Month: January 2026

For the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Science Fiction/Nonfiction” category, I just grabbed this relatively thin hardback. I picked it up with the great haul at the Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, Library in 2023 (almost three years ago? Already?). I thought it might be a Pip and Flinx book, like Mid-Flinx since I bought a lot of them at that time, but like Slipt, it is a stand-alone novel. Again, I am going to pause to admire the career of Alan Dean Foster: Multiple series, movie and television adaptations, and many standalone novels. He definitely got into the writing racket at the right time.

So: An insurance adjuster with a particular set of skills, his sexy, semi-alien counterpart, his “Minder” (a self-propelled mobile computing device), and a sort-of humanoid robot go to Juarez El Paso’s space port to find out who is stealing very expensive pharmaceuticals from the ultra-secure storage facility where they are stored before being lifted into orbit on their way to ports across the, I dunno, galaxy. Much of the book is their investigation, including some attempts on their lives by the unknown thieves–and they eventually discover who’s behind it, saving the reputation of the company and the sanity of the police in JeP.

It’s a bit of a loose narrative. It features monospaced commentary by the “Minder” who is constantly slagging on humanity along with some humor from the robot who the adjuster has “reprogrammed” to be a little more human-like. But the investigative episodes and other set pieces don’t lead anywhere, and when we get to the climax, in kind of drags on an extra scene or two–I mean, I kind of get why, but it still drags on for that little pat payoff at the ultimate end.

But for its slight flaws, it’s not a bad bid of midlist/semi-pulp science fiction. Its 216 pages move along fairly quickly, and fortunately the Minder’s intrusions, which start pretty early in the book, taper off to traditional narrative as it goes on. And at 32 years young, it’s not dated–as a mater of fact because they book talks about the Minder and various robots as powered by AI, so it seems timely (and although not on a Segway, the humanoid robot is on a ball or wheel which limits some of its mobility–no stairs, for example). Also, Foster uses different terms for things like computer workstations, so he’s not dating the material that way, but he does use physical media more than we do now–WiFi is computer telepathy, ainna? But, again, not bad.

So it’s my 11th book for the year. I am in progress on two other books, which means I just have to find an inspiring book and a book set in two time periods to hit the Whole 15. If this book had any time travel whatsoever (like, say, Time & Again), I would have used it in that category instead like I put The Pride of Chanur in the non-human character category. Could I have put this book in that category as well, making this a two-fer? I guess. But, fortunately, I’ve read enough science fiction this year to cover all these bases separately.

I bought this book not long after Neo announced it, but it didn’t arrive until the last week of the year. So it wouldn’t count for 2025. And if I started it before January 2, I wouldn’t be able to count it toward the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge which has a “Short Story / Poetry” category (ah, gentle reader, you knew this category would not be an issue for me). As a matter of fact, it’s not the first book of poetry I’ve completed this year–Native American Songs & Poems was–and it might not be the last–a little poetry collection with “Inspire” in the subtitle is my fallback for the “Inspiring” category unless I get, erm, excited about another book (that is, I find an inspirational book of some sort in the stacks).

This book was not a particularly quick zip-through; van Der Leun’s poetry features some longer lines that I favor and some longer, multi-page poems that I had to slow down for, and some probably would get better with a re-read or dwelling on. However, the poet often layers descriptions upon descriptions (with prepositional phrase-based rhythms, so I cannot fault that) into poems. And, thematically, some of the poems explore the impermanence of individual life and, indeed, all human life and civilization, and they seem almost Lovecraftian in their descriptions of primitive/pre-human and post-human life. Also, since I’m airing grievances, the poet says in many different poems that water “plash”es instead of splashes–which honestly might be a better word for strict onomatopoeia purposes, but it is atypical–so one instance of it would be novel, but repeated in numerous poems in the course of a short collection, it was distracting.

It’s probably a sampling of his work over many years, some that he selected and some that Neo selected. So he might have only used “plash” every decade, but they’re all in this book.

Ultimately, the poems overall are pretty good–certainly better than a lot of the grandma poetry I read and more engaging than, say, Pindar. He’s not Robert Frost or Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, to be honest, he probably suffers by comparison because I’m reading the complete works of one of America’s finest poets (of whom you’ve probably never heard, name to be revealed within the next decade when I finish the 600 pages).

And it’s one more book down in the reading challenge; I shall (probably) have 11 complete by the beginning of February, which will put me in pretty good shape. If only I could find something “Inspiring” and “In Two Time Periods”.

