Get that fourth volume out, Mr Saber

I wrote a review of a book by Nasser Saber some time ago. The fellow who was then managing editor at HedgeWorld, who knew Saber somewhat, asked me to write a review of the book, which was the third volume of an ongoing series.

The book seemed when I first looked it over to be sufficiently strange that I thought I should inform myself about the earlier volumes before writing about it. I did so, and ended up writing a rather unflattering review about the whole series.

Nasser wasn't happy about this, and made several complaints, one of which (the least subjective of the bunch) was that I had misquoted him by inserting an exclamation mark into a certain sentence I quoted.

He was wrong. I had not made up the exclamation mark and had thus been more accurate in quoting his book than he evidently wanted me to be. Anyway, after a bit of e-mailing back and forth, my new BFF told me that I would be likely to receive unflattering mention myself in his next volume. I continue to wait.

Here is Mr Saber's blog, with cover shots of each of the three volumes out so far, the number still does stand at three. One of his recent posts begins with the remark, "I want to work on Vol. 4, but they pull me back!" That sentence of course is a tribute to the Godfather movies. What he seems to mean is that the fascinating absurdities of contemporary politics and culture pull him away from his task of writing book four of the set, into writing blogs about ... the police in Cambridge, Mass., or why American movie makers are no good, and so forth.

I'll just sit here tapping my foot, waiting to be made infamous.