Year: 2021

I have been pleased with a couple of the Executioner books I’ve picked up lately. This book and Rescue Run are a cut above, although this one does get a little outlandish at the end.

In this book, Bolan goes to Arizona near the border to investigate a mining company that runs the town and runs off or kills those it cannot control. A lawman known to the man from Justice dies, triggering Bolan’s investigation, and he basically discovers that Soviet deep agents have acquired the mining company and have built a large tunnel into Mexico for smuggling. Bolan has to bust it up, but the mining company has hired an army of ex-Spetsnaz troops to defend the complex.

So Bolan has to singlehandedly, with the help of the dead lawman’s daughter, now the chief of the local police, put a stop to it. Which he does in a set of exploits that get a little ridiculous at the end, and the Able Team and Phoenix Force parachute in to help mop up.

So a cut above, but trending down.

Also, who wrote this, Lee Child?

Larquette snapped out of her daze. She pulled a lever action rifle from a rack off the wall and chambered a round. With a sudden afterthought, she snatched up an extra box of shells and then positioned herself in a crouch between the filing cabinets.

If enough of these books call rifle food shells, I’m going to start doing it, too.

I bought this collection of poems at the Webster Groves Book Shop; it (this book, not the book shop) was on the local interest bookshelf near the door. The book is chapbook-sized, but chapbooks aren’t really that chap any more–when I was hawking Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows, I priced them at $3 each. This volume was like ten bucks; although the author had another volume available, I only bought one in case I didn’t like the poems. Which is kind of the opposite reaction I have when buying cheap LPs, wherein if I find a bunch from a new artist for a buck each, I buy them all in case I like the artist. The philosophical difference is the difference between a buck and ten bucks, I guess.

Which is a shame, as I did like the poems in the book.

They deal with aging, traveling, family matters, and whatnot; the poet might have been a professional instructor in the liberal arts or might just have been a vagabond when younger. But the poems have heart, rhythm, and relatively longer lines at times, so I enjoyed them. Not grandmother poetry at all.

You know, this book is dated 2004, and the poet would have been in St. Louis at the time, but it was five or six years after my Coffee House Memories days, so I have no idea who she is and don’t recognize any names in her acknowledgements/thank yous. Perhaps she was an academic-minded poet and not a coffee shop/open mic brawler like me. Or maybe that few years was long enough to completely turn over the crowd.

So worth a read. The next time I am in the St. Louis area, I hope to pick up a copy of the later collection.

I bought this book almost two weeks ago (already?) when we visited Old Trees during our vacation and promptly read it since it’s a collection of short, what, essays? A woman in late middle age or early later age meets friends for coffee, and she captures some of the things they talk about into these brief paragraph or so musings. They’re kind of grouped by topic, but mainly they’re just musings on life, the goings on in the world, and family by a local author.

It clocks in at 102 pages with room in the back for discussion questions (and To and From on the frontspiece) that indicates this book is not supposed to be heavy literature but rather something to perhaps trigger other discussions. But, you know, discussions between people, not “discussions” that are Serious Political Messages You Must Present Strenuously Until Your Family Agrees Just To Shut You Up. The entries are not Political, but sub-political. That is, real life, but which percolates up into the political these days, unfortunately.

And I liked the–voice? The paragraphs are a little thin to really have a narrative voice. But I agreed with a lot of it, which kind of worried me: Why am I, so very young-thinking and -acting (why, I just this week showed off a bit in martial arts class by doing a set of ten push-ups as clapping push-ups which I impressed my sainted aunt with on one of my visits to the St. Louis area in 2019), why am I agreeing with a woman of a certain age so much?

Because I guess I am getting to that certain age, albeit reluctantly. And, as this blog attests, I was a curmudgeon in my relative youth.

The author is a toastmistress, she mentions in the book, and the book came with a the top of Toastmasters Item 163 which is a ballot/evaluation form for speakers at a meeting. Given that only the top remains, I have to wonder if this book was used as part of the discussion at a Toastmasters event and then found its way to the Webster Groves Book Shop. As you know, gentle reader, I once thought about (and created) a blog called Found Bookmarks (now a category on this blog, and the sparse entries in that category indicate why it never went anywhere. This stub would not warrant a full entry in that line, but it did make me look up the local Toastmasters clubs–and there are five entries in Springfield, Missouri, in 2021. So now I am thinking about maybe sitting in and seeing what it’s all about.

