Category: Book Report

I picked up this book back in 2007, and likely then as now I confused it for “Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist” which was a physics lecture given when I was an adult instead of this novel which was written when I was a boy and must have gotten some use as a textbook, as the volume I have contains some note-taking.

It is a bit of a non-linear story about a classical physicist at the end of his career in the year 1917. He reflects on his career, the physicists he has known, and how Einstein and quantum theory is really not all that–he still believes that aether is the substance tying everything together, and he bemoans that physics has moved from a mechanical understanding of the universe to a mathematical one. The story is set during World War I, when it was becoming clear that the war was not going well for the Germans, so the war and its impact are a counterpoint to the main character’s story–or an augmentation thereof, as he served during the 1870 war with France. The timeline of the story outside the flashbacks and dreams of being judged for being an inadequate physicist takes place over a couple of days starting with a trip to the theatre and through a talk that the professor gives and beyond. He reflects a bit on the suicide of a peer, which leads to a (spoiler alert) final Did he? Probably!

It’s but 157 pages, so a quick read if you’re in it for the fiction. It also comes with 60 pages of end notes and bibliography, essentially, if you want to see how much research the author went through to get details right. But I’m just here for the story, pal. I’ll deal with the math when I come to a copy of “Night Thoughts of a Quantum Physicist” which I probably have around here somewhere. Actually, I both do and do not until I discover I do, and that copy is right now on my to-read bookshelves vibrating in unison with a copy in Berkeley, California, right now.

An interesting read, more literary than a lot of stuff I stuff into my intellectual gullet, and it kind of reminded me of The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy in its end-of-life reflections. Hopefully, the theme is not resonating with me because I am nearing the end of my life, but one never knows. One never knows.

I have to say that this is the best novel based on country-and-western album liner notes that I have ever read.

Apparently, Brooks & Dunn’s albums had some stories featuring Slim & Howdy in the liner notes. Gentle reader, I gathered my Brooks & Dunn albums in those dark days of audiocassettes, which contained liner notes in very small type indeed. So I had not seen any of this material before.

Slim and Howdy are a couple of hard luck singers who meet at a used car lot and decide to pool their resources for a bit. They have some adventures recovering Slim’s guitar; wooing a couple of women from a honkytonk who then lead them unwittingly into a burglary; and ultimately into rescuing a friend and employer, the woman who owns the Lost and Found bar in Del Rio, Texas. A border town, get it? Lost and found in a border town? Yeah, the book alludes to a number of Brooks & Dunn songs like this. It probably does more than I know since my collection stops at Hard Working Man, and to be honest (as you can guess, gentle reader) my country and western listening is limited to the rare occasions (rare now as my son is mowing the lawn, and rare as it will be for a year or so until he is too busy or two gone to do so).

The bulk of the book is ultimately (I guess I already said that) to the latter quest–finding the bar owner who has been kidnapped for unknown reasons, but for whom a ransom note eventually arrives. Is it the recently fired employee, a hard case with body piercings making a fake mohawk? Is it the person from whom Slim and Howdy recovered Slim’s guitar, the person who has vowed revenge? Is it someone who has done busines with the woman’s father, who has gotten wealthy not entirely honestly? Or something else?

Well, it’s something else, a bit twee and perhaps expected. It ends up with gunplay that only scratches the heroes but mortally wounds the bad guys. And finis.

Not a bad read. Certainly targeted to Brooks & Dunn fans. The book included a CD single with the song “Gotta Get Me One Of Those”, and very stern warnings indicated you could not return the book if the envelope containing the CD had been breached. I assumed that the CD was missing, as it is on so many of my tech books, but I discovered it is intact and unbroken. Oh, the dilemma: Get the single which I will not listen to often or preserve the collectibility of this book for future generations who will not find it collectible anyway?

Well, gentle reader, they might have saved it from Napster kept it off of the iTunes store and forgotten to make it available on Amazon, but it’s on YouTube:

No word on if it’s available for free on Napster.

I did not break the seal on the CD, anyway, as it is my wont to not adulterate the books I read in any way except for some Dorito dust now and then.

At any rate, an okay, if simply told bit of modern Western. Not the amount of depth you get in, say, Louis L’Amour or James R. Wilder, but a bit of fun for Brooks & Dunn fans. Speaking of whom, holy smokes, those guys are like 70 years old now, and they’ve been retired as a musical act for over a decade. Somehow, in my head, they’re always forty-something like they were when I got the albums in the middle 1990s. And I’m still twenty-something.

I got this book last month at ABC Books, and when I saw the date, I thought Was it that long ago? Because somehow July 2023 already seems like a long time ago. I guess it has been a long week for me.

At any rate, this collection of science fiction, horror, and other stories is part of the author’s Take Ten Tales series which has a couple of other books that I passed over because the book signing had multiple offers, so I only bought one book from each.

So I just read Into the Night, another collection by a local author with similar thematics/genresificity. So I cannot help but compare them, and I kind of liked this one better.

It is shorter, which helps, even when I’m starting out. I mean, when I pick up a really thick book, even if I really enjoy it, I tend to get a little antsy with having to stick to the book for a long time, even if it’s only a week or so. Or more, sometimes (details forthcoming). So a quick collection of 10 stories beats out a couple hundred pages of other material.

Although the stories are not as well written–which is not to say they’re poorly written, but they lack a bit of the umami in setup and character development that you get in the beginnings of the stories in Into the Night–but the story structure varies. The stories do not end with a DUN DUN DUH! and a predictable loss on the part of the human characters in the story.

So I consider it a notch above the other book, and when the author returns to ABC Books, I shall pick up some of her other work.

The book also has some room for your handwritten notes and discussion questions in the back of the book, which I thought was interesting. I cannot imagine any of my work being included in a book club discussion, but I guess this author can/could.

