Month: August 2020

This is the first collection of poetry I spotted on my to-read shelves after Loveroot, and it was a good palate cleanser.

Issa was a Japanese poet from around the time of the American Revolution (he lived 1763 – 1828) who wrote in “haiku”–the translations in this book do not follow the common haiku pattern of 5/7/5 syllables, but the originals might. Some of the haikus were translated by R. H. Blyth, the source for Games Zen Masters Play. The volume is a Scholastic book, which meant it was sold in school book orders before I was born. When elementary school kids or their parents apparently bought collections of poems, simple as though they might be.

Well, the book is a lot of haikus, many about insects, and some breaths of insight from seeing flies alighting hither and yon. I read them all in one sitting, and that’s not the best way to enjoy a haiku. They should be savored one at a time, reflected on a bit. But I am a man in a hurry to make my annual book quota (70 books, of which this is the 73rd I’ve read this year, but the unofficial stretch goal is 100), so I gulped them down too quickly.

I have identified my favorite, though:

Just being here,
I am here,
and the snow falls.

I have started (long ago, but I have not worked on or completed) a military science fiction book where a space marine says, “I am here” before every action. Now I know where the quote comes from. Am I retconning? A little. Given that I have only a couple of pages of this book done, I am merely conning.

At any rate, a nice respite from more modern poems. Better if taken in moderation.

Ever since I bought this book at the Friends of the Kirkwood Library book sale in 2008, it’s been on the tops or fronts of my bookshelves where paperbacks fit when double-stacking books. So the book has often been visible, and many times I have picked it up and thought about reading it. It was not the time, then. It was that time now. Or this week, anyway.

The book is a novelization of the 2000 animated film that I have not seen. It seems to me that a similarly flavored movie came out at about the same time, but I cannot remember what it would have been, and although I have done a bit of research, I don’t know what I might have been thinking about. Twenty years ago, I was not so into animated films that it would have made too much of an impression. Just enough, I suppose. Also, I would like to defend myself that I am not into animated films even now, thank you very much, and I have not read a comic book since my favorite comic book shop closed up last year.

At any rate, the book details the story of Cale, the son of a prominent scientist/engineer. Fifteen years after the destruction of earth by a race of energy aliens called the Drej, humanity is scattered, a refugee race without a home world. A former associate of Cale’s father shows up at the backwater junkyard asteroid where Cale is eking out an existence and dreaming of building his own ship. He wants Cale to help him find the Titan, the ship Cale’s father built before the destruction of the earth. The mixed species crew of the associate’s ship keep almost a step ahead of the Drej as they use a special ring Cale had as a guide to the Titan. When they get there, they discover the associate is working with the Drej in their quest to eliminate the Titan, which was prophesied to be the end of the Drej? Something.

You know, like the Robotech book I read in 2016, I suspect that the novelization here has a depth that the cartoon itself doesn’t. I quibble with some of the timeline: The book is set 1000 years in the future, but humanity doesn’t seem to have changed, and the earth’s destruction was fifteen years before the book, but humanity has seemingly forgotten it even though much of the human population should remember it fairly clearly.

That aside, the book is akin to Heinlein’s juvie fiction, a rocket jockey story with some interesting depth to the villains as well and perhaps a twist or two that were unnecessary. But a pleasant little read.

Apparently, the book has a couple of prequels and a comic book series prequel. The video game rendition was cancelled, though, and I guess the intellectual property lost its lustre sometime the same year. Which means it’s ripe for a reboot, amirite? This time with live action, and Matt Damon can be the father instead of voicing the son.

I bought this book in June at ABC Books; of the seven books I bought that day, I have now read/browsed six. So it is possible that for a second year in a row, I will finish all of the books that I bought on one trip to a book store in the same year I bought them. But that’s not actually certain.

At any rate, I had not really paid much attention to her work. I knew she had a reputation for being gay, although that is in dispute, and that a lot of people see vaginas in her flowers. I think I confused her with Grandma Moses when I was young, as she was still alive but was very, very old–both she and Grandma Moses lived to about the century mark (Grandma Moses a little older, Georgia O’Keeffe a little younger). And both of their names started with G, which means to a young man not steeped in the arts, they were practically the same person.

So. Georgia O’Keeffe. She’s a little modern for my tastes, but she paints in sharp lines and bright colors, so I rank her higher than Matisse, Picasso, and the post Impressionists–even Americans like William Partride Burpee. Some of the landscapes/buildings have wavy lines where I would have preferred them straight. I like a couple of her New York series, but I’m not fond of the landscapes with the floating skulls. The more abstract work and some of the stylized flowers, meh.

Still, I’m glad to have reviewed this monograph (for which I paid TEN WHOLE DOLLARS) to increase my familiarity with her work and make me slightly more intelligent of art.

I forget where I saw this book listed most recently on the Internet, but I bought a copy for my former Marine brother and a copy for myself. As I had just finished an Executioner novel (Combat Stretch), I thought I would pick up something quick to read before jumping into another novel. Not that I’m reading long novels recently.

At any rate, it’s what you would expect: A couple of longer stories (which are a couple paragraphs long) interspersed against single-quotation-on-a-page sections. A lot of insults, some of which we civilians can appropriate.

As you know, gentle reader, I did not serve, but I come from a military family (Marines, not army). So I recognized at least one story–the candy bar in the toilet–that my father’s drill sergeant had done. So that’s been around a while. And I realized that I knew my mother’s boot camp nickname, but not my father’s–one assumes he had one.

I have seen a lot of ASMDSS t-shirts listed on my Facebook feed; now I know what it means.

