Month: December 2025

Well, this book (which I just bought in October) is kind of a Christmas book. I mean, it stars Santa Claus, and he’s trying to save Christmas, so….

Okay, here’s the deal: Santa Claus’ marriage is in trouble because he looked at a Victoria’s Secret catalog a couple of decades ago. On Christmas Eve, as he’s preparing his trip, the reindeer, zombified, attack. After he dispatches them, he discovers only young Rudolff is unaffected. He seeks help from a cantankerous but inventive elf recently fired for drinking who provides him with an engine he developed and which NASA and SpaceX are interested in. They outfit the sleigh with it, but then Santa finds that the MacGuffin is missing. It’s a Timepiece, a time and space device that allows him to deliver all packages around the world in time. Father Time has taken it and offers it back in exchange with a night with Mrs. Claus. Santa says no, and Father Time sets a couple of zombie polar bears on the elves.

Santa looks to find Father Time and to save Christmas and heads into the blizzard with the inventive elf, whose dark elf cousin comes along to protect him. Then booby-trapped puffins attack; they join up with their weapons expert Vladimir Putin (this being before the current war made him into the tabloid supervillain he has since become); they fight zombies but are saved by mermaids; dinosaurs attack; et cetera.

So it’s a bit of a romp where you never know what might happen next. It’s chock full of allusions to pop culture, including Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Frozen, and others. It’s the kind of thing I would have written in high school, kind of reminiscient of Samurai Cat and not unlike Rickshaw Riot.

So I am down to two Ben Wolf titles…. Will I make it through them both this year? Tune in and find out!

This is the third of the three local history books I picked up in our trip up north in 2018 which featured a brief visit to Mackinac Island, a famous resort island more famous because it does not allow cars, so people traverse the island in horse-driven conveyances or bikes. In the summer. I have to wonder if they use snowmobiles in the winter and presume so.

I read Mackinac Island: Its History in Pictures in 2018 and We Live on Mackinac Island in 2021.

This book, of course, is more like the former than the latter. A high-level history of the region chronologically, with a paragraph for various years starting in 1624 and continuing to the present day, although the story thins out toward the end “continued being a resort, basically” was the history. In its history section, it also goes far afield, talking about some of Schoolcraft’s trips in the upper Midwest and some of Pere Marquette’s trips which were outside Mackinac Island.

But it’s sprinkled with historical photos and starts with Indian legends and ends with touring information, so definitely a tourist take-away. Which I was and did.

We only visited the island for a couple of hours on a summer day. What did we do? Took a tour in a horse-drawn carriage. Walked around the fort. Walked around the lower commercial area a bit. And took the ferry back to the UP where we crossed the bridge back to the LP where we were staying.

When I showed my beautiful wife what I was reading, she started to daydream about places we could visit: Sanibel Island again, maybe the keys, Mackinac Island (staying on the island, perhaps)…. But, you know, that’s interesting and all, but when I do that sort of thing or when I’m on vacation, I think, “What would it be like to live there?” Like, for a period longer than a week? Wintering on Mackinac Island? Spending a year on Sanibel Island? I would still be an outsider–hell’s bells, I still feel like an outsider in Southwest Missouri even though I have ancestors from the area and I’ve lived here for sixteen years. Probably I’d feel like an outsider anywhere, and I would probably adjust and get bored living anywhere.

Perhaps it’s just best to visit places for a little bit and to read up on their history from the comfort of my own home.

I don’t know when I got this book, but I picked it up with a couple of other shorter books not so much because I’m looking to pad my annual stats (although I am), but because they were on the collapsed bookshelves where I last think I spotted Time and Again by Jack Finney which I wanted to pick up since I just finished Time & Again by Clifford D. Simak. I didn’t find the book I was looking for, but I did find this little Scholastic sports bio.

Bo Jackson was a big deal in the late 1980s, ainna? He played baseball and football and had a huge Nike ad contract–remember the Bo Knows commercials?

This book, written in 1990, was at the peak of his career. It’s kind of read that kind of bio, brimming with optimism. In 1991, a football injury caused him to miss time in the football season and the whole baseball season; he came back to baseball, won comeback player of the year, but retired in 1994. So he probably did not play long enough to get into either sport’s Hall of Fame–although he is the only athlete so far to have been a two sport all star. But that’s beyond the scope of the book.

The book itself tells about his youth, 8th of 10 chlidren and a bit of a J.D. but not a gangbanger or anything (apparently). It talks about him taking up sports after he straightened out and being a natural athlete who didn’t like to practice, but got through on sheer athleticism, much to his coach’s chagrin. He did multiple sports in college and completed his four years despite being drafted his junior year.

So the book’s a bit of a hagiography, of course, and geared to kids, although perhaps Jackson would not be the best inspiration for them, at least in how practicing and study of a particular sport go. However, he seems a standup guy. He’s remained married to his college sweetheart and has done charitable work after his retirement.

The book mentions, in passing, Deion Sanders, who was just coming into the leagues then. I mention this because I read a similar biography of Sanders in 2012.

So the hunt for the Finney continues after a couple of other books.

Whenever I read Clifford D. Simak’s books (such as City, Mastodonia, or Project Pope), I think they’re…. interesting. But not compelling, which is why they are spaced so far apart in the archives (2010, 2017, 2020, and now 2025). They all feature great sweeps of time or time-travel or distant futures and big questions and although the characters are not bad, they’re do not make for heroes or compelling reading.

At any rate, in this book, a spacefarer who has been missing after going to an isolated and potentially dangerous planet returns after twenty years, but before he does, an unknown person or entity approaches an agent of Earth’s security forces to explain that they should kill Sutton, the traveler. The unknown person is from the future, and he wants to make sure that Sutton does not write a book. Because Sutton, who died in a crash on the planet but was revitalized by the aliens there and put in touch with the entity paired to him, his Destiny, which all living things have. And Sutton will write his reflections in a book which will become a religious text at the core of a inter-time war between a faction that wants Man to be the supremest being in the galaxy and to conquer and rule through a corporation that lasts a million years and one that wants to recognize the dignity of all life, particularly androids, which are not robots but rather are humans who are built organically but are sterile.

So that’s the setup, but it’s not the setup–it’s the story as it is revealed two and experienced by Sutton, the main character, who is approached by both factions and others and struggles with his Destiny–well, not the entity he calls Johnny, but he tries to wrap his head around how it’s all going to come to pass, whether he’s in real danger since he has not yet written the book, and discovering the non-human abilities he has been given by the aliens–including the ability to die and to then revive from the power received from twinkling stars–or a ship’s engine.

So it’s a lot of hopscotching and cogitating on the questions about destiny and the paradoxes of time travel, but events just seem to happen to Sutton, and although he’s a sympathetic character, a stranger both to the future where the factions are sending him back in time and to the past (1981, which is 30 years after the book was written, so the future from the book’s present but closer to the book’s publication date than to today), the alien abilities which are revealed as the book progresses makes him a bit of a Mary Sue, and the ending indicates how one faction has successfully nudged Sutton to fulfilling his destiny. So it smacks a bit of nudge and behavioral economics which I find unpalatable.

So I might have a couple of more Simaks lying around, but it is likely to be another half-decade or more until I get to it if I find it.

I do think I have a copy of Time and Again by Jack Finney around here somewhere, a 1970 book with the same title which also involves time travel. Maybe I’ll pick that up sometime soon (when I find it) just because it would seem to be just the right time to do so.