Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Recommended to You,” which is a bit of a problematic category for me as I don’t have a wide circle of friends, most of the people I know don’t read books, and even people I know do read books, they tend to be of a different variety than I read. For example, my mother-in-law reads a lot of contemporary, modern, and a little messagish literary fiction, and my beautiful wife reads practical for her professional aspiration books like books on sales, technologies, and self-affirmatory books the types of which I buy from time to time but don’t tend to read (which leads to some hijinks at Nogglestead–a couple years back, she gave me a book about networking called Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, which I said I’d heard of–which I had, as she picked a book from my to-read shelves to give to me as a gag, and no one told me till later). So when Jack Baruth mentioned this book on his Substack, I ordered a copy. I also ordered a copy for my mother-in-law for her birthday as buying a copy for her and for me is a fig leaf for when I want to buy a book which she might also find interesting–I say I’m buying it so we can both read it. To my knowledge, this is the first of such books that I’ve actually read–and she has been a little more dilligent about it than I.

At any rate, this book starts not long after the Soviet revolution in Russia. A gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, is found to be a problem to the Soviets. However, as he purportedly wrote a pro-revolutionary poem some years before, instead of execution, he is given a modified Minus Six punishment–Minus Six being internal banishment in the USSR where the banishee could not live in the six largest cities and had to eke out an existence somewhere else. Count Rostov, instead, is confined to a grand hotel in Moscow which he cannot leave under the punishment of death. And he’s no longer allowed to stay in the elaborate suite he’d occupied–he’s banished to a small room upstairs.

The book starts pretty linearly with the banishment and the immediate aftermath, but soon starts skipping to incidents and plotlines spanning decades. The Count befriends the young daughter of a party official staying at the hotel, but she grows and becomes a young party participant herself. Eventually, she leaves but returns with a daughter that she wants the Count to watch for a couple of weeks which turns into years so that the Count calls the girl his daughter.

Through the decades, the Count learns to change with the times a bit and to handle the changes in life as he ages and as the Soviet Union and the Party evolves around him (I admit having some preparation for some of it having read some Dostoyevksy and Tolstoi and watching The Death of Stalin last year). There are subplots and threads running through it, including the Count’s relationship with an aging movie actress; a Party-favored fellow rising in the hotel management; and so on, but some of them feel as though they would be resolved or would change in the gaps in the narrative, but here they are, five years later, not much changed.

The writing is a bit florid and sensous in spots, especially when talking about food, and when you get down to it, characters aside from the Count are a bit cipherish, but it’s not a bad read. At 462 pages, it has proven to be the longest of the books I’ve read for the Winter Reading Challenge thus far, but it was a pretty quick read and fairly easy to break away from to fit in another bit of a shorter book during the reading thereof.

Definite life lessons to be learned from it: Changing/adapting with the times so that you’re not merely buffeted by them is the biggest one and to make the most of your surroundings even when they’re limited. Something I surely need to learn over and over again.

As with Karate-dō: My Way of Life:

When I started reading this book, it felt familiar: A book by a man who was the son of a noble family on Okinawa who became a teacher and then brought karate to Japan proper. I thought Oh, crap, I just read this!

Actually, I kid; I “just read” Linda Greenlaw’s The Lobster Chronicles in 2009. The books both cover lobster fishing in Maine, but this book is more straightforward documentation where the Greenlaw book was a personal narrative/memoir of the same thing.

At any rate, it, too, like most of the books I’ve read for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, is fairly short, clocking in at 98 pages. It’s condensed from a larger book, The Great Lobster Chase: The Real Story of Maine Lobsters and the Men Who Catch Them. Apparently, the longer book had a lot more discussion about policy, regulation, and legislation which were trimmed for this shorter book which focuses on the lobster, the fishermen, the equipment, the relationship, and the communities in which the fishermen live. The chapters are limned with a bit of humor, a wry but respectful tone that illustrates and informs and makes one greatful to be ashore and indoors when it’s cold outside.

Again, like so many of the books I’ve read for the Winter Reading Challenge and so many of the books in the stacks, it comes from the latter part of the 20th century and not the 21st. But I suppose the sheer proportion of books that have been published come from before now, so I guess that doesn’t make me too much of a fuddy duddy.

