Month: September 2025

This, too, is a fairly recent acquisition (May) which I flipped through during the Bears game on Sunday. Unlike the Okinawa book, the other languages used in the captions use the Roman alphabet, so I recognize them as Danish, French, Spanish, and German (and I can almost suss out the captions in some of them). And all the photos have the captions, and an end notes-type section includes further information about some of the photographs, although I admit I did not flip back to look at the photos as I read the extra material.

So: Denmark. Sounds interesting. It’s a relatively small country, a collection of islands and penninsulas between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. North of Germany, across the water from Sweden and Norway. It punched above its weight in history due to its location. It’s not a very tall country, as its highest point is only a couple hundred meters above sea level, and it has a variety of topography in spite of that. The photos focus on some of the more touristy old town areas and some of the rural areas. It looks interesting, but I do wonder how much it has changed since 1984 especially as Malmo, Sweden is just across the bridge.

I am starting to imagine that I will never have to choose whether to travel to Europe, but if I did, I might want to see Denmark.

Oh, and as a reminder, I must be on a Denmark kick as I did a little research on it in May when I found a Christmas card with a return address of Sundby, Mors, in a book.

Undoubtedly, Facebook will use this to surmise I like Danishes. And it would be right!

On Sunday, I did something I really haven’t done in a while: I watched a couple of football games. And since the one was the Chicago Bears game, which they won not because they deserved to win it but because the Raiders deserved to lose it, I had the opportunity to flip through some art and touristy books between plays (which is most of the three hours of the televised football game).

The first book was the book on Okinawa that I picked up on Saturday because it was still on my desk (as are the swords).

As I mentioned, it’s a set of glossy photo pages bound with an iron comb and with a thin plastic front cover. It’s designed for tourists and dates probably from the 1990s (as one of the photos has the date 1992 attached to it).

English captions are really an afterthought, as the book is written probably primarily in Japanese, but looks to have two other alphabets in the mix (Mandarin and Korean?) Not all of the photos have English captions, so although I could look at the photos, I didn’t know where most of them were taken or what I was looking at–a lot of stone monuments and shrines, but little to explain them.

So this was a quick browser for sure, and it shows the wide variety of topography that Okinawa has. Including white sand beaches which were quite stained when my grandfather visited. I often mention, either because I want to bask in reflected glory or because I respect what the other men of my family did, that three generations–my grandfather, my father, and my brother–were stationed on Okinawa during their time in the Marine Corps. I was thinking about giving this book to my brother for Christmas, but I will probably keep it and stack it atop the precarious pile of art books atop a couple of my bookshelves in the common area.

So that must be some kind of record; I bought it on Saturday, and I browsed it on Sunday. Maybe not–I probably did that plenty when I watched multiple football games the day after book sales in the past. But I will likely not watch multiple games again.

I picked up this book in June, and since I’ve been reading a lot of Westerns this year (The Man from Skibbereen, Westward the Tide, Homicide Near Hillsboro (sorta), and Once More with a .44, which is only four books this year, but it seems like more), I thought I would read a real history book about a character in the old west. Probably because I watched a lot of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. concurrently.

And, well. This book is more a history of the towns where Joe Lowe visited and some of the stories based on what people said about him than a true biography. He left no diary or journal, and this pre-Internet book relies on the authors, one of whom is in England, relied on historical societies to provide news clippings containing the title character–and they would have had to rely on whatever indexes they had at hand to find them.

So we get the story of Ellsworth, Kansas; Witchita, Kansas; Newton, Kansas; San Antonio, Texas; Leadville, Colorado; and Denver, Colorado. Joe Lowe lived in and often operated dance halls in this cities, which often brought him into conflict with other dance hall owners, cowboys, gamblers, and the police. As I mentioned, much of the coverage is quoting newspaper articles about his court cases or public recrimination for dance halls, prostitution, and whatnot with some connective tissue in it. Many of the articles mention him as having a great reputation for being a bad man, but I don’t know if it’s borne out by the text–I have no real insight into how other such personages were described in the papers of the day. But Joe Lowe did apparently know some of the other more recognized names from the era, including Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and others. So maybe the book really is talking about a legend about whom I’d never heard.

Still, a good read and interesting because I’ve somehow become interested in the old west in my dilettante fashion. Looking at the front matter, I see Roda wrote The Gunfighter: A Man or Myth?. Which I have seen and passed over many times on my to-read shelves since I bought it seventeen years ago. In a post my sainted mother commented on. At any rate, I might not pass over it the next time that I see it.

I don’t remember when I got this booklet. By “remember,” I mean I did not list it on the Web site in a Good Book Hunting post. But it is the size of something that would have come in a dollar bundle at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale.

It contains four short stories:

• “A Chess Problem” by Agatha Christie, a Hercule Poirot story involving a murder during a chess game.
• “Back for Christmas” by John Collier about a man who murders his wife before leaving on a holiday only to be undone (probably) by plans she made while they were away.
• “The Border-Line Case” by Margery Allingham about a gangland hit made incomprehensible and unsolvable by the police actions.
• “Sredni Vashtar” by Saki about a boy and his secret pet ferret whom he worships and an overbearing maiden aunt who would have none of it. I probably “just” read this story in 2023 when I read The Best of Saki.

So, yeah, four short stories, 40 pages total, and I’m counting it as a book.