So, definitely worth my time in reading on my vacation. Better than an encyclopedia of disasters, truly, but that’s a lower and lower bar to clear.

The book bears the subtitle An Office Power Ballad. It details the author’s brief employment as a marketing executive at a record company headed for a takeover told in a series of short vignettes. The voice is a bit neurotic, a bit “I can’t believe I’m here” laced with imposter syndrome as he meets different musical artists and normal-in-these-books corporate interactions.

So it’s kind of like mixing one’s Stanley Bing (Lloyd What Happened and You Look Nice Today) and one’s Joshua Ferris (Then We Came To The End) except that it’s not fiction. The book goes through those office politics and through his layoff with some anecdotes about being laid off (shades of Executive Blues by G. J. Meyer).

The book kind of disappointed me; as it’s just a collection of vignettes, it doesn’t really lead to anything beyond the amusement of its anecdotes. Still, it was better vacation reading than an encyclopedia of disasters.

When I bought this book in May, I said I might loan it to my youngest who is reading dystopian YA fiction these days. I offered it, but he demurred. So I took this on my recent trip and read it quite early in the vacation.

At any rate, this is young rocket jockey fiction from the 1960s that was still in print in my formative years and filled the library shelves of my middle school. A young man notorious for stealing a rocket and joyriding to the moon and requiring rescue washes out of rocket flight school and returns to the space station where he was raised by a distant father. He’s at loose ends at the station, where everyone has a job to do but him, but he gets a chance to go on an underfunded mission to the moon as a junior pilot, where his piloting skill and unnaturally good mental ability to calculate trajectories comes in handy. But he gets a reputation for being bad luck as difficulties befall the scientific survey team he’s on, and he mutinies when another space ship, a prototype fast rocket, crashes somewhere other than the computers calculated it would–and he gets the chance to save the very instructor who opposed him in the rocket academy.

The narrative is a collection of scenes more than a truly cohesive narrative–the climactic problem really does not arise until the end of the book–with a bunch of neat-o speculative science fiction things and explanations as to how they work to keep the mid-20th century boys interested and maybe thinking about an engineering career. The book also addresses some social-political considerations of space flight and exploration, including the tenuous economics and support for space exploration/colonies and some logistical challenges therein.

So it’s young adult fiction, but the young adults from sixty and seventy years ago–and just forty years ago when these books remained on school shelves–must have been a bit more educated than they are today. But, of course, this being an old-timey blog and not a TikTok, you already expected that kind of messaging, ainna?

Del Rey is a cut below the Heinlein or the Asimov, but still good enough for a quick read.

(Previously on MfBJN: The Early Del Rey.)

We don’t skip but a month ahead in time between publication (in December 1995) Rescue Run and this book (January 1996), so no great leap forward in my life. Of course, I failed to mention that my father passed away in the last gap and we moved from the house down the gravel road, to whence I returned after college, to the rundown suburb in south county where my mother grew up. In two months, I will get the printing job which was my last non-IT job, and sometime later this year, I will break up with the young lady whom I’d dated for, what, two years? At any rate, that’s personal trivia and not a discussion of the book.

I brought this book on our vacation in De Soto as one of the two little fiction books to read among the Important Books I brought to compel myself to read. So, of course, I read it and the other fiction book before I completed The Pessimist’s Guide to History.

However, this is not one of the better entries in the series.

The plot: The Israelis have captured a major Iraqi terroist (ca 1996) and will, reluctantly, turn him over to the United States for trial. However, he’s broken out of captivity with the help of an Israeli turncoat and an agreement with an American mercenary leader to lead him back to Iraq. The American mercenary also has picked up a couple of nuclear missiles from Russia (nee: The Soviet Union) that he hopes to sell with the freed Iraqi to The Iraqi Madman (so-called, but not named until later in the book, which made me wonder).

So. Yeah. That’s a complicated plot as they’ve started to get. How’s it executed?

Bolan shoots a guy in the leg with a .44 Magnum so he (the shootee) will be available for questioning. And he shoots a guy with the same gun who runs off, relatively unhurt. Also, the book calls a C-130 airplane a “gun ship.” So one gets the sense that the subscription author might not know what he’s talking about.

So.

I guess one could say that the book was interesting in the abstract, but not so much in the… execution.

I cannot believe that I haven’t said that so far in the series, but you might expect to see that again in the future given that I have a dozen later titles in the Executioner series and a several dozen in other previous, current, and later related series to go.