversations I'm having. 

I'm sure that estranges me from 97.9-percent of the people I interact with.

Finding the next book is a challenge for any reader, especially readers whose interests are wide-ranging. What's next? What's new? What sounds cool? What can my brain handle at the moment? These are all parts of the equation that answer the next-book dilemma.

If you're a reader it helps to read about books. Years ago, if you were a New Yorker, you could walk along Broadway on the Upper West Side, or Madison Avenue or Lex on the Upper East Side, or, even Fifth Avenue in Midtown. You could reliably expect to find a book store every five blocks or so. 

Today, though, virtually all those books stores are closed. They seem to have been superseded by nail salons.

To browse books today, to see what's out there and what's coming, I rely on two of amerika's last remaining newspapers: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Occasionally, I get a recommendation from The Economist, which generally reviews a book a week, or The Washington Post. And occasionally, I'll get a recommendation from a friend, or even bezos' monopoly. But seven out of ten books I buy (and like most bibliophiles I buy more than I can read) I get from the Times or Journal.

On Wednesday, my elder daughter's birthday, I read this review in the Journal. You can read it here, if you can get past the Journal's Draconian paywall.

Regardless of that, here's the bit that started my remaining synapses firing:

Like many heavy readers, I had read Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Sixth Extinction," in which she introduced me to the word "Anthropocene." A coinage used to describe the epoch we created, where the effects of humans are changing life of earth and, in fact, the very survivability of life on our planet.

But to my eyes, Faustocene was a cut above anything I've read over the last twenty years. What's more, as amerika gallops toward a trumpian dystopia (whether or not he claims victory in the election that's just three months away) we seem more of a Faustocracy than a Democracy and the words of the "weird sisters of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" ring in my ears. Those words might be, in fact, the taglines of the Faustocene Era. Though I suppose I'm committing the sin of melanging Marlowe and the Bard.

Faustocene sums up everything we're living through, today. A cosmic deal with the devil for earthly riches, or sex, or luxury in return for a damned future. Except the future, the burning lake future, is happening right now.

Of course I think of the Faustocene deals the big names of advertising made when their millions were no-longer enough and they sold their agencies and their workers' futures for instead multi-millions to short men in expensive suits who dealt with agencies like they were cards in an under-cranked three-card Monte scam. For all the promises made by the private-jet-jettisoners, I can think of no human benefits that come from the consolidation of capital, unless you're the one it's consolidated around.

In any event, I haven't yet read "The Devil's Contact" by Ed Simon, though I do generally like books that depict cloven feet on the cover.

But you don't have to read everything to get something out of what you haven't read.

I learned the word "Faustocene."

Expect to hear it from me.

As we continue to live it.