Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I must confess to you, gentle reader, that it took me three tries to make it through this book. The first, no doubt, was during or not long after our vacation to Florida which included a stop on Sanibel Island in 2016. I am not sure why I powered through this time. Perhaps because access to my library was limited for a bit. Perhaps my new reading habits allowed for it–although I did not take this upstairs to read whilst stretched out on the sofa. Perhaps my present “reading habits” also includes dodging my dilligence in reading a little bit of the Story of Civilization every night. But I made it past page 50 (of 232).

Okay, so, the plot: A Russian arms dealer blackmails an attorney into helping him take over land left by a Sanibel-island resident to create a nature conservatory (along with others in various places) so that he can store biological and chemical weapons that he’s selling. Local and part-time Sanibel residents including a couple of government and quasi-government officials, a potter, the former judge handling the estate, and the main character, a marketing guy who has just written a book and was instrumental in the incident of the Sanibel Arcanum (a previous book) work to thwart the Russian. I mean, the plot has some interesting twists to it–the blackmailed attorney plans to double-cross the Russian. Okay, that’s the twist.

Unfortunately, the execution poorly serves the plot.

Most of the narrative structure is very short peeks into various characters. By “short peeks,” I mean sometimes we get two or three paragraphs before jump cutting to the next group. This makes it difficult to really tell the characters apart. And even the longer pieces are the groups getting together to talk about what’s happening instead of actual action. The characters come together and have dinner; they talk about biochemical weapons, which is the subject of the report that the quasi-government characters are working on and, coincidentally, what the Russian hopes to store and/or traffic from Sanibel Island.

At about page 70, the marketing guy/novelist goes to the Grand Cayman where the Russian has another home. The books focuses on this single character, who happens to be on Grand Cayman because he has a freelance assignment to write about the island. Not because he’s investigating the Russian, although he does while he’s there.

Even when focusing on the single character, the tone of the book shifts to a bit of travel writing with exquisite descriptions of the island and the food the character eats. A little action happens, and then the reader thinks, “Ah, a story!” But then after a bit of action, the character returns to his main home in Indianapolis, several months elapse, and then his family returns to Sanibel Island and we get dinner parties again. Oh, wait, no, the potter goes on a mission trip to Russia to a Siberian town where the Russian’s father coincidentally lives, and he gets info that will ultimately become important.

We get another burst of action/action in the book’s climax, but a lot of the book hinges on coincidences and improbable-to-poor decision making. It repeats some of its descriptions early and refers to the previous book far too often.

I did flag a couple of things in the book:

• The book mentions several times the bin Laden organization as a possible buyer for biological and chemical weapons; this book was published years before 2001.
• “We have established a strong environmental stewardship here. Thanks to the wonderful efforts of Ding Darling when he worked for the federal government.” To be honest, I was a little afraid to search the Internet for that name, but I guess you probably already know he was an early 20th century cartoonist who founded the National Wildlife Federation. The book is all-in on trusting the government and believing it’s a force for good–and perhaps that simply raising awareness of the dangers of biological and chemical weapons will change the world.
• “Hey, Dad, you’re on Amazon.com!” one of the children says. True fact, children: We did call it Amazon.com once upon a time.

The book is also very dated for its relatively young age. It goes into too much detail about computer use and the Internet–people sure are printing out a lot of Web sites–and it is before the Department of Homeland Security and the whole two-by-two/hands-of-blue/pats-for-you regime. So the bad guys wheel an incapacitated character onto a plane in a wheelchair and just walk through security like that in a fashion we cannot fathom now, where we still have to take off our shoes after that one thing twenty years ago.

One biography of this still-living author says he has a third book in the works, but I have not seen evidence of it online. He does have a blog which he looks to update monthly or a little more frequently with photos and musings from his life in California (not Sanibel Island). I’d link to it, but although he says the media is broken, he also says that those who creatively indict the former president are patriots who are sucking the poison out of our country. So, nah.

I thought I might have just picked this up at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale in September, but apparently it was part of my haul in April.