The book was published in 2003, which means she has slowly been putting out work over the last twenty years. Me? I’ve got a novel, a collection of poetry, and a full evening play in print, and I’ve not written much outside this blog and some professional articles in that time. Clearly, I need to do better.

I mentioned when I read Viets’ collections of columns from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Urban Affairs and Viets Guide to Sex, Travel, and Anything Else That Will Sell This Book in 2009 and 2010 respectively) that I would delve into her fiction. Well, I read both books after we moved from Old Trees to Nogglestead, and I had not seen any of Viets’ fiction until the Lutherans for Life garage sale in 2017. I don’t tend to hang about in the mystery sections of book stores or book sales much these days, so it would have to be a garage sale for me to find them.

Also, I clearly did not jump right into the book six years ago. But it seemed a thing to read between chapters/sections of Our Oriental Heritage.

This book is the 13th entry (of 15) in Viets’ Dead-End Job Mysteries. Which means that the series has a lot of business in it already, and that takes up a good portion of the book.

The main mystery revolves around the purebred kitten of a socialite who shares custody of said cat with her husband. The kitten is kidnapped, or Catnapped! as the title would have it. The main character, Helen Hawthorne, and her husband are private investigators engaged to find the kitten. They find the ex-husband murdered, and the socialite is arrested. Meanwhile, the ex-husband of the owner of their apartment building shows up after thirty years of shacking up with another woman–he wants to reconcile, but she most assuredly does not. When he winds up dead, she, too, is arrested for the murder.

So we have two or three crimes that the duo investigates. It took me a while to get into it–as you know, gentle reader, despite this being the second cozy I’ve read this year (Murder, She Wrote: The Maine Mutiny being the first for the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge), they’re not my bag.

The particular schtick of this series is that Helen Hawthorne had been on the run from an ex-husband in St. Louis, so she takes low skill jobs for cash. According to legend (and by legend, I mean Wikipedia), Viets actually did these jobs before writing about them. By the 13th book in the series, the reason for the schtick–the ex-husband–was a problem solved in an earlier book, so Hawthorne has to go undercover as an assistant cat groomer to get close to a subject and to show us how grooming and cat show exhibiting goes on.

The other bit of series business that takes up a lot of real estate in the book is the group of people who live at the apartment building. They get together every night to watch the sun go down, and they interact a bunch. It does lead up to the third mystery, who poisoned the ex-husband, but it also fills a lot of pages with socializing and chitchat.

Most people don’t start series toward the end (or just the latest, perhaps), but it does detract a bit from the stand-aloneness of each novel. I know I’ve mentioned it before, and it’s a line that authors have to walk between serving their long-time readers who want these elements of the book and those just looking for a mystery. This book goes a bit far in the series business.

At any rate, I liked it well enough that I’ll pick up more Viets books when I run across them, and maybe I’ll even read them six years later.

I got this book at ABC Books in June at the author’s book signing.

When I bought the book, the author described the short stories as O. Henry mixed with The Twilight Zone. As you might recollect, gentle reader, I read The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia in 2018 and have since accumulated a number of DVDs with episodes on them (and I’ve watched a few). I’ve always found its speculative fiction inspirational in giving me ideas for my own writing, so I looked forward to this book. I bought the author’s first two books of short fiction, and she said she had enough ideas mapped out for another eight or nine books in a similar vein.

The book collects 42 stories in roughly 420 pages, so about ten pages per, more or less. Genres include fantasy, horror, and science fiction along with some that are more speculative than genre-specific. They’re pretty well-written and well-executed for the most part, with interesting characters built with good prose. But….

The O. Henry part rears its head in that most of the stories are structured with that well-crafted beginning of the story that ends on the twist ending in the last sentence, paragraph, or couple of paragraphs. Characters and their situations are built up and then DUN DUN DUN! The demons are loosed upon the world. Or DUN DUN DUN! They were the aliens visiting Earth. Or DUN DUN DUN! The aliens sucked their brains out through their noses!

So it’s a book best taken in sips and not one to read all the way through all at once, as that will highlight how the stories have very similar structures and DUN DUN DUNs. As I said, well-written but formulaic in its own way, and many of the stories could use a little more denouement and maybe not have all of the sympathetic heroes and heroines getting killed by shapeshifting alien serial killers. Once in a while, it would be nice if the plucky small town girl would maybe at least survive.

I got this book two years ago at ABC Books, and it stayed on the side table for browsing during football games in 2021 and 2022, but I didn’t make it through them, mostly because I kind of gave up on browsing through books during the football games. I’m in a bit of a spot, gentle reader, as I have read fewer than 40 books so far this year, and I’ve always counted on the football browsing to make up some ground in my annual quest for 100 books read at the end of the year kind of like how churches expect to make up an outsized portion of their budgets during Christmas week. Since I gave up the habit of browsing during football games, and we’ve given up any television provider that carries football games, I won’t be doing much browsing at all in the autumn and winter.

At any rate, onto Earth Games. Well, now, this might be Grandmother Poetry: The Next Generation. Blurbs on the back come from grandchildren, and one of them indicates Grandma Ruth is 80. My Internet research (a quick search) found an obituary that aligns with that, so Ruth Loring might well have been a grandmother when these poems came out.

However, unlike the Grandmother poetry that I read from earlier eras, these poems do not often deal with home, family, and Jesus nor do they end with rhymes. Instead, they read more like the instapoetry of Rupi Kaur and Pierre Alex Jeanty in having short lines, stream of consciousness, and abstractions rather than images.

Here’s a taste:

Zapped

Round and round and round I go
my life an endless zero
forever o-ing money.
Oh oh oh!
Then owe owe owe.
Oh…
     woe.
Credit card junkie
and all for naught.

More wordplay than poetry, and like I criticize (most) instapoetry, it has a few good moments scattered throughout but it’s mostly for the amusement of the poet herself.

