Book Report: Star Trek 8 by James Blish (1972)

Book coverYou know, I did not have this particular volume of the series before I picked this one up, unlike so many of the others for whom I wrote book reports in 2005. So I don’t have to add appendixes to the filenames for the image or the book report text file on my desktop. Which I did anyway out of habit.

This book was first published when I was but months old, fifty years ago come November (the book’s publication, not my enumerated rings). The paperback is read and worn, with some tears on the cover and a broken spine, but it’s in readable shape. I wonder if those who produced it during the first Nixon administration (spoiler alert: He would be re-elected the month the book appeared) ever thought of those of use who might read it five decades hence, earthbound, but that the stories that it spawned would still be made fresh and new. Probably not: It was just a job to them.

At any rate, the book collects:

  • “Spock’s Brain”, the one where the women who are the Morlocks to the men’s anti-Eloi steal Spock’s brain to power their supercomputer that runs their underground society–the men live on the surface of the brutal ice world after the high civilization collapses–and Kirk and an away team (they called them “landing parties” in the swinging 60s) try to get it back.
     
  • “The Enemy Within”, the one where a teleporter malfunction splits Kirk into two, one the brutal, decisive, id-driven half of his personality and one that’s, well, not. The crew first has to discover the two Kirks and then figure out a way to fuse them before the rest of the landing party remaining on the surface of another inhospitable frozen world die.
     
  • “Catspaw”, the one where the Enterprise landing party encounters aliens whose science is sufficiently advanced enough to seem magic, and they have to rescue Sulu and McCoy from servitude. You’re forgiven if you think this sounds a lot like…. wait, no, it doesn’t sound like something from the first seven Star Trek books, it sounds like something from the one I’m reading now.
     
  • “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, where the Enterprise tries to go through the “galactic barrier” with dangerous results, including madness. Somehow, this became canon, the “galactic barrier”–or at least it was canon in a text-based Star Trek game I played in the last century.
     
  • “The Wolf in the Fold”, the one where Scotty, on shore leave, is accused of killing a prostitute woman of a pleasure-seeking planet. It turns out that an alien that feasts on terror did it. Which also sounds like a story/episode in the volume I am currently reading
     
  • “For the World is Hollow, And I Have Touched the Sky”, wherein McCoy diagnoses himself with an incurable disease, and they then land on a rogue planet built by an advanced civilization, but it’s a generation ship taking the remnants of a civilization to a new home, but it’s on a collision course with an occupied planet. The Enterprise crew has to contend with the super computer controlling the ship, and McCoy wants to live out his short remaining life by marrying the high priestess. It sounds a lot like many other episodes, including not only “The Apple” in Star Trek 6 and “The Paradise Syndrome” in Star Trek 7 but also “Spock’s Brain” that kicked off the book.

Below the title of each chapter, we see the writer credited with the script, including Robert Bloch, who wrote the “spookier” stories in “Catspaw” and “The Wolf in the Fold”, and if you get one of the screenwriters like Gene Coons, you know it’s going to be more planned for television.

I’ve also noted in compiling these book reports that some of the volumes have tables of contents, but others, like this one, do not, which makes it a little harder to come up with these brief summaries as I have to basically page through the book to get the episode/story titles and to review the content of each. Ah, but I will put that effort in for you, gentle reader, for you.

So although the volumes have been contiguous to this point, I do not have the whole set, so we’ll be skipping ahead to volume 11 in a book report in a couple of days. I do have 9 and 10 on my read shelves, but I shan’t be going through them again for purity and completeness’ sake. That effort, gentle reader, is beyond me. Besides, they’re not on my to-read shelves, and I have too much to re-read books on my read shelves. Although I will re-read if I get another copy, at which point the duplicate is on my to-read shelves. Yes, gentle reader, my rules are arbitrary, but they are my rules, and not universal moral statements.

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My Kitchen Needs, But Not Our Kitchen Needs

Ducks Unlimited offers some cutlery for a donation:

This knife set includes an 8″ chef knife and a 3½” paring knife for all of your kitchen needs.

Gentle reader, I could get by with that, I mean, dubious quality of the free knives aside (probably about as good as a Ginsu knife, ainna?), I cut some vegetables sometimes and maybe a melon or two.

But my beautiful wife is a cook, and she has needs that far outstrip mine. I mean, you cannot safely spatchcock a chicken with either of those.

So two knives would certainly not meet all of our kitchen needs.

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You Didn’t Need To Do That

As I have mentioned, my Facebook feed is roughly 30% posts by about eight of my “friends,” many of whom I’ve never met in real life, 20% actual advertisements, 15% pages I’ve liked, and 35% pages Facebook recommends, many of which relate to television or movies.

Like this retro post about how old Cheers is:

They didn’t need to downgrade it to black and white to make it older, but they did.

C’mon, kids, it ain’t that eld.

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Book Report: Life to Life by Don Pendleton (1987)

Book coverIt’s been four years since I read the first book in Don Pendleton’s Ashton Ford series, Ashes to Ashes; in it, I said I had another in the series, the third. However, I must have been mistaken or I might have not put that in the series grouping the last time I deeply cleaned and reorganized my to-read shelves six years ago, as this is #4 in the series, and I also have picked up #6 somewhere.

In this book, Ashton Ford investigates murders occurring around a new Age style preacher who, with some wealthy production backers, is building a worldwide multimedia organization. And she’s gorgeous and also gifted on the paranormal spectrum. As Ashton mucks around, he finds that church members, the woman’s family, and a group of early Hollywood actors and actresses are intertwined, with the results leading to murder which might or might not be precipitated by other worldly spirit guides including maybe the father Ashton never new.

So it’s less action-packed than other investigative or suspense series that Pendleton did, and it’s a little woo-woo for my tastes. As Ashton has astral sex with the woman while she’s locked up in jail and seemingly impregnates her leaving her still a virgin, one wonders if the next two volumes in the series have a big wrap-up story line that I’ll only get when I pick up the last book in the series four years from now.

It reminds me of Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas books–they started out with a premise and they could have been episodic, but they moved into being parts of an overarching story with the pregnant woman in Odd Hours and Odd Apocalypse. Which is where I kind of wandered off. I read Odd Apocalypse being eight years ago, and although I bought the last/latest book in the series, in 2018, I haven’t bothered to pick up the in-between book, Deeply Odd, in the interim. I wonder if I could find it if I looked in the fiction sections at the book sales I go to every year. Maybe, but I will likely not think of it in the spring.

So as to the Ashton Ford books, I’m glad I only have one remaining. It’s not a series I’d follow in real time. But by the time all is said and done, I will have read half of the series.

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They Make Her Sound Like A Liar

Marching bands these days have growing “front ensembles” which are marimbas and xylophones and gongs and large drums that are set up on the near sideline at the fifty yard line. Increasingly, they include sound systems to play prerecorded samples and whatnot. I’ve only been attending marching band festivals for two years now, and I’m already an old school purist who disdains props and elaborate stagings that look more like a musical set piece rather than, you know, a marching band.

Last weekend at the Ozarko Marching Band Festival, one of the St. Louis-area bands went crazy, and might well have made a young lady sound like a liar.

“Oh, you’re in the marching band. What do you play?”

“The piano.”

“LIAR!”

She should probably just say percussion.

Although one of the Ace of Spade’s HQ’s overnight thread posters would like the band–that poster says if the band has an upright bass, it’s a good band.

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Book Report: Bendigo Shafter by Louis L’Amour (1979)

Book coverGentle reader, I have been reading, although not as much as normal over the end of the summer, and I have been really slow at writing up my thoughts on the books I have (I have read three and almost five in the last month). I finished this book on September 13, and I am only now getting around to typing up my thoughts which are likely to be even more brief than my normal book reports as I have probably forgotten what I want to say.

As I mentioned when I reviewed A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, I said this looked, based on the quotations in the aforementioned compilation, that the L’Amour book I would like to read first. And as I picked it up in Kansas Labor Day weekend, I dived right into it.

A brief synopsis: Bendigo Shafter and his brother are working on a wagon train on the Oregon trail, but the they decide they will not make it through the mountains before the winter seals the passes, so they build a town in Wyoming. Some unsavory characters appear, Shafter saves an Indian’s life and the Indian vows revenge, a known gunman protecting two children wides up one winter night, and various other things happen, challenging the good men of the town. One local man finds a little bit of gold, which makes him the target of some bad men. Shafter is chosen to take a pool of the townsfolk’s money to Oregon to buy cattle for them, a trip that takes him almost a year. He starts alone but befriends a couple of Indians on the way, and they join the town. When Shafter returns, he finds some of the bad men have basically gotten themselves put into positions of authority until Shafter and his brother intervene. Then Shafter finds some gold, goes back east to New York City looking for the now-grown little girl he earlier saved, and when he returns to Wyoming he goes with the aged Indian he met on his cattle drive to an ancient Indian monument of some sort.

It’s basically a coming of age story telling about how Bendigo grew to be a man, which give L’Amour time to pontificate on manliness in spots. They’re akin to the little asides that Pendleton put into his Executioner novels, a bit of philosophizing to add depth, although L’Amour does more of it. And although Friar said the last third of it was a bit weak–I’m not sure whether that’s after the cattle drive or not–I did not find much of it dramatic. I mean, in the tense scenes and trials, Bendigo pretty much knows what to do and does it, so I didn’t feel like he was ever in any danger. I don’t know–your mileage may vary. I have several other L’Amour books on my to-read shelves to review, and I will learn if that’s just the way he wrote.

I cannot help but compare the arc a bit to My Ántonia in that the main character, the young man who gets educated, goes back east and compares it to his experience in the west. Unlike that book, though, Bendigo Shafter ultimately prefers the west. Which is because this is a Western and not literary fiction.

At any rate, I flagged a couple things ago a month ago. Let’s see if I remember why.

Bendigo is better read than I am.

Fixing myself a cup of coffee, I then went up the ladder to my bed and got the book I was reading. Only this time she had given me two at the same time, and I decided to take both of them down. The first was the Essays of Montaigne. The second was the Travels of William Bartram.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I started the Montaigne five years ago and only made it a couple of essays in, after which it remained on my dresser for a year or two before I put it back into the stacks. Which is not the longest a book has been unread on a book accumulation point. I’ve not made it through the Classics Club collection on Plato nor the first volume of Copleson’s History of Philosophy in far longer periods of time.

I Have Been To The House

When they had gone old Uruwishi came out of the brush with his old Hawken rifle.

The Hawken House, where the maker of the Hawken rifle lived, is in Old Trees, Missouri, and is home of the Historical Society. I actually have the commemorative tile from being a member prominently displayed on my desk.

Everybody Goes To Delmonico’s.

On his New York trip, Shafter does.

We met at Delmonico’s. It was, at the time, the most favored eating place in the city.

Come to think of it, this book takes place at the same time as Clarence Day’s Life with Father sketches. They went to Delmonico’s, too.

Mindfulness in the 19th Century As Told In The 1970s.

It is my great gift to live with awareness. I do now know to what I owe this gift, nor do I seek an answer. I am content that it be so. Few of us ever live in the present, we are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone, and this I do also. Yet it is my good fortune to feel, to see, to hear, to be aware.

Buddhism was making some inroads in the 1970s. I wonder if this influenced L’Amour.

So it was an interesting read, and I will not avoid the other L’Amour books when I’m going to the bookshelves for something to read.

And I cannot help but note that I have metamorphosed into a man who reads Louis L’Amour books. What kind of man is that? Oh, yeah, an old man.

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That’s Some Fencing

Gentle reader, Facebook has determined that I must want to buy a new home. Maybe it’s not Facebook–maybe it’s the whole Internet. Maybe it’s my fault, actually, since my job requires me to test Web sites that refer to actual addresses, and I use Realtor.com to look up addresses in various ZIP codes. Regardless, I get a lot of ads for real estate listings on Facebook, and as you can guess, I often click through to see what they have to say (I do like to look at castles from time to time, not to mention old island forts).

But this rather simple, $499,900, this Absolutely One-Of-A-Kind Property has 20 acres, a pond, an out building, a barn, and a rather small modern home on it.

But the fences? The fences are tight.

There is so much outdoor space with Barbed: 5 wire and pipe/steel fencing for horses, cattle, chickens, bees, donkeys while living the dream in a beautifully modern home with soaring ceilings and fabulous open living/dining area featuring floor to ceiling stone fireplace!

They got fencing that will keep the bees in, y’all. You know what we call that in my old neighborhood? A screen. And we used it to keep the bees out.

You know what I call this listing? The product of a young real estate agent from the city. Perhaps a journalist who wanted to, you know, make a living.

In other news, perhaps I need a category for real estate.

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