Month: May 2020

I bought this book last spring at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale back when we had such things.

I didn’t review it during football games last year because I ended up traveling a lot and not watching that much football, and this book is a little text heavy for browsing as the book has some black-and-white images, but this book comes with a set of slides instead of the colored images.

After fifty-one years, the slides have all washed out into tones of red, so one cannot really appreciate the artist as the critics should you should appreciate him, which is to say for his use of color.

Because, let’s face it: In technique, he’s a twentieth-century man. The text says he’s the product of Gauguin and Matisse, so you know what I think about it. Middle school stuff. Look at this picture. Superficial no matter how much the critics will tell me that there is metaphor in it and that it’s an evolution or improvement over realism that came before it.

I have another volume like this for Cezanne which I’ll look over in the next couple of days or weeks. I might not like that, either. So it’s more a matter of reading it for completeness, so I can say why I don’t like a particular artist and be definitive about it.

Plus it’s an easy +1 to the annual reading list.

I got this book in my first ABC Books online order during the past-but-sorta-current unpleasantness, and after I finished the Agatha Christie omnibus, I fully expected to jump immediately into the ordered books because last in, first out. After all, I was excited to receive them in the mail, so I should jump on them as soon as I could while I was still sort of excited about them. Also, these books will be atop and in front of other books, so they’ll be the ones closest at hand.

Si, a member of the Duck Dynasty clan and a popular part of the show, recounts his life through stories from his youth and his army days peppered with tall tales and old jokes recounted as though they actually happened to him. It’s a pleasant enough read; it’s 230 pages, but lightweight prose that moves quickly.

I do have one quibble, though. When he’s talking about a military posting in Massachusetts, he talks about the crazy accents they have, and he says:

The first time I walked into my barrack, I asked a sergeant where I could find some water to drink.
“The bubbler is down the hall,” he said.
“The what?” I asked him.
It took me a few minutes to realize he was talking about a water fountain.

That sergeant isn’t from Massachussetts. He’s from Wisconsin, Jack!

I have never seen the program, but Duck Dynasty had been a gift schtick for my recently passed aunt. She’d mentioned something about the show at some point, probably tut-tutting it, so for most of the last decade she got at least one Duck Dynasty branded product (but not the wine) as a Christmas gift. So reading the book kind of reminded me of her. Strangely enough, my other aunt (who once lived in Texas) spent a great deal of the decade living down the road from the Robertsons in Louisiana. Well, as down the road as Mickey Gilley’s anyway. That other aunt, my only remaining one from that side of the family, was and is a vagabond and is probably due to move soon.

Having read the book, I’m interested in seeing a bit of the program to see what prompted the interest in Si–it’s claimed that fans of their outdoor program and later Duck Dynasty wanted to see more of him telling stories like those in this book. I would, too. He is a couple of years older than my father was, and an outdoorsman, so he could serve as some middle-aged proxy of sorts. Well, not that psychologically deep, but still.

At the end of the book, there’s a page marketing the other books in the Duck Dynasty series, including a cookbook and a book by/about the head of the clan/company. Which leads me to believe that someone believed that fans of this show could read, which probably differs from what the friends Facebook shows you would believe. Maybe I’ll pick some of them up at the book sales to pair with my Duck Commander wine if they even make that any more.

I bought this book at LibraryCon last year (is it showing off my riches to link to posts that illustrate how profligate I am in buying independent artists’ and writers’ work at fantasy conventions?). After reading the long Agatha Christie omnibus, I wanted something shorter to pad out my annual to-read collection. So I essentially read this on Wednesday night after finishing the Agatha Christie.

I told my beautiful wife that Cullen Bunn was a horror writer, but that’s not exactly true. He’s a comic book writer, and this is an independent collection of some of his stories that he’s turned over to other comic book artists (aside from his normal co-workers at the big publishing houses) to draw up and whatnot.