Oh, yeah, and, as a reminder, I read van Der Leun’s book of essays, The Name in the Stone, last month.

Well. I’m not sure when I got this book; the ABC Books signing event was on November 5, 2022, and the book is inscribed to me, so that was probably it, but I did not buy enough for a Good Book Hunting post, apparently. I think I remember talking to the author, but I’ve been to so many book signings over the last decade…. I had to go to ABC Books’ Facebook posts to find the date, anyway. Since the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has an “About Family” category, now was the time to read it.

So: The named author is the wife of the person who’s, uh, telling the story. Basically, the man’s father was inducted/drafted into the Army during World War II right before the man was born, and he died in World War II when the boy was about two. So the father only saw his son two or three times whilst on liberty stateside, and then he got sent to Europe in March 1945 and died a month later, a month before Germany surrendered. After spending a year and a half stateside and going through basic training twice, mechanic’s school, and M.P. school once or twice.

The man’s mother remarried a year or so later to a man who was not kind to the boy, who spent as much time as possible with his other relations. Around the turn of the century, the mother sent the father’s effects, including his military records, medals, and these letters to him.

So the book is largely a collection of excerpts from the letters that the father sent to the mother during his service with a little bit of commentary or explanation. The book includes some family and service photos and records as well. Apparently, the father was interred in Germany, moved to Holland, and then repatriated to Nebraska, his home, at the behest of his parents, not his widow.

So, what to make of it? Well, I am not impressed by the wife much–many of the letters include reminders and eventually admonishment and threats that she should go to the dentist as she had one or more problems with her teeth who needed correcting; she’s always going out with her sister-in-law/roommate whose husband is also away at war, and sometimes it seems like it bothers him; and she often buys new shoes and stuff, including a fur coat whose price he asks about many times over the course of many months (apparently, it cost $96 in 1940s money–the author says it would be over a thousand dollars today, in 2022 dollars–which might not be today today’s money). Of course, the hero of the story is the father, so the excerpts of the letters might craft a certain point of view and clean up some of his rough edges. The daily letters, though, declare his undying love (with a little impatience) and fidelity and include details of camp life, the training he’s going through, and whatnot. The book footnotes some of the military jargon and anachronisms, but as a child of military parents and a reader of pulp, I didn’t need them. The book also takes a moment to explain that the father might prefer that a white man win in a boxing competition over a Negro, might mention when people are Jews or Japs (and Polish, and anything besides Nebraskan-American), if the father had lived, his thinking would likely have evolved to match modern sensibilities–maybe, or maybe this is just something the actual author, a former teacher, had to insert as a matter of course. Odds are that someone reading letters sent by a relatively unimportant soldier in a war eighty years ago might already have known he was a product of his time.

At any rate, an interesting book for its look at Army life in the time period from a private (later PFC) perspective.

I hope the man got some solace from this exposure to his father whom he never knew. He, the man whose wife wrote the book, went into the Marine Corps early in the Vietnam era, and he mentions going through El Toro MCAS (although it’s misspelled in the text) and visiting Okinawa. He might have been a couple years ahead of my folks, but maybe not. Also, I couldn’t help but note that the father was stationed one or more times with a fellow named Lum; I just read a book by a woman named Lum. Probably no relation, but who knows.

This is the ninth book from the Winter Reading Challenge; I have 6 more to go in February, and I’ve started a science fiction book and a translated quality textbook, and I will likely finish a collection of poetry tonight. So I am in good shape for the Whole 15, but the “In Two Time Periods” category might be tricky unless I stumble a time-traveling science fiction story. Which I probably will.

For the “Based on a Real Person / Event” category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I selected this book. Actually, I first picked it for the “Money” category since the title was an amount of currency, but I wasn’t sure that even I could stretch that to fit, and I was a little concerned that Unbroken, Lauren Hillenbrand’s take on Louis Zamperini’s life story (his own was Devil at My Heels which is also around here somewhere), would be another near 500-page book. Since the cover of this book says it’s a biographical novel, I thought it would fit its category and almost count as a two-fer.

At any rate, this novel recounts elements from the life of Polly Bemis who was a Chinese-born woman who came to America as cargo and was sold to a saloon owner in Idaho (maybe–this is a novel and it takes liberties, and the Wikipedia entry highlights some of the confirmed details and places which are in dispute). She ends up owned/freed by a neighboring saloon owner, with whom she lives for almost two decades before she marries him, and they move to a valley seventeen miles away from the town where they’d lived and operated a saloon and boarding house. They live there for a number of decades until their deaths, Charles, her husband, first and then her some years later.

