Category: Books

This book is a 1979 young adult novelization of the Bill Murray film. It’s quite mindbending, when you think about it. In 1979, Scholastic was publishing 91-page-long novelizations of screwball comedies. A couple decades later, Scholastic would publish weighty young adult fantasy novels that got translated into major motion pictures. A mind bender, huh? An who owns the copyright to the novelization of Meatballs? Haliburton Films. Well, probably not that Haliburton. More likely it’s related to Haliburton, Ontario. But that’s neither here nor there.

So what’s the book like? The movie, maybe. I haven’t seen the film yet. It’s a screwball comedy, with young men trying to attract members of the opposite sex and with a camp of lessers pitted against a camp of athletes and well-to-do. There are a couple set pieces and an uplifting plot of a young boy being taught how to be a better person by the whacky camp counselor portrayed by Bill Murray.

As a book, it’s a collection of disjointed scenes with little continuity between them. In a movie, which I suspect in the matter matches the novelization after a fashion, this works better with the visual comedy and such. But in a book, it’s very juxtaposed to the point of just being juxt.

So take that for what it’s worth. It’s not a bad read, I suppose, if you’re thirteen years old in 1982 and your parents have coughed up a buck and a half for the book club order and you don’t have cable or a Betamax to watch the actual movie (which was a real condition in 1982, and it explains why books like this exist). But the book holds up less well than the film, probably.

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This book dates from the 1980s, so it is dated in some regards, but only in minor ways. Well, minor ways if lived through the 1980s. No one uses a computer or a cell phone, for example. Cell phone? Geez, even that’s dated; I’m the only one in the world except Jitterbug customers still carrying around anything but a smart phone these days. My poor children have no diversion when we’re waiting somewhere except for horning in on other children whose parents have provided them with a digital pacifier. But I digress.

Some of you might remember this strip, which ran for 34 years in the newspaper (geez, that’s dated, too). It dealt with an 80s career woman who was perpetually on a diet, sort of involved with a lightly stereotyped 80s man named Irving, and dealing with older, traditional parents who did not get her at all.

The material seems to hold up well; although I’m not a career woman, I have seen some struggle with the same issues that Cathy makes light of. Except they have cellular phones now, sorry, smart phones, and computers. It’ll probably hold up a little better than, say, Dilbert, which depends on technology and on surreal humor that will be about as funny and relevant as Bloom County remains today. Sorry, Scott Adams, but there it is. Cathy, like Calvin and Hobbes, comments on the human condition, not just the contemporary workplace or political landscape.

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 This book and this book are a couple of titles early in the Dilbert series (the years on them are 1993 and 1994 respectively). They predate Dilbert.com, okay? Scott Adams invites you to mail him or email him at his AOL.com email address. I was still in college when these cartoons were in the paper. Wow.

The first volume (actually, the third in the series) is centered on strips featuring Dogbert’s etiquette advice, and the second (fourth) is just a run of topical strips. As such, each book offers a certain continuity theme. They’re amusing, but they’re missing a number of the characters that have come to represent the Dilbert world. Wally doesn’t make many appearances (and he shows with a different name in one). The boss’s hair is not yet pointy. You know. If you’re steeped in the later Dilbert, this might be strange.

At any rate, amusing enough, but it’s a while before Adams reaches his stride and becomes part of the zeitgeist. Or maybe it’s a while before I’m working in the IT office environment and I recognize and share the geist. Since I’m out of that now, the cartoons might have lost a certain resonance. Or maybe it’s because they’re just not the peak of the Dilbert world.

At any rate, worth reviewing if you’re into Dilbert.

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This book is a short story chapbook published and, I presume, distributed to promote Christensen’s 2004 novel Sara’s Search.

This particular volume, if you can call it that, is 14 pages long and first appeared in a 2000 anthology of some sort. It’s a British-style mystery, with a rich great aunt whose sister recently fell down the stairs pretty sure that her great neice and great nephew are about to marry two ne’er-do-wells only looking for the future inheritance. So she gets them to tell their fiances (fiance and fiancee) that they’ve been disinherited, and sure enough, the two scram. The great aunt then tells the two about her suspicions regarding the death of her sister and leaves instructions as to her will if she should die suddenly, which leads to her sad victory.

Hey, it’s a British style story, with tea and domestic help. If you like that sort of thing, it’s your bag. It’s the sort of thing you read a couple of in any given month of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or whatnot.

But it counts as a book, because as I mentioned, I’m trying to make the annual hundred while reading, slowly, through 1000+ page books (and 450 page books).