This book came out a couple of years after The Jeopardy! Book and refers to it as a lightweight cash-grab that only glosses on the show and presents quizzes without actually delving into the backstage workings of the show. Which, come to think of it, is kind of what I said in my review of that book in 2009 (for historical perspective, five years before I auditioned for the program, and seven months before I moved to Nogglestead from Old Trees–so a long time ago).

This book, on the other hand, is written not by ghost writers, but by one of the actual writers (who had just left the show). It includes insights into how one goes about making up the questions for each program as well as how the shows are filmed and some of the personalities involved–Alex Trebek was the producer on the first season, but he was replaced with someone that Merv Griffin had worked with previously. The book also gives short biographies of all the parties involved, from Trebek and Griffin to the various writers, producers, researchers, and receptionists.

The book also tells the history of Kings World who distributed the show and Merv Griffin Productions and how all of that works out, and how Jeopardy! was a surprise holding the #2 game show slot behind Merv Griffin/King World’s Wheel of Fortune.

Which kind of led me to the question: Has the New York Post been ragging on these game shows over the past, what, year to get a better distribution agreement or price? I mean, readers have been subjected to seemingly daily stories mining Twitter for hot takes on anything that anyone said negative about the shows.

For example:

• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans cheer Ken Jennings replacing Mayim Bialik: ‘Don’t let her back’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans complain show is ‘unwatchable’ after recent flubs
• ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant slams show for not paying for travel, hotel room
• ‘Jeopardy!’ champion James Holzhauer reveals show’s problem that’s been causing fans to rage
• Final ‘Jeopardy!’ clue blasted as not ‘appropriate’: ‘Hate this’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans outraged by ‘horrendous’ movie category: ‘Awful’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ producer asks fans to forget ‘horrible’ episode: ‘Something we never like to see’
• Ken Jennings reveals the ‘cringey’ part of ‘Jeopardy!’ he ‘never liked’
• ‘Jeopardy!’ fans call out Mayim Bialik for inconsistent hosting rules

Those are headlines from the last month. And prior to Pat Sajak announcing his retirement, the paper also ran numerous articles about bad puzzles, Sajak’s inappropriate behavior, and so on, to rag on Wheel of Fortune. Like I said, I wonder what’s up with that and suspect it’s a money thing between the Murdochs and Sony, who now owns the shows.

At any rate, definitely a better read than the other book, and probably more insightful into the show than a contestant’s book would be. The Afterword wanders away from the core topic matter and into a bit of a polemic about the role of television, even Jeopardy! on public discourse. It doesn’t really add to the book, but I guess the author thought it was important.

Also, note the timestamp on the book (1995), and note this bit of prescience:

The new game’s experience of its young existence was to be presented to George [the producer] for his comments and approval. If a particular clue bothered him he ordered it replaced. For some reason he hated references to hamsters or gerbils; he seemed to consider these creatures obscene and so that was out. Other no-nos included references to Donald Trump, the quiz show scandals of the 50s, and mentions of Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Jeopardy! declared Donald Trump persona non grata before it was cool. Or maybe it was always cool to a certain set.

I picked up this book from the free books cart at church. I know, gentle reader, it’s not that I lack for something to read. But our church has a free books cart with cullings from the church library and other books that people drop off. Well, other people, not me, as I rarely separate books from the Nogglestead library, and when I do, they are generally not religous or church-friendly titles. Every Sunday, or almost every Sunday, I make my way past this cart and look it over. Most of the time, I don’t pick up anything as Nogglestead is topped up on Bibles and I don’t tend to read devotionals. But I picked up this book because it is the biography of the guy who serves as the main mascot for the Kansas City Chiefs and includes the story of an accident at Arrowhead Stadium that almost killed him.

The book is biographical and starts with his youth, his attendance of Lutheran church and school, and his relationship with his family. He ends up at Mizzou, not too far from his family in St. Charles, Missouri (a little farther than I had to drive once or twice a week to visit my beautiful girlfriend who attended grad school at Mizzou when I was working as a printer in O’Fallon). Although he played high school sports (at Francis Howell North, which was originally M. Gene Henderson Junior High which I briefly attended in the middle 1980s, right before the change to the high school–given that he’s four years older than I am, he must have started elsewhere as the class of 1990 would have been the first to start and finish at FHN), he wasn’t good enough for college–but he tried out to be Truman the Tiger, the Mizzou mascot, and got the gig. And proved very successful at it–he took first or second at national mascot competitions several years running. After college, a university contact got him an interview to be Fredbird, the St. Louis Cardinals’ mascot, and then an interview to be the new Kansas City Chiefs mascot, K.C. Wolf.

Meers has been a faithful Christian throughout his life starting in his youth, but he turns his position as K.C. Wolf into an opportunity to talk to others and to make appearances at schools and in other forums to gently spread the word. He even becomes an ordained minister in the Baptist church and serves as one of the ministers in his church for a time, so he has helped wedding proposals at Arrowhead Stadium and he has performed weddings (and gave away a bride a time or two when her father was unavailable). The book is chock full of Bible versus that inspired Meers at any given moment (and as this book is signed, the signature–K.C. Wolf–has a Bible verse with it). Clearly a Godly man with a story to tell. I was pleased to do further research, and it doesn’t look as though in the nine years since he’s written the book that he’s had any scandal or divorce followed by a quick engagement like some Bible-quoting Facebook friends. Which was reassuring and inspirational in itself.

So, the accident: As part of his act, he does a little bit with a dramatic entrance at football games at Arrowhead. He started out by riding on an ATV, but he’s also appeared via airborne jumps (tried several times, with only a few successes–and the guys landing with parachutes were professionals). Meers had ridden a zip line into the stadium, and in this case he was going to jump off a light with a bungee cord attached to a zip line–I’m not sure how exactly it was supposed to work–but in the rehearsal for the stunt, something went wrong, and he hit the upper deck before the zip line carried him out over the field. The last bit of the book talks about his recovery and return to the field, which he handles through faith, although it was challenging. This book was written and published within the year it happened, so that part is no doubt fresh.