The book does not have a particular overarching narrative, no book-long antagonist. The first part, when she is owned by the first saloon keeper, gets presented with her unhappiness in dealing with that and her love for first, the Chinese packer who brought her to Idaho as part of his cargo after she was bought by the saloon owner, and second, the white saloon owner next door who protected her and then wins her in a poker game (which probably did not happen but was part of her legend). Then we have a bit of, I dunno, story arc as anti-Chinese sentiment rises and falls a couple of times offstage (for the most part) until they get married and move to the ranch. And then some incidents and vignettes about ranching, Charlie getting sick, the fire at their ranch which destroyed it, Polly’s trips to larger towns and cities (in the roaring 1920s) and finallt her settling back into her ranch when friends rebuilt her a small cottage. She then dies there ten years later. The last several decades of her life are just a hop-and-skip approach, but I guess the quiet part of her life was less of a legend and probably less remembered than the later parts. Kind of like my life, too–most of my stories are from 20+ years ago because I’ve been a house tabby since then.

At any rate, it was a quick read–at 308 pages, it only took me parts of two nights to read it. Partially its the slightly wider than normal margins, but the prose is plain and readable. The author says she based the story on previous writings about Polly’s life and on interviews with people who knew Polly or people who knew people who knew Polly–Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver mentions a technical-sounding term for that, having a source that is in the third generation up (someone who knew someone who knew or saw something) in a lecture on Herodotus, but I have forgotten it by now (like most things I read or hear these days). But it is not nonfiction; it is a novel.

It looks like this novel got made into a movie in 1991, ten years after its publication–I presume they truncate and tart up the first part of the book for the film. And, apparently, that spawned a couple other books about her life–the ones I see on eBay date from after this book, so you’d have to look more closely to find the source material books.

And, apparently, the ranch on the Salmon River where she and Charlie lived is not only a historical site, but a place where you can “own” part of it and stay in guest cabins on property. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Polly Bemis Ranch, and it might prove cheaper than a Viking River cruise up the Mississippi, but maybe not–it’s a long way from civilization and reachable only by jet boat even today.

So a pleasant and interesting read about someone of local or regional importance in a place far away from here. The copy I have is a remaindered library book from the Polk County Library which I picked up on one of our only and maybe only only trip to the Friends of the Polk County library book sale in 2011. We joined the Friends of the Polk County Library based on that excursion, but so many of the friends groups I’ve joined (Webster Groves Library, Webster Groves Historical Society, Polk County Library) did not send out reminders when my memberships ended. Perhaps the Lawrence County Historical Society will be the same way, but when I visited them in 2012, I sent them an exhorbitant amount of money, and instead of giving me an annual membership at Deity-Level, they gave me the $10 annual membership into forever. I hope it’s heritable, because when my children ask, “Daddy, why is our roof made of 2 mil plastic sheeting that you stapled up there?” I will be able to point to this membership, expired membership cards from across the state, and lapsed subscriptions to newspapers from here to St. Louis on I44 and to Cape Girardeau on US60.

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge includes a category “Native American Author” again (it did in 2021 which doesn’t seem like so long ago, but it’s been half a decade?). Instead of doing what Dave Ramsey would have approved, which is to say get a book from the library, I ordered this book on Amazon (also buying it on a credit card, Dave). But, in my defense, it was only $3, and I needed to pad my order to $35 to get free shipping on a heating element (since returned as it was damaged in transit, and I’ve since returned the other book that I bought at the same time because someone spilled something on the pages in the bindery, which meant the first 50 pages of the book were unreadable but the cover was pristine–hey, Amazon, one out of three is bad). At any rate, after finishing Different Seasons, I tore into other books to get back on track in my quest for the full 15 (reading a book in all categories in the Winter Reading Challenge), which is more fun than the Whole 30, that’s for sure.

At any rate, this book is half traditional Native American songs, with preference given to plains and southwest Indian tribes, and the other half is contemporary Native American poets, and although many of the names do not sound especially Native American, one presumes they have more tribal ancestry than many United States senators.

The songs are often presented in concrete form, with the words making shapes on the pages, which led me a couple of times to have to re-read the poems when I figured out that the words were going in a different direction that I thought. I mean, they make sense, the songs, in their simple ways, and I guess the concrete form made it so they filled pages where they would not otherwise.