Man, I am glad I was born when I was, before the ubiquity of computers and mobile devices. I can read and appreciate stories from 100 years ago without being jarred by how different they are. Because they were not as different in my formative years when we did not have them. Fifty years ago. Half the distance to the original copyright date on “A Chess Problem”. I can even relate to things like not having air conditioning (not that it comes up in this particular story) but, you know. I even find historical fiction approachable because I’ve lived in cabins unhooked to the power grid or running water.

I “just” got this book in the spring of 2024 where it was in a dollar bundle with The Yellow Wallpaper which I just read last month. I might make it a twee goal to read all the books from that bundle, but unfortunately, they’re scattered amongst the stacks, and I probably won’t even see them before the end of the year.

Although the title indicates it’s a memoir and the author’s name starts with a P, it looks to be a fictionalized account, as the Ms. P in the book says her last name is Pepperdine and says she does not have a boyfriend–and the back cover indicates Ms. Petrus is married. I guess it’s possible that the author was née Pepperdine, and she didn’t have to change her monogram when she got married. Sure, and it’s possible Petrus is a pseudonym, and she put her real name in the book text. I’m overthinking it, but I’d like to think it’s a fictionalized account with some amalgamation of anecdotes and personalities.

So: It’s a series of short vignettes taking place throughout the school year. Ms. P. teaches third grade. It starts with the first day of school and cycles through different things like parent-teacher conferences, recess duty, the Halloween parade, Christmas, and then the last day of school. And by “short,” I mean that the chapters are two pages or so. The writing is wry, maybe a touch world- or school-weary (even though the Ms. P. of the book is only a couple of years into a teaching career), and I expect teachers, and elementary school teachers especially, can relate.

A quick read, and worth whatever portion of a quarter I paid for it. If you want a copy, though, gentle reader, it might be harder for you to find.

So much wrong with that Amazon listing. But they spelled the author’s name, if that is her real name, correctly.

I said I was going to read enjoyable books for a bit, and I thought I’d pick up some of the thin saddle-stitched books that I buy by the dollar bundle at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sales to pad my annual stats.

I knew this book was prose instead of poetry, but I didn’t look to closely at it until I sat down with it. Published by Hospice of Huntington and with a The Hospice of Southwest Missouri sticker in the front cover, I discovered I was not in for a comfortable read.

Basically, it’s a set of fictional letters (presumably, as they’re not particularly personal) from a woman who is caring for her father who is in hospice care to her brother who does not live in the area. They demonstrate a gamut of emotions and kind of how the feelings change over the course of hospice care to provide an example for those dealing with it in the now (which was then–a later edition might have emails or social media posts instead of letters).

The book uses the metaphor of redwoods, which it says have shallow root systems, so they have to grow together and entangle their roots to survive–like, I guess, caregivers and their non-profit helpers. Also, I’m not clear whether this is just one entry in a series or if the letters in the book are the series in the title. I guess I could do an Internet search, but, eh. CBA.

You know, I’ve never really had to be a caregiver like this–when my sainted mother was sick, she stayed in her house, alone (jeez, I did that whole thing badly). I remember when my aunt died from cancer twenty years ago visiting her a couple of times while she was waiting to die (my aunt who died six years ago from cancer moved in and took care of her, much like my youngest aunt did as she, my St. Charles aunt, was dying). So the book lightly ruffled my unmitigated guilt for not being a caregiver (but not so rawly as Love’s Legacy did).

Given how small my close family is, I don’t think I’ll ever need to deal with caring for someone at the end of life–I’ll probably be the one needing the caring, and if my matrilineal line is any indicator, not too long from now. But should that befall me, gentle reader, remind me that resources like these are available, or I’ll go crazier eating the emotions on my own.

I picked up this book last year Sparta (home of the Trojans) because I had some room in the bag-for-three-bucks and I’ve been working some Westerns into the rotation. I read this book in between chapters of Perelandra, the Venus book of C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy, and I am likely to cull the stack of books on the chairside table because I’m finding that I’m reading more and more of these enjoyable little in-between-chapter books rather than the others, and I do want to make quota this year.

So: Apparently, this is the third(?) book in a series, and it rehashes a bit of the previous business in spots. A small town is growing due to the influence and spending of a rough rancher and his collection of hired hands, and they turn to a retired lawman who had previously taken care of another badman in town. He brings his tough but genteel wife along, and he hires a deputy barman who is black to help him clean up the town and to serve a warrant for the murder of a mentally disabled man in a put-up shootout.

The text of this 25(!)-year-old book moves along pretty well. It has some sex scenes in it which are not as explicit as a Gunsmith book, but definitely describes what goes where in a manner you would not find in Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. It spends some time with the setup, but ultimately devolves into a couple of set pieces and questionable decisions that lead to a dramatic staged climax. I mean, not a bad book, but it’s light popcorn reading and nothing more.

Also, I must comment that the main character plus black sidekick staying at the Boston made me wonder if it’s supposed to be a holla to Spenser and Hawk. Dunno.

So if I find any more of this writer on bag day at the Christian County book sales, I won’t avoid them. At the Springfield-Greene County book sale (running now), I won’t make it to the Westerns section, so I won’t be seeking them out. As it stands, I have enough backlogged Westerns for the pace at which I read them, even as I am reading them more frequently these days.