I guess that makes sense, as I picked up a number of chapbooks to plant on my chairside book accumulation point when the football season started so I could browse them whilst holding an iPad to watch football games on those rare occasions where my NFL+ subscription would yield a football game I wanted to watch but could only do so on the iPad due to NFL+’s limited streaming rights. That was a week before the book sale this autumn. I discovered one cannot really browse a book whilst holding an iPad, so I have not been able to browse the chapbooks during the couple of football games that I have caught on a mobile device. I still have them on the table, though, as I have invented a new reading habit this summer which finds me reading on the sofa upstairs to finish the evening. I have some First Things and New Oxford Review magazines that I’ve read up there–mostly reading The Story of Civilization in the chair downstairs–but I’ve also read some of other books such as Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies and Vengeance Is Mine! up there. So I brought this book up to read there. You know, I might have written a navel-gazing post on my new book reading habits (mostly, I finish the evening stretched out on the couch upstairs reading a book or magazine because that tracks with how I spend evenings on vacations), but, c’mon, man–you’re not here for my navel-gazing. You’re here for pictures of movie starlets in films I watch. Odds are you’re not even reading this, and Jeremy Daryl is going to wonder what the hell I’m talking about in this book report. If he can even find it when searching the Internet on “Jeremy Daryl”.

So that’s a lot of verbiage in a book report that’s not about the book, but I suppose that’s okay since I really don’t have a lot to say about the book. To be honest, it looks like it might have been the results of a high school or college introduction to poetry class that the fellow decided to dump onto print-on-demand. The layout is rudimentary–a series of poems with titles and lines in double-spacing with no breaks at the pages, no headers or footers, and no pagination. As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been lauded, well, noted for my bok design ability more than my actual poetry.

The poems themselves are, well, rudimentary. You don’t get the whole mélange of different types of poems–an acrostic, a limerick, a haiku, a tanka, a sonnet, and a free verse–all the poems look to be free verse with little to no rhyming on a variety of topics. A couple nice moments amongst the pieces

However, if the fellow chooses to continue writing poetry and reads a bit more of the stuff, I’m a little more optimistic for his development than your average Instagram poet because the poems are longer and have a little more room for thematic expansion and explanation than brain droppings not done by George Carlin. So maybe there’s hope, but probably the publication of this book was more of a lark than a serious endeavor.

I bought this book in 2017 (at the same garage sale where I got Catnapped! which I also read this year) for just the moment where I was in the mood for it, and apparently this was it. I mean, I had passed over it a couple of times, but this time was the right time, apparently.

So: This book is the fifth in a series (!) about bipedal cats who are samurai and who are on a mission to avenge the uncle’s master’s slaying. Well, that’s the premise of the series, anyway. In this book, they are on the run from a cold assassin robot from the future (or another timeline) sent to kill one of them. Which leads them to Oz (Australia, you see) to see the wizard (which allows them to blend parody/satire of The Wizard of Oz with Mad Max), a flashback story patterned on The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven, and then onto a Predator/Star Trek mashup, and, well….

I am pretty sure I would have found this more funny in 1994. When in high school, I penned a number of satirical stories of this nature. It started when my creative writing group broke into groups, and each group added a bit to a story started by another group, and the assignment continued until each group had contributed to each story. We came up with an obnoxious character named Tyrone Jackson who was a rabbi from Thailand and inserted that character into each story. Once we were done with it, I wrote out, by hand on loose leaf paper The Further Adventures of Tyrone Jackson where I did the same sort of thing in this book, and Jackson “borrows” Doctor Who’s TARDIS and goes through space and time and dimensions, picking up a companion from a world of superheroes and confronting his multi-dimensional enemy Lyndon LaRouche. So, you see, I was primed for this kind of humor in my youth.

But now that I am, ahem, slightly older? I found some of it amusing, but it really ain’t my bag any more, baby.

I got this book the last time Sleuth Ink came to ABC Books for a signing in July. Wait, maybe it’s not the last time ABC Books had a book signing for the group–maybe it’s just the last time that I went. ABC Books has been racking up the book signings since, and I have been missing a lot of them. I’m also playing the little interior drama will I go to the Friends of the Library Book Sale? It starts today, and I am not sure about going. I am really, really running out of space for books and LPs. And yet the odds that I attend are still fairly high even though I won’t decide to do it until Saturday morning.