Meers is still the K.C. Wolf, although with less zip lining and crazy stunting now, which is appropriate, since he’s four years older than I am, which would make him almost thirty. Which seems improbable, since he has been the K.C. Wolf for over thirty years. But I am pretty sure time-space itself is warped these days, which makes all of that possible.

So an enjoyable and inspirational book. As intended.

My goodness, it has been a year and a half since I read the first in the Harbison Mystery series (Terror Near Town, which I read in January 2022). It’s been two years since I got the series at a book signing at ABC Books. This probably means that there’s another one or two in the series since real writers are writing books whilst I write intermittent blog book reports.

This book takes place almost twenty years after Terror Near Town. Set in the Great Depression, Chet Harbison, the Spanish-American War veteran from the first book, is 51 years old and has lost a bundle in a St. Louis bank’s failure. He and his family, including his brother and his family, economize and handle different business ventures to keep themselves and their farms afloat. The Jefferson County sheriff gets Chet to agree to be a deputy to earn a little money and to mostly keep him on a short leash and to take credit for Chet’s successes.

Although there is a bit of “mystery”–organized crime is moving in on local bootleggers–the book is not a mystery–it’s a western in the vein of Louis L’Amour (which, of course, I have cottoned to after reading A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour and Bendigo Shafter last year). The crime part of the story is a small part of it, almost an afterthought. But I suppose it’s better to be in the mystery section of the book store than the Western section–although in ABC Books, I’m pretty sure he’s still in the Local Authors section regardless of where the author actually lives.

I flagged a number of things in the book, gentle reader, that were errors and oversights, such as talking about the county alderman from High Ridge (the county has a council, but I’ve never heard of them called aldermen–but, to be honest, most of my time living in Jefferson County when I was too young to pay attention to such things) or a character telling another to bring in half a cord of wood for a stove–half a cord of wood is 8 feet by 4 feet by 2 feet (64 cubic feet) which is a pretty big ask to bring inside at one time or how onerous an eighth of a mile walk is (it’s 660 feet or two football fields which is not that far). But never mind those.

I will mention one thing: One of the events in the book is a raid on the Biltmore Club which straddles the St. Louis/Jefferson County Line. Apparently, the trick was if one county raided the club, they would all run to the other side of the club in the other county. As you have often heard, gentle reader, I lived in a trailer park down Delores Drive, and I often mention going up to the flea market on the hill. The hill was overlooked by a ridge, and atop that ridge was Biltmore. It wasn’t a club in the 1980s, but they did have a little business center up there with a couple offices (and a dump). Now, I believe it’s a real retail development. But the locations in the book came very close to where I lived indeed.

A good enough read that I look forward to the two others I have in the series. Apparently, I picked up the fourth in the series last August, which means I might only be missing one in the series if one came out this year. Note how this note indicates I’m writing these book reports in stream-of-consciousness–I just now searched again for the author on the blog and only now, four paragraphs later, I discovered I had actually bought the fourth book in the series. Of course, time goes all a-wonky again since I’ll be scheduling this post, so now is several days ago. Ay. And it might well be another year and a half before I pick up another in the series, by which I might well be further behind in the series.

I bought this book at ABC Books in the summer of 2021. The book is dated 2010, and the author’s signature is from 2018, so this is either before I started hitting as many of the ABC Books signings as I could, one that fell between the cracks, or one that the author signed for stocking.

At any rate, the story is about the owner of a boutique who seems to have a stalker. Who apparently starts killing people she knows or knew–one murder is the family at a house where someone she knew used to live.

The book is leavened with almost a bit of tension with the man whom she thought of as a brother as her mother took him in when his rich parents died and who has been her constant friend since. But he’s engaged to be married, which leaves her free to feel the flutterings for the handsome police detective on her case.

So it’s a bit of a cottage mystery, with a side order of romance. It’s a bit thin on the prose, which is better than being overdone, and the book is a short 140 pages, so it’s not long enough to be annoying. Next time I’m through John Donnelly’s Gold, I’m definitely going to gauge myself according to this new metric I have for prose: the density of it, contrasting paragraphs versus dialog and complexity of sentences to express meaning. I mean, Robert B. Parker, for example, wrote better when he had longer paragraphs, but not so much later when he relied mostly on dialog and stage directions. It’s kind of akin to my length-of-line metric for poetry, I suppose, but there’s something to it.

Another thing that struck me about this book was a certain similarity to Finding Lizzy Smith by Susan Keene which I read earlier this year. In both, people close to the female protagonist are getting killed. I wonder topically how often this happens in cozies–I don’t read many of them, Murder, She Wrote books that I read every seven or eight years. So I don’t know how much of a trope it is.

In researching this post, I see that the author published another book in 2012 which was to be the first in a trilogy. But nothing after, and her Internet presence is a Tripod site that has not been updated in years. This saddens me somehow, even though we’ve never met.

Full disclosure: I sort of know the author as she has volunteered with my beautiful wife in a local entrepreneur’s group (well, she was there before my wife, so perhaps I should say “My beautiful wife volunteered with this author.”) So when I saw that she, the author, was having a book signing downtown (not yet at ABC Books) on First Friday Art Walk night, I dragged my wife and my youngest downtown to get a copy.

Ms. Greiner is a photographer and avid hiker, and she often hikes alone. The book talks about those hikes, hikers who get lost, tells the story of how she got lost trying to get a photo of a sunset but made it to camp and to her husband only a little late, and then culminates in the story of how she got lost on a hike and spent a night in the forest whilst thunderstorms raged and the temperature dropped to near-freezing before hiking some number of miles in the morning to rescue (and then to a series of events that would not be believed in fiction).