The poetry is okay in spots. A little much about being Native American in places, and as you know, I prefer poetry which I can relate to, not something that’s affixed to explains something separate from me (and with the subtext, culturally if not textually, that I could never understand). Is Joy Harjo, whose collection I read for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2021, represented? You betcha! And as this book is copyright 1996, it’s even before she became Poet Laureate.

I’ve mused before on Dover Thrift Editions: For a long time, they were cheap paperbacks with classics that have fallen out of favor, and here I got one in 2026 “new.” Although I have to wonder if this was printed recently or is if it’s part of someone’s dwindling 30-year-old stock. The cover price is $4, and I did pay less for it. But they are still a thing, on Dover’s Web site and everything. Good on ’em.

I didn’t flag anything to mention in particular, so nothing will really stick with me. But that’s so much of poetry in general and, increasingly, in things I read. Ah, well, I have this collection of book reports to remind me.

For the 2006 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Money” category, I was a little conflicted. I mean, I don’t have many books on investing–not enough so that they’re seeded for quick discovery of the genre in the stacks of Nogglestead. So, instead, I bought this book at ABC Books last weekend, putting a Dave Ramsey book on a credit card, and I expect he felt that in the Financial Force.

This is a short book, 134 pages (perfect for the Winter Reading Challenge!). Even more perfect is that it’s designed to be a quick intro, a gift book (with “To / From” lines on the frontpiece). So its contents are basic: Cut up your credit cards. Pay in cash. Pay down your debt. Tithe. Negotiate. Buy secondhand. That sort of thing. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses, especially if it puts you into debt.

And the “chapters,” such as they are, are really three or four paragraph summaries–maybe a page, maybe two–about the topic followed by a couple of pages of quotes/bible verses/proverbs sort of related to the topic. And we get one or two pages, which is three or four, short testimonials about the Ramsey program and how he helped people of various stripes get back onto track. And the book includes a number of worksheets you can use to begin your journey to freedom from debt and whatnot. So lightweight even for its light size, but designed as I said to be a giveaway and maybe gateway to the program.

A couple who got into this and, probably, the MLM component of it ran workshops at church for the program, but I didn’t participate, and they’ve since left the church. Which is probably why some of the people who did are out of debt now (having gone to Ramsey’s radio station to do the whole scream thing and everything) and now have multiple income streams and rental properties and drive Porsches a decade later whilst I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle major repairs at Nogglestead with thin income but too much for health care marketplace subsidies.

Oh, but don’t worry about me, gentle reader. Like the other Philosopher says, grant me financial austerity, but not yet. I am not yet eager to downsize my home (with its mortgage payment less than modern rents), sell my valuable possessions and collections, or, heaven forbid, work on a government contract (this last the more likely of the three). Also, this book is now 25 years old; one wonders what the modern equivalent numbers would look like (a $1000 emergency fund? That covers an appliance or single car repair these days).

But I do take some solace in some of the things I do right:

• Shopping secondhand, at least for gifts and sometimes clothes.
• Not buying a lot on the spur of the moment these days, heating elements and sundries aside.
• We’ve been a little light on the tithing after a decade of being heavy on the donations, but I’m trying to work some more into our spending.
• I’m resisting taking on another car payment, and our main drivers are 20 and 18 years old and hopefully will last a couple more years.

Dollars-a-day habits remain, though, and the Whole 30 diet is not a cheap one; we’re eating probably $10 a day in grapes, maybe $10 in other varied produce and nuts for snacks. Which is not bad, but they’re not the meals. And rice and canned beans are right out.

It does make me think I should pick up another source of income. Looks like blogging, writing books, hawking cute kitten t-shirts, and writing twee little apps (including some based on cute kittens) is not doing it for me.

Dave Ramsey. He tells a bit about his story in the book (one section is “Dave’s Story”), but man, this guy has been around a long time. When I was working at my first startup around the time this book came out, my office mate listened to him on the radio. And he’s still around. And even this week, you can find stories talking about his strategies (Couple eliminates $43,000 of debt in under a year — here’s how, which does not mention Ramsey by name). He’s certainly made a lasting mark, although maybe just for some people. Too bad. The whole of society could use some of his common sense.

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “500+ Pages,” and, to be honest, I had a little trepidation about what I would find to fill that category. And here I had just been talking about my shelf of Stephen King which I might never get to. As it turns out, not only did I get to it, but we had a second copy of the book which had been in my son’s room for a time and then moved to the parlor when he cleaned his room a couple weeks or months ago. It was my mother-in-law’s copy, sans dust jacket, which she had loaned to my youngest when he was grounded from electronics, and he managed to make it through the first story and onto the second, but that’s when his grounding ended, and I’m not sure he has opened a book since.