On July 24, sometime commenter A. Rothman friended me on Facebook, prompting me to comment “Brian J. Noggle got friended by a Minneapolis concealed carry instructor. Noggle feels compelled to read a Joel Rosenberg book now.” This book is the one that sprang into my hand. Which means it took me several months to read it. Wow.

The conceit is this: Magic exists, and Mordred defeated Arthur. Hundreds of years later, the British crown is in a power struggle with the Dar al Islam and another empire whose provenance I’ve forgotten. Priest warriors for the crown carry swords imbued with the souls of either saints (white swords) or very evil men (red swords). Apparently, the swords were made in ancient times and are the magic that has created them has been forgotten or driven from history. But in the Eastern Mediterranean, where the three empires clash, a new red sword has been found. Two active members of the holy order, the paladins of the title, bring a former member of the order, their former mentor, out of retirement to investigate. Their former mentor recruits and deputizes a local fisherman–fisherboy really–to their order and gives him the sword, which has been infused with the soul of a baby (but somehow, this becomes a red sword). The young paladin and the mentor depart to investigate on their own, leading the other paladins, including a conflicted paladin bearing a red sword carrying the soul of Genghis Khan, to follow them.

So it’s a very rich book, and it clock in at 450+ pages, so there’s plenty of room to spread the wealth and depth. We have well-rounded Marines and side adventures in taking a pirate ship. We have a little battle with darklings, the nature of which is unclear (and whose presence is remarkable, according to the characters, but is not resolved). We have an aging Navy man in port duty intriguing within the Navy and with the enemies of the crown. We have hints and some details about the past, why the mentor left the order, some history regarding the other members of the order, and, as I said, a lot of depth.

Which is then lost on the plot.

The story of the new live red sword runs through it, but the ulimate resolution takes place suddenly by comparison. I won’t spoil it for you because the book might be worth reading on its own–I’m a bit ambivalent because of the ultimate weakness of the plot or at least how the main plot is resolved–but the climax comes out of left field with some unheard of people working on their own plot unrelated to the things investigated, off and on, by the paladins for 350 pages. Then there’s a scene with the king at the end, a sort of Star Wars award ceremony, except R2 D2 doesn’t come back to life (although his return might have been foreshadowed).

There’s only one more book in this series, so I don’t know what Rosenberg had planned. Maybe a series of seven or eight which would have made more use of the deep background. I haven’t read the early books in the Guardians of the Flame series, so I don’t know if that’s how he did it with that series. Or maybe these books didn’t sell well enough to continue.

Jeez, it took me since July to read this, and it’s not even one of the big books I’m sorta reading.

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Of all the picture books I’ve been browsing lately, this book has a distinction: I actually started looking through this book last football season, and it remained on the side table, often-dusted, until I finished it this season.

This book, as its title might indicate, is a retrospective of Rembrandt’s work and a pretty detailed biography of the man. Too much text, almost, to read and keep one’s place while watching the intermittent plays of a football game. I learned a bit about Rembrandt’s rise and fall and the meaning of chiaroscuro. That might be the only thing I retain long term, but it’s enough.

Related story: I’ve had two copies of Rembrandt’s Man in a Gold Helmet in my life. The first I bought when I was in college with a freshmanly minted credit card. The Alumni Memorial Union had a print sale in it, and I wanted copies of Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Since it was three for $15 or $6 each, I picked a third. The third was Man in a Gold Helmet.

Sometime later, I divested myself of those prints, but I found a framed one inexpensive at a garage sale or an estate sale back when I was hitting them all the time. I bought it, and I hung it in Casinoport, and I hung it in Old Trees, and I hung it at Nogglestead. But when I was talking to my beautiful wife about the painting, I couldn’t remember where we’d hung it. The living room is rife with Renoir, the bedroom has a Monet (I’ve discovered recently it’s a Monet) and a couple of Hargroves, but I drew a blank on the Rembrandt. I didn’t know if we’d stored it or if we’d donated it, but I’ll be darned if I remembered it or could find it.

Until my wife and I were sitting in a chair together, a chair I don’t normally sit in, and I saw it: it is in the small hallway between our offices, a hallway that we rarely light. I pass by it several times a day, but I’d lost it there until such time as I was sitting somewhere I normally don’t and looked into that hallway.

So I still have it, and now that I have reviewed this book, I can definitively and with more authority say that it’s my favorite of Rembrandt’s work. Probably partly because of the history I have with it, but also probably because the affinity I have for it thematically and stylistically I would have had with it even if I’d seen it in the book for the first time.

So the book’s worth checking out. Rembrandt was a very interesting painter, and he lived a very interesting life.

