Month: December 2020

Well, I have completed the first three books in the series, which I bought in 2017. He’s got at least one more out, and I’ll probably pick the others up the next time I see Chase at a convention. And by “the next time,” I mean “if ever again,” but I hope I do.

Let’s see, in this one, the Empire and the Confederacy are stalemating a bit. The Confederacy has some alien tech that gives them a bit of an advantage; some systems align with the Empire, and some with the Confederacy. And the military leader for the Empire starts laying the groundwork for a coup when the current emperor orders the slaughter of civilians in retaliation for a Confederate victory. Then the aliens whom humanity slaughtered hundreds of years ago–the ones that left behind the advanced technology return, and they’re pissed.

The book runs a little longer than the previous ones–180 pages versus under 140–and Chase is still good at plotting, and the book moves along at a quick pace, but he’s also really starting to develop as a writer with some more polished descriptions added and some characterization to the story. So he’s improved as a writer since his first book eight years ago to this book which is four years old.

Good for him.

I said when I reviewed Georgia O’Keefe earlier this year:

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.

Well, I have now completed my education into the differences between Grandma Moses and Georgia O’Keeffe (with a little Frida Kahlo thrown in this year for a bit of spice). Grandma Moses was what they call a “primitive” artist, meaning in the art world that she was not trained in the arts. I tend to use the term incorrectly, meaning that she’s kind of folk art, with some good representation of nature in a distant landscape but with diminishing skill on buildings and then on people and animals. I mean, much of her work is about what you would expect from a paint-with-wine class, maybe. Not quite up to Bob Ross on the landscapes, even.

I think she became famous because she was a novelty: She started painting at about 80, and a New Yorker visiting upstate spotted her work and worked to make her famous (and that he was an early collector and made money on her is purely coincidental). Soon, she was having exhibitions around the world and appeared in a documentary film and an appearance on Murrow’s See It Now television program.

This book is not just a monograph, but rather a comprehensive treatment of Moses and her work. It includes a biography, information about her career, several letters in her own hand reproduced, and a complete catalog of her known works (at the time of publication–it’s possible they have found and/or authenticated more in the almost fifty years since this book’s publication). It’s a bonzer–356 pages, although it’s not small print and has extensive indexes and a complete listing of her work with small photos where available). Very complete.

One gets the sense that Grandma Moses herself did not take the whole thing too seriously and did not let her fame go to her head. Of course, as a child of the 1860s and a resident of Virginia in the reconstruction era (perhaps considered a carpetbagger by the Virginians) she would have more perspective than a young artist who was 20 something at the time of “discovery.”

So although I appreciate her work a little more than Kahlo or O’Keeffe, I would still not decorate my house with Grandma Moses prints.

This book is of unknown provenance; it has no title page or copyright page, and the Internet has never heard of it. I’m guessing that it was written in the early to middle 1970s because it refers to Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. It has the feel of small town paper’s humor column (or maybe something from the Springfield papers at the time, but it’s before the Internet), and a later entry does start out “This week” which lends credence to the belief.

And it’s quite an enjoyable little book. The “author” is purportedly a barber in a small town who tells stories about the local residents, mostly made up characters so I guess this is more an example of a collection of flash fiction than the actual reporting on what is going on in a real small town, but it’s amusing and sometimes humorous. I actually laughed out loud at a couple of the bits, including a man who corrected a nagging wife by slapping her bottom with a carp (it must be the Ozarks, as no self-respecting northerner who catches a carp brings it home to eat–because even when we’re poor, we’re not barbarians).

Given the size of the book, I probably bought it in a packet of chapbooks for a buck at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale at some point. I will keep my eyes open for other volumes by the author, but I’m not sanguine–this looks like a self-published low run number (although it’s signed and inscribed to Theodore), so it’s probably a one-off for a larf.

This is the second of Joshua Clark Chase’s military science fiction novels; I read the first, Triumphant Empire a week or so back, and I will likely read the third very soon. So that if I ever see him at a convention again, I can proudly by the next book or two in the series since I will have finally found and read the ones I bought three years ago.

So.

