The savagery and power of Edith Wharton's ghost stories surprised me.

In classic noir fiction and film, it is always hot. Fans whirr in sweltering hotel rooms, sweat forms on a stranger's brow, the muggy air stifles - one can hardly breathe. Come nightfall, there is no relief, only the darkness that allows illicit lovers to meet, the trusted to betray, and murderers to act.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

In 1911, Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business.

Born in 1910, Wilfrid Thesiger spent his childhood in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as it was then called, where his father was an important and much-admired British official.

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.

To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.

Summertime, and the reading is easy... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.

None of us, of course, will ever read all the books we'd like, but we can still make a stab at it.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I'm tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else's life offends my vanity.

I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts.

With the possible exception of steampunk aficionados, many reasonable people must view my fascination with Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction - mysteries, fantasy, and adventure - as eccentric or merely antiquarian.

People sometimes think that I bring home all these old books because I'm addicted, that I'm no better than a hoarder with a houseful of crumbling newspapers.

I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.

No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me.

Literary generations come and go, and each generation passeth away and is heard of no more. In the end, simply the making itself - of poems and stories and essays - delivers the only reward a writer can be sure of. And, perhaps, the only one that matters.

Once upon a time, I sat in my mother's lap as she turned the pages of Golden Books, and I gradually learned to read.

Long ago, I realized that my only talent - aside from the rugged good looks, of course, and the strange power I hold over elderly women - can be reduced to a single word: doggedness.

With concerted effort, I can follow written instructions, but don't ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smartphone.

In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy.

Because of Kipling, I've sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland - zero, when last I checked - we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the steno pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me, it's both ugly and confusing.

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Your own business growth and success depends on many things, and along that growing path, you are going to have to concede certain responsibilities and activities - whether for your accounting, your production, or day-to-day management.

Entrepreneurship requires an unvanquished spirit of curiosity, an openness to learning, a letting go of OldCo so you're free to create NewCo.

Trendy gadgets and edgy pitches inevitably get replaced due to the fickle nature of the buying public, but a business designed from the start to play big has the ability to weather trends and redirect itself to venues and products that its customers want and need.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

If you are with five successful people, then you are the sixth successful person. The reverse of this is true as well, so who are you hanging out with?

There is always going to be someone more successful, richer, better looking, or with a nicer car.

Look at what is average in your area, your industry, and your company and then be better. That could be as simple as reading another book each month or attending a seminar each year. On the other hand, it also means acknowledging what 'average' actually is and how you, as the owner, arrive at that figure.

You can't be the accountant in your accounting firm. You can't cut the grass in your landscaping business. You can't work on the vehicles in your auto repair shop... And you really can't spend all of your time managing those actions, either.

McDonalds. Apple. Starbucks. They were all small businesses, owned by entrepreneurs and people with vision.

As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury to throw good money after bad, but if you can ascertain the 'why' of the failure, you can draw some significance from it and then turn it into something that clients will buy.

Your target market and their demographics realistically need to be in alignment with your own beliefs and morals, or you may have trouble reaching out to them - or keep them once others have entered the market.

Without concentration, a business will be ordinary in every respect, because it will have no presence, no inner force, no way to attract the people upon whom it depends for its very existence - employees, customers, suppliers, and lenders.

Every life a legacy, every small business a school.

For decades, I've spoken of McDonald's as one of the premier examples of how to build a company, scale it, and ultimately sell it.

Ray Kroc called his first McDonald's restaurant, which he opened in Illinois, 'a little money machine.' That's why thousands of franchisees bought it.

You did not disturb Hemingway before noon on Monday through Friday - he was in his office, writing the books that made the lifestyle possible.

The number of businesses that fold due to bad partnerships is staggering. In some cases, they are charlatans, in others inept business people, and others find themselves unable to scale with any growth.

Your Dream, Vision, Purpose, and Mission all come together when you bring products to market - so make sure you're bringing your best.

How can you, as a small business owner, figure out what you are and, from there, begin to take action? Simple - you have to understand what part of the job you are doing and, if it isn't fulfilling the role of the entrepreneur in your business, you must make the decision to take on that role.

A true entrepreneurial enterprise begins with a big idea - a unique way to solve a customer's problem. Your customer, after all, is the only justification for creating a company in the first place. Without a big, transformational idea, you can't produce a great result for your customer.

Remember, if your business isn't making money, then you and your employees aren't, either.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs worthy of the title need to build systems that replace themselves.

Understand this - as a new company, if you don't know how to get interested prospects into your company, then you don't have a company. At the same time, if you, as a owner, have to drive every lead into your business, then you need a real lead generation strategy.

The world is littered with the tales of small businesses in the dire straits of hiring that spent time and money they couldn't afford to hire people who couldn't perform.

Tactical Work is the work you do every day in your business to generate income, along with all of the operational, financial, and management tasks that entails.

Remember: you cannot build a better mouse trap by fixing the old one - NewCo demands active ownership, and that activity is not the sum of doing multiple jobs but, instead, the sum of implementing paradigm-shifting changes that create new industries and solutions.