The book is relatively short (117 pages), leavened with the author’s photographs. It’s professionally laid out (which as you know, gentle reader, I can appreciate, or at least do). Not only that, but the book builds the story–I confess, I knew what the book was about when I started it–starting with some anecdotes about taking photographs, sometimes in dangerous circumstances (it starts out with photographing alligators on the bayou in Louisiana) and then a little about getting lost, building to almost dying at the end and then dénouement which is its own story.

Okay, so I liked the book. How much? I read it in a single night, and then we tracked her down at Artsfest in Springfield the next day to buy another book as a gift. And if she ever makes her way to ABC Books for a book signing, I’ll have to think of to whom I will give that copy as a gift. But hopefully I will have some time. Maybe Mrs. Shepherd. Who likes to hike? Who likes photography?

Oh, yeah, I would be remiss if I did not mention that she credits God for her survival, and the book is also a testament to her faith.

Well, finishing this book has been a long time coming. I mentioned that it was a gift from a friend at a garage sale at my sainted mother’s in Fall 2008. We would have known, ainna, by then? My sainted mother would have been in the early parts of diagnosing and examining the cancer that would kill her early the next year. Her surgery, which the surgeon later said he would not have performed if he’d known how pervasive the cancer was, would be in late November or early December. So she would have been full capacity, and the event would not have been terribly somber, although we undoubtedly missed my aunt who passed away a couple of years earlier and always made these events a hoot.

More on the history of this book: As you know, gentle reader, I had this book beside the sofa for browsing during football games, wrapped in a paper bag until I properly wrapped it in mylar. I mentioned in September of 2021 that I’d started reading it in earnest, which means “off and on. Mostly off.”

I have certainly read other poetry books completely in the interim, but I had to be in the right frame of mind to read this book. After all, it is almost 150 years old, and I had to treat it gently. I did not open the book completely, only parting the binding the minimum I needed to read the book. And I had to read slowly, as the font sizes varied on each poem down to pretty tiny print to make it so the poems fit into the artwork.

So, the poems: I enjoyed them. They’re romantic, rhyming, and well-rhythmed. They deal with enjoying nature, looking forward to meeting one’s beloved, being with one’s beloved, and a couple about having lost one’s beloved. The sort of thing that heavily influenced me in my younger poet years, and I loved them.

I did flag a couple of things:

The first line of “In the Park” is:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever!” so they say;

You might know, gentle reader, that I have a volume of the complete works of Keats and Shelley that was on the chairside table in 2019 but has migrated to the dresser upstairs as I’ve read the book outside on the deck in the evenings from time to time. But I know that “they” in this case is John Keats, as this is the first line of “Endymion”. Of course, I already flexed that I recognized it in a book review in 2021–however, to be honest, what cemented the first line for me is that when I mentioned I was reading the, my mother-in-law (epithet needed) quoted the first line to me, and I did not recognize it. But I do now.

A poem entitled “The Golden Gate” begins:

Beyond the clouds, the Golden Gate is waiting,
Which only angel hands can open wide,
And only they whose toil has ended
Pass in, and find their rest at eventide.

Gentle reader, when you and I think of “The Golden Gate,” we think of the bridge. Which was completed fifty-one years after this book was published in the first Grover Cleveland administration.

The book itself is beautiful. Heavy paper and lush illustrations surround every poem.

Every page is like that. Beautiful, but hard to read in spots because the fonts (although they probably called it merely “type” back then) is often small so the poems can fit into the illustrations. I might or might not have used a pair of my beautiful wife’s cheaters a time or to, but no one will ever know because I would only have done so after everyone else was in bed.

Now, a bit more about the provenance of this book.

The book was originally given to a Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Perry, on Christmas of 1886.

The book was then given by Mrs. Perry to her grandson, a young man named Ray Wood, in March 1929. Right before the bad times were coming.

I received this book in 2006 from a relation of Ray, I suspect, as they shared the surname. Given her age in 2006, I would guess Ray was her older brother or cousin and not her father. But what a great gift. I miss “Roberta.”

I’m glad I gave this book its due and read it outside football games. I am glad I’ve protected it with mylar and have hopefully kept Dorito dust out of it. But I cannot help feel some sadness that I suspect that I will be the last person to read the book.

I hopped into this book right after reading Open Net because I was in the mood for another sports book, and this one was right across the hall.

So. This book really has three themes, and they don’t mesh together very well at all.

• It’s partly a biography of Bob Gibson, who came out of a poor neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, played with the Harlem Globetrotters for a season, and then settled into playing for the Cardinals organization and then the major league team, winning a couple of World Series with them and becoming a star, although he’s pretty humble about that.
• Because it’s 1968 and because Gibson is Black, the book also tackles the Race Question, which served to distance this particular reader who is white but grew up pretty poor. It distances the reader from the experience of the man whenever the book goes into the Experience of the Race.
• A bit of a baseball book which goes into the philosophy of pitching and that particular, 1967, when the Cardinals won the World Series.

It would have been a far better book if they’d only focused on the first and the third of those themes. It would have focused on what draws us together, not what separates us. Fifty years later, the professionals have gotten better and more scientific at separating us.

At any rate, some good stories in here, like the time where he broke his leg and came out to pitch on it anyway before coming out of the game and being shut down for most of the season thereafter. A lot of love for his wife, whom he divorces a couple years after the book comes out. A lot of familiar names from Cardinals history–Mike Shannon, Tim McCarver, Roger Maris, and so on. So like Open Net, it helps someone who came to fandom later connect those names to stories, but perhaps useless to current fans.

The book is written in very plain language–I wondered if it was targeted to kids, or if it’s just the way the sports journalist Phil Pepe wrote.

I did flag a couple of things.

