All flesh is grass (Hebrew: כָּל־הַבָּשָׂ֣ר חָצִ֔יר kol-habbāsār ḥāṣīr) is a phrase found in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, chapter 40, verses 6–8. The English text in King James Version is as follows:
6 The voice said, Cry.
And he said, What shall I cry?
All flesh is grass,
and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it:
surely the people is grass.
8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:
but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_flesh_is_grass
I don't know if I've read this book before or not. I read a lot of Clifford D. Simak in my youth, and the title seems familiar, so it's possible. But that was at least 55 years ago, so I don't imagine I'll remember anything as I (re-?) read it. Let's see.
I'm going with an e-book on this, but a reliable source (the library) tells me it's 272 pages long in the print version, so I'll go with that. Can I read it in 7 days to round out DDRDs 2,001 to 3,000? That's about 39 pages per day.
☮ o' 🥮.
Judging from the number of covers I found, this book has gone through quite a few editions...and more than a few translations. (See https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2439)
Day 1 (DDRD 2,994) January 13, 2026
The e-version of this book has 197 pages, so that means I'll need to hit a mere 28 pages per day (plus change) to meet my goal.
Again, ☮ o' 🥮.
I hope.
Hmm. So after a mysterious thing happens (no spoilers, but VERY mysterious), our hero, Brad Carter, goes to a bar for a beer, meets a friend he hasn't seen for six years, and invites this friend to go fishing the next day. Say what?
There was also a reference to a man who lives in the town who seems to be special needs and Brad refers to him as an "idiot" who drools when he talks. I know times were different when this book was published but that still stuck in my craw. (Later on ge refers to this man as a "jerk" and a "dope." 😠
Read to page 38.
Day 2 (DDRD 2,995) January 14, 2026
Read to page 64. Hmm. 133 pages to go, and 5 days to do it in. I'm either going to have to slow down or give up on the goal of an Even Finish for my third K. (Oh, anal retention....)
"You had to have a hunger, a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book." (46)
I used to have that hunger. I wrote senior year in high school, The Lone Cry of a Wolf during my senior year, and Yesterday's Rebel during my first semester in college. Things get a bit blurry after that, but there was Images of Pilgrimage, Somewhere Between Being and Nothingness, and A Matter of Reason, Master Lyghthum's Journey. Then my great era of false starts, Flies & Bees, ...Then There Is No Mountain. One of those was several hundred pages long.
And what finally stopped me in my tracks wasn't the crushing workload of being a high school English teacher, wasn't the diagnosis of my daughter with autism, wasn't even the diagnosis of my last child with autism, wasn't the death of my father, wasn't the death of my mother, wasn't my first divorce, wasn't my second divorce. It was my heart failure. It was when I truly realized that I was not in control of my life, that despite my greatest efforts and strongest will, my life would go where it would, careening like a drunken novice skier down a dangerous slope. Many is the time when I thought, "I'll pick it up again. I'll finish those unfinished novels. I'll start a new novel." But nothing. Last night I had another of those times. I was stoned on Delta 8/9, listening to an audiobook of Feodor Chin's The God Equation and just starting to drift into sleep when this line snagged my attention: “If the apple falls, does the moon also fall?” It is (purportedly) what Isaac Newton said when he spied his iconic apple. And I immediately thought Does the Moon Also Fall? would be a good title for a novel. I first told myself that I would remember it the next day and allowed myself to continue to drift towards sleep, but then I realized there was no chance that I would, so I made myself sit-up and write it down. And now this morning I'm thinking, "Sure...but I'm not a writer anymore, am I?" 🤔
Or am I?
News as it happens.
Meanwhile...
Oh. Chapters 2 through 6 were Flasbacking. That wasn't clear to me, and led to more than a little bit of confusion.
On Second Thought...
I just picked this
up from the LFPL. Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize. 353 pages. 7 days. Game on.
P.S. Stop me if this sounds familiar: in this book, alien invaders with a hive mind communicate with Earthlings via telephone, and get this...they can't lie. Oh, and they offer to take care of all humans' needs. What the fuck, man? I find it very hard to believe that Pluribus isn't ripping off this novel. Google time.
And?
My search--Vince Gilligan's Plur1bus and All Flesh is Grass by Clifford D. Simak--turned up zero hits. Something is rotten in the state of Gilligan.
I've been laid up with a back that hurts so much that I had to crawl across the floor this morning, yelping in pain. Since then it's been Ben Gay, heating pad, and drugs left over from my lung removal surgery. Which explains wby I've now read to page 100 of this book, and might could read some more later on.
Day 3 (DDRD 2,996) January 15, 2026
Read to page 197, The End. And quite a bit ahead of schedule. The fringe benefit of being incapacitated by pain. And now...back to Flesh!
Watching an old lady (Mrs. Tyler) walk away, Brad thinks, "...she could take harsh reality and twist it into something that was strange and beautiful." (166) With respect to Mrs. Tyler, thus means living in a world of delusion, but I think it applies to everyone to some extent, and especially to writers.
No comments:
Post a Comment