Month: January 2026

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.

So for the In a Different Country category of the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, when I was gathering prospective reads for the categories, I grabbed Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, a literary novel elevating the bleks and putting white South Africans in their place which I read in college (in a copy I might have borrowed from the campus library as was my wont in those years) and later picked up in hardback. Undoubtedly, this is what the librarians wanted: a proper literary book with a proper literary message. Oh, but no. You get a Tarzan novel.

Not sure where I picked this copy up, but I do know that somehow I ended up with two copies of this book, both in the 1960s Ballantine printings with the hideous 60s covers. And I’ve been reading the Tarzan books out of order, apparently; I read both Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan, the first two books in the series, in 2009 and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the 11th book in the series, last year. This is the third book, but I probably did not have it when I read the other two books–although without its (or their, considering I bought two copies probably at different times), perhaps I did but it was shuffled in the move. Certainly, in those days, the Nogglestead library was not quite as double-stuffed and unkempt as it is now.

So, after quickly reviewing the previous book reports, I guess this is a pretty stock Tarzan plot. Something connives to get Tarzan to Africa, where wild things happen. In this case, Russian nemesis, presumably from the last book, escapes prison, links up with a colleague and some unsavory fellows, and they kidnap Tarzan’s son and tell Tarzan they’re going to have him raised by a tribe of cannibals. They connive to get Tarzan, too, and they do. And! As a bonus, Jane follows Tarzan to an unsavory meeting and they get the drop on her, too. So they strand Tarzan on an island not far off the coast of Africa which allows Tarzan to gather a troupe of apes and one panther to cross to the mainland and begin the chase.

So a series of set encounters occur, and Tarzan twice decided to sleep in the village of hostile natives, allowing the bad guys to get the jump on him. The book shifts perspectives from Tarzan to that of Jane and/or the bad guys, sometimes shifting into the past to catch up with one group or another, but allowing to end a chapter and section on a cliffhanger to be resolved a couple of chapters later.

So it’s an okay piece of pulp, and, again, an enduring character–this edition came out fifty years after the original, and I’m reading it over a hundred years after it was published. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice. Also, for something coming out at the turn of the 20th century, one (educated in the very end of the last century or beginning of this one) would think it all racism and misogyny, but although Jane is sometimes helpless when overpowered by stronger males, she definitely is not a docile character. And some of the African natives are bad, but some are good. You know, a little like real life. So the pulp of 1914 is more realistic and treats people more akin to people rather than message-conveying ciphers that you get in some modern cartoonish depictions. But that’s why I read the old books.

This book is a two-fer in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge; it would fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category, but I’m putting it into the Nonhuman Character category. Looking at the list, many of the categories whisper to me books that would also fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category as well. So I will probably listen to that whisper to get my two-fers.

And I must confess, gentle reader: I read this book about forty years ago. And my first exposure to it was from a song. You see, at some point in middle school or high school, I ordered an inexpensive cassette called Quarks and Quests from the back of a science fiction magazine. It was a “filk” (science fiction and fantasy folk music) collection which included “The Pride of Chanur” by Leslie Fish:

I spotted it in a library at some point thereafter–I remember it was in the original DAW paperback but with the library binding (basically, a hardback with the paperback inside and the paperback cover pasted on the outside). I picked up this volume in a book club edition in 2007 (the same day I bought After Worlds Collide, the sequel to a book I read in sixth grade and the follow-up recently, in 2024), so it’s a hardback with the paperback front cover on the front dustjacket. Weird.

At any rate, the book starts out on a trading station where the crew of a cat-like race called the hani are loading cargo when a nearly naked and bleeding creature that is keeping to the shadows bolts onto the ship. Spoiler alert: It’s an unknown-to-them species, but it’s human, and the kif, a race of raiders and pirates, want it back so they can torture it to reveal its homeworld so they can raid trade with it (::wink::). The haniem> on the ship, the Pride of Chanur, decide not to give the human up, so it turns into a bit of an interstellar war. Kind of like the song says.

So the book has a bunch of world- galaxy-building, detailing the internal politics of the clans of the hani and the relationships between the races. It alludes to the technologies the different species use, but it doesn’t go into excruciating detail. It has but a few set pieces–fleeing, hiding at the edges of a system, and so on, and then it culminates in a trip to the hani home world to handle some intrigue and a rush back to orbit for an epic space battle handled with a bit of a “Wait, what?” deus ex machina climax followed by a long dénouement.

Apparently, the book spawned four additional books over the next decade and are part of the same universe as Cherryh’s Downbelow books, of which I read Merchanter’s Luck for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2023. So it looks like James Wilder is not the only author to make a repeat appearance on the forms. Some librarian or librarians will think I don’t read widely at all.

Also, forty years later, I still pronounce the name cherry-h although I am sure that I have read her Wikipedia entry before (likely in 2023), so maybe someday I will remember it’s pronounced just Cherry because that is her real last name–the h was added to make it look less like a romance author’s name.