31: Jazz Is, Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff is one of the co-editors of Hear Me Talkin' to Ya.

This is a collection of essays on prominent figures in jazz, with several short quotations on the nature of jazz and its practitioners sprinkled in between. The essays contain a good amount of anecdote and quotations themselves, but are not nearly as entertaining as the free-form Hear Me Talkin' to Ya.

Most of the chapters deal with modern figures. The chapter on Mulligan was particularly interesting and makes me want to hear a little bit more of him.

30: T'ang-yin-pi-shih: Parallel Cases from under the Pear-Tree

"A 13th Century Manual of Jurisprudence and Detection, translated from the original chinese with an introduction and notes by R.H. van Gulik."

So yeah.

This is the case book that inspired van Gulik's first few Judge Dee novels and several of these cases are easily recognised in those novels. The cases are all brief sketches of a paragraph. Most of the notes are on textual differences between sources, but one of the introductory essays, on court procedure in ancient china, is pretty good.

Only worth the bother if you're studying ancient Chinese jurisprudence, or are a complete van Gulik nut. I easily qualify in the second category.

29: Murder in Canton, Robert van Gulik

Yes, another one. But pretty soon there'll be some terribly exciting other things here.
(Yeah, right. As if anyone's reading this.)