So a quick read to be sure, and amusing enough if you’re the kind of person who likes the novels of Richard Marcinko. And maybe wonders if he regrets not signing up back when three or four years of military service sounded like a long committment, but four years of college and a decade’s worth of student loans did not.

I have mentioned before that I read Jong’s How To Save Your Own Life, her 1975 sequel to her seminal novel Fear of Flying a long time ago, before I started writing book reports on this blog. I never read Fear of Flying, though. And I’ve read some about it (mostly Wikipedia) that says Fear of Flying was an empowering bit of second-wave feminism. I guess it fit into the zeitgeist of the time, when the early boomers were coming of early middle age (well, their 30s, which was middle aged in those days), and Erica Jong became a thing.

This was her third volume of poetry. I started reading it after Fully Empowered, and the second poem in the volume is “To Pablo Neruda”. As a matter of fact, the poems refer/allude to/directly address a number of poets, including Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton (twice, and apparently Jong new her personally), Sylvia Plath, Keats, and Colette. A lot of the poems in the book deal with being a poet and the poetic impulse, so Jong is learned and takes herself very seriously.

The poetry is often vulgar and only sometimes crosses the line into earthy and sensuous, but you can only use the word “cunt” never in your poems to be anything but vulgar. Perhaps that’s the point, shocking little old bourgeois moi. Perhaps I’m judging her a little harshly because for every passage where it’s appealing that she’s good to go without using the cunt, she looks like she could be one of my immediate relatives.

So maybe that squickied the lusty appreciation of this early 1970s authentic womanly carnal expression right out of me.

Overall, aside from a few interesting moments, the poems have a very collegiate feel to them as though they were written by a sophomore at a university somewhere immersed in a creative writing program than real musings of someone growing older. I paid $4.95 (the same as the book’s cover price in 1973) for this at ABC Books in June for a first edition in a mylar cover, I don’t expect I’ll pay that much for another book by this author. If I ever buy another book by her, which is unlikely.

Not longer after finishing the Medellín trilogy with Message to Medellín a week or so ago, I jumped back into the Executioner one-offs with this volume.

An interesting thing I discovered when researching the trilogy: Although the trilogy is numbers 149, 150, and 151 in the numbering, the numbering on Fantastic Fiction and in the front of the books indicates that #150 in the series is Death Load. Which makes me wonder how that happened. Was the middle book in the trilogy only available to subscribers? Who knows. Well, someone probably knows. Actually, Wikipedia says Death Load was in the main line and Evil Kingdom was in the Super Bolan line. Which probably explains why it was longer than the mainline. The copy I have of Evil Kingdom does not indicate Super Bolan at all. I wonder if that makes it a collector’s edition.

Sorry, that’s more about the series than this book. Don’t I decry series business over the individual books in my book reports? I do!

This book has Bolan working with a beautiful KGB agent to find a Japanese terrorist organization which has a super typhus that it threatens to release unless its demands are met. The KGB agent has another objective: To steal the bioweapon for the Soviet Union and kill Bolan.

In a series of set pieces, Bolan and the Russian track and engage elements of the organization at the safe houses where they’ve stored the bioweapon for dispersal. In one of the firefights, the good buys are exposed and have 72 hours to find the main stronghold and find an antitoxin before they become infectious and need to be quarantined. They find the stronghold, discover the kidnapped scientist who has already discovered the antitoxin, and get saved with thirteen minutes to spare–and the beautiful Russian agent has fallen in love with Bolan and cannot kill him, so her superior who is in love with her shows up and is disappointed.

So it’s not a bad entry in the series, but it does have some errata. At one point, Bolan discovers that the Russian agent is to poison his granola bars with arsenic using the nuts to cover the scent of almonds. As any Agatha Christie reader can tell you, arsenic doesn’t smell like almonds–cyanide does. And when teams kit up for battle, they all end up with different weapons again. I guess in a post-apocalyptic scenario, this might occur as gun collectors emerge with different guns in their collectons.

Aside from the little mistakes, not a bad entry in the series. Fear of bioweapons is as timely as ever, ainna?

I bought this book at Books-a-Million in June. I haven’t made a goal of reading the books I bought in Branson this year (unlike last year, when I read all five ending with Herschend Family Values). But we bought a copy of this book for the boys as well, and the oldest spotted on my to-read stack (those volumes from Branson this year are still stacked on the floor atop the box of books I inherited from my most recently passed aunt) and recommended the book.

Well, he hasn’t read What If?, another book with a similar premise. Wherein What If? the author speculates on crazy questions and works out the math and physics on the prospect, in How To, he takes a basic activity like being on time, digging a hole, moving a house, playing piano, and so on and then goes off on a little physics tangent exploration of the possibility. So the schtick is a little different because he’s taking things for which we already have a good solution–leave early, use a backhoe or excavator, buy a player piano–and goes tangentally off into ridiculous but physics-ally sound answers (or reasons why the answers he chooses are not physics-ally sound).

So a little less engaging than What If? from my perspective.

My boys liked it, though. Enough to recommend I read it sooner rather than later. Although I’m not sure how much they appreciated the math and physics in it. I suspect they liked it because it had a lot of cartoons in it, like their previous favorites Dog Man and Captain Underpants.

I see Munroe has published another book in the interim–Thing Explainer–that I’ll watch out for. I’m also thinking about getting a copy of What If? for that former physics teacher on my gift list. She might find it a hoot. Or not. The key in Christmas gift giving, especially to those with whom you’ll open gifts in person, is a large number of items so that, hopefully, something will delight the recipient.