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I’ll be honest: this book appealed to me for a specific reason. As you remember, I only bought the book because I saw it and Rosemary’s Baby together at a book fair.

I wanted it to read it now, of all times, because my children have both gone off to school full time, and as I work at building up some contract work, I’m cleaning the house pretty regularly and meticulously. As a matter of fact, I’m cleaning things and places people don’t see, and I’m sort of taking a weird pride in it. On one occasion, I’ve wondered if I’ve turned into a Stepford wife. Since I have the book, I could investigate.

Spoiler alerts follow Continue reading “Book Report: The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972)” →

I have bought a large number of guides to Missouri flora and fauna like this book so I can be more definitive when my children ask me about plants and animals they see on our long nature hikes. I don’t know when we’re going to take these long nature hikes–I’m not much of an outdoor hiker, although I am a bit of an urban walker when living in urban domiciles–but I’ll be prepared, I hope, if I just thumb through enough of these.

This small product of the Missouri Department of Conservation gives a high-level primer on birding, including identifying the distinguishing features of birds and tips to help with identification, but this is not an identification book or a field guide. Most of the book is given over to charts identifying the frequency of birds’ appearances in Missouri by month and habitat so you’ll know what to look for in the field and in the field guides.

A quick browse and, as I mentioned, a very early primer for anyone who wants to get into birding.

Heaven help me, I know how birdwatchers refer to themselves. I might as well get The Big Year on Blu-Ray.

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This book is the source for the 1953 film.

In it, a Philadelphia cop, not the smartest guy on the squad, but the straightest and the most methodical, is called to investigate the apparent suicide of a police clerk. Ranking cops want it to be a suicide, but Bannion, the cop, thinks there might be more to it and is reluctant to give it up. Eventually, he stirs up a mob hit that kills Bannion’s wife instead, and Bannion goes all in, giving up his career as a police detective to find and punish those corrupt city officials who make it all possible.

This is a good bit of noir. It’s third person, so it lacks the immediacy of the stuff that makes the latter half of the 20th century narration, but it makes up for it in spades. Because I bought it in a detective book club edition, I expected less than I got. Recommended.

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As I might have mentioned, it’s football season again, so it’s time to look at books with pictures of cars in them amid the cartoon books and art books. Last year, it was Triumph Sports Cars by Graham Robson. This year, I’ve read Triumph Sports Cars by the same author. While that book was a hardback, this is a short gallery book (32 pages) given over to photographs, mostly, with a brief history of the models.

It’s more of a primer than the other book, probably sharing some copy and photos. The Shire Album series is a collection of pictorial guides to old British things, with other books in the series covering Playing Cards and Tarots, Cricketing Bygones, Agricultural Hand Tools, and the like. So it’s geared to the collector. What’s odd or ironic is that the books themselves, judging from the price on the Internet, are collectibles themselves, which means there might be room for a Shire Album entitled Shire Albums. Or maybe not.

Someday, I’m going to have to write a detective series where the investigator drives a TR7 or something to make sure that I put these books to use and can write off the five bucks or whatever I’ve dedicated to the innumerable books.

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This book is a collection of black and white photographs, along with a couple of poems, by the author, a former architect who brought his design eye to photography. He prefers, as do many photographers, the wild, bridges, and old buildings. He also is a fan of a certain photographic techinique–longer exposure times or development times–that washes water splashing into a white miasma. I remember when my photographer for the St. Louis Artesian used a similar technique for the first cover with her photograph “Shattered Water”. Wow, I was the editor of a literary magazine such a long time ago that its Internet presence is slim? That was almost twenty years ago.

At any rate, the photographs are what you would expect. None leapt out at me. I’m not a real critic, so don’t take my dismissal as definitive. I’m that way with most of the contents of museums and books of work by serious artists, too.

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I swapped a copy of my novel for these books, since I know the author from the old BBS days, when he dominated the local CG64 boards as White Knight. Or maybe that was me.

Regardless, these books collect the first two years (already?) of his Web comic Frik’in Hell. The motif centers upon a medieval warrior who finds himself out of war-work and takes up as the counter man in a fast food inn. He doesn’t take it too well, and beheads customers in between visits to a support group, attacks of ninjas, and a quest by another character to create ketchup.

Strangely, given that I’m an IT professional, but Web comics don’t tend to draw me in. I see the occasional Penny Arcade and XCD-something (see? I can’t even remember the name of it). I did read another book made from an online Web comic (RPG World). But it’s not my thing. Old Heathcliff? My thing. Maybe even Marmaduke.

But if you’re hipper than me, check his comic out at frikinhell.com.