How do you measure poverty? I wore the same coat for three or four years. It was a hand-me-down from one of my brothers and I wore it until it had too many holes in it. I had one pair of shoes. No Sunday shoes, just one pair for every day in the week, and I wore them until they practically fell off my feet. When they got holes in the bottom, I put a piece of cardboard in them so the water would not seep through when it rained.

See, I can understand that. I got hand-me-downs from the neighbors, which meant I was pretty fly for a white guy in 1980. And my shoes were rubber-soled sneakers, so they’d break down by having the top separate from the sole, not wearing holes in the bottoms, but I remember making the shoes talk like a mouth with my exposed sock as the tongue. It was definitely not a Race thing.

Now that’s the way I see the Negro riots we’re having in this country, as a brushback pitch. Their intention, like the brushback pitch, is to get people to think and not to get complacent and take things for granted. Negroes have been mistreated for years. They are getting tired of being mistreated, misused, and misunderstood, and the only way they can rebel is to stage riots.

The chapter was called “Brushback”, and it started in pitching philosophy including when to brush someone back. Then, it turned into justifying riots as part of the Race Question. Gentle reader, I remind you that over 80 people died in 1967 in riots. The only person who died from a pitch was Ray Chapman. So they’re not the same. And it illustrates how the book veered between its themes poorly. One wonders what Gibson thought about the riots fifty years later in 2020 (which occurred right before his death). Oh, one wonders.

And, yes, lest you wonder, the book does contain the baddest word. Gibson talks about how he feels about it and how he and a couple of teammates cleaned the locker room up of language (and how the team came together as a team instead of groups of different colors).

All I wanted was a baseball book, where I could learn from Bob Gibson, the pitcher. Instead, I got a whole lot of Bob Gibson, The Other.

I bought this book at the J. in St. Louis in August 2007, and I guess I was waiting for the right time to pick it up. It rested on the half bookshelf in the hall, close to The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire. So I picked it up. I suppose it helps that the St. Louis Blues did not make the playoffs this year, and I have no live television provider to watch hockey anyway, and Facebook for some reason is showing me lots of hockey-themed suggested posts. At any rate, I picked it up and read it.

The book takes place almost twenty years after Paper Lion (which I read in 2016), so the author cannot really embed as an older rookie with the Boston Bruins, the team that he embeds with for some training. The book takes place in the early 1980s, before the NHL grew to what it is today. The players remember the brutal days of the 1970s and the older facilities in which the teams played then. Don Cherry is the coach of the Bruins at the time, and I remember him from my hockey watching days fifteen years later as the CBC commentator with the crazy suits. And free agency wasn’t the thing it is now–players tended to stay with teams for a long time. From what I know of hockey today, that still seems truer than it is for other sports, but not like the old days.

The book contains stories from the players, descriptions of the drills, and then Plimpton gets some game time in a preseason game against the Philadelphia Flyers. But that’s two thirds of the way through the book. Then he goes into meeting with the WAGs (wives and girlfriends–don’t you read British tabloids?) and watching the game with them, experience watching the Bruins, whom he has come to think of as his team, at Madison Square Garden, and other stuff, and I wondered–where is he going with this? In Paper Lion, the climactic scene is the football game at the end, but it didn’t seem this was the case with Open Net. But then I discovered that after his experience, he went on a tour promoting the book or hockey or something and ended up in Canada, with a chance to play goal against Gretzky in warmups. So I guess that is the climax, although we’re never informed that we’re building toward that.

So it’s a good book that tells some stories about names I’d heard of, and it includes as young guys some players I’d recognized from the height of my hockey fandom around the turn of the century. No telling how good it would be to, say, my son, whose hockey knowledge is twenty years later than mine, and he might not even know who Bobby Orr was or Eddie Shore, whom I only knew that the Hanson brothers wanted to play old-time hockey like him.

If you’re going to read about a toff pretending to be something he or she is not, Plimpton is far superior to Barbara Ehrenreich.

And, full disclosure, I might have some Plimpton signatures around here on rejection slips from his magazine back in the day. Or they might just be stamps.

I have, I might have mentioned, his golf book as well (which was right next to Open Net, which probably means that the only organization in the stacks at Nogglestead is now gone). But as I am not a golfer, it might take longer than seven years before I pick it up.

I bought this book last year when I met S.V. Farnsworth at her book signing at ABC Books. She is only the editor on this book which is a collection of works from the Joplin Writers’ Guild.

So the book collects works by the members. Poetry, some genre works, some slice-of-life short stories like you used to read in McCall’s or other general interest magazines. Some of it is pretty pederstrian, but I’m not one to level judgment. I haven’t completed a poem or short story in months. At least these kids (some of whom are older than I am, no doubt) are trying.

Ya know, I was a member of the Missouri Writers’ Guild for a year or so and perhaps a paper member of the Springfield Writers’ Guild. A full member–I’ve had works in national magazines for pay, gentle reader, and don’t worry, I won’t let you forget it. I never made it to a meeting, though. But maybe this book has encouraged me to consider trying again. I am surely less of an ass than I was in writers’ workshops in college, where I was one of the few seriously cranking out works and submitting them. Trying to be a writer, not just a writing major.

But I’ve mellowed.

This collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov could be considered Encyclopedia Brown stories for adults. They were published monthly in Gallery magazine in the early 1980s. Man, I wish I’d known about that when I spent a long, uncomfortable stretch of time pawing through magazines in the Adult section of a used book store looking for the Gallery magazine with Robert B. Parker’s “The Surrogate” in it. I could have amortized the time in scoring some original appearances of these Asimov stories. Also, Stephen King had numerous short stories in men’s bazinga magazines in the early 1980s–at one point I compiled a list of them and started ordering them on Ebay when they were listed strictly as bazinga magazines and whose sellers did not know what was contained in the words within them. But I know now. Not that any used book stores in southwest Missouri have those kinds of back rooms. I associate them with Milwaukee.

