Rules for Readers, and The Fall of Rome

I read a tip once, I can't remember where: if you're traveling somewhere new to you, and you go to a restaurant and order x, and they ask you "do you want the y with that" (or something similar), just say yes. You'll be getting it the way the locals like it. Maybe you'll like it too, and at the least, you'll learn something.

If I were trying to collect useful tips for readers, and it looks like I am, my Rule #1 would be:

If you like what an author writes for money, seek out what he writes for love.

Or, less pithily but more accurately, if you like reading what an author is best known for, try to find things he's written out of love for the subject, or curiosity, or just for the hell of it. It doesn't always work, but sometimes you strike gold.

Like this nugget, with its dry title and dull dust jacket:

I recognized the author's name -- RA Lafferty, an idiosyncratic, not to say loopy, science fiction writer of the 60s and 70s, now mostly forgotten, whom I liked a lot. So I bought it (for $2.95 according to the bookseller's price penciled on the flyleaf) and read it.

The effect was sort of like watching a learned, sprightly old professor who, now and then, climbs on a unicycle and circles the lectern, or throws a bucket of glitter into the audience, while continuing to lecture.

You're reading along, enjoying the friendly, nonacademic prose, when all of a sudden he hits you with this:

The devil-gods of the Phoenicians were capable of a grin, for all their evil. In Greek verse or statuary we can never be sure that there is not an element of burlesque, or even that it is not all burlesque. Hittite serpents turn and bite themselves, and Egyptian mummies are buried with their childhood toys. There are Eastern minarets built in the form of a pun, and the most philosophical of all folks had a frog-faced deity. Chinese temple roofs turn up like cowlicks, and wooden Indians have been seen to wink. Only the old potato-faced Romans took themselves completely seriously.

Or this:

The drink of the Goths was wine, beer, and mead. Christian men had not yet been seduced by the oriental imposters tea and coffee; the nothing drinks.

Or this (again, of the Goths):

There is no record of their early philosophy. Since they were Germans, they must have constructed philosophical systems; and also, since they were Germans, these would have been erroneous.

I was going to finish by saying that copies of this book would be hard to find, but likely cheap if you found one. But I checked online, and boy, was I wrong. Four copies on Abebooks, one each on Amazon and EBay, prices ranging from $69.99 to $225. Including a remaindered copy with purple Magic Marker defacing the tail-edge, a leper in the bookselling world, for an insane $150. Well, if I've talked anyone into wanting to read the book, I offer my sincere apologies. But you can't borrow my copy.