The copyright date is 2014, two years after Chase published Triumphant Empire, and I think I see some improvement in his writing. The book still jump cuts a bunch not only between chapters, but in chapters between the various characters and perspectives. We see the Primary of the Ordeon Empire (the triumphant one) as he meets with the emperor and deals with some light intrique with the leader of the Star Knights by commissioning an apprentice and assigning her to his task force. We get some of her perspective as well. On the other side, we focus mainly on the leader of the resistance and his brother the pirate, but also amongst some others as the resistance foments rebellion on a slave planet and meets with other leaders. The resistance discovers alien tech and captures an imperial dreadnaught to try to reverse engineer it. The empire helps the weaker side in a conflict to actually pull both into its orbit and then launches an audacious attack on three systems at once–only to be thwarted on one such attack by the resistance.

So there’s a lot going on, and the books might have fit together as a single novel. Or, perhaps, the plots could have been fleshed out to make each book bigger than the roughly 130 pages of action. The next book looks to be longer and even more recent, so I’m looking forward to it after a brief interlude. It’s best to read them all very close together, as the books might not stand alone very well as the plots are so completely linked.

I’m starting to realize that my year’s reading log is coming to an end. I will finish, what, three or four books that I have in process? I don’t know that I’ll read a whole other novel–aside from Total War, the third in this series, this year. But I guess it’s only the middle of December. I might.

I have a confession to make: Despite the fact that I have bought several years’ worth of Christmas novels at book sales past, when Christmas time closes in, I can’t find the Christmas books I already own (and this year, I am certain they are not by the Joshua Clark Chase books). So last Friday, I headed to the northern wastes of Springfield, where ABC Books is an oasis on the distant horizon to buy one such novel for this year. Ms. E. keeps her holdings in far better order than I do; although she did not have a special display of Christmas novels set up, I quickly found one in the extensive Christian Fiction section. I recognized the name Melody Carlson as I started to read it; her novel The Christmas Shoppe was the first Christmas novel I read in 2012, when it and I were young.

This book focuses on a college-aged adoptee whose natural mother died shortly after her birth and who was adopted by an older couple who befriended the natural mother who fled from her family for some reason. Although they look a little to try to find her family, it’s only now (sixteen years ago, so then already) that the young lady gets a lead on her birth grandmother in the very town where she is attending college. As she rings the doorbell, the embittered old woman thinks she is a housekeeper/caretaker she has hired because she has sprained her ankle. So the young lady does not correct the misinterpretation and hires on as a housekeeper/caretaker and grows close to the woman without revealing her secret. She tries to learn a little about her mother and why she left–apparently, she took preggers a couple weeks before her graduation and left after a row with her family about whether she should keep the baby or not.

About the midway point, she talks to her pastor and decides to tell her family–her grandmother, her step great aunt, her step-uncle and his family–which left me to wonder where the book was going to go after the big reveal. Welp, it had one family secret too far: You see, the adopted girl is the product of a union between the stepfather and the (of age) step-daughter. So the second half of the book is the family members coming to terms with this revelation. The book uses the word rape a lot, but neither of the participants are alive in the book to say whether it was really rape or just a drunken hookup. I read enough Agony Aunt things where that sort of thing happens to think it possible, but the book calls it rape, so let it be rape, I guess. As I said, that’s a family secret too far, and it makes for the most macabre Christmas romance I can think of (actually, there’s no romance in this book: no love interests for the grandmother or the granddaughter, wait, I mean stepdaughter, I mean, whatever she ended up being).

So, yeah, that might not have been the Christmas novel I was looking for.

As I’m listening to a lecture series on the English Novel, I can’t help compare this book to the themes found in traditional English novels. An orphan, a rich family, mistaken identity, a family secret, and at the very end, the revelation that the orphan is a blood relation inheritor. It reads a lot more modern than, say, Jane Austen, but one can easily see the influence of the typical, and generally much longer, classical English literature story arc.

Or at least I can, right now, because I’m listening to the lectures that I mentioned.

Of the two, I think I prefer the later work that I read earlier. I won’t dodge her Christmas books in the future. Likely because I won’t remember until I’m researching book reports on them that I’ve read her books before.