I have two lists of books on my older website:
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/reading-list-1983
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/recent-reading-2011
The lists were given to students interested in a variety of books that I had found worthwhile. More recent books that have mattered are listed here and there on other pages of the web site and on pages of the blog:
https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/
Most of the books cited are still in my mind and memory. I read in the "Writer's Almanac" the other day that someone had written a book called "The Coast of Bohemia." I once read a book with a similar title but by a different person but I couldn't remember just what the title was nor the author's name. It took a little while and some repeated Google searches but eventually I found "The Seacoast of Bohemia" by Nicolas Freeling. He is an author that I knew I had read sometime back. I liked the atmosphere of his books and I knew that he had once written about a fictional detective who died one way or another but whose wife continued on with some of his cases. I knew that this was way back in my life and that is the sort of half-clear memory that I like to track down.
Turns out that Inspector Van der Valk's widow is told about in "Arlette". I never read "Arlette" but I might. I knew that I had seen Freeling's name in the credits for a show on PBS. For old times sake, we watched the first episode of Van der Valk last night. We had seen it before but long enough in the past that scenes and faces and plot turns were familiar but only after seeing them.
It is fun to use Google and Duckduckgo (and Vivaldi and Brave and Opera, all browsers like Edge and Firefox) to find stuff. I remembered that Freeling's book said Bohemia had no seacoast. I learned that Shakespeare refers somewhere to Bohemia's coast. Here's what Google says about this very unimportant mystery:
It is true that, at the present day, Bohemia, situated as is in the heart of Europe, does not touch the sea anywhere, and owns no seaports of her own; in her days of glory, however, under the King Přemysl Otokar II., she really had a sea coast and harbors on the Adriatic.Jan 6, 2021
The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 1/Sea Coast of Bohemia
Let's hear it for nerds!