At any rate, the book is structured thus: A group of men retire to their club after dinner and chitchat about something. This awakens Griswold, a man whom they don’t really like, and he lays out a mystery or spy story of which he took part, and each ends with a dramatic pause on the part of Griswold, inviting the others to guess how he solved it. In the magazine, the ending would be printed elsewhere or upside down to give the reader a chance to guess, but, man, the reader of the bazinga magazines in the 1980s must have been pretty clever indeed as I think I got one out of 30.

Each mystery is only a couple of pages, which makes for a quick read and something easy to pick up and put down. It has been less than a year since I read a science fiction collection from Asimov (Nine Tomorrows). Given how the stacks here at Nogglestead are sprinkled with Asimov fiction and nonfiction, I shall probably accidentally pick up another before long.

So I see three little paper flags in the book. What did I mark to comment?

He said, “I obtained a very good set of Durant’s The Story of Civilization for a mere pittance and I was delighted. I read each volume from the library as it came out, and I had always wanted a complete set. The only catch was that Volume 2, The Life of Greece, was missing.”

I bought most of them in 2019 (minus Volume I and Volume VI), and I even started to read the first volume three years ago. Well, I picked it back up right before I read this book, starting over with Egypt (which might be the longest chapter/book in the volume). I’m pleased to say I’ve finished the chapter on Egypt.

“Yes, we have some idea. Indirect evidence leads us to suppose he’s a member of the Black Belts, a street gang.”

Me, too, brother, me too.

I’ve often thought to ask kyoshi what he’s going to do with the army of martial artists he has trained, but I have not. When the time comes, he will let me know.

At any rate, a quick and amusing read. Apparently, Asimov wrote 55 of these stories in total, but a second collection of them did not appear. And, sadly, if it hasn’t by now, it probably won’t. I know the blogosphere is very high on Heinlein, but, c’mon, man. If you could have dinner with only one of them, you’d have to pick Asimov, ainna?

I have to admit, gentle reader, that this book has spent many football seasons on the Sauder printer stand serving as book accumulation point for browsing during football games, and it has spent many off seasons on the lower deck of the table by my main reading chair. It had a bookmark not far into it for all those years. When I’d bought it at the Hobby Lobby, I’d hoped it would be an easy browser, but no. I briefly considered it for the Instructional category in the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge, but I opted for A Beginner’s Guide to Glass Engraving instead. And they both suffered from a similar flaw.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I do a little bit of woodburning or pyrography from time to time, but I’m not the sort of person who can do highly detailed work. See the work I did for Christmas gifts in 2017–as it had been six years, I felt comfortable doing a couple this year as well. And, whoa, the Make It Happen plaque was seven years ago? I probably picked up this book around then.

So, gentle reader, here are the flaws with this book, or at least the flaws at the intersection of what Brian J. can or wants to do and this book.

• The book is written in British. And by that, I mean that the chapters are full of thick, descriptive paragraphs that one does not generally find in craft books. At least not American craft books. In our craft books, you get a bit of introduction about the craft, and then when it comes time for projects or techniques, you get a photo, an introduction, and a numbered list of steps with only a couple sentences each. Which makes them skimmable. This book has, erm, richer prose, but it does take away a little from the pragmatic or practical application one gets with American craft books. Not a lot of discussion why the author made the choices.
   
• The author is an artist, with a degree and numerous awards to his credit. Which introduced some distance between us as I am not an artist, and my fine motor skills preclude anything but thick kindergarten-crayon lines in pyrography.
   
• The author uses a wire-nib pyrography machine instead of a cheap solid-state one like I have, although I bought a unit that’s a little more advanced with a stack of Hobby Lobby gift cards I’d gathered over the years. But it was a lot like in A Beginner’s Guide to Glass Engraving, where the author used grinding wheels instead of a rotary tool (or acid etching) to make the marks. One wonders how much the techniques can be transferred from the artist’s tool to the rudimentary tools that the barbarians are using. Some, I am sure, but it still builds distance between the reader and the work.

The author also focuses a lot on small works, like keychains, napkin rings, and keepsake boxes–which I guess are good ways to practice, but of somewhat limited utility either as items for sale or for gifts. Perhaps these are best for practice while honing skills for larger things.

He also talks about working with a lot of different woods, which means he has a better craft store than Hobby Lobby to source from. At Hobby Lobby, it’s all pine, all the time.

At any rate, ultimately not that helpful for me. I’m going to end up hanging around at chapter 3, Silhouettes, for most of my woodburning hobby career.

Which does kind of strike at one of the conundrums I have with woodburning and hobbying: I make these things, and they languish in boxes in my garage, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I deluge my shrinking number of gift recipients with whatever I’m trying out when I try them out, but other than that, I’m reduced to putting things in silent auctions from time to time. I could do holiday bazaars or try Etsy or a booth somewhere, but that would probably only indicate how much money I lose per item.

I mean, I kind of enjoy making something, but I hate learning how little value my skill is to others. I mean, gentle reader, that’s what this blog is for, to keep me humble.

This book has been languishing on the most ignored to-read bookshelf at Nogglestead, the small little bookshelf in the hall between our offices. The three full-sized bookshelves on the opposite wall command the attention when I’m looking for something to read, and so I rarely draw a book from there. Even when I’ve looked at that shelf for something to read, I’ve sometimes considered this volume, but it’s a bit of a chonker–it’s 400 pages, and with Playboy on the cover, it’s not like I was going to carry this book to the dojo or to church. I guess I was saving it up for just the right moment when I would want to read it. Which finally arrived.

The book contains over 30 humorous articles and essays that appeared in the magazine up to the middle 1960s. Some of the articles are about sex, but not all of them. Remember, younglings, back in the 1960s, Playboy was a premier literary magazine as well as a place to see bazingas.