We’ve got eleven stories set in the horror milieu with different drawing styles. Unfortunately, the depth of the stories is a little thin–at least from a textual perspective. As you know, gentle reader, this is a peccadillo of mine: That modern comics have thinner stories to make more room for the art work, which someone decided is the whole reason for comics in the first place and should be paramount.

The stories themselves are of the type you’d find in D.C.’s Secrets of the Haunted House (although how would I know? I was a Marvel kid), albeit a little thinner. Perhaps those old stories were padded to stretch two into a comic, or maybe they had ads in them to make them seem longer.

At any rate, a quick enough read (look). It didn’t inspire me to try my hand at more fiction like The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia did, but, on the other hand, this represents eleven story set-ups that Bunn came up with that turned into a finished product. Which is a far better track record than I have over the last decade, which is basically two completed poems and maybe a short story nope, that was completed in the first decade of the century, not the second. So maybe I should get to work and get into the game before I tut-tut someone else’s comic book stories too much.

Also, when I went looking for the book of Charles Sander Peirce last weekend, I turned up a lot of books I wished I could read right now but I had to finish the Agatha Christie omnibus. Now that I’m done, though, I’ve forgotten which books I was so hot about, so I’ll probably pick up another graphic novel I bought at LibraryCon or an Executioner novel instead.

This is the famous five-novel omnibus that my grandmother sent me earlier this year. It includes the following novels:

• The Mirror Crack’d, wherein a movie star buys a home and renovates a home in St. Mary Mead, home village of Jane Marple. The movie star throws an open house, and a woman dies immediately after meeting the movie star. Poisoned! Miss Marple investigates.
• Caribbean Mystery, wherein Miss Marple is on holiday at a Caribbean resort, when an elderly blowhard offers to show Miss Marple a picture of a murderer. When he glances at the photo whilst taking it out of the wallet, he reacts to it and puts it back without showing Miss Marple. He then dies, and when Miss Marple investigates, she discovers the photo is no longer in his wallet, and someone else to whom he told the story must be THE MURDERER. Other bodies hit the floor sand before Miss Marple strikes!
• Nemesis, wherein a rich fellow from Caribbean Mystery leaves a strange bequest/challenge for Miss Marple when he dies: Travel on a garden and sites bus tour and solve a mystery. What is the mystery? He doesn’t say, but ultimately it might be to clear his estranged, ne’er-do-well son of a murder. Other bodies hit the floor treacherous mountain trail before Miss Marple, along with some dead rich guy-funded guardian angels, nab the bad guy before Miss Marple becomes the next victim!
• What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, wherein a friend of Miss Marples is convinced she has seen a murder on a train on the next track, but the police find no evidence and no body. But Miss Marple believes her friend and finds herself in a remote town with a catspaw investigating a rich house full of suspects. When the catspaw discovers the body, everyone might be a suspect, but whose body is that in the sacrophagus? Also, poisoning occurs!
• The Body in Library, wherein friends of Miss Marple find a body in their library. For novelty’s sake, this body was strangled, but it’s not anyone known to the Bantrys, in whose library the body was found. So Miss Marple comes to investigate on behalf of her friend, and as the other bodies hit the floor canyon in a flaming wreck, she has to uncover the real murderer.

So, Brian J., did you figure out the murderers? You know, I knew by page 70, about halfway through The Mirror Crack’d, but I might have read that book before. I also remember Mrs. McGillicuddy seeing the murder from when I read that book in high school, but I didn’t remember whodunit. So I was one for five, ish, as I knew in what direction the murderer lie in What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!. But perhaps I kind of remembered it. Also, I knew kind of something in Nemesis, but not exactly.