At any rate, this book presents itself as a Christian Suspense Novel, but it’s not, really. It’s more of a Christian romance or melodrama. A young man with a family moves to Springfield Lake City from a small town in the region with a promise of a contract by a known developer based on a relatively recently deceased mogul from Springfield. However, this business owner has the reputation for screwing over subcontractors who work for him, driving them into bankruptcy. The young man pretty much bets it all on this one contract and gets put behind the eight ball when a flood wipes away his work and makes it difficult for him to making the spring Lake–no, it’s spring in this case–and missing the deadline would trigger financial penalties.

The pressures of the job lead him to pulling away from his pregnant wife. Then a series of unfortunate events occurs: A car hits their house, the husband is t-boned by a car which puts him in the hospital, the wife has her baby, the husband befriends the homeless near the job site and eats with them at the mission, and the wife get hit over the head when visiting the job site which puts her in the hospital as well. The family pulls apart and comes together, the husband finds the faith that the wife always had, and then an unrelated investigation handles the bad businessman in the last couple of pages.

The writing is not bad, but the plotting is a rather melodramatic. The book is a bit talky–I know, I know, if you’ve read John Donnelly’s Gold, you could say the same about it. But the worst part is some of the detail work which just doesn’t ring true. Now, I’ve not been in a maternity ward in fifteen years, but the description of the events of the wife’s giving birth and that whole thing–she hasn’t seen the baby in a long time? From my recollection, the mother is supposed to suckle the child a whole lot. I’ve been in an ER and in hospitals, and some of those elements don’t ring true. And the owner of a landscaping business who spends months moping around a job site and a husband counting on that one thing for all of his family’s finances…. Well, these things did not feel right.

I always feel bad when I pan the work of local authors who have put in the effort to write and self-publish novels. I mean, it’s been almost 20 years since I finished my magnus opus. Reading these books inspires me, though, to see other people doing it. And I’m hopeful that the authors I review will go on to write more and better in the future, unlike me.

I forgot to include Fraktur in my list of disparate vocabulary words I will soon forget, but fraktur is one of them. Because suddenly I found myself reading this book, which I undoubtedly got in a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale bundle of chapbooks for $1.

The booklet contains the contents of a talk that the author gave when the Free Library of Pennsylvania got a large collection of fraktur documents. Fraktur refers not only to a font/typeface of German printing but also to the freehand documents produced by German immigrants in Pennsylvania in the late 18th through the late to middle 19th centuries.

Basically, if you wanted to have a birth certificate or a marriage certificate in those days, you’d hire a wandering illustrator to write one up for you are pre-printed forms from the county office were not available. The Pennsylvania “Dutch” (Deutsch) mostly spoke German, so they hired German-speakers to write them up, and the producers also decorated the documents with little illustrations. The Free Library of Pennsylvania in the middle of the last century (hey, old man!) got a private collection (and later another) of these historical documents.

And, you know what? It was an interesting little read.

The talk/booklet gives a bit of history, some description, and a couple of stories. She tells of finding an illustration of a crocodile on one such document and wondering how a German-American circa 1850 knew how to draw a crocodile, so she starts looking at educational spellers, in German, and finds the very illustration the artist reproduced. She also briefly outlines one such itinerant artist who spent years going community to community, sleeping in the rail depots, and earning just a bit writing and illustrating fraktur.

It’s 26 pages, so the length of a long essay or something that the New England slicks produced before they became mere propaganda mills.

And, gentle reader, you might wonder, Does Brian J. have any fraktur? Well, gentle reader, I might, although a photo reproduction. I have in a rolled tube somewhere a large photograph or slick reproduction of my great Aunt Laura’s birth certificate from the late 19th century (I assume), and from what I remember, it is in German, elaborate, and quite likely frakturic. It has been a while since I’ve gone into the archives–about a year and a quarter ago I had to come up with my marriage license, and although I did not find mine (I am married–I remember that pretty clearly even though I might have gotten a little wavery and woozy when she came down the aisle), I found many others in the family–and I would likely have put this document to the side un-unrolled as I knew what it was and I was not interested.

I am interested now. So I got more out of this book, and more interest on things outside this book, than I get from most books I read.

The author has a couple of other books available on Amazon and eBay from the first half of the last century, but this one does not look to be widely available. As it is collectible, perhaps I should put it in a special place on my read shelves. Undoubtedly, wherever I put it, it will be the place where I cannot find it again.