So this book includes pieces by Woody Allen, Allan Sherman, Art Buchwald (who must have been young once, ainna?), Jean Shepherd, and others. And aside from Art Buchwald, I could hear the enumerated authors’ voices in my head as I read (after all, I did listen to Pomp and Circumstance, a collection of Shepherd’s radio programs, in 2019). In searching for the link to the musings on that radio program collection, I externally remembered that Shepherd Mead, also in this book, was the author of How To Succeed In Business Without Trying (which I have not seen or read) as well as How to Live Like a Lord Without Trying (which I have read). So, clearly, I am in the target demographic of this book although I was born five years after it was published.

Overall, an up and down collection. Some pieces are funnier than others. Some rely on being an insider on publishing or movie-making. I was going to say that a few of them are dated, but, c’mon, man, very few overtly political sneers and no mentions of modern technologies or mindsets, so they’re all dated, but some of them fall into the anachronisms of my lived experience. I am sure that if you handed this to a kid today, he wouldn’t be scandalized because he wouldn’t know what Playboy represented in the 20th century, and he probably would not understand much of the humor within the book anyway. Not that he would want to read it. Not if there was a good, or any, TikTok or YouTube video available.

Which is unfortunate.

At any rate, Playboy collections from the 1960s are probably worth picking up even if they don’t have pictures. So one can remember a time where men aspired to some sophistication or at least think wistfully about a time when men might have aspired to some sophistication but were probably mostly all about the bazingas.

Although the cover art, man. That gives me nightmares.

I have a bit of a confession to make, gentle reader: when I was younger, middle school or high school perhaps, I was prone to confuse Saki with O. Henry. Mostly because I knew that both were short story writers who used pseudonyms. I am pretty sure that I only had O. Henry stories available in the giant reusable English textbooks of the day, but it certainly wouldn’t have helped that I only read “A Retrieved Reformation” and maybe “The Gift of the Magi” and no Saki whatsoever. Because the styles are quite different.

One wonders if young people today, or even college English majors, could tell the difference between the two or know just that much about them (short stories, pseudonyms) to confuse them. Probably not.

It doesn’t help that Saki short stories are rather short, with a bit of a twist to them kind of like O. Henry stories. However, they are very British. They reminded me of Chesterton’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, as it too deals mostly with upper crust members of society at their particular concerns and country manors. Several deal with Clovis, a young sophisticate and how he punctures some of the more fuddy-duddy members of his class.

The book also plays upon the trope of aunts, childless women in the family who insert themselves into the lives of their families (or who end up raising the children in the family for various reasons). Kind of like a relatively recent Progressive insurance commercial I’ll post below but which will be yanked from YouTube within a year as its rights expire or something, and we’ll all wonder what I was talking about when viewing this post in 2026:

One had to wonder if the shrinking size of the American family has put all of that aunt energy into the political arena to our detriment.

At any rate, an enjoyable read at 178 pages in a cheap college-reader paperback edition.

I did flag a couple of things:

The baddest word
The book does feature the baddest word, and even in Britain in the late 1800s or early 1900s, it’s used to show the speaker in a bad light. In this case, a man who would like to be known as an expert in religious architecture has moonlighted as the writer of poems that are set to popular music of the day, and he’s afraid that he’ll be known as the writer of music that, erm, black minstrels sing. So it’s not the main character (Clovis) using it, but a bit of a ridiculous fellow.

Although, to be honest, the word “minstrel” is probably already on its way to being a bad word, and I should probably be banned from polite society for using it. Not that 1) there’s any part of society that’s polite these days, and 2) I probably would not be part of that world anyway.

I’m right there with you

“It’s not the daily grind that I complain of,” said Blenkinthrope resentfully; “It’s the dull grey sameness of my life outside of office hours. Nothing of interest comes my way, nothing remarkable or out of the common. Even the little things that I do try to find some interest in don’t seem to interest other people.”

Ya know, I spend my off hours reading books I only post about on this blog, writing poems that I’m not sanguine about placing with magazines, and doing various crafts that end up in boxes in the garage because I’m not sure they’d be of interest to anyone but me, and I’m not eager to open an Etsy account to determine if that’s truly the case.

Hopefully, though, I won’t have the comeuppance or resolution that Blenkinthrope has which involves a fictional chicken.

Walmarts Dollar Generals in 1910 England

“The outlook is not encouraging for us smaller businesses,” said Mr. Scarrick to the artist and his sister, who had taken rooms over his suburban grocery store. “These big concerns are offering all sorts of attractions to the shopping public which we couldn’t afford to imitate, even on a small scale–reading-rooms and play-rooms and gramaphones and Heaven knows what.”

I guess it was not the Dollar Generals back then, but the same complaints are heard today, ainna?

The solution, devised by the artist, involves having some actors in to provide some intrigue which the housewives spread amongst themselves and that pretend intrigue draws them in to shop.

I’m not sure if it would work at the Pricecutter–it’s hard to keep the story lines straight when the employee turnover is accellerating (Dusty was in produce for a number of years, Ira and Debbie’s pharmacy is gone, Ron, the retiree who worked at Pricecutters as a bagger for fifteen years after retirement from his real job, and Linda, the sour checker, are gone; even Andrea and Ryan, the later replacements who checked and worked their ways up to the courtesy counter, have been gone for–years?)

But it’s a good example of how the stories have their twists, and how they might have been ahead of their time. Or how, perhaps, I did not give enough credit to stories and concerns that were nearly universal in industrial/modern societies that might have been shared by people or writers before my time (random thought: My brother and I offered this rejoinder to our sainted mother back in the day: “It’s the 80s, Mom.” which is an anachronism now).

I guess that’s why I read: to broaden my horizon and to realize that my experience is not so unique.