So, the combinations of those factors, thinking recently about the Stephen King shelf, and talking about 11/23/63, which my mother-in-law enjoyed as a book and, as she has started watching the miniseries and is not enjoying it, and encountering a copy of this book led me to think of Stephen King for this category, and I checked some of the books. Early novels are not 500 pages; later novels are too much so. But, it turns out, this book weighs in at 527 including the self-indulgent afterward that some authors tack on.

As you might know, gentle reader, this book is a collection of three novellas and a short story which King had written in the gaps between his early successful novels Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, and The Shining (he’s about to write Christine according to the afterword, although the title is not given, but 44 years later, we know). Three of the four, all the novellas, were made into major motion pictures. This guy was a juggernaut in the late 1970s and 1980s, as hard as it might be to imagine now that he’s been around forever.

The book contains:

• “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (made into The Shawshank Redemption, the biggest of the films or at least the one most fondly recollected) is about a banker, Andy Dufresne, who is convicted of murdering his wife even though he proclaims his innocence (he is, in fact, innocent). The story is told by Red, who is a long-time inmate at Shawshank Prison and is known for “getting things.” He gets Andy a rock hammer so he can continue his geology hobby, and the story covers decades of the lives of the inmates at Shawshank. One morning, they cannot find Andy and discover he has been tunneling from his cell to a wet wall for decades and has escaped to a new life with an alias he had set up before he went into the can. The coda finds Red paroled and on his way to meet Andy in Mexico. Haven’t you seen the film?
   
• “Apt Pupil” (made into Apt Pupil, appropriately enough) is set in the early 1970s. A middle school aged boy recognizes his neighbor as a superintendant of a concentration camp and wants to hear all about it. They end up mutually dependent and mutually blackmailing each other to keep the secret. I really didn’t like the story because the first half of it, 100 pages or so, is two evil people doing evil things. Finally, it starts to move in the second half, but King introduces sympathetic characters, but you know he’s going to slaughter them. Well, it turns out, not all of them, but for much of the book you really don’t have anyone to really sympathize with. Not the boy, not the war criminal, not even the boys’ self-involved and self-indulgent parents. The book ends with more implied bloodshed, not a real climax, really. Looks like the film changed it in significant ways–setting the story in the 1980s instead of the 1970s, but it should definitely have the macramé-decorated feel to it. The boy is changed to a high schooler in the film, and the end is apparently ambiguous and not as final. I haven’t seen the film; I haven’t had the urge to see it; and the written story has not made me want to.
   
• “The Body” (which became Stand By Me) tells about a group of boys who learn of a dead body and then hike and camp several days to see it. It’s sold as a coming of age story, but the double-effect narrator is a wealthy horror writer who is dissatisfied with his current state of writing by rote for money and who longs for those days again. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 30 years, but I wonder what they might have changed from it.
   
• “The Breathing Control Method” (not made into a movie) is a double story of sorts. A midling employee of a law firm is invited by a partner to a nondescript club with no obvious dues where the “members” tell stories. One Christmas Eve, a retired doctor tells of a case where a single mother carried her baby to term, but has an accident arriving at the hospital and she delivers the baby after her death.

So: I mean, the prose moves along, for sure. King wrote very frankly for the time about things that might have been shocking then, but then were not shocking, but now are prohibited. The stories are all set in the past, although I guess “Apt Pupil” was fairly recent past. He uses the word nigger and the word Republican both as perjoratives–I am pretty sure that all the stories have that, the baddest word, in them, although maybe “Apt Pupil” only uses the German equivalent. I don’t remember him using the word Democrat for anything, so I guess that was just normal to him even then. So the guy didn’t just start slagging on those who disagreed with him in the George W. Bush administration.

As I might have mentioned, I have a shelf full of King, and I’m not sure when I’ll be inclined to get to them. Maybe I’ll read one or two this year. Although if I get a hankering for thick tomes, maybe I should finish the second volume of The Story of Civilization (it’s been three years since I read the first, and at that pace it will take me almost as long to read it as it took the Durants to write it) or the Summa Theologiae which I received as a gift in 2021 and which I have not started, but it looks nice on my shelves. More likely, though, I might pick up Herodotus or Thucydides (he says, having just heard lectures on them, but the lecture series is long and I’ll likely want to read other books as well when I hear about them).

First, though, the Winter Reading Challenge. With this book, I have hit five, which is what you need to read to get the mug. But I must press onward in my quest for filling all fifteen categories.