Month: June 2025

I guess after reading a couple volumes of Thoreau, I was in the mood for some additional nature-themed reading. And I prepared for just that occasion seventeen years ago when I bought this book at the book sale at the Jewish Community Center in St. Louis.

So this is a late 1960s naturalist, well, novel I guess. It talks about the life of a Kodiak bear from its birth to its death on Kodiak Island in Alaska some years later after it has grown to legendary size and is sought by hunters. It talks about the biology of the island, its history, and goes into detail but narratively unlike the Thoreau catalogs. It’s got a materialist, circle-of-life vibe to it but it presents Nature as red in tooth and claw (literally) in a nonjudgmental fashion. It does tut-tut hunters who come to the island to kill the big bears (and a couple get what’s coming to them courtesy of Monarch). And although it does say not to anthopomorphize animals, it does with Nature herself.

Written in the 21st century, the book would have been unreadable likely with the Message, but it’s not a bad read as it is.

The Bass Pro Shops headquarters here in Springfield has a stuffed Kodiak bear that is a bit of a photo op for visitors. I wondered if this was, indeed, Monarch of Deadman Bay, but it turns out he was not taken by a hunter (scientists tranquilize him to test him and tag him, and a rival bear attacks while he’s incapacitated–the ultimate irony that do-gooders did him in instead of hunters). I had thought of having my picture taken with it and this book, but, c’mon, man, you’re not here to see pictures of me. You’re here to see pictures of random actresses, not me. So no fun in that.

I guess Caras was a known animal/naturalist journalist with many television appearances (including being a regular host of the Westminster dog show) and has a pile of books to his credit, and some look to be in this line. If I see them, I will pick them up. Let that be my recommendation to you then.

Clearly, I sometimes go Last-In-First-Out when it comes to selecting books. In this case, for the poetry collection that I keep beside the readin’ chair, I picked out a book I just bought last month (well, actually, I brought out a couple when I was stacking them up) and of the couple, I started this one first. At some point, I thought “Isn’t this the guy who translated Beowulf?” Yes, it is, and I’m not sure how I knew that. It’s been a while since I read Beowulf–probably college–and Heaney’s version did not come out until 1999 to some fanfare. Perhaps I have a copy of it that I’ve been avoiding. But I delved into this book, and….

Well, it was all right. Some of the poems were interesting. The style tends to feature longer lines and completing thoughts, not just a couple of words dropped ponderously which the reader can imagine the poet saying and then pausing and looking around as though the two or three word lines were profound enough to warrant a pause much less a poem. But, gentle reader, I slag on modern poetry like that all the time.

Themeatically, he talks about love and whatnot, but half of the book is given over to The Troubles as he is Irish after all. So they didn’t speak to me as much as they would an Irishman or as much as they would to a literati who wanted to claim they speak to he/she/it.

But, some interesting rhythm wordplay and rhyme. Not a bad collection, and it makes me wonder how his earlier works were. By the time he published this book, he was teaching at Harvard and had a number of other books under his belt. One wonders if his earlier work was better, more real, than what might have come after he was a cause célèbre in poetical circles such as they were in the 1980s which is a far, far cry from what they might be in he 21st century.

Ah, gentle reader, I won’t be taking the crown from Joe Kenney for the longest time between getting a book and reading it since I only got this book probably 31 or 32 years ago whilst in college and when I had a class for which I had to read Walden (although I cannot remember exactly which class that would have been–a philosophy class? A middle American literature class?). So I would have bought this at Waldenbooks (which would have been meta, would it not?) or B. Dalton’s at the Northridge mall (and not the university bookstore where it would have been for a few dollars more). So I read Walden in it and I started A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers judging by the era-appropriate bookmark, but since I just read The Maine Woods / Walden / Cape Cod, I figured I might as well knock out this book as well. Originally, I’d thought that I’d pulled it from my read shelves when I tried to encourage my son or sons to read this book, but it is not in my read book database, so perhaps it has been on my to-read shelves for these thirty years.

At any rate, it contains a couple of things which I had not read before, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which Thoreau self-published. He had 1000 copies printed in the days way before print on demand, and he did not sell them all–this is the book about which he quipped about having a library of over 1000 books, 700 of which he wrote himself. It chronicles, in Thoreau’s fashion which means several years after the fact cherry-picking some bits from his journals and inserting some philosophy in them. It describes, theoretically, a boat trip he and his brother made down the local river to the port on the ocean (I was going to say sea, but can one ever pair those two in prepositional phrases again?), but it’s laden with his philosophical asides. I can see it as a precursor to Walden where he blends to two better. It’s not too long, though, and it was what Thoreau wanted to publish unlike posthumous works which were culled from his journals and not pored over or refined by Thoreau himself.