My beautiful wife asked me which was my favorite, but to be honest, that’s like asking what your favorite Executioner book is. They’re formulaic, but of a different formula than men’s adventure paperbacks. Someone Miss Marple knows or somewhere Miss Marple goes has a murder on her/its hands, and she acts all dithery but listens to people and compares them to a list of people she’s known to ferret out the killer. The books often feature common tropes, such as:

• A child or young person interested in the murder who looks for clues or tries to help, and sometimes finds a relevant clue. Although in one such book, playing against type, the child is the murderer (not in any of these books, though).
• The murderer(s) kill a second person to confuse the issue by dressing the second person, a random townie, up like the person he/she/they meant to kill in order to confuse the time/circumstances of the original murder. This happens a couple of times in these books.
• Poison is the method of choice for many of these murderers, or strangulation. Neither of which leaves a messy crime scene–at least, not a crime scene that would have yielded many details in these days.
• Rich men who are almost dead or invalid. Such characters appear in two of these books and trigger a third.
• The murderer is generally present throughout the story, but is not under suspicion until the big reveal at the end.

Reading five relatively close together means I can spot these tropes. I imagine if I read a bunch of them, I would get better at figuring out whodunit. I think I was better at them when I was reading a bunch of them at the beginning of high school, but in the interim, I’ve gotten a little more used to hard boiled or modern thrillers which are less clue-driven whodunits.

Also, the body in the library thing. The last novel is entitled The Body in the Library, as a matter of fact. You know, in reading these old English mysteries, libraries aren’t good for much except killing people or stashing bodies. You know, I have often dreamed of having a home with a proper library, but English mysteries might be killing that urge in me.

So it was a nice way to pass some time. Although I’m not sure I am in the frame of mind, really, to get the most out of English or modern cozy mysteries, although I will read them from time to time when I find them on the to-read shelves. Or when my grandmother sends them to me.

This is a pretty nice edition, too, with Genuine Bonded Leather cover and gold paint atop. Probably archival paper, too. Chatham River Press must be akin to Easton Press in publishing nice editions of books, but it looks like they’re no longer in business. Still, although Nogglestead does not smell of mahogany, it’s nice to have as many leather-bound books as possible.

Like The First Four Years, this book was not published in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lifetime and is based on a loose diary she had of her trip with Almanzo (Manly), Rose, and another family from South Dakota to the land they eventually bought near Mansfield, Missouri, which became Rocky Ridge Farm and their forever home. The diary entries are leavened with Rose Wilder Lane’s recollections and some photographs not only of the family but also of the places they passed through, although many are historical photos of the time when the Wilders passed through and are not of or by the Wilders themselves.

That said, the book does not have a great narrative structure and does not characterize the people in it much. The trip occurs after repeated crop failures and both Laura and Almanzo suffer from bad cases of diptheria. I read Willa Cather’s O, Pioneers! after I started reading the Little House books, and this one reminds me most of the Cather book. Whereas the other Little House books (except, perhaps, the aforementioned The First Four Years) emphasize the technical skills and mindset in being a pioneer, but the diary entries in this book catalog not only how pretty the land is that they visit but also the price of land per acre and the expected yield in bushels per acre.

The other stunning metric from the book is that she reports the daily high temperature on their trip until she loses the thermometer sometime along the way. Many or most of the days of their trip through South Dakota and Nebraska the temperature was 100 degrees in July and August. In 1894. Don’t the models predicting our imminent demise from the boiling seas take data from after that to make their predictions? All I know is that we’ve had two cool springs in a row here in southwest Missouri, this one with a late freeze that killed my peach blossoms (again), so I’m inclined to believe that temperature has varied and continues to vary. But I am no scientist, just someone who takes his lived experience and tries to make sense of it.

I have two other books of Little Houseiana here: A biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and a collection of her “discovered” writings in pompous hardback that I suspect will be more unpolished bits that she didn’t plan to publish but that the Trust put out on her behalf eventually. I was going to power through them, but I’ve decided to power through the last novel in the Agatha Christie omnibus instead. Because, despite all the cool books I’ve recently found and want to read right now, this is a situation that calls for powering through books I’m not excited about. But soon: fun!