So a pleasant, short read to fill the Food category of the book. Is that a stretch? I went looking for a book that I bought some years back, the Dummies Guide to … something food related because I bought it for another food category on another Winter Reading Challenge. And I couldn’t find it. I also couldn’t find anything about peanuts (from a trip to the George Washington Carver historical site some years back), berries or preserving food, or anything like that. A couple general gardening books, but that felt like a stretch. Probably no more than a book about professional hunters/gatherers, but still. And if you ask me in the next couple of days how a lobster trap works, I might be able to answer it. But hurry–I would have expect that Greenlaw covered it, too, but I didn’t really retain it and probably will not again since it’s not a daily practical consideration.

I pored through my stacks looking for any stray bit of manga or graphic novel that might have escaped my notice for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Graphic Novel or Comic category, but I could not find anything. So given that I had a little time between dinner and the beginning of a Springfield Lutheran School basketball game, I stopped in at Hooked on Books for the second time in a month (the first was for some fruitless Christmas shopping where I bought a book for myself anyway) and looked over their supply. I grabbed this volume because I remember Hawkeye from the West Coast Avengers series from the 1980s.

Ha! The joke is on me. This book is about the female Hawkeye. It’s from 2019. Who is the female Hawkeye? Bloody heck, I don’t know; I have barely read any fresh Marvel for thirty years. Apparently, she knows the Clint Barton Hawkeye, who is something of a mentor to her (and who appears on the last page as a cliffhanger), and a running joke is that she is the other Hawkeye, the girl Hawkeye. Apparently, she was a member of the Young Avengers before she got her own book, wherein she has moved to Los Angeles and has set up a shingle as a private investigator (she’s working on getting a license when she gets the capital).

The book collects the first twelve issues of the series which includes three story arcs which have some interrelation. Apparently, her mother is missing (or dead); her father is missing (or dead); and a group of white Nationalist types are doing bad things (at the behest of a supervillainess who is apparently cloning people for some reason which might be known to people who were fans of this Hawkeye before this series). The style of the art changes a bit between arcs, so I wonder if the artists got shuffled (and maybe why).

So if you’re looking for a comic like the old Ms. Tree comics but with a protagonist who is also an expert archer featuring a modernly diverse set of sidekicks and a bit of a girly focus (a lot of How do I look? kinds of panels and whatnot), I guess this is a book for you. I mean, it’s not bad, and it’s a little more story rich than some 21st century comics that I’ve read, where the art is the point and the words/plot are just there to support the drawings. But I’m not sure why it’s necessary to call the character Hawkeye.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, a female Wolverine does not appear in the books. Two do.

You might remember, gentle reader, I read a couple of golf books last October (The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiaasen and The Bogey Man by George Plimpton). So I came across this book and thought it’s too bad I didn’t read it then, but the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a Sports category, so it’s game on (although it does not actually clarify when I might get to the Bob Hope golf book I’ve also uncovered while combing the stacks for prospects for the Winter Reading Challenge).

So: The book comes out not quite in-between the other golf books (seventeen years after The Bogey Man, 21 years before The Downhill Lie), but the book reads a lot more like the former rather than the latter. Dobereiner was a golf writer for British papers and Golf Digest, so he covered a lot of tournaments before this, his third book, came out. He was also steeped in the history of the game, so he refers to a lot of the old timey players from the early part of the 20th century (although not necessarily that old timey in 1986). We get mentions of Sam Snead. Arnold Palmer is still very big in the game along with Jack Nicklaus. Names that still resonate, I suppose, but as old timey now.

The book has several chapters that collect small anecdotes about bad shots, errors, bad luck, and that sort of thing grouped by…. Well, the chapters are “Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”, “On the wrong side of the law”, “Bundles and bunches”, “One of those days”, “All God’s creatures”, “The law according to Murphy”, and “Just whose side are you on?” Okay, I guess the chapter titles are not that descriptive, but they’re grouped by mistakes that cost tournaments, rules violations or rulings, animal encounters, and that sort of thing. Each anecdote is maybe a couple of paragraphs with some connective tissue philosophizing.

It clocks in at 180 pages, and it’s somewhere between the two books topically as well. The Downhill Lie is mostly about Hiaasen’s personal experiences; The Bogey Man is Plimpton’s experience on the Tour leavened with stories about golf history and the books about golf he’s reading; this book pretty much omits any personal experience, certainly golfing, and goes right to the stories about others. Of course, that was to be expected as the author is a golf writer, not a writer golfing.

A quick enough read, and something that got me ever closer to my goal of completing all 15 categories of the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. At this pace, I’ll be done sometime at the end of the month, which will leave my February reading open for maybe the Bob Hope golf book (and other Bob Hope books, of which I seem to have several).

When I started reading this book, it felt familiar: A book by a man who was the son of a noble family on Okinawa who became a teacher and then brought karate to Japan proper. I thought Oh, crap, I just read this!. But it was Karate-dō Nyūmon by Funakoshi which I read for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge (the author of Different Race/Religion Than Your Own category). The books are in different editions, so they look different, and I actually bought them a week apart (this book July 23, 2022, and the other July 30, 2022, at ABC Books) during my periodic clearing of the martial arts section. So they were, in all likelihood, shelved in different locations in the stacks here. In the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, this book goes into the Asian Author category. Although I could have set it in the Set Somewhere You’d Like To Visit category. So perhaps it’s a two-fer.

At any rate, this book is an autobiography by the author (obviously), so perhaps it goes into greater detail about his life than the previously read volume (which had enough about his life to make it familiar). And, well, actually, looking over the summary of the book I read a year ago, it was:

So this book is part history of Karate (and Okinawa and the southern part of Japan by extension), autobiography, and the description of a particular kata that the author’s school emphasizes (and briefly compares it and the other kata it uses to other schools and the evolution of kata). It has a number of static images from the kata, including the steps that feature a partner, but it’s hard to get the flow from a kata from text description and pictures.

So I guess the difference lies in the fact that this book does not have the photos of the kata and talks a little more about how karate as a way of life fits in the Buddhism and Zen Buddhism in particular as well as perhaps shinto. It doesn’t go a lot into texts or sutras or theory in that regard–instead it just goes into peace, nonviolence, and a little Confucism in the heirarchy of authority. Perhaps it goes into greater detail into about his life story and experiences, but the familiarity I had with the basic outlines indicates maybe not much.

So also a quick read at 127 pages. Most interesting to the students of martial arts such as I fancy myself (wish me luck on testing for a third degree black belt later this month and as I consider perhaps joining another school to learn another form). And, most importantly, progress towards my next mug.

Ah, gentle reader. I thought this Robert E. Howard book, one of the paperbacks upon which I blew all my cash in Berryville, Arkansas, in 2021, would slot into the Fantasy category in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, oh, but no.

The book is a mere adventure story, a pulp version of Kim after a fashion dealing with The Great Game in Afghanistan (so it couldn’t fit in the Set Somewhere You’d Want To Visit category). An American adventurer who works for the British, sort of, a legendary swordsman and shot, investigates a series of attempts (some successful) on leaders in the region. It leads him and some retainers to a hidden city in the mountains where a descendent is trying to build a new caliphate based on the Assassins order, but apparently a Russian is funding it and pulling the strings from behind the scenes.

A couple of action scenes lead to fisticuffs, skulking around the city, intrigue, and whatnot, and all the while I’m hoping for some magic or a demon or something. There’s a dungeon and a door to a mysterious place where the tortured and sometimes babies are thrown, and I was all right! Here we go!. But the adventurer, El Borak, as he is known, (real name: Francis Xavier Gordon) discovers it’s just a labyrinth with a yeti in it. I mean, a touch of cryptozoology does not make it a fantasy book. Or Harry and the Hendersons would be a fantasy movie, ainna? Maybe it is, but I’m making the arbitrary Rules up as I go, so no to this.

Apparently, it started out as a short story and first came to the light of day (publishing) in the middle 1970s (according to Wikipedia) which says it came in various flavors and with various revisions in the 1970s. So I was going to say that this book is a direct ancestor of mid-1960s pulp such as Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels, where the hero is known by many names and who uses ruses to get into the hard sites he’s going to hit. But given that most of the text here is likely later than 1960s pulp, perhaps it’s more appropriate to say that things written forty years after Howard’s death influenced this book attributed to him.

Although I could not, due to the impartial judge’s (my) ruling on the yeti thing, count it as Fantasy, and I could not count it as Set Somewhere Where You’d Like To Visit, I did decide to slot this as Chosen Based on the Cover. I mean, it’s not like I was likely going to be able to choose a book from the stacks based on the front cover as they’re jammed tightly into the shelves. But I did choose this one which I judged to be a fantasy book based on Howard’s name and the cover which features a domed citadel, a man with a sword, and a damsel. So let this also be an illustration, again, about how you should not judge a book based on its cover.

It’s only the second entry in the reading challenge, and I am almost a week in. I’d better lock in, as the kids say these days.

So of course I picked a picture book for the first entry in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. As you know, gentle reader, I have accumulated a number of monographs as I used to flip through them whilst spending my Sundays watching football (that is, having football on so I could sit and browse art and poetry books). However, I haven’t had the expensive football package for a couple of years now, but I’ve still picked up inexpensive art books when I can. Like this book, which I bought in October at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library, whose sales are pretty much all bag day sales–so this book was under a dollar and probably closer to twenty-five cents given how I can pack a bag.

This is a hardback with a dust jacket, and it kind of falls between an exhibition catalog and a monograph. It contains an intro essay by oceanographer Sylvia Earle and an outro by art writer Joan Seeman Robinson, both a couple hundred words of overly vivid prose designed to sell the work, but if you’re familiar with Chihuly and a fan, you don’t need the selling. And if not, prose ain’t going to do it. The book was published in Seattle, home of Chihuly’s workshop, and you can imagine the gift shop of his museum/workshop is its natural habitat.

This book covers one series/set of his work from the 1980s. Blown glass bowls, essentially, with floppy sides and inspired by/designed to represent, sort of, aquatic life. Aside from the two essays, the book is essentially photographs of the work against dark backdrops. And unlike, say, images of paintings in monographs and art books, the photos do not do the work much justice. For one, you lose a sense of scale. Some of the work takes up a cubic yard in volume, but you don’t get that even if the photo spans two pages and the photos are the same size as 10″ works.

But, again, if it’s something designed for the gift shop, it’s more to remind you of what you’ve seen. And, you know, I can see it. Actually, I wonder if I did see it, or at least some of it. I think the Milwaukee Art Museum has or had a lot of his work or an exhibition in the early 1990s when I was at the university up the road and went to the museum a couple of times a year. So I have seen a bunch of his work in person. And now I’m wondering why I haven’t really been to the art museums since. I hit the St. Louis Art Museum a couple of times in the middle 1990s, and I’ve only been to the Springfield Art Museum three or four times since I moved to Springfield. I wonder why that is–I’m no longer trying to impress girls with a relatively cheap date, or my beautiful wife does not particularly favor art museums (she prefers botannical gardens), or because I’ve become a homebody as I’ve gotten older. Ah, well–the Springfield Art Museum is closed for a number of years for expansion and renovation, so I’m not going to revitalize my official art appreciation anytime soon.

And the easiest book is knocked off of the category list. Easier, even, than Graphic novel or comic.

This is the third of these little Salesian Missions booklets I’ve read this year; I read The Way in June and Priceless Gifts in August. Given that I bought another booklet when I got this book and The Way in April 2023, I have at least one more floating around the stacks here in an unread state. They tend to get jammed into narrow slices between larger books only to pop out at strange times, like when I’m not hoping to start a larger book before the Winter Reading Challenge begins on January 2.

So: a booklet small enough to fit into a #10 envelope with poems by Whittier and Whitcomb Riley which won’t help me to keep them straight (although remembering Riley is the Little Orphant Annie and Old School Day Romances guy helps me to remember that Whittier was the more serious of the two). Several poems by Helen Steiner Rice back when she was a going concern (I just read her Wikipedia entry, and an interesting but brief story which is told with greater detail on her Web site–she died in 1981, and she has a Web site, so let that be an indicator of what a big deal she was to some).

At any rate, you could do worse than to read these little booklets with their focus on inspirational messages and mixtures of greeting card scribblers and major poets and to read old Ideals magazines which are mixtures of the same with some grandmothers’ poetry included as well. I recently bought a stack of a major poetry magazine issues from the last year, and I’m telling you that they are, in fact, much worse. So don’t laugh at me for picking some of these up and wondering if I should start actively collecting them (given that they were published many per year for decades, probably not). And enjoying them for the little literary charcuteries that they are. Designed to be disposable but with indispensible literary merit within. What a culture we once were.