The book also contains, in addition to Walden (which I did not read in this volume this time, but I read it in this book in college and I read it in the other volume earlier this year, so no double-dipping), “On Civil Disobedience” and “Life Without Principle” as well as excerpts from The Maine Woods, Cape Code, and Thoreau’s journals. I read the essays and the excerpts from the journals, but not the excerpts from the things I’d already read.

So: “Civil Disobedience” is his diatribe against an overarching government that takes from citizens to do things that are not in their interests. Based on a single night he spent in jail for not paying a tax that supported the Mexican-American War (although his refusal to pay the tax was longer than the war itself), it really only documents that one night in a couple of pages near the end. The rest of it is pretty free-wheeling anti-government abolitionist almost stream of consciousness.

“Life Without Principle” is described as a talk or lecture he gave on several occasions but only was published the year after his death. I guess it sums up his philosophy as succinctly as possible where Walden did not. Basically, it’s about living life according to the individual’s needs, according to nature, and with minimal interference from government and society. It denigrates people who, getting and spending, lay waste their hours (to be honest, it does read a bit like Wordsworth themeatically) by actually earning a living and making money–which would provide for families, a problem Thoreau didn’t have, of course. He argues against many contemporaries and their tracts/books, but all the names are unfamiliar to us now (and given this is 2025 and not 1993, perhaps the name Thoreau is lost to most)

And the entries from Thoreau’s journal are a couple of paragraphs each, some nice little poetic moments capturing a bit of nature with the flair and philosophizing that is Thoreau at his best and are mercifully briefer than The Maine Woods.

So, now, at the end, what do I think of Thoreau?

As I have mentioned (I think), I can see why he hit differently in the mid-to-late 20th century, when the Baby Boomers were coming up through the college ranks. Thoreau was a Harvard man himself who never really grew up–he did not really have to work for a living nor support a family, so he was enabled to live the “life of the mind” and continue his concordance with nature up until his early death in his early 40s. His themes of non-conformance and the loss of the wild areas (which would have also, been metaphorically, youth to professors who did end up with families to support by professing) aligned with that fin-de-middle-siecle sense of the 1960s turning into the 1970s turning into the 1980s which would have been the lives my professors had known.

But aside from Walden, Thoreau is…. meh. “Civil Disobedience” wanders a bunch as does “Life Without Principle”. We get that Thoreau didn’t like the Mexican-American War. Or slavery. Or the Irish. Or most human development. And the other books and presumably the journals are really just fairly wordy catalogs of daily experience in great detail with some flourishes of interest but mostly just lists of flowers and trees seen in the wild.

So I won’t be getting the complete journals any time soon (unless they’re at the Clever branch of the Christian County Library later this month on bag day).

Ah, but Brian J., you might say. Are you not just slagging on Thoreau as a man-boy who never grew up and had to “adult” as the kids say these days who play-acted at living off the land but really just wanted to make a living from the “life of the mind” by writing his own ill-informed, twee sentiments and lightweight experiences as though they were profound, and that pretty much describes you with a blog twenty-two years on now? A fair cop, gentle reader. Perhaps even true: What I least like about Thoreau might be what I fear I share in common with him. But I’m not boring in detail of flora and fauna. I’m too dull to even know what those birds are in the tree in my back yard that seranade me evenings when I am in the pool. So I don’t even rise to the worst of Thoreau. Thanks for asking.

Oh, and lest I fail to mention it, this book provided me a Found Bookmark of my own. Stuck in the middle of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I found an index card with three names on it and the words, “Dues From.” This would have been my senior year, ainna, when I was the treasure of Marquette Writers Ink, the writing club at the university. One of the names is a girl (woman, I guess, but a young woman) who might have had a crush on me that I never suspected until the president of the club asked me if there was something going on, as she always came to me first at any event or gathering. Strangely enough, she’s the only one I’m nominally connected to as she showed up as a suggestion on LinkedIn some years ago, and I connected with her–she’s a copywrighter in Minnesota these days. Another, I had been thinking of because he would have been the only Indian-American I knew at the time, thirty-some years ago. Over at a blog I read, commenters disparagingly refer to Indians especially in the ever-growing number in the tech industry as Jeets, as this guy actually went by Jeet. He was at least second generation, though, as he had no accent. And he was a poet in English. I cyber-stalked him and found that he might be living in St. Louis these days. It didn’t catch me by surprise–so I might have looked him up before. I wonder if we overlapped there. I feel bad for JenBen, though, the other woman whose name is on the card: I don’t really think of her at all.

And: I have to say that this might not be the last of my collegiate acquisitions that I read. So I might read the book I picked up on the Chinese tradition of Buddhism sometime. I might actually finish George Steiner’s Real Presences, a textbook for Dr. Block’s class, on my third attempt (the last being about a decade ago). So I might very well have more Personal Records in laziness in reading books I buy to set yet.

I mentioned, gentle reader, that I’d started reading a book about cats on the aborted vacation last month, and this is that book. Apparently, I got it at Redeemed Books over on Republic Road in 2021, and that might have been the last time I was in that store. I’ve even been not going to ABC Books that much these days, which is definitely atypical. But I am getting pretty topped up on books with nowhere to go with new arrivals but the floor or the tops of the shelves in my office where they’re already blocking the cool bladed weapons and are getting a little precarious, where an exploring cat will likely knock a stack of them to the floor. So maybe I should be building the stacks on the floor so that the books atop the have less far to fall. But that is neither here nor there.

At any rate, this is a collection of stories about people adopting or finding cats. Given that it’s from Revell Publishing, it has just a blush of Christianity to it, with several of the writers mentioning God (but not Jesus). All of the stories have happy endings, especially the kittens-gone-missing stories. And most of them are anachronistic–although they don’t all talk about the eras in which the stories occurred, those that do mention it having been in the mid-20th century.

So: Well, you’re not going to get the “couple paragraphs of analysis” twee insights that I reserve for, say, Thoreau. But it was a pleasant read and almost led me to adopting a couple other rescue kittens. If you like cats and reading about cats, you’ll like the book. But it’s not as deep as Willie Morris or (probably) Cleveland Amory might try to be.

I was thinking that I was tearing through these Louis L’Amour books that I bought a year ago in Clever (watch for the Good Book Hunting post for this branch’s book sale later this month!), but I guess I’ve only read three others: Hondo in September; Silver Canyon in October; and The Man from Skibbereen last month. Although four books by the same author in six months is, at the Nogglestead pace, tearing through.

In this book, a scout/gunslinger type, Matt Bardoul, sees the girl of his dreams in Deadwood, South Dakota. Her father is bringing her along on a wagon train planning to start a new town by Big Horn mountain where gold might have been discovered, but Bardoul has his doubts as other power brokers in the proposed trip are amassing a group of desperadoes, and Bardoul thinks that they’re up to something, perhaps killing and looting the wagon train when it’s out of the reach of civilization. Some events back this up, and then….

Well, the narrative differs from the other books for sure. L’Amour builds up some characters and develops some cross-purposes, but about two-thirds through the book, Bardoul is left for dead, and then he pursues the wagon train which has been completely hijacked by the bad guys, and he finds those developed characters and allies dead along the trail which seems an abrupt end to them. We get Bardoul’s dogged pursuit even after greivous wounds that would have left him dead or unable to operate but for his being the main character in a men’s adventure novel. We get a couple page monologue from an Indian decrying the white man that has no real purpose in the story. And…. Well, finis, eventually.

You know, I was probably influenced by the whole The World’s Best Selling Frontier Storyteller, the commercials for the book club back in the day, and A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, and the fact that I started reading L’Amour with stronger titles (The Last of the Breed and Bendigo Shafter) which were heavily quoted in A Trail of Memories. But these books were just men’s adventure books set in the West, and L’Amour a talented workman, but he was churning them out at a great pace probably at least partially dictated by contractual obligations. So they’re all not going to be the pick of the litter. And this one is not.

Still, I might not seek out additional titles from what I already have accumulated. Aw, who am I kidding? If it’s bag day, they’re going in the bag.

Also, a housekeeping note: Although originally a paperback, this is in the library binding (it, too, a discard from the Nixa High School library thirty-some years ago). So it goes on the shelves with my hardbacks, not my mass market paperback read shelves. Which is good, as these last are now overflowing. Which, hopefully, will induce me to read more hardbacks or trade paperbacks amongst